dph writes...

Where was Thailog during present-day events of City of Stone?

Greg Bishansky writes...

Just a little something I've been thinking about. One of the things I always liked about "Gargoyles" was the status quo could always be changed. The cast was rich enough that the perspectives would alone would be fascinating. Case in point, the revelation of gargoyles to the world.

Obviously, we know how Goliath feels about this, and he dreams of one day bringing about a new golden age.

We haven't seen Demona react to, or comment on the revelation, but her thoughts and plans are only too guess. Kill them before they kill us.

But, Thailog on the other hand, he's much harder to predict. He has never shown an interest in "race relations", nor demonstrated any animosity towards humans. But, at the same time, he is a gargoyle. He has to have an opinion on this. The Quarrymen are as much a threat to him as they are to Goliath and his clan.

As I said, he's hard to predict. I don't see him trying to reach out and build bridges, like Goliath. Nor do I see him working towards their destruction, like Demona. For one, he's not that wasteful, and he clearly likes the idea of holding economic power, or else why would he have helped form Nightstone Unlimited?

Of course, it all depends on what Thailog's goals are. So far, everything we've seen him do seem like means to an end. Adding to his wealth, by robbing Xanatos, and eliminating Demona and Macbeth. Creating flunkies and his own concubine when creating Delilah and the clones, and forming Nightstone, which he lost to Demona. But, these don't feel like overall goals, more like stepping stones. Which makes me think, what does he want? For that matter, does he even know what he wants beyond proving himself to be superior to Goliath and Xanatos?

I'm sure you have something in mind, and hopefully future issues of the comic will shed some light on this. Overall, I think Thailog is a fascinating character, a great villain. And I eagerly anticipate seeing more of him in issues 4, 5 and beyond.

Demon@ writes...

Hello Greg,
What im going to asked you is not comic related. Im from argentina and i cant find any website or something that could bring an issue here. But well i was complaining about the same thing a year ago abouth the dvd and i finally manage to get it :D Origynal and all!! :D.
But well, on with my questions:
I was reading the archives and i read something like "Thailog was the most evil of the three.." comparing him with Demona and Macbeth. That got me thinking...
How is that someone can be more evil than a creature who is planing to destroy the human race (wich has some sense. Humans themselves have destroy entire species of animals considering them as dangerous, but thats not the point on these post). If we consider Evil as the capacity of someone to do, willingly and consciously, damage to others, Thailog should hardly be consider more evil than Demona, since both of them are as equal to destroy another sentient been.
But if we consider Evil someone who actually enjoys causing damage and suffering to others, that may change things a bit and thats what brought those questions up.
1- Does Demona enjoy killing humans?
2- Does she see the killing only as something that has to be done?
3- Is it something born only from rage and grief, or does she has a sadic pleasure on killing those who made her life miserable?
4- Can we consider Demona as someoe cruel and that finds actual pleasure on the suffering of others?
5- What would Thailog do that Demona wouldnt even think of? Something that would make him more evil than she is.
Well thanks again for any respons you give me. And i WONT loose my hopes of getting the comic :D (someway somehow).

Charisma82 writes...

I was watching "Double Jeopardy" last night and it reminded me about a question I've wanted to ask for a while. After Thailog puts Elisa, Xanatos, Sevarius, & Goliath in the oil tank, he tells Goliath that he had considered sharing the money with him but decided not to because Goliath had "disappointed him". What exactly disappointed him? I've been looking though the archives and the closest I've come to finding an answer is that Thailog didn't like it when Goliath called him an abomination. I'm sure that Thailog didn't like being called that, but that couldn't have been the main reason for not letting Goliath in on his scheme. There's got to be more to it. I've also wondered if it had to do with Goliath wanting to protect humans, because Thailog does mention something about not wanting to play "guardian angel" to the city. But then I figure that Thailog would've already known this about Goliath in the first place. He was smart enough to set everything up in "Double Jeopardy", wouldn't he be smart enough to do some research on Goliath to find out that protecting people was what he did? And if this is the case, why did Thailog even decide to include Goliath in the money part in the first place? The way I heard it was that he didn't decide until that night that he didn't want to share the money. So, why did he change his mind about Goliath?

Thank you for your time and your answer.

-Charisma82

Makhasu writes...

Who came up with the idea for the Paris scheme against Macbeth? Thailog or Demona?

Shawn writes...

Since Thailog is the clone of Xanatos, which would also imply that he has some human DNA, then does that mean that he doesn't turn into stone like Goliath since Xanatos's DNA would probably prevent that?

Psycho girl writes...

It's me! (Giggles, chuckles and many guffaws.)

How are you? I have some questions about Thailog and....yah...

1.(WHY WONT THE STUPID TAB BUTTON WORK!!!) Uh....anyway, How dose Thailog view Alexander? Dose he consider him a 'brother'?

2. How dose Thailog view his own creation? I'm asking this because of the Justice Leauge clone Galatea. She thought hse had to prove her 'own existance' to everyone by destroying super girl. Dose Thailog feel the same way about Goliath and Xanatose?

Thanks

Punchinello writes...

<<Well, let's start with the "buffet"/game-playing writing style. I think it's awful. >>

I agree.

