I’ve never seen a project quite like this. It’s written by an actress and has a sequential art section and artist’s sketches interrupting a prose narrative. The main characters (even in the prose section) are based on people involved–who are credited as such. Sounds like this would be a fun collaboration.
Back in the ’90s I had friends who were fans of Babylon 5, which is where I think Claudia Christian made a name for herself. So an actor in a sci-fi TV series is now the co-writer of a sci-fi fiction publication–with the main character based on her. That character is Adjudicator Steele.
The Prose Section:
And Hell Followed Him is a western set on a Mars colony. Instead of a shady Indian Agent selling rifles to the Apache, there is a shady outlaw who has been selling people to the mutants. For dinner.
Agent Steele teams up with tough-as-nails Marshall Jake Reeves to rescue a kidnapped teenager before she, too, is eaten by the mutants. There seems to be more going on around Devil’s Ridge than meets the eye, and there’s definitely more to Steele’s mission than what we are told, for now. She hides her true agenda from the Marshall, and from the reader, but if this is just the first installment in a series, I’m sure all will eventually be revealed.
The plotting seems fine, so far. Avid western readers should feel right at home in this opening act. The text could have used some proofreading/editing, though. My guess is Chris MCauley wrote it, based on Christian’s ideas, but there was no other pair of eyes on it before it went to press.
The Sequential Art Section:
Steele is the star of this story as well. Here she investigates a string of murders on a Jupiter “mining platform.” Damage to the victims, plus footage of the murders, suggest the murderer has superhuman strength and wears a “morphic” suit of armor which is more advanced than the most state-of-the-art military combat armor.
It’s a simple mystery, easily solved, but also sets up a longer story arc involving Steele and her homicidal sister, who murdered their parents and now commands a space fleet and works out dirty deals with at least one planetary government.
I’m a little confused about the setting here. What is the mining platform, exactly? I think most of this story takes place indoors–in ships, maybe a biodome or airtight buildings, but some of it is outdoors where it rains. I wouldn’t think the climate on Jupiter would be very human-friendly, yet humans are evidently fine there with just a rain poncho and no oxygen mask or rebreathing system.
Nevertheless, the artwork is very nice. Penciller Staz Johnson seems very comfortable with comic panel work, and his cover art is even more impressive.
My Take:
I watched a few episodes of Babylon 5 back in the day, but never really got into it. I saw it as sort of The Love Boat in Space. But this series looks to be more like Trek Classic: more adventure, with some mystery (and western!) mixed in. It has the potential to be fun. I would like to see what happens in the prose story next, but would like it even more if they transform it into comic form, as well.
Recently I was searching the Internet for an image of a book cover. The book is Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes. I have owned this book since I was nine years old and still have it, but it is a little worse for wear. I wanted the image of a pristine, legible cover.
I found one fairly easily, but I also saw a “for sale” price with one of the images…for below $7!
What?!?
Yeah, I already had the book–but not in condition like that. And at that price? I’ve read all my life about guys who find optioned-out Hemi ‘Cudas sitting in barns for a couple hundred bucks, but I’ve never found such a deal. I would have been foolish not to buy it.
So I went to the store. The name of the site is “WOB” for “World of Books.” I ordered it and began getting emails just like when you buy anything online.
A week or so later, a package was delivered. I knew something was wrong before I even opened it. It was too thin to be Feiffer’s classic. Had the company advertised the complete, original book, but delivered the one with just the essay but the reprints removed? No, it was much worse. I would have been annoyed with that scenario, but just taken the “L.”
The Bait-&-Switch
Here is what they sent me.
Yup, with an incompetently-removed sticker on the back from some library in Virginia.
I contacted their customer service. Amazingly, they responded. I gave them all the info they requested, and somebody wrote me: “Blah blah blah I apologize blah blah blah I’d be happy to refund your order blah blah blah.”
To which I responded: “Thanks. Can you just send me the book I paid for, instead?”
Two days later I received the word: “This order has been refunded.”
And it was.
Pondering the Motive
So, what was the deal, here? Seems like it would be a disappointing prank, for a prankster. Some kind of grift? No–I got my $$ back. ID theft? I guess my info could be used by them for something–maybe forthcoming credit card fraud. Or maybe there’s some way this improves their SEO? I don’t know. I’m not interested in cheating anybody out of anything, never have been, and so never have wargamed out all the ways to take advantage of honest people online.
