Oh yes, it’s real. And it’s coming in June.
Check it out here.
Your Deepest Darkest Fears, Illustrated
Illustrator Fran Krause asked people to tell him their darkest fears, which he then turned into a series of short comics.
The human mind is a wonderful and treacherous thing.
Check it out here.
Contagion, An End Of The World Simulator
THE COLLAPSE is a web-based simulator that starts with you–Patient Zero in a smallpox pandemic.
Type in your address, and the simulator places you on a map. It then asks you questions about what you want to do in response to symptoms, riots and food shortages, and so on. As you travel, you spread the pathogen around your community until it jumps to other cities and then around the world. Along the way, you’re given frightening facts about pandemics.
THE COLLAPSE is a promotion for a new game by Ubisoft, THE DIVISION, that came out in March.
Ready to destroy the world? Click here.
And if you’re interested in what a real pandemic of a novel strain of influenza would look like, be sure to check out my work THE THIN WHITE LINE, available for free here.
Here’s a screenshot of me infecting everybody at Calgary Rockview Hospital. Sorry about that! 🙁
The Destruction Of Pompeii
Pompeii was an ancient Roman city near modern-day Naples that was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius over a period of 48 hours in 79 AD.
From June 26 to October 25, 2009, the Melbourne Museum hosted an exhibit, “A Day in Pompeii,” a 3D theater installation that allowed visitors to experience the horror of this event. Watched by more than 330,000 people, it was the most popular traveling exhibit staged by an Australian museum.
Check it out here:
KINGDOM COME By Mark Waid And Alex Ross
Confession: When I was a kid, I didn’t read many comic books. I can’t tell you who did what in episode whatever. At heart, I’m a nerd, not a geek.
I just couldn’t get into the serial nature of them, and I didn’t find their moral clarity appealing. Often, the heroes always seemed to encounter situations where there was a clear right or wrong rather than a choice of a lesser of two evils. I found the latter juxtaposition much more appealing, the idea of an extremely powerful icon of virtue facing difficult ethical choices. Also the idea of something that is extremely powerful and extremely good ultimately judging humanity. On a spectrum, I think, we’re all on Superman’s shit list.
Enter some amazing graphic novel collections such as RED SON, THE WATCHMEN, and, reviewed here, KINGDOM COME. I picked it off my bookshelf to reread after BATMAN V SUPERMAN came out. I haven’t seen the film yet, but it seems to explore a lot of interesting dark themes. Mainly, whether an all-powerful hero, however good, can fit into the modern world, and whether that hero, however good, should be considered an enemy, as our fate is in that hero’s interpretation of good.
In KINGDOM COME by Mark Waid and Alex Ross (DC Comics, 1996), it’s the modern day, and Superman, Batman and the other heroes of yesteryear are getting old. Their progeny–the metahumans–now roam the planet in great numbers. The supervillains have been defeated long ago, and the superheroes are bored, so they have formed gangs and fight for sport, terrorizing the humans. The story is told through the eyes of an elderly preacher, who is given vision of the apocalypse triggered by conflict between superheroes. He lives in a world where humans have slowly ceded their ambition to be better because superheroes are there to take care of them. Faced with perfect, humans no longer aspire for progress as a species.
When a superhero fight turned deadly results in the destruction and irradiation of the U.S. breadbasket, Superman comes out of retirement to reform the Justice League. Some of the younger superheroes join him willingly, but others resist, some out of rebelliousness, others because they fear Superman is taking too much power into his own hands and deciding the planet’s fate on his own. Eventually, the rebellious superheroes are imprisoned, but Lex Luthor, in the guise of defending humanity, has other plans. The result is Ragnarok, superhero against superhero and civil war and final battle. Old generation versus the new. The question is whether it can be stopped or if it will destroy the world.
Mark Waid tells a complex, engaging story with no clear right or wrong, and the final battle seems inevitable. Superman is put in a no-win situation. There are cameos by so many heroes that if you’re a comics geek, you’ll be in heaven. Alex Ross’s art is amazing.
If you’re interested in looking at superheroes a different way, check it out. It’s a dark, complex and bold superhero story told with fantastic visuals.
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