Over at the Tumblr parallel universe I’ve started a series of posts that excavates the source material of the architecture found in Beta Testing the Apocalypse. Follow that tumblr if you’re into that sort of thing. The first post was about Jan Maneval:
Proto Trans-Alaska
As I started to compile my notes on Trans-Siberia, I realized there was still a couple of things left unsaid about Trans-Alaksa. If you haven’t read the first batch of Trans-Alaska notes, you can catch up here.
Trans-Alaska was a very formless book. It was done without preparation and ‘straight to ink’, without any pencilled art. It’s title was a kind of last minute tribute to a series of dreams about Alaska that I had in the mid 90s. Those dreams inspired an attempt at a 24 hour comic. Instead of producing a 24 page comic in 24 hours, I made a 10 page comic in 6 hours.
That comic saw ‘publication’ in my last (semi) regular mini-comic Reduction #7. The story, titled ‘Slow’, was quickly forgotten. Recently, I re-read the story and I realized that ‘Slow’ was in effect the blueprint for the entire Trans series!
panel from Slow
For those of you interested, I’m posting the entire story here. Also, for those of you that still care about physical objects, a limited number of copies of Reduction #7 are available from me at robot26.com. It’s pretty embarassing stuff so don’t laugh! 😉
It’s pretty clear that a most of the ideas in the Trans books were already in ‘Slow,’ though in a very unformed fashion. It’s definitely stuff I was thinking about back then, but for one reason or another (working to pay the rent) I put that stuff on the back burner. Even some of the visuals are very similar. I guess I’m just a cheap copy of myself!
panel from Trans-Alaska
World 2.0

I tricked another magazine to publish one of my comics. This time it’s Punk Planet. The current issue (75) has a theme: The Revenge of Print 2. I was asked to contribute a 3 page comics essay on the topic. It ended up being an apocalyptic rant on the state of the world… somewhere in there I managed to talk about immanent Death of Print. Comics at the end of history.
Keeping up with the digital bibliography theme from the last post, here’s some of the works that were cited and/or influenced the piece:
The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil. Ray’s Law of Accelerating Returns (LOAR) makes a prominent showing in the story. I’m not very nice to it.
Techgnosis by Erik Davis. Erik’s take on the intersection of occult/religion and technology informed a lot of what I had to say about Ray Kurzweil. This should a text book in every high school or college.
So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid. A short and sweet book on… other books. If you like books you will probably like this book as well.
buzzmachine.com by Jeff Jarvis. Jeff has been on the forefront of the print-to-digital meme. He will have to get this issue of Punk Planet to see what I wrote about him 😉
Collapse by Jared Diamond. A really thorough and illuminating (if a bit dry) look at how and why complex civilizations collapse.
T.A.Z. by Hakim Bey. Actually it was really an online (the irony!) interview I read with him that I haven’t been able to find again. He was talking about turning off computers and digesting information at a slower pace.
Business Week In 1975 published the first article on the Paperless Office.
The issue should be on the stands now. It can also be ordered here: Punk Planet 75.

Trans-Alaska Notes
One of the reasons I started this blog was to make it a sort of digital bibliography for the comic-books I create. This is especially relevant to these three books: Trans-Alaska, Trans-Siberia, and Trans-Atlantis. All of the books are out of print at the moment. I’ve started working on new editions and I wanted to expand the notes section that can be found in the back of each book. I’m planning on a series of entries that hopefully will help me do that.
Trans-Alaska is the first book in the series. It was written and drawn over a period of about 2 weeks prior to the 2004 MoCCA Art Festival.
The notes section identified three main concepts that underpin Trans-Alaska. They are: Richard Florida’s Creative Class, Pat Kane’s Play Ethic and Momus’ Metaphysical Masochism of the Capitalist Creative.
