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dessgeega
loves your favorite videogame
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 03, 2008 8:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

so after a decade of radio silence, larry marder's chronically unfinished beanworld suddenly has a new episode - on myspace?
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dessgeega
loves your favorite videogame
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Location: bohan

PostPosted: Wed Sep 03, 2008 8:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

oh my god he's continuing beanworld
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Dracko
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PostPosted: Fri Sep 05, 2008 10:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

extrabastardformula wrote:
Dracko, on account of you always talking about the DC stuff I had a dream about a game starring Lex Luthor as a giant robot pilot last nite. His attire was rather striking in that he looked carefully disshevelled.

pix or it never happened also this:



Comes out in a dozen days!

Cycle wrote:
Dracko, what would you recommend from that sale?

Well, I'm still waiting for Eddie Campbell's Bacchus and Alec to be collected in their entirety before shelling out for them - though actually at that price, I may be better off getting those trades and finding the other volumes elsewhere - but I intend to buy Alan Moore's The Mirror of Love in any case.

"How, how did you do this? Are you a magician?"
"I'm a bookseller, sir."
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Harveyjames
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PostPosted: Sun Sep 07, 2008 7:06 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Wow! That'll be Frank Quietly, right? I like his take on Superman. He kind of gives Superman the physique of a 1930's bodybuilder / circus strongman, which is apt, since that's where the inspiration for his costume came from.

Actually, I think I really like Frank Quietly.

Why does Lex Luthor have laser vision?
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Dracko
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PostPosted: Sun Sep 07, 2008 8:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

You'll just have to read the past eleven issues of All-Star Superman to find out!

They're really quite excellent and one of the best miniseries o the stands today, and I'm not a Superman fan by any means.
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 22, 2008 1:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Lord Horror is the creation of David Britton and Michael Butterworth, founders of Savoy Books in England. Savoy has a long and colourful history that began with independent ventures — bookshops, writings, underground zines — by Britton and Butterworth in the late 1960s. In 1976 they joined forces to launch Savoy and nearly became William S. Burroughs' UK publisher in 1979. The ink barely dry on a contract for Cities of the Red Night, Savoy's bookshops and offices were raided for the nth time by Manchester police, perpetuating what would become two and a half decades of harassment and witch-hunting by a constabulary with clearly repressive ambitions. Savoy was forced into bankruptcy and Britton obliged to serve a term in prison for selling publications deemed "obscene" (but which were openly sold elsewhere in the country).

Lord Horror is based on a historical personage: Lord Haw-Haw, aka William Joyce, British fascist and radio announcer. Warping him from Haw-Haw to Horror, the novel views the rabble-rouser DJ through a glass darkly. It turns out to be a double negative — after Auschwitz, can you view a fascist any more darkly? — that catapults the narrative in the other direction, into exuberance, extravagance, and excess. (In the novel, Hitler's penis suffers from a gigantism that seems to epitomize the over-the-topness of the book itself.) Lord Horror takes the repository of symbols bequeathed by World War II and pours it into a cauldron boiling over with pop culture. Bigots and death camps get cooked up with rock and roll, comic strips, esoterica. It's a "what if the other side had won the war" trip like you've never seen before.

Though they were blind to its literary qualities, the Manchester police could not ignore the novelty and daring of the book. Once again they raided Savoy, confiscating more than half of the book's already small print run. A court declared the book obscene, less for its sex or violence than for anti-semitic ravings put into the mouths of anti-semitic characters, and sent Britton to Strangeways Prison for four months. Though this made Lord Horror the first literary work to be suppressed in England since Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, advocates of free speech paid little heed to the plight of Lord Horror's creator. If this had happened ten years later, Britton would have become a cause célèbre fuelled by online petitions and blogger outrage. But in 1991 there was not much of an internet, and liberals had already blown their wad on Salman Rushdie. The Satanic Verses had been easy to stump for. It pit the good enlightened West against the bad repressive East. Lord Horror, with its exaggerated depiction of British collusion, occupied a more disturbing terrain. It wasn't us versus them. It was us versus ourselves.

