Technoccult

Mutate Your Mind

Show menu Hide menu

TagComic Books

New Alan Moore Interview in The Believer

June 3, 2013 /

alan_moore_believer

Too Much To Dream author Peter Bebergal interviews Alan Moore for The Believer:

BLVR: So in writing, whether you’re trying to inhabit a metaphysical being or trying to inhabit someone living in a poor neighborhood, unless you can inhabit them with compassion, and inhabit them with understanding, they’ll never be a believable character otherwise.

AM: Right, the character will be limited, and so will you. When I was doing V for Vendetta years ago, and I started to introduce the Nazi heads of this totalitarian state in the far-flung future of 1997, I’d been marching against the National Front and taking part in the Rock Against Racism marches, and I realized that I can’t just portray Nazis as bad guys, because everybody knows that, and you’re not saying anything. You’re contributing to the myth that they were somehow separate from the rest of humanity, which they weren’t. The Nazis were just ordinary human beings who got caught up in something very bad and, at the time, rather unprecedented. This is not to excuse their behavior, obviously, it’s simply to point out that it doesn’t do you any service to demonize any group of people. It’s much better to try and understand from the inside.

There was a scene in Promethea where the character is confronted by a horde of demons, and the way that she decides to deal with them is by owning them, by identifying each demon’s qualities and saying, “Yes, I’ve done that; yes, I accept responsibility for that,” at which point she actually physically eats the demon that she’s referring to. What a lot of magic is about is coming to your own individual terms with the universe, which is to say yourself, given that the entirety of the universe that is observable to you or me is that which actually exists inside our heads. And coming to an understanding of those things made me a little bit bigger because I had a part of my mind that could look with compassion at a class of people that I had never been able to do that with before. Not to like them any more, but to understand them.

Full Story: The Believer: Alan Moore

Drive Director Refn Adapting Jodorowsky and Moebius’ The Incal

June 3, 2013 /

Nicolas Winding Refn — who dedicated Drive to Alejandro Jodorowsky — is reportedly adapting Jodo and Moebius’ comic book The Incal:

France Inter also talked with Refn on the Croisette, and while they don’t provide a direct quote, they do report that he’s working on an adaptation of Jodorowsky and Moebius’ comic series “The Incal.” The original six book series launched in 1981 and is set in a dystopian future, detailing the battle over the powerful Incal crystal. The comic series is notable in that it followed the collapse of Jodorowsky’s “Dune,” and utilizes some of the similar designs that Moebius had created while working on the movie. (The forthcoming documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune” goes into more detail about that, and you can read our report on that flick right here).

Full Story: Indie Wire: Nicolas Winding Refn Reportedly Working On An Adaptation Of Alejandro Jodorowsky & Moebius’ ‘The Incal’

(Thanks Ales)

Here’s an animated trailer for the comic:

If that looks familiar, it’s because Moebius was also the designer for The Fifth Element. He and Jodorowsky unsuccessfully sued the director Luc Besson for plagiarizing The Incal.

(The above video is a higher quality version of the trailer originally shared by Quenched Consciousness curator Ian MacEwan)

Karen Berger, Comics’ Mother of “the Weird Stuff,” Is Moving On

May 30, 2013 /

The New York Times has a profile of Karen Berger, the editor of Vertigo Comics. Berger announced earlier this year that she is leaving Vertigo. The Times has no update on what she’s doing next.

For the roster of artists she leaves behind, Ms. Berger’s exit raises questions about the future of Vertigo and where its renegade spirit fits into an industry and a company that seem increasingly focused on superhero characters who can be spun off into movies and TV shows.

“It’s really hard to tell at this stage,” said Mr. Gaiman, a best-selling novelist and fiction writer who was scouted by Ms. Berger in the 1980s. “That was DC Comics, now we have DC Entertainment. It is a different beast, being run by different people.”

Sitting in a DC conference room a few days ago and surrounded by shelves of Vertigo titles that she published, Ms. Berger, a soft-spoken woman of 55, said she quit to pursue new challenges. “It’s time to ply my storytelling skills elsewhere,” she said. […]

Comic sales have fallen off substantially, Mr. Morrison said, and the qualities that defined Vertigo’s titles have become widely imitated. They have “bled into the mainstream in such a way that you almost didn’t need it anymore.”

Mr. Morrison said he could still remember when his Vertigo series “Sebastian O,” about an assassin in Victorian-era England, sold about 90,000 copies of its first issue in 1993 — a modest quantity that would make it a Top 10 best seller in 2013. (DC said it doesn’t provide sales figures.)

Full Story: The New York Times: Comics’ Mother of ‘the Weird Stuff’ Is Moving On

There is no one who shaped my tastes more than Berger. I can’t wait to see what she does next.

A Web Comic About Steve Jobs And Steve Wozniak As Young Hippies

May 6, 2013 /

steve-and-steve-1

steve-and-steve-2

steve-and-steve-3

steve-and-steve-4

Patrick Farley, the artist behind the pioneering web comic E-Sheep, has a series that started today. Steve and Steve follows the adventures of Apple Computer founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as young, acid tripping hippies in the 70s. The ending of the prologue makes me think this may be an alternate history comic. It also displays the fascination with early hominids found in Farley’s last comic the First Word.

