Something positive

Something Positive (in German something positive , often abbreviated with s * p) is a popular English-language webcomic by RK Milholland. Since November 2001, an episode consisting of four to eight pictures has appeared several times a week, sometimes in a comic strip style, but mostly as part of a continuous story.

action

The nerd Davan MacIntire - at the beginning of the comic series in his mid-twenties - comes from Texas , but at the beginning of the comics (he moved back to his parents' house in 2007) he lives in Boston , where he also maintains a circle of friends. His sandpit friend Aubrey and her later boyfriend Jason, as well as the Sinocanadian Pee-Jee go through sometimes absurd situations in the manner of a sitcom , which usually end with cynical comments. The comic describes situations from the lives of these young people, whose role models are often dialogues and scenes from the author's own life. The main thing is that young people, whose main interests are more in the individual-artistic field, are still looking for their fixed point of view in life, just like a stable relationship. This is particularly difficult for the passive, pessimistic Davan.

characters

Davan MacIntire: His hair is shown in gray (sometimes he can be persuaded to try a tint) and remains uncombed. He wears rather unfashionable glasses with huge glasses (which always make his eyes appear a little panicked and torn open in amazement) and a blue work shirt.; He comes from a Baptist family and only had disillusioning experiences in his early childhood loves. As a result, he abandoned all moral concepts. According to his statements, he seems to be a nihilist, where he acts repeatedly testifying the love for his three friends. He remains passive, his life is determined by his actionist friends, in which he participates with set fatalism. Davan attended drawing school and works as an accountant for a medical insurance company. His boss is even more cynical than him and hates him for it. He owns a small, pink, hairless cat without bones ("a post-chemo kitty with a rare bone disease"), which mostly moans, wiggles around like amoebae, sleeps in the refrigerator and disgusts "normal people" to flee. Davan and this cat named "Choo-Choo-Bear" love each other and share his spartan apartment. During the course of the comic, Davan went through various relationships with different women, all of which ended badly, but for which Davan was never to blame. The character "Davan" is an exaggerated representation of the "freak" in society as seen from the outside.

Pee-jee: She is Davan's Sino-Canadian friend, who takes similar ideological views as Aubrey, but appears a little more moderate. She advocates the attitude “tackle it and it will be good - or at least amusing”. So she puts together several plays and productions and leads a D&D group over several episodes .

Aubrey: She is the best friend of the two and has been friends with Davan since kindergarten age. She agrees with Pee-Jee in many points of view (for example in her deep love for violence as a problem-solver), but her attempts to do something “meaningful” in life are already destructive in the beginning. She breaks D&D role-playing groups and transforms Jason's attempts to initiate a musical or a strip show into infernal catastrophes, which, however, satisfy both herself and Pee-Jee, but at least seem to confirm Davan's worldview. She can curse so violently that she has often been thrown out of cinemas, coffee houses or theaters, but this only encourages her in an effort to consume the maximum amount of amusement until she is kicked out. Over the course of the comic, she marries Davan's boyfriend Jason.

Jason: He seems to pursue a largely normal life, his free time is dedicated elaborate sarcasm projects, such as the Sacred Passions musical "Nailed" ( "Nailed" ) or the like. In the end he actually always benefits or accepts the results positively; sometimes it seems to be enough for him if his friends can each enjoy themselves in their own way. These unprofitable projects mostly serve to make him "famous" and to pick up groupies . Therefore, he considers himself a specialist in seduction, which later leads him to look for a girlfriend for Davan. Throughout the story, Jason eventually marries Aubrey after several failed relationships.

Over the years, several other supporting characters came into play, such as Davan's ex-girlfriends, his parents, new acquaintances, the D&D playgroups and the participants in various theater productions.

style

The comic often allows itself running gags and social satire at the expense of nerds , Jesusfreaks, cautious parents, Wiccans , homosexuals, nymphomaniacs with homophile desires and old-fashioned conservatives. These are more than fillers, as they are constantly being expanded. The comic is often discriminatory and degrading for special social groups, whereby it does not attack them in their aspects that are opposite to the mainstream, but in their intolerance , dogmatics and obstinacy . The comic itself is a kind of live journal , which means that a new episode appears several times a week that continues the story. Over the years in which the comic has grown to its present-day size, the characters have also grown older and "lived" with the author. It is characterized by the large amount of text, which makes it not only artistically but also linguistically valuable, but makes translation more difficult (because in an adequate German translation of the sometimes quite sophisticated word games and jokes, the German text too often breaks the Speech bubble ).

Web links

Official website (English)