What I do know, beyond any reasonable doubt, is that nobody at WOB shipped me that children’s book thinking it was the same book they advertised and I ordered.
The Pervasion of Scam Culture
Scam culture is ubiquitous–and this has me thinking about it.
Know why this site is DOT NET and not DOT COM? Because a hosting company dropped the ball while supposedly transferring us over from a different host, let the domain name expire and never told me until it was too late. When our domain name became available, apparently, somebody in Ukraine bought/secured the rights to it/whatever and then wanted thousands for me to get it back. They didn’t have any content or products to sell that related to the name in any way. They just wanted the name because somebody else had used it so must have figured it was in demand, and they could demand money for it.
Right now the world is full of people who can’t produce or conceive of anything useful, so they seek fortune by stealing or hijacking the intellectual property of others. The entertainment industry is full of such people, which is why there are so many movies about heists, glamorizing thieves, grifters and other scum who have never experienced an independent thought, but are lifted up to young people as heroes and role models because they figure out how to screw people over.
Our government is controlled by such scum. Back when elections were real, the scum were voted into power because they promised lower-caste scum to redistribute wealth from those who earned it to the Official Victim Class. You can probably name several Corporations that have grifted their way to power, backstabbing their way to the top. And of course we have entire countries like Ukraine whose primary function is parasitic, doubling down on an idiotic war and destroying its own young male population in the process, just so it can help the parasites in Washington bleed their host dry.
Parasitism is everywhere, today. There’s no escape from it. The American Dream was: build a better mousetrap that meets a need, and sell it at a competitive price; then use the profits to make a good life for your family. It has been replaced with the American Nightmare: screw over whatever decent people still exist and skate through life without ever doing an honest day’s work.
Yeah, I know: harsh generalization. But I bet the statistics would back it up. I would also bet there’s a strong correlation (if not causation) between recreational reading and independent/critical thinking.
When Did the Slide Begin?
Some sources suggest America’s decline in literacy began in the 1920s. I consider it more likely that significant decline can be traced to 1947, when television began to proliferate in middle class homes across America. But whatever.
Two boys reading reading comics at a news stand, USA, circa 1955. (Photo by FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
What we do know is that the popularity of comic books exploded in 1938 and lasted into the 1950s (the superhero craze lasted from 1938 until about 1945). Comic books have never been as popular as they were during the Golden Age. And the comic-reading demographic during that time was mostly boys. A lot of teenagers read them, some old enough to serve in uniform overseas, but the scale tipped significantly to pre-teen boys. Specifically, these were late-cohort GI Generation, Silent Generation, and early-cohort Boomers.
Changing of the Guard
Many from the latter generation would continue reading comics into adulthood. Some from that generation would take over the industry, and shift their sights to an audience of their own peers, turning their backs on the following generations.
Fast-forward to today. With some exceptions, the Millennials and Homelanders* are functionally illiterate and incapable of independent/critical thought. Lots of factors have converged to handicap them this way. One factor is there have effectively no comic books that excited them as boys and led them to a transition to “more serious” prose books.
I listened to one of Chuck Dixon’s podcasts recently, He mentioned that Manga has attracted the young audience that comics lost over the course of the Pozzed Age.**
What Manga Proves
If Manga can win back that young demographic, then why couldn’t American comics, too? After all, American comics are the original gangsta that first won that audience, anyway.
Here is a windmill worth tipping at. I have begun some research, starting with Demon Slayer, which a librarian says is one of the more popular titles with teenagers. So far as drawing and writing style, it is more refined than most of the Golden Age comics. But I don’t see the story quality as an improvement. I’m sure there is better Manga out there (and hopefully I’ll find some), but take note, my fellow creators: we can do better than this stuff!
We don’t have the equivalent of Anime to market comics to kids, but we should think of something. The Boomers will begin dying off, soon, and American comics will die with them as a medium, unless we crack the code for finding a young audience.
Share your thoughts in the comments.
