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New Post has been published on http://www.nerdtitan.com/2013/06/29/taking-a-swipe-at-cyberpunk-interview-with-swipes-park-cooper/

Taking a SWIPE at cyberpunk: Interview with SWIPE's Park Cooper

We caught up with writer Park Cooper, recently, about his latest offering coming up from Angry Viking Press, the rollicking, rockerboy-murdering, zombietech cyberpunk thrill-ride SWIPE.

Do you like Heavy Metal? The comics magazine, I mean– but the music helps, too. Are you like me , wishing that there was more cyberpunk, Blade-Runnery fiction out there… while you watch a bunch of drunken medieval twits assassinate and have sex with one another? (Not that I mind, mind… I love that stuff.)

Anyhow, I shot Park a few questions. Here’s what went down. (And you can click on the images to make them tres bigger!)

NERD TITAN: Hey Park, thanks for joining us on here! So, I’ve been reading SWIPE and I have to say I’m really digging it. Always good to start an interview with a positive bias, I say.

In your own, nutshelled, succinct words, how would you explain to someone what SWIPE is all about?

PARK COOPER: SWIPE is the story of Ray, a hacker who finds a one-in-a-million self-aware robot, Karina, and, well, there’s immediately some trouble between a cyborg pimp and an old friend of Karina’s, and from there, things escalate a lot, and very quickly.

Yay, money!

NERD TITAN: The characters of Ray and Karina are quite interesting… and I think many readers will really want to know more about Karina right off the bat… what, if anything, inspired you to create them?

PARK COOPER: William Gibson’s Neuromancer (and related shtick), robots in manga and anime, maybe a tiny touch of Louis Wu from Larry Niven’s Ringworld, and, to an even lesser degree, a bunch of other things. I wrote a little essay on this and I think it might be included in the back of SWIPE, or at least that was the plan at one point.

Yes. Maybe this.

NERD TITAN: It’s nice to see pacing and story and art all sync up with a story involving sequential art. How did this process go for you and Bryan Randall (as well as the rest of the art team)?

PARK COOPER: Hmm. Gee, how did that work? I’ve played this writing-for-an-artist game before, and it was sort of similar this time, too. Bryan wanted to draw certain things, especially a villain he’d always wanted to draw, a cyborg pimp. I felt like that sounded villainous enough to me, and I had Ray and Karina in my head with nothing for them to do, so I said, “okay, Ray and Karina have to meet and defeat this evil cyborg pimp. I know how Ray and Karina get together… now I have to write the pimp in… yes, I can see how that can work…” and so it becomes this sort of obstacle course of “how can I put these elements in the story, and make it feel like I planned it that way all the time?” Bryan wanted a full-page close-up of the pimp’s face at one point, I made there be a reason for that– we see in captions what he’s thinking, or rather remembering, at that moment. Bryan wanted cyborg attack-babies, I said, “okay, let’s put those in this scene, and…” Then for the later chapters, Bryan wanted weirder-looking bad guys, and for Ray and Karina to save the world, and so I had to continue the story with those factors in mind.

Now that’s some robot action.

NERD TITAN: The whole concept of “cyberpunk” seemed to have fallen by the information super-wayside this last decade or so, chombatta. SWIPE appears to be a part of a resurgence in cyberpunk style and philosophy. What are your thoughts on the comeback of hard-hitting, gritty, dark future, cyberpunk stuff?

PARK COOPER: Well, science fiction always gets a boost when authors realize that we’ve caught up to the classics a little… Cyrano de Bergerac imagined rockets to the moon, we got there in 1960. Star Trek imagined communicators and tablets, we mastered those in the last 10 to 3 years. Now we have Google Glass and megacorporations that some say should count as people and an incredible gap between rich and poor and quasi-robotic limbs and online currency that’s doing better than the currencies of many countries. It’s time to revisit the concepts cyberpunk started working with around the eighties and so on.

Insert Blam-bot joke here.

