Ancestor by Matt Sheean and Malachi Ward

Here’s a drink you can make to best enjoy Ancestor, which was released today in trade paperback by Image Comics. Take one Philip K. Dick and one Alejandro Jodorowsky (circa The Holy Mountain) and throw them in a cocktail glass with two blackberries and a splash of agave nectar. Muddle. Add two shots of blanco tequila, two drops of Dimethyltryptamine or Lysergic Acid, and give it a dash of Black Mirror. Mix, shake, and serve. Now take your drink to a dark corner of your room, far from your computer or any wi-fi enabled devices. Read and drink slowly.  Short as it is, Ancestor is a trip for the mind that’s worth your time.

Ancestor is a loaded slice of psychedelic philosophy, written by Matt Sheean and pictorialized by Malachi Ward. Set in a non-specified time in a non-specified corner of the United States, it’s the story of a well-meaning lunatic genius who upgrades a social media platform / body enhancement service into a hybrid, post-human being that changes the course of entire human race. Its narrative swerves are buttressed by knods to the philosophical anxieties that we, as a society of “enhanced” interconnected technologies, are slowly coming to know.

Surrender your autonomy to the service
and make her the perfect cocktail!

The plot’s lunatic genius, Patrick Whiteside, is an outwardly kind, curly haired tech billionaire who's tendency to turn conversations into one-sided motivational pep talks betrays his maniacal desire to control and reform everyone he comes across. Whiteside was a co-developer of “the service.” The service is what personal computing will be like once we're able to inject the internet into our blood streams and tether it directly to our mental and bodily functions. It’s more or less augmented consciousness, an artificially intelligent Siri for your mind, that goes with you everywhere. The service can float social media and web content in your face on levitating yellow jelly screens, instantly identifying friends and strangers and objects. It can also talk you down from a panic attack if you’re going nuts. When talking doesn’t work, the service can, at your behest, administer a calculated dose of whatever medication you need to to get on the wagon again, then monitor your vital signs until you’re copacetic. On good nights, it can take control of your body (after you grant it permission to access your motor skills), which it can then use to make a perfectly mixed cocktail of your choice for whatever platinum blonde art femme you're hitting on. The service is the ultimate integrated web experience.

Whiteside talks it out

Like us and our hyper-connected devices, people in the world of Ancestor can become so inured to the service that they experience varying degrees of anxiety when disconnected from it. While the service enables superhuman abilities, it's also a nuisance to immediate experience. Whether you want it or not, the service will tell you everything it thinks you need to know.

Ancestor’s main character, Peter, is not sure how he feels about this intense connectivity. Though he relies on the service to get a grip on his anxiety disorder, he’s often a victim of the incessant suggestions of it’s yellow jelly screens. As troubled as he is by all this, it’s apparent that he is a brilliant and pensive man who is simply trying to life his live free of anxiety, and sees the service as a tool to that end. Peter is invited to an impromptu party hosted by Whiteside in his billionaire mansion in the middle of nowhere. There, he’s made to participate in the beta-testing of Whiteside’s magnificent new invention, his Service 2.0. Peter, Whiteside, and the rest of the world are then forcefully thrust into unknown territory, as Whiteside loses control of his new product. From there on out, things get incredibly strange and wonderful.

Whiteside is like a cross between Goethe's Faust and Ozymandias from Watchmen, placed in the body of a creepy child-therapist or hypnotist. In him we see the expression of a utopian ethos prevalent in Silicon Valley. This ethos, “California Ideology,” preaches that a blend of technological innovation and bold individual action will eventually solve all of humanity's problems. But as the story progresses, Peter grows to resist Whiteside's manipulations and psychological games, and resents the implication that he needs either a guru or a some post-human bio-integrated bloatware to give him peace of mind. By the end of their "relationship," it's Peter, not Whiteside or the human race, who finds something resembling inner peace.