* I use Generational Theory, as codified by William Strauss & Neil Howe, not the MPAI terms like “Gen Y,” “Gen Z,” “Zoomers,” etc.
** IMO this age began in the 1990s and is still in effect, at least when it comes to mainstream entertainment. Some of us are hard at work trying to usher in an Iron Age…history will determine if we’re successful.
(This post was originally scheduled for a couple weeks ago, but stuff happened and it had to get shuffled around. Apologies if you were expecting it earlier.)
Why do we consistently lose, politically? (And even when we supposedly win, we still lose.)
You’ve probably already figured it out. If not, you likely will soon: the GOP always sells us out. They are controlled opposition. Or the “good cop” LARPing as our champion while the Uniparty they belong to commands them to continually betray us.
Lucy: the GOP Establishment. Charlie Brown: Republican voters.
Nobody truly committed to liberty, national sovereignty, or even sanity will ever be allowed to rise to prominence in the Uniparty Machine. Real change (change for the better, I mean) is what the MSM and Establishment gatekeepers exist to prevent.
This post applies to the Dissident Right writ large, but I intend to specifically address the creative/artistic “community” within this faction.
There are plenty of squabbles on the Left: Should we commit infanticide only before birth, or is any time hunky-dory? Should we incessantly ram sodomy down people’s throats, or Islam? Who deserves our support more–macho chicks who think they’re as good or better than dudes, or dudes who pretend to be chicks and shatter those fantasies?
But whenever there’s a significant battle to be fought, the leftards put aside their differences, present a united front, and dogpile on anyone with the audacity to question their Big Tent Agenda.
On the Right, we are too busy backbiting each other to even entertain the idea of unity. Chances are (if you’re not a well-known influencer of some kind), you’ve been wounded more and deeper by potential allies than the enemy.
When I dusted off my Twatter account and began spending time there again, I couldn’t help but notice all the bickering about some “conservative calendar” with photos of attractive women in it. Most of the mudslinging and name-calling was between right-of-center folks. And that was just a blip compared to an ongoing feud between the respective supporters of Eric July and Ethan Van Sciver.
People supposedly on our end of the political spectrum will sabotage others’ marketing efforts, assassinate their character with flimsy or no evidence, copy stuff others have written and use it for their own purposes without giving credit…and that only scratches the surface.
A lot of you just won’t quit feeding the Beast, even when there are alternatives. You keep using Google, Wikipedia, Facebook; drinking Coke/Pepsi, eating at McDonalds/Burger King and buying Hersheys/Kellogs, etc. Same with Marvel/DC, Disney, Netflix, etc.
Unity comes natural to collectivists. They fear independent thought, so naturally fit the role of obedient drones in the Hive Mind. Their largest demographic is Millennial–one of the most cooperative and conformist generations alive today.
By our nature, liberty enthusiasts are independent thinkers. Getting us to unify for any cause is like herding cats. And the dominant demographic in the creative “community” on our side is Generation X. We don’t play well together. We are the most competitive of the living generations.
So, spoiler alert: extreme individualism and a hyper-competitive instinct don’t naturally gravitate toward unity, or even solidarity.
What is needed for us to build a parallel economy/culture that succeeds? I probably can’t provide a comprehensive list, but I know we’re gonna need an online bookstore. Arkhaven is already on its way to scooping up the audience that the pozzed comic sites are chasing away. We may see an online drop-shipper rise up out of the Gab Marketplace to compete with Amazon in the realm of all the other stuff they peddle, but we are gonna need a bookstore that will sell the books they ban, and design algorithms that allow readers to decide what succeeds, instead of woketard gatekeepers.
But no matter what platforms are built on our side, and how good the quality of the products, they can’t and won’t succeed if you keep using your voting dollars to enrich the businesses that hate you. Those woke, pozzed businesses have the deck stacked in their favor. While small (and non-woke) businesses have been targeted for destruction, anointed favorites like Amazon get special deals that make them immune to most of our totalitarian overlords’ poison.
This is one battlefield of many where we need solidarity to have any chance of success.
