June 2013
47 posts
“As far as I can remember, the original idea behind Promethea was to come up with something that worked as a mainstream superhero character, maybe looked a bit like Wonder Woman or Doctor Strange in a weak light, and which would enable me to explore the magical concepts that I was interested in before a mainstream comics audience that may never have encountered these ideas before (and may very possibly never have wanted to). It seemed to make sense that we should start at the shallow end, with inflatable arm-bands, so as not to alienate the readership from the very outset (the plan was to wait for about twelve issues and then alienate them)”
—Alan Moore (via quantumblog)
The Tumblr of Andrew Hickey: Have just discovered that the Mindless Ones may well be getting a... →
andrewhickeywriter.tumblr.com
Have just discovered that the Mindless Ones may well be getting a table at Thought Bubble after all. That gives me a big incentive to finish the Doctor Who book, get the Promethea one written, and work on the game I’ve vaguely discussed writing for thecommonswings (who’ll have his own table again)…
1. Write that Promethea book, before someone else does (HINT: it will either be Jess Nevins or Me)
2. Don’t just remind IllogicalVolume, threaten him- never mind his puny tears, get that Filth book done!Oh, the Promethea book will get done. But that one is going to be a collaboration with my wife, so we’ve had to wait until we both have some free time, when our work and activism schedules don’t conflict too much…
And I use illogicalvolume’s tears as an aphrodisiac, as do all the Mindless Ones. It’s what provides us with our extreme virility. That said, the Filth book would be good…
“And then, in 2010, Marvel Comics presented a Spider-Man (the ‘Ultimate’ version) who was 13 years old and brown. To see Spider-Man pulling his mask over a tiny brown chin – to see a boy with short curly hair sticking to the ceiling of his bedroom— well, something happened. Dagim has been Spider-Man for two Halloweens in a row. He takes a bath with his Spider-Man and a toy killer whale. He has Spider-Man toothpaste and a Spider-Man toothbrush. If Spider-Man offered medical coverage, I think he would want that, too.
………….
I thought for a while that my son would never be interested in my comics. I was afraid they would just represent another club he couldn’t join: all those big-jawed white guys with their hair parted to the side. But thanks to Spider-Man, my son imagines himself jumping on giant robots and saving the city. I hear him doing that behind the door of his room.” —NY Times: A Superhero Who Looks Like My Son (via fyeahlilbit2point0)
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I thought for a while that my son would never be interested in my comics. I was afraid they would just represent another club he couldn’t join: all those big-jawed white guys with their hair parted to the side. But thanks to Spider-Man, my son imagines himself jumping on giant robots and saving the city. I hear him doing that behind the door of his room.” —NY Times: A Superhero Who Looks Like My Son (via fyeahlilbit2point0)
Butler →
mediafire.com
I wrote a (very) short play in an hour this afternoon. Let me know what you think.
The usual First Draft, Fast Fiction caveats apply.
If only there were some kind of job you could have where you just write all the books you want to write and people gave you money for it, and you could do it during your work time instead of having to wait until you were too tired to do it properly. They could call it “professional writer” or something. That would be a good job to have.
“Geek Pride?” Fuck off.
thanks to @quantumblog and @iamdavidbrothers for solving my internet treasure hunt.
Came Back Haunted (2013)
Nine Inch Nails: “Came Back Haunted.” The new single from the forthcoming album “Hesitation Marks,” out September 3rd. Download “Came Back Haunted” on nin.com and iTunes starting June 6th.
This is so much better than I expected. It’s very [with_teeth]/The Slip in it’s sound, but there’s touches of early stuff in there buried deep right through it. The resurrection of the Downward Spiral-era typesetting is much more than just cosmetic I feel. Nice touch.
I saw something on GoT-y Tumblr on Monday/Tuesday that i can’t find now, an image set of the starks with “we are never ever ever getting back together” superimposed over it. any dieas who posted it?
Play
Mindless Ones » Blog Archive » Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1989 →
mindlessones.com
My thoughts on Survival — and on tonight’s news.
All good things come to an end. Neil Gaiman, someone who will have a large effect on Doctor Who in future years (even though now, in 1989, it looks like there won’t be any future years), described his comic Sandman in a single sentence — “The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision.”
That’s a pretty good summary of Doctor Who, too.
And up until 1989, the choice has always been to change and die, to throw out the old and to move on to something new. It’s only when the show comes to its end, to the very last episode of Doctor Who that will ever be made, that it chooses to examine this decision, and look at the underpinnings of it.
I think this is one of the more interesting of my Who essays…
“Who but a black teenager has the ability to dehumanize a police officer with a stare? Who but a(n unarmed) black teenager can make (armed) police feel threatened by clenching his fists? Who but a black teenager can simultaneously clench his fists and feed a puppy? Who but a black teenager isn’t afforded the opportunity to comply with a request before it’s determined that they’re not complying? Who but a black teenager is choked to the point they urinate themselves while being handcuffed? When does any of this happen to people aren’t black teenagers?”
—Mychal Denzel Smith, To Be Young and Black in America: Always Considered a Threat (via thenationmagazine)
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I think mainstream American Superhero comics lag a little behind other expressions of teenage life in culture, and if you do that, you’re risking writing comics that appeal to the parents of teenagers rather than the teenagers themselves.
In terms of blocks, I suspect a good chunk of it comes out of comics being a visual medium. Text is a great obfuscator of content. You can read a book, and your parents will never know that it contains matter they’d have trouble with, because they’re never actually going to read it. But comics, being visual, are transparent. At a glance, they can judge it — and so often judge it at a glance, without actually reading it.
So you walk a line. I started “Young Avengers” with the scene for a number of reasons, but one of them was certainly seeing if Marvel would let me do it. If I weren’t able to write that, I’d have had to bow out of the gig, because there would be no way of doing anything I thought worth doing.
Marvel didn’t even raise an eyebrow.
I think the biggest blockade to the creation of the content is creators not choosing to create the content.
” —From my new interview about Young Avengers over at CBR, which finds me in a pugnacious somewhat wanky mode. (via kierongillen)
Hmm.
(via infectedworldmind)
“
God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matthew 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering.
Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.
” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a letter to Eberhard Bethge, July 16, 1944, from his Letters & Papers from Prison. via Daily Dish.This is incredibly moving. I’m fascinated by this vision of Christianity.
(via infectedworldmind)May 2013
99 posts
Black Holes and Helium Balloons: Wide Eyed and Wordless →
saraannwyl.tumblr.com
I am recovering from a brief but vicious manic episode which put me in hospital two weeks ago. I am home now, washed out and shaken. I feel as if I’ve gone through something that is hard to absorb, I have that wide eyed and wordless sensation of shock. Everything around me seems fresh, as if it’s…
