I was forwarded a promotional mail for Fluorescent Black. The collection is being released as a hardcover and promo material is here:

http://www.heavymetal.com/shm/product_i ... ts_id=5496

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Fluoresce ... ?ref=share


My personal opinion is that Fluorescent Black is a bland story with good artwork.

I'd like to talk a little about Heavy Metal Magazine where Fluorescent black was originally published. That magazine was something of a culture carrier for a long time, it revolutionized comics(yeah graphic novels) when it first came out in France in the mid 70's.

The first stories were arty psychedelic, fantasy, almost always set in space. Space being the final frontier at that time. The 80's stories are about computers and robots.

The thing is... Heavy Metal/Metal Hurlant was great. It was started by borderline nutty people with a vision. They had an idea of what they wanted comics to look like, and they produced these surreal stories no one had ever seen before. No one had seen comics like that, They created complete never before seen universes. And it took off and became hugely popular. Dio(mentioned a few days ago) was part of the cultural soundtrack singing with Black Sabbath on the Heaven And Hell album. It was fresh, edgy and huge.

Biopunk is still looking for that soul, language, imagery that Metal Hurlant captured and presented for people who just saw a man walk on the moon. That sense of wonder, that everything is possible.

“Everyone but my friends are zombies or out to get my body parts” just doesn't capture what synbioculture feels like. It's so incredibly far from the weird dream like stories that somehow resonated with their time and audience to make Heavy Metal magazine great to begin with.

The “zombies and body parts” theme is analogous to how space novels in the 50:is mostly involved robots sent by a superior civilization to conquer earth... it's just not the Heavy Metal way.

It takes balls to do something unsafe. Something that hasn't been done before... Gibsons Neuromancer is just weird. I didn't understand half of it the first time I read it. Maybe weird is a necessary prerequisite to be brilliant.

Fan art, pinupversion of Blue from Fluorescent Black by Dan Luvisi, link

That's all

-Splicer

bland story? You have any idea what it means they will be able to do if the comic comes true?

sigh, its always about the human experience here, never the tech.