The 40 Years of Comics Project - Weekend Edition

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In an effort to not make me hate writing completely, I think my weekend comics will be blogged this way. Just a short note and some thoughts I had on each one.

Day 2419 - Generation Gone #1 by Ales Kot and Andre Lima Araujo. A cool concept, which I've come to expect from Mx. Kot. They are a writer that wears their Grant Morrison influence on their sleeve. Like me with Marillion or Ween. 3 hackers steal some code that causes structural changes in their bodies and gives them superpowers. And they're angry young people.

Day 2420 - Porn Star Fantasies #7 by Xenia Blue, Crystal Gold, Paradise, and Chuck Bordell. This series reprints the fictional stories that are back-ups in the "True Stories of Adult Film Stars" series. I don't know how much of the "True Stories" series is actually true. I like to think that most of it is, if embellished for creative reasons somewhat. The biographical pieces, almost to a fault, tell the stories of women who really like sex, but are told that it's not okay for young women to like sex. And then they discover the porn industry and their own power. I'm sure there's some shady as fuck stuff that is left out, but the takeaway is that, if true, each of these women entered this industry not because they were abused or broken, but because they were people who loved sex in a world that told them that women shouldn't.

Though maybe I'm being a bit too optimistic in that reading.

Onward.

Reading Between the Panels

A lovely short piece of writing by my friend Tom Sewel on the voices of comics scholarship and the ways we, as a community, are interacting with and interpreting our beloved medium.

Reading Between the Panels.

Live-Post: Sunday Afternoon Comics - Material #1

The word "material" has so many different meanings.

Ales Kot is cranking out comic after comic. While I was in the store today with my pal Tom, I wondered just how many comics he could put out without his writing becoming too diluted. He appears to be doing okay so far. Material is made of material, of physical material, of written material, of matter-ial. The material of Material is material issues of our material world, materialized in the aforesaid material. Material. Material.

Crosspost from Facebook

A little more coherent wrap-up of the comics I live-blogged earlier.

"To celebrate handing in my exam, I went out and bought some comics. Here's some things I think are pretty good:

ODY-C - retelling of Homer's epic set in space with an all-female cast. One of the most beautifully coloured comics I've ever seen, and written in Homeric verse. Supposedly. I don't know what Homeric verse is.

Intersect - I just wrote on my blog that when I read this comic, I feel like I'm taking part in some weird performance art. I thought I had a sort of general idea of what was going on, and then things got very weird, very fast.

Kaijumax - I actually don't know if I'm going to keep reading this one. I found it uncomfortable. It's set in a super-max prison for all those monsters from Japanese B-movies, and the art style is fairly cartoony, but it is played FUCKING HARDCORE LIKE OZ. And that's a bit disturbing.

Secret Wars - So, yeah, forget that Infinty Whatever movie stuff that's coming up in 2018/19 - Jonathan Hickman is telling the ultimate story of Marvel superheroes right now. I know that's a pretty hyperbolic thing to say, but it's really, really, really good.

The Surface - I'm convinced that writer Ales Kot is either having a very intense conversation with Grant Morrison, or he is Grant Morrison. This comic's use of the format is blowing my mind. As is Intersect, actually. Some very cool formal experimentation going on.

That's it. As you were."

Live Post - Wednesday Afternoon Comics - The Surface #2

Ales Kot is having a really intense conversation with Grant Morrison.

Or is Grant Morrison.

That's it for today. You should check out all the comics I've read today. Not a bad one in the bunch.