AND THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS:

a. Don't GO TO SEED!

b. When life gives you lemons, MAKE LEMONADE!

c. Cannibals did call human meat "LONG PIG"!

d. GET RID OF Bush, Cheney, Bushland Uber Allies and ALL repugnicant-rethug-repub republiCAN'T republican fudge-pachyderms BEFORE THE EVENTS IN THIS STIRRING CARTOON BEAR FRUITION!

e. ALL OF THE ABOVE!

ANSWER: NEED YOU ASK?

McCarthy

Is this new? Because in the past when I've liked Carol Lay's work, I've found that it's been from the archives. This seems new, though.

Take it as given that we'll have a climate-driven civilization-ending cataclysm. For no good reason, I think of it as losing 999 in every thousand people.

Whatever we want to preserve of civilization will have to leapfrog the time of fast climate changes to a time of slow climate changes, which will allow us to do things like plant crops, predict the movement of animals and define sea lanes. So, we'll do something like this seed store.

And Carol Lay brings up a point which bothers me sometimes. How do we design a store that a nascent hunter gatherer civilization can access, but only when they're developed enough to learn from it and not destroy it? And I think she dramatizes it well; this is great work.

Not to sound Nietzschean, but I love that it's the man's sentimentality that assaults the future. It seems more moral to consume poorly secured seed stores than children. But, he's damaging the future of the entire species with his archaic mortality. I find that poignant.

This is something I might have expected out of Harlan Ellison. Very much like A Boy and His Dog. Whew.

This is a haunting and metaphorical piece. Can we really distinguish ourselves from the worst elements of human nature if we take actions that have the same end result?

But McCarthy never hints why the earth is dead. It could be an asteroid strike.

Interesting. There was a play mounted here in the LA area last fall called Canned Peaches in Syrup that took place in post-apocalyptic landscape where the surviving humans were either vegetarians or cannibals. Wonder if Carol saw it. Seems like it might have inspired this strip.

http://www.laweekly.com/stage/theater/canned-peaches-in-syrup-eat-me/17489/

Probably a new strip, as I recall hearing about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway receiving its first seeds a couple of mos. ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault

I heard an interview with an author (whose name I cannot remember) who was comparing vegetarians and cannibals, in that he found their moral bases on food much more consistent than other people. Most of us practice an arguably hyocritical omnivorism (e.g. Cows, pigs - yum! Humans, dogs - ew). In fact, without getting into it too much, he discovered he couldn't find much of a problem with cannibalism, so long as

a) you were considerate enough not to eat anyone you knew, and

b) you weren't pushy about it and waited for your human meals to die on their own (though we never do this for animals).

"My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to.

He says only a few people are awake, and they live in a state of constant total amazement".

Minimalist, heartbreaking, beautiful. Completely amazing.