| | Yes, Thom, it was the cave paintings.
In the likely event you aren't Thom, then there's a good chance you won't know to what that's referring. If that's the case and you'd like to, check out the "At Least One Lie" column at Comics Bulletin. You can find the first one here and the second one there.
For more fun and excitement, here's page 11 of Project Menagerie. Let the ultra-violence commence. | |
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| Apparently, I'm Zoe Washburne. At least if I have to be a woman I'm damn sexy and a touch cookie.
Speaking of tough cookies, let's get back to Project Menagerie. Here's page 10.
Later that same day...
There's a great article over at NPR about how the fight over comic books in the '50s changed American culture. I've also started writing a column at Comics Bulletin entitled "At Least One Lie". The answer posed by the article will be posted here early next week. | |
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| Now that I'm back in Colorado and over my exhaustion I thought I'd post some of the more interesting photos from my trip. New York ComicCon was a bit like Halloween, so here's some of the best of the costumes I came across.
Updated GC-7 pages as well. | | | | | | | | | |
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| Everything they say about New York is true. It's been called iridescent and a beautiful catastrophe. It's a place that in a day you can hear a dozen different languages, see the Pope and attend a pretty cool comic book convention.
Not far from the shores of New York is the Statue of Liberty. Seeing it, not surprisingly, has reminded me of what I love about the States, even as it caused me to reflect on how far we've strayed from our intended course. In the home of the brave you now have to worry about your government torturing people, spying on its citizens without warrants and you must go through the demeaning ritual of taking off your shoes before getting on an airplane.
Home of the brave, indeed.
Something very bad happened here in New York not too long ago. In that moment of shadow we didn't have a leader who said, "We have nothing to feat bur fear itself." We had a leader who said, "Keep shopping." I largely consider this to be the source of the problem.
But this has little or nothing to do with comics. I'll be back in Colorado and back on track Wednesday, when I'll be posting some pictures from the convention. Good stuff and great costumes. |
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| As of tomorrow, this Colorado hayseed is off to the big city for the New York ComicCon. I can only hope that the evils of the metropolis do not corrupt me. My God, I hope I don't get mugged.
Hmmm…any other stereotypes I can throw in here? I can't seem to think of any, so let's move on.
I'm not certain what my schedule will be like, so there probably won't be updates on Friday or Monday. I will try to upload photos from the convention. In the mean time, here's page 9 for Project Menagerie. | |
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| Ramblin' time.
The universe is telling a story. Comic books are one of the purest manifestations of this, being only pictures and words. As a reader of comics and a visitor to this site, you aren't a demographic, you aren't a part of a subculture. You're a part of a cult that generates and shoots outs stories, infecting the rest of the world with new ideas while others recycle such classics as Knight Rider and Dukes of Hazard.
Everyday, the universe is telling us stories that it wants us to tell. This is only appropriate considering we are a part of the universe. Don't believe me? Consider the bits of reality below. But also bear in mind that, in keeping with reality, at least one of these is a lie, a complete fabrication. Does that make it any less a part of the universe?
When lasers were created in the '60s, no one (other than science fiction buffs) were quite sure what to do with them. However, now lasers are involved in everything from medical surgery to supermarket scanners. A team at the University of Michigan has recently created a laser that is capable of producing a beam of 300 terawatts. To put that in perspective, that's several hundred times the capacity of the United States' electricity grid. But it was focused into an area a thousandth of a millimeter across and lasted less than a billionth of a second. What good is that? Well, thanks to our growing understanding of quantum communication, it could be used to send entangled photons into space to provide incredibly fast means of communication. Since each photon in the entanglement carries a piece of unique information, it is also an incredibly secure means of communication as disrupting the flow will destroy the entanglement. So we just took a jump from fast communication to quantum encryption. This could be awfully useful as Nobuyuki Sakai of Yamagata University has used models of the early universe to speculate that rogue bubble universes could be eating through into ours, bringing in God knows what.