We all know by now the mythology of the tech boom. Scientists and ex-hippies, with the help of massive private and public investment, invented the personal computer, the internet, the iPhone, the Google. The digital backbone of information technology was highly influenced by a bourgeois subset of the 1960’s counter culture. This counter culture failed to liberate human consciousness from its societal captors. Having failed, those with the knowledge and the inclination began to look towards technology and capitalism as humanity’s only hope. A large part of the advertising for contemporary technology and software displays a remnant of that failed hope for technological liberation and omnipotence, the hope that “existing social, political and legal power structures will wither away to be replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals [or businesses] and their software.”

In response to the Silicon Valley messiahs preaching salvation, peace, and money through tech-gnosis, Ancestor offers an almost satirical counter narrative. It expresses a healthy distrust towards anyone who claims to have all the answers, be they human or otherwise. Malachi Ward and Matt Sheean’s story is an expression of the desire to not be told who you are or what you need to do with your life. It also asks whether or not we should sacrifice genuine unmediated experiences (and the commensurate euphoria and excitement that comes of sometimes not-knowing) for the sake of complete control and self-determination.

If Ancestor has one failing it’s that it’s way too short. While readers will get a conclusion that satisfies the arc, there’s 15 billion years worth of plot missing that I wish they had gotten into. By the end, I found myself wanting to hear more about the how and why of it, to see more of Matt and Malachai’s bizarre alternate reality. It’s such a tease. Maybe the comic book gods will see fit to provide mankind with a spin-off? It’s pretty great for what it is though - a self contained thought experiment with poetic conceits and beautiful art.

I would recommend also checking out this short comic by Ancestor's creators regarding "the process" of making Ancestor a reality.

#moebiustime - The Incal meets the Pendleton

Thanks to Bryce Martin's bright idea, the king of insanely trippy fantasy/sci-fi (Jean Giraud a.k.a. Moebius a.k.a. Gir) has (finally?) met the kings of insanely trippy children's cartoons (Finn and Jake) by way of the right of artistic reinterpretation. Bryce asked a handful of artists, among them Brandon Graham (ISLAND, Multiple Warheads), to create illustrations that implanted Adventure Time characters in the worlds of French illustrator and comic artist Moebius. The resulting drawings work predictably well, given Adventure Time's infinite adaptability. Check out the art below, and #moebiustime for more.

Tristan Wright (@tristanatsirt - tristanwright.com)

M.L. McDonald (@Alchemichael7 - alchemichael.tumblr.com/)

Brandon Graham (@royalboiler - royalboiler.wordpress.com)

Michael Danielsen (@inradiator - radiacious.com)

Daniel Tuucaan Starflower (@crystalZONElife - underwatercrystalzone.com)

3 Items for a Monday

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It's Monday, but don't worry about it, it's almost over. And there's been some exciting developments around the world and across the solar system that may reaffirm you're faith in the value of being alive all weekdays, Monday included. I'm going to list some now, but if you don't feel particularly inspired by them I refute any responsibility for your continued hatred of the work week and the rest of existence.

Item 1: Vintage Science Fiction Magazine Omni has been released on Archive.org

Founded in 1978 by co-founders Kathy Keeton and Penthouse publisher Bob Giuccione, Omni Magazine was a monthly collection of science news, science fiction, science speculation, with some spiritual / paranormal fuckery mixed in for finishing. This publication had consistently on-point cover art, original fiction by some of the most famous names inside and outside of genre fiction, and a hedonistic enthusiasm for the bizarre future they knew would soon devour their culture. They were the original publisher's of stories by William Gibson, George R.R. Martin, William S. Burroughs, and also had a hand in popularizing H.R. Giger's paintings.

There are a lot of issues up, and I barely had a chance to look at any of it. Topicly they can be everywhere, but the same theme pervades: the psycho-social effects of knowledge and technology on our fragile little societies. I need to take a day and a six pack to look through it as much as possible. Who knows what kind of tech-anxieties and science dreams we've forgotten about that are waiting there for us to find again.


