Newsarama Q&A with Rick Remender and Eric Canete on The End League. 05.11.08
Newsarama article on comics collective ACT-I-VATE’s advances in thier third year. 05.09.08
Newsarama Q&A with artist Nathan Fox on Pigeons From Hell. 05.05.08

Of last week’s published work, one snippet stuck out in my mind most. This is artist Nathan Fox, answering my question about pacing of horror in comics:

I honestly don’t know how to answer it yet. It has been something I have really struggled with in Pigeons From Hell. I am trying to push the boundaries of how I structure the page so that the flow and pace of the panel structure within each physical page reflects the story pacing as well. So when things get crazy or suspense starts to take hold, the panel structure on the page starts to reflect that kind of energy. Then it goes back to a more sound and calm structure as the story slows down and so on. Joe’s script did a lot of pacing with each page turn and how he wrote the script per page, but as an artist, much like you just suggested, once the reader gets a hold of it and the book is opened its hard to hide what comes next aside from a page turn. You see it all. One major thing I did try and do was use objects and odd camera angles to aid in the suspense and pacing of it all visually. Getting right up to the characters and cutting out what they are looking at or panning through rubble or debris to keep the viewer wary of where they are at in their imagination and cropping the hero’s from the danger and so on. A few characters aren’t even visually seen until its a necessity. Especially in issue 4. The Shadow In The Corn and the truly horrific and brutal character climax’s aren’t revealed until there is no escaping it.

I recently came across a 2007 Rolling Stone interview with William Gibson, and the central pieces to me are his thoughts as an 80s Sci-Fi writer now becoming a 00s modern-day writer, and how the reality of the present is imcompatible even as fiction to those of the 80s. Here’s what I’m talking about:

RS: You made your name as a science-fiction writer, but in your last two novels you’ve moved squarely into the present. Have you lost interest in the future?

GIBSON: It has to do with the nature of the present. If one had gone to talk to a publisher in 1977 with a scenario for a science-fiction novel that was in effect the scenario for the year 2007, nobody would buy anything like it. It’s too complex, with too many huge sci-fi tropes: global warming; the lethal, sexually transmitted immune-system disease; the United States, attacked by crazy terrorists, invading the wrong country. Any one of these would have been more than adequate for a science-fiction novel. But if you suggested doing them all and presenting that as an imaginary future, they’d not only show you the door, they’d probably call security.

This is something I had been thinking about tagentally earlier today. How the immense technology gains in the past 10 years have primarily been for entertainment and excess pursuits and not gains for the greater good. Maybe I’m being a bit too FDR, but sometimes the fact that the technology and production effort to make iPhone exist, but that society hasn’t cured AIDS makes me wonder.