NOTE: Sorry for the recent lack of writing on this site, the combination of getting hit with midterms,being out of commission for over a week rom being sick, and writing for other places (one you should see real soon, the others not for a while). All of this was unavoidable, and now that I’m finally getting caught up with all the work I’ve missed, I’m going to have free time and get something good up here by the end of the week. About comics, because what else would someone write about? Obsessing over Moebius and Howard Chaykin lately.
Here’s some links in lieu of real content, even though I hate linkblogging. Because I am a hypocrite. This will probably come down when I post something worth a damn.
- David Allison finally closed down his old site, Vibrational Match, and started up again with the Mindless Ones. His first post is here.
- Tucker Stone on a Spider-man comic no one else ever needs to read.
- Jared Lewis is participating in this ridiculous 30 Characters challenge, probably just so he can use it as a a) way to show off, b) a shunt for the several million ideas he comes up with between breakfast and lunch. Actually just click over to his blog and look instead.
-This is a really fantastic panel recording of Paul Pope and Dash Shaw in conversation on Inkstuds.
- And finally, found during my brain-destroying glut of research on science fiction – I found archives of two of Bruce Sterling’s old columns that made me love science fiction a little more than I already did. One is Catscan, which is mostly theory about science fiction and its forebears and where Sterling saw it terminating in the early 90s. Some of it is ridiculous and dated, but some of it is really insightful. The other is Cheap Truth, which is a completely different thing. I don’t want to go in super-detail on it, because I kind of want to write about it in depth. So Cheap Truth is a newsletter that never had a copyright on it, and was widely distributed. It was written by most of the original cyberpunk writers under fake names. It was written basically during the year immediately after Neuromancer came out and started destroying mainstream science fiction. It is a document of the time – which makes it great but ridiculous – but it has that quality of those Lester Bangs collections. Ie, “wow this is great writing but what the fuck why are they writing about this shit?”. And they do fake interviews with the progenitors of the medium where, say, Raymond Chandler laughs at anyone with a brain ever reading science fiction. But the most important thing for me is its best quality – here’s a bunch of scifi writers who are saying “these writers are the future of the medium” and they’re actually talking about themselves. I love that shit.
Basically, its the birth of comics blogging. Its shitty, teenage, angry, pretentious, funny, and massively hucksterish. Its awesome because its the kind of stupid shit you wish the creators of your favorite genre movement would do. Its not Cahiers du Cinema, its “fuck you Arthur C. Clarke, you’re old and out of touch, buy my fucking book”. Comics doesn’t need a real critical base, it needs a bunch of pissy kids to do something like this. It’s Odd Future Wolf for the hardest core of early 80s nerds, who all turned out to run the place in a decade’s time.
Best thing, though? There’s a big glowing review on American Flagg in there, proving that comics hit that stride at the exact same time that the official “cyberpunks” did, and kind of blew their minds in the process.
- one last thing, this quote from a Catscan column:
“The alternative would be to state that science fiction is not a true kind of “fiction” at all, but something genuinely monstrous. Something that limps and heaves and convulses, without real antecedents, in a conceptual no-man’s land.”
