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Gay🏅irl

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I’ve seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism going around, but to really appreciate it you have to know the context.

The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech. She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.

Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead in the eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”

She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit. She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable”. She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees. And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

Ursula K LeGuin got up in front of an audience of some of the most powerful people in publishing, was expected to give a trite and politically safe argument about literature, and instead told them directly “Your empire will fall. And I will help it along.”

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Adventures into Terror #30 - Atlas, April 1954. Cover by Syd Shores (illustration) & Stan Goldberg (colors).

The Dead Don't Sleep by Al Eadeh.

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My take on a Muppet version of the Princess Bride

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If you like classic science fiction, one of the genre’s best magazines can now be found online for free. Archive.org is now home to a collection of Galaxy Science Fiction, which published some of the genre’s best works, such as an early version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man.

The collection contains 355 separate issues, ranging from 1950 through 1976. Open Culture notes that it’s not quite the entire run of the magazine, but it’s got plenty of material to keep fans occupied for years. It includes stories from science fiction legends such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Clifford Simak, and Theodore Sturgeon. There are also some underappreciated authors who deserve re-discovery, such as Kris Neville, Alan E. Nourse, or John Christopher. (Sadly, like most publications of this era, female SF authors were underrepresented.)

Galaxy Science Fiction was a digest magazine founded by editor Horace Leonard Gold, after the Second World War. During this time, the science fiction field was in flux. The scene’s biggest publication, Astounding Science Fiction, was starting to lose its edge, while American readers had more entertainment options, like radio, novels, or television…

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FREAKIN’ ROOMMATES

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1984 printing of Han Solo and the Lost Legacy. An original novel by Brian Daley. Cover art by Willian Schmidt. It was originally published in 1981 and was the third of three Han Solo books.

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SCIFI MONTH!

Tom Corbett Punch Out Figures

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Disect-An-Alien - Mad Scientist (Mattel)

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SCIFI MONTH!

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A Wizard Of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin

A Wizard Of Earthsea / The Tombs Of Atuan / The Farthest Shore

Art by Pauline Ellison

Bantam Books (1975)

#Paperback Cover #Paperback Art #A Wizard Of Earthsea #Ursula K LeGuin #Pauline Ellison #Fantasy #Vintage #Art #Paperback #Paperbacks #Earthsea #The Tombs Of Atuan #The Farthest Shore #Dragons #Earthsea Trilogy #Bantam Books #Bantam #1975 #1970s #70s

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Snapshots from the Gemini 7 mission, December 4-18, 1965.

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Cyclops

Art by Dave Rapoza

#Comics #Fantasy #Dave Rapoza #Cyclops #Mythology #Myth

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Espectros #13 - 16, Ediciones Vertice, Spain 1973.

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Espectros #17 - 21 ~ Ediciones Vertice, Spain 1973. Cover art by Rafael López Espí.

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Poster for the unproduced 1984 live-action horror adaptation GARFIELD: FIRST BLOOD.

Following the success of CUJO in 1983, studios were scrambling to find the next hit “killer pet” flick. Notorious grindhouse auteur Ron Sharleton, seeking a big-budget movie deal to fund his struggling production of CANNIBAL QUARTERBACK 2, set his sights on the most unlikely of properties: Jim Davis’ beloved comic strip Garfield. Sharleton, a self-proclaimed fan of Garfield who called the strip “a subversive celebration of misanthropy,” believed an “alternative, adult” spin on the character could thrive in tandem with its kid-friendly cartoons. Describing his rationale in an interview later, Sharleton said: “You have all of these R-rated films that come out and become big hits and the studios want to suck every penny out of one idea, so they sanitize it and repackage it as a cartoon for kids. So I said, why can’t we do the reverse?”

GARFIELD: FIRST BLOOD was pitched as a dark, gritty reimagining in which the titular cat, pushed to the brink on a particularly bad Monday, finally snaps and kills Jon’s dimwitted dog Odie. As he tastes Odie’s blood, Garfield is overcome by how good it felt to put a permanent end to something that annoyed him. He then realizes that everything and everyone annoy him, and his murderous rampage begins.

Describing his take on the character, Sharleton said: “Garfield never really sat right with me as a children’s character. He’s so much darker, more complex. You have this cat who is filled with contempt; he looks at the world around him with radical skepticism and scowls at the prison of tedium mankind calls ‘society,’ and he responds with this very self-indulgent nihilism: Be lazy, be a glutton, don’t participate in anything because it’s all bullshit. Garfield looks at Jon waking up early on a Monday and putting on his tie to go to a job he hates, and he sees a pathetic fool. It’s all such a powerful rejection of the Reagan Wall Street capitalist disease that has poisoned the 80s. ‘Work hard, climb the ladder, buy a boat!’ Garfield says fuck that, stay home, eat lasagna, accept no master. But living as an iconoclast in a conformist world has filled him with all this tension. There’s anger in there, you know? So I wanted to examine what would happen if Garfield was finally pushed over the edge. Where’s the line between a passive nihilist and a violent anarchist?”

Warner Bros execs were intrigued by Sharleton’s pitch (and the lucrative cash cow of the Garfield brand) and funded a short “proof-of-concept” trailer, directed by Sharleton, to convince Garfield creator Jim Davis of the idea. The trailer reportