Ales Kot writes because nothing else makes sense. He's responsible for screenplays, video games, graphic novels and products/experiences which do not even have their names assigned as of yet. His portfolio includes Disney, Warner Brothers, Image Comics, Marvel Entertainment, DC Entertainment, Dark Horse Comics and more. If you want to contact him, his email is aleskotsays at gmail and his cell phone is 310-259-7803. If you want to talk with his manager, contact Ari Lubet at 3 Arts Entertainment. If you want to talk with his agents, contact Roger Green and Phil d'Amecourt at WME Entertainment. If you want to talk with his lawyer, contact Caitlin DiMotta at Impact Law Group. If you want to talk with his imaginary platypus, you better imagine it.
If you pay attention to the monthly comic book solicitations, you’ll notice that my name is absent from the listing for issue five of Image Comics WOLF (the book i have been drawing with Ales Kot, Lee Loughridge, Clayton Cowles and Tom Muller). If you were to look into the future and see the solicit for issue six, you wouldn’t find me there either. And you might then think: ‘hey, what’s up with that?‘
So here’s what’s up with that. After four issues of surly private investigators, tentacled down and outs and, well, wolves, i am leaving WOLF for pastures new. Which I know isn’t all that common on Image books where you have a creative team locked in and they tell the story they wanted to tell. You’re probably thinking: “maybe there’s some behind the scenes shenanigans that they’re not telling me about.“
So here’s the behind the scenes shenanigans that they’re not telling you about. Comics are HARD WORK. And as it turns out, they’re harder work than i ever anticipated. Also harder than I anticipated: trying to maintain a full time gig as a freelance illustrator alongside a monthly book (in the same time I have been working on WOLF i have produced somewhere north of fifteen portraits, eight movie posters, four book covers, a bunch of editorials and comic book covers and full artwork for three albums). The reason for the full time job is because, I only got my first cheque for WOLF about three weeks ago and I’ve been working on it since January (that’s just the way it works with Image books, where you won’t see money until a couple of months after the first issue).
Even harder still: doing all of this with a new baby (her name is Nico, she is one year old, and she is wonderful - thank you for asking).
I’m pretty sure I should have listened when seasoned comics friends told me how much hard work comics could be, but I was way too confident that I could juggle everything and still get to bed before midnight every night. I have a newfound respect for monthly artists having tried and only just managed four months of it!
WOLF had a difficult birth with some changes in personnel as we were just getting started, then a first issue which was 28 pages, then 39, then kept on growing to eventually 58 (and there was some great stuff which was cut after it had been drawn and some sequences were reworked and moved to different places and in one case a different issue - including, i kid you not, a zombie Heidi Klum which was one of my favourite pages and I hope will surface somewhere). The release was initially scheduled for April, then moved back to July. None of this is uncommon, but for someone who is used to working on fairly rigid deadlines with illustration, being one part of a machine like this was a bit of a shock. And that’s before we even get to moments of my own stupidity like leaving half the pages for an issue on a different computer and completely forgetting to upload them to be coloured. Before issue one had dropped I was already very aware that it wasn’t going to work on an ongoing basis and so we agreed that I’d do the first arc and then hand over the reins.
I’m immensely proud of the story we have laid the foundations for and i’ll be continuing to read the book now that Ricardo Lopez Ortiz has joined the team.
And so for now, my brief flirtation with monthly comics is over. But not with comics in general because I have a few things lined up already to keep me busy over the next year. Things I can work on slowly and surely and not have a monthly panic attack over.
Working with Matt was great and I’m hyper-grateful for the experience and the book we built together. The start of WOLF was a clusterfuck for many reasons, mostly my own (bad health, too many deadlines, changing perception of the story), and I’m impressed that we made it through without deciding to shoot each other. Especially Matt.
And now...drumroll: Ricardo Lopez Ortiz starts on WOLF with #5 in January 2016!
“Last night I dreamt I was back in Ostrava. It's a city heavily reminiscent of the English North -- coal mines and steel factories intertwine with brutalist Eastern bloc architecture and half-hearted "modern" additions by architects who likely could not wait to get the hell out of the smog-ridden, cancer-infested region. It's where I grew up, and I rarely look forward to visiting. In the dream, while in a tram, I somehow lost my luggage at the Republic square, so I politely asked the driver to wait. The driver ignored me. Then another passenger said something toxic to me and to the driver, something like "His fault, who cares", so I confronted him about it and gave him a verbal fan that ended up with me telling him that while he's taking his sad ass to a boring job he doesn't even want (I knew, because sometimes you can see these things in people's faces very clearly), I do what I want, when I want. And you know what? It was angry, unpredictable, and vicious. But it wasn't mean-spirited and it wasn't done to cause pain. It was done to clear my space and tell him, once and for all, that I am not here to be stepped on. Have you ever been stepped on? It hurts. Sometimes a person even allows others to do it, because the person hopes that maybe they'll realize they're doing something bad and they'll stop, or maybe a person allows others to do it because the person thinks if they do this it must be my fault. Material is cancelled. It's no-one's fault. The facts are simple: the current comics marketplace, and the current comics business, do not support the type of work I predominantly want to create, nor do they support the type of ethical conduct I want to perpetuate. Nor do they pay enough.”
From “Wash Over Me”, a newsletter I sent out last night. You can subscribe here, and full version of “Wash Over Me” can be read here.
I've been with my boyfriend for almost 6 years. We live together, I lost my virginity to him, I love him, we cam together and we're making quite a bit of money but... I love what you are able to do. What I mean is that my boyfriend is not ok with me seeing other people(guys,girls,trans, it doesn't matter), he is not ok with me camming by myself, not ok with nude pics unless he is in them... I have no friends I can be sexual with but I want to experiment and he isn't ok with that. Any advice?
Ack. This is hard, I feel for you.
for me, a relationship shouldn’t be about feeling limited. It should be freeing because you feel like you have the support of someone, someone that’s going to be there on adventures and have experiences you have together, like a team. (/soppy cliche but whatever) I need to feel like they expand my horizon not shut it down. You deserve to have any experience in your life you want, no one “owns” you or has authority over your choices but you.
buuuut, relationships are compromise. There’s no perfectly in tune relationship where everything just maaaagically slips into place and there’s never a conflict of interests, I don’t think that’s how people work. Introducing new things is difficult and it can totally take time. It’s a process. They’ll need to see that this new thing you want to do might seem life destroying and terrifying at first but when you approach it s l o w l y with reassurance and communication and all that good stuff that it might actually be
a) actually not that awful
b) actually pretty hot and cool for your relationship.
so: I guess I would tell him that this is what you want to do, that you love him but it’s not negotiable that you need and want this in your life, that you want him in your life and you love him and you want to go on this adventure together. (sell it as a cool thing for BOTH of you rather than him feeling shut out and isolated) then take baby steps and keep having conversations along the way about how you’re both feeling and be as honest as you can.
If he refuses and doesn’t want to help you do the things you want, then you probably should break up with him because there is nothing good about feeling trapped and resentful and looking back with regrets for the things you didn’t do.
"There’s a fundamental problem in working-class families. It’s like you revere art, you believe in reading, you believe in books, but you don’t understand their production. That’s the disconnect. Those are the keys you can’t have. And that’s the nonlineage that cuts people from other classes out of the art life. Art looks like a lottery from out there." ... "There’s a whole female industry engaged in materially supporting the illusion that the artist doesn’t work directly on his legacy, his immediate success. He’s just a beautiful stoner boy or an intellectual. All thought. No wife? I like turning that illusion inside out. And making the work be literally about the field and the failures and even the practice. I wrote about these things in Inferno because Dante did. We should let the writing world and its ways of distributing awards be part of fiction. We should expose the very cultural apparatus that is affecting the reception of the book you’re reading. What’s dirty is that we’re not supposed to talk about how it has sex and reproduces."
