New Octoprop at VulgarArmy.com

New posts up at VulgarArmy.com and a few more to come over the next week or so.

• “contra el fascismo y el un frente unico” (against… February 17, 2010
• Protest poster from Frente Popular Revolucionario (FPR),… February 17, 2010
• Five-armed octopus, with Pentagon as its head, holding gold, oil…February 16, 2010
• A fairly standard anti-catholic cartoon. It is titled:… February 15, 2010
• This is presumably a follow up to ‘The Serio-Comic War Map…February 15, 2010 (via Indie Squid Kid)
• “Datenkrake: A German term to describe companies or… February 15, 2010

VulgarArmy.com

Last post:

New site up at http://vulgararmy.com (not https://octoprop.wordpress.com; which is now archived).

New RSS Feed: http://vulgararmy.com/rss (sorry, I have no control over this, changed from /feed/).

New RSS Feed

It make take a few days for the new nameservers and DNS settings to propagate. The new RSS feed is at: http://vulgararmy.com/rss

This may, or may not be the RSS address you have in your reader.

I still have a few articles to move across (Victor Hugo and Standard Oil) but as I want to rework these prior to reposting them.

Site is Moving: WP to Tumblr

VulgarArmy.com will be moving to Tumblr over the next two-three weeks. Mostly due to free domain name hosting, and ability to edit HTML/CSS. It will be easier for people to submit octoprop, ask questions, reblog things if they want, and comments will be available.

I will not be actively maintaining the site after April/May but will add submissions.

ALL LINKS WILL BE BROKEN. (Correction: sort of, I will not be deleting content off octoprop.wordpress.com, it will just be obsolete).

There is no way around this. Tumblr uses a different permalink structure to WordPress. You may also want to make sure links (and RSS feeders) are pointing to http://vulgararmy.com NOT https://octoprop.wordpress.com

This is going to be a really painful move (no import feature on Tumblr, broken links), but will hopefully be worth it.

Drug Habit Skulltopus

Editorial heading cartoon by Winsor McCay taken from Golden Age Comic Book Stories piece on Winsor McCay (via lines and colors). I don’t think context needs to be provided for this one: not exactly subtle.

Winsor McCay "Drug Habit"

Vampire Octopus Returns

Brief post. Another (contemporary) reference to blood sucking octopuses (or in this case the inverse of “multitentacled vampire“):

Political parties appeared and disappeared like the thick grounds at the bottom of Turkish coffee cups. Gipsies read fortunes and played addictive violin music that made one lascivious and light-headed. All this frivolity rested like a multitentacled vampire above a huge, backward peasant mass that lived in hunger and rags in villages. The aristocratic vampire with its grotesque appetites sucked dry the energy of millions of wretched humans.

–Andrei Codrescu, ‘The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess’

–Quote taken from ‘The Many–tentacled Vampire of Andrei Codrescu‘ (George Ttooli).

Other blood-sucking octopuses: Landlordism octopus of London.

Victor Hugo – Toilers of the Sea (The Literature Network)

• ‘What, then, is the devil-fish? It is the sea vampire.’  (NB: This depends on your translation, in The Modern Library edition it is ‘What, then, is the devil-fish? It is a suction pad.’ p.350)
• ‘English sailors call it the devilfish or the bloodsucker’ p351 (roughly the same in both translations)
• ‘A tearing of the flesh is terrible, but less terrible than a sucking of the blood.’ (In The Modern Library edition:  ‘ A bite is fearful, but less so than a suction’ p.353)

Winding Down

This is the start of formally ending the Vulgar Army project (or at least my participation in). I hope to have a crude essay done summarising some of my findings in April. I find I am repeating myself, or simply have nothing left to say on this topic.

I started this project for all the wrong reasons: heart break and vindictiveness (or my version thereof), and a genuine –although temporary^{1 —} fascination with cephalopodia.  Vulgar Army was supposed to be a just a few spoof paintings on the depiction of octopuses in pulp and propaganda (as complimentary to Poulpe Pulps), not a full-blown study into the representation of the octopus in political cartoons and propaganda. However, I have thoroughly enjoyed the unexpected diversion, and the insights gained through it into the use of metaphor.

I also hope that Vulgar Army has been of use to others (yes you, whoever you are).

Also, if anyone does want to take it over after April please contact me: michelle (removenospam at) whymicesing.com or leave a comment (with valid email address) below.

Footnotes

1. The tattoo of an extinct arthropod on the back of my neck shows where my true loyalties lie. Sorry, but molluscs aren’t it.