Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Thursday, January 17, 2008

AUTOMATONED

The ultimate horror in science fiction is neither death nor destruction but dehumanization, a state in which emotional life is suspended, in which the individual is deprived of individual feelings, free will, and moral judgement. That the most successful SF films of the past decade seem to be concerned with dehumanization simply underlines the fact that this type of fiction hits the most exposed nerves of contemporary society: collective anxieties about the loss if individual identity, subliminal mind-bending, or downright scientific/political brainwashing. (Not by accident the trend began to manifest itself after the Korean War and the well-publicized reports coming out of it of brainwashing techniques.)

We have come a long way from Metropolis and the encroachment of the machine. Nowadays man can become the machine himself. The automatoned slaves of modern times look perfectly efficient in their new painless state. From this aspect, they are like the zombies of old-- only we never bother to wonder if zombies were happy in their trance.

--Carlos Clarens: An Illustrated History Of Horror and Science Fiction Films (1895-1967). New York: Putnam, 1967.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

COME BACK

"A man goes away from his home and it is in him to do it. He lies in strange beds in the dark, and the wind is different in the trees. He walks in the streets and there are faces in front of his eyes, but there are no names for the faces. The voices he hears are not the voices he carried away in his ears a long time back when he went away. They are so loud he does not hear for a long time at a stretch those voices he carried away in his ears. But there comes a minute when it is quiet and he can hear those voices he carried away in his ears a long time back. He can make out what they say, and they say, Come back. They say: Come back..."

--Robert Penn Warren, from his novel All The Kings Men, Harcourt, Inc. 1946.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

WHITE FANGS

CANUS LUPIS
Jack London was born today in 1876. I've been celebrating by listening to White Fang on tape while drawing an 11 pg. sequence for THE LONE RANGER #11, for Dynamite Entertainment. The story is a beautiful and poignant kind of Indian folktale, written by Brett Matthews.