The Year’s Best-Dressed Graphic Novel
Chapter 16 asked me to have a chat with Jim McCann and Janet Lee in order to get to the bottom of their new graphic novel Return of the Dapper Men. The book has been selling out following a wave of rave reviews and this wide-ranging chat included talk about the Big Bang, the nature of time, innocence, experience and the nature of the relationship between men and their machines:
Can you hear a buzzing sound? No, it’s not Rudolph’s nose on the fritz. This is a holiday surprise that finds two book creators with Nashville connections giving Santa a run for his sleigh with what looks to be one of the season’s hit holiday gifts.
Although their celebrated new book takes place in a fantastical world, Jim McCann and Janet Lee both trace their roots to Nashville. McCann, a native Nashvillian, moved to New York in 2004 to become a successful comic book…
Harvey Pekar & Doug Rushkoff: How Life Got Incorporated
Two pop culture mainstays, comic book legend Harvey Pekar (RIP) and author/media theorist Doug Rushkoff collaborated on a graphic adaptation of Doug’s book Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World, and How We Can Take It Back for SMITH Magazine as part of the Pekar Project. Part 2 has just been published by SMITH (sample panel below) and if you missed it, you might want to check out Part 1 first. Not to be forgotten, artist Sean Pryor.
Source: SMITH Magazine
Monstrous Teenagers from the Charles Burns Comic ‘Black Hole’ Brought to Life
Looks like the source site The Operators is currently down, but thankfully Cyriaque Lamar on io9.com posted a bunch of these wonderfully disturbing recreations of the Charles Burns classic graphic novel Black Hole:
The “Bug” never looked so freaky…
Douglas Rushkoff’s New Graphic Novel is Entangled with Gaming
In a new interview, Douglas Rushkoff talks about his writing graphic novels based on the universe for the game Exoriare. (”They needed an author to come in and say who lives there…”) To avoid intellectual property disputes, he accepted a small share of the company – but now he worries about future plans for basing characters on actual players in the game!
“The way that some person played this game – is that now their property?”
But he also suggests the reason conspiracy theories seem to be increasing. “I think that people really do sense that machines are doing the majority of the thinking now… When systems break down, people start looking for alternate system”
“I mean, there’s nothing people love more than being controlled, so, if the things that were actually controlling them cease to function, they’re going to create imaginary mechanisms of control, just to maintain that good
feeling of being victimized.”
But he…
