REMAKE/REMODEL: The Spider Queen

May 22nd, 2009 | brainjuice

This week’s Remake/Remodel thread at Whitechapel was chugging along happily, trying to make sense out of a tiny description of an obscure 1940s character:

Sharon Kane is the sworn enemy of all criminals. Her specially designed bracelets eject spider webbing. Her boyfriend is a detective named Mike O’Bell.

And then Ryan Kelly, Pia Guerra and Paul Sizer came in overnight and just owned pretty much everybody.

Ryan Kelly is the illustrator of LOCAL, a teacher, and currently illustrating a NORTHLANDERS sequence:

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Pia Guerra is the illustrator of Y THE LAST MAN:

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Paul Sizer is the creator of the graphic novel BPM.

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8tracks: Nearly New

May 22nd, 2009 | music

A random selection from the music that’s been living on my laptop this week.


If You’re Going To MCM Comics Expo This Weekend…

May 21st, 2009 | brainjuice

…keep an eye on this site. Planned London public transport engineering work for the weekend. If you’re still unsure of what route to take, try the TFL Journey Planner.

I’m there Saturday afternoon only, from around noon (which probably means 1pm), in the Comics Village area of the Expo.


Links for 2009-05-20

May 21st, 2009 | brainjuice


Webcomics Week: Survive

May 21st, 2009 | comics talk

I love the energy of Ash’s SURVIVE!! serial.

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ODYSSEUS THE REBEL, by old friend Steven Grant and Scott Bieser, is working its way from web serialisation to print publication this autumn.

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YON KUMA, by Josh Hechinger and Jorge Munoz, is, in Jorge’s own words "about a kid who wrestles bears." BEARS!

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Asylums In Jerusalem

May 20th, 2009 | music

I’m reading Simon Reynolds’ TOTALLY WIRED at the moment, a compendium of the interviews he conducted for the highly recommended RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN, a history of post-punk. (At the same time as I’m re-reading Paul Morley’s WORDS AND MUSIC and picking through zttaat.com.) And this morning I read the interview with Green Gartside aka Scritti Politti — who seems to have mellowed significantly, and provides a warm and fascinating memoir of the times — and realise I haven’t listened to "Asylums In Jerusalem" in ages. I still have it on vinyl downstairs somewhere.

I remember that, at the time, it seemed a deeply peculiar thing. Didn’t sound a bit like earlier Scritti Politti. Didn’t sound a bit like the New Pop, to my limited ears, although it bore clear signs of having come from the same places. I’ve always loved this song the best of all Green’s work, much as I admire the perfect pop of his most commercially successful phase. This is the sweetest thing: a song about crazy people.


Forthcoming: SUPERGOD

May 20th, 2009 | Work

So there’s this series coming out in the last half of 2009 called SUPERGOD:

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And it’s one of the odder things I’ve written, I think. Someone made the mistake of asking me for another superhero-mode comic, and I suspect maybe since I returned to that subgenre something important in my brain developed moss on it or something. Here’s a piece of my notes on the book, for a sequence in issue #2:


China began designing their own superhuman soon after, but didn’t have the tech for Megareactor Buddha’s Spine until 1990. Nominally, PRC is atheist, but the old religions never went away, and a surprising number of Chinese state scientists still think in terms of qi. The superhuman Maitreya was a subject enveloped by scanning tunnelling microscopes wired into his visual cortex, forced to meditate upon his own atomic structure until he could perceive the quantum foam of every particle of his being birthing and annihilating under the uncertainty principle. His emergence into superhumanity was heralded by the impossible light of zero point energy accessed from the spaces between virtual particles. The Chinese filled a warehouse with political prisoners and told Maitreya to kill them, to demonstrate his power over spacetime and matter. He instead fashioned them into a vast musical instrument of entrancingly beautiful tone. Then configured all the assembled soldiers and scientists into a self-supporting worm-like structure and fired them into space with/through the musical instrument, where they journeyed as a biological probe of brains linked in parallel that reported information about the solar system back to Maitreya via quantum entanglement until the structure, starting to break up, was identified as comet Shoemaker-Levy and eventually smacked into the surface of Jupiter.



