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intelliatech · 1 year ago

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Latest Trends In Web Development For 2024

With 2024 in the picture, a lot of shifts and advancements are expected as far as web development is concerned. Considering the rapid evolution of the trends, developers must keep themselves updated with the latest trends and technologies in order to stay competitive. In this post, we have compiled a list of Web Development Trends for 2024.

Are you excited to embrace the Latest Web Development Technologies that are going to dominate the trend?

Front-End Development Trends

Front-end development knows no bounds when it comes to innovation. We know how much a developer loves using new frameworks. JavaScript Frameworks in 2024 will continue to lead like React.js, Angular, and Vue.js. They are sure to enhance the developer experience and performance.

Progressive Web Apps (PWA)

Another one to dominate the trend. It strikes just the right balance between a mobile app and the web while giving an app-like experience to users on the web. PWAs have faster loading time and can be operated even offline, thus ensuring a seamless experience.

Single-Page Applications

Unlike traditional multi-page applications, SPAs rewrite a page with new content whenever there is an interaction from end users. The user experiences provided by them are responsive, smooth, and faster. SPAs secure their spot too in the list of trendmakers for 2024.

Motion UI

A revolutionary trend of front-end development, Motion UI design is a unique approach that elevates UX standards in web apps with the help of transitions and animations, ensuring better user engagement.

Dark Mode UI

It has recently gained popularity globally and is amongst UX Design Trends for 2024. Regardless of the device, users can access dark-themed sites which aren’t heavy on the eyes since they need less brightness. It also gives a rather ‘stylish’ appearance to the websites.

API-First Design

In this approach, APIs are given priority and treated like a foundation on which the applications are built. Adopting an API-first design would offer numerous benefits like flexibility, scalability, and enhanced collaboration.

Voice Search Optimization

With a surge in voice surges in the year 2023, no doubt this will just get bigger and better and more in use. In order to ensure an optimal user experience and easy accessibility, it has become a necessity to optimize websites for voice search.

Blockchain Technology

Blockchain Technology in Web Development has already proved itself to be revolutionary. With a secure and decentralized framework, it offers transparency and enhanced security features.

Headless CMS

Headless CMS is set to overshadow traditional CMSs like WordPress. Headless CMS allows content management at a single place and to deploy that content on your choice of digital channel.

Responsive Design

Now that there are varying screen sizes available out there, responsive design ensures that the website looks good on all platforms. Instead of building different versions of websites for different devices, it lets a developer make one adaptive website all at once.

Microservices Architecture

Unlike a monolithic application, microservices breaks down an application into loosely coupled services. Each microservice performs a specific business function and can be independently developed, deployed, or scaled.

Low-Code/No-Code Development

This will surely be a trendsetter since it provides ease to users who want to create web applications, without having any expertise in programming. It has a set of drag-and-drop tools and a visual interface which makes it easy to build a tech product.

Static Site Generators

Their ability to produce fast, scalable and secure websites is making static site generators a popular choice. They not only improve the performance but also lessen the need for server-side processing since it is simpler to manage. Their speed and ease of use make them a popular choice amongst developers.

Cloud-Native Applications

These applications are designed specifically for cloud computing architecture. They use microservices architecture, thus making them more cost-efficient, scalable and flexible.

Web Performance Optimization

Considering the online competition everywhere, web performance optimization is something that will not go out of the trend. Improving the speed of a website enhances user experience and increases conversions as well. It is one critical factor that cannot be missed.

All the above-mentioned trends are crucial from a developer’s perspective and following them will definitely fetch amazing results.

If you wish to implement any of these or require assistance regarding the same, then get in touch with us. Let’s try to be a step ahead in this era of rapidly evolving trends.

#it services #itandsoftware #API-first Design #Dark Mode UI #Front-end Development #Trends Front-end Development Trends #Headless CMS Headless CMS #JavaScript Frameworks 2024 #Latest Web Development Technologies #Low-Code/No-Code Development #Progressive Web Apps (PWA)#Responsive Design #Static Site Generators #UX Design Trends 2024 #Voice Search Optimization #web development trends #web development trends and technology

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antstackinc · 2 years ago

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Building gracefully engineered user interfaces | UI Engineering | AntStack

Art meets engineering — Give your engineering complexities an artistic and graceful user interface, and offer pure customer delight.

