The Point of Patreon

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing.net makes a good point here about Patreon's real role in connecting artists to audiences. Succinct and driving a fine point.

Corresponding attire not included

Reimagining The Simpsons’ Home in 8 Popular Architectural Styles by HomeAdvisor

Required reading, this right here.

Enjoyed reading this, even if everything came clear only towards the end.

Have some Ambiguous Grammar.

Recommended that you read it to the end also.

Old School Revolutionary

"Up from the ocean depths comes the jet-black caucasian transvestite champion. Resplendent in warpaint, wampum beads and silk suit by Cardin, armed only with a tomahawk and vibragun, he returns to the napalmed ruins of London to resurrect his sister and wrest from the disgusting Bishop Beesley and his formidable henchwomen the black box which has diffracted the cosmos and set the world spinning at super-speed towards its own final solution. Lock up your daughters, hide your stash, keep to the shadows."

-Michael Moorcock , A Cure for Cancer

Coming to a Famous Roof Garden near you.

HHH

Spooky spooky come to me

Mars Rover looks out across the plains and... there's a light.

Bang bang

Here's what Jerry Cornelius' needle gun might look like in the real world, courtesy of SockGardener. Honestly I've never been comfortable with the needle gun; I'm more of a vibragun person myself. But check out that whammy bar!

Along those lines, five years ago...

Jerry Cornelius and the rest of his milieu (his mother, Frank and Catherine, Una Persson, Bishop Beesley, Miss Brunner, and all the others) all seem to be 20th century archetypes of one kind or another, and I think their relevance hasn't dimmed as time has marched on (asFiring the Cathedral demonstrates). I'd like to hear a bit more about how the Cornelius characters function as mirrors of the times, both in the 1960s and 1970s when they were born, and now.

Well, Modem Times has come out since Firing the Cathedral, in which I try to address changing times since I first started doing the Cornelius stories. As some readers have suggested, the method (and Cornelius is as much a method as a character) seems to be just as relevant to current problems as when Jerry first made his appearance in 1965. I think we need to add an extra character or two, to symbolise this particular period of history, and I'm at present trying to find a good 'useless liberal' character. It's possible that I can turn Frank into this. I've been going back to base as much as possible in recent months to see how I can do this. My anger has to be cut by plenty of humour or it just becomes a rant. I need to be able to keep balance and focus and find the right locations which best symbolise what I want to say. It gets somewhat harder all the time. I think I also need an American character to add to the troupe, since I'm seeing so much these days from an American perspective. They function as mirrors to the times by at once, of course, reflecting what's going on and offering a commentary. The reason for using newspaper reports and other quotes is not because I approve of those quotes but because they replace exposition and show the 'subject' speaking for itself. Readers aren't asked to agree or disagree with the quotes. The quotes demonstrate what I'm trying to get at. By setting a story about, say, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Russia (from The Tank Trapeze, 1968) against a cricket match in Mandalay, I can make comparisons between various forms of imperialism and authoritarianism while also achieving a particular kind of distance. I used the now dead Robert Maxwell, himself a Jewish Czech, in that story, too, as an aggressor. Over the years the stories have become more complex and increasingly subtle, since I've set myself harder tasks, higher standards, which also means I have to do a lot more thinking over of the ideas, frequently rejecting stories before I complete them. Its more a hall of mirrors, I suppose, than simply a glass held up to the world, but since I'm using absurdism only as one element of the mix and can't indulge myself by being simply that -- I take the themes very seriously, of course -- I have to be able to provide the reader with a map and a compass, without being obvious about it. I do this, often, by describing relationships and referring to internal, often autobiographical traumas (as, say, in The Delhi Division). Takes a long time to turn one of the buggers out, I have to say.

Egypt

Some great stuff to be found on Sean Phillip's blog. Above, a promotional piece for Milligan's Egypt(!). Below, a joke rendition during one of Hellblazer's more interesting periods, when Phillips was doing all the pencils. 