This Week In Comics (20may09)

May 20th, 2009 | comics talk

So… any creators here have a book coming out this week?

If you do: want to mention it? Talk about it? Point at a website, a blog entry, a bit of art, whatever… let these many thousands of people with disposable income know about it?

Please speak your brains at this thread at Whitechapel. Some people have already started.

And for those of you who visit a comics shop weekly, it’s a nice way to get a preview of what’s on offer this week.


Webcomics Week: Knots

May 19th, 2009 | comics talk

Juan Santapan’s collection of short stories in comics form, THE SECRET KNOTS, is gently, sublimely mental. Quite, quite mad. Wonderful. Look:

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Chris Eliopoulos, as well as being one of the best letterers in comics, does a daily webcomic called MISERY LOVES SHERMAN. The strips are too wide to present here properly, but, in Chris’ words, "it’s about two aliens and a miniature Grim Reaper." It’s very funny.

Raz Solo’s AIMESKI, EVIL GIRL GENIUS is just warped. You will probably like it.

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APPEARANCE: London, 29 May 2009

May 19th, 2009 | Work, about warren ellis/contact

Am speaking at the Architectural Association on May 29, as part of the Thrilling Wonder Stories: Speculative Futures For An Alternate Present symposium. (Here’s an alternative link if that one dies, thanks to Matt Jones.)

A symposium co-ordinated by Liam Young (AA INTER 7 / Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today) and Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG)

’Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.’ J G Ballard

We have always regaled ourselves with speculative tales of a day yet to come. In these polemic visions we furnish the fictional spaces of the near future with objects and ideas that at the same time chronicle the contradictions, inconsistencies, flaws and frailties of the everyday. Slipping suggestively between the real and the imagined they offer a distanced view from which to survey the consequences of various social, environmental and technological scenarios.

In this symposium we will hear stories from such foreign fields as gaming, film, comics, animation, literature and art. These speculative practitioners present alternative models as test sites for the deployment of the wondrous possibilities or dark cautionary tales of our own architectural imaginings. And so we wander off the map to embark on a future safari into the brave new worlds that may evolve from our own. The symposium will be a collection of presentations, interviews and group discussions. The event will also be streamed live online.

Speakers
Geoff Manaugh, bldgblog.blogspot.com (founder), journalist, commentator, author
Vicktor Antonov, www.vulkanbros.com
Art Director for game ‘Half Life 2’ and Production Designer for film ‘Rennaissance’.
Francois Roche and Stephanie Lavaux, www.new-territories.com
R&Sie architects Paris.
Warren Ellis, www.warrenellis.com
comic author, creator of ‘Transmetropolitan’ and ‘Fell’, writer for Marvel and DC comics
Ian Macleod, www.ianrmacleod.com
science fiction novelist, winner of 2009 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction
Archigram, www.archigram.net
Seminal visionary architecture group
Squint Opera, www.squintopera.com
Film and media production studio
Jim Rossignol, rossignol.cream.org
Gaming author and journalist
Nic Clear, TBC-editor of ‘Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design’
Mark Tildsley, TBC-production designer for films ‘28days later’ and ‘Code 46’


Some Months Away: CAPTAIN SWING AND THE ELECTRICAL PIRATES OF CINDERY ISLAND

May 19th, 2009 | Work

Art by Raulo Caseres. Forthcoming via Avatar Press.

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Links for 2009-05-18

May 19th, 2009 | brainjuice


Webcomics Week: Popes And Pervert Suits

May 18th, 2009 | comics talk

So, on Whitechapel last week, I declared Webcomics Week and had webcomics creators tell me about their work. This week, I’m pulling out my favourites from that thread and noting them here. Or, at least, the ones so odd I thought you should see them.

I don’t even know what to tell you about SIX OR SEVEN POPES.

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And if you like superhero comics, and you’re old enough that swearing won’t make you faint, you might like PLAN B.