Categories
Blather Comics

Speaking of Alan Moore

Speaking of Alan Moore, here’s a photo of him from a recent interview where he’s wearing the same T-Shirt as me (and clearly we’re both not happy about it):

Moses, you're holding those tablets the wrong way upHere’s how the interviewer describes Moore:

And while he is reassuringly genial, he is much bigger, more leonine and prestidigitatoresque than photos make out. He looks more like a Brian Bolland drawing of himself than himself. Even the permanently smouldering joints on which he tokes are much fatter and longer than you’d credit — although filled from a soft, dark block of Moroccan hashish resin the size of a cigarette packet, not some discombobulating new strain of super skunk.

And here’s a nice bit from the interview itself:

Everybody is becoming [a superhero]. In the past I’ve tried to say, ‘Look, we are all crappy superheroes,’ because personal computers and mobile phone devices are things that only Bat Man and Mr Fantastic would have owned back in the sixties. We’ve all got this immense power and we’re still sat at home watching pornography and buying scratch cards. We’re rubbish, even though we are as gods.

Go read it it to see what Moore’s got to say about taking Acid and people experiencing 9/11 as a flashback to Watchmen:

One of my friends over there [New York], Bob Morales, said he’d been talking to some people on Ground Zero on September 12, 2001 and he was asking them if they were alright and what it had been like. Two of them, independently of each other, said that they were just waiting for the authorities to find a giant alien sticking half way out of a wall.

Categories
Comics

Harvey Pekar is dead


Harvey Pekar died yesterday. Obituary by R. Fiore at the Comics Journal blog.

My brother once sent Pekar a comic he drew, inspired by reading an article of his in the Comics Journal. I remember he drew me in one panel, when he’s telling me how critical Pekar is of Alan Moore, and I reply, slack-faced: “but Alan Moore is God”.

Categories
Comics

Shang Chi, Master Of Kung Fu goes on a date

shang chi puts on a recordPlaying around with bing image search, which kicks google image search in the nads and steals its lunch money, I ran across another one of those wonderful comics blogs that posts scans of comics pages long engraved in my id. The blog has a bunch of posts about the old Marvel Master of Kung Fu comic, including this one: Shang Chi, Master Of Kung Fu F.A.Q.

It doesn’t really explain Shang Chi (the “get this, bro” pitch is “the son of Fu Manchu, but Bruce Lee, but James Bond!“), but it highlights how writer Doug Moench tried to add characterization by giving Shang Chi and his supporting cast (MoKF had a terrific supporting cast, mostly a bunch of aging British spies…) all sorts of enthusiasms. Like, Shang Chi and his super-spy girlfriend Leiko Wu go to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind and argue about Star Wars; they enjoy listening to Fleetwood Mac (heck, this is the comic that got me to listen to my parents’ tape casette of Rumors), Black Jack Tarr likes Frank Bloody Frazetta (and who can blame him?)

In retrospect, it feels false, because it’s so clear that the characters are just into whatever the writer was into at the time. But at the time I read this, it felt quite innovative. You saw stuff like that later in Chris Claremont’s X-Men and elsewhere, current culture referenced in the comic, but with Shang Chi, it felt like he really lingered on those moments, those interests – perhaps because Moench wrote a very introspective character, who seemed to spend pages just chilling and thinking about life and stuff, like what do those Fleetwood Mac lyrics all mean, before the inevitable assassins would show up to have their faces kicked.

Categories
Roleplaying

Schweinsteiger’s Revenge

Back in 2005, when we were playing our Science Fiction game, Empire of Doors, a certain recurring villain was a barbarian warlord on the planet Conan who recruited an army to conquer other planets (traveling through those eponymous doors). Israel dubbed him Schweinsteiger. He ended up permanently mind-swapped with Bo’s PC, Aedapp.

Flash forward to this year’s World Cup, and apparently there’s someone prominent on the German team called Schweinsteiger. I do not follow the Football, but I noticed this flurry of tweets from Warren Ellis:

  1. I believe that goal should be ascribed to Schweinsteiger because his name is Schweinsteiger. Der Schweinsteiger. 30 minutes ago
  2. Schweinsteiger should be striding across Germany right now, judging the guilty and impregnating women with his uncanny foot 27 minutes ago
  3. New rule: if someone dispossesses Schweinsteiger of the ball, Schweinsteiger is allowed to execute them on the spot. 21 minutes ago
  4. Half-time. Uruguayan team discover that the mere presence of Schweinsteiger has turned their gonads into ovaries. 7 minutes ago

All this is further proof (as if any was necessary) of our game’s ability to predict generate reality.

Categories
Comics

‘I’m The Internet…’

‘I’m The Internet…’I bring pornographic pictures… and the opinions of angry children!.
Via LinkMachineGo. Alan Moore tells this joke here.