NERD TITAN: What were your favorite moments when working on SWIPE?

PARK COOPER: Karina is extremely fun to write. All my favorite moments would have to involve writing her dialogue.

NERD TITAN: These ideas have to come from somewhere… what would you say your biggest influences were when you were scripting SWIPE?

PARK COOPER: I mentioned a few before, so let’s mention Ghost in the Shell. Oh, and The Dirty Pair, because GitS isn’t funny enough. The Big O. Blade Runner. Oh, and Deus Ex. And Snow Crash.

Don’t be THAT guy.

NERD TITAN: And what would you do to get in the exact mood for writing it?

PARK COOPER: I have a few songs, I suppose… “Big in Japan,” by Alphaville. The first time I heard it, I thought it was “Made in Japan,” and that it was about a Shadowrun cyborg street samurai… Phoenix’s “Lisztomania (Classixx Mix only),” not for the lyrics, but just the retro-futuristic feel of it… Maybe a little “Video Killed the Radio Star,” by The Buggles…

SWIPE’s this good.

NERD TITAN: An excellent review of SWIPE openly compared it (favorably) to Cowboy Bebop… I won’t lie– I noticed it, too (also a good thing). Are you a fan of the manga and show?

PARK COOPER: The show, definitely. The manga, I tried it, didn’t grab me the same way. Love the anime, watched every episode.

NERD TITAN: Speaking of manga, what are your reading these days?

PARK COOPER: Manga? Oh, not much. Waiting for Naruto and One Piece to end (well, no end in sight for One Piece, really)… Hunter X Hunter‘s on hiatus… frankly, manga isn’t what it used to be.

NERD TITAN: What else is up with you… any other projects going on?

PARK COOPER: Nothing I can talk about just yet, but things are happening, mostly prose things.

NERD TITAN: And back to the beginning of this interview for a moment: Quick, sell this book on the poor sucker reading this. Right here; right now, the last words are yours… 3-2-1-GO!

PARK COOPER: Did I mention there are nanotech zombies? Corrupting the living and the dead, but especially the dead? Man become machine, machine become unholy organic nightmare?

Ray and Karina’s whole city is one of several launch points for a nanotech invasion that turns people into zombies, corrupts machines’ programming… and eventually starts fusing the two together in very unnatural ways… The basic zombies were no match for Karina’s martial arts (and a timely head-explosion from Ray), although the resurrected Marines were pretty tough. But when Ray switches the orders the zombies are being given over the city’s wi-fi from ATTACK to BUILD, it might not have been the best idea in the long run, because the new hives they create start spitting out fighter zombies… and giant zombies made from seven or eight bodies merged together… and when the nanovirus starts infecting even Karina, she runs off to try to find a way to cope with it, leaving Ray to deal with the state-of-the-art stealth zombies on his own…

Can Ray and Karina get it together in time to save humanity from the genius who repurposed military-grade nanotech to end the world because the best show on the web jumped the shark?

It’s cyber-zombie invasion madness, all in one graphic novel: SWIPE, from Angry Viking Press.

SWIPE: Where zombies aren’t a bug, they’re a feature.

But the key thing is that SWIPE must be ordered RIGHT NOW. This weekend RIGHT NOW is IT as far as meeting Diamond’s orders.

You can go to this page and click ADD TO CART and then follow through, that would count.

Or if you’re a store, or feel like calling one up and making them order it for you, the order code for Swipe is STK613565

–

I would like to thank Park Cooper on behalf of all of us here at Nerd Titan for taking the time out his busy schedule to answer our questions.

Look, I haven’t read the first two issues of SWIPE once. I’ve read them twice. Take it from me, a lifelong cyberpunk nerd-expert (come say it: Nerdspert– yeah, it’s funny) that SWIPE is the Fun Ticket. It is worth every goddamned nano-second and eurobuck or nuyen spent on it.

#angry viking #cyberpunk #park cooper #swipe