First! This site has a gallery of ad designs from the 40’s to the 60’s. Amazing stuff like this:
And second. Here’s a gallery of old fanzines, centered around Start Trek, Star Wars, Dr. Who and more. Do I have to say it’s not safe for work?
(both links via the Amazingly Remarkable Monsieur Church)
I’ve seen this on today’s Journalista. “Eccoci Ancora Qui” is a study of early daily strips, made by Alfredo Castelli, a writer and researcher from Italy. Until february 7, he’s offering the full book for download in a series of zipped files.
I’m looking at it now, and I can’t stop recommending it. I’ll buy the book when it comes out, too.
A little essay from his website:
G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: “When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He believes in anything.” Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.
The “death of God”, or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church — from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code.
It is amazing how many people take that book literally, and think it is true. Admittedly, Dan Brown, its author, has created a legion of zealous followers who believe that Jesus wasn’t crucified: he married Mary Magdalene, became the King of France, and started his own version of the order of Freemasons. Many of the people who now go to the Louvre are there only to look at the Mona Lisa, solely and simply because it is at the centre of Dan Brown’s book.
(I need it at hand. Reference, and all of that)
In which Mr. Doctorow talks about many interesting things. Excerpt:
There are three reasons why it makes sense to give away books online. The first is that publishing has always been in this kind of churn and flux—who gets published, how they get paid, what the economic structure is of the publishers, where the publishers are, all of that stuff has changed all of the time. And it’s just hubris that makes us think that this particular change—the computer change—is the one that’s going to destroy publishing and that it must be prevented at all costs. We’ll adapt. If we need to adapt, we’ll adapt. And today, the way that we adapt is by giving away e-books and selling p-books.
So that’s the economic reason. But then there is the artistic reason: we live in a century in which copying is only going to get easier. It’s the 21st century, there’s not going to be a year in which it’s harder to copy than this year; there’s not going to be a day in which it’s harder to copy than this day; from now on. Right? If copying gets harder, it’s because of a nuclear holocaust. There’s nothing else that’s going to make copying harder from now on. And so, if your business model and your aesthetic effect in your literature and your work is intended not to be copied, you’re fundamentally not making art for the 21st century. It might be quaint, it might be interesting, but it’s not particularly contemporary to produce art that demands these constraints from a bygone era. You might as well be writing 15-hour Ring Cycle knock-offs and hoping that they’ll be performed at the local opera. I mean, yes, there’s a tiny market for that, but it’s hardly what you’d call contemporary art.
So that’s the artistic reason. Finally, there’s the ethical reason. And the ethical reason is that the alternative is that we chide, criminalize, sue, damn our readers for doing what readers have always done, which is sharing books they love—only now they’re doing it electronically. You know, there’s no solution that arises from telling people to stop using computers in the way that computers were intended to be used. They’re copying machines. So telling the audience for art, telling 70 million American file-sharers that they’re all crooks, and none of them have the right to due process, none of them have the right to privacy, we need to wire-tap all of them, we need to shut down their network connections without notice in order to preserve the anti-copying business model: that’s a deeply unethical position. It puts us in a world in which we are criminalizing average people for participating in their culture.
I listen and learn.
Alan Moore, interviewed at infoshop news.
Before the usual excerpt: The little bit you’re going to read below is probably the most obvious part of the interview. In the rest of it, Moore talks very, very much about politics and anarchy, very little about comics (thank god). I can’t recommend it enough. It’s great. Now, the obligatory quote:
What had originally been a straightforward battle of ideas between anarchy and fascism had been turned into a kind of ham-fisted parable of 9-11 and the war against terror, in which the words anarchy and fascism appear nowhere. I mean, at the time I was thinking: look, if they wanted to protest about George Bush and the way that American society is going since 9-11—which would completely understandable—then why don’t they do what I did back in the 1980s when I didn’t like the way that England was going under Margaret Thatcher, which is to do a story in my own country, that was clearly about events that were happening right then in my own country, and kind of make it obvious that that’s what you’re talking about. It struck me that for Hollywood to make V for Vendetta, it was a way for thwarted and impotent American liberals to feel that they were making some kind of statement about how pissed off they were with the current situation without really risking anything. It’s all set in England, which I think that probably, in most American eyes, is kind of a fairytale kingdom where we still perhaps still have giants. It doesn’t really exist; it might as well be in the Land of Oz for most Americans. So you can get set your political parable in this fantasy environment called England, and then you can vent your spleen against George Bush and the neo- conservatives. Those were my feelings, and I must admit those are completely based upon not having seen the film even once, but having read a certain amount of the screenplay. That was enough.
Professor Steven Shaviro writes about David Fincher’s film. I agree with many of his points. The only thing is, I thought the movie could have been a good 30 minutes shorter. Recommended, none the less.
A little excerpt:
Despite what I might have expected from the director of Seven, Zodiac is not interested at all in the inner motivations of the serial killer, nor even in the spectacle of gore that his acts created. Even the murders we see on-screen are oblique and deadpan; we have little sympathy for the victims, but also no sense of identification or complicity with the masked killer — the Zodiac killer is no Michael Myers. The movie has no shock effects, and no unplumbed depths. What you see is what you get, without any residue of mystery or suggestiveness or (even) danger. This is a world that is cooly and carefully visualized, and that doesn’t seem to have anything lurking in the shadows, anything beyond the literal givenness of what is visualized. This makes Zodiac almost the exact polar opposite of, say, Dario Argento’s films, with their baroque flourishes and arcane visual conceptions.
Don’t take a look at this if you’re easily saddened, like me.
Sometimes I feel quite lucky that the cloud just gave me myopia.
(found at Ectomo)
