2000AD ONLINE is scanning some classic material from the early days of the legendary 2000AD weekly comic, including this demented “future advert” illustrated by Kev O’Neill and derived from the FLESH serial therein.

Y’know, I actually remember reading this page as a kid. Most of my American peers in comics writing grew up reading Superman and Batman and Captain America and all that. This is what I had when I was nine years old.

Edith Frost:

A guy on a message board pitches “the worlds first conservative comic” (sic):

America’s future has become an Orwellian nightmare of ultra-liberalism. Beginning with the Gore Presidency, the government has become increasingly dominated by liberal extremists. In 2004, Muslim terrorists stopped viewing the weakened American government as a threat; instead they set their sites on their true enemies, vocal American conservatives. Terrorist assassins have thinned the ranks of the vocal Right. The few conservatives that survived attempts on their lives have been forced underground by the oppressive “Coulter Laws” of 2007. In order to further their cause, they have joined forces and formed a powerful covert conservative organization called “The Freedom of Information League”, aka F.O.I.L.

The New York City faction of F.O.I.L. is lead by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North, each uniquely endowed with special abilities devised by a biomechanical engineer affectionately named “Oscar”. F.O.I.L. is soon to be joined by a young man named Reagan McGee. Reagan was born on September 11th, 2001. Reagan has grown to manhood in an ultra-liberal educational system: being told, not asked, what to think. With personal determination, which alienates him from his contemporaries, he has chosen the path less traveled…the path to the Right.

Two decades of negotiation with the U.N., and America’s administration of 2021 (President Chelsea Clinton and Vice President Michael Moore), has culminated in a truce with fundamentalist Islamic terrorists, or so America is told. The honorable ambassador from Afghanistan has come to NYC to address the U.N., his name is Usama Bin Laden.

Although, Ambassador Bin Laden has announced that he will publicly apologize for the “misunderstanding” of the events of 9/11. In actuality, he intends on detonating a tactical nuke that is contained in his private diplomatic briefcase. It is a race against the clock to save NYC from a nuclear holocaust and the world from liberal domination. Only with F.O.I.L.’s help, can “Liberality For All” once again become “Liberty For All!”

Dinosaur experts have extracted samples of what appear to be soft tissues from a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil bone. The US researchers tell Science magazine that the organic components resemble cells and fine blood vessels…

We love Defamer:

We think we’re finally starting to get a handle on what it takes for a reality show to can an episode.

* Television producers destabilize a family by removing a parent and replacing her with a near polar opposite: Father in destabilized family commits horrible act of child abuse (punched his 13-year-old daughter in the face) : Episode canceled

* Contestant commits suicide: OK, likely somber boxing-glove retirement segment to follow. Show trumpets tragic fighter’s defeat on website.

Holy fucking shit. Jean Snow just found this: “a search engine that goes through Amazon and displays results as, well, have a look for yourself.”

Give it a few moments to build.

The internet loves me.

According to Chuck Jones, the ROAD RUNNER cartoon’s creator and chief director, in Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times Of An Animated Cartoonist, he and the artists behind the Road Runner and Wile E. cartoons adhered to ten simple but strict rules…

But the Damage is Irreversible. It’s become a favourite webcomic of mine over the last six months.

Fascinating little sketch of a recent shamanic experience in the Andes:

The thing I said before that I was going to do after the Inca trail was was to take San Pedro. It is a hallucinogenic cactus that has been used in the Andes for spiritual healing for 5000 years. We managed to get in contact with a woman, Lesley, who has been trained by a shaman about San Pedro; how to prepare it, guide people taking it etc. The basic idea is that it is used to reconnect you with Pachamama and yourself and it’s called San Pedro, Saint Peter in Spanish, because he is the saint who unlocks the key to heaven…

(Cheers, Lindsay.)

Like you ever doubted it:

John Rogers and Andy Kuhn have put their short comic for Boom!Studios’ ZOMBIE TALES, “Daddy Smells Different”, up on his blog. Go and look.

In mediascape 2005, how many things can a person be?

I’m a writer. There are something like 55 books with my name on currently residing on amazon.com. I have my own Wikipedia entry and I’m apparently a celebrity atheist. People remix photos of me. So I have kind of a head start. Let’s assume you’ve got a website of some kind, a computer that does stuff without coal and a hand crank, and the sick wish to worm yourself into people’s brains. How many ways can you do that?

Record a short mp3 and you’re a ringtone. Take a picture and cut it down to around 150 pixels across by 200 tall and you’re a phone wallpaper. How simple is that? Anyone whose phone is equipped with a way of changing its screen’s appearance can carry you in their pocket. PayPal five US dollars a month to LibSyn and you’re a broadcaster, sending out audio and/or video to anyone who wants it. If it’s just audio, stream it off a MySpace page for free. You can be a t-shirt, a coffee cup, a visual brand across a bunch of objects. You can be a badge or a sticker. A photographic print, a magazine, a book, a pack of postcards. An instant messaging icon, an LJ icon or a message board avatar.

Right there: an image, a sound, a radio star, a video star, a brand, a slogan, art, thought, iconography.

