Rebel Angels: The Card Game

Look! It's a book. Now it's a card game!

Rebel Angels now being solicited in Previews

A print edition of Rebel Angels is being solicited in this month's Previews. Head on down to your local comic retailer and order the book and make my dream of printed pages come true!

I am Charlie

Satire is a vital tool against rigid ideology, against the powerful and obdurate, for laughter can suck the wind out of tyrants and leave them bare before those they would oppress. 

The writers at Charlie Hebdo ridiculed everything and feared nothing. They were brave souls who gave their lives for principle. 

They will be missed.

io9 on Revolutions: Fact vs. Fiction

io9 has a good post on how fictional dystopias tend to ignore certain aspects of revolutionary movements: 10 Lessons From Real-Life Revolutions That Fictional Dystopias Ignore.

They're wrong: not every creator ignores such issues.

Just the popular ones.

I've been exploring several of them in Rebel Angels, which uses the original revolution as a platform to explore the phenomenon in general.

And I played with it even earlier, in Nil: A Land Beyond Belief. 

So there.

Evil and Evolutionary Convergence

Evolutionary convergence occurs when, for example, nature winds up with at same solution from two different directions. Like how every planet in Star Trek is populated by white people with prosthetics stuck to their foreheads.

The dolphin and the ichthyosaur is probably a better example:

But ideas can also converge. For example: 

"When the existence of the church is threatened, she is released from the commandments of morality. With unity as the end, the use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony, prison, and death. For all order is for the sake of the community, and the individual must be sacrificed for the common good."

- Dietrich von Nieheim, Bishop of Verden, De Schismate Libri III, AD 1411.

"To us, everything is permitted, because we were the first in creation to take up the sword not for the purpose of enslavement and repression but in the name of universal liberty and emancipation."

- Krasny Mech (Red Sword) Bulletin, Kiev Cheka (Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, Soviet Secret Police), regarding massacre of peasant uprising, AD 1920.

Some things never change. 

Note the first quote is cited from Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, an anti-communist, apparently from a paraphrase by Ludwig von Pastor in History of the Popes (1906), extrapolated from a more meandering original statement by Nieheim on dealing with the Antipopes in De Modis. Of course, paraphrasing quotes kind of defeats the purpose. But then, that's what translations often amount to. The underlying point is the same but Pastor seems to have added a more poetic edge to it.

A relevant section from De Modis: 

"Then, if the Church will not be able to accomplish it in this way, then by way of deceit, fraud, arms, violence, power, promises, gifts and money, and finally, prison and death, it is appropriate to procure in any way whatever the most holy union and conjoining of the Church." - Dietrich von Niehem

As Stephen Pinker notes in Angels of Our Better Nature, more violence and murder has been carried out in the name of morality than has ever been committed for the sake of sin. 

Rebel Angels delves into the divide between righteous revolutionary theory and reality.

TCAF 2014

I will be attending TCAF once again (The Toronto Comic and Arts Festival), Saturday May 10 (9am-5pm) and Sunday May 11 (11am-5pm) at the Toronto Reference Library. Come on by, there'll be lots of amazing artists with fabulous stuff for sale, and entry is free. This years promotional TCAF poster (above) is by Michael DeForge, who illustrated the cover of Rebel Angels issue #5. His stuff is fabulous and utterly unique.

I'll have some exciting new stuff with me, too, so don't miss it!

Biplane flies over The City of Dis

Demon piloted biplane flies over The City of Dis in Rebel Angels. The Infernal Forces use Army Surplus and weaponry scavenged from the sea floor of earth to equip their troops. It's their only source of modern weaponry.

Added some effects (such as snow) and some glows to the footage. Not convinced myself. Loaded it directly into Blogger instead of linking to Youtube. Blogger's compression downgrades the quality quite a bit more.