Steve Moore 1949 – 2014

Steve Moore passed away last weekend. It's strange, but having learned so much about him through the lens of Alan Moore's Unearthing, and about himself through his own book, Somnium, I've always sort of hoped to meet him one day. Under unspectacular circumstances, perhaps, like a second before getting off the bus when you notice the guy at the seat closest to the door, but almost definitely in the vicinity of Shooter's Hill. He had been working on the Big Bumper Book of Magic, along with Alan Moore, when he died.

A favourite video of mine for some time now.

METRIC - Lost Kitten (Official Video) from Metric on Vimeo.

"Shibaraku!"

David Bowie, side-by-side Utagawa Kunimasa's 三代目市川八百蔵の梅王丸, who, judging solely by his name, would be the grandson of Ichikawa Ebizō (Utagawa's rendition of whom can be found here). Found in the pages of 2013's final issue of PEN, where the detail leapt right off the pages.

First time for everything

Story's End is now up at Quantum Shorts.

Bit of a time loop for the voting period, too. How apt: Online public voting on the International Category shortlist begins at 00.00.01 EST on December 20, 2013 and ends at 11:59:59 EST on January 10, 2013 (the "Voting Period").

Somedays...

Short Peace

The last movie I caught before leaving Japan in July of this year was the anime anthology, Short Peace, featuring, among the anime heavyweights, Otomo Katsuhiro. Each of the four films differed respectively from one another in terms of setting and theme, although in the line-up was explained to trace a coherent (if faint) line from the past and into the future. Of the four directors Otomo-san is slightly over-represented, having his hand in at least two of the stories, 『火要鎮（ひのようじん）』 and 『武器よさらば』, the last of which was adapted from a strip penned by Otomo-san long before I knew which end was supposed to go onto the paper. Technically five pieces, with an opening by Animatrix: Beyond director, Morimoto Koji, the piece that stands out the most in memory has to be Morita Shuhei's 『九十九』or, Tsukumo. Following an Edo-period tailor who gets waylaid in the middle of a stormy night, and is therefore forced to seek refuge in an old, abandoned temple, the film's delivery was singularly refreshing, in apparent answer, it seems, of the slogan that accompanied the anthology's publicity posters ("For the grown-ups who have forsaken anime"). The results was a little too successful, perhaps, although the darker themes explored immediately after could be seen as an exercise in range, if nothing else. The DVD hits the shelves in Japan, early January in 2014.

Happy Birthday Mr Moore

60 and looking pretty (well, technically this shot was from earlier this year, so).

Of things to come...

 

The Futures Anthology that came out seven, soon to be eight, years ago is a bit of a gem, with perhaps the most impressive list of contributors that you can ever hope to find under one book. Each entry is a potent idea sharpened and condensed to under a thousand words, ranging in impact and delivery but remaining distinct and memorable (some more than others, Nate Balding's Twenty2 and Bruce Sterling's The Ivory Tower come to mind instantly and, oh yes, so does Greg Bear's RAM SHIFT PHASE 2).

Roses in March

But when the pirate queen learns that her loved ones are held hostage in the nightmarish Berlin, she has no choice save to intervene directly, travelling with her ageing lover Broad Arrow Jack into the belly of the beastly metropolis. Within that alienated city await monsters, criminals and legends, including the remaining vestiges of Germany’s notorious ‘Twilight Heroes’, a dark Teutonic counterpart to Mina Murray’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen...

With The Bojeffries Saga coming in February, the early part of 2014 already looks to be a busy time. Not to mention the final installation of the Jimmy's End Cycle, His Heavy Heart, which delivers right around when Roses does.

#304

This came in today. While I knew that it carried a signature from Moorcock, but from Moore as well? Double the joy. Fantastic Metropolis is currently down, will link back to Moore's smashing intro some time later.

Sitting comfortably?

Nemo & the Art of Being No One

It might be too early still to talk about Janni Dakkar, but let's see where it gets us.

