Dark Horse’s StripSearch features some interesting new comic book talents. My favorite is Ben Stenbeck who uses the influence of Geoff Darrow, Chris Ware and R. Crumb to create a bizarre space drama with sharks. His work can also be found at the Illicit Streetwear site.
I don’t know what the truth is about Jerry Duggan but this story is stranger than fiction…
DM was down for a few back there. Now it’s back up. Presto.
As I watched thousands of New Yorkers on TV after power went out across the Northeastern U.S. and Canada, they seemed to take it all in stride. The blackout goes far beyond luckless NYC, though, so far that the media doesn’t know whether to use the English or Metric system. Some have reported the affected area as 9,300 square miles some as 9,300 square kilometers. According to this page, 9,300 square kilometers is 3,600 square miles or “about half the size of New Jersey.” New Jersey is a pretty small state, relative to New York, and the affected area stretches from Connecticut to Michigan, and Vermont to Ohio, and into Canada too. The seven affected U.S. states add up to 211,317 square miles. I’m sure the actual blackout areas are a lot smaller, but WTF!? Isn’t our power grid supposed to be designed to compensate for failed power stations!? We all learned the benefits of wiring in parallel vs. series in grade school! Of course people are going to use more and more electricity as we march into the future, so why aren’t our leaders planning for that?! A mini version of this crisis happened last year at the very same 14th St. ConEd plant that was smoking earlier today. Something similar was also happening in California 3 years ago! Where’s the money that should be paying for infrastructure upgrades going!?!? Like I have to ask…
Seems like everytime the Prez gets in front of an audience he forgets that people can see him. Thankfully John Stewart can see him and broadcast his oratorial gems properly as punchlines to a rapidly aging joke (why the fuck is HE in the White House!?!). To around 600 military families, his latest cavalier taunt was downright offensive.
Paycheck is yet another film adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story (published in the June 1953 issue of Imagination), confirming the cliché that great artists aren’t recognized as cash cows until they’re dead and their fans have gotten lazy. So far only one Hollywood adaptation has satisfied this PKD fan, and I don’t think a Ben Affleck vehicle is going to break that cycle. What makes a PKD story so great is that it’s impossible to envision Ben Affleck or Tom Cruise playing the hero. Trapped like mice, PKD heroes plod on with dogged persistence toward the next tiny piece of cheese, finding their way out of the vast maze by slipping through mechanisms built to contain hordes, not individuals.
PKD died before the film was completed, but what he did see of it awed him. He was pleased with the casting, especially seeing Harrison Ford become the complex anti-hero Deckard before his eyes. Ridley Scott took PKD’s story in a radically different aesthetic direction, drawing on the imagery of Film Noir and cyberpunk, but his understanding of the story left its philosophical crux subtley intact.
My dream list for future PKD film adaptations:
Ha! Ha! I made a funny… Goddamn this country is throwing democracy down the toilet. California has a history of electing populist crackpots, but if I lived there I’d be paddling to Haiti by now. The way things are going in the world Arnold is a shoe-in, but WHY is he running? Is he simply following in the gubernatorial footsteps of his Predator and Running Man co-star in a game of publicity one-upsmanship? Or is he the GOP’s only chance to soften up the traditionally Democratic state for the Bush re-election? Will California be to 2004 what Florida was to 2000? Thank Christ for Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution!
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