If someone had a mind to, they could become their own internet-powered brand with some speed. Tons of people could do it. They could design themselves to infiltrate cellphones and iPods, all the shit we’re told to own, all the shit we want to own for the pleasure of it but which by design comes contentless.

A bunch of people actually attempting to take back the process of human productisation (as opposed to ignoring or fighting it) on an intensive basis…

I seem to remember Lydia Lunch once saying she’d much rather people jerk off over her than Debbie Gibson.

[related: 4GM]

Click Opera is still probably the best-written blog on the Anglophone web:

My best friend is a Greek communist studying Sociology (he now works as a transport advisor in Greece, engineering the downfall of the private car). In 1980 he’s reading Stalin’s biography. He admires Stalin’s ruthlessness and tells me that, come the revolution, if it becomes necessary he won’t hesitate to have me shot. He’s decided not to make love to his French girlfriend because he believes, with some of the more radical feminists, that all acts of penetration are a form of imperialism. Later, when we all move to London, his girlfriend gets sick of the non-intervention and becomes mine instead.

Oh, this is excellent. Flash-powered soundtracked art magazine/gallery/dynamic installation/collective. I am admiring and jealous.

“The Solar Death Ray is made of 112 mirrors mounted on a platform 4 feet wide and 6 feet tall. Each mirror is a square roughly 3.5 inches on edge. All these mirrors focus the sun to a single spot 5 feet, 6 inches from the mirror platform. A wooden fork extends from the mirror base to the area near the focus and serves as a mounting point for Solar Death Ray targets. The mirror platform is mounted to the support frame on a pivot that allows the platform to be angled. The whole system is mounted on a set of wheels.

“I estimate that the Solar Death Ray can heat things up to between 500-600 degrees Celsius 930-1100 degrees Fahrenheit) under good conditions… The “output power” of the Solar Death Ray is roughly 1,500 Watts, meaning that 1,500 Watts of energy can be deposited onto a target…”

An Indian woman committed suicide so her two blind sons could receive her eyes and see, a newspaper reported Monday.

But doctors say the chances of success are bleak, The Indian Express reported.

Thirty-seven-year-old Tamizhselvi’s sons, Kumaran, 17, and Kumar, 15, have been blind since birth. Doctors in the southern city of Chennai say Kumar’s condition cannot be helped with a cornea transplant and also suspect his elder brother does not have a cornea defect.

“We had told the family earlier itself that a corneal transplant was not needed for the younger son,” the Express quoted hospital official G. Seethalakshmi saying.

The family is insisting Tamizhselvi’s corneas can only be used for her sons and no one else.

So a CD turned up in the post yesterday, from a band I’d never heard of.

Turns out they’d heard the Superburst Mixtapes, and were asking me if I fancied putting one of their songs on a Mixtape if I liked them.

They had no idea about the comics stuff or anything else I do. They only knew me from the Mixtapes.

I think that’s actually kind of great.

I do actually need new music, so if you and/or your band has downloadable mp3s on a website,
let me know. The Mixtapes go out to over a thousand people each time.

– W

Mansions Of Glory: Straight undiluted drunken half-coherent clanging garage guitar the way proper humans like it. Approved. OFFICIAL. Streaming-only.

She opens her perfect mouth and the sound of a modem pours out. The long shriek of signal, and then the radio-static-and-rubber-band song of connection.

And then another. She looks up, opens her mouth, and the electric scream beats up into the night. Another two, three signal-songs harmonise. More. A row of Shrieky Girls, all in black and hazmat orange, standing outside the club, looking up and dialling in.

Inside the place, there’s an ozone pressure from the mass of Shrieky Girls beaming internet whispers to each other. Shrieky Girls dance, turning slow circles on the floor as the DJ plays tripped Bristol beats spiked with Shrieky connection-sound samples and tranquillised by sibilant female voices whispering about sex and vodka in the dark.

Shrieky Girls lock us out of their world. Their shared gaze darts around the room in flock patterns, homing in one on one guy’s piercings, one woman’s shoulderblade brand. People still flinch when they see twenty, thirty girls all turn around to look at them at exactly the same time.

In the back, picked out in stopmotion by strobes, a Shrieky Girl stands against the wall and pulls a boy in to her. She unzips him, closes fingers around him, pulls him inside sharply. Her lips part, and you expect a sigh, but you hear connection hiss. On the floor, twenty, thirty Shrieky Girls stop dancing, and all their backs arch in exactly the same way. Heads thrown back and mouths open in modem screams.

It’s not that Shrieky Girl who finds someone worth going home with. But, when morning finally comes, it’s all of them who share the modemed sensation of a warm arm closed softly around them. It’s all of them who see him wake up and smile at them and look at them, and see him keep looking and smiling at them even though the make-up’s half gone and the hair’s been smashed by the bed, because it was them he wanted to be with, not the look.

Two, three hundred Shrieky Girls smile just a little bit and hold an invisible hand for a while.

Shrieky Girls are never alone. They live in an invisible web of constant secret conversation, transmitting raw feelings like they were texting notes.

Twenty, thirty thousand Shrieky Girls smile just a little bit and turn away to dance.

(A fragment, written 2003. (c) Warren Ellis and all that.)