Pat Kane’s Play Ethic is an attempt to create a new kind of philosophy of work in the 21st century. If the capitalist economic system has always relied on the Work Ethic as it’s engine, then in today’s (and tomorrow’s) post scarcity economies we will need something new: a Play Ethic. “If work doesn’t believe in you, why believe in work?” seems to be the general attitude. Kane is convinced that by embracing our inner homo ludens we can all become more creative, playful (responsibly so – hence the ethic) and happy. I sort of dismissed his ideas in the comic by pointing to the dangers of blurring the boundary between work and play in a capitalist context. At that time I hadn’t read Kane’s book The Play Ethic. I had only read his blog and some articles. The book is a much more nuanced examination of the possibility of a wider shift from work oriented culture to a ludic one. Although Kane suffers a bit from too much technophilia (for my taste) and is perhaps a little more over optimistic about the potential for play in a profit driven environment, nevertheless the book is a chock full of great ideas and concepts. I’m rooting for you Pat!
Florida is more of an urbanist and his concept of the Creative Class is deeply connected to cities. He sees the Creative Class (artists, designers, programmers, etc.) as the real economic engine that drives the vitality of cities… and economies. In that he is not that far off from the late and great Jane Jacobs. Florida’s book hinges on his Creative Cities Index. These cities, according to him, are attracting the creative work force necessary for competitiveness in the global creative economy. The book is almost a how-to guide for cities on how to re-create themselves to attract the creatives and by extension the businesses that want to hire them. And business brings all the ‘benefits’ like higher real-estate prices, more tax revenue, etc. This focus on the intersection of money and urbanism is pretty much what turns me off from Florida’s ideas. Momus said it best here. The influx of capital (and consequent rising prices) into creative city centers (often low-rent and marginal neighborhoods) chases those very creatives away. Soho in NY is a good example. San Francisco (number one on Florida’s Creative Cities Index) during the 90’s internet boom is another.
Speaking of Momus, he is probably the primary the catalyst for my doing these little theoretical comic tracts. Specifically I was very impressed by his Metaphysical Masochism Of The Capitalist Creative essay. In the essay Momus is taken by the ability of creatives to create metaphysical value out of the capitalist cesspool of money and greed. The equivalent of alchemical transubstantiation of shit into gold. Any designer trying to squeeze a drop of quality out of a clueless client will know exactly what Momus is talking about.
The notes ended with a bunch of Name dropping: Karl Marx, George Orwell, Chip Kidd, Witold Gombrowicz and André Breton. Karl Marx is a pretty obvious choice given the generally critical approach to capitalism in the comic. More will be written on him later.
George Orwell came to mind only briefly in the perhaps over-the-top assertion that the Play Ethic may be in danger of becoming a kind of newspeak version of Work Ethic. Following the 1984 logic of WAR=PEACE I was presenting my own WORK=PLAY. Pat Kane’s book rounded out his theory for me and I don’t think he implies anything of the sort. However the danger for that kind of misinterpretation is still valid think. Orwell will become more significant in Trans-Atlantis where I take a look utopias and dystopias.
I had read Chipp Kidd’s The Cheese Monkeys some time before I made Trans-Alaska. One of the characters, Winter Sorbeck, struck me a perfect Masochistic Capitalist Creative. That’s really the only connection here… though the novel did made it easier for me to think of design and it’s surrounding issues as a valid topic for a comic-book.
Gombrowicz is one of my favorite authors. Right around the time I was starting to work on the comic I was reading his novel Kosmos. The novel is this amazing study of nothing and everything. The main character from the most random occurrences, signs and coincidences, concocts multitudes of paranoid meanings. In some ways I see this novel as kind of template for the comics… a kind of archaeology of contemporary culture… digging up weird books and objects until they all start making some sort of sense.
André Breton. I probably should have said Surrealism. The influence of Surrealism has been with me for a long time. There are some obviously surreal moments in the comic (like the Giorgio de Chirico moment – see image above the Momus entry), but I won’t really get into the surreallity of capital until later books.
Well that’s it for now. More soon.