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| Art by Minna Sundberg |
This just came across my desk. It’s a short online graphic novel about bunnies living under a social credit regime.
The artist behind Lovely People, Minna Sundberg, is an unapologetic Christian, which probably won’t win her much acclaim in her home country of Finland.
Here’s a representative sample for review purposes:
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| Art by Minna Sundberg |
What’s most striking about this delightfully dystopian comic is the fluffy bunnies. Its next most impressive aspect is how the creator nailed the cloying, effeminate nature of Death Cult coercion.
The Cult won’t be satisfied with you mouthing the right platitudes, signaling the right virtues, and conspicuously consuming the right product. Just as Christian missionaries genuinely hope their new flocks will enter into personal relationships with Jesus Christ, the Death Cult’s anti-evangelists want you to really love Big Brother.
Or more aptly in this case, Big Wine Aunt.
The antidote to rule by micromanaging DMV ladies is a renewal of the traditional masculine virtues, especially fortitude.
Our enemies are weak and stupid. How much worse are we if we can’t summon the courage to stand up to their lunatic demands and simply say “No”?
And be sure to back my Combat Frame XSeed: SS crowdfunder. It’s the best way to get the whole CFXS saga thus far. Every backer gets XSeed: S and SS, plus a free short story. And for authors looking to bring out the best version of their story, the Pro Editing perk offers a $100 discount on my expert editing services.
Just seven days remain, so don’t wait. Back the book now!
She's not just a Christian, but a recent convert from atheism. The postscript to the bunny comic gives her testimony. Her readers were *not* happy, and she's handled the pushback with aplomb and grace.
Her current WIP, Stand Still, Stay Silent, is hauntingly, horrifically *excellent*: https://www.sssscomic.com/
One by one, the Enemy's cultural leaders are turning to Christ. Aslan is on the move.
I have to second "Stand Still, Stay Silent.
I saw the artwork in this post and immediately recognized it as hers.
Also – SSSS has an absolutely gorgeous language/roots tree infographic that's easily discovered.
So she'sthe one who made the language tree infographic. I thought it looked very familiar
xavier
I read that yesterday and, despite not being a fluffy bunny fan, really enjoyed it. Very well done and the freaking-out fluffy bunnies with bows and ruffles and "be kind" pillows ADD to the dystopian feel. Really good stuff. Gail Finke (anonymous for some reason)
Easiest way to support Minna Sundberg is through this storepage:
https://hivemill.com/collections/stand-still-stay-silent
The comics are the most notable things to purchase, though the aforementioned language tree infographic can also be purchased as a print.
Her prints can also be purchased here:
https://society6.com/artdcomic
There's a third page for tie-ins to her Redtail's Dream comic but the links don't work for most of the items so I would be hesitant to buy things through it.
That is some fantastic art. Definitely going to check more her stuff out.
Haha, just noticed the "book-goodness algorithm" and the recommended books under the Bible being all new age humanist garbage unrelated to the topic.
It really is just like amazon.
She skewers amazon, google, and alibaba (which chicom-azon, as I understand it) all at once, I think.
Thanks; I couldn't figure out where the 'Ali' was coming from.
That was actually REALLY good. I'm impressed. She did a pretty good job making it seem plausible.
I just had my copy of Combat Frame XSeed S delivered to me, and my first thought is that this cover art looks really good on the physical copy. I've seen it on the side of this page for months but that doesn't do it justice.
Glad it surpassed expectations. Thanks for reading!
As others mentioned, I didn't think I'd care for a bunny story, but I slimmed and found myself hooked. The Twitter blue-check satire was chillingly spot on.
The more I look, the better it gets. She nails the toxicity of social media and "influencer" culture. The red-pilling and redemption of the influencer is as much an example of grace as the restoration of the main character.
This is great, both in terms of art/content and the fact that an artist has chosen to glorify God by her work. And a Finn, no less! I've been in contact with two Finns online (albeit in a somewhat Left-leaning environment), and both were atheists. One was a utilitarian who regarded Christians as "those weird Evangelical dudes who are suspiciously close to each other and are famous for in-group preference to the point of being like a Masonic society that gives unfair favors to each other". The other had extremely little tact, though that probably had as much to do with the extremely nerdy environment that we encountered each other in. Still, my point is that it's good to see someone from such an atheistic country come to the Lord, and sad at the state of her homeland.
