Netarts??

i have no idea what this means! but Ardeidae is a pretty cool family of birds.

tangentially, this x-ray of a heron's neck i just saw on wikipedia's Ardeidae article explains some things.

sometimes there's a gestalt.

however, a comic made by a lone weirdo is inevitably a different animal than any work in another medium.

not trying to be a pedant. it's genuinely thrilling to see art like this that links human history into natural history, which is also why i find it thrilling to consider art made by anatomically modern humans 40, 50 thousand years ago, and by our cousins and antecedents stretching back even further.

this is a really cool example of neolithic art conversing with earlier epochs of life on our planet; i'd like to mention though that there are many examples of upper paleolithic art, known examples of middle paleolithic art, and examples of lower paleolithic mark-making that can be argued to be art.

realizing i read your statement backwards. that said, you could replace 'it's real' with 'it's fantasy' in my last sentence and it would still hold true. if the author clearly has chosen one over the other to appeal to the seriousness of a given audience any potential tension will be dissipated.

unreliable narration can be really effective for building anxiety in a narrative (paul tremblay comes to mind as someone who habitually does it well), but it absolutely hinges on 'it's real' being an actual possibility diegetically.

i'd also like to revisit some other oshii films—GITS, yes, but also Patlabor 2. i've had Patlabor 2 on my mind a lot, having watched War in the Pocket adjacent to the original two Gundam series. i was shocked by how sharp WitP's writing is, critically—definitely close affinities with Patlabor 2.