To coincide with what seems like Scott Pilgrim week the creator of comic book series Brian Lee O’Malley has reveled the cover artwork for the storys final chapter. Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour which will be hitting shelves on July 20th 2010. If you still haven’t started reading O’Malley’s mini-epic by now, then you really have no excuse.
Just finished this book recently. I was a big fan of Blue Like Jazz and I love Donald Miller’s other work too but to be frank I think this might be his best. Blue Like Jazz came just at the right time for me, but I have grown a lot now. What really was amazing about this was it wasn’t just a book of good thoughts and ideas, it was about actually living them. I can in all honesty say that whoever you are, this book is probably relevant to you. It’s one of the most inspiring works I have ever read. To give you a quick overview it’s basically just about how and why to live a more worthwhile and meaningful life, and how a meaningful life is a lot like a great story. Give it a read, I doubt you will be disappointed and I would bet you would be better off for it, I can honestly say I am.
If your going to do a comic about vikings it’s probably going to have two things, firstly it’s going to be bloody with lots of people get there heads chopped off in big battles, Northlanders – check. Secondly the people getting their heads chopped off are going to need to be big beardy types, all covered in grime and assorted bits of animal, Northlanders – check. but what else you put in between the hallmark elements of medieval butchery is entirely open to interpretation, and with a writer like Brian Wood, it’s probably going to be even more fascinating than the action.
What’s life like in a third world country? Hard?, Then what’s it like to live in third world conditions inside of the United States? If you were to visit the fictional Prairie Rose Indian Reservation the only reason you’d likely be there is to visit the novelty ‘Indian’ casino, owned by tribal leader of the lacota people, Lincoln Red Crow. But life on the ‘rez’ isn’t smoke signals and peace pipes, organised crime, racial tension and drugs have taken a heavy toll on the population of the lacota, Scalped reflects the real world problems of America’s native American population, the lacota are a people who cant escape from the rez, finding work outside of it’s boundaries when your a ‘red skin’ is so hard the only way to make any money is the wrong way, selling drugs or prostitution or maybe worse still as one of Lincoln Red Crow’s goons who keep the whole thing running, part native American activist, part crime lord.
Spider Jerusalem, this is the name of the main character and our guide through the world of Transmetropolitan. The futuristic urban earth where commercialism holds sway to such an extreme it governs every aspect of civilization. This is a world where the only alien species to contact humanity has already exhausted its usefulness and has fallen to selling its DNA as a fashion trend, in a culture that cant even remember what year it is. This is a world that Batman couldn’t save, but a man with a keyboard can. Imagine a world where cannibalism, porn and death mesh with Ipods, politics and religion. Warren Ellis creates a universe totally in keeping with the direction our own culture is taking. Where the cryogenically revived dead of yesteryear return as second class citizens doomed to roam the streets homelessly, where the media can advertise in your dreams, where speaking French is punishable by death.
The first issue of a new comic series ‘EXISLES’ which I’m a part of is out to read online currently, this post is celebrating our major website overhaul. It’s all about a flooded version of England, which after this winter seems rather topical. the second issue is in the works currently and should be out sometime in the new year.
There’s no shortage of Japanese manga that use the evolution of technology as a basis for their narrative. Manga such as Serial Experiments Lain, Ergo Proxy and most famously Ghost in the Shell all hail from this central idea of technology succeeding humanity. The idea has been taken by films such as The Matrix and The Terminator and received the ‘Hollywood’ treatment as well.
But only one example of this idea of technology replacing nature really stands alone for me, Tsutomu Nihei’s BLAME! It’s a work that stands separately from other cyberpunk and machine take-over stories, because it’s a vision not just of the furthest excesses of this familiar idea, but because of the sheer inhospitableness of the world it’s set in. The story takes place within a vast industrial hell, where all control has been lost over the structure’s builders. As a result the Megastructure as it’s called, has grown out of all conceivable proportion, at one point the protagonist ‘Killy’ comes across an open space the size of the planet Jupiter, after which the Megastructure continues. Remnants of humanity continue to survive amongst the chaos, some are drastically altered having either changed size or shape or reverting to a tribal level, nearly everything in the series of books is left for the reader to decide, everything is explained within the dialogue and often the best explanation for what’s going on is a guess by one of the few characters in the story.
On the 15th July Boom! Studios released the first (in a set of 24) graphic novel versions of Philip K. Dick’s classic sci-fi masterpiece “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?“. Without loosing one word of the original text (Dick’s writing is broken into caption boxes and speech balloons) and stunning artwork to boot the printed medium doesn’t disappoint. A must for any tech-noir fan but i do recommend reading the masterpiece that is the original book.