April 15, 2021
I've received some amazing interviews back, and I am excited that starting April 22, interviews will appear each work week day for perhaps 2 weeks straight. A movie director, many writers, an artist, a podcaster, and a number of fun people with great minds will be here having been interviewed in preparation for my surgery, which seems now to be the beginning of May. The change happened due to covid. So I have nothing to complain about, as having insurance I can get treatment, whereas there are many who cannot.
COMIC BOOKS
I don't think we've reached the place in our popular culture where all media are equal. Films featuring comic book worlds do much better in film than comics themselves. Reading is a dying art. What I have found most curious in retrospect is how certain publishers have flourished, some have fallen, and for reasons I think most outsiders wouldn't understand. The direct market allowed certain products to exist that would've never happened otherwise, due to focus upon a group of buyers not found in newsstand distribution. I found it ironic that at a time comics were said to be aiming at a group of buyers, likely male between 19-25 or older, Image Comics were often dismissed for producing works that worked for a younger audience. The works were fun and well constructed to fit lock step with a
12-16 year old kid with money in his pocket. They were dismissed
for the lack of maturity in the stories or the kind of story telling. Whatever the stereotype had been (comics are for kids, comics today are too dark), you couldn't be seen as making comics just for kids, or for adults. DC Comics was taken to task for publishing darker works that seemed to change the market. But they opened many new paths forward when they began to publish creative works that took their characters from G rated adventures to more adult works. But in the present readers of comics know that they can appeal to numerous groups, and none should be left out, or hyper-focused upon.
If comics are ever going to be seen as a medium for all ages, from children to adults, that consider many genres, the world will have to accept that there is no single model to follow. Good comics have come from many publishers, different nationalities, and different life experiences, and while not every work will find an audience, the audience and sales does not redeem a work and make it important. Which is why there have been comic series that were canceled far too early, and later revisited. I've expressed here that I was and that I am still a fan of ECLIPSE comics as well as FIRST comics. Now, certainly I've read and enjoyed more publishers than that. Since the 1990s the two publishers providing me with entertainment has been DC Comics especially in their imprints VERTIGO and HELIX, and the publisher IMAGE Comics. IMAGE has grown from a publisher of superheroes created by popular talents, to producing works that are wide reaching, experimental, and worth reading. These two publishers are not more popular in sales than MARVEL Comics, nor am I suggesting other people should think as I do. I am suggesting that as a reader, DC and IMAGE created product that worked for me. And, while I've liked Marvel products, I am not able to say I've been willing to follow any long running or mini series they've released for any amount of time. I find them to be far too continuity intensive to want to know the entire big picture. DARK HORSE and IDW have had some great comics over time, but they are limited for me, as they are often licensed product related, which doesn't always move me, and I cannot say I've found myself compelled to keep buying any series.
IN MEMORIA
I am aware that upon this entire planet we live in a new and different place since Covid. For Americans this comes in numerous areas. For instance it is not just for the fact that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are in power versus Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Nor is it for the fact that in the US outrage is now ever present regarding the horrors of race relations. We've changed in our aim, the old ways of doing things regarding equity and race are now seen as being useless for most non whites, and non males. I've certainly known people who foretold a wave of disaster upon the ascension into office by Biden/Harris. But if Covid or the Border crisis are that disaster, the disaster isn't from the leadership's hand, but the world that they had inherited. I am not absolving anyone, by the way, I am simply saying, the changes over the last decade in America have been mind boggling. And unless a politician is directly responsible for a disaster, it is often unfair to aim blame, since the way of life in the political world is collective claims of victory, and rare individual's acceptance of blame.
My father was a lifelong voter Democrat. He was
never wealthy and like most humans, worked diligently if not outright struggled to make a living. He was a working class
person who forged a life out of various difficulties that we all go
through, when not born wealthy. He made a life for his wife and
children as well. However towards the end of his life he said he didn't
recognize the world he lived in, and thought that his party had become
the same as communists in their beliefs. Along with that, my father
who almost never read books, had gone out to buy and read two different
Donald Trump books. Not that my dad saw him as a great moral leader,
or that he would like to spend time with him, rather, my dad came from
an era that being wealthy and a business leader wealthy, was something
that made the person worth admiration. I suspect that based upon my
father's comments about the Democratic party and his admiration for the
wealthy, he'd have voted Trump. For instance, rightly or wrongly, gay marriage in
my parents' era would have been impossible, and laughably out of step.
Even just 20 years back legal use of pot would have been considered a pipe
dream, literally. And this is just to say, I don't think you'd recognize my father in a group of Trump supporters, he was different than most but still, he felt lost, and many who followed Trump found Trump to be a leader or shooting star to wish upon or follow.
