Death in the gutters
A day early this week. My Sunday morning ritual is being cast aside this week, so here we are.
This week was mostly spent getting the credits and various related pages ready for Disconnect and the reissue of Go Home. Yep, they're both sidling along and nearing completion!
I also finished up a flash fiction piece entitled "A Sign of the Times" which is now out for the approval of strangers at potential publications, etc.
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Launching back into I guess what is now a 'feature', I read another Eisner nominated comic short story recently. This time it was The Ghastlygun Tinies by Matt Cohen and Marc Palm from MAD Magazine #4 from DC.
Like the others discussed previously the story tackles current issues head on, delivering a gut punch of a short.
The title and the strip itself is a play on the classic Ed Gorey alphabet book called The Gashlycrumb Tinies. The Gorey illustrations can be seen here.
The book details the fate of various children in darkly humorous fashion using rhyming structure and the alphabet as its scaffolding.
Cohen and Palm take this style and structure to show the reader the fates of various children involved in a school shooting.
The strip is simple but powerful in its starkness, subverting the black humour of the original and replacing it with something haunting.
Each entry in the alphabet is its own vignette, its own mini-narrative. Due to the nature of the images and the medium itself the reader can't help but fill in the blanks between the gutters and imagine the lives lived (and lost) off the page.
Simple, but hugely effective.
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Links
This is bananas. The article covers a mobile game called Ingress, an AR precursor to developer Niantic's megahit Pokemon Go.
Ingress involves portals, waypoints and a capture the flag style gameplay loop, all across vast distances. This Vice article details some of the huge plans and co-ordination involves in some of the big attacks and the incredibly devious espionage style escapades in the meta-game.
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The Ringer covers the glorious second season of Barry.
Watch Barry.
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S. Craig Zahler is an acquired taste. This LitReactor article on his body of work and the ambiguous politics contained therein is a pretty good primer.
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A fascinating read on the 'Dark Forest' theory of the internet. Borrowing a page from Liu Cixin the article posits the idea that the internet's inherent viciousness in the modern era is driving users towards silos and private channels.
//Via Hawtgluh at Restricted.Academy//
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Somewhat related I liked this article on why everyone should have their own personal website.
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How to ride out the storms with your writing.
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Finally, here is a post (and the rest in the series) I missed the first time around from author Hugh Howey. He details the thinking behind his writing process from idea to revision to publishing.
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I'm off to rotavate some soil. See you in two!