Tag Archives: cyberpunk

Comics, Top Fives

Top Five Characters that Should be in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Reading a new interview from Alan Moore always reminds me of one of his greats: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I’m sure most will only remember the godawful  Sean Connery movie, but the comic portrayed Victorian literary characters in a great steampunk English backdrop against a Cavorite-hunting Professor Moriarty and the War of the Worlds itself. Moore is still writing the series, with the next part of  Vol. 3 -Century being released sometime in 2011. With that in mind, I started wondering what other characters made throughout the century would fit in this illustrious and highly dysfunctional super-heroic team?


Dr. Victor Frankenstein: Every team needs a Henry Pym, and having one of fiction’s most famous mad scientists on the team would definitely help. I can even see him as a sort of forensic scientist that can aid the team in figuring out how to properly dissect a shoggoth when they land on English soils. You know he can also bring some bruisers to the fight, provided you give him a lab, a graveyard, and a slaughterhouse.

Lara Croft: Now before anyone freaks out, think about it. She has all the fighting and shooting skills that the current team’s adventurer, Alan Quatermain, has and then some. Seeing that Moore is taking references from TV shows for Century, I don’t see why it would be much of a stretch to take one of the more famous video game references (besides licensing issues, of course) and put her on the team. She’s also British to boot.

The Doctor: While some might call this choice a bit overpowered, bringing one of British sci-fi’s largest exports over could make for an interesting team member if done right.I mean, think about it: the Doctor as written by Alan Moore? you know the Time Lord is going to end up pretty twisted.

Nick Haflinger: Now this character isn’t known to many sci-fi fans, but he was the hacker protagonist in the novel The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner.  The book was published in 1975, way before the cyberpunk genre blew up. This book started the use of the word “worm” as a self-replicating computer program. Although his tools are pretty outdated now, as he used public telephones to make new identities, developing him into a reverse anachronistic character for a League in the ’60s and ’70s is a good idea. He could use computer/programming concepts that wouldn’t exist yet, and serve as a bridge between dystopian characters like Winston Smith from older stories like 1984 (covered in another League story, Black Dossier) and the crazed hackers  that had yet to come out  from writers like William Gibson or Neal Stephenson.

Hannibal Lecter: An excellently cultured serial killer, Lecter’s medical and psychiatric knowledge is of great use to a team when trying to hunt other psychopaths down. If the fact that in Hannibal Rising a young Lecter is given kick-ass kenjutsu skills is added , this plus his intense way of messing with people’s minds would make him a great anti-hero on par with Midnighter from the Authority. Imagine it: He gets in the bad guys’ heads, makes them slip up once, and then slices them up in preparation for a wonderful dinner.

Honorable Mentions

The Shadow

Tyler Durden

Patrick Bateman

Buffy Summers

 

With that in mind, I started wondering what other characters made throughout the century would fit in this illustrious and highly dysfunctional super-heroic team?

Hannibal Lecter:

Thomas Harris’ excellently cultured serial killer is the first on my list for one reason alone: with his medical and psychological knowledge, he could go toe-to-toe with an hero like The Midnighter from (now defunct ) Wildstorm’s The Authority. Imagine it: He could size up an opponent just like he sized up Clarice Starling, Dr. Chilton, and (Red Dragon’s character), and once they’re all thoroughly mind-fucked, he slices them in two with the katana he kept from Hannibal Rising.

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Art, Links, Literature, Poetry, Sci Fi, Science

Afrocyberpunk to Genocide

It’s really cool to see sci-fi writers from other parts of the world getting some press, so let’s all give  Jonathan Dotse props for actively trying to bring the cyberpunk genre to Africa. Sci-fi fans should check it out regularly to see a different take on what has become a rather played-out genre.

Turing it back to just regular science (if you can call it that), a group of British scientists have found a way to transfer all the genetic material of one egg  without mitochondria. The reason this is interesting is in how this could save many people in the future from diseases caused by mitochondrial defects.

Here’s an eye-opener: approximately 600,000 workers in China die a year making the parts for the computer or mobile phone you’re reading this from. They even have a name for it: guolaosi, which is Mandarin for “worked to death”.  The Consumerist article got its info from this Johann Hari article. Hari also wrote the amazingly good article on horrible work conditions in Dubai that I mentioned a while back.

For all you conspiracy theorists, reading up on the mysterious mass poisoning at  Pont-Saint-Esprit has a pretty interesting theory: instead of the ergot poisoning that has mainly been seen as the main cause of the psychosis people felt, one Hank P. Albarelli Jr wrote a book claiming that the CIA used Pont-Saint-Esprit as a LSD testing groundLSD as part of that tin-foil hat favorite,  MKULTRA . Add Rennes-le-Château to it and you can start making a pretty weird road trip in southeast France.

Comic artist Cameron Stewart, who happens to have a blog for all his artwork, has won a Shuster and Eisner Award for his own webcomic,   Sin Titulo. It’s a good noir fantasy story about one man’s descent into some dangerous people and some of his own personal demons as well.

I just got into reading the poems written by Jeremy Prynne, and I seriously don’t know what to make of it. There’s this odd lyricism that exists in his almost stream-of-consciousness poems that works somehow. Check out this introduction into the man and his work, and here is a link for one of his pieces, ‘Rich in Vitamin C’ to learn more.

To cap it all off, here’s a video of  Carlos Andrés Gómez’s amazing spoken word poem, “What’s Genocide?” (here’s a link to the written version):

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