FTA TRADE GETTING SOME NICE REVIEWS & PRESS

Newsarama (review), Newsarama (interview), Destroy the Cyb, Wired. Suvudu. Mapcidy.

For whatever reason the link the Publishers Weekly is not working, so here's what they had to say:

From the Ashes Bob Fingerman. IDW, $19.99 paper (176p) ISBN 978-1-60010-600-2

This “speculative memoir” chronicles the misadventures of writer/artist Fingerman and his wife, Michele, in a postapocalyptic Manhattan. Despite being bombed out and irradiated, New York City is still rife with assorted factions representing the worst of humanity, only now those groups are writ large and lawless since the restraints of conventional civilization no longer exist. While a far cry from the all-out horror of a Mad Max–style landscape, Fingerman's wasteland is overrun with homophobic religious zealots, insane right-wing politicos and cannibalistic foodies, while the last bastions of human decency prove to be a plethora of mutants and zombies (or “reanimated Americans,” as they prefer to be called). Bob and Michele wander through all of this with a wry acceptance familiar to anyone who's ever lived in New York City, serving as the heart of an end-of-the-world narrative that wrings a wealth of humor from its potentially bleak scenario while making pointed observations about the idiocy of humanity and how it's likely never to change. A fun read, spiced with highly appealing artwork, this one's a solid winner. Plus it gets extra geek credit for inside jokes involving Zardoz and cannibal cinema auteur Ruggero Deodato. (Mar.)

TV-STYLE COMMERCIAL FOR FTA TRADE

FROM THE ASHES TRADE ON AMAZON FOR 32% OFF!

Hey all! Got some extra dosh to spend for Xmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa? Then please spend some of it (very little, really) on the spiffy trade of FROM THE ASHES. It boasts over twenty five pages of bonus material (thumbnails, prep art, sketches and character design stuff, cover gallery and more), plus a foreword by comedian Marc Maron (whose podcast, WTF, was #3 comedy podcast of 2009 on iTunes). I'm really proud of this book, so if you were waiting for the trade to finally read it, now's the time to order it!And if you already bought the comics, this is the sweet-ass edition you've really wanted all along. BUY IT!

SLOW DEATH

I did a panel today at the Doomsday Film Festival & Symposium. It was a nice opportunity to share some thoughts on the apocalypse and From the Ashes with some like-minded people. Also on the panel were John Joseph Adams (editor of the exemplary anthologies The Living Dead and Wastelands), Jimmy Aquino (of the podcast Comics News Insider), cartoonist Hillary Florido, Justin Taylor (editor of The Apocalypse Reader) and moderated by Matthew Hawkins. At one point in the proceedings, an audience member asked for some recommendations of apocalyptic comics and I was reminded of this fine anthology collecting many stories from the underground comic of the same name:
This gnarly (sometimes very gnarly) comic really delved into the post-apocalyptic setting with gusto, like a filthy EC Comic. It boasts some of the best UG artists around (Corben, Crumb, Irons, Holmes, to name but a few). Jaxon's contributions always unsettled me a bit (his style is so, well, ugly... but effective). Jaxon did introduce me to the term "bent-head" as a pejorative for mutants. I've always loved the cover by Richard Corben, who is one of my art gods.

Anyway, this book is highly recommended. Unfortunately it's long out of print and the cheapest copies online seem to be north of thirty bucks.

Supernatural

I really like the TV series Supernatural. Even though I prefer my fictional apocalypses to be man-made (as opposed to big "A" biblical-style), here's a nice still from the recent episode "The End."

THE HUFFPO PIECE THAT ALMOST WAS...

The following was supposed to run in a slightly different draft on Huffington Post a couple of months ago, but I guess the editor either changed her mind or it was forgotten. The opener is a little dated (does anyone even remember the "Earth 2100" ABC News special?), but the rest is still valid. Does it belong on this blog? Well, it’s sort of apocalyptic, so why not?

Recently ABC aired a special called “Earth 2100”, which featured a “graphic novel”‡ in which the protagonist—an old woman named Lucy—looks back on her life from 100 years in the future. In animatics bolstered by news footage and expert testimony (scientists, journalists and the like), we watch the world turn to shit over the course of the two-hour presentation. But at about the half-hour mark, any sympathy I might have mustered for fictional Lucy went down the drain. Why? Because at this point, after already witnessing the world spiraling into ruin for the first 18 years of her life, Lucy and her equally fictional boyfriend hook up, get married (after two months) and have a kid of their own. Yes, Lucy, eyewitness to humanity’s folly, decides it’s a good idea to bring another child into the world she’s watched deteriorate since her own birth precisely because there are already too many goddamned people on the planet.

One of the luxuries—if you could call it that—of not having kids is I don’t even have to pretend to be optimistic about the future. I marvel at people who have kids, because they either 1) actually believe everything is going to be all right for them and their offspring, or 2) don’t really think or care about the future as long as things are comfortable in the here and now, or 3) are totally freaking out about how bad the future looks while maintaining a brave front for their kids, or 4) have a healthy awareness of the present situation and hope for the best as they do what little they can to make the world a slightly better place.¥ By all evidence, things are not going to be getting better any time soon, if ever. As long as the greening of this planet is going to cost more green than it makes, it won’t be up for serious consideration. Sure, politicians make lip service to change while looking pinched and thoughtful, but really nothing is happening. Not at the speed that is needed.

So, what are these parents seeing that I’m not? Are their glasses that rose-colored or are do they just think if they clap hard enough Tinkerbell will live?