Both quotes from this fantastic Lerner/Myles interview.
The Feminine Grotesque: A Unified Theory on Female Madness in Cinema and American Culture (Series Introduction)
[Joan Crawford photographed by Eve Arnold]
I have a madness in me as real as my own heartbeat. It has three names: anxiety, bipolar disorder, and anger. It’s the last one even my closest friends have never seen. As a child, my mother taught me these were things to be ashamed of. When I got angry over some perceived slight or my inability to meet whatever goals of perfection she laid out for me she would invoke the name of my abusive father. Reminding me how I inherited this anger from him. So, I turned my anger inward and it festered into self-hate. It’s especially easy to hate myself right now as I moved in with my mother after a suicide attempt this spring, hoping to get my life back on track but instead I’m falling apart, the seams are showing. My therapist tells me I need to figure out a plan to move so I can be free of my mother’s toxicity, regain my independence, and start a new chapter of my life. All of which I’m finding hard to do given my circumstances at the moment. So, I write.
Female madness is a preoccupation of mine. For over a year I have been developing my own theory that explores the way female madness is framed in cinema. Films of the Feminine Grotesque continue the questions and preoccupations of 1940s women’s pictures primarily within horror but at times finding a home in noir and fantasy. The Feminine Grotesque is a genre, style, and thematic preoccupation that truly begins with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and continues with Queen of Earth.
The emotional, social, and psychological problems that are specifically connected to the character’s sense of womanhood provide the meat and gristle of this genre. The questions of women’s pictures turn on their pretty heads in the feminine grotesque. The tools of beauty—physicality, dress, makeup—become weapons that wound as much as they empower.
Like women’s pictures, the feminine grotesque offers visual liberation from the confining strictures of the patriarchy. No matter how temporary, women are able to see themselves as bold, defiant, vulnerable, sexually realized, ambitious, and hopeful. The films of the feminine grotesque obsess over female desire and subjectivity. But even with this strong feminist impulse, the genre is muddled by endings that show these women integrating themselves but lacking any hope for a future. In cinema, there is rarely hope for the madwoman.
Madwoman (noun)
1. A woman who is mentally ill.
2. A woman with a transgressive place in society because of her anger, sexuality, and/or refusal to play by the rules.
3. A woman rules by her passions (see: Taylor, Elizabeth).
4. A woman of fire and music (see: Davis, Bette in All About Eve).
I redefined madwoman as an act of reclamation. An act of learning to love or at least come to terms with the part of myself I hate. As a teenager I found a sense of family with the real and unreal women that now make up my pantheon of madwomen. They became my sisters and aunts and mothers and mentors that I always yearned for in real life. When I’m honest with myself, which usually happens around 3 a.m., I still yearn for this sort of sisterhood in real life. This series is ultimately about these women.
You’ve seen her before. She’s Lilith refusing to lie under Adam. She’s Zelda Fitzgerald in in the sanatorium. She’s your ex-girlfriend that drank too much and laughed too loud and in the dark muttered about her intense fear of becoming the mother she barely knows. She’s Medusa. She’s your best friend from college whose red lips seem abhorrent, like some open wound speaking all the things women aren’t even supposed to think. She’s the mess you don’t want to clean up. She’s me. Or maybe you’ve seen her on screen in the overripe sexuality of Nicole Kidman in Stoker. Or in the gunshot loud shriek of Bette Davis facing the mirror image she can’t escape in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Or she’s the warped legacy that Joan Crawford has become in the cultural imagination. These women have been with us for a long time and they are legion.
Barthes, looking into the hideous future of electoral politics.The Internet is awash in devastating, graphic personal essays—young writers are encouraged, maybe more than ever, to monetize and sensationalize their grisliest experiences. So … now what? “The Internet’s confessional impulse has been fully codified. Every site seems to have a first-person vertical … But for all... Read More »
The first-person economy, the overlooked Didion, Barthes on passion, and other news.
