What

The figure of Gilles is stolen from Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Pierrot painted in 1718/19. Angela Merkel is stolen from the political life in the divided and the no-longer-divided German states.

Gilles makes use of the large fund of cultural & scientific as well as literary and comic-historical traditions. Persons become material, when treated as historical. Contemporary history is captured as a counter-example, as a neither-like-that. Existing alternatives are introduced as neither-nor, even where they are used affirmatively from the characters’ point of view. Only utopian alternatives are valid; their actualization is the King Midas of modal logic.

Cui bono? - Yes, exactly! Cui?!

Similarities to living and historical persons are intentional. Denigration takes place only against ideas, words and deeds, on the basis of quotations and paraphrases; not, however, against a whole personality. Even Heinrich Himmler will not be denigrated as a person, but only his ideas, words and deeds, as soon as he will appear for the first time in number 00666, on September 3, 2027.

What not

Ceci n’est pas un manifeste.

The font: Charter

The typeface used across this site is Charter, designed in 1987 by Matthew Carter for his company Bitstream Inc. Its strict rectangular serifs may exude the flair of mechanical typewriters and add a smile from a past era to Gilles’s style so heavy of text & statement.

Technology

Djil.de is distributed across the planet from a Uberspace where it is deployed after local static site generation by Hugo via rsync landet. The site’s theme is a development of ours based on Tony Barry’s Hugo Web Comic Template Theme of which there are scarcely any remains, but which was quite useful as a starting point.

Leaving comments on comics is made possible with Commento, an open source software written in in Go, just like Hugo; it stores your posts and profiles into a PostgreSQL database in our own infrastructure.