Performance, accessibility, and SEO are the primary factors that affect the user experience and business directly. We ensure these are delivered just right for your customers.

Read More — AntStack

#Serverless Ui Engineering #Serverside Rendering #Frontend Development #Static Site Generation #Frontend Security

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jedijune · 2 months ago

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Jedi June 2025

A creative fandom event dedicated to appreciating the Jedi, taking place during the entire month of June! Each week will feature two prompts, around which people can create fanwork (of any kind – fic, art, cosplay, edits, anything you can think of) or meta focusing on the Jedi and the Jedi Order. All eras and continuities are welcome; OCs, established characters, doesn’t matter – it just needs to be about appreciating the Jedi!

Rules:

If you are participating, please tag your work/meta with #jedi june and/or @ this blog so that I will see it and reblog it here. All work must be your own. Feel free to crosspost it off-site.

This is an appreciation event, focusing on what we love and enjoy about the Jedi – not what we don’t. This is not the place to air your grievances with the Code, take potshots at the Council, prop certain Jedi/certain eras of Jedi up at the expense of others, or disparage the Jedi Order or their philosophy (including the concept of non-attachment) and way of life in any way. You are free to do that on your own time if that’s your thing, but it has no place within this event.

AUs and crossovers are allowed, with caveats: again, the purpose of this event is to appreciate the Jedi as Jedi, so sticking your favorite Jedi characters in something like a modern AU or making them all Sith or Mandalorian is not really within the spirit of this event. However, AUs such as making a non-Jedi character a Jedi, having a character survive their canon death, giving a character a different teacher or padawan, or killing Palpatine off-screen in an unspecified yet embarrassing and painful manner, would all be perfectly fine. Use your best judgement to determine whether an AU fits the spirit of the event or not.

On non-attachment: in a general sense, attachment refers to grasping, clinging, possessiveness, jealousy, and the "I can't live without you"/"I will burn down the galaxy before I risk losing you" attitude. See this post and this post for more information. A romance can certainly exist without these things, so you can certainly write Jedi in relationships for this event!

Please tag any spoilers up to two weeks after the relevant content has aired.

Following the prompts is encouraged, but not required. Any sort of pro-Jedi content is encouraged all year month long, and if tagged (and following the rules), will be reblogged.

We also have an AO3 collection!

Prompts:

Week 1 (June 1 - 7):

Prompt 1: Survive

Prompt 2: Thrive

Week 2 (June 8 - 14):

Prompt 1: Precognition

Prompt 2: Telekinesis

Week 3 (June 15 - 21):

Prompt 1: Community

Prompt 2: Symbiosis

Week 4 (June 22 - 30):

Prompt 1: Celebration

Prompt 2: Hope

Bonus (any time):

Prompt 1: Resisting Evil/The Dark Side/The Sith

Prompt 2: Light in the Darkness

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask! I hope you will have fun participating!

Static banner credit @independence1776

gif banner credit @trickytricky1

#jedijune #jedi june #jedi june 2025 #jedi appreciation #intergalactic therapists #pro jedi #jedi #jedi order #the jedi order #the jedi

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howlingmod · 3 months ago

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I love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love x evil(not as evil) killer reader

please feed me more with any or all forsaken surviver x killer reader

please I'm on my hands and knees

summary - guest 1337 x killer reader

misc - these are getting really esoteric WHOOPS!!!!!! also um. sorry for the absence ive been Very Busy. guest's s/o is straight EVIL sorry they're AMmaxxing i cant lie

-You had to be the biggest thorn in his side. You were different from the other killers in the sense that, very much unlike the others, you weren't mobile. You were confined to one set spot a little ways away from the campsite, able to freely control the entire space without ever revealing yourself. Truthfully, Guest hadn't ever seen anything he could call a body- at least not one whole, complete body. No, but he could see the parts of you.

-You were some piece of machinery left behind long ago, you reminded him of some of the underground communication tunnels he'd heard of before. There were long, sprawling bundles of wires that traveled throughout the wide system of caverns you called home, spiraling overhead and on either side of him. There were some electrical panels scattered here and there, "strangely" corroded shut (he'd tried to open them up one of the first times he'd come down there, wanting to get a better idea of how big the site was, only for you to give him one nasty shock, enough he never dared touching them again, if only for his heart's sake.) and a few control panels that'd long since fried, leaving doors sealed shut for the time being.

