ise

On the occasion of First Night, 2001, I was a sometime member of an experimental rock band/theatrical troupe known as Industrial Sonic Echo. First Night is what New Englanders refer to New Years as. ISE was like a real-life Buckaroo Bonzai, a band of artist-scientists whose performance was one third audio, one third organized movement, and one third structure and sculpture, and two-thirds mindfuck. The setting was Worcester, Massachusetts. Specifically, on that New Years Eve evening of the year 2000AD, the Worcester Art Museum, where we orchestrated two sets for a supposed grand total of roughly 2000 helpless viewers.
This was the playbill I wrote for the night, long thought lost.

The Neo Mythography...the Nuclear Eyeballs!

See the technological static of pure science fiction and all that is gothic and the yin-yang of the Greek poet Hesiod while Friedrich Nietzsche and the Mad Monk Grigori Rasputin and Albert Einstein and Gene Roddenberry and the astroGOD Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan gone too far again with whiskey and artificial crystals and Osiris Was A Black God and the sounds of Pink Floyd and Sun Ra and maybe George Clinton and a random tribal dance of Australian aborigines in honor of their wacky Rainbow Serpent Dagon and see Christian guilt and televisions galore and contraband and DNA strands and the helix is beautiful this time of year and see the grassy Dallas knoll and charcoal figures on the cave walls and the Bhagavad ala Gita-Baby (don't you know that I love you?) and the Divine Comedy of Groucho and Doktor Faustus and Illuminatus to the Nth and geometric symbolism mixed with Aegyptian mythology mixed with Tibetan mysticism mixed with Stanley Kubrick films in reverse and ALIEN LIFE and see falling airplanes and rusty computers and anti-matter and apocalyptic nightmares of trashed cityscape streets and darkened urban jungles and painted faces hiding therein and political jokes and religious truths and see Jack Kirby parademons driving fast old cars through Timothy Leary timelessness and mental warnings of Danger Danger Danger and cyberpunx radiation energy while consciousness engineering weblines to bring you the Lost Gods in full process techni-colour and electrical emotions and codex arcana...

...FUSION!


These digital souls, locked within their own timestream continuum...

- What sweet music they make!

Nancy Hernandez and the Black Widows

Written by Scott "el Diablo" Marcano & Jaime Zevallos
Illustrated by Juan Romera
Self Published

Nancy Hernandez is a good girl, a student at Felipe H Middle School, where she is a straight A student, hall monitor, and general teacher's pet. She earnestly tries hard, wanting to find a better future for herself. The Black Widows, a Latina gang consisting of her fellow students, are not good girls. Led by the hard and delinquent Shorty, Ratita, Pollita, Tattletale, Roach, Face, and new recruit Dulce care less about the future and more about mindlessly showing the world how little they care for anything at all. With such a volatile mix of personalities, it is safe to presume that wackiness does not ensue.
This original graphic novel may be more than a little too energetic to qualify as a slice of life piece, although much of the language is certainly adult. A fastly-moving plot and realistically sharp dialogue together present a tale with more horror than typically found in coming of age narratives. I am very familiar with Marcano's previous endeavors as a comics scribe. Actually, Nancy's story here seems to contain aspects from Marcano's debut book The Unwanted, wherein troubled youths and their colorfully-personified elders are all caught up in a supernatural struggle. But Nancy's story here is presented in a voice more reminiscent of Marcano's later book HUM, which was an evolutionary (and horribly overlooked) leap in his storytelling ability wherein spirituality and revolution go hand in bloody hand. Here teamed with actor Jaime Zevallos he offers a solid story of arrogantly ignorant youth self-destructing amidst an appropriate Halloween backdrop.
Juan Romera's art is so much more concise this time at bat, compared with his prior contributions in The Unwanted. What caught my eye immediately was his experimental explorations of shape and form, to levels that would impress even the great Mark Badger. He is not just a visual storyteller, he is quite stylish and thoughtful in how he pulls the reader along. The black and white interiors are so different, yet as equally evolved, as his painted cover- I love love love artists who put such consideration into what they do, and I am eager to see what the man has next on his creative agenda.

Nancy Hernandez and the Black Widows, without revealing too much here, is a new work (available in this month's Previews catalogue from Diamond!) that is something much more daring than one might expect from a plot full of inner city youthful angst. There is real violence and death, yes, but there is also the pleasantly surreal aspects of The Things That Go Bump In The Night Immortal. Marcano is called Diablo for a reason. And this work, aided and abetted by such a fine roster of talent, is one of his more mature efforts in comix to date. If you like a fun read without capes and with something meaningful to say, then do NOT let this book go unnoticed.
Or I will throw rats at you.

Stiletto 8

Everything and the kitchen sink by John B. Lai
Published by Ultimate Comics Group

While our vivacious heroine Stiletto and her pet puppy monster Rigby are hitching a ride back to Earth with the Pak-Wan rebels (following the big victory last month), their ship is attacked hard by a warbird from the Godra empire. That was last issue. This iss we see the girl and her dog taken prisoner aboard the Godra ship and forced into a battle arena against seemingly dozens of the brutish warriors. Freeing a new friend, the trio fight and fight and fight. And make a few sexual innuendos along the way. Do they survive? Does anyone, really?

Lai wraps up his second big story arc of everybody's favorite intergalactic stripper. This plot unfolds deftly amidst the violence. And yes, there is nonstop violence in this book, with gnarly fight sequencing and alien spaceships being blasted back to Creation. But despite the hoopla, we do meet a major new character in Stiletto's crazy sci-fi world, the Kadra fighter Ren. So readers may well at long long last be seeing Stiletto encountering someone who may well be her equal enough so as to do something more than mere sexual innuendoing. Not that sexual innuendoing is not fun, but then neither is the third. or fourth dimension, honestly. The IMPORTANT thing to be remembered and so acknowledged, of course, is that this issue does still, despite such copious quantities of character development, have nipples, nipples, and nipples.

The art continues to shine and evolve. The pages are as pretty to look at, the storytelling becomes even more clearer, and Rigby is still adorable while she licks alien blood off the floor. As expected, a plenitude of nifty alien designs on show, from the creatures to their tech and environs. Imagination is a wonderful thing, and Stiletto is loaded up the arse with it in spades.

And yes, the second Stiletto storyline from the nilskidoo-approved ongoing series does indeed wrap here, but it is my understanding that likeminded Stiletto fanatics should expect a trade collection of issues 5-8 coming soon...and with this snazzy cover:

So make like a stone and paint it, black!

despair gets hers

Been gone from LouEVIL for two days now and I have no desire, no cause, to ever return. Though I am not online as much for the time being, I do yet have a few interviews in progress, along with a growing stack of reviews. And a secret project!
Reading list...finished the Lenny Bruce book, then Ayn Rand's Anthem. Currently halfway through L. Sprague DeCamp's excellent (though vicious) biography of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

More to follow, as ever.