Strip 15: The Best of Friends

With this strip, I wanted to not only formally introduce Captain Tannin’s crew, but I wanted to bring up the concept of alien races as a rarity in the galaxy. In Dy-Gar’s time, no intelligent species had yet been discovered, and as you can probably tell from Cygnus Jones, the ones that have been discovered since then are more or less enculturated by humanity. The reason for this is that science fiction often tends to paint humanity as the plucky underdogs on the galactic stage - take, for instance, Mass Effect, which constantly reminds the player that humans are looked down upon by virtually every race in the Milky Way, yet they constantly defy expectations with their courage and diversity and hair styles. While this is all well and good, it’s a little optimistic for my tastes, and it doesn’t afford much opportunity to look critically at humanity’s faults, which is what I think sci-fi is best suited for. Making humanity the dominant race in the galaxy keeps the focus on human problems, like cultural genocide. Hooray!

- J.S. Conner

August 30th 2020