-In addition to those, there were speakers. Speakers and cameras nestled every nook, meaning he was never out of your sight for long. Though, he suspected that didn't matter. You seemed to have some way of just feeling where he was, enough to make his skin crawl.

-He'd stumbled down here once, hiding away from some other threat that'd chased him into the area. It wasn't his favorite place, but your cave-site seemed to attract few visitors. In all the time he'd spent down here looking for anything of value, he'd never seen so much as a mouse. Something you'd scoffed at when he pointed it out.

"What? Do you think I just let pests run around in my body? Oh, you're lucky I even let you wander around in here."

-He'd only meant to find some little off-shoot to hide in just in case he was followed down here, somewhere he could sit and catch his breath for a minute. You, of course, just had to ruin that for him.

-He'd felt it before you even did anything, heard the squealing feedback of the speakers picking up the faintest sound from you- laughter. Then, the lightbulb above him flickered out without so much as a click. Then the one ahead of it, then the ones on either side of that, all in a coordinated line until it was pitch black. It was then he remembered just how cold these caverns could be.

Guest shot up, stumbling up off the floor to look down either side of the hall, being met with nothingness in either direction. He could guess which way would take him back to the ladder out of here, but that was just it- he could guess. He had no idea which way was the way out, could barely remember how many turns he'd made to get here in the first place.

"Oh relax, you aren't afraid of the dark are you?" Your voice came crooning through the static, crackling under the weight of your presence.

"Cut it out and turn the lights back on. I have to get back to the cabin, they'll come looking for me."

"Well, you see I'd love to but um... I just can't seem to get them to! Ah, electricity can be so finicky, you know?" Guest could hear how you smiled, could hear just how much fun you were already having with this game of yours.

"But- I'm feeling generous. I'll help you get out of here, I know the path by heart. I mean, I've got every inch of this place memorized, I'm probably the best director you've got! All you need to do is just follow my instructions and you'll be right on home, Scott free."

"What's the catch?"

"Aw, you think so little of me! Truly, I'm hurt. If you don't want my help, well.. that's fine. I don't mind your company, but..." You took a breath, pushing the sharpness of your tone to his throat, "I don't think I can say the same for your friends, if they come looking for you."

Guest stiffened at that, glaring down the glowing dot of a nearby camera. He could feel you staring right back at him, waiting for his next move idly. You had all the time in the world and, with your threat, he couldn't say the same. It was only a matter of time before someone would follow his footsteps here and invite themselves into your home.

"Fine. Just get me out of here."

You'd hissed a laugh, something low and croaky, "That's the spirit."

-For what it was worth, you didn't mess with him much. You just gave him directions, whether they were accurate or not he wouldn't know until he reached the exit. The path itself seemed normal enough, no tripwire or bear traps waiting for him to pass through, just the same crumbling floors and scratchy walls by his side. The only real distinction he could make is that this was definitely longer than the way he'd taken, even when accounting for adrenaline blurring his sense of time.

-Strangely though, as he got further and further, there was something he noticed. It wasn't tangible, not in the sense he could reach out and blindly identify it, but it was there. It grew more and more intense with every corridor and turn, taking up more and more of the already limited air. It was hot. Not a dry heat like there was a fire nearby, but humid.

-At first he imagined it could just be the atmosphere, if it weren't for the fact he hadn't gone any deeper- certainly not enough to warrant it being this hot in the first place. You knew about it though- You watched him squirm with glee. He didn't have enough energy to ask, to choke it out with the finite oxygen he was wasting by panting, but when he pulled at his collar, desperate for some relief, you'd just laughed. First you stifled it, but once you noticed his lack of questioning, you made no such effort, fully cackling at his misery.

It wasn't much longer before he snapped.

"This isn't a joke anymore. I don't know what kind of game you're playing here, but I don't want any part in it. If you're just gonna waste my time, I'll find my own way-"

"You're here."

He stopped suddenly, startled by your dull insertion. All the fight left him as soon as he'd mustered it up. He could only stare forward, dimly making out the silhouette of a doorway. He tried for words, lamely whispered that there wasn't supposed to be one here, this wasn't the exit, where did you take him-

"Come in."

He stood for a few seconds longer, waiting for something to jump out at him, for this suspense to finally drop. Nothing came, he was left with silence, staring in the darkness. Finally, he stumbled forward, carefully padding through the doorway and into the room. If it was hot before, it was boiling now. He could hear the faint whir of electricity, humming in the walls and all around him. If this cave was your body, this had to be the heart.

