#red herald webcomic

[redherald]

(Chapter 1 || Page 23)

NOTE: Page 1 until 33 are from Comic Studies subject back in 2018. Thus, the mistakes and wonky-ness in terms of art and English language are not subtle at all. :”P Deadlines rush!

Edit: Anyways Happy New Year! Rude of me to not wishing you all well this freshly baked 2021. I hope everyone’s well in this pandemic!

[keenphantomkid]

Ok, Theory

Ok so in the webcomic Aurora, the “main” character Kendal is an entirely new uncategoriseable entity, a god’s incarnation that survived the god leaving it and developed its own mind and personality. 

Now the god that this happens to is the hero god of the city Vash and, like the Ancient Greek Eros or Nike is named after his domain. So what we know about Vash is that he cut his teeth in this god business by defending his city from and defeating the storm god Tynan, the way he does this is explained here with an in universe telling of the story. What we know is that an alien metal and jewel was worked into an incarnation of Vash at a thematically appropriate moment and became an extremely effective power up, enabling Vash to defeat the hitherto undefeated Tynan. 

Now how this works in the world built magic system of Aurora is really interesting. So in Aurora it appears they're are two (or eight depending on how you count it) fundamental substances of magic, the elements and soul energy, now we know where elemental magic comes from as a central piece of lore in the main storyline so far has been about the ancient war between the elementals and a Void Dragon and how the elementals died defeating this Void Dragon and their bodies meshed together supplying the materials as the world, but the elements still count, and can be persuaded to act, as one body essentially unique to the other elements and so because they belonged to a living entity with a soul can exist in two states, the material element and a sort of potential/soul element held in other materials or channeled by mages to enact elemental effects.

 Now soul energy is something very different and despite the excessive amount of time I've spent explaining the elements, is what we’re focusing on here. Soul  energy is what living things are “made of” being literally the material of souls, now I could be wrong but from I can figure out everything alive contains and in someway uses soul energy, and soul energy has a connection with other soul constructs allowing for an in any capacity uniform group of living things to develop a larger social soul that becomes a god. Vash for instance is a city of people and so through the interaction of their soul energy, construction of early incarnations, and people assigning these incarnations personality or motivations became the hero god the city imagined, as the god itself is made up of the whole cities population who once saw incarnation interpreted them a certain way and influenced some of their aspect. Basically, because the god is their domain how they are viewed by the creatures in their domain effects their personality and most comfortable form. 

So what does this really have to do with Kendal. Well if Vash’s sword was constructed from an alien metal, a solid substance, which issomething almost impossible to make without an elemental, after Vash worked his soul energy into like soul shaper monks do with human prosthetics, which would more than likely work some of this starmetal soul energy into his own soul lattice. Then its likely that Kendal’s soul is made of what little of soul star metal was in the solid material of the meteor. And it’s not just background lore magic systems backing this up.

In the series of pages telling the mythical story of Vash’s Sword we find out that it’s being told through the framing device of the smith god who forged it, to a similar style god to Vash of the Fire influenced race of Ignans. Now while why they're talking and what this incredibly effective smith who uses the arcs and emotional journeys of the wielders of his weapons in his smithing process is doing with a god of fire and fire people directly related to one of our adventuring party is incredibly plot important and personally intriguing, there is something else I wanted to focus on here.

In these panels Tahraim appears to be talking about Dainix, a character Kendal is currently imprisoned with and who are jelling suspiciously well. Now we can see that Tahraim is using his Xanatos gambit forging technique of social engineering to forge out a weapon and fighter for Caliban (probably to fight the fire demon from Dainix’s backstory (who is probably another elemental emissary for Fire (like two other characters currently being heavily associated star metal soul Kendall (I see you Red, with each subsequent layer of brackets I get closer to the truth, witness as my bracketry grows)))) and describing some of the forging fires he’s using fo this weapon (who is probably Dainix, if not definitely)calls one of them “the divine blade”, referring to Vash’s starmetal sword currently held by Kendal, but the blade its self is isnt world shaking, its been around for millennia and everyone is very familiar with its power and prowess as a sword because Vash is an incredibly well known god. But that’s only as a sword, and we know Kendal is world shaking after his discussion with Ilia here where he is told explicitly that the gods fear what he represents but respect the fact that he is an incredibly powerful being with all the strength and ability of a godly incarnation but with no responsibilities of upholding a domain or the limits of staying within they’re domains range. And so the theoretical soul that is Kendal in this incarnation must be made of whatever remainder of star metal soul is left from the solid  star metal in the sword. That had been given the shape and properties of a human/incarnation soul by being weaved into and by Vash and then had the Vash soul ripped apart from they’re shared incarnation leaving the star metal soul to have to develop as its own being in this body

And if all you wanted is proof of this theory you can honestly stop reading here. So far this is dense and a lot and I wanna run through some stuff with this head cannon to nerd out. So if you don't wanna have to read anymore, my argument for this theory is basically through

Kendal being the star metal soul can provide a reason for, guess plot dent instead of plot hole? when Vash takes Kendal to where he is being held by the Collector. The reason this could be a plot dent is that one of the working theories for why Kendal exists can be found in the Sentinels. Essentially building sized stone statues animated by a god semi incarnating in them, its hard to explain so if your interested read here (Also read the comic, it’s really, really good. Like really good. If you get into the extra lore on the website and then scroll through Red’s Aurora Tumblr answers you get to appreciate how truly spectacular her worldbuilding and magic systems are. I mean clearly they’re cohesive and well thought out enough that just off of the magic system you could make a (if I don't say so myself) well reasoned prediction for a major character reveal.) the theory being that because these Sentinels can develop these echoes after being un-possessed by a god over time, the unique way Vash was taken out of his incarnation without dis-corporating it that the body developed a similar echo and is now ambient soul energy drawn into the empty body. However, this wouldn't make sense with Vash taking Kendal to the Collector’s hideaway in his sleep, as if Kendal is made of ambient soul energy he has no actual connection with Vash’s soul and so Vash shouldn't be able to bring him to the crystal he is being held in. But, if Kendal is in fact the star metal soul then he would still have that connection with Vash, as they are the same soul but different parts made of different materials, and so ca operate separately whilst still being so intricately connected.

On one final note, there is one character that already seems to know all this, Tahraim. That Kendal in everyway is the weapon he forged, that they're is a capacity for new elements and therefore different soul energies, that Erin has been possessed by the Void Dragon, and that the Collector has revived life, who has taken Alinua as an emissary, and is using this information not for his own divine or dastardly machinations but on commission. Which is A) a potential threat if Tahraim turns out to be a tad more amoral than he first appears, working as effectively for the next customer instead of esoterically guiding events for the cause of good and B) show cases an incredible mesh of world building and character work with gods being influenced by how their perceived and a god perceived and heralded as an unachievably proficient smith knowing more than any other character or entity we’ve ever seen before and doing exactly what is necessary to forge his commissioned weapons into the most powerful and effective instruments they can be almost only because of how in the magic system some gods are made from ideals and interpretations instead of groups of living things and actually fits the way they are most commonly perceived

[warao]

Gladnis dance I drew on early November 2020! I just realized Gladio and Ignis’ thighs below there look merged up xD But I was too tired to repair it. So I just let it be. They are fusing. 

I want to draw other ships like this too especially Promptis, Gladnoct, Promnis, Promptio, Ignoct, or 4 of them in one go, but,,, my enthusiasm change drastically T_T 

yet, I looooove the atmosphere colouring here. I’d do more the same thing over and over again on other drawings either fanarts or ocs <3 

________________________________________________________________

Red Herald webcomic | Instagram | Main Twitter | Art Twitter | Artstation | Portfolio (professional & job purposes) | Website (fun stuff) | DeviantArt

[bestiarium]

The Pocong [Indonesian mythology]

Indonesia has its fair amount of ghosts and evil spirits, among which are the Pocong, sometimes also called shroud ghosts. These creatures are undead, being the souls of deceased people dressed in their burial shrouds. Because of how traditional Indonesian burial shrouds look, Pocong have earned the nickname ‘candy ghosts’ in the west. But they do not dispense candy.

(This is one of my favorite ghosts, by the way, so this is a pretty long article)

They have glowing red eyes and a rotten, decaying face, befitting a dead body. A very old Pocong is in a more advanced state of decay, usually being a skeleton in a burial shroud.

As the story goes, after a person dies and is buried, the soul of the deceased remains in its body for 40 days after the burial. If the ropes around the burial shroud break during this time, the spirit can move on to the afterlife and rest in peace. If the ropes don’t break, the spirit is trapped on Earth, and will haunt the world of the living as a Pocong.

A Pocong is unable to walk because of the strings around the burial shroud, but it can float above the ground. This is often how fake Pocong are distinguished from real ones in Indonesian fiction: if the creature is hopping around, it is not a real ghost, but a living person disguised as one.

There are many regional stories about Pocong variants. One of them is the tale of the ‘plastic Pocong’ which supposedly haunts the city of Jakarta: she was a pregnant woman who was murdered by her boyfriend before giving birth. For some reason, the body had a supernatural amount of blood: during the autopsy, blood kept flowing and flowing and showed no signs of stopping, even after the wound was sewn shut. People eventually wrapped the corpse in plastic over the regular burial shroud, hoping that the bleeding would eventually halt. But when the woman was buried, the spirit could not break fee from her plastic prison, and turned into a Pocong. She still haunts the city to this day.

Much like JRPG enemies, there are coloured variants of these monsters. The red Pocong (Pocong Merah) are considered the most dangerous ones, as they are unusually aggressive and unpredictable. These ghosts died a particularly unpleasant death and seek revenge against the ones responsible.

Sidoarjo is also said to be haunted by a Pocong, with supposed sightings as recent as 2008. The ghost supposedly rides around the city in a cart pulled by a spectral horse. Its arrival is heralded by the sound of bells, and it stops in front of peoples homes to knock on the door. If anyone opens the door, they will mysteriously fall ill and succumb to a strange, deadly disease in a couple of days.

(image 1 : a Pocong as it appears in the webcomic Brain Anthology) (image source 2: Atmaflare on Deviantart) (image source 3: LoranDeSore on Deviantart) (image source 4: McwitherzBerry on Deviantart)

I suppose I used too many images for this one. 

[apieters]

I posted 80 times in 2021

39 posts created (49%)

41 posts reblogged (51%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 1.1 posts.

I added 215 tags in 2021

#sketch - 36 posts

#cartoon - 33 posts

#cartoon characters - 32 posts

#character art - 28 posts

#original character - 25 posts

#sword - 15 posts

#anthropomorphic lion - 14 posts

#anthro lion - 12 posts

#leo king - 10 posts

#rapier - 10 posts

Longest Tag: 54 characters

#almond milk lattes will now be named “crusader lattes”

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

In another universe, Dr. Chris Carnovo is older, wiser, and a professor of Renaissance history at the local university. He’s also the maestro of the local historical fencing club. One of his colleagues, Audrey King, has a teenage son named Luke whom Chris has decided to teach the art of 17th century Italian rapier. Luke just so happens to be the cousin of Leo King, the boxing Lion character I created. So yeah—my characters all know each other and are related to each other.

Here, Chris demonstrate to Luke the geometric principles of the inquartata. Luke is now a little more motivated to trust Chris’s instructions.

9 notes • Posted 2021-06-17 06:41:13 GMT

#4

See the full post

10 notes • Posted 2021-08-18 05:57:25 GMT

#3

Peter the Marshal, Lord of the Isles, depicted normally and personified (fursonified?) as his heraldic animal—the Islandic lion. In the background is his ancestral castle of Aesirert. He carries Dragonsbane, the dragonsteel greatsword of his ancestor, Peter Dragonsbane.

The Isles are home to a still-healthy population of Islandic lions. They are among the top predators on the Isles, rivaled only by dragons. But while dragons are considered the most powerful animal of Heimar, the lion is considered the most noble. Islanders respect the lions’ living in prides, believing that it mirrors their own strong commitment to family and clan, and they are not generally considered the threat to humans that dragons are. It is also the heraldic symbol of the Prince of the Gods, ever since the days of Peter Dragonsbane, who appeared as a stranger wearing a badge with a golden lion.

The lion was also the heraldic badge of Peter’s father, Claas Perseyn, the previous Lord of the Isles. When Tiberian I united the free Kingdom of Heimar with the slave-holding Thrallic Empire, Claas painted a red lion on his shield and banners, symbolizing his allegiance to the Prince of the Gods but also the unworthiness he felt to bear the Prince of the Gods’ own golden lion, due to his role in supporting Tiberian (albeit before his treacherous nature was revealed). Claas was nicknamed the Red Lion due to his coat of arms and his prowess in battle. 

After Claas’s assassination, Peter was adopted by Torin Capintyre, the Prince of the Gods, and in Torin’s honor adopted the golden lion as his coat of arms. The golden lion head on a blue field is the coat of arms of the Marshals of Heimar to this day.

14 notes • Posted 2021-10-04 00:25:03 GMT

#2

So I just discovered “Beyond the Western Deep” (drawn by @kobbers ) and OMGoodness I love this webcomic! It’s like Game of Thrones with talking animals, rated PG-13. It has great characters with complex motivations, great worldbuilding and character design, an art style I love, and a gripping series of interlocking plot lines. It’s a rare treat to find a story that I have to read compulsively, but this story was one of them.

One of my favorite characters is Hardin, an ermehn warlord whose morally questionable decisions kick off the events of the story. He’s a mysterious character, with an undisclosed plan to help his people take back their land and dignity from the warlike canid, who can really rock the cape and kilt look. I decided to draw him as he appears in Chapter 2, overlooking the pass guarded by Deltrada Garrison as he plans his assault on the fortress—an assault which marks a major turning point for the other main characters.

I drew Hardin freehand, and used a screenshot of the comic to get the right colors.

32 notes • Posted 2021-06-17 06:20:21 GMT

#1

The Phantom of the Opera was one of my favorite novels growing up, and I think I am the last person alive who fell in love with the novel before ever hearing about the musical. This is how I imagine Erik, the eponymous Phantom of the Opera, looks according to the book’s description.

Growing up nerdy and socially awkward, Erik became a particularly special literary friend to me. I think everyone at some point or another has felt like there was something good they could offer the world, like they could be something special for someone—a lover, or even a friend—but has felt like there was some quality about themselves that holds them back. Some feature of themselves that, if seen, would make the world recoil in horror. I don’t think I’m particularly special in having felt this way. I think it’s a universal human feeling—only the details are unique to our own little stories.

But that is why we need characters like Erik. That is why we need novels like The Phantom of the Opera. We need the exaggerated pathos of a Gothic novel to put a magnifying glass to the feelings we feel but do not notice that we are feeling. We need the grotesque face of Erik to haunt us because underneath his mask is not merely a death’s head, but that feature of ours that holds us back. We need Christine and Raoul and the Persian to show us that when we give in to our self-loathing and defeatist attitudes and make that feature of ours our identity, we become the very monsters we fear that others see.

What was Erik, truly? Was he a disfigured monster? Or was he a musical genius who just wanted someone to love, into whom he could pour his heart? Isn’t that what we all want? Isn’t that what makes us human? As Gaston Leroux said of his creation, we must pity Erik, because he was the one who couldn’t see his worth behind his face, and he was the one who hid it from the world.

That is what a well-written character is—they are like us, blown out of proportion until we can see all that we are, good and bad, and who can take us by the hand and say, “I understand. But now it is time for you to live, and have the happily ever after that I could not.”

53 notes • Posted 2021-08-23 08:17:18 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#1yrago My RSS feeds from a decade ago, a snapshot of gadget blogging when that was a thing

Rob Beschizza:

I chanced upon an ancient backup of my RSS feed subscriptions, a cold hard stone of data from my time at Wired in the mid-2000s. The last-modified date on the file is December 2007. I wiped my feeds upon coming to Boing Boing thenabouts: a fresh start and a new perspective.

What I found, over 212 mostly-defunct sites, is a time capsule of web culture from a bygone age—albeit one tailored to the professional purpose of cranking out blog posts about consumer electronics a decade ago. It's not a picture of a wonderful time before all the horrors of Facebook and Twitter set in. This place is not a place of honor. No highly-esteemed deed is commemorated here. But perhaps some of you might like a quick tour, all the same.

The "Main" folder, which contains 30 feeds, was the stuff I actually wanted (or needed) to read. This set would morph over time. I reckon it's easy to spot 2007's passing obsessions from the enduring interests.

↬ Arts and Letters Daily: a minimalist blog of links about smartypants subjects, a Drudge for those days when I sensed a third digit dimly glowing in my IQ. But for the death of founder Denis Dutton, it's exactly the same as it was in 2007! New items daily, but the RSS feed's dead.

↬ Boing Boing. Still around, I hear.

↬ Brass Goggles. A dead feed for a defunct steampunk blog (the last post was in 2013) though the forums seem well-stocked with new postings.

↬ The Consumerist. Dead feed, dead site. Founded in 2005 by Joel Johnson at Gawker, it was sold to Consumer Reports a few years later, lost its edge there, and was finally shuttered (or summarily executed) just a few weeks ago.

↬ Bibliodyssey. Quiescent. Updated until 2015 with wonderful public-domain book art scans and commentary. A twitter account and tumblr rolled on until just last year. There is a book to remember it by should the bits rot.

↬ jwz. Jamie Zawinski's startling and often hilariously bleak reflections on culture, the internet and working at Netscape during the dotcom boom. This was probably the first blog that led me to visit twice, to see if there was more. And there still is, almost daily.

↬ Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. Curios and weirdness emerging from the dust and foul fog of old books, forbidden history and the more speculative reaches of science. So dead the domain is squatted. Creator Josh Foer moved on to Atlas Obscura.

↬ The Tweney Review. Personal blog of my last supervisor at Wired, Dylan Tweney, now a communications executive. It's still going strong!

↬ Strange Maps. Dead feed, dead site, though it's still going as a category at Big Think. Similar projects proliferate now on social media; this was the wonderful original. There was a book.

↬ BLDGBLOG. Architecture blog, posting since 2004 with recent if rarer updates. A fine example of tasteful web brutalism, but I'm no longer a big fan of cement boxes and minimalism with a price tag.

↬ Dethroner. A men's self-care and fashion blog, founded by Joel Johnson, of the tweedy kind that became wildly and effortlessly successful not long after he gave up on it.

↬ MocoLoco. This long-running design blog morphed visually into a magazine in 2015. I have no idea why I liked it then, but indie photoblogs' golden age ended long ago and it's good to see some are thriving.

↬ SciFi Scanner. Long-dead AMC channel blog, very likely the work of one or two editors and likely lost to tidal corporate forces rather than any specific failure or event.

↬ Cult of Mac. Apple news site from another Wired News colleague of mine, Leander Kahney, and surely one of the longest-running at this point. Charlie Sorrel, who I hired at Wired to help me write the Gadget blog, still pens articles there.

↬ Ectoplasmosis. After Wired canned its bizarre, brilliant and unacceptably weird Table of Malcontents blog, its editor John Brownlee (who later joined Joel and I in editing Boing Boing Gadgets) and contributor Eliza Gauger founded Ectoplasmosis: the same thing but with no hysterical calls from Conde Nast wondering what the fuck is going on. It was glorious, too: a high-point of baroque indie blogging in the age before Facebook (and I made the original site design). Both editors later moved onto other projects (Magenta, Problem Glyphs); Gauger maintains the site's archives at tumblr. It was last updated in 2014.

↬ Penny Arcade. Then a webcomic; now a webcomic and a media and events empire.

↬ Paul Boutin. While working at Wired News, I'd heard a rumor that he was my supervisor. But I never spoke to him and only ever received a couple of odd emails, so I just got on with the job until Tweney was hired. His site and its feed are long-dead.

↬ Yanko Design. Classic blockquote chum for gadget bloggers.

↬ City Home News. A offbeat Pittburgh News blog, still online but lying fallow since 2009.

↬ Watchismo. Once a key site for wristwatch fans, Watchismo was folded into watches.com a few years ago. A couple of things were posted to the feed in 2017, but its time has obviously passed.

↬ Gizmodo. Much has changed, but it's still one of the best tech blogs.

↬ Engadget. Much has changed, but it's still one of the best tech blogs.

↬ Boing Boing Gadgets. Site's dead, though the feed is technically live as it redirects to our "gadgets" tag. Thousands of URLs there succumbed to bit-rot at some point, but we have plans to merge its database into Boing Boing's and revive them.

↬ Gear Factor. This was the gadget review column at Wired Magazine, separate from the gadget blog I edited because of the longtime corporate divorce between Wired's print and online divisions. This separation had just been resolved at the time I began working there, and the two "sides" -- literally facing offices in the same building -- were slowly being integrated. The feed's dead, but with an obvious successor, Gear.

↬ The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Required reading at the time, and very much a thing of its time. Now vaguely repulsive.

↬ i09. This brilliant sci-fi and culture blog deserved more than to end up a tag at Gizmodo.

↬ Science Daily: bland but exhaustive torrent of research news, still cranking along.

The "Essentials" Folder was material I wanted to stay on top of, but with work clearly in mind: the background material for systematically belching out content at a particular point in 2007.

↬ Still alive are The Register, Slashdot, Ars Technica, UMPC Portal (the tiny laptop beat!), PC Watch, Techblog, TechCrunch, UberGizmo, Coolest Gadgets, EFF Breaking News, Retro Thing, CNET Reviews, New Scientist, CNET Crave, and MAKE Magazine.

↬ Dead or quiescent: GigaOm (at least for news), Digg/Apple, Akihabara News, Tokyomango, Inside Comcast, Linux Devices (Update: reincarnated at linuxgizmos.com), and Uneasy Silence.

Of the 23 feeds in the "press releases" folder, 17 are dead. Most of the RSS no-shows are for companies like AMD and Intel, however, who surely still offer feeds at new addresses. Feeds for Palm, Nokia and pre-Dell Alienware are genuine dodos. These were interesting enough companies, 10 years ago.

PR Newswire functions as a veneering service so anyone can pretend to have a big PR department, but it is (was?) also legitimately used by the big players as a platform so I monitored the feeds there. They're still populated, but duplicate one another, and it's all complete garbage now. (It was mostly garbage then.)

My "Gadgets and Tech" folder contained the army of late-2000s blogs capitalizing on the success of Gizmodo, Boing Boing, TechCrunch, et al. Back in the day, these were mostly one (or two) young white men furiously extruding commentary on (or snarky rewrites of) press releases, with lots of duplication and an inchoate but seriously-honored unspoken language of mutual respect and first-mover credit. Those sites that survived oftentimes moved to listicles and such: notionally superior and more original content and certainly more sharable on Facebook, but unreadably boring. However, a few old-timey gadget bloggers are still cranking 'em out' in web 1.5 style. And a few were so specialized they actually had readers who loved them.

Still alive: DailyTech, technabob, CdrInfo.com, EverythingUSB, Extremetech, GearFuse, Gizmag, Gizmodiva, Hacked Gadgets, How to Spot A Psychopath/Dans' Data, MobileBurn, NewLaunches, OhGizmo!, ShinyShiny, Stuff.tv, TechDigest, TechDirt, Boy Genius Report, The Red Ferret Journal, Trusted Reviews, Xataca, DigiTimes, MedGadget, Geekologie, Tom's Hardware, Trendhunter, Japan Today, Digital Trends, All About Symbian (Yes, Symbian!), textually, cellular-news, TreeHugger, dezeen.

Dead: jkkmobile.com, Business Week Online, About PC (why), Afrigadget (unique blog about inventors in Africa, still active on FaceBook), DefenseTech, FosFor (died 2013), Gearlog, Mobile-Review.com (but apparently reborn as a Russian language tech blog!), Robot's Dreams, The Gadgets Weblog, Wireless Watch Japan, Accelerating Future, Techopolis, Mobile Magazine, eHome Upgrade, camcorderinfo.com (Update: it became http://Reviewed.com), Digital Home Thoughts (farewell), WiFi Network News (farewell), Salon: Machinist, Near Future Lab, BotJunkie (twitter), and CNN Gizmos.

I followed 18 categories at Free Patents Online, and the site's still alive, though the RSS feeds haven't had any new items since 2016.

In the "news" folder, my picks were fairly standard stuff: BBC, CNET, digg/technology, PC World, Reuters, International Herald Tribune, and a bunch of Yahoo News feeds. The Digg feed's dead; they died and were reborn.

The "Wired" feed folder comprised all the Wired News blogs of the mid-2000s. All are dead. 27B Stroke 6, Autopia, Danger Room, Epicenter, Gadget Lab, Game|Life, Geekdad, Listening Post, Monkey Bites, Table of Malcontents, Underwire, Wired Science.

These were each basically one writer or two and were generally folded into the established mazagine-side arrangements as the Age of Everyone Emulating Gawker came to an end. The feed for former EIC Chris Anderson's personal blog survives, but hasn't been updated since his era. Still going strong is Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond, albeit rigged as a CMS tag rather than a bona fide site of its own.

Still alive from my 2007 "Science" folder are Bad Astronomy (Phil Plait), Bad Science (Ben Goldacre), Pharyngula (PZ Myers) New Urban Legends, NASA Breaking News, and The Panda's Thumb.

Finally, there's a dedicated "iPhone" folder. This was not just the hottest toy of 2007. It was all that was holy in consumer electronics for half a decade. Gadget blogging never really had a golden age, but the iPhone ended any pretense that there were numerous horses in a race of equal potential. Apple won.

Still alive are 9 to 5 Mac, MacRumors, MacSlash, AppleInsider and Daring Fireball. Dead are TUAW, iPhoneCentral, and the iPhone Dev Wiki.

Of all the sites listed here, I couldn't now be paid but to read a few. So long, 2007.

https://boingboing.net/2017/12/29/my-rss-feeds-from-a-decade-ago.html

[ecritetmort]

About the Writer (mobile-friendly version)

To start, more specifics about me as a person is over here on my personal blog.

For eleven years, I’ve been terrorizing the world with stories of vampires, faeries, demons and angels, and anything else suiting my fashion. For context, I’m seventeen and a senior in high school, so you can do the math on when my fascination with storytelling began.

As of right now, I have five active projects:

[Karyn] | potential: All the Tears We Didn’t Cry YA Modern Fantasy | LGBT (wlw) Romance | Novel A teenage girl revives into a world of unconventional angels and demons in which she is the key to a political revolution heralded by a king of shadows and must find her own truth and life before the two gods who returned her to life pull her from it once again. Character tags: Karyn, Death, Triste, Diana, Life, Oscar, Universe Character tags (main blog): Karyn, Death, Triste, Diana, Life, Oscar Pinterest boards: Karyn, Death, Triste, Diana, Life, Oscar, Universe (you can also see my Pinterest boards for some of the reoccurring settings.)

[Rose-Colored Boy] | potential: Tapes for Icarus Urban Fantasy | LGBT (not focus) | Novella (probably) (plot in progress:) focussing on an oracle, Tijuana, their roommates Hester (Oracle-in-training) and André (herbologist), and their brother, [Icarus], who has been traveling around the world as Apollo’s lover. Character tags (currently empty): Tijuana, Hester, André Pinterest boards: multi: rose-colored boy

[Apprentices] | (no working title yet) YA Historical Fantasy | LBGT (not focus) | Novel (in progress:) Set in Karyn’s world almost a hundred years earlier, twin sisters Zeta and Delta are offered apprenticeships by the twin gods of their world, and in the process come to know the Earth they have only glimpsed through their fathers’ and mother’s stories. Character tags (currently empty): Delta, Zeta, Bella, Castor, Pollux, Death, Life, Betelgeuse, Anne, Rajani Pinterest boards: multi: apprentices, Death, Life, Anne

[Girl Gangs] | (no working title yet) NA Urban Fantasy | LGBT (wlw) Romance | Novella (or shorter) Vigilante Moryseis has always gone by the name the Black Adder, but not until she meets the tiefling Red Rose does she realize that there’s more to her scales than just a nickname, and it’s going to take both dealing with her raging crush on Akdai and the hunters flooding her city to protect her family. Character tags (empty): Moryseis, Akdai, PAM Pinterest boards: Moryseis, Akdai

[etc] | (no working title) Urban Fantasy | LGBT (non focus) | Slice-of-Life short story collection Set in a similar world to Mory and Akdai’s, it centers around a web of vampires, incubi and succubi, witches, and mages settled into a world where magic is common, but there’s always that one dude who just isn’t chill with vampires. Light-hearted without being all fluff. Character tags: Nathan (vampire), Mya (blood mage), Tanith (vampire), Alex (incubus), Ava (herbologist), Lydia (witch and elderly landlady), Kenneth (gorgon)

As you can see, I have a bit of an affinity for gay ladies, in part because I am a gay lady, and fantasy. Karyn and the others, as my oldest characters, have the most development, while Tijuana, Hester, and André are my newest (but I didn’t list these in any particular order outside of what came to mind first, so). PAM and Akdai were first developed by a friend and I for a D&D campaign, with Akdai being my own, which is why she is.. literally a tiefling. From D&D.

In addition to my own characters, my wonderful datemate @thegreatphantasm and I have a series of crossover universes between their future webcomic, Here Be Lions, and what I’ve affectionately nicknamed the Karynverse (I’ll give it a better name eventually, I swear). There are four as of now, in order:

Joint House AU | Pride has kids. Karyn needs a home. Why not? Crossover Ships: Salted Caramel (Pride/Death), the Edges  (Triste/Adikias), (Louise/Oscar) Crossover-specific Characters: Aneko, Blaise

College JH AU | Pride and Death are the graduate student saviors of the three disasters of undergraduate students in room 66. (Info on this AU) Crossover Ships: Salted Caramel, the Edges, Fleur-de-3  (Florence/Oscar/Louise) Crossover-specific Characters: Noah

Animalia AU (aka the Furry AU) | It’s the joint house AU, except in a science fiction world where all humans are genetically modified to be furries. (Look to the JH AU for details, or this post for info on the world.)

Just Your Average Canon Casual Crossover | As on the tin: the worlds are together, but outside of a few times, they don’t interact. Canon is canon. Crossover Ship: Salted Caramel

In the JH and college AUs, the results of some ships are children that don’t exist in either canon. You can read an explanation of Blaise (and Aneko, though she isn’t mentioned by name) here. (Spoilers: Adikias wanted to do some magical artificial insemination.) As for Noah, he’s Florence and Oscar’s son, the one and only child of our one and only truly conventional m/f couple. Also, in case you couldn’t tell, I have a soft spot in my heart for Salted Caramel, and it is the sole reason for the genesis for every single crossover AU you see here. Every. Single. One.

Otherwise, you might find some allusions to a scrapped Steven Universe-crossover canon AU called Children of War, but I hated it so much that in a burst of energy one fateful 2 AM I deleted just about every post dedicated to it. I also have a pet canon AU where Karyn doesn’t leave home, leading to she and Death having odd roommate status as her life continues despite the grander plot, almost all contained in a short series called Death & Co., centered around little clashes of Karyn’s average Asian-American teenage life with Overprotective Asshole™ Death.

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Hyperallergic: Banned Horror Comics Rise from the Dead

Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s (all images courtesy of Fantagraphics Books)

The charges that Fredric Wertham made in 1954’s Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth — that a relationship existed between comics reading and “violent forms of juvenile delinquency” — didn’t materialize out of thin air. The oft-vilified German-born American psychiatrist gets a lot of credit for a censorship campaign that had legs long before his articles and book were pinned to it. Critics and clergymen were blasting all kinds of comics as “objectionable” for years, singling out depictions of gun violence, gore, and a broad range of fare they deemed offensive. Church bulletins and hyperbolic magazine features laid the groundwork for a national panic over comics, but the war on the medium gained steam in postwar America, just as some comics became increasingly violent and grim.

“The debate over comic books hopped from the back of the newspaper to the front, section by section — from the book reviews and religious columns to the ‘women’s’ department to the hard-news pages,” writes David Hadju in The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. Ordinances criminalized newsstand comics sales in the late 1940s in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and more. “Comic Books Banned in Detroit as ‘Corrupting'” blared a headline in The Washington Post in 1948, when somewhere between 80 and 100 million comics were being sold monthly.

Wertham scored a seat before the Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency in April 1954. When governmental regulation loomed, the self-regulatory Comics Code Authority emerged that fall. A problematic and sweeping set of vanilla rules instituted to police comics’ subject matter and art, the Code sank publishers and killed off the kind of crime and horror books for which readers crowded newsstands. Hadju reports that by the early “pre-Code” 1950s, horror comics in particular had grown “ever more gruesome and lurid.” And they were everywhere.

“By the end of 1952,” he writes, “nearly one-third of all the comics on the newsstands were devoted to the macabre.”

From Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s

Swamp creatures and animated but still-rotting corpses swarm the 40 stories collected in the new edition of Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s, a survey of grisly pre-Code comics that hasn’t been in circulation since 2011. While reprints of the prestigious and oft-imitated EC Comics titles over the years have cemented a sterling reputation for series like Tales from the Crypt, scholars Greg Sadowski and John Benson mine less-well-known ten-cent anthologies like Black Magic, Weird Adventures, and more, heralding a time when cheap four-color printing processes meant that an easily reproducible palette would be manufactured from hand-separated colors. These comics feel like dessert, and they should. Benson, an EC aficionado with his own fanzine to prove it, suggests we make-believe we’re adolescents of the era, “reading these stories slowly to savor every chilling moment.”

Yarns excerpted from Beware Terror Tales and others will read like nonsense to most folk. Their smudgy aesthetic will confound today’s devotees of Marvel’s digitally polished relaunches, too, while racist caricatures like the brown-skinned people and Haitian “voodoo” in 1952’s “Drum of Doom” haven’t aged well, either. But for every predictable zombie plot, there is a hallucinatory murder mystery like “Colorama,” penciled by artist Bob Powell in 1953.

Authored by Harvey Comics editor and admitted EC fan Sid Jacobson (who reportedly directed Chamber of Chills artist Howard Nostrand to just “copy” the work of EC’s illustrators), “Colorama” has Powell playing generously with perspective and color. The direction is clever for a disorienting first-person narrative about a colorblind killer, in which the cosmic swirls representing his protagonist’s blurred vision bump up against Powell’s realist urban backdrops and assured landscape drawing. Elsewhere, MAD cartoonist Basil Wolverton, whose absurdist productions had a clear impact on underground comix artists, crafts nasty bald-headed gargoyles for Weird Tales of the Future, their leathery olive-green skin flecked with innumerable short dashes that lend a convincing illusion of ripples of movement.

From Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s

Ludicrous storylines aside, Four Color Fear‘s selection and archival research add critical context to a fascinating age for comics in North America. Benson’s insights reveal that the book’s frequent nondescript Iger Studio credit (an outfit founded by Will Eisner and Samuel “Jerry” Iger) likely refers to the sole work of an editorial powerhouse named Ruth Roche, who cranked out horror scripts and lots more for the publisher. Roche’s framework subsequently went to pencilers and inkers like New Jersey–born artist Jay Disbrow.

In an interview with publisher Craig Yoe that prefaces Jay Disbrow’s Monster Invasion, Disbrow connects his comics career to a consumption of Sunday supplements as a kid and remembers tiring of commuting from Asbury Park into Manhattan for inking and penciling gigs at Iger in his 20s. After a year, Disbrow traded up for freelance assignments as a writer, artist, inker, and letterer of horror and romance for Star Publications editor Leonard “L.B.” Cole. Jay Disbrow’s Monster Invasion culls mostly from this pre-Code horror work, specifically the creature-centric stories he did for supernatural- and suspense-themed anthologies Ghostly Weird Stories, Blue Bolt Weird Tales of Terror, and more.

“Cole wanted ghost stories,” explains Disbrow of his Star comics tenure. “I said to him, ‘That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. What we oughta be doing is monster stories!'”

Jay Disbrow’s Monster Invasion images( © 2017 Gussoni-Yoe Studio, Inc.)

There’s no supplementary material aside from the interview here, and unforgivable book design decisions give way to tacky fonts and fake blood splotches in the margins. But Jay Disbrow’s Monster Invasion adds weight to the legacy of an artist best known for “jungle comics,” science fiction such as The Flames of Gyro, and the gorgeous, full-color “syndicate-type” webcomic called Aroc of Zenith that he started in his 70s.

Like a lot of Golden Age creators, Disbrow could’ve used a watchful editor. Loads of copy swallows up word balloons and captions, and lines and lines of the artist’s hand-lettered text are given little room for legibility. His figure drawing needed practice, too. The often wooden movements and overlong, flat-looking limbs rendered his humans even less likely to succeed in battle with the monsters he loved to draw. But the inventive layouts, sinister terror, and wealth of beasts here are things of beauty.

Jay Disbrow’s Monster Invasion images (© 2017 Gussoni-Yoe Studio, Inc.)

Panels dart inward at strange angles in “A Stony Death,” allowing for worming gutters and the provocative inclusion of an odd center panel. “The Ghoul of the North,” like every creature here, is enormous amid puny mortals. Giant fanged ogres from “the bowels of the earth” terrorize a novelist in “The Insider,” while a red-eyed specter towers over his prey in “The Unknown Presence.” Cinematic shadows blanket caverns and crime scenes, and action bursts out from under audacious type in title-page headers as graphic design and vintage movie posters figure into these pages as frequently as Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon strips do. Disbrow’s action sequences are explosive, with hulking abominations reaching out from the back corner of a panel toward a helpless character in the foreground. All of your pre-Code goods are here: blood and guns and tentacles and stranglings and hell demons.

And then … nothing.

Fredric Wertham took aim at Star’s Spook and more in his book, and the company shuttered shortly after the Senate Subcommittee hearings on comics. In Disbrow’s talk with Yoe, he recalls the “comic book crash of 1954,” owing to the good Christians who gathered around bonfires to torch comics in Wisconsin and New York, and the tarring of publishers as Communists and smut peddlers. Although University of Illinois professor Carol Tilley would find that Wertham’s “research” relied on omissions and manipulated data, the campaign to censor comics took a terrible toll on the industry. Awash in publicity, the hearings and resulting Comics Code effectively crippled then-thriving studios. Publishers killed titles deemed disagreeable and sent their staff home. There were other factors, but suddenly, hundreds of comics professionals in the late 1950s would never work in the medium again.

“Unlike their rough counterparts in the Red Scare, the artists and writers caught up in the comic-book controversy were never charged with espionage, treason, contempt of Congress or court, or obstruction of justice,” writes Hadju in The Ten-Cent Plague. “What they did was tell outrageous stories in cartoon pictures, a fact that makes their struggle and their downfall all the more strange and sad.”

Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s is available from by Fantagraphics Books. Jay Disbrow’s Monster Invasion is available from Yoe Books.

The post Banned Horror Comics Rise from the Dead appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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NOTE: Page 1 until 33 are from Comic Studies subject back in 2018. Thus, the mistakes and wonky-ness in terms of art and English language are not subtle at all. :”P Deadlines rush!

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The map I designed is not what I really fond of. The most rush world-building. But it’s already printed as a book, so, can’t go back. Gotta move forward while reworking, innovating the ideas, and cutting corners from page 33 onwards.

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I seriously dislike how I chose the lettering... :”D Welp, first time for everything.

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NOTE: Page 1 until 33 are from Comic Studies subject back in 2018. Thus, the mistakes and wonky-ness in terms of art and English language are not subtle at all. :”P Deadlines rush!

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NOTE: Page 1 until 33 are from Comic Studies subject back in 2018. Thus, the mistakes and wonky-ness in terms of art and English language are not subtle at all. :”P Deadlines rush!

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NOTE: Page 1 until 33 are from Comic Studies subject back in 2018. Thus, the mistakes and wonky-ness in terms of art and English language are not subtle at all. :”P Deadlines rush!

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NOTE: Page 1 until 33 are from Comic Studies subject back in 2018. Thus, the mistakes and wonky-ness in terms of art and English language are not subtle at all. :”P Deadlines rush!

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NOTE: Page 1 until 33 are from Comic Studies subject back in 2018. Thus, the mistakes and wonky-ness in terms of art and English language are not subtle at all. :”P Deadlines rush!