Hello everyone. Something a little unusual today: a rare copy of The Box of Bad Nightmares Issue 23! Alas, it has hardly been kept in mint condition and all that remains is one tale from the anthology, Eddie Johnson’s Diminishing Paciderm Formation (complete with the original misspelling of Pachyderm that made the issue such a coveted collector’s item).
Enjoy!
The Box of Bad Nightmares
Page 1
In my thesis I have made a distinction between the types of posthuman body found in comic books and how these relate to various other versions of posthumanity in philosophy and transhumanist texts. Of particular interest in terms of posthumanism and anarchy is what I call the posthuman Cosmic Body (more detail can be found by clicking on the link). This final post on Anarchy and Posthumanism (part 1 is here and part 2 is here) will consider how anarchism has been presented within superhero comics and note how these representations usually chime with this vision of the ‘Cosmic Posthuman’. Continue reading
Asmodeus by Alan Moore
In part 3 we delved into the mechanics of comic book continuity and touched upon some of the philosophical implications of such fictional universes as well as drawing attention to some analogous theories from modern physics relating to the idea of the multiverse. Come on, you remember. It was fun wasn’t it? In this part I want to explore further the notion that fictions have some sort of autonomy. We begin first by considering Alan Moore’s concept of “idea-space”. In an interview with Arthur magazine Moore explained that the impetus for his concept of ‘idea-space’ stemmed from trying to understand the nature of consciousness and where our ideas come from:
the best model that I can come up with for consciousness is consciousness as a form of space…Most of us never come out of our living room. We’ve got our individual little private space in our head–just like we’ve got a house as a private physical space. But most of us never go outdoors. We stay within our own identity. However: people who are creative, or people who are questing spirits of some sort or other, have to go deeper. I mean, most people don’t really need new ideas as part of their daily round, depending upon what their job is or what kind of people they are. The same ideas that they had yesterday will probably do just as well today. If you’re a creator, or scientist, or any sort of creator, then you have to look deeper. You have to travel further, to find ideas that no one’s come across before. Rarer ideas.
Moore naturally wonders if such a space would be inhabited; would it contain its own unique ‘flora and fauna’? In Comics are Magic Part 2 it was seen that Moore makes no distinction between art and magic. Both involve accessing, exploring and navigating this ‘idea-space’. As such the demons , angels and other entities encountered by the artist-magician can be understood as living ideas. Or as Moore said in an interview for Blather in 2000: “entities are a kind of compound idea, at least as far as I see them”. Continue reading
David Cronenberg’s new movie A Dangerous Method is out now. I haven’t seen it yet, this isn’t a review. But thinking about the film led me, naturally, to thinking about sex in Cronenberg’s movies. Specifically, about how Cronenberg’s films offer up images of posthuman sexualities, of erotic experiences beyond the bounds of what human bodies are normally considered capable of. So this post is about Cronenberg’s new flesh. The erotic flesh. The philosophy of which is illustrated in the speech in the video below. Fair warning though: although this audio-visual tour through posthuman sexuality will be stimulating and enlightening, you probably don’t want to be reading this post at work or in front of your Granny. Unless she’s very adventurous.
Just uploaded some new pictures onto Flickr. Some may not be suitable for children, the elderly, people of a nervous disposition or small pets. There’s a few below. The rest are here. Enjoy!
The Comical Adventures of Virginia Woolf
Seaside Holiday 1978
I’ve written about the links between superhero comics, magic and religion frequently on this blog. So these pictures of stained glass windows featuring superheroes hold a strange resonance. As well as being just plain brilliant. These obsessively detailed and beautiful images from the artist Marissa Garner have evidently been beamed in from some glorious future where superheroes have truly taken on the status of religious icons. Imagine sitting in your pew as the sun shines through these. Worth getting up on a Sunday for I think. Though presumably these particular services would take place on a Wednesday. Continue reading
Hello humans. One of the benefits of going to comics studies conferences is that you get to see, hear and meet lots of interesting people, both scholars and artists, and sometimes both at once.
One such human is the artist previously known as Sina Evil . I’ll let Sina’s Flickr bio do the work:
I am over 21 years of age. I am a queer cartoonist and graphic artist. In the early 1990s I self-published various queer comix zines including the seminal queer teen zine Concerned Muthers and the highly acclaimed, intensely personal autobiographical mini-comic BoyCrazyBoy, and contributed to queer zines such as Boy Trouble, Holy Titclamps and Hormone Frenzy. My strips have appeared in The Book of Boy Trouble and The Book of Boy Trouble Vol. 2, both edited by Robert Kirby and David Kelly and published by Green Candy Press. I am also currently working on my PhD, a history of queer alternative cartoonists.
You can check out Sina’s art over at Flickr and his blog boycrazyboy. Lots of good stuff there but most interesting for me are his superhero pictures in the collection Man-Gods of the Homoverse . These illustrations have a curious primal force to them. They also make explicit what was already implicit in superhero comics. Not as subtext exactly, but as potential. That all those muscles rippling beneath skin-tight spandex were always, on some level, about sex. As Scott Bukatman noted, “superhero bodies have always been naked bodies”. As such they have always been troubling for some commentators. Continue reading
As I wrote in part 2 (part 1 here) Robert Anton Wilson’s brand of ‘scientific-shamanism’ is linked to a vision of the posthuman I call the Cosmic Body, a postuman form not uncommon in superhero comics. One of the questions I was asked when I delivered my paper on this (available here) was how much the depictions of cosmic superheroes in the 60s/70s constituted a way of ‘piggy-backing’ on the subversive cachet of the comix underground, which of course prided itself on its open depictions of drug use, sex and violence in a way that the Comics Code would never allow for superhero comics.
Having briefly considered what seems to be a largely implicit influence of RAW on the work of Moore and Morrison, it occurred to me that Wilson’s cultural milieu might align him with the comix underground in some way. As I said in Part 2 underground comix are not my speciality but curiosity led me to investigate te idea a bit further. So what follows is a brief investigation into the topic by someone who is not an expert. Still, I think I’ve unearthed some interesting tit-bits and hope that if anyone has any further information they get in touch. Continue reading
Nth Mind 