In 1993 the American Jewish Year Book, which chronicles anti-semitic events around the world, noted that in Britain "racist literature continued to cause concern." Discriminatory publications included The Holohoax by "Simon Weaselstool," an Examination of Anti-Gentilism, and an edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In addition "Lord Horror by David Brent [sic], published by Savoy Books and based on the life of British World War II traitor William Joyce ('Lord Haw-Haw'), was banned under the Obscene Publications Act, though no reason was given." No reason was given because the book was railroaded, banned not by a jury but by a judge — pause on that: there was no recourse to "community standards," just the subjective assessment of one man who was unable to see the difference between being and satirizing hate speech. (This was particularly ironic since anti-gay rhetoric by the Chief Constable of Manchester had been transposed into the book, replacing gay with Jew — in other words, transforming real hate speech into satire.)

Other books, such as Phillip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream (1972), had utilized the "what if Hitler had won?" premise without causing much controversy. Postwar pulps regularly eroticized the Holocaust, using Nazis and Jewesses — never did the starving inhabitants of death camps look more buxom than on the lurid covers of pulp fiction — as stand-ins for sadists and masochists. These failed to ruffle feathers partly because the "politically correct" mindset dominant at the time of Lord Horror's publication had yet to prevail, and partly because the works themselves were clear about their moral positions. Spinrad appended a fake scholarly analysis to his tome to ensure that his intentions would not be misunderstood. And no one considered the pulps anti-semitic because it was obvious what their game was: to beat the censors, S&M bodice rippers posed as historical novels about the war.

Savoy has occupied a more ambiguous terrain. Unlike Dick or Spinrad, sci-fi writers who confined Nazis to a book or two, Britton and Butterworth have pursued their theme with a probably disturbing intensity that can be quantitatively measured in the sheer volume of Lord Horror productions. What's more, they do not tack a moral to the end of their tales. This is not to say that there are no morals but rather that there are no easy answers, seals of approval, rubber stamps, calmatives ("don't worry, it's just fiction, the jackboots won't hurt you"). Their work is not ideological, like a hate tract, but is rather a deliberate collision of seemingly incompatible ideologies: death camp + dream factory = ? Satire, hyperbole, and reductio ad absurdum work to energize, anger, inspire, offend, but the one thing they do not do to readers is pacify. And why should anyone be pacified by Nazis, even fictional ones?

Potentially the most anti-semitic passage in Lord Horror depicts the protagonist literally ingesting a Jew. The description, which carries on for several pages, also happens to be the most brilliant and farcical moment in the book. After swallowing half the Jew — whole — Lord Horror

Quote:
heaved himself onto his feet. He propped himself unsteadily against the wall, wreathed in steam, with the two bent legs of the Jew brazenly dangling from his mouth. He raised his hands to the pain in his head, clasped it, stared up at the big moon. When the white orb tossed down light, the loose legs swung and crossed one over the other as though the old Jew inside had seated himself casually in a roomy armchair. [LH 160]


Anti-semitism? Or Surrealism? The appeal here is not to haters of Jews but to lovers of art. It is a Max Ernst image with echoes ranging from Goya (Saturn Devouring His Children) to Dali (Autumn Cannibalism). The burlesque is completed by Lord Horror's revelation that "his body could literally accommodate thousands of Jews. He had struck on the perfect Final Solution — he could eat and digest the Jews of the world!" [LH 161] Jonathan Swift had argued in A Modest Proposal that the solution to famine was to eat the children of the poor. Here the solution to ethnic "degeneracy" is to eat the degenerate. Plainly this is the type of epiphany that occurs not when you want to resurrect Nazism but when you transplant Auschwitz to Oz.