Thank you !
Read it again. It's so pregnant with satire. When the girl bunny is becoming an "influencer" (i.e. product evangelist), the selfie featuring her with her mouth agape as she holds up the latest hand-held game system is too perfect. Move over Jonathan Swift!
I discovered Minna Sundberg back when she was posting *A Redtail's Dream*. It's a delightful fairy tale based on Finnish mythology. Her artistic skills started out very strong and have only improved since then.
Her turn to Christianity is wonderful news and I'm very glad that you are bringing her work to the attention of your readers.
I enjoyed how I couldn't tell if one of the platitude signs said "Joy" or "Soy." I'd like to think that was intentional.
For those wondering what the Death cult makes of Lovely People, I found this gem from TVTropes, under Broken Aesop:
"The comic's social credit system suppresses freedom of religion and expression in the name of "equality" and "correctness," forcing the characters to flee to where they can practice their religion freely. The afterword spells out that such systems where there is only one correct line of thinking and mindless consumerism should be rejected. While a fairly middle-of-the-road position, the afterword then argues that any good deeds are meaningless because people are inherently sinful and the only path to goodness is to embrace God and reject everything else. Essentially, Minna ends up advocating for a system just as totalitarian as the one she rails against."
The death cult got bit.
You also see the phrase "Chick tract" come up quite a bit – also nonsense.
The correct response to such bad-faith charges of hypocrisy is, "So the system she's railing against is right?"
In the SSSS comic comments there are a lot of people very obviously offended by the Christian content. A lot of fedora tipping atheists but stuff like this:
"What shook me about lovely people was how she showed the peer pressure, and social media issues. So many people seem to be harping on the christian aspect. Yank the Christianity out of it okay? Insteae, picture it as china. Gays are persecuted, uighur muslims, christians, blacks etc."
which had people respond with:
"I wish I could yank it out. Replace the Bible in that story with literally anything that actually criticizes authority, and it goes from terribly ironic and misguided to deep and important.
Or, let each Bunny have their own religion, and it gets better. Or even better, let one Bunny be gay, one muslim and one atheist, and we are REALLY on to something."
"It "could" have been gays, it could have been Uyghurs, but it's not. Minna decided to show Christians as the poor, persecuted ones. This is a conscious decision, that support a conscious intention.
And this intention is criticizable. First, as Christians are overwhelmingly the persecutors, especially of those minorities you propose we imagine instead."
"I have no issue with Minna finding comfort and fulfilment in religion, but alarms go off when she starts referring to herself as a 'sinner'. I daresay Minna has performed as many self-centered, thoughtless, and uncharitable acts as any of us. But 'sinner'? This is a word with several connotations. I *hope* it's no more than an admission that nobody's perfect (as some have suggested). "
and so on.
They are like vampires being exposed to a crucifix.
Yes, many of them suffer from demonic obsession.
The Cross stands for the Truth. Liars hate being confronted with it.
In a different set of circumstances prior to my conversion I'd have probably mewled about it being terrific if not for all the Christian stuff, but no way around it– it sows seed looking for good ground. Frankly, it should be printed up and distributed like a Chick tract.
Pah! TVTropes? That place is a hole, and I'm glad I wrenched myself away from it years ago. It reflects nothing more than the bias of its left-leaning nerd userbase. It's basically Wikipedia but even *less* professional and even *more* biased. Even in the nicest possible interpretation of TVTropes, it's still bad – stories are meant to be encountered as *stories*, not as collections of story-parts haphazardly thrown together in an index. It distorts your sense of what a story should be, and that's without going into the way that many "tropes" are themselves poor classifications to begin with, which isn't helped by their explicit policy that a trope does not need to be noteworthy to have an article made about it. There are tropes that describe absolutely nothing but a single physical characteristic or object, like "has cool hair", "has a cool beard", "has a cool coat", etc. The idea that two stories are in any way similar just because they both have characters that share physical characteristics is idiotic in the extreme, but if you see masses of identical tropes on both of their pages that's the inevitable implication that you're going to draw.
And yes, they are indeed like vampires. Clearly they are angry because Minna has blasphemed by daring to side with the Evil Christians, and by profaning the orthodox order of oppression, daring to show the oppressors as oppressed instead of taking the chance to show the True Elect being oppressed.