I taught in 1999 at a small college and on the last lecture for class was
asked in the modern US history course what did I predict for the
world after the turn of the millennia. I was moved by the opportunity to espouse the future predictions, mostly because it showed a hungry mind in the students asking and participating. But, importantly, I have a master's degree in History with a minor field of Political Science. History is about research and understanding the world that has happened. Political Science is about how to understand the human interactions that leads to diplomacy, laws, elections, and events. It isn't, really, about prediction of the future. My father had died 1 year prior to that moment in class, and I was aware that the world perceived itself on the precipice of change. As I certainly did, as my life had areas that were unrecognizable to me, for the changes. My father was gone, I had a 5 month old baby boy in my life, (my now 22 year old beloved son), the world was on the brink of war in the Balkans, I was working in a field I thought I wanted to be in, and the millennia, so pregnant with danger soon beckoned.
The human mind often doesn't understand the artifice that the logical mind uses to frame experiences in life to give them a way to understand that moment. As you might know, our being perceives time, and counts days or minutes passing, as if there were something that could be called time. But there is no such thing. It is a construct to give our minds a sense of context. We'd not know when things happened if not recorded in books, texts, or stone. And the written archive of human events helps us know why certain situations exist. I began the discussion without having prepared anything. I wanted to give an hour lecture about the political divide we could see growing, the inevitable war that would happen in the middle east, not that I wanted such. I thought it was important to talk about how the UN at that moment had more importance than any time before, since most of the world in the wake of the fall of Soviet Union, now had less desire in the world being divided between the poles of nations who are super powers. But my students were very excitedly asking questions, and I tried teaching by rapport and giving context for why they should learn and find a reason to know more.
My first point was about the international world. With a new power structure in world affairs being that the US, having won the cold war, had the military, economic and infrastructure to demand a position of controlling how the world behaved. Not that they SHOULD do so, I was and remain opposed to one country becoming a police power to enforce their version of affairs. Not because of cost, financially, rather, for the effect it has upon the nations both doing the policing, and the nations being policed. This change from two sides in a mass conflict to a single winner had to have enormous consequences beyond being the winner and receiving accolades and awards. What it meant was that the US had no "known" nation state enemy. The enemies it had would come from those who held personal grudges and sought to create vendettas, as well as the religious political cultures who hated Western culture. (The US and particularly the products of Hollywood California at the forefront.) Ultimately the ideologies of our modern civilization and individualism, versus more traditionally based and group oriented perceptions of being were the area of existence that I felt would birth most conflict.
Furthermore I said, conflict from such sources would not be the only conflicts. I said, when a state reaches the high point of existence what inevitably happens is decay from within, and a time when unresolved issues have the likelihood of rising from the calm. Change can be accompanied by revolution and violence, but the constancy of the status quo often seems to spark fires from the underbrush of simmering issues. Certain groups of Americans in the 1990s began calling themselves militias, who presented themselves as being devoted to the Constitution. Often they were guys with guns who wanted to blow up stuff. In most cases where an empire or civilizations falls, the rot came from within. Whether from racism, opportunism, pure chaos, Americans did see attacks from extreme religious groups, and from state actors who sided with those extreme groups.
More than the events, the people asked about other things, all quite interesting. Someone asked if clones were in the near future, and I said no, but the existence of clones and cloning technology does present the world with ethical questions to answer. Is a clone equal to any other human life? Could clones be developed for replacement parts and made to suffer, due to them not being life? Will we become overrun with clones as the human fertility rates crash, and our own existence becomes threatened by lack of population? At the time a number of cultural conflicts within the US were going on. There was political correctness (PC) culture going on, on each side of the political divide. I was asked what I foresaw happening in terms of culture. I said, you can see certain things looming in the distance, such as addressing racism, addressing the standards and limits of marriage, and I said, most of this will fall upon libertarian concepts but not because I agree with the Libertarian party. It was because with rights and laws, often society fractures on lines that get directly into rights, what is it that is being asked, and how does it affect ME? Racism would fall into the realm of free speech for more people, such as in the right to say certain words, but society would try to change how words are used and consequences of them in industry and cultural institutions would enter legal ramifications. I saw affirmative action being perceived as unfair and illegal by the courts, due to the strict views towards equality. I know it can't and won't go away until some equality was perceived. (Frankly, I find affirmative action to be a day late and a dollar short, I don't think it goes far enough, but that isn't what I was expressing. I was pointing at how the world or the US would do things, not me). Things like Marriage would be defined differently, because if the state is involved we must all be treated fairly, and, equally. SO, if the government is involved in our personal relationships, official or otherwise, I said, you have to accept that marriage will change from two adults of different genders, to purely as two adults. Eventually you might see government not being involved in marriage at all, due to the libertarian outlook, that is, why do you need the state to affirm your decision?
Lastly, for this discussion, the class went on for some time, I suggested that the internet would change human minds to such an extent that letter writing would generally end, that magazines and newspapers would lose revenue, and that for better or worse, politics, entertainment, academia, and creative content would all become based upon and rely upon the internet. I saw it as both dangerous and alluring, and had a potential of changing how we think, due to the addicts of the internet that the fledgling creature had already become. One solar flare or series of EMP weapons and the internet goes away for a while, if not forever, and our archives in the cloud are gone. Some of these outlooks were somewhat correct, and others were dead on. I've always thought that most social scientists could do the same thing and achieve similar results. The area in which we all fail is the unknown unknowns. That is, you can make a generally correct prediction when you can see and know what is going on. It requires some thought but it isn't hard to do. What is hard is imagining trends, ideas, events, that haven't happened and won't without the changes that you do predict happening. You can't predict what hasn't been possible, until now, without pure and flawed speculation.