As if its anti-anti-semitism weren't obvious enough, the novel continually undermines its own protagonist's hatreds: "Lord Horror's avowed anti-semitism was a cartoon, a burlesque, a technicolour replica of Hitler's own Jewish stance... Horror was just a brushstroke in a tapestry without substance, his actions far too Grand Guignol theatrical to be truly convincing." [LH 37] Impressed by Mengele's (imagined) experiments "grafting white limbs onto black bodies," Lord Horror tries "duplicating Mengele's achievements... by tacking gentile anatomical characteristics onto Jews." [LH 90] Such copycat behavior is expressly condemned by the book itself: "Hitler had lain in the wound in the heart of mankind, not just in the wounds in the hearts of the Jews. He had become a token reminder to the world that the seeds of its immolation lay in blindly inherited behavior." [LH 188]

It is difficult to fathom how this, particularly when compared to genuine hate speech, could be mistaken for anti-semitism. Still, let's presume the worst. Acknowledge that Savoy must have some sense that hate is the new outré. It used to be that you couldn't say fuck without causing matrons to overturn their teacups. Nowadays it's rockstar, illuminati, paki. (Interestingly, though, the word illuminati does not appear in Motherfuckers, currently the only one of the three novels whose text is searchable at Amazon.) Certainly Savoy is aware that its subject matter is inflammatory. Britton and Butterworth relish their ability to scandalize, épater le bourgeois. They are guilty of this much. But does that make their work dangerous?

There are all sorts of moral codes at play in the Lord Horror novels, and there is even the odd maudlin moment: "Nobody knows how it feels to put a child into the ground. Unaccustomed tears would come to Ecker. Every monster imagined by mankind had died and was reborn a hundred times more terrifying in the concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau." [MF 65] But fragments of morality do not make a book moral. "Dangerous" books are often justified by claiming that they possess some latent or even superior morality. Simone de Beauvoir used this tactic in Must We Burn Sade?. William Burroughs has been almost forcibly moralized by his supporters, as in publisher John Calder's obituary: "Like Swift, [Burroughs] was a moralist torn between horror and gloat."

This may not be entirely untrue, and no doubt the same could be said of Savoy's productions. For example, Motherfuckers makes the point that it is not the vanguardist who holds nothing sacred. It is the businessman.

Quote:
Fifty years on, Horror had confided to Ecker, Auschwitz would be a recognisable brand name, a mythic character as well-known as Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan. A fortune awaited the author who could bring "Mr Auschwitz" to life... In a hundred years, Auschwitz would form its own genre and become the most successfully marketed product in the history of the world, a name as well-known globally as Coca Cola. [MF 69]


But emphasizing the rectitude of these books seems disingenuous. The importance of Sade is to have mapped out a terrain of sexuality beyond good and evil. The importance of Burroughs lies not in his morality — a mind-your-own-business ethos typical of certain classes of American — but in his art (his vivid language, black humour, routines, cut-ups). So too with the Lord Horror novels. You can read them like the Gospel, if you want, and draw out the lessons. But that's not really the point. These are not moral books. They're good books.

This disjunction between ethics and aesthetics plays an important role in the novels themselves. What may well scandalize some readers — especially the ones in judicial robes — is not the absence of moralizing but the presence of aestheticizing. Here is Lord Horror describing the death throes of a man he has just stabbed:

Quote:
Language is truly poetic only in so far as it is used musically, plastically or, only when it is filled with scintillating colour... Dying in my arms, Lord Boothby exhibited a similar trait; the purist 'visible speech' of Tone-Eurhythmy. How disappointing no sound engineer was there to record his declamation. What came from him were the last soul-qualities of the Human Being giving expression both audibly through speech and visibly through Eurhythmy — music translated into movement — slippery and ethereal. Boothby was not dancing in any real sense of the word but rather paying respects with movement as he prepared to journey from this world. [BBM 82]


He expresses no revulsion at the deed, no self-doubt about the need to kill, no fear of recrimination by society. It's murder considered as a fine art. Moral valuations are replaced by aesthetic ones. Hitler, far from being a failed painter, "has become the most successful artist of all time, certainly the most studied." [LH 20] The insight is weirdly true, if you think about it, but it also has the effect of portraying atrocities as artistic triumphs.