Awesome Column On How To Break Into The Comic Book Industry

May 5, 2013 /

Death Tax cover

Jeremy Holt column “Strange Love” is a revealing and inspiring look at what it takes to break into the comics industry. Here’s the last bit form part six:

Pitching is very much its own art form, which requires dedicating time and energy to honing the craft. Each time you do it, only helps inform your decision making the next time around. This journey is part of the process and a healthy amount of humility will grease your wheels insuring a smoother ride. Remaining humble and appreciative of any advice you might receive from established talent will foster that eagerness to improve each time you fail. And believe me when I say: You will fail a lot.

If after reading all of this, you feel even more excited to go out and make some comics, I’d say you’re already ahead of the curve. Good luck.

Full Story: Multiversity: Strange Love: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying About Breaking Into Comic Books – Part 1

Alan Moore Working on “The Watchmen of Lovecraftian Stories”

April 20, 2013 /

neonomicon

For someone who has supposedly turned his back on the comics industry, Alan Moore sure is doing a lot of comics work. He’s currently doing the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen spin-off Nemo, the next LoEG book and a follow-up to his Neonomicon series called Providence. From an interview for The Beat:

At the moment I am swamped in Lovecraft books about – I’ve got nearly every book of criticism that’s been written, that I’ve accumulated over these last six months, so I’m living and breathing Lovecraft. […]

It’s obviously a completely different animal to anything like Watchmen, but there is that point of similarity. It’s starting from – if Lovecraft’s characters, if Lovecraft’s monsters, if Lovecraft’s locales actually existed in A Real World, then what would they really be like, and what would the world be like? So it’s the same premise, but it’s taken me into some very interesting new directions. […]

Having run on at the mouth relatively recently about the appalling standards of research that exist throughout the rest of the comic book industry… I’ve said some very scornful things about some of the other writers in the industry and how – in my opinion – they are completely lazy, that they obviously do not have the respect for their own work that would lead them to actually put a bit of effort into it, and research some things, you know. Don’t just copy everything from an episode of Deadwood that you’ve seen, actually research the American West, find out how people talked. So, having been incredibly nasty and high-handed about many of the other professionals in the industry, I have kind of left myself wide open. If I don’t get every detail of this completely right, then I deserve to get a taste of my own medicine. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. We have been devilishly thorough in researching this. In the first issue there’s a brief glimpse of a gramophone record, and we’ve got the actual label to paste in, with the record’s serial number on it. I think we briefly see somebody reading a New York Times in the first issue, and it actually is the New York Times for June the 19th, 1919. I’m even – I’ve not actually done this yet, but I’m even trying to check out what the weather was like, which is difficult to establish other than in broad generalities, but I can at least sort out what the sky looked like, and what the phases of the moon were – which is something that Lovecraft used to take pains to do, so I feel that I should as well.

Full Story: Part 1 Part 2

Apple bans another comic from iOS for gay sex

April 9, 2013 /

Apple bans another comic from iOS for gay sex

Comic Artists Razz Lichtenstein With The Image Duplicator Show

April 3, 2013 /

Lichtenstein Image Duplicator show

Artist Rian Hughes is putting together a show at Orbital Comics to criticize pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and celebrate his original sources:

“Pop artist Roy Lichtensein currently has a show on at the Tate. While the public is intimately familiar with his work, what they may be unaware of is how closely many of his images were “appropriated” from comic artists like Irv Novick, Russ Heath, Jack Kirby, John Romita and Joe Kubert, who received no fee or credit.

Is this an act of brilliant recontexturalisation? The elevation of commercial “low” art to “high” art? Art world snobbery? Artistic licence? Cultural annexation? Gallery shortsightedness? Or something else?

This show is a chance for real comic-book artists (and other “commercial artists” – illustrators, designers etc) to ask these kinds of questions and share their views, via their work.Every interested comic artist (or illustrator, graphic designer or other “commercial artist”) should “re-reappropriate” one of the comic images Lichtenstein used, and rework it, using some of their ‘commercial art’ drawing skills, to warp and twist it into something interesting and original, and in the process to comment on this type of appropriation.

The IMPORTANT thing to stress is that you’d be going back to the source material and re-reappropriating (sic) Coletta, Novick, Kirby et al – NOT copying Lichtenstein, as we don’t want copyright issues from the Lichtenstein estate …see this as a celebratory, positive show which aims to get the point across that the original artists deserve credit and respect …As suggested by Dave Gibbons, money raised from selling prints or originals will be donated to the Hero Initiative, which helps down-on-their-luck comics veterans: http://www.heroinitiative.org/ Again, a nice way to Give Back the Art.”

The show is accepting submissions.

Full Story (and many more images): Robot 6: Comic artists razz Lichtenstein with the Image Duplicator show

Jezebel: New Web Comic From Reich Artist Elijah Brubaker

March 23, 2013 /

Jezebel by Elijah Brubaker

Jezebel is a new web comic by Elijah Brubaker, the writer and artist behind the Wilhelm Reich bio comic Reich. It’s humorous telling of the Biblical story of Jezebel.

The comic is being serialized at Study Group Comics every Wednesday. There’s a warning that this is not safe for work, but I haven’t noticed anything particular racy — but perhaps the comic will get more explicit as it progresses, so watch out for that.

My interview with Brubaker is here.

An Old Favorite Web Comic: Exterminus

March 16, 2013 /

Are we going to say anything else?

10

Full Comic: Exterminus by Kieron Gillen and Charity Larrison.

Older posts Newer posts

Archive by Subject

Archive by Date

© 2024 Technoccult

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