I write all of this, all of the memory archives of the past revealed, because while my dad is still dead, the world has changed in front of me, and I can't for a moment tell you where we are going with it. I feel like he felt watching the changes of his time unfolding, that he had known one world, and by the end of his life he didn't recognized the world in which he lived.
QUESTION AND ANSWER TIME
I get many emails at my address AlexanderNess63@gmail.com, even though I don't create much of anything in the realm of comics, prose, music or games. I love them all, some more than others. And I do like getting good emails, and by that I do not mean good because they compliment me, almost none do. A good email often will lead me to discover new things or old things I'd never heard about. Even fair criticism gives you opportunity to grow. Sometimes humans offer chances to grow by what they consider to be important to find out. While I don't plan to do Q&A's for myself much, I will do one here. Perhaps once every 6 months I'll do them. (Questions answered here were asked by 6 different people.)
Question 1, Will you review Chuck Dixon's work with/published by Vox Day, why or why not? Isn't he a close personal friend of yours?
Last
question I'll answer first... I do like Chuck a great deal but his best
and good friends are in the industry and in his personal life. I'd call
him a friend but I think we might be considered friendly acquaintances
by others.
I think he is mega talented and his combination of quality
and output make him really an amazing talent. We've talked a lot, (via
email or facebook chat) and in person, and I can tell you that I have
never seen a discriminatory word he has said about any group or ideals.
However Vox Day is a writer who has views that skew to the
farther right on the scale. He has been an agent provocateur taking
stands with the intent to offend people about subjects he is interested
in, and those subjects include race and gender. I am perfectly content
that Chuck remains talented and a morally good human, I cannot for the
life of me understand his working for or with a person who goes out of
his way to trigger people as best he can. I've no doubt the content of
the comics is written well, but I've grave doubts about the who that
publishes that work.
Question 2, (same questioner) Are you getting the fake covid shot? And, as long as I am asking, if you did already get it, I would also guess you voted Biden, so did you vote for him?
I
got vaccinated, and I don't want to get the virus nor share it nor get
it from others. So I am doing a utilitarian thing, trying to do the
best for the most. And I am not discussing my vote, there is a reason
the ballots are secret. I don't have tell anyone. It really doesn't
even matter. My one vote for or against either candidate is like one
single cell out of body of 330 million cells.
Question 3, I am a fan of your interviews, and like your reviews, but could you ever review more new stuff?
Thanks.
But unless I receive product I can't review it. Since I have no money
to buy new comics, there are a bajillion comics I'd need to have to
understand all the world of comics since I stopped in 2010 from being
active in reviewing. Frankly, paying 4 dollars per comic is a lot of
money for a chump like me. I can't do it, so sadly, no. I can't review
more new stuff.
Question 4, I bought your Sasquatch and Bam Too. When is your next comic work coming out?
Easy,
no idea, probably never. I do honestly love comics, but writing them
isn't my area of expertise. And to forestall inbox jerks, I acknowledge
that I have no area of expertise. Loving a genre or a medium is not equal
to being talented enough to work in said genre or medium.
Question 5, Are they ever going to announce when Spring Con is?
Another
easy one, some time in Spring 2022. This year's show was canceled.
Although I've definitely heard Fall Con will take place. I certainly
hope so.
Question 6, Hey I heard you had a project involving UFOs, is that a comic, and when is it coming out?
No
idea who told you, but at one point I did want a book with prose and
comics discussing or showing or story telling about UFOs. But my
financial and health situation led to that being canceled.
Question 7, Why not interview people that others, me included, have ever heard of before?
Now, I've had people say this before, so it is not insulting, but I've done over 400 interviews, most of those featuring comic book world talents were names you'd have heard of. If my website popthought hadn't been hacked and the data corrupted you'd see how many different people were interviewed by me. On that site usually about four or five interviews a month appeared. But that was then, and this is now.
ABOUT GETTING REVIEWS FROM MEFirst off, I can be found on Facebook, Twitter or through email at Alexanderness63@gmail.com. I accept hard copies, so when you inquire at any of these places, I'll follow through by telling you my street address. I no longer have a post box, although I regret that. It was a crushing defeat to no longer have a p.o. box, when I came to realize I was getting so little product it made no sense to pay for the privilege to not receive mail at both my home and at the post office. If you send hard copies for review I will always review them, but if you prefer to send pdf or ebooks to my email, I will review these at my discretion. I don't share my pdf/ebooks, so you can avoid worry that I'd dispense them for free to others.
My Poetry Blog alexnesspoetry.blogspot.com
Published alexnesspoetry.blogspot.com/2007/01/My-Work.html
My Amazon Page Amazon.com/author/AlexNess
Personal Blog catastrophicmemories.blogspot.com
Lovecraft Horror cthulhudarkness.blogspot.com
Atlantis MU, Lemuria alexnesslostworlds.blogspot.com
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