Rather than condemn the aestheticization of violence from the standpoint of the victim or the man of conscience, Savoy takes the opposite tack: the Lord Horror books repeat the ploy, substituting artistic evaluations where moral ones might seem more appropriate. And while they do this they turn up the volume, carry the tactic to new extremes, attain satire via hyperbole and excess. It's like someone saying to you, "How would you like a punch in the kisser?" And you respond, "I'd love that." You don't really mean that you want to be punched. To the contrary, your sarcasm negates the threat, implies that the pain it promises is no pain at all. So too with Savoy. Fascism says, "Fiat arts, pereat mundus: let there be art no matter how much of the world gets fucked as a result." And Savoy says, "I'd love that." But you'd have to be a rube or a judge to think that that's what they really mean.

Britton has been shy about personal publicity — perhaps an understandable result of having been to prison twice for obscenity. The only picture of him that has appeared in a Savoy publication shows a young man in the 1960s affecting a rock star glamdom. He grew up in industrial Manchester, the son of a Christian mother and Jewish father. This fact is either trivial — meaning that his half-Jewish parentage has no bearing whatsoever on the Horror world in his head — or it's so deeply Oedipal that you hate even to pursue the thought. Suffice to say that this is probably an interesting line of inquiry for the writer's intimates, and everybody else will have to content themselves with descriptions of Britton as congenial, inspired, generous, polymathic, fun, a "xenophobic Lautréamont from Manchester" as artist Kris Guidio once called him.

Britton's earliest publications were not texts but images. He contributed illustrations to weird independent zines, eventually joining Butterworth as art director at a venture they called WordWorks. At what point did his artistic output become a literary one? Emerging from his first stint in prison in a self-described fury, Britton took over a novel that Butterworth had been writing called Das Neue Leben. He seemed to do to it what Old Shatterhand, Hitler's creature penis, does to a rare volume of Schopenhauer in Lord Horror — inundate it, flood it with his manic imagination. The literary result was the first novel in the series, and the ironic result was that Britton was sent back to prison. Once there, he must have said to himself: "They think that's obscene? These fuckers don't even know the beginning of obscene. This is obscene." He spewed out Motherfuckers, and from there the character and the mythos took on a life of their own.

From Horror Panegyric by Supervert.

Pictures by John Coulthart.
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Dracko
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 13, 2008 1:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bryan Talbot's Memento
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Dracko
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 3:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Jonathan Hickman is very excited about his Marvel gig.

Blatantly:

Quote:
Jonathan's so gung-ho about Secret Warriors that he recently turned in a broad-strokes outline for 60 issues, accompanied by flowcharts and graphs explaining the relationships between all of the various characters, heroes and villains alike! Just look at these examples!






60+ issues? Well, I'd be very happy to witness the birth of a medium standard creator from the very beginning.

That, and Nick Fury should be the centre of Marvel's universe anyway.
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Dracko
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 6:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Aetheric Mechanics is one of the best things Warren Ellis has written in a long, long time.

It helps that it's self-contained and not a mini afflicted by delays and drop in interest on his part. Maybe he should stick to that format.

What would you do if presented with incontrovertible scientific evidence that you didn't exist?
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tygerbug
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 08, 2008 1:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
Children of cartoonists are never as good as their fathers! Garret Gilchrist, Kim Deitch, Richard Scarry Jr., Leo Baxendale's son, Adam Hargreaves, Sophie Crumb.



Hey. That's mean, Harvey.

And why is it that my name pops in your head first?



And besides:





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Cycle
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 09, 2008 5:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

tygerbug wrote:
Quote:
Children of cartoonists are never as good as their fathers! Garret Gilchrist, Kim Deitch, Richard Scarry Jr., Leo Baxendale's son, Adam Hargreaves, Sophie Crumb.



Hey. That's mean, Harvey.

And why is it that my name pops in your head first?


Harvey has "quit" internet forums, but I passed your message onto him and am now posting on his behalf:

"Tell Garret Gilchrist his name popped into my head because he posts on the boards sometimes, and I was only really being mean because I didn't think he'd ever see it

And also I found out that there are exceptions to the rule (Glen Keane, for example)

And also tell Garret has his own thing going on which is pretty cool, so he shouldn't sweat it"
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Dracko
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 26, 2008 7:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Browsing for WE3 info and screenshots and look what I found!


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PostPosted: Fri Dec 26, 2008 9:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Some of the art here reminds me of the Crayon Master.
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