Item 2: We landed a thing on a fucking comet seven months ago and that shit's finally working!

I'm using "we" very lightly so you can feel like you did something. You didn't do shit, and if you're in America or any other non-European non-member state (with the exception of Canada) you did even less. This comet lander was the product of the European Space Agency, or ESA. To ensure conspiracy theorists have enough to occupy their time, the lander was named after an ancient Egyptian obelisk which, along with the Rosetta stone, helped humanity understand what the Egyptians were saying with all those little pictures.

It's news because one: The spacecraft didn't land where it was supposed to land, bounced a couple times and almost escaped the comets gravity altogether, then fizzled out of functionality for 7 months, before waking up a couple days ago fully functional and ready. Before it fell asleep it took some amazing pictures of the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko from a distance. I remember seeing these ominous photos a while ago and being amazed, and then being devastated that it looked like the mission was an almost complete waste due to a crash landing. So it's an inspirational comeback story.

And because two: As far as we can tell no one has landed on a comet before. That's important somehow. Here are a couple of those beautiful pictures:

Item 3: Better bullshit through technology

Have you ever wanted to invent a story and make it reality? Of fucking course you have, man. Thanks to flash-research in the age of Wikipedia and Google, you can almost sorta maybe do that, if enough people don't have the resources or interest to look into the facts. Yes, it happened, according to this article in The Kernel.

In 2002 a couple of movie nerds, haggard from from a day in the film industry and perhaps knocking back Belgian trippels at just the right pace, invented a man, a maniacal film director who's methods were toxic to his film crew's psychology. Their names were Gavin Boyter and Guy Ducker. A venting session at a Belgian restaurant (in London) turned into an 11 year journey to turn this fictional psychotic director, dubbed Yuri Gayudkin, into a historical fact using Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, and any other internet information channel available to them. Their hoax was so convincing, that a completely unassociated hopeful playwright was getting ready to pen a script about the entirely fictional auteur. He wrote to the author of a blog about Gayudkin, who was a friend of Boyter and Ducker, asking for more facts about Gayudkin, as "information is really sparse on the web." All of the information he needed was of course lodged firmly in Boyter and Ducker's asses.

Feel better yet?

Nameless, or, "Grant Morrison Just Wants to Watch Them Bleed"

What we all love about Grant Morrison is how resolved he is to make the traditionaly trashy or silly into something profound. Nothing new. Everyone wants to, and only a few are successful, and only one does it, effectively, with the calculated use of gigantic weaponized sperm cells.

Thus far, Nameless isn't that. From the three issues I've read there's not yet any attempt at philosophizing the esoteric references to current events, modernist architects, and ancient religions he slaps on every other page. Yeah, it's all there, that encyclopedic emesis Morrison loves to spew at you, and it's not unenticing to look into every bit of triviality, but it's so obviously not what's on display here. It's a vehicle for what ultimately feels like a gory sci-fi body-horror B-movie with culture. In short, it's pretty fun.

I honestly don't think Grant knows anymore.

The world, unlike a lot of Grant Morrison's settings, isn't a future filled with the noise of abruptly changing information structures, and no one is falling into their own mindhole and discovering glowing discs of knowledge that forever alters their world view. It may as well be set in the present, albeit a present where, for reasons not yet explained, lizard people and naga stalk the land and suburbs, making families happily massacre themselves, and hunting after our square jawed and stubbled protagonist, named Nameless (because names have power, he says) after he nabs a mystical key on behalf of his client.

Brave and handsome

Nameless is an occultist for hire. He's like a John Constantine in need of a long relaxing bath and some benzedrine. When we meet him he's recalling December, a "cunt of a month", when things started to get markedly Lovecraftian. None of Constantine's reflectiveness here; No philosophy. He needs money so he's doing this thing and now there's fish people trying to rip out his throat, then there's a fucking lady in a veil with a bulbous fleshy parasite on her face, and he knows her pretty well and he's so over her shit already, and it feels like just another fucked up day in his happy life. Nameless, through all three issues, retains this air of haggard wisdom, always knowing at least a bit about what's happeing, though not enough to save his or his company's asses.