Bill Hicks once said, “I'm tired of this back-slapping ‘isn’t humanity neat?’ bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are.” The Matrix regurgitated that thought when Agent Smith contemptuously sneered, “Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.” We all want to be Neo, but Agent Smith was the one with whom I found myself in agreement. In 1964, when I was born, the world population was 3.276 billion. It is now roughly 6.788 billion. It’s more than doubled in 45 years. That is horrifying and unsustainable. Too many being born, not enough dying.

Even Obama, with his two young daughters’ futures at stake, is proffering less than half-measures for a brighter tomorrow. He wants American cars by 2016 to get 35.5 miles a gallon. Big whoop. Average fuel consumption in Europe is 47% better than here. The Fiat 500 gets 50 mpg, and Fiat has the lowest carbon emissions of any manufacturer in Europe. Maybe they’ll bring some of that here with their partnership with Chrysler, but I won’t hold my breath (though that might not be a bad idea). The VW Jetta TDI gets 44.9 mpg. Those models aren’t for export to the USA. The technology exists, so why isn’t it mandated from on high that all new cars built/sold here get equal or better mileage? Since the government has already bailed out all of three US auto manufacturers shouldn’t we, as stockholders, demand that they do better? C’mon, Obama, have the audacity of audacity. Push them around; show them who’s boss. They shouldn’t even be making cars any more. Retool the factories and have them build wind turbines or some other green technology.

The thing that sickens me to my marrow is that there are solutions for all the world’s human-induced woes but none of them are being pursued with any vigor whatsoever. I read articles all the time about implementable ideas that could make life better. Vertical farming comes to mind. Build upward instead of outward. You could have farms in every major city, which would 1) create jobs (how cool would it be to have urban farmers?), 2) grow food in cities and thereby 3) cut back on truck farming? You cut back on having to deliver food to urban centers and that would cut back on gas usage and pollution.

As long as corporations put profit ahead of everything else, we are screwed. So, what I’m saying is screwed we are, because that tune ain’t apt to change. Nothing I’ve seen persuades me in the least that this course will be averted or (ha!) reversed. Humans, by and large, are greedy, willfully ignorant beasts with very little foresight. I’m not saying we’re doomed today or tomorrow or the day after that, but I’m glad I’ll [hopefully] be dead before it all becomes too unbearable.

But maybe I’m kidding myself. C’mon, everyone: clap harder for Tinkerbell. For fuck’s sake, clap as hard as you can!
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‡Yeah, I know; Charlie Gibson could barely bring himself to say it, mumbling instead about it being a "graphics [sic] novel." Okay, ABC, way to embrace a "new" term, but let's call a spade a hoe, okay: it was a cartoon. That said, it was a very handsome cartoon designed by some very talented friends and acquaintances of mine, so kudos to them for getting a sweet gig and doing solid work.
¥There are actually a lot more eithers and ors, but I can't list them all. Suffice it to say that given my wiring, I don't see how I could bring a kid into a world this precarious. And I’m not even addressing religion, terrorism, nuclear weapons, etc. This would be an epic not an essay, then. We're Coming up on seven billion. That’s the amount in Harry Harrison’s nightmare overpopulation novel, Make Room! Make Room! Yeesh.

Homage or Rip-off?

Recently I finally had the pleasure of seeing one of my Holy Grail movies, namely 1959’s The World, The Flesh And The Devil, starring Harry Belafonte, Inger Stevens and Mel Ferrer. It’s a post-apocalyptic movie loosely based on what is considered the first modern post-apocalyptic novel, M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901). It’s a very interesting meditation on race, relations between the sexes and the end of the world as we know it. Belafonte is a commanding presence as a Pennsylvania mining safety inspector who gets trapped in a mine during what appears, at first, to be a routine cave-in, only to emerge five days later to discover he’s the last man on earth. Or is he? He travels by stolen car to nearby New York City, having to walk through the Lincoln Tunnel because it’s too clogged with empty cars to drive into (one wonders if Stephen King’s The Stand was influenced by this powerful image).

As I watched, a frisson of familiarity tickled the back of my brain. I’ve seen some of this before, the tickle said. Recently, too.

Richard Matheson’s I am Legend is one of my all-time favorite novels. Ever. I reread it every few years and it’s always good. Three movies have been based on it: the most faithful, but low-budgeted Vincent Price vehicle The Last Man on Earth (1964), the groovy, Chuck Heston-driven, albino-afroed The Omega Man (1971) and most recently, the ironically least faithful, Will Smith-starrer I am Legend (2007). I won’t even get into the nitty gritty of why the Will Smith version falls the farthest from Matheson’s source material, because that’s not germane to this essay.

What is relevant is how much of The World, The Flesh And The Devil was plagiarized (or do I want to be open-minded and polite and say paid homage) in 2007’s I am Legend.

In The World, The Flesh And The Devil (heretofore to be referred to as TWTFATD), Belafonte, slowly going mad from loneliness, makes friends with mannequins:

In I am Legend (ibid. IAL), Smith, slowly going mad from loneliness, makes friends with mannequins:

In TWTFATD, Belafonte broadcasts to the world in hopes of finding other survivors:

In IAL, Smith broadcasts to the world in hopes of finding other survivors:

In TWTFATD, Belfonte runs through an impressive shot of a totally abandoned Times Square carrying a rifle:

In IAL, Smith runs through an impressive shot of a totally abandoned Times Square carrying a rifle:

In the book I am Legend, the lead character does none of the above (particularly not the final one because it's set in California), so the movie version seems to have cherry-picked this striking imagery from TWTFATD.

I’m just saying.