Marasma
Marasma is a comic collaboration. Each strip will explore the abuse society visits upon its weakest members. The name of the title character is the feminine variant of the Spanish word marasmo. An image search for this word on Google will acquaint you with this medical condition of extreme emaciation.
Characters
Marasma – the main character. She embodies moral apathy in that she perceives need, suffering, and pain in the world, but will not take action to alleviate the same in her immediate surroundings. Marasma likes to style herself a sensitive soul and a globally aware citizen of the world. She often scoffs at those in society whom she considers parochial and jingoistic in their view of the world. She prides herself on being up-to-date with world events, national and foreign policy issues. She always votes Democratic (regardless of the issue) as a point of pride.
Marasma lives in a major urban center, yet never reads a local paper or seeks any awareness of local issues or politics. The one time she volunteered to serve meals at a homeless shelter on Thanksgiving, she was inwardly repulsed by all the dirty and smelly human beings. While she is styles herself as post-racial in her relationships and interactions with others, socio-economic prejudice is a deep-seated, if unexamined, part of her psyche. This prejudice causes her to feel extremely uncomfortable when in the presence of those who are experiencing severe economic destitution. This reaction produces a cognitive dissonance with her ideologically based compassion and desire for solidarity with the global under-class. While she perceives this dissonance as a general sense of inauthenticity, she has never faced it directly.
Marasma carries the fundamental tension of the comic strip. Her comments, observations, and actions focus on poverty and need, but at either the national or international level—in other words poverty and need as intellectual concepts. In each strip she remains inactive, non-responsive, or reactive against the characters of the Unheard Voices who exist around her. The goal of each strip is to use the inherent disconnect between Marasma’s words and actions to produce in the reader the cognitive dissonance Marasma herself is feeling.
Camdrin – the supporting character. He is beyond moral apathy in that he is, at his best, oblivious and, at his worst, abusive to those he encounters who are in need. He functions as an id to Marasma. He will say and do things that reflect her inner inclinations but that she would never bring herself to express.
Camdrin has two functions in each strip. In the first several panels he serves almost exclusively as an audience to Marasma’s comments. Any response he might make to her statements in the first panels of any given strip are essentially inconsequential and only move the narrative thread forward. The last panel of each strip is his. In the last strip, through his words or his actions, he creates the feeling of dissonance in the reader. The words Camdrin speaks in the last panel appear to be in response to Marasma’s previous comments but have an application, unrealized by Marasma or himself, to the characters of Unheard Voices in the strip. The same applies to his actions. He takes even the most abusive action without any recognition of the Unheard Voices around him.
Unheard Voices –these characters embody those in need in our very neighborhoods and cities. They are at all times unheard, having no spoken dialog.