The people who want the key, and who eventually get the key after some intense effort on the part of Nameless, turns out to be a secretive and privately funded corporation run by a billionaire named Darius. Darius, appearing only mildly Asian and generally smiling, wants to save the planet from a hulking fuck of a space boulder named Xibalba, after the Mayan underworld. He's at once an altruist and a capitalist and someone who uses his money to advance human knowledge. A mildly asian Elon Musk, in other words. Darius even floats around remotely from a base located on the dark side of the moon using a video-conferencing hele-drone, as we all know Elon Musk would love to do.

Xibalba's not just an asteroid. This thing is marked on a long flat side with a rune the size of a mountain. It's apparent that the asteroid does not simply intend to smash into the Earth like any amateur space rock: It has a payload, and Darius employs Nameless to find out exactly what the world is getting into, and how to stop it.

That's issue one. It's not much, to be honest. Issue two and three, however, is when the series begins hitting it's stride. Nameless and a team composed by Darius go to space to meet Xibalba headon and deploy drones with sensory equipment to explore what turns out to be an asteroid full of alien structures, "brutalist" in design and obviously not meant for children. Shit goes down, eyeballs with giant talons attack, and Grant Morrison smashes and reassembles the narrative in that special, and in this instance creepy, Grant Morrison way.

In a nutshell

Sometimes the art, done by Chris Burnham, feels like Quitely. Not to knock the artist, he's fantastic. There are some clever panel sequences, and the panels depicting the journey of the drones through that brutal alien architecture are done with a real sense for how massive and lonely celestial objects really must be. Xibalba seems not to be of exclusively extraterrestrial or supernatural origin, but a mixture of both, in a way that implies that maybe the two were one and the same all along (shades of The Invisibles here). Chris Burnham gets both across, with covers and splash panels alluding to creatures that reside in lonely H.R. Geiger space fortresses, but look like amorphous demons made of shapeshifting muscle tissue, and that do things to human bodies straight out of medieval Hell.

Whether the book will reach for some big-deal psychological or philosophical conclusion has yet to be seen, but I have a feeling Grant Morrison just wants to rip people apart and destroy civilization for a bit. Looks like Morrison's taking all his occult and science fiction training, and using it to make an irreverent, gory, AND clever monster movie. In Nameless #3 we get a glimpse of Xibalba floating on the horizon, it's ominous rune staring down at us all, and we just know it's getting ready to make life interesting in painful and horrifying ways. Honestly, can't wait.

Breaking News: The Apocalypse is Irrelevant

No one likes a good apocalypse as much as me. that's what I thought, anyway, until I found out someone wrote an entire thesis on post-apocalyptic fiction. Her article, up at the much beloved io9 blog, is a pretty good summary of what and why apocalyptic literature means so much even when we have no idea how or why the world ended in the first place.

Disaster porn is no longer the point of the apocalypse. It doesn't matter how the world ends, just that it does. Making it to the End doesn't mean the story's finished; much of the time, it's only just gotten started. Stories of the End have never been about ending – they're about the beginning that comes after.

The bit about disaster porn is debatable, at least in the all powerful realm of the feature film, where the image, enhanced by calorie-induced popcorn euphoria, reigns supreme. The chance to watch every familiar feature of our modern world be destroyed is, I think one of the major drawing points for some of the most popular Armageddon stories, from Dawn of the Dead to 2012. But the also arguably recent tendency for global calamities to not be explained is fascinating and something I also noticed.

A video of Ms. Chanda Phelan presenting her thesis can be found at Vimeo here, and more random thought by her can be found at her blog.