Since its conclusion a little more than a year ago, Century has come to mark a major turning point in Moore and O'Neil's massive, multi-cast literary crossover, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; having dragged its core members through disaster, madness, heartbreak, and, as it would seem, death, they have prevailed at last into that most vacuous of cultural periods - our period, our time.

Departing from its earlier agencies that gave us the first two volumes -in company, if not in format- Century marks the end of the journey Moore and O'Neil first set out for themselves in the Black Dossier (Volume III of the League series), witnessing in the process the emergence of a central if not unifying theme: that of immortality.

It is a fitting choice, and one that the series' three -immortal- leads, Murray, Quatermain, and Orlando, use to great effect.

Set against the background of a world where the passage of time is far from inconsequential (a la Superman and Archie comics), each installment serves not only to distance this new League from the immortal/mortal subplot long dominated -but never directly addressed- by the mainstream, but also to set them off on their own, more sober, direction. Delightfully, along the way the story cameos another lineage of time-trippers, although while Moorcock's Cornelius & co are free to step in and out of time as they please, buffered no less by a temporary loss of identity that blunts them against what has come before, Moore's League remain entrenched in time, and perceive its effects in a more cumulative manner (as far as I can recall, there has been nothing to suggest that the Burning World allows for time hopping), often to ugly ends. And tellingly so; the Cornelius Chronicles are full of moments when the characters, far from the stalwart models of literary classics, who appropriate instead the everyday Joe, begin to fragment whenever they are forced to recall too much of their own past.  Time, it seems, is a burden.

The League, therefore, is left to seek out their own means of amnesia, be it through madness (Murray), drugs (Quatermain), or apathy (Orlando), all of this while some abstract storyline explodes around them. Century, more than culture, I feel, addresses how our characters deal with time and change across a hundred year period, while they themselves remain physically unaltered. It is because of this last point that, time and again, an almost infantile-like disposition seems to emerge from the group, placing them to stand closer with the Cornelius gang, rather than the alternative, which we will come to a paragraph later.

As far as Moore's work is concerned, however, the themes are all too familiar: very few comic book writers have been more than willing to leave their characters to their own devices and, driven by something other than a desire to propagate a certain franchise, allow to them their own natural ends.

"I would have been basically going through all the decades of her life, with her getting older in each one, because I liked the idea, at the time, of having a strip in 2000AD with a seventy or eighty year old woman as the title character."

-Alan Moore, on Halo Jones. Here.

Janni Dakkar is a different sort of character. Ever since that night in 1910 when she leapt into the seas against a full moon, directly after a frightened Carnacki had woken up gesticulating about a certain Moonchild, it has stayed with me that she, and not our many eyed anti-Christ, was the coming change that our spectral investigator had spoken of.

For one, unlike the core three, Janni isn't physically immortal, and while this tends to sum up the generalized take on her, a closer look will show that, being a fictional character in her own right, her position up there with the rest of the fiction-verse is more than a little assured, nurtured in part by her present and future fan readership, and sowed no less by such capable hands as Moore's. In Century & Heart of Ice, as we will see, it is the choices she makes that sets her apart.

Every one tends towards their own state of rest, to paraphrase Matchbright, and either consciously or not we edge towards that condition that requires the least energy to maintain. It is therefore no coincidence that when we first see Janni it is to find her naked and unembarrassed, carefree and at ease - right up to the point where Ishmael appears with her father's summons. Later renouncing, as far as she can, her own heritage, she swims out to sea to a passing schooner. When next she returns to the mantle of Nemo, it is after she has been violated by the very hands of those her father despised most, so that even as the drawbridge of the Nautilus closes up and the vessel swallows her whole, we are left with a feeling that her story is far from over, and that what we have seen is little more than a temporary respite from the impetus that led her to leave from Lincoln Island in the first place.

