Pornokitsch

It's Captain America: Civil War week (here in the UK), so Bex, Jared and Jon are marking the occasion with a One Comic Civil War show.

The first issue of Civil War from 2006 marked the start of the series that saw hero vs hero in an ideological battle; should heroes be registered and licensed by the government, or should they operate freely? If the government defines who is a villain, what's to stop them basing their decision on political grounds? But without regulation, who holds the heroes accountable when things go wrong? This promises not to be a typical all guns blazing super-heroic clash.

As Civil War was written by Mark Millar, Jared rounds out the show with a 3&1 on Millar comics. In a long career covering multiple publishers, multiple genres and no small amount of controversy, what makes Jared's top three, and what's his worst one ever?

Yesterday’s release of a trailer for the upcoming animated version of famous Batman story The Killing Joke kicked off much discussion of the source material in various circles.

For a number reasons more or less this exact discussion surfaces whenever The Killing Joke is in the news. I was particularly aware of yesterday’s iteration because well-known comics writer Gail Simone ended up at ground zero for a lot of the Twitter-based ‘debate’.

The various strands of conversation that intersected Simone’s timeline, often followed into other people’s feeds and then back again, seemed such a perfect representation of how in multiple ways a certain segment of fandom deals with the most common critiques of The Killing Joke that it felt worth spending a little time interrogating the key points.

In fact, as is evident from Gail Simone’s mentions, people who’ve never read a comic in their lives feel entirely qualified to express a view on this. Mostly, it seems, people who don’t like women very much.

Head's up! Pornokitsch is one of the ten blogs participating in this year's Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off. Mark Lawrence started this quasi-award last year, and I'm very glad to be one of the bloggers for its second iteration. 

You can read more about SPFBO here, and even snag a Storybundle of last year's finalists.

[Updated 29/4 with the list of 30 books]

[Updated 23/5 and 25/6 with links to reviews]

[Updated to add - I've reviewed all ten finalists here.]

The British Library Labs are amazing.

Last year's projects are viewable online (in various states of existence), and they're absolutely fascinating. These include everything from a Victorian joke generator, a tool that helps connect handwritten manuscripts to their transcriptions, a gamefied way of creating metadata and one of the most clever (and perhaps significant?) open source maps I've ever seen.

Do yourself a favour and have a play.

Have you ever had that feeling where you’re going about your business just like any other day, and all of a sudden everything seems strange to you? Nothing’s changed, nothing’s wrong, but you look at totally ordinary people or things and they just don’t make any sense. You start asking yourself questions like: why are they doing that? Aren’t clothes weird? Who ever thought buildings were a good idea? It’s this feeling of dislocation, of finding the surreal in the absolutely banal, that Paul Kirchner taps into in ‘The Bus’.

Stark says: “You won't find much mercy anywhere in Wyoming.”

Seen The Revenant, yet? No? Well, if you’re pushed for time but harbouring a hankering for a hardscrabble, snow-choked Western, then go for Day of the Outlaw instead. If nothing else, it’ll save you an hour and a half, which you can spend doing… other things. Like smoking meat or practising macramé.

I will admit, there’s less grunting than there is in The Revenant, and less bear. Directed by Hungarian-born Andre de Toth – of House of Wax fame – what’s on offer here is a psychological, powder-keg of a Western that feels less like a yee-haw-thankee-ma’am-cowboy-movie and more like a taut, 1930s noir thriller.

By many accounts, one of the few high points of the low point extravaganza that is Batman vs Superman is the introduction of Wonder Woman to the DC Cinematic Universe. So to mark that, we've declared Episode 32 The All Wonder Woman, All The Time Show.

In a conservative country no stranger to the Taliban and ISIS and all sorts of extremist behaviour, a country not known for its great liberal, progressive, humanist ways, a country where homosexuality is very much illegal, where anything outside of heteronormative cliches is considered a ‘deviancy’ and isn't really tolerated by most of the population, where transpeople are treated terribly and where being subversive or transgressive in even the smallest of ways can be an act of major rebellion... here is a man who is throwing this all out of the window.

"Little Happenthatch" first aired May 23, 1969, on Beyond Midnight.

Thoughts Before Listening

This is going to be great because it’s called Little Happenthatch. How can this not be great. This is going to be great.

[via Jurassic London]

This October is Jurassic London's 5th anniversary, and we're celebrating with a huge new anthology.

The Extinction Event currently clocks in at over 150,000 words; over half of which will be completely new material. We've been taking this as an opportunity to revisit our previous publications - including the more rare and out of print titles - and also commission some terrific new stories.

I suppose the clue is in the name, but... The Extinction Event is also Jurassic London's last book. 

The Extinction Event will be published in late October, as a very glamorous limited edition. In fact, this will be the only edition - no ebook! - so we're going to make it as special as possible. 

It has been an incredible five year run and we've had a blast. We'll do the various "thank you" and "goodbye" bits in October, and we'll wait and talk about it then. But for now: you're all awesome! This is not a sad thing! 

For now... start clearing some shelf space. The Extinction Event is coming, and it is going to be big. 

Links and updates:

"ACK! I'm a Jurassic London reader and/or writer. What does this mean?!" 

Table of Contents - and a bit of art! - revealed at Tor.com.

r/fantasy will be hosting an AMA for contributors on 13 October

For updates on pre-orders and the launch party, join the Jurassic London mailing list.