Yep, just wanted to note that the Pope's new encyclical is making a stand on the Garden of Eden.
]]>" Battle Pope is an independent comic book created by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore, which was published by their own small press company under the moniker of Funk-O-Tron originally in 2000. The series was reprinted in color by Image Comics in 2005, with plans to possibly continue it with new stories after collecting the original material.
The book tells the tale of a hard drinking, womanizing Pope, condemned by God for his own evil ways, who is called to action to save Saint Michael, with the help of Jesus H. Christ, becoming mankind's final hope in a world overrun by demons following the Rapture.
The comic was adapted into an 8-episode animated version that aired on Spike in 2008.[1]"
Great Cthulhu ! It's amazing the things that I am completly ignorant of.
]]>I loved them, because they really were alien. I couldn't stand DC comics, which were too po-faced for me, but reading Marvel comics entailed trying to parse a foreign tongue, using only speech balloons in superhero panels. And this was the time of Marvel's Not Brand Ecch, so it was largely written in New York Yiddish.
Anyway, it was better than Bunty, or photo-love stories in Jackie. When 2000AD came out, I devoured it, but had a lot of difficulty with the hasty art. I preferred the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. (I got Gilber Shelton's autograph a couple of years ago and squeed like a teen fangirl.) I did read Viz regularly as it was such a dead-on parody of the comics of my childhood.
On-topically, I'm still finishing the written Hugo noms, and haven't started on the graphic ones yet. Since I don't read much in the way of modern comics, I'm not looking forward to it.
]]>Wapsi Square only came up once but might be worth a look to many people here; it starts out as a gag-a-day comic and levels up several times from there on both story and art quality metrics. (Disclosure: I like Paul Taylor, the artist, so I'm biased.) The tale goes paranormal fairly early and the Calendar Machine is an existential threat Bob and Mo would respect. It's also been going over ten years now so new readers face lots of characters and maybe an archive binge.
Questionable Content, likewise - though the weirdness isn't hidden and there's no ancient apocalypse. Hardly anyone asks, "What about ordinary slackers living through the Singularity? Would transcendent AI disturb their musical interests and crappy coffee shop jobs?" I'm looking forward to seeing what Jeff Jacques does with Alice Grove as well but it's too early to judge.
There's Freefall for hard SF. Order of the Stick and Erfworld for a game worlds seen from the inside, complete with explicitly spelled out rules and meta-gaming. I'm sure I'm forgetting several.
Honorable mention for concept to The Dragon Doctors, which starts out looking like Extruded Fantasy Product before the reader discovers it's actually set in the far future after several well separated apocalypses, one of them literally Earth shattering. Alas, the creator is a better writer than artist.
For completed webcomics, definitely read A Miracle of Science; you'll remember "Mars likes you." There's always Faans, wherein the protagonists are, well, science fiction fans; it skewers some of our personality quirks all too well. For anyone who hasn't filled up on Phil Foglio from Girl Genius, his old What's New strips from Dragon are still online.
]]>Alas, the surfeit of superhero comics make me somewhat queasy. I thought this was due to genre overload, but then came across this description of superheroes in David Graeber's recent book of essays:
They are just ordinary, decent, super-powerful people who inhabit a world in which fascism is the only political possibility. (from The Utopia of Rules, Appendix)
This explains my nausea at confronting world upon world the creators of which are regurgitating lies from the 1930s. There are other ways to structure society. I will in future avoid polluting my inner landscape with fascist fantasies. Now, where did I put my copy of The Dispossessed?
]]>Schlock Mercenary, already mentioned, is science fiction with violent military folks - it's about a mercenary company, after all - but while some of the characters aren't very nice people not many of the political groups can reasonably called Fascist. Mass-murdering monsters, yes, at least once...
Girl Genius and Gunnerkrigg Court have non-fascist autocracies that are even sympathetically portrayed some of the time. Alice Grove may be such a place, at least for the one small down we've seen so far.
And sometimes powerful people live in worlds without any particular centralized power at all, and yet do not wear silly costumes, adopt code names, or take over the world. That's the case in most RPG themed settings. Examples might be Wapsi Square, Order of the Stick (one would-be world conquerer there), Keychain of Creation, or Oglaf.
]]>That Girl Genius portrays some members of nobility is a positive light probably shouldn't be taken as a positive portrayal of nobility as a system -- and I feel like Girl Genius does a good job of being aware of the systemic flaws and failure modes of nobility-based governmental systems.
In the same way, comic books have at least recently done a pretty good job making it explicit that the difference between a superhero and a supervillian is whether the reader agrees with the character (and some particular books -- Superman: Red Son; Planetary -- have made their focus on this clear); at the same time, having a world politics based on the whims of superempowered individuals is an essentially fascist position. It's the responsibility of responsible writers in the genre to portray the problems of such a society in such a way that it isn't glorified. Probably the easiest cop-out way of doing that is to portray the daily life of someone living in the Marvel Universe as a janitor or retail worker, up until the point where they are accidentally killed by the hero.
]]>Michael Chabon won the 2001 Pulitzer, for "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay", exploring that whole epoch in the development of comix and superheros, against the background of anti-fascist struggle. A fun read!
]]>Let's just say you've got a couple of treats in store, in the shape of Ms Marvel and Sex Criminals -- even if you don't like the others. (Rat Queens might/might not work for you, depending on how you like having your D&D tropes subverted; Saga probably won't work unless you read the previous two years -- too much background -- although it's wildly creative. And there's an, ahem, puppy in the corner.)
]]>http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2394
I meant to ask you Charlie: how was the wedding?
]]>My absolute favourite webcomic is octopuspie.com. Some really great use of art and emotional depth.
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