#stray headmatter

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Emergency headmatter storage, cont.

Possibly it, for now. From Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's LoEG:

Via.

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Emergency headmatter storage, cont.

From Tony Crisp:

There are at least four aspects to Dreamtime – The beginning of all things; the life and influence of the ancestors; the way of life and death; and sources of power in life.

Dreamtime includes all of these four facets at the same time, being a condition beyond time and space as known in everyday life. The aborigines call it the ‘all-at-once’ time instead of the ‘one-thing-after-another’ time. This is because they experience Dreamtime as the past present and future coexisting.

See also: Riders in the Sky, ghost people, dream batteries, the world as a living neural organism, natural soul engines, improvised soul technologies (a la 90's Vertigo comics), and the History of Gods On Earth. 

See also: 

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Emergency headmatter storage, cont.

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Emergency headmatter storage

I need to put this all somewhere so I don't lose it. The next few posts are going to be a bit of mild nonsense -- so, a step up from the usual broadcast. Incoming:

The eponymous Doctor Sax, also part of Jackie's fantasy world, is a dark, but ultimately friendly, figure with a shroud black cape, a inky black slouch hat, a haunting laugh, and a "disease of the night" called Visagus Nightsoil that causes his skin to turn mossy green at night. Sax, who also came to Lowell because of the Great World Snake, lives in the forest in the neighboring town of Dracut, where he conducts various alchemical experiments, attempting to concoct a potion to destroy the Snake when it awakens.

Also, "Dharma Burns."

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As with all my visual suggestions, both here and in the panel descriptions below, please don't feel bound to them in any way. They're only meant as workable suggestions, so if you can see a better set of pictures than I can (which I'd say is quite likely, all things considered) then please feel free to throw out what I've come up with and substitute whatever you feel like.

That's from Alan Moore's opening letter to Brian Bolland in the Killing Joke script. If this isn't hilarious to you, please click the link and get back to me. 

So yes, Alan Moore built his ships to last. Which I'd think is a big part of why more people are still reading The Killing Joke than, say, Starlin and Aparo's Ten Nights of the Beast. Not to knock either book, I'm just saying one clearly was made up of superior raw materials -- and considering who Ten Nights had on the art, that's a statement. But this was Moore and Bolland at the top of their respective games, with things to say and the time to say them well, and it is just plain not fair to put something else against that and expect it to measure up. You can hem and haw over which coloring you dig more, but there's no escaping the craft in those raw lines, both lettered and inked...

...I respect and admire Moore's particular brand of attention to detail. You don't always see it in the final comic, but the script describes in detail things like the architecture of Arkham Asylum, Bruce Wayne's bone structure, the geology of the Batcave. It's like the production values in a high-grade film or a play -- Lord of the Rings is an example -- where there's some intricate pattern on a scarf we only see somebody wear for three minutes out of the hundred and eighty minute running time. We don't need to be able to see every side of every thing in every scene -- which would be cubist storytelling, I guess -- to know, through audience osmosis, that all that detail is there. We come to trust the creators that their world holds water, and if we look hard at it, oh shit, it totally does. Ideally. Iceburg storycrafting -- and what makes Moore Moore is he doesn't let all this worldbuilding step on the toes of his storytelling. 

See also: Top Ten, Tom Strong, Swamp Thing, and not League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. 

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But, as I say, the focus is off webcomics. Everyone seems to be eyeing the digital comics services, and I suspect that within six months it’s going to be a lot easier to get on to a digital comics shelf. (Just as, right now, it seems to be very easy to get on to a Kindle.) Which makes sense. People like to be paid. My concerns are that if you make it harder to look at something, then you’re making it harder to access the full set of people who might be prepared to spend money on it. That, and… …this is harder to make sense of, perhaps? It may just be a weird personal tic masquerading as a concern, that is meaningless to everyone else? But I always saw webcomics as the place where people could do huge, sprawling picaresques. I thought webcomics had a great potential to be the place where you’d get graphic novels that read like Pynchon or Neal Stephenson or add your own discursive, meandering and circumlocutious author here. And certainly some people got close to that – we could both write our lists of Really Good Graphic Novels Done On The Web here, although mine might have less of the “funny” stuff than yours. But I have a feeling we may not see many more.

-Warren Ellis Dot Com

This is on my mind lately. "On my mind." It's pitched tents and dug latrines in my mind. JD plans to bring our pop pulp crime comik SAN HANNIBAL (nee AVERY) to the internet this spring. I'm a third of the way into the second draft of a new project, a contemporary horror-western called SCRATCHTOWN. We're young hungry nobodies, and these long-form visual narratives are meant to bag us attention and revenue. The idea of an iTunes for digital comics -- flat rate of, what, thirty-five bucks for a month of hosting, free renewal if you turn a profit in thirty days? That's pretty sexy to me. Magazine rack comics have always been playing catchup to dinosaurs while webcomics are flubbering for their next evolutionary form. If we can get hip to the startup mobility the music biz is constantly refining, we may've found the thing that sees the artform through the wilds of the twenty-first century. Or the next ten years, at least. 

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It was that or shave my head

Last month, I sold some of my books. Most of my books. Something like 75% of a collection I'd built up over ten years of buying graphic novels and a decade before of people giving them to me. Books that'd followed me over state lines, man. Whole sets I'd bought one after the other like chaining cigarettes because I just had to finish the story. This sentiment is not unfamiliar, I'm sure. There's one very important difference between a bookshelf in a bookstore and one in a home.

I sold.. let's see. Elektra Assassin. The first eight trades of Fables. From Hell, which someone I was rotten to gave me for christmas last year and I still don't know why. Batman and Robin, all three books Morrison's run, all hardback. A lot of Powers. Hellboy. A spare hardcover Batman: Year One someone gave me -- I kept the trade paperback, which I like better anyway. V for Vendetta. Watchmen, yeah, but that's like selling a textbook. I held onto the Dark Knight Returns, though, 'cause that'd be like selling a bible. And Sin City. I sold all of Sin City to Powell's City Of Books.

Because I needed the money. Which I word very deliberately -- 'I needed money' just means you wanted to see a movie and you didn't have twenty bucks lying around, but I needed the money. But I could've made it another way, somehow. Surely. How's escaping me, but I bet there was a way I could've hung on to the books.

But I don't know. At a certain point a collection becomes just stuff and stuff is a thing, not things. And was it just me or did this thing, with all the harder-to-find eclectic stuff high and center, seem more like it was meant to show how fucking interesting I was...?

I kept the Doom Patrol -- there's really only one run -- and I kept Baker Street,  Batman: Year 100, Give Me Liberty, Aetheric Mechanics, Kill Your Boyfriend... things I actually like a lot, and that show why I am kind of interesting. And I made a couple hundred bucks. And I ate last month. I continue to eat this month.

Seems to me that the difference between a nerd and a person who likes things is the nerd cares what other people think. 

-- no, wait, not all of Sin City. I kept Family Values. What Miller does with snow is amazing.