Letter from the Editor: Diagrams and charts mending broken hearts

Art by Cassondra Jones

Welcome, dearest readers, into the fold of the October 2024 issue of The Pitch—a product homegrown right here in KC. As you can tell from our cover story, homegrown is certainly a theme for this month’s issue. The narratives you’ll find us tackling in these pages all share a common thread of who in the metro is crafting what comes next—and why we’re stoked to let them cook.

Art by Cassondra Jones

While we’ve got discussions of the afterlife, murder, and more, there is probably little scarier right now than the pending election. We’ve saved you the torment of “grotesque masks of presidential candidates” cover, but we’re all aware that looming November day is the most existentially threatening part of this Halloween season. To its credit, this year, the politicians up and down the ballot have provided us with near-daily jumpscares, so credit where credit’s due for being the living embodiment of horror—the Friday the 13th franchise has nothing on CNN’s Tuesday the 5th feed ahead of the big day. A real monster mash of weird people and bad ideas is chasing us through a field out there, and I’m running out of places to hide.

All I’m saying is that if this year’s Halloween festivities looked more like a night in The Purge, I would understand how we got there. [As an aside, why do people treat Purge Day in those films as just an opportunity to do murder? If everything were legal, I feel like more Americans would engage in grand financial crimes, acquire exotic pets, or really, really upgrade their automobile by borrowing from a nearby car lot or museum. Just comes off like a lot of untapped potential for American ingenuity.]

Art by Cassondra Jones

As this year’s spooky season starts to overcome my nightly background film schedule, I’m coming to understand why I like/love/hunger for the kind of scary flicks that speak to me. I was revisiting The Blair Witch Project and became enamored by the disconnect of knowledge itself buried in that flick. It opens on documentarians who are, in a subtle way, dunking on small-town folk for believing in something obviously fictional. We’re setting up the main characters’ own delusion that they’re too smart for this. So when they find themselves inexplicably lost in the woods—a traditionally relatively simple problem, yet one they cannot solve—it lands hard that no one here could have outsmarted a situation bigger, crueler, and cosmically unbound from their existence.

The knowledge disconnect has been key to my lifetime obsession with mad scientist movies, or even regular scientist movies where just a tiny sprinkle of hubris sends them out of their league. Any situation where ambition and hubris come together to, say, create a murderous robot, unleash killer aliens, or (especially) open a lil ole portal to Hell—That’s my sweet spot. I love watching smart people make untethered decisions that lead to absolute madness.

Photo by Cassondra Jones

That’s why this issue stings a bit because it is our final go-around with our personal Mad Scientist in Residence: Cassonda Jones. Cass has been our designer for exactly two years now, and while she’s moving on to greener pastures (actual money, benefits, things journalism rarely provides), we’re going to feel the loss of her manic energy in the office. In the last few years, you’ve probably noticed a hard shift into maximalist energy and a connected, yet, otherworldly smattering of colors, shapes, arrangements, and concepts that have helped redefine how we tell the stories of the city. That’s been Jones, hard at work.

The delightfully named Ron Cobb served as the set and costume designer on Ridley Scott’s Alien. One of the things that makes the original 1979 film so enduring is the way everything on the spaceship setting looks and feels. That guy didn’t just draw ideas for computers, control panels, spacesuits, or airlocks—He created blueprints and charts, showing how each of these mundane background details would actually function in the real world and why they needed to look the way they looked. It was a degree of detail obsession that few would ever hear about, even though you can take the feature film in, and, somehow, that dedication sticks with you, and makes the entire thing work.

Art by Cassondra Jones

Cassondra Jones has been our Ron Cobb. In February of 2023, I was frustrated that our design for a Valentine’s Day issue—featuring skeleton astronauts floating through a void of candy hearts, obviously—was taking too long to come together on the page. I’d seen sketches weeks earlier and thought they were great, yet the cover still seemed miles away. It was only then that I discovered Cass doesn’t just do “art”—She puts in the work to build realities. These space skeletons didn’t just exist, they needed backstories. Their universe needed rules. Their bodies needed character models and technical functionality. When I thought Cass was right at the finish line, she was not because Cass was storyboarding an entire Pixar movie for no one, just to get to the right final position.

Truly, mad scientist shit. God, we are all gonna miss finding out how deeply, troubling obsessive she was. Godspeed to wherever life takes you, Jones. Thanks for experimenting on us.

And with that… on to the October issue. We hope you enjoy everything we’re putting on the platform today. Between Cassondra and the folks whose tales we tell, please keep the inspiration with you: go nuts out there. There’s never a bad time for weird science.

Pitch in and we’ll make it through,