Anonymous aka The Physics arXiv Blog, Why Physicists Are Saying Consciousness Is A State Of Matter, Like a Solid, A Liquid Or A Gas, for Medium, September 2015. Via.
The forgetting is habit, it is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world. I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.
Ta-Nehisi Coates from his book Between the World and Me (via Democracy Now)
Once slavery was abolished in 1865, manufacturers scrambled to find other sources of cheap labor—and because the 13th amendment banned slavery (except as punishment for crimes), they didn’t have to look too far. Prisons and big businesses have now been exploiting this loophole in the 13th amendment for over a century.
“Insourcing,” as prison labor is often called, is an even cheaper alternative to outsourcing. Instead of sending labor over to China or Bangladesh, manufacturers have chosen to forcibly employ the 2.4 million incarcerated people in the United States. Chances are high that if a product you’re holding says it is “American Made,” it was made in an American prison.
On average, prisoners work 8 hours a day, but they have no union representation and make between .23 and $1.15 per hour, over 6 times less than federal minimum wage. These low wages combined with increasing communication and commissary costs mean that inmates are often released from correctional facilities with more debt than they had on their arrival. Meanwhile, big businesses receive tax credits for employing these inmates in excess of millions of dollars a year.
While almost every business in America uses some form of prison labor to produce their goods, here are just a few of the companies who are helping prisoners pay off their debt to society, so to speak.
Whole Foods. The costly organic supermarket often nicknamed “Whole Paycheck” purchases artisan cheese and fish prepared by inmates who work for private companies. The inmates are paid .74 cents a day to raise tilapia that is subsequently sold for $11.99 a pound at the fashionable grocery store.
McDonald’s. The world’s most successful fast food franchise purchases a plethora of goods manufactured in prisons, including plastic cutlery, containers, and uniforms. The inmates who sew McDonald’s uniforms make even less money by the hour than the people who wear them.
Wal-Mart. Although their company policy clearly states that “forced or prison labor will not be tolerated by Wal-Mart”, basically every item in their store has been supplied by third-party prison labor factories. Wal-Mart purchases its produce from prison farms where laborers are often subjected to long, arduous hours in the blazing heat without adequate sunscreen, water, or food.
Victoria’s Secret. Female inmates in South Carolina sew undergarments and casual-wear for the pricey lingerie company. In the late 1990’s, 2 prisoners were placed in solitary confinement for telling journalists that they were hired to replace “Made in Honduras” garment tags with “Made in U.S.A.” tags. Victoria’s Secret has declined to comment.
Aramark. This company, which also provides food to colleges, public schools and hospitals, has a monopoly on foodservice in about 600 prisons in the U.S. Despite this, Aramark has a history of poor foodservice, including a massive food shortage thatcaused a prison riot in Kentucky in 2009.
AT&T. In 1993, the massive phone company laid off thousands of telephone operators—all union members—in order to increase their profits. Even though AT&T’s company policy regarding prison labor reads eerily like Wal-Mart’s, they have consistently used inmates to work in their call centers since ’93, barely paying them $2 a day.
BP. When BP spilled 4.2 million barrels of oil into the Gulf coast, the company sent a workforce of almost exclusively African-American inmates to clean up the toxic spill while community members, many of whom were out-of-work fisherman, struggled to make ends meet. BP’s decision to use prisoners instead of hiring displaced workers outraged the Gulf community, but the oil company did nothing to reconcile the situation.
From dentures to shower curtains to pill bottles, almost everything you can imagine is being made in American prisons. Also implicit in the past and present use of prison labor are Microsoft, Nike, Nintendo, Honda, Pfizer, Saks Fifth Avenue, JCPenney, Macy’s, Starbucks, and more. For an even more detailed list of businesses that use prison labor, visit buycott.com, but the real guilty party here is the United States government. UNICOR, the corporation created and owned by the federal government to oversee penal labor, sets the condition and wage standards for working inmates.
One of the highest-paying prison jobs in the country? Sewing American flags for the state police.
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