| | For the end of May, the beginning of Forgotten. Words will come soon. | |
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| Nothing clever to say today due to a virus that is ravaging my alimentary canal. More Forgotten preview art. | |
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| It's been awhile since we've seen Forgotten. Jason Hazel, who was the artist behind all of the art that is currently on the Forgotten page, had a tragedy in the family and had to walk away. I left it myself for awhile, the discouragement of having to start over being a bit much. However, Stefano Cardoselli has taken an interest in the work and we're starting from the beginning. Below is a preview of the new style of art the project will now feature. | |
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| Bang Bang Bang
That phrase, familiar since childhood for most, hadn't even entered into the collective lexicon until the advent of the repeating firearm and, most likely, not until revolvers became common place. Up until then it was just bang. This was so ingrained, that one pistol or rifle or whatever, fired one shot, that Indians of the Old West relied on it to chase away pesky white people. Cause some noise, jump around, fire some arrows, then wait for your prospect to get jittery and fire off his shot. Then move in before reloading can be completed. In 1844, a group of Comanche Indians got a big surprise when they used this tactic on a group of Texas Rangers, one of the first posses to carry the new Paterson Revolvers on the frontier. When their initial shots were fired off, the Comanches moved in only to discover the rangers kept shooting. Things did not go well from there.
Bang Bang Bang
Eventually, the plains Indians began to adopt these weapons themselves, most famously at the battle of Little Big Horn. There, the Cheyenne's main weapon was their numbers – some accounts stating that they outnumbered Custer's men four to one, mostly armed with bow and arrow. Custer might have prevailed if he had more firepower, perhaps in the form of the new Gatling gun. Although he had shown himself willing to slaughter women and children, Custer strangely thought the use of such a rapid fire cannon to be dishonorable. In the end, his dead soldiers provided many of the Indians with their first rifles.
Bang Bang Bang
While Custer may have turned his nose up at the idea of a continuously firing weapon, Hiram Maxim did not. When in Paris an associate told him, "If you want to make a lot of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other's throats with greater facility." He immediately began work on the world's first true machine gun and demonstrated a portable model to the British army in 1885. However, the culmination of this early work was done by John Moses Browning, who designed (among many others) the Browning Automatic Rifle, capable of being fired by a single infantryman, delivering its powerful .30-06 rounds at a maximum speed of 10 rounds per second. Although ideal for the trench warfare of World War I, the BAR saw limited deployment due to the fact that the States government didn't want it to fall into enemy hands. But it couldn't change the fact that Bang Bang Bang had changed into something else.
Rat Tat Tat
By refusing to deploy the BAR and its smaller cousin, the Thompson, the United States was left with a massive surplus of both types of guns, which were stockpiled in various National Guard armories throughout the country. Sitting idle, many of these were sold to the black market, ending up fueling the violence of prohibition in the Great Depression. Famous gangsters and outlaws such as Machine Gun Kelly and Baby Face Nelson outgunned lawmen with their Tommys, but one man took it over the top; Clyde Barrow was famous for his skill with the BAR, a weapon so powerful it was renowned for shooting through car doors, through the people inside and then out the car's other side. Clyde kept himself constantly stocked with the automatic rifle by stealing from National Guard armories, then using the rifles to commit robberies and kill lawmen. Until, that is, Texas Ranger Frank Hamer orchestrated an ambush of Clyde and his paramour Bonnie, using the same BAR type weapon of which Clyde was so fond. It's estimated that 130 shots went through Bonnie & Clyde in their car on that fateful day, and then through the tree outside.
Rat Tat Tat
Both the BAR and the Thompson shipped out for World War II, having proven themselves time and again on America's criminal killing fields. The Thompson submachine gun became extremely prevalent, not dissimilar to the AK-47 today. Reliable and accurate, the gun was carried by American, British, Canadian, Australian and even Chinese forces during the conflict. Both the Swedish and the Soviets copied the design to make their own versions. But a couple of good guns weren't enough to end a conflict as large and monstrous as this one. Everyone was racing for that next evolution, the next step from the Bang Bang Bang to the Rat Tat Tat. The United States found it first, used it to reach out and touch the Japanese with a light so bright, dirty and destructive that they didn't believe the U.S. could do it again. So the Fat Man fell on Nagasaki and the Japanese surrendered, knowing their enemy had found that next evolution.
Boom
But having that evolution in your hands doesn't guarantee victory. The weapon was so terrible that Eisenhower refused its deployment during the Korean War, choosing instead to fight the war to a stalemate. While the this held as well in the Vietnam War, somehow something got away and the result was a dropping of over 7 million tons of ordinance, enough to amount to 1,000 lbs for every man, woman and child in Vietnam. Over the course of two wars, the States seemed intent on proving that having the biggest and best weapons didn't guarantee winning, but that you could lose the war because of the way you deployed them.
Boom
The massive collateral damage from the Vietnam War pushed the evolution to its next incarnation, the powers that be focusing on smart bombs; weapons that could strike accurately within 8 meters of a designated target, whereas before you dropped it from a great height and relied on the massive detonation to do the work. But to call it a smart bomb is almost a misnomer, because the bomb is only one component. The bomb is equipped with special sensors, that plug it into the airplane that dropped it, that plug it into the soldiers on the ground that designate the target with a laser, or plug into a satellite flying high above in a geosynchronous orbit, spitting out global positioning information that tells it where to go. From the ground to the sky, we've cocooned the world in a blanket of information that helps us kill each other with greater facility, creating something that Maxim could never have imagined when speaking to his old friend in Paris.