But you don't need to look up into the sky to see the end of the worlds. Why is it that when people think about the apocalypse, no one thinks about the garbage? Naples, Italy, renowned for its beauty, is now renowned for the mountains of garbage that line its street. Incompetent government coupled with local mafia has led to several hundred thousand tons of illegal dumping. It has gotten so bad that runoff has poisoned local cattle with dioxins, even infecting the milk output. If that's what the normal garbage could do, what's going to happen when there's no one left to run all of those nuclear power plants? The more complex our society becomes, the greater is its fragility and the probability of its collapse. As if to illustrate this point, the universe sent a rather fat rat to shut down the city of Stockholm recently. When the furry fatty got trapped in an electric station is caused a caused a three hour shut down of its central train station, paralyzing most of the traffic in the city.
The New York Times recently ran an on article on how troops in Iraq are fighting high levels of stress. Seriously. Apparently, getting shot at in a foreign land by people who hate you is stressful.
Of course, that's been going on since man has walked the Earth. Recently, new cave paintings in France depict not just men hunting animals, but men killing other men, victorious in battle. 32,000 year old propaganda.
But men will always keep fighting as long as we keep giving each other such good reasons to do so. As if telling the living Buddhas of Tibet that they are required to obtain permission from the Chinese Communist Party before reincarnating wasn't enough, the Party is now are upping the voltage on its "patriotic education" helping monks become more "religion-loving and law-abiding" by denouncing the Dalai Lama and accepting the Chinese-appointed Panchen Lama, who has (one would guess) agreed to check in with the local bureaucrats before being reborn. I'm sure there's something about flaying yourself in there as well. Meanwhile in Iran, a once quiet new year and spring celebration called the Nowruz has turned into a dangerous cacophony. Coming from pagan and Zoroastrian times, Nowruz was once celebrated with gift giving, open-air picnics and special foods. However, when the Islamic Revolution came along and tried to ban it (or when that failed, taking a note from the Catholic playbook, replacing the holiday with a celebration of martyrs and imams) it jumped up several dozen octaves. It is now celebrated with pipe bombs, firecrackers and daredevils riding motorbikes through bonfires in the streets. It's called the law of unintended consequences.
So all of this is true. Except for one. Or maybe two. You tell me.
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| Page 7 for Project Menagerie. Keep an eye out for new reviews later today and tomorrow. | |
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| So we're going to take a break from GC-7. There are some logistics I've got to finish up for that story so I can be prepared to shop it around when I go to New York Comic Con next week. In the mean time, we'll pick up once again with Project Menagerie. It's been awhile since we left off on that one, so you may want to pop over to Page One and refresh your memory. Enjoy. | | Later that same day...
Spring time in Colorado. | |
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| I've been doing a bit of research for an upcoming sci-fi title that, for no good reason, I wanted to have a bit of a retro feel to it. Often when I start out a story with little more than a nebulous idea, I'll start reading reference books or looking around the internet for odd bits of inspiration. While doing this I came across an interesting evolution of a long time staple of pulp sci-fi – the ray gun.
This first one is a venerable machine. Dating from 1946, the Buck Rogers' U-235 Atomic Pistol may not be the oldest, but was certainly inspiration for decades of geek imagination.
| | The second isn't technically a raygun, but a "needle" gun developed by Jim Steranko for use by Nick Fury. Much like Buck, this was way before my time, but this one also cast long shadows. | | Lastly is the newest gun, but is developed by Weta Workshops to have originated from an earlier age. From somewhere between War of the Worlds and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen I present to you the Manmelter 3600 ZX. | | I have decided to call my ray gun the NF330 Wide Array Blaster, aka the Spigot. It does not shoot water, but much like a faucet has an adjustable "flow" of energy, capable of pinpoint accuracy or a wide spray for taking out a large number of targets. Just the thing for the traveler who doesn't know what to expect. |
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