<<Having said that, I have this friend, a garg fan who's now a pretty darn successful writer. When I read her first book, I felt that the first half of it was written in that way. As if rolls of the dice determined who each character was, what he or she could do and what happenned to them.
When I asked her about it, she confessed (if that's the word) that I was dead on. The first half of the book was her almost literally setting to prose a game of D&D that she had played.
I don't recommend doing that, but look at the result. The second half of the novel, inspired as it was by the first half, was wonderful. And she's moved forward with these characters into other books as well. >>

When I indicated that I thought this game-players writing style could be exploited profitably, I wasn't really thinking of more mature, conventional writing emerging from it. Although, that obviouly works too. I was thinking, if you were writing something, for instance, where there was a consistent theme of game-playing, then maybe you could exploit it as a device. I'm thinking of game-playing themes more along the lines of George Perec than dungeons and dragons. So maybe there would be subtle games embedded in the text. But at the same time, maybe there could be a section of the book, or a certain character, which you treat in the game-players writing style. Sort of in the way you could mimic the writing style of the Victorians. I have given no serious thought to what properties make game-player writing read the way it does. But it _is_ recognizable. You've identified it, yourself.

<<But your second question is more serious. Does this process in fact impair the reader/audience. Forget that some of these guys will never be great writers, will this make them bad readers?
I don't know. But my guess is that it's the same (or similar) percentage of people who would have been bad readers in the first place. The good ones will transcend. The others won't. That's my hypothesis.>>

I suppose so. It's just that I keep on detecting subtle trends in the way people in our culture think about things. And I worry this game-players thing will worsen. It's like that business of an incomplete idea of "sentience" invading popular culture. It seems ridiculous to speculate that the idea migrated into the culture from star trek, but if you observe carefully, you can see it. I think people in our culture, are less and less informed by critical thinking today.

Ten years ago, for instance, I don't think I saw game-player writing anywhere. Now, even before this conversation I had, in which we began to put a name to this thing, it seems pervasive. I think the novelty has become the institution. Consider that twenty years ago, aspiring authors could not have seen this in literature. Today, I have waking nightmares that the kid who would have been the next Paul Auster is going to become intellectually deranged when he picks up a dungeons/dragons book for the first time and gets the idea that "this must be how people write."

I'm probably thinking of something along the lines of memes here. Ideas enter the culture and become dominant over time. Usually, stupid ideas. They begin to define the way that people think about things and even the way they value things. It doesn't just erode our intellects. It can erode sensible ethics. Consider this...

I saw an episode of star trek recently, and it really alarmed me. The premise was that the characters travel to a planet where the human population reproduces exclusively by cloning. For some ridiculous reason they could no longer continue cloning themselves, so they ask the characters to donate genetic material so their culture can survive. The characters hostility to the idea is so irrational that I wouldn't know how to describe it. And when the clone people sneak away some of their genetic material to make clones of them anyway, a demonstration of some of the most demented rationalization of science fiction occurs.

The characters go to the lab where their clones have already developed into full grown reproductions of themselves, and use their death rays to obliterate them. And I should be clear that these were not blastocysts in test tubes. These were obviously fully grown and autonomous people. And this is all treated by the authors as though it were the most natural thing in the world. It's simply understood that being cloned "diminishes you" as a human being, and that their absurd indignation was somehow righteous. Precisely how this diminishes a person is never elaborated upon, and I'm sure that the authors never even thought about it. They assume, with remarkable vacuousness, that the cloned people in the lab do not possess any type of intrinsic worth. I know that star trek authors have never picked up a science text, but the poverty of ethical thinking here, compelled me to think they had never read a book or had a thought about anything.

Of course, it's just a silly TV show. Right?

And yet, it's conspicuous that the range public debate about bioethics is defined by these concepts. I'm not talking about the range of debate in the literature of science or philosophy. That remains very isolated from the public forums where most people in our culture consider these issues. In popular magazines and network news journalism, the dominant logic is that a person is rendered somehow, "lesser" by having been cloned. The idea has been in ascendancy for a decade despite the depth of it's ignorance. The people who define and limit public discourse about it have certainly never thought about it critically. Their positions frequently contradict themselves and more frequenly rely on popular myths and emotional appeals to people's superstitions.

And it gets worse. Something far more sinister has emerged from popular, misinformed dialogue about cloning. In popular disputes about it (I heard the notion resurface on CNN about a month ago) the question of "what kind of rights would a clone have" is routinely brandished about as though it were an intelligent thought. To practicing ethicists and scientists, this notion probably would not have even entered the dialogue if it had not been thrust upon them by popular culture. That the question is being asked at all assumes, uncritically, that there is something meaningfully distinguishable about a cloned person which would compel us to assign a different worth to them. A worth, lesser than a person who came into the world by conventional means.

I have a suspicion, that the people most vocally shrieking about the moral dilemmas of cloning, are actually theologically threatened by it. I have no evidence of this. But a few inferences they have made, have got me thinking that their theological picture of "personhood" follows a very rigid prescription, and their indignation may originate with some inept idea that a clone would not have a soul.

"Soul" becomes a good parallel to "sentient life." One is from religion and one is from science fiction, but both of them are shortcuts people use instead of actually thinking about the internal properties that imbue something with intrinsic moral worth.

I hope it's apparent why I think this is important. Magical thinking can be dangerous. The worth of a being can't reasonably be described in these terms. If the distinction between ruling class and underclass or the difference between pets and meat is being determined by distinguishing one as sentient or soul-containing, then we have not really distinguished anything. We're just making things up. We might as well assign moral worth based upon who has stars on their bellies.

I don't remember what Goliath's reaction to Thailog was precisely. I remember that he was alarmed by the prospect of there being another version of himself. How would you describe his feelings about the issue. I suspect since he would have no concept of cloning technology, his perception of it would be unique.