Back when I first published Hell and Gone (paid link), it got a good review. I say good because the reviewer was a combat veteran who appreciated what I had injected into the men’s fiction/action-adventure/military thriller genre(s). I spent a lot of time on a forum for Kindle authors in those days, and evidently he did, too. He sent me a DM there identifying himself as the reviewer, and went on to say he bought/read my book to check out the competition. This was Jack Murphy, a Mack Bolan fan and former Army Ranger, who was, at the time, writing his own first novel–also a paramilitary adventure.
I don’t have any copies of our first correspondence (or even remember the name of that forum), but my response was along these lines: “Nobody is writing this kind of stuff anymore, so there’s plenty of room for competition. In fact, it could use some good solid competition.”
We became online buddies after that, helping readers discover each others’ work, commenting on each others’ blogs, and giving signal boosts whenever possible. We gave each other crossover business, intentionally and unintentionally. He was one of the guys who convinced me to write a sequel (paid link) to what I had not myself considered more than a stand-alone novel. As it turned out, Jack made better choices than I did and had me beat on the right time/right place dynamic as well. His novels got hundreds of reviews. He was a founding member of SOFREP, became an investigative reporter, and went on to write some non-fiction, including a New York Times Bestseller.
Jack was a stand-up guy, but is not a member of the Dissident Right. He chose a different path than I did. And he is far more successful as an author than I am. But I don’t regret helping him out in those early days. I don’t resent his success. Not at all. Even if he goes back to writing men’s fiction, I still want him to succeed (continue succeeding, that is). There is room enough for both of us, and plenty more.
Like all the arts, literature is not a zero-sum game. When somebody buys Reflexive Fire or Target Deck, (paid links) odds are, they’re not going to stop reading books for the rest of their lives after reading those. Plenty of readers bought both my books and his.
I personally think it’s economically crazy for CVS to build a store at every single intersection where a Walgreens sits, as they seem to in every Florida city. Yet I’ve never seen one of them capture 100% of the customers and force the other one out of business by doing so. Both are doing fine, so far as I can tell.
I was a huge Batman fan as a boy, and bought his titles whenever I had money. But that didn’t stop me from buying Spiderman, too. Neither of them decreased in popularity just because the other was also popular.
It is not going to hurt you if somebody buys a book written by somebody else you consider competition. It is not going to hurt your blog or review site if an Internet user (or two, or 10, or 10,000) also visit a different blog. Same deal with comic buyers, social media followers, whatever. You should want them to succeed, if they are also in favor of liberty, Christianity, and the nuclear family–or even just not trying to help Globohomo destroy all of the above.
Will this turn out to become the Iron Age, or will it remain the Pozzed Age? Without a little bit of solidarity throughout the Right, and not-so-common sense, the enemy will win this battle, too.
Share your thoughts in the comments. And if you like what we’re doing at Virtual Pulp, share our posts on social media (those convenient buttons on the right sidebar are one way to do it).
UPDATE: I’m backing up the site now, will update the PHP afterwards, then see if I can get the subscription widget working. Thanks for your patience!
According to Vox Day, the cultural Marxist Thought Cops are now taking over BIC (Bounding Into Comics) too. News to me, though I should have expected it.
First off, BIC was never a right-wing, right-leaning or culturally consoivative site to begin with. As mainstream comics became increasingly feminized and sodomized, BIC always struck me as firmly in the “not that there’s anything wrong with that” camp. So I can’t even say that once they, too, are completely pozzed, it would be 180 degrees off from their founding principles (like I even know what those were). Will they begin gushing over comics that suck? To the extent they even cover comics: yeah, probably. More on that soon.
I went over to Fandom Pulse and looked around. What I found was in sync with online comics media and forums I’m familiar with. I follow the BIC group on MeWe, a more Big Tent comics fan group on Gab (that I haven’t managed to get kicked off of, yet), read the Arkhaven blog regularly, and have BIC and Bleeding Fool bookmarked in a browser. This has been part of my status quo for a couple few years now. In case it is not for you, breaking story:
They hardly have any comic-related content.
Visit any of these sites and you will find all kinds of posts about manga, movies and toys, but not much at all about comics. After pondering this over a glass of wine at the country club (not really, but it makes me sound more sophisticated, don’t it?), I concocted a theory. The theory has two major components/exhibits.
Exhibit A: Mainstream comics/the Big Two are in a flaming death spiral, due to abysmal writing and utter depravity. Bloggers could fisk and critique DC/Marvel’s latest abominations on a regular basis, but that’s like asking them to spend their life sniffing turds and reporting on what they smell.
Why not write articles about the indie comics and graphic novels being produced? There’s decent work out there.
Exhibit B: From what I can tell, current SEO doctrine dictates that websites must generate scads and scads of content. (Please note my courageous stand here at VP that defies SEO doctrine.) From my brief perusal of Fandom Pulse, I can tell Supply Side Content Creation is their guiding philosophy, too. Content, content, content! More content! There’s just not enough sequential art being produced they can write articles about to meet this mad demand for 500-word articles.
Where is that demand coming from–the fans or the editors? That’s a question worth asking IMO. As somebody who loved comics as a kid and is stumbling toward creating some original graphic novels of his own, and is still interested in the medium and whatever good sequential art can still be found, I would rather read one or two relevant articles a day about comics/graphic novels than 50 articles a day about Hollywood inside baseball, action figures, videogames, film adaptations, and Bob Iger’s most recent brainfart.
But, as often is the case, my reasoning is much, much different than the prevailing wisdom.
Plenty of people are fed up with how the self-righteous leftards at Marvel and DC have ruined pretty much every character they inherited from creators and writers who actually had talent and imagination. The good news is that they now have options–and so do you. If you like the medium but the GloboHomo Narrative isn’t your cup of tea, you can read some decent graphic literature…for free.
New content is added multiple times a week at Arktoons, which now has a substantial amount of content. Arktoons is the online comic reading site built by Arkhaven Comics. We have reviewed Arkhaven titles Alt-Hero, Avalon, and Alt-Hero: Q here before. Those titles have been re-launced through Arktoons, plus a whole lot more.
First of all, there are three “Classics” series, introduced by Chuck Dixon, reproducing some of the comedy, adventure, and war comics from the Silver Age. Chuck Dixon has some of his own, original work (in addition to Avalon and Q) available. Go Monster Go is a horror/Supernatural series about a ghost car that appeals to me because it’s about the teenage rebel hot rod milleu in the era before hot rodding diminished into a subculture (and then disappeared altogether). He’s also got Shade, a superhero series set in Europe.
There are some titles based on the literary work of Vox Day. Midnight’s War is set in a city controlled by vampires, where a small resistance cell is interfering with black market blood plasma trafficking, and saving some would-be victims in the process. A Throne of Bones is a fantasy set in a Tolkienesque (?) world in which Roman legions (?) are at war, not with Huns or Goths, but with armies of goblins. I find the military perspective interesting, as I did with some of Howard’s Conan adventures. Quantum Mortis, so far, looks like military sci-fi set outside our solar system. I’m interested to see where it’s going. Something I saw or read made me think it would be a sci-fi police drama, like American Flagg! (but without Howard Chaykin’s avante gard leftist crap).
There are a few series from Jon del Aroz, including Clockwork Dancer, a steampunk series about an inventor who gets in trouble for building robots; Flying Sparks features an aspiring superheroine who doesn’t know her boyfriend is a crook; and Deus Vult is about a knight on a quest through some sort of underworld populated by cat and frog people, on his way to match wits with the devil himself.
Swan Knight Saga is a fantasy based on John C. Wright’s YA novel, about a young man who can talk to animals, who finds out the world is secretly oppressed by elves. It’s better than it sounds.
Arktoons has several other series; but the one I have the highest expectations for is Hammer of Freedom, about a homeless veteran fighting the power in a GloboHomo police state (Sao Paulo, 2045).
Superheroes only make up a fraction of the lineup at Arktoons. There’s a pretty good chance there will be something for most comic fans (unless the comic fan prefers reading about transgender Norse gods or some such). I’ve found that, rather than read each snippet as they come out, I prefer waiting until those (often quite short) snippets accumulate to the point that I can absorb a significant portion of the plot line at one sitting.
The artwork varies. Some is very slick, while some looks rushed and amateurish. The writing that I’ve seen runs from solid to perhaps brilliant. Time will tell.
Again, it’s free, though you may want to subscribe just to support the creative teams making these comics available.
Red-Blooded American Men Examine Pop-Culture and the World
