I will be at APE this weekend. I’ll be at the AWP table along with Alex Holden, Vanessa Davis and others. I will also be part of a couple Fantagraphics signings. Details here.
Category: Comics
-
APE 2007
-
MOME Spring 2007
My blogging frequency was never great, but it has slowed to a glacial crawl in recent months. One of the reasons for the slow-down is MOME, the quarterly comics anthology published by Fantagraphics. I’ve been asked to become a regular contributor so now I spend most of my free time working (or thinking about working) on comics for the publication. The quarterly deadline has been a difficult adjustment. Time for all sorts of other activities (like this blog) has pretty much evaporated. I’ve heard some say that I’ve been MOMEd… But I’m not writing this to complain. I’m honored to be included in such good company!
The MOME 7 (Spring 2007) story is actually a reprint of a story that first saw the light of day in The Backwards City Review #4 a few months back. This was done to give me a little bit extra time to develop new stories for the subsequent issues. All future MOME stories are going to be new, and created specifically for MOME. One thing MOME has allowed me to do is use color. I ended up converting the graytones (roll over the image above to see comparison) to a second color.
Anyway, the book should be in stores now. You can also pre-order it on Amazon, or get it now from the source itself: Fantagraphics.
-
Drama 9 Release Party
Another issue of The Drama magazine is set to hit the stands very soon. In just a few issues the magazine has evolved into one of the best new magazines on the stands. And I’m not just saying that because they published another comic of mine. They are celebrating the release of their 9th issue with a few parties in select locations. I will be at the New York one. More details here. Stop by and get a free copy of the mag before the print medium expires altogether! -
SPX 2006 Part 2
SPX 2006 turned out pretty great. The new venue wasn’t too bad, though the food around the hotel sucked. But I won’t bore you with an exhaustive account, there are plenty of them out there. No need to add to the noise. Thanks to everyone that stopped by to say hi.
For those that have been following my notes posts to Trans-Alaska, but haven’t been able to get ahold of a copy of the book: I have finally re-printed all three of the Trans-Books. They have brand new covers hand made on the amazing, soon-to be obsolete Gocco.
They are available on my robot26.com site. Older editions should still be available from other places. -
SPX 2006
I will be attending SPX later today. I believe my table is next to Alec Longstreths table. See you there! -
Random Quotations
Transcription for clarity:
“Power operates most effectively not by persuading the conscious mind, but by delimiting in advance what is possible to experience.” – CCRU
“Kapital really is a planet-wide artificial intelligence, feeding matrix-style, on the energy of human slaves.” – K-Punk
“The opposite of real isn’t phony or illusional – it’s optional.” – Thomas DeZengotita, Mediated, p. ?
“We are lucky that the organic realm reached the foot of evolutionary ladder before the inorganic.” – J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, p. 22
“Why believe in work when it doesn’t believe in you?” – Pat Kane, The Play Ethic, p. 79
“What if the ‘idea’ of progress were not an idea at all but rather the symptom of something else?” – Frededric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p.281
-
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 -
100,000 Miles of Cars
I briefly mentioned this one before. But, I just found out that it’s finally out! Available from the fine folks at Backwards City Review. My story is an 8 page meditation on cars and cities. It’s sort of in the same vein as the Vague Cities mini-comic. Here’s page one. But don’t get it on account of me alone! There are plenty of other great contributions. -
100,000 Miles
I’ve got another short comics story coming out soon in the new issue of Backwards City Review. They just announced the contents of the issue. Here’s a preview of page 1. It’s an 8-page story with lots of cars. Cars on every page. Perhaps I’ve been reading a little too much J. G. Ballard lately. It’s supposed to be out in about 3 weeks. -
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.