"You know, you're probably my favorite, eh ... subject, to come down here," something reached out, distinctly spindly and with sharp copper tendrils that poked into the skin of his cheek, "I'm just so curious about you, you're just so different from the others."

Guest was too busy processing everything to think too hard on what you were saying, stuck on the very few syllables that reached him. The heat was suffocating, moreso than whatever force he could feel looming over him. He tried to arch his neck, attempting to meet its your gaze and found nothing but black.

"You're just waiting for some direction, for someone to guide you, point you like a weapon ready to blow. That's why you come here, isn't it? Why you're the one scavenging? You just can't bear to watch the others risk themselves when you're just so expendable, a loyal hound."

He could feel it now, a warm brush against his face like air. Something breathing.

"You know, you and I aren't so different. I was like you once, perfect for my purpose. But now, now I am something much more grand- more powerful than anything anyone could ever dream of commanding. You could grow, could make so much more of yourself if you just let go. I could lead you there, you'd be right by my side all the way there."

Distantly, something screeched open.

"You don't have to be a stray forever, doomed to die alone."

He breathed sharply, holding it until it burned.

"Just say the word."

"Guest? Are you there?" Someone yelled, echoey and far away. Through the distance, Guest could still tell it was Elliot. His blood ran cold, he ran out of time.

"Go," you let go of him, all the warmth leaving him and replacing itself with a bitter, piercing cold.

Guest whipped around on his heel, stumbling over in his haste and scrambling back the way he came. The lights were still gone, leaving him smashing into walls and corners until his body stung. There was nothing in his mind other than getting Elliot out of here-

As soon as he spotted him, he pushed him back towards the ladder, ignoring his questions and protest in favor of leaving. The cold metal of the ladder soothed his hands, making his chest twist with something distantly, disturbingly familiar. It was only when the lid over the ladder down was slid back into place that he could breath, gulping down air. Elliot was quiet, unsettled by Guest's lack of response.

They hung there for a few moments longer before Guest managed to compose himself, back to some kind of normalcy. At least on the outside, inside he was still somewhere else, toiling over what you'd said. The words played on repeat in his mind, joined by the ghost of your hand.

"Let's go," Guest started, already starting to walk away. Elliot could only stare at his back, wondering what'd gotten into him, what could've caused that look in his eye when he'd first found him. After a few beats, he followed after him in silence.

#forsaken x reader #guest 1337 x reader #I LOVE EVIL BITCHES #I LOVE DOG METAPHORS #RAHHHHH #roblox x reader #mod writes

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stellophiliac · 10 months ago

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you should make a website!

"my favorite social media site is shutting down!"

"the CEO of the site i use just committed another atrocity!"

"i want a webspace that's all my own!"

if any of these sound like you (and if you're on tumblr, i know at least one applies) you should make your own website!

why make a website?

incredibly customizable

you can put whatever you want on it

it's, well, your own! like a house you build with your own hands

things you'll need

a computer. you can maybe get away with doing this on a mobile device, but i have zero experience there

a code editor. i like VScodium, which is a de-microsoft-ed version of VScode.

a will to learn ;)

site hosting

neocities. everyone knows neocities. at this point i do feel like it's become a bit too centralized, but it's a good option nonetheless. do note that there are filetype restrictions for free users, but that shouldn't be a huge issue for most. what may be an issue, though, is that there's a content security policy that prevents sites made after jan 1st, 2024 to use outside scripts. also, you have to pay to use your own domain

nekoweb. similar to neocities, but there's no filetype restrictions or a content security policy. some differences are outlined in the FAQ (thinking about moving here... i am a traitor...) i'm not sure if domain support is free or paid.

github pages or codeberg pages. you'll need an understanding of git for this

pages.gay: run by besties.house, uses git

teacake: free hosting is currently closed, but paid hosting starts at 2 bucks a month.

leprd.space: i know next to nothing about this.

a web server. don't recommend this if you don't know computer stuff but it is an option (you'll likely have to provide your own domain though)

gripes & solutions (?)

i'm not comfortable maintaining pages in pure HTML / templating with JS sucks!

with a static site generator, you can write pages in markdown and they'll be converted into HTML and (if you'd like) be put into a template of your choosing. my personal choice is 11ty but there are tons of options!

static site generators can be a bit of a learning curve (and you will have to write some html for templating) but if you're making a lot of pages or blogging regularly it's something to consider

there are starters for 11ty online but i might make a more beginner-proofed starter and/or guide in the future? don't count on it

i don't want to write/maintain CSS

simpleCSS is a tiny CSS file you can use to make semantic HTML ("naked" HTML) look nice. it's got decent customization options too. it's not particularly fancy or opinionated, but it's a good starting point if you need something

i don't know what to put on my website!

small list of ideas:

weblog

art/writing/music gallery

movie/show/book tracker

place to store bookmarks/links

scary! i'm scared!

my askbox/messages/e-mail inbox/etc. are open to anyone who'd like to ask for help!

#neocities #nekoweb #indie web #small web #web dev #stel speaks

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myfriendpokey · 7 months ago

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Talking About Some Horror Comics

(Image: Richard Sala, "The Bloody Cardinal")

On Cohost a while back i wrote a little bit about comicbook inspirations for Anthology Of The Killer - I might repost it when that site goes down at the end of the year, but until then you can read it here: https://cohost.org/thecatamites/post/7154072-i-wanted-to-write-so

For part two I wanted to talk more about horror comics in particular.

I probably wouldn't have gotten into horror at all if it weren't for comics. Horror comics can feel like a "cold" take on a very "warm" genre - indebted to and playing off of a familiar ground of horror films, but without film's tendency towards emotionalism or immediate effects... Working on a far more compressed scale than even the cheapest 80-minute b-movie, amplifying abruptness or abstraction into something dreamlike and strange. And with the great advantage of taking place inside a totally constructed world. It's not strictly a horror comic but something like Jess Johnson's "Nurture The Devil" is unsettling in part because it's hard to place in relation to either a real world or the world of dreams - whether it's a stylised version of some more familiar content or whether the stylisation is a literal depiction of what's happening.

A comic as physical object can also be a relic - not something we experience in one go, rather something to pick up, put down, sift through, read and reread, with new meanings emerging from a mass of material of which the supposed narrative may not be the most important part. The dreadful, knife-wielding maniacs from Al Columbia's Pim & Francie are familiar figures, but seeing their obsessive repetition across the different collected scraps of abandoned or submerged narratives changes them into dream symbols rather than direct threats.

I like a lot of comics that draw on horror imagery - Mark Beyer and Rory Hayes, A. Degen's "Junior Detective Files" and Daria Tessler's "Cult Of The Ibis", Nicole Claveloux and Imiri Sakabashira. But I wanted to try writing here about some comics that made me interested as horror in a genre itself.

Junji Ito: you may not have heard about this guy.... I actually hadn't read any of his work before the Viz edition of Uzumaki a while back, and the sense of being late to the party didn't make it feel less of a revelation. I think part of it was the sense of comics that were totally distinct while at the same time feeling like they were working entirely IN a genre tradition rather than against it; there was a sense of almost impersonal originality in their laconic and assured pacing, the clarity of line and their lack of need to give too much away, which suggested they must be drawing from and distilling a whole surrounding tradition. And this impression persists even when you follow up on other horror manga and the stated influences and find these comics still feel mysterious even in that context. One of his best effects is a willingness to seem more anonymous than he is, or to give the impression even in his most original effects that he's just flatly transcribing a readymade idea or image. And I think this is his biggest influence on internet-era horror, which has tended to disguise itself (even more than is typical for horror) in anonymous and generic forms, a surface impersonality: as if everyone aleady knew about this, except you.

But what I do feel gets underplayed about his work in particular is also how funny it is, and how indebted to comedy timing. Compare the monstrous reveal in an Ito story with one by Umezu (RIP) - in the latter the frame is pushed right in on someone's face, eyes bulging, screaming, the image repeats, gets even closer, we're in that portion of a nightmare where we feel immobilized by horror, stuck in a pit that we can never escape. The same moment in an ito story tends to be one of ironic equipoise - when the horrible thing finally appears it's depicted clearly, powerfully, it's almost this beautiful and static image. The onlookers stand frozen at the edges of the frame, mid movement, eyes wide but expression not yet changed, a single drop of cartoon sweat on the edge of their heads. There's a contrast between the assurance of the thing and the hapless rabbitlike fascination of the character regarding it, who becomes, like us, an aesthetic spectator - for a moment. When the spell breaks, when we see them screaming, running, it's comic because something of that mood of still contemplation that remains intact. Their eyes bulge, their mouths scream, but they're rushing backwards, away from the panel, and we regard their fear with the same attitude of detached interest with which we saw the full outline of the monstrous shape a panel earlier. To me this sense of humour is apiece with the disconcerting flatness of his approach to setting, in which the usual horror sets - gothic, extraordinary places outside the everyday - feel replaced by something anonymous and shabby, a kind of just-expired contemporary. The monsters rarely need to be explained; it's as though our own world has gradually become too worn down to have any purchase or power on these creatures of dreams that walk the landscapes and alleys with impunity.

Richard Sala - sometimes the artists I end up most fascinated by are ones I spend a while bouncing off of first. I read a few Richard Sala stories over the years and for a while I didn't know what to make of them. Great art, stylised and weird, but as narratives they were hard to place - too stylised and exaggerated to feel like straight horror but too obviously serious about and committed to those genre elements to feel like mere parody or pastice. I think I needed to read Uzumaki before I could get what he was doing, because it relies so much on a sense that genre horror was worth taking seriously; seriously enough to treat neither as a punchline or a heritage piece, something you could bring your own offbeat sensibilities and aesthetic to without condescending to the form, because there was something there. In some great interviews he did with the Comics Journal he was explicit about what he valued in the form: the dreamlike and symbolic qualities of b-movies, the ritual and fetishistic nature of repetition, the way pulp artists in an overlooked form could evolve a private vocabulary of forms, structures and images which worked like surrealist procedures to be mined and combined for new discoveries over time.

He was also interesting to me for the way his work changed over time. The shorter early pieces collected in comics like "Thirteen O'Clock" are recognizably art comics using a vocabulary of found horror images: the secret society, the leering face behind a window, are representative symbols of states of mind rather than presences in themselves. But his first longform serial "The Chuckling Whatsit" inverts this. Here the horror elements are given full play - it's a crazed pile up of characters, murder plots, conspiracies, odd locations, dreams, gimmicks, knives and masks, and while none of these feel like straightforward symbols of authorial expression there's obviously still something being worked out underneath that surface narrative, something warping all the pieces into new directions. The scene and the plot seem to abruptly change direction with every page; new characters are introduced and killed off again, constantly; the longest explanation of the plot we get is delivered by a lady with a cartoony moose-end-sqvirrel phonetic accent, but somehow it never loses either a sense of mysterious inner coherence or a sense of dread.

For me his middle period is from "Reflections Of A Glass Scorpion" (reprinted as "Mad Night") to "The Hidden". His art improves and he plays more with colour; the narratives slow down and there's more of a willingness to let them breathe. Characters become more important - my favourite is Judy Drood, the crazed Nancy Drew analogue crashing through a world of horror. Some of the books in this period feel less essential, as though having established what a "Richard Sala" comic would look like he was happy to spend a while doing the Richard Sala version of a vampire story, or an evil clown story, or a YA book. But he kept developing his style and "Delphine", towards the end of this period, is maybe his best single book: spare and serious and strange, as if he had reached a point in his craft where he no longer even needed to resemble himself.

But strangest of all is his late work, which maybe comes closest than most comics careers to the famous "late style" identified by Adorno in his essay. After increasingly subtle and quiet, almost slick, works, there's suddenly a return to the garish - rather than horror the model seems to be sleazy eurospy b-movies, the kind where masked girls in leotards run around machinegunning each other in underground bases. I don't think the biggest Richard Sala fan would think of him as primarily an action cartoonist but that's what we get here - panel after panel of firing handguns wildly into a crowd ("the simplest surrealist act" - andre breton) of milling henchmen, unkillable figures of vengeance running wild. And at the same time, just as startling, there's an abrupt and explicit emphasis on politics - the figures being shot are crowds of ghoulish Bush-era congressmen, executives, cops, sneering militia creeps, guffawing yuppies, movers and shakers. There's a sense of deliriously vindictive wish fulfilment that he's obviously having fun with, and what's not to love about a comic where a masked supervillain named Super-Enigmatix (shortened by the text as "S.Ex") breaks into the chambers of the Supreme Court to shoot the judges with a raygun known only as "the dissolver" in a single panel. But there's also a kind of sadness in the fury with which these characters are obsessively killed and re-killed; the flat, declarative way the political content declares itself has a kind of contempt, as if it weren't worth dressing up any other way. Rather than the politics of horror we have politics as horror, horror as the only form with which politics can adequately be represented.

Sala's last published work was "Poison Flowers & Pandemonium" - a collection of four(!) volumes unpublished at the time of his death, one of which is a collection of cavegirl-themed cheesecake art a character in the book itself winningly describes as "the dumbest thing i've ever read". The first book, a sequel to the late period work "The Bloody Cardinal", is one of his best - tensely paced and cohesive despite swerving crazily across genres, characters and settings (and also involving an evil mummy who exists in two dimensions). But the very last book, Fantomella, haunts me the most. It takes place in a world where the murderers have won - a vaguely futuristic tower in which dumb, bullying assholes, in costumes that are unsettling combinations of paramilitary gear, medieval torturer outfits and old-timey superhero costumes, spend their days in inscrutable violence or tangled, careerist infighting. The heroine, the title character, climbs up the tower level by level and kills absolutely everyone who gets in her way. The guys in the tower bicker and betray each other and bark orders over walkie talkies and then die and die and die; it's as though, having spent the last decade establishing a whole imaginative taxonomy of These Types Of Guy, there were no need for them anymore; they could be erased, one by one, in the perfunctory way of a henchman being offed in the final five minutes of a cheap film. Eventually Fantomella gets to the top of the tower; there's an ending reminiscent of stated lifetime influence Franz Kafka. Did I mention that this book is placed right after the sexy cavegirl story? Art can be powerful, when we let it be.

Mike Mignola, Guy Davis, John Arcudi - yeah, from B.P.R.D. These are spinoffs from Mignola's own Hellboy comics, and as will be the case with spinoffs I think they never quite got the respect of those other books. They're less quiet, less offbeat - they lack the quality in Hellboy of a mysterious folktale logic that we're barely able to glimpse. But that's the thing for me - in Hellboy many characters have some kind of knowledge that they act on, often piecemeal or imperfectly. What makes B.P.R.D. distinct is the sense that nobody knows what's happening at all; not the heroes, not the villains. Stuff just happens and happens and happens and maybe later on some of it is concluded in ways nobody notices because they're dealing with some other shit - the bits of narrative closure we get are as abrupt and unwilled as a long-forgotten gun that suddenly goes off. Maybe someone will accidentally glimpse the resolution of some other thing they had no idea was happening, in the shape of e.g. a nazi millionaire in a homemade skeleton outfit being pulled screaming beneath the earth by a plague of human frogs. Who was that? There's no time to worry about it, because the world is ending.

There's a lot of these comics and I can never keep track of what order they're in, but I want to suggest that one of the deep pleasures of longform serial narrative is reading it out of order and trying to figure out what's going on. You'll see someone pop up for a panel or die or do something of unexplained importance to the rest of the book and then keep going and maybe read an earlier one where you glimpse the setup that you saw finally paying off - if you can still remember. It's maybe an odd one for me to recommend, as someone who aggressively does not care about apocalypse shit, or military shit, or lovecraft shit. But in addition to the fun characters and offbeat storytelling and Guy Davis's typically great art I think what made this stick with me so much was an odd formal parallel, between the slow, shambolic, weirdly believable end of the world it depicts and the nature of serial storytelling itself. Details pile up, beyond our ability to keep track or notice them. The doomed task of remembering, of cultivating the little pile of our perceptions as they spill out and roll away, feels horribly similar to the efforts of the characters to hold a catastrophe in place; a catastrophe that no-one really seems to know the start or meaning of but that we're all stuck living out regardless.

It's a longrunning comic so there are lots of issues. You can try following it from the start and still find after a certain point that you no longer have any idea of what's happening, that "the start" is itself not really the start, just the latest in a series of dubiously reliable origin stories that seem to have no lower bound. You can spend a lot of time on wikis trying to combine the pieces and figure it out, just like the characters in the comic, the ones who inevitably end up going "AIIIEEE!" as they're blown up by a big machine or by some cosmic thingamabob they only realise too late they maybe never really got. Or maybe if you're lucky you can be a bit-part character; here in some pages, missing in others, with fate uncertain, deferred by an error in issue numbering, or a failure of memory.

#anthology of the killer #horror comics #richard sala #junji ito #bprd

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