WILD CHILDREN: FRESH LINKAGE
Riley Rossmo & I talked to MTV Geek & iFanboy.com about WILD CHILDREN, the graphic novella we made together that’s coming out via IMAGE COMICS in JULY 2012. I’m pretty happy with how these interviews turned out.
Also? Fresh art. Take a look.
WILD CHILDREN: the MTV Geek interview
WILD CHILDREN: the ifanboy.com interview
JEFFREY EUGENIDES – THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW
“Every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagination.”
More here.
ON THE STARTUP BUBBLE
“A lot like the situation with the mortgages in the last bubble.”
More here.
IAN BOGOST ON THE NEW AESTHETIC: “IT NEEDS TO GET WEIRDER.”
“For another part, the New Aesthetic fails the ultimate test of novelty: that of disruption and surprise. Misguided as they may seem a century hence, avant-garde movements like Futurism and Dada were not celebrating industrialism nor lamenting war so much as they were replacing familiar principles with unfamiliar ones on the grounds that the familiar had failed. The New Aesthetic is not surprising, but expected. After all, the artists now wield the same data access APIs, mapping middleware, and computer vision systems as the corporations. In some cases, the artists are the corporations.
A really new aesthetics might work differently: instead of concerning itself with the way we humans see our world differently when we begin to see it through and with computer media that themselves “see” the world in various ways, what if we asked how computers and bonobos and toaster pastries and Boeing 787 Dreamliners develop their own aesthetics. The perception and experience of other beings remains outside our grasp, yet available to speculation thanks to evidence that emanates from their withdrawn cores like radiation around the event horizon of a black hole. The aesthetics of other beings remain likewise inaccessible to knowledge, but not to speculation–even to art.”
More here.
HACKSTABILITY
“I’ve concluded that we’re reaching a technological complexity threshold where hacking is going to be the main mechanism for the further evolution of civilization. Hacking is part of a future that’s neither the exponentially improving AI future envisioned by Singularity types, nor the entropic collapse envisioned by the Collapsonomics types. It is part of a marginally stable future where the upward lift of diminishing-magnitude technological improvements and hacks just balances the downward pull of entropic gravity, resulting in an indefinite plateau, as the picture above illustrates.
I call this possible future hackstability.”
More here.
GULF SEAFOOD DEFORMITIES ALARM SCIENTISTS
“Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs “with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they’ve been dead for a week”.
Rooks is also finding eyeless shrimp, shrimp with abnormal growths, female shrimp with their babies still attached to them, and shrimp with oiled gills.
“We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills.”
Rooks, who grew up fishing with her parents, said she had never seen such things in these waters, and her seafood catch last year was “ten per cent what it normally is”.
“I’ve never seen this,” he said, a statement Al Jazeera heard from every scientist, fisherman, and seafood processor we spoke with about the seafood deformities.
Given that the Gulf of Mexico provides more than 40 per cent of all the seafood caught in the continental US, this phenomenon does not bode well for the region, or the country.”
More here.
JULIAN ASSANGE: HIS TV DEBUT
Things got a bit odd with Assange’s last question, in which he asked the reglious extremist, “Isn’t Allah, or the notion of God, the ultimate superpower? Shouldn’t you as a freedom fighter also seek to liberate people from the totalitarian concept of a monotheistic god?” Not surprisingly, Nasrallah didn’t buy the premise of the question.
MATT SENECA ON JACK KIRBY AND GALACTUS
“Galactus is a fascinating creation, one whose simultaneous simplicity and complexity isn’t often found outside religious text or myth. The spontaneous creation of a cosmic catastrophe, he scours the universe searching out new worlds to destroy, not because of any inner evil, but simply because he must do so or perish. Galactus is Destruction personified in the best costume Kirby ever drew, the inevitable result of all the power his comics unleashed on the page, the balancing force to everything in the universe that was designed to create, including Kirby himself. Kirby seemed to sense that in Galactus he had created his own antithesis, and tread carefully around the character, literally giving him space — the full-page headshot above being only one example of the muralistic treatment he receives in the issue. ”
More here.
ON MINDLESS ONES
Mindless Ones: one of the blogs so close to my heart that I hit it up at least two times per week. Let me explain why by showing you a quote from this short article on the relatively recent fuck-you-grave-we’re-in-this-for-real-the-prog-shall-never-die creative resurgence that revitalized 2000AD, an UK-based comics magazine that’s responsible, in one way or another, for birthing or at least influencing most of the actually-interesting comics writers on the Western hemisphere. Gaze into the fist of serious writing:
“Comics don’t have to be Doing Something Big. Disposable is fine. We call it recycling now: today’s throwaway is tomorrow’s permanent edifice. But if comics do Do Something Big, pluck their zeitgeist from the sky, or grapple their larger embedded social moment to the floor and daystick it to death… Well, that’s what I’m really here for. (That and the fighting.) Why shouldn’t comics try to be the world they exist in, dissect it, re-staple it together, stick it on the shelves there in reach of the toddlers, maybe change their minds forever? Wise their pissy asses up?”
This is what comics ARE ABOUT, to me. Fast & thoughtful responses to where we are at the moment. Entertainment that works as a mirror, entertainment that changes your approach to daily life. A DESIGN FOR COMICS that changes your DESIGN FOR LIFE. Because that’s what art’s about, innit?
Don’t mean it can’t be fun at the same time.
Besides being incredibly erudite — their posts on John Smith, the hyper-abrasive well-hidden Cronenberg of comics, are nothing short of brilliant and incredibly useful to a beginning wannabe big writer like yours truly — Mindless Ones also post their roundtable discussions of Mad Men episodes, the second-to-the-last of which made me sit down and chew on my tongue for a few hours, seeing as I (on multiple occasions) referred to Pete Campbell as my spirit animal.
Yeah, that’s me. The one in the back.
Anyway. Try ‘em. And follow on twitter.
ANNOUNCEMENT: WILD CHILDREN
And another cat’s out of the bag:
USA TODAY: ALES KOT PLOTS YOUTHFUL REBELLION IN ‘WILD CHILDREN’
“The first spark that led to writer Ales Kot’s debut in comics is something shock rocker Marilyn Manson once said about the Columbine high school shootings.
The exact quote? Well, Kot’s going to remain cryptic about that for now. He’d rather you wait until July 11 to immerse yourself and ponder his Image Comics graphic novella Wild Children all on your own.
Kot teams with artist Riley Rossmo (Green Wake, Rebel Blood) for a story about a group of sharp, smart kids who’ve had enough of their high school and what they’ve been “learning” so they take the school and the teachers hostage. And this revolution will definitely be televised.”
Much more, including a 4-page preview, here.