I don't know if this panel left with me a strong enough impression upon first reading, although by the end of V it had certainly taken on a whole new meaning. It was only much later, when recoiling from the effects of V, that it occurred to me that I wouldn't mind reading about Evey Hammond's subsequent adventures, the challenges she would face as creator rather than destroyer, simply because it was always so much easier to fight *against* something, as evidenced by every other comic on the market; I was sure, even then, that no one else would be able to write something like that.

Lincoln Island, in occupying the part of what could be considered North Korea in the world of the League, minus all the political alliances (but not matrimonial ones), appears to remain the underdog throughout the entire fourth volume of the League series. They will always be the Destroyer, the thorn in the side of the Empire, keeping true to Prince Dakkar’s split from England as promised at the end of Vol II.  By the time we reach 2009, Prince Hira seems more than keen on continuing this line of the Dakkar dynasty, and it is only in Janni’s lifetime that some other facet of the Nemo legacy is revealed. Given how bleakly the rest of our cast has turned out, I think that a welcome development.

It is her adventures, therefore, that picks up where Evey Hammond’s left off.

Before that she still has one more thing to see to.

In Heart of Ice Janni has grown tired from walking in her father's shadow since reclaiming her birthright, 15 years ago; so much has passed her way since then, in fact, that she has become more than a little jaded, her own history capped off by those two events that, however long ago, still inform her entire character: her escape from Lincoln Island, and her rape by the English. Subconsciously, we wonder if she hasn't been looking for some way out when, almost on a whim, she announces her intention to revisit one of her father's earlier, failed expeditions. (Far from a whim perhaps, but the story's short format makes it so – and my only complain about the installment; who would not have loved to see more perspective shots of the Nautilus, A LA the Carrier in the Authority?)

Yet there is more to this than a passing fancy. She has, by Ishmael's account, outdone her father and, by her own hatred for the English as well as her agency of the Nautilus, given form to that sentiment (two qualities that Prince Dakkar also possessed); in short, Janni has come as close to being like her father as she possibly can. Yet something is amiss. Outwardly she tells Broad Arrow Jack that she is tired of looting, and yearns instead for adventure, except that perhaps there is some part of her that wonders how differently life would have been for her father -and so her- if he had spent more time adventuring instead, and if his most glaring of failures had turned out otherwise.

Of Prince Dakkar's own trek through the Mounts of Madness we have only his account from Volume II's New Traveller's Almanac to go on with, and Kevin O'Neil’s rendition of Janni's adventure in Heart of Ice seems to mirror her father's journey for the most part, except for one difference: where Prince Dakkar entered the Antarctica bitter and angry about his wife's not giving him a son, and emerged maddened and incoherent with his disappointment intact, it is his daughter who, seeking adventure and escape, ends up finding for herself a new life instead. Yet this involved her choosing as well; close to the end when Janni reflects on her escape, we see an unnatural lens turned towards her deceased father, whose time and era she reasons as no longer her own, when perhaps she wonders instead why the the same journey that made her change her life did nothing to endear her father to the daughter he never wanted.

It is easy to ascribe Janni declining Mina's offer of immortality to the effects of acceptance itself, when one sees one’s end as a natural course of things, although I believe the full effects of this decision will only be revealed to us much later, in the next two standalone installments of her adventures. Janni's affection for Jack, while not as overt as that between Murray and Quatermain, is of course the main reason cited, although having seen how things have turned out in 2009 for our immortal couple, a lot stands to be played out between Captain and first mate here. For some reason I now recall Orlando's depersonalization across the ages, whose attributes come down to fucking, fighting, and perhaps, “Sinbad was the only person I ever loved”, with even that going straight to Hell in the opening pages of 2009. To be fair, of the three, only Murray gained her immortality willingly; Orlando did it without knowing, and Quatermain because he was about to die. Yet, if there is anything that Century has shown us, it’s that, far from what is gained through immortality, it is what's lost that really matters.

Looking forward to Roses of Berlin.