#i hope some kind soul out there can take high res scans of.....the whole book IVLASKFVALSIF

[actualbird]

Hihi zak!! Been a while, love the cookies, very zakcore, hope they were as delicious as they looked

(Um.. artbook spoilers? LMAO)

Nonetheless I am here to sob and wail over luke pearce yet again. someone on twitter(@/chanuanzi i believe? shoutout to them) posted pages from the artbook, and theyre all in chinese so i cant get extra context, but i can see with my eyes my two wonderful somewhat functioning eyes and theres art and i saw so many lukes HES SO????!?! Found out the key has feather and fire motifs which is SO HIM and i believe his phone has a sherlock tobacco pipe for some reason(?did he make his phone?? is there a brand of phone with a pipe logo in stellis?? is it his phones cover???) and his silly little socks and he still wears those godforsaken boots even in childhood bless him

theres also pages with all the other guys, AND MC!! The mc concepts looked so pretty!! Shes stunning and gorgeous no matter what. Alternate outfits for everyone,, little sketches of the guys with different emotions.. artem wink.. luke with a little cat mouth. All of which is lovely, very interesting to look at. Love how theres a specific sock drawing for all the boys, only god knows why is Vyn wearing sock garters (do you have to go that far for the aesthetic, vyn?), MARIUS COULDVE HAD A TATTOO?? No idea, i think so?? this is driving me insane. and did i mention everyone gets little alternate outfits… yeah.

Anyway, thanks for reading my rant of the day! Hope youre doing well zak! Sorry if this was incredibly long and incoherent </3 -K

hi k!! and hehe, thank u for the kind cookie words :DDD

and GOSH YEAH, ive been delightedly freaking out about all of the pics of the tot artbook ive been seeing on twt. linking one of the tweets below so others can see, check em out! i dont think u'll need a twitter to see these :D

every single luke detail has added like power to my life force i swear JKHVAKJSHFASFKA. and all of ur thoughts, UR SO RIGHT!!! out of all the details ive seen from the different pics tho, ive got so much to say!! and no idea how to order any of them orz

but heres some bits i really fixated on for some reason

(among them, yes, the socks JKHAVKJSHFA)

the socks rlly did something to me , im past saving

pls dont apologize for stuff being incoherent bc as u can see //gestures at this response. Same. maybe some other time when ive got more energy and more braincell, i can put it into words a bunch of the rlly cool things that struck me and Why from the artbook, but thats for another day mayhaps :'D

[dailyaudiobible]

07/17/2018 DAB Transcript

1 Chronicles 24:1-26:11, Romans 4:1-13 , Psalms 13:1-6, Proverbs 19:15-16

Today is the 17th day of July. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I'm Brian. It is a pleasure and an honor to be with you today. I'm glad we can come in out of whatever is going on, all of the cares of the world and life’s distractions. We step away from that, kind of move into another atmosphere. All that stuff will wait. We center ourselves in God's word, allowing it to come washing into our lives and re-calibrating. So we're reading from the Christian Standard Bible this week and we'll pick up where we left off yesterday. 1 Chronicles 24:1-26:11 today.

Commentary:

Okay. So in the book of Romans, I think I look forward to this day each year, although I hadn't realized that until just now. And it's because I get to say circumcision so many times in one sitting. Of course, circumcision...come on, this is always a trending topic. I mean, I think about it all the time. Don't you? As funny as that might be, the people that Paul's talking to they do think a lot about it. Because for them, at least for the males obviously, it was a sign of the covenant. Something that made them exclusive. Now, Hebrews weren't the only ones practicing circumcision at this time. But this had been a long-standing sign of the covenant with God. What we're watching Paul do is deconstruct and re-imagine the faith of his fellow Hebrews. And what he begins to lay out today is something that we will see over and over and over throughout Paul's letters. So here's the problem: Paul, a devout Pharisee, had realized and spoken out loud what everyone knew- no one could ever obey the law perfectly. Therefore, no one could ever achieve righteousness before God by their good works, by obeying that law. Because no matter how good they were, they were going to fail at some point. So Paul, being a devout Hebrew Pharisee, reasoned it out. We can't get there from here. And what Paul wanted is to be righteous before God. That was his entire mission of his life as a Pharisee. So he goes back to the beginning of the story. And the story of the Hebrew people begins with a man named Abram who becomes Abraham, who enters into the first covenant with God. It is Abraham's offspring who become the people of God - the Hebrew people. This is their origin story. It is the animating story that propels their culture. So no one was going to argue with Paul about that. Abraham started it all. They all knew that. But they may have not considered and what Paul was inviting them to consider was the fact that Abraham wasn't circumcised. There was no covenant at that point. Once the covenant happened, than Abraham was circumcised.  But that didn't make him righteous before God. It was something else that made Abraham righteous. Abraham, and I'm quoting Paul, Abraham believed God and it was credited to him for righteousness. Paul was simply quoting the book of Genesis. That right there is foundational, fundamental to what Paul was teaching. It was Abraham's faith in God and belief in what God had promised that mattered. God considered him righteous because of that. So Paul is saying, hang on. We got a law, we gotta lot of rituals, we gotta lot of culture, we gotta lot of custom. We got all this stuff going on, but we've forgotten how this whole thing started. We keep trying to worship in a way this law that we cannot live up to. And that is not what started our story. Our story began with a man and his faith. Abraham. And he wasn't circumcised when he put his faith in God. He wasn't obeying a law because there wasn't one to obey. So we have to consider what happened at the beginning. We'll watch Paul lay this out over and over and over again. And it's important because it is also a central thing to our faith obviously. Our faith is the bridge that all of our hope in Jesus drives on. And Paul will continue to pound this point home, like I said, over and over, as we'll see.

Prayer:

Father, we thank You for Your word. We thank You for the gift. We thank You for the community that we get to share each and every day no matter where we are on the earth, we come together each and every day to allow Your word to minister and speak, direct and comfort us. So we thank You. Father, in light of our reading today we put our faith in You. We believe Your promises and we ask that You lead us on the path of righteousness today by the power of Your Holy Spirit. Come Jesus, we pray. In Your precious name we ask. Amen.

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And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hi. If this is Amy from Texas. This is the first time that I’ve called, although I’ve been listening for four years. I just have a prayer request for my husband David. He finished, recently, a year’s treatment for cancer and at our last scan of his chest, his tumor site, a couple of spots showed up in his lungs. The doctor did tell us that she was not worried about them because they were so small but the likelihood of his kind of cancer spreading would go to his lungs. He has another scan in three months just to check for if they’ve grown. So, I would just ask that you would pray that there is no cancer anywhere, that the spot’s would be nothing, that they will not even be visible on the next scan. 95% of people have spots on their lungs. So, she said the likelihood of that happening is high also. So, but of course the fear is always there for me even though I’ve seen God’s faithfulness through these last years. So, please just pray that it’s nothing and that we can put this chapter in our lives behind us. Thank you so much.

Hola DAB family. God bless you Brian, Jill, and all who are working behind the scenes. This is Viv from Canada and it’s been so long that I’m getting called out by my brother Sean 316. It is always been a pleasure to hear you call in Sean. I remember how much I laughed when you called in that little imitation piece of our fellow DABbers. Anyway, thank you for the shout out. That was very sweet. I too have been wondering about our sister Sherry. I hope she’s doing well. I miss her sweet voice singing for us. Ut it does get busy. You know, so, I hope she’s really doing well. And here’s my request today. Whenever you are wondering about a regular caller who has not called in for a while, just say a prayer for them because you never know what’s going on in their lives. Thanks to everyone who prayed for me and my friend Darla and the loss of her brother. We definitely felt your prayers. So, thanks. And Asia, thank you so much for the sweet message. It is truly appreciated. What an awesome community this is. The love and care that we all show for each other is amazing and can only be from God. So, Father God, thank You for the vision that you gave to Brian and Jill so many years ago and the wisdom that You have bestowed upon them, enabling them to continue Your work. We pray Father for Your continued blessings of provision, for health and super strength for Brian. And as he reads every day the Lord, as he reads the word fresh every day, I pray that Yo will continue to anoint him with Your Holy Spirit. We pray that You continue to bless all who give financially to this ministry, that Your store baskets may never be empty. We pray this all in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. And family, if you remember when you pray, I’m learning a new language, Spanish. It is a lot of fun but it’s taking a bit of effort to grasp. So, I just might have to call Pastor Gene for some lessons. Anyways, thanks for listening and praying with me.

Hi family. This is Melody Faith from Canada. I want to thank all of you, including Victoria Soldier, Pastor Gene, and Lee from New Jersey for praying for Jared regarding addiction, his court date, and needing a haircut. He did get a haircut and the court appearance resulted in a reasonable sentence. Regarding the addiction, well, let’s just say my husband and I can certainly feel out little boat rocking the storm. I will call in with another request when I figure out just how to word it. As I join with each of you in your everyday, I find myself praying for each of your needs and applying the word of God. Many of you are in crisis and I hear the desperation in your voices. I ran across a quote today that caught my attention and I’d like to share it with you. “Next time you’re walking through something and you’re not sure what to do, do this. Never doubt in the dark what God has shown you in the light. Have faith in God. Don’t believe the lie that God doesn’t see you there. So often we take our cues was going on around us. Instead, grab a hold of the word of God. God is on the throne. He hasn’t changed.” I need to remind thyself of that too. Often, I have to remind myself of that. Hebrews 6 verse 19 says, we have this hope for an anchor for our soul, firm and secure. So, if your boat is rocking, throw down the anchor of faith and trust Him today. I hope these words encourage you. I love family. Thank you DAB. Have a great day.

Good morning Daily Audio Bible family. This is Dan from Arkansas. I just wanted to call in and let Scott know that we’re praying for his family and his son Joel. It’s a horrible time they’ve been going through and it just weighed super heavy on my heart and I just wanted to call in and let him know that we are all with you brother and, you know, we may not understand what you’re going through but all of us have felt loss and felt pain and we’re just praying for Joel and we just pray that the Lord just takes that issue that’s going on with the water on his brain away and just heals him completely. And so, I’d like to pray for you now. Dear Lord, I thank You for this day Lord. I think You for my Daily Audio Bible family Lord. I thank You for Scott and his calling in and letting us know was going on in his life Lord. And I pray for his son Joel Lord. I pray that You put Your hands upon him Lord and that You heal this boy and let him just be well Lord. I thank all the rest of the Daily Audio Bible family for always being so uplifting. And I love you guys and I pray for you guys every day and I hope everyone has a wonderful day.

[spynotebook]

Dynamite has sent us a new writer’s commentary for their brand new Barbarella series. Mike Carey goes page by page through the first issue. Here we also see covers by Kenneth Rocafort, Joe Jusko, and Joseph Michael Linsner with interior art by Kenan Yarar.

Page 1:

We had a lot of ground to cover in this first issue in terms of world-building – giving the sense of a society that’s both familiar and alien, getting Barbarella into prison and out of it again, introducing her and the supporting cast and laying the groundwork for the wider conflict. So it seemed to make sense to hit the ground running, with a space battle in progress and Barbarella flung into the middle of it.

Some of the first sketches I saw from Kenan [Yarar, artist] were of the crew of the Parosian flagship as we see them in this scene – and I knew at once that he was a great fit for the book. He embraced the weirdness of this alien theocracy and brought his own craziness to the party. The stained glass window is a particularly nice touch.

Page 2:

If you want to sing We Labour in the Vineyards of the Seven, like a good son or daughter of the church, it fits in a rough and ready way to the tune of Oh, What a Friend We Have in Jesus.

It was my editor Matt’s [Idelson] suggestion that we make the Parosians polytheists, so as to minimise the sense that we were getting at any specific religion. Any of our readers who are believers are more likely to believe in a single god than a whole pantheon (all due apologies to the comic fans who are Hindus, Buddhists or Shintoists).

In the original outline I had the Parosians worshipping a mother goddess, but matriarchal religions are usually much more laid back when it comes to matters of sex. The Parosians are fairly uptight, and their sexual hang-ups are very much a plot point.

Pages 3-4:

I thought long and hard about how to bring Barbarella on stage for the first time. Jean-Marc L’Officier, who is a creative consultant on the book, said at one point that he saw the original Barbarella stories as a kind of adult Alice in Wonderland. Like Alice, Barbarella wanders into outrageous situations and takes them in her stride. She accepts the insane logic of the universe she lives in, but she never allows it to compromise her own sense of how things should be. I really like that definition of the character.

So here Barbarella finds herself in the middle of a war, but she’s not intimidated by the Parosian military. She knows her rights. She also knows her ships, and she’s already reading a lot into this military encounter. We get to hear some of the clues she picked up here, and more later when she meets Jury Quire.

Incidentally, I didn’t originally have any sound effects for the scene in which Barbarella’s ship is snared. I added them when I saw how beautifully and playfully Kenan had interpreted that scene.

Re: Barbarella’s outfit: she lives in outer space, mostly on ship-board, so as in the original series she wears a serviceable space suit that covers most of her body – not a spandex bikini or a costume with strategically placed holes in it. She gets naked when she feels like it: the rest of the time she dresses for serious sh*t because it’s generally not far away.

Apart from the boots, of course. She wears high-heeled boots with fold-down tops because her fashion sense was forged in the ’60s.

Page 5:

We weren’t being coy in avoiding the word “vagina” here. Barbarella uses it herself a little later in the story. I just wanted to generate a little curiosity about what Barbarella is supposed to be smuggling.

We did try to make sure the scan as un-erotic as possible, though – by blurring the line between Barbarella’s naked body and her sub-dermal muscle and tissue. At the back of my mind here were the millimeter-wave scanners now in common use at airports, which produce a photographically real image of a passenger’s entire body. I know there are measures in place to make that less intrusive – including blurring faces and introducing a “double blind” system where the scanner’s operator doesn’t see the passenger. It still freaks me out a little that there is now a working version of the X-ray specs that used to be advertised in the back of DC comics in the 70s. What happens to Barbarella here is possible with technology we have today.

Page 6:

Alert readers will see some odd details in this cityscape. They’re meant to be there, and they’re indications that there is more for Barbarella to discover about Parosian society. That’s for issue 2, though. For now I just wanted to give Kenan enough space to draw a panorama. He didn’t disappoint me. He did point out that if I let him have a double-page spread he could have done even more. Soon, Mr. Yarar, soon.

The billboards look like a homage to Futurama, but I was actually remembering those wayside pulpits with their terrible clever-clever messages that are meant to make you think but generally just make you wince. There was one in my neighbourhood that (for many months) read: SOUL-AR POWERED BY THE SON OF GOD.

“She has demonic powers to tempt men’s souls.” Woman as the devil’s gateway into the human soul is a fun feature of many orthodox religions. The Parosians didn’t invent it. In orthodox Christianity, Eve was the one who listened to the serpent and was responsible for original sin, something that medieval clerics never got tired of bitching about. You eat one lousy apple and your entire gender has its cards marked for the rest of time.

Page 7:

I’m not sure where I got the idea of a rifle that fires sermons. I needed to insert some exposition, and I wanted to do it in a way that didn’t seem forced. After all, the defendant in a criminal trial has a right to know what she’s being accused of: the judge in this case chooses the most direct means.

I use a lot of different words to describe the ranks of the Parosian religious hierarchy. Deacons, prebends and lictors are all present. We also meet a number of people like the ship’s captain in the opening scene and the judge here, whose military and civil roles seem to overlap with a religious one. The state religion is the axle tree on which the whole of Parosian society turns – like the Communist party in Stalinist Russia, say; or in the UK, talking about the weather.

Page 8:

“My body is my own concern!” Of course it is. But that has never stopped religious authorities from trying to control what you do with it. Or civil authorities either, to be fair. If this position can still be read as controversial in the 21st century, I don’t hold out much hope that the sort of idiocy embodied in the judge’s reply will go out of fashion by Barbarella’s time.

I like trial scenes. I seem to have written a ton of them in recent years. I would not, though, want to contest a speeding ticket in a Parosian court.

Page 9:

And now we come to the body loom. It’s not entirely clear what sort of physical reconfiguration Barbarella undergoes. The conceptual rifle in the earlier scene talks about “the organs that embody and channel desire.” At the very least, this would seem to imply a clitoridectomy.

There’s a real-world analogue for this, of course, in the female genital mutilation practised by both Christian and Muslim groups in Africa and Asia. I don’t want to get heavy, but this is not a historical curiosity. It’s a hugely serious issue NOW. If you want to learn more about it, there’s a WHO fact sheet here.

Barbarella gets to meet this technician again in #3. When she says she’ll be back, as with Arnold Schwarzenegger, you can take her at her word.

Pages 10-11:

“Whatever you were bringing in, I’d like a taste.” I make no apology whatsoever for this smutty joke.

Quire is a character we’ll see again later on in the series. I wanted a foil for Barbarella who is as strong-willed and resourceful as her but follows a different agenda. Quire’s role as an agent of Earth calls for a lot of moral compromises, and throws Barbarella’s sense of right and wrong into sharp relief. By the way, although we don’t see it Quire’s prison greys reveal that she’s in jail for heresy.

There are other differences between them, too. When Rho prays, Quire dismisses her as being wholly enslaved to her Parosian beliefs. Barbarella is less willing to write someone off on such scant evidence, as her later rebuke of Quire shows. Overall, Quire is an ally – and will shortly become more than that – but she may not always be a reliable friend.

Page 12:

I didn’t have a whole lot of time to draw in the prison regime, so I just hit the highlights. Unremitting hard labour, terrible food and endless hectoring from the prison officers. And the officers are all robots, which just makes the whole thing that bit more alienating.

Someone smart said something quotable about judging a society by the way it treats its enemies. I think we should be judged by the way we treat our prison population.

Pages 13-15:

Sex as political subversion was a big part of the original story idea. I love the idea of Mills & Boon-style romance novels being illegal contraband – and it’s a theme we return to later.

But the true revolutionary act is the orgy, initiated by Barbarella when she kisses and embraces Quire. The salient fact here is not that these are women making love with other women, although the Parosian church would presumably not approve of that. What’s crucial, in my mind, is that they’re prisoners giving each other pleasure in defiance of the state’s attempt to confiscate that pleasure via invasive surgery.

I had to re-read George Orwell’s 1984 recently for a panel I was on at Norcon in Oslo. There’s a scene in that book where Winston Smith describes Julia as “a revolutionary from the waist down”. She doesn’t reply “don’t knock it until you’ve tried it”, but mainly that’s because she lets her actions speak for her. And later in the same book there’s a speech where O’Brien talks to Winston about the Party’s quest to “abolish the orgasm”. Sex is subversive because it’s yours, not theirs. They hate that. [Fill in a “they” of your own choice here.]

Page 16:

We don’t know whether Quire’s body modifications were elective or not. The original script had her wearing a more conventional prosthetic. In my imagination Quire had birth defects affecting one arm and one leg, and turned those physical disabilities into assets in her chosen work. That’s absolutely compatible with what Kenan has done here, but his surreal scrolling flesh makes for a much more powerful visual – and makes it more plausible that the Parosians’ search regime missed the incredible amount of gadgetry Quire smuggled into jail with her.

We also see here how much Barbarella can pick up from minimal cues. It’s easy to forget this in the general whirl of events, but she’s crazy smart and she doesn’t miss a thing.

We want the nudity in the book to feel natural and casual, not titillating. It used to gripe me sometimes when I was writing superhero books and the artist would sneak in a butt shot or a ridiculously cheese-cakey pose. After sex, you sprawl around companionably, or if it’s cold you get back under the covers and huddle, and that’s what’s going on here. Jean-Claude Forest, in the original books, similarly included a lot of after-sex moments, and I had those in mind when I wrote this sequence.

Pages 17-18:

Barbarella thinking outside the box again, and also laying down the rules for the jailbreak. Of course, she regards robots as fully sentient. She has had more than one robot as a lover (in the original books), so she knows what she’s talking about.

Pages 19-22:

The prison break was fun to write. Again, the contrast between the two women is very much to the fore. Quire sticks to the letter of Barbarella’s “no killing” rule, by not firing directly at the lictors and vaporising them. But bringing a wall down on their heads is a fairly liberal interpretation of non-lethal damage.

It would have been cool to see the gorgeous baroque structure of the cathedral in all its glory as Barbarella whangs the top off one of its spires, but visibility was low over Parosia’s capital city that day. “Was that your first act of blasphemy?” I’m guessing not, but Barbarella’s moral compass is a strictly personal thing. She doesn’t define herself against anyone else’s codes. Hence: “I don’t keep count.”

At one stage Kenan wanted the razor-doves to look like modern military drones, but in the end we went with a design that was more in keeping with the Parosians’ weird tech as seen elsewhere in the issue.

I love the coloring on that final panel, and the way the NEXT teaser sits in one of the pieces of falling debris.

Okay, now I’d better think of a way to get them out of this…

The post Writer’s Commentary: Mike Carey on the Important Messages in Barbarella #1 appeared first on Bleeding Cool News And Rumors.