This will be a short one this week. I set my very first Kickstarter campaign live earlier today, for my webcomic The Cycle, and would you believe it, it’s already been funded! I didn’t even have to involve my grandmothers--those sweet ladies have cash to burn! So naturally, I’ve got a lot on my mind. With thirty days left in the campaign, I’d like to see how far I can push this thing. You can check it out here. Any reblogs/retweets/rewhatevers are much appreciated!
I recently made the mistake of trying to read three books at the same time. Well, four, if you count Batman and the Outsiders Vol. 1 as a book, and you know I do. Instead of allowing me to read more books in a shorter span of time, I just wound up reading them slowly, without making much progress in any of them. So lesson learned there.
Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End is certainly not my favorite of Clarke’s work, nor is it even my second favorite, but it is very good. It’s more interesting than it is entertaining and it certainly supports the idea that Clarke was obsessed with the idea of a hyper evolved celestial-children-deities(s). Some of his little bits and pieces about a world post-benevolent alien takeover are remarkably modern. He describes a boom in televised entertainments, predicting the rise of the television recapper, writing that soon “It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!” Later in the book he mentions the concept of readily available commercial VR. These are just throwaway passages...written in 1953!
Glen Weldon’s Superman: The Unauthorized Biography was a joy. I picked it up after finishing his recent work The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. Much of the information contained in these texts was not new to me, but what I did learn about for the first time was eye-opening. This guy knows his stuff, but better than that, he knows how to place these two mythological figures in the History of Us. Superman and Batman aren’t just 2-D drawings on newsprint--they mean something. And Weldon has a knack for finding out what those somethings are.
And with that, I reverse quietly into the dead of night. A figure composed of shadow. A ripple on the surface of the pond. A forgotten word on the tip--oh shit, I just backed my car up into a telephone pole.