Searching for post about Objectivist web comic

June 19, 2017 9:27 AM

I'm having trouble googling up a web comic I'm sure I saw on MeFi in the last several years. I believe the setting was an space colony or space station that was run according to Objectivist philosophy.

The premise was that a few outsiders (ambassadors or something like that) arrived and experienced the glory of rational self-interest.

There are a lot of Objectivist web comics out there. It doesn't seem to be any of the ones on the Ayn Rand TV tropes page.

We talk about Rand a lot on MeFi, and I've trawled through the relevant tags, but I don't see it.

Anybody know what I'm talking about?

posted by He Is Only The Imposter to MetaFilter-Related at 9:27 AM (18 comments total)

Was it Escape from Terra, linked from the first comment on this post?
posted by jedicus at 10:20 AM on June 19, 2017 [6 favorites]

That was definitely the one! Thank you!
posted by He Is Only The Imposter at 10:21 AM on June 19, 2017

I read that series from end to end. It's a bit of a preachy series with great art but, like most utopian stories, it's a complete fairy tale.
posted by Talez at 11:05 AM on June 19, 2017

I'd forgotten about Escape from Terra - I was going to ask if it was something from this fpp.
posted by rmd1023 at 12:15 PM on June 19, 2017

Is it easy to eat guacamole - or at the least, smashed avocado toast - in the zero gravity of space?
posted by Wordshore at 1:42 PM on June 19, 2017

Guacamole is an ideal food for zero g. It is sticky. They aim for sticky in the food they create. Toast OTOH is problematic because of crumbs.
posted by Splunge at 3:33 PM on June 19, 2017 [4 favorites]

See also
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 8:24 PM on June 19, 2017 [3 favorites]

Not what you're looking for, but related
posted by exogenous at 6:46 AM on June 20, 2017 [2 favorites]

If we're posting Objectivism-related comics, I'll put in a plug for Patrick McCray and Dave Garcia's comic book, Elvis Shrugged. Not sure it's available online anywhere, but you can see the covers here. There was a trade paperback at some point.
posted by asperity at 9:02 AM on June 20, 2017

Kept waiting for the ironic self-awareness. I read as far as the genius guy on the asteroid who is going to change the world with his disruptive technologies so the collectivist bureaucrats try to kill him but he's a genius so they can't.
posted by thelonius at 9:45 AM on June 20, 2017 [1 favorite]

Wow. I'm ashamed to admit the number of pages it took me to realize it wasn't satirical.
posted by dazed_one at 12:03 PM on June 20, 2017 [9 favorites]

Sufficiently earnest Objectivism is indistinguishable from satire.
posted by happyroach at 2:27 PM on June 20, 2017 [11 favorites]

Wow. I'm ashamed to admit the number of pages it took me to realize it wasn't satirical.

*Evil Bureaucrat cackles in French at your foolishness*
posted by sebastienbailard at 2:31 PM on June 20, 2017 [1 favorite]

Sufficiently earnest Objectivism is indistinguishable from satire

I blame Rabelais.
posted by clavdivs at 2:40 PM on June 20, 2017 [2 favorites]

I don't know how you folks have been able to read more than a couple pages of that. It's very, very painful.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 10:11 PM on June 20, 2017 [2 favorites]

Read it in the same frame of mind as you'd watch a Tommy Wiseau film. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll throw up a little bit inside your mouth.
posted by dazed_one at 9:18 AM on June 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

i accidentally the whole thing
posted by eamondaly at 1:22 PM on June 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

Yeah, honestly, a lot of Heinlein has trained me to ignore insane libertarian bullshit while enjoying rip-roaring sci-fi pulp adventures, and Escape From Terra has pretty good art and decent plotting once they push past the government = tyranny didacticism. And reading it at a binge allows for moments of unintentional humor, like how some 100 pages after how global warming is described to have killed millions of people and cost billions of dollars on "Terra" (one of the ostensible disasters that the sinister collectivism was unable to prevent despite its claims of authority), a Texan physics professor complains that he was mustered out of his department because he didn't believe in it, so wasn't a "team player." He also thinks that maybe 9/11 was a hoax, but then he's rendered a Mary Sue of cool-headed reason.

Or that everybody is real rah-rah about wearing guns and taking combat training, but nobody needs them because there's no crime, you know, because everyone is armed.

I just got to the part where wildcat strikes are totally OK but unions might just be problematic. And they keep referring to billions living on Terra, but think that any sort of centralization or bureaucracy is tantamount to slavery — so what if free market anarchism doesn't scale?

Anyway, when it's Sov Cit In Space, it's hilariously deluded, like someone blaming Big Publishing for keeping their Garfield/Odie fan fic out of book stores, and when it's not, it's pretty decent exo-planet sci-fi comics.
posted by klangklangston at 5:49 PM on June 23, 2017 [1 favorite]