Cory Doctorow?s craphound.com ? News Stories Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh I passed a lithe cormorant of a woman trying on gas masks at a street kiosk. She was gazing intently into a little round mirror mounted on a telephone pole, wearing a cute round avocado-colored mask. I loved the way she moved, loved her librarian glasses and her buzz-cut. The lanky beauty left my field of vision. Not that I'd ever approach a woman on the street; I hated guys who did that. And like a line of song stuck in my head, I thought of Deirdre, who had last ignited that flame, and felt a familiar stab of guilt. What had she done with my photos? There had been no cut-up pile greeting me in the doorway the day I broke up with her. I missed them to my bones. I slowed as I passed Jittery Joe's Coffee, hoping against hope to score a cup. I spied a sexy pair of legs in the crowd, strutting my way. A busty black woman with dreadlocks and tribal scarring hurried past. There was a bamboo outbreak on thirty-ninth street. The asphalt cracked and popped. “ID?”
Satori in the Dust Bowl: A Review of Seed by Rob Ziegler About a century from now, climate change has caused a new Dust Bowl in the Corn Belt, resulting in major famine across the United States. Most of the surviving population leads a nomadic existence, migrating across the ravaged landscape in search of habitable, arable land. Decades of war, resource depletion and population decline have left the government practically powerless. Gangs and warlords rule the land. The only thing staving off full-blown starvation is Satori, a hive-like living city that produces genetically engineered drought-tolerant seed. Seed follows three separate but connected plots. What’s interesting about Seed are the huge differences in tone between the three plots. The way Rob Ziegler manages to weave these three highly disparate stories into one cohesive narrative is impressive. The resulting novel is a real page-turner filled with interesting characters and pulse-raising action scenes.
Southern Enlightenment With healthy doses of Axl Rose and methamphetamines, two new collections, from journalist John Jeremiah Sullivan and crime fiction writer Frank Bill, call forth the power of place and personal history in the Shallow South. Axl Rose makes it out, escapes. He spends his youth stealing televisions, brawling and losing fistfights, assaulting the occasional neighborhood mom. Then—fiery red mane presumably flowing behind him—he boogies. “Kiss my ass, Lafayette,” he’s rumored to spray paint on the street the night he flees his hometown for good. Twenty years after Ax takes flight, journalist John Jeremiah Sullivan— JJS to his growing legion of adoring fans—spends a few days poking around the Hoosier State, digging up old police reports and childhood friends. An inane lede, perhaps, from any other GQ writer, parachuting in from New York, surveying the bad and worst of the local color, and then beating hell back to Brooklyn. Not everyone makes it out, of course.
The Codex Seraphinianus DISCUSSED: Extremely Limited Editions, The Metamorphic Bicranial Rhino, French Booksellers, Grievous Errors, Italo Calvino, Pliny’s Natural History, Hieronymus Bosch, ’70s Pop Art, eBay, The Voynich Manuscript, Italian Aristocrats, Bodoni, In Watermelon Sugar, Ovid, Lewis Carroll’s Photographs of Children, Hypertext Fiction, Taxonomical Surveys, Alchemical Etchings, Billy Joel Image from Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus.Click to enlarge. Who were the people who had invented Tlön? The plural is unavoidable, because we have unanimously rejected the idea of a single creator, some transcendental Leibnitz working in modest obscurity.—Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” Like a Borges story, this is as much about the quest for knowledge as it is about the knowledge itself. At the beginning of my junior year of college, some friends and I came across an upper-division English class called Eccentric Spaces and Spatialities. Dr. One day Dr. Here is his Wikipedia entry, in full:
Barefoot Gen Barefoot Gen (はだしのゲン, Hadashi no Gen?) is a Japanese manga series by Keiji Nakazawa. Loosely based on Nakazawa's own experiences as a Hiroshima survivor, the series begins in 1945 in and around Hiroshima, Japan, where the six-year-old boy Gen Nakaoka lives with his family. Plot[edit] The story begins in Hiroshima during the final months of World War II. In the days following the attack, Gen and his mother witness the horrors wrought by the bomb. Gen looks for work to pay the family's rent. Following Japan's unconditional surrender, American occupation forces arrive to help the nation rebuild. In December 1946, Gen is reunited with Ryuta, who has become a juvenile delinquent, doing odd jobs for the Yakuza. Themes[edit] Major themes throughout the work are power, hegemony, resistance and loyalty. Gen's family suffers as all families do in war. Many of these themes are put into a much harsher perspective when portrayed alongside themes of the struggle between war and peace. Editions[edit]
Palestine (comics) Palestine is a graphic novel written and drawn by Joe Sacco about his experiences in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in December 1991 and January 1992. Sacco gives a portrayal which emphasizes the history and plight of the Palestinian people, as a group and as individuals. The book takes place over a two-month period in late 1991 early 1992, with occasional flashbacks to the expulsion of the Arabs, the beginning of the Intifada, the Gulf War and other events in the more immediate past. Sacco spent this time meeting with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the narrative focuses on the minute details of everyday life in the occupied territories, presenting the daily struggles, humiliations and frustrations of the Palestinians. Sacco’s visit to Israel and the occupied territories is presented chronologically, from his arrival to his departure, through dramatic scenes with only a handful of diversions to present the historical and personal background.
Joe Sacco Biography[edit] Sacco earned his B.A. in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1981 in three years. He was greatly frustrated with the journalist work that he found at the time, later saying, "[I couldn't find] a job writing very hard-hitting, interesting pieces that would really make some sort of difference."[4] After being briefly employed by the journal of the National Notary Association, a job which he found "exceedingly, exceedingly boring,"[3] and several factories, he returned to Malta, his journalist hopes forgotten. "...I sort of decided to forget it and just go the other route, which was basically take my hobby, which has been cartooning, and see if I could make a living out of that," he later told the BBC.[5] Eventually returning to the United States, by 1985 Sacco had founded a satirical, alternative comics magazine called Portland Permanent Press in Portland, Oregon. Sacco currently lives in Portland, Oregon.[8] Bibliography[edit] Comic books[edit] Solo[edit] Editor[edit]
The Art of Comics No. 1, R. Crumb Robert Crumb asked me to say that he lives in Albania, to discourage would-be pilgrims from beating a path to his doorstep. He doesn’t, but his medieval hamlet is so far from the United States in every sense that it takes some perseverance to find, and upon locating it, I discovered that the streets of his walled village are too narrow to penetrate with even the tiniest French rental car. I mean, Albanian. But even this tiny community was too distracting when it came time to draw and ink the extraordinarily detailed illustrations for The Book of Genesis, which was published last year. Crumb is perhaps the most influential cartoonist of his or any generation, famous for decades of work that reflect an idiosyncratic variety of fascinations—arcane twenties music, everyday street scenes, the female form—yet have proved capable of mass appeal. Let’s begin with Genesis. Well, the truth is kind of dumb, actually. But it does also seem like a labor of love. I did try to be respectful. I didn’t.