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Horrible Indeed

It seems that Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows have col­lab­or­ated again. In past years the team has created some such gems as Alan Moore’s The Court­yard and Alan Moore’s Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths, and Neo­nomicon, the latest comic, looks very prom­ising indeed. You can see some sample pages here. And you can see some other work by Jacen Burrows on his website, here (the list of writers with whom Burrows has worked, Alan Moore aside, includes, impress­ively, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, and Brian Michael Bendis).

A cover for Neo­nomicon. (Source)

Do Anything

The most con­sist­ently inter­esting thing I read last year was Warren Ellis’ Do Anything, a series of columns pub­lished on the Bleeding Cool website. Here are links to each of the indi­vidual install­ments: 001, 002, 003, 004, 005, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026. I highly recom­mend taking a look.

Talking Heads

Warren Ellis is on good form:

I have the head of Jack Kirby in my office.

I built it myself. Which means, this being the late-​postmodern 21st Century, I stole it from someone else and then tinkered with it until it became a trans­form­ative work. What I actually did was steal the Hanson Robotics-​designed android head of Philip K Dick off an airplane, res­culpted the front and filled its brain with the work of, inter­views with and anec­dotes about Jack Kirby. Like the original Philip K Dick head, it now does the work of an oracle of that mys­ter­ious time, the 20th Century, and of the seminal years of a 20th Century art form. In the case of Phil Dick, this was the science fiction story. In this case, it is of course the comic book.

The Watchmen Effect

Watchmen was written by Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons, and coloured by John Higgins. It is a mas­ter­piece both of its form (the comic book serial) and art and human expres­sion in general. When I read it eight or so years ago, it changed the way I thought about lit­er­ature and also changed the way I thought about life. Although all of that no doubt sounds hyper­bolic, it isn’t: Watchmen really is that good, that important. V for Vendetta, another book penned by Alan Moore, made a similar, if not even larger, mark on me, but I’ll save my thoughts on that par­tic­ular mas­ter­piece for another post. Continue reading…

A Future Tokyo

The above image is a scan of a two-​page spread from Akira, a Japanese manga by Kat­suhiro Otomo. It is a fant­astic series, and well-​worth reading (try to find the original black and white version cur­rently pub­lished by Dark Horse). Here is a summary from the Wiki­pedia page on the manga:

Akira is a black and white serial manga or graphic novel by Kat­suhiro Otomo. Set in a post-​apocalyptic Tokyo, the work utilises con­ven­tions of the cyber­punk genre to detail a saga of turmoil. Ini­tially seri­al­ised in the pages of Young Magazine from 1982 until 1990, the work was col­lected in six volumes upon com­ple­tion by Japanese pub­lisher Kodansha. The work was first pub­lished in an English language version by the Marvel Comics imprint Epic Comics, one of the first manga works to be trans­lated in entirety. Otomo’s art on the series is con­sidered out­standing, and the work is a break­through for both Otomo and the manga form. An identic­ally titled anime film adapt­a­tion was released in 1988, short­ening the plot, but with its struc­ture and scenes heavily informed by the manga and its serial origins.

A key char­acter in Akira is the city itself, Neo-​Tokyo, a new urban area con­structed in the after­math of the nuclear war that dev­ast­ated the “old city”. This “new” Tokyo is con­structed on top of Tokyo Bay: