Think of this as the “Director's Cut” for the comic that I've been working on the past few months. If you've noticed, I haven't been doing regular blog updates, it's because I've been working on this comic that I call “The Ghost of Jupiter.” You can read it in its entirety on my Deviant Art account, and in the original resolution (very high quality). Deviant Art isn't the best site for hosting a web comic, but it is a great site for hosting original artwork.
So, what is the “Ghost of Jupiter” comic?
It's part Film Noir and part Atomic Age Sci-Fi. My personal interpretation of David D. Friedman's vision of what a true anarcho-capitalist society would look like. Set in the not so distance future, the entire solar system is colonized, but this story in particular takes place on Enceledus. It's a world where various rights enforcement agencies are crossing paths, so what are the conflicts that they are dealing with? And even though space travel is commonplace, there still appears to be a need for a good gumshoe... Or, two, or three, or several.
Everyone has their own winter rituals. Either you make them or you follow what has come before, or you choose to ignore them all together, we're all acutely aware that it's something that a lot of us do every year. Figuratively, symbolically, or astrologically, everything in the human condition is a cycle of some sort, like a series of a million different Venn diagrams creating infinite combinations of various overlapping factors, perpetually in motion like celestial gears; these cycles dictate a number of things related to our lives. Or, the cycles at least preside an influence over our perceptions, emotions, and actions during certain times of the year, or periods in our lives over the course of several years.
As the quality of televised and digital entertainment has degraded over the years, and not wanting to be bombarded by the sheer negativity of it all, I've found myself spending more time listening to music and reading comics. It's been a gradual transition for me... That isn't to say that I don't spend entirely way too much time watching garbage on YouTube or mindlessly surfing, looking at things I'll never buy, or researching video games, or learning things that have no real practical purpose in my life other than to be interesting topics for cocktail parties that I'll never attend, etc.
Something happened though... A tipping point? I did attempt doing a web comic maybe a year or so ago, but I never stuck with it. I have revisited the idea though, and this time I sat and thought about the story ahead of putting pencil to paper, I drew a few outlines and sketches first.
Just from my 9-to-5 and thinking about the type of comic that I wanted to read, I came upon the idea of an insurance company in the relatively near future. But it's going to evolve beyond that, because, fuck it, I have a story universe where people live on Europa and Titan, and giant monsters are a real thing. So I'm going to play with the surreal and the supernatural, the pragmatic and the practical, and I want to put it together to highlight the absurdity of life and the human condition.
Not sure if this will technically be a review of the album... But it's the one album that I've been listening to a lot lately. I only had a mild fascination with Pierce the Veil when they first came out. After I'm done ranting about music today, I'll talk a little bit about MTK Ultra tomorrow, which is a web comic I'm working on and developing.