Posts tagged scifi
Career Timeline: 1978 - Alien
After Dune falls apart, Dan O’Bannon writes the script to Alien. When the film is greenlight and begins pre-production, O’Bannon invites many of the people who worked on Dune to get involved, including Moebius. He worked on costume design, specializing on the space suits.
[T]he Death Star requires .03% of the GDP of each planet in the Republic/Empire annually. By comparison, this is the equivalent of about $5 billion per year in the current-day United States. In other words, not only is the Death Star affordable, it’s not even a big deal.
If you can keep these embryos in a freezer, forever, are they legally essentially immortal people? Say we hook up a generator to the freezer and so on to save it from power cuts, etc.
If we have an embryo in a freezer, and it is an immortal person under Mississippi law, can we transfer assets to it and have it hold them in perpetuity, avoiding tax penalties, etc.?
Silber Mini Comics. Via nevver.
Machine Man, by Barry Windsor-Smith, 1984. The covers formed a cycle of X-51 being rebuilt - 1, 2, 3, 4. I was endlessly fascinated with Windsor-Smith as a kid, because he threw so much detail into his work. Machine Man was always a favorite - a Kirby creation from the pages of his 2001 adaptation that gained sentience through exposure to a Monolith.
Book layouts from the opening titles for Gentlemen Broncos, which is easily one of my all time favorite opening title sequences. The Art of the Title Sequence has not only the opening available for view, but interviews with director Jared Hess and production designer Richard A. Wright. Most of the illustrations were by Frank Kelly Freas, a legend in scifi book nerd circles.
The first page of Bill Sienkiewicz and Ralph Macchio’s adaptation of David Lynch’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Yesterday, I did not know this existed. Today, the internet provides the complete comic.
From Jack Kirby’s adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“But somehow Kirby reached forward, went beyond once again — 2001 feels post-all that, somehow. Serene, cool, at least until you really get inside it. It seems to belong to a “quiet era” of American comics, ‘77 to ‘79 or so, when most of the sweaty, ugly energy that powered the best ‘70s comics had dissipated. Just the fact of Kirby the paragon of the straitlaced Silver Age that ran on the other side of the fence from the underground boom in the ‘60s doing a non-superhero comic in an artistically advantageous, even innovative format — let alone the official comic of something as beloved to the hippie counterculture as 2001 — can be taken as some kind of sign for the end of underground comix’s first wave.
And it cuts both ways: Kirby the prince of serialized, shared-universe superheroes swimming into the languid blue serenity of 2001 as he returned to Marvel rather than just going back to the same old thing again is a message to the tangle of frenetic, overstuffed, continuity-indebted action-and-philosophizing comics that had grown out of the seeds he planted since he’d been gone. Time for something new, time to go somewhere else, time for comics as art and Miller’s Daredevil (and then Ronin) and Bissette and Totleben and Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing (which gets pretty 2001-the-comic-ish in parts). Time, with the mainstream’s godfather moving explicitly into psychedelia and hippieisms with stuff like 2001, for the underground to punk up and create Raw. That big fucking tabloid comic works all right as a gravestone, or at the very least as a Kubrickian Monolith, put in place to evolve the form with its mere presence.”
Matt Seneca from he and Joe McCulloch’s epic conversation on Jim Sterenko’s Outland and Jack Kirby’s 2001. Via fuckyeahkirby.
If the damage to the Iranian nuclear program is genuine, this makes Stuxnet something of a landmark in cyberwar history. Much has been made of the threat of computer-based attacks, but thus far they appear to have been limited to either denial-of-service attacks, website defacement, or attempts to break into systems to steal classified data.
New art from old art.
I love the internet.
The heterosexual hand-job business has been treated rather differently, and one can only assume that it was seen to possess some genuine degree of importance in the national Confucian scheme of things. Most shopping centers currently offer at least one “health center” - establishments one could easily take for slick mini-spas, but which in fact exist exclusively to relieve the paying customer of nagging erections. That one of these might be located between a Reebok outlet and a Rolex dealer continues to strike me as evidence of some deliberate social policy, though I can’t quite imagine what it might be. But there is remarkably little, in contemporary Singapore, that is not the result of deliberate and no doubt carefully deliberated social policy.
Happy Hallowe’en, ladies! Nuns. No sense of humor.
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