Boom |
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| Busy, busy day, so we're going to get a little random. Below is the new concept cover for Project Menagerie. | |
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| For all three of you who showed up at this site to learn which was last week's Lie, it was the one about the Koreans. While the North Koreans are certainly up to no-good nuclear hijinks, most recently building a reactor with Syria there's no chance that a freighter giving off radioactivity would be allowed much of anywhere.
This may shock and possibly even appall, but I don't use the internet to research this column. I read books, newspapers, magazines -- I have even been spotted at the library on occasion. This has the tendency to make one feel like a Luddite or some kind of post- modern information guerilla. While I'm sure these items may exist on the internet, I will never reference them here because;
- I don't know where these references are and;
- It would make it far too easy to tell what's the truth and complete fabrication if I linked to the stories.
| Given how quickly modern society has become dependent on the internet for information retrieval, relying on print media, especially when it's hidden in such an esoteric place as a library, almost feels like cheating.
But I suppose I am cheating. While most of the stories below are taken from said books, newspapers and magazines to show how comics aren't simply fanciful creations, one of them is a lie. In all of them, though, I'll be noting comics that make good use of the ideas presented here.
Super-criticality may sound like something your mother-in-law specializes in, but it's actually a name for a cascading effect among space debris. The threat here is that orbital debris might begin smashing into each other, causing a domino effect that could destroy portions of the world's satellite networks, endangering civilian and military communications. Theoretically, a nation could push this to happen by taking out key satellites, such as China did last year when it zapped one of its own aging weather satellites. Why would you want to do this? Well, currently the U.S. military is nearly dependent on satellite networks for its eyes and ears. Infinite Horizon is a title from Image that capitalizes on this idea. An adaptation of The Odyssey, it takes the anger of the gods in the original work and replaces it with a war in which everything has gone wrong, including the destruction of military satellites, resulting in the main characters becoming completely separated from the chain of command.
Of course, you don't need to look into the theoretical to get strange. Recently in New Zealand marine scientists studying the corpse of a gigantic squid measure its eye at 11 inches across. Of course, the body had been frozen for awhile, so the biologists assume that it would, in fact, be larger if the creature were still living. It'd probably be the equivalent of swimming along and having an eye the size of a hubcap open in front of you. That's what seniors refer to as a 'bladder control moment'. So what else lives down there in the deep blue sea? Gutsville, another Image title, takes a look at this by supposing that a band of colonists from England were swallowed by a giant sea creature and forced to carve out a living in its belly. Sound implausible? Sure, but a penguin recently discovered in the belly of a Blue Whale makes it seem less so. The whale's digestive system, use to only breaking down plankton, didn't kill the penguin, but the little bird had been in there long enough to have had the feathers on his behind begin to dissolve.
Perhaps the weirdness and seeming hostility of nature is the reason that mankind can be so hostile itself. But does what we do really matter? To us as a species, certainly. To the planet? Probably not. Recently a group of ecologists took a look at some coral that had been nuked 50 years previous to discover that 65 percent of the species have returned to the kilometers wide crater. Mother Nature is just chugging along at the Bikini Atoll. In a nod to this, BOOM!'s Northwind takes place in a future where Man's pollution has turned Winter eternal and the equator has been nuked because, true to our species, we couldn't share. However, while people in Northwind may be hiding underground, the planet continues to change and adapt, not seeming to much notice our presence.
So we're on a hostile planet that doesn't much care if we're on it. Is it any coincidence, then, that we're so cruel to one another? In April, a report released showed that the CIA viewed legal problems from "harsh interrogation" techniques to be inevitable. Not surprisingly, someone over there had the conversation that I imagine went something like, "Yes, Martha, torturing people will probably get us sued, so we'd better have a defense drawn up." So they set out to build a legal support from the Justice Department, which they received in the form of Alberto Gonzales. Left On Mission is another title from BOOM! that tackles this issue in the espionage sphere, head on. And not in a sexy, pro-torture, 24 way, but in morally shady and far more realistic fashion.
It's not terribly surprising, though, that secret agents and covert organizations, by definition groups with little to no oversight, don't always act honorably and sometimes even act criminally. To wit, investigators from the Government Accountability Office were a bit distressed to realize just how easy it was to gain sensitive material over the Internet. On eBay alone, they were able to pick up a nuclear-biological- chemical suit and space parts for a F-14. While the States may have retired its F-14 fleet, Iran is currently sitting on a bunch of them that could function if only they could find the spare parts. Of course, while becoming a regional powerhouse, Iran also has its share of criminal problems. Recently the capital Tehran's police chief, in charge of fighting vice in the city, has been arrested after being caught with six nude women in a brothel during a police raid. Naturally, crime in all of its forms, has always been fertile ground for comics, with 100 Bullets and Criminal being the current standard bearers. Image and Virgin are doing some work in the past eras of the genre with Pretty Baby Machine and Dock Walloper respectively.
So there you have it, the weird and the wonderful in our world and how it's peaking through in comics. |
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| Back from the Emerald City. Seattle is a lovely town only made more so by the friends and strangers there who took pity on me to put me up and showed me a good time. As a pittance of thanks, I present the seventh page to Underside.
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| The new picture at the top there is the cover for the first issue of Underside. For those of you who'd like to take a better look at it, a bigger version is below. New pages for the story will be going up over the next couple of days. | |
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| So for those of you who remember the Buck Rogers / Ray Gun tangent, there's something new for you in the writing section. While Cristian Valdes and Philipp Neundorff have been hard at work on the art for Project Menagerie and Underside I've been working on a new script entitled Ana Chronistic. I'm shooting for something fun with this one and a decidedly lighter tone than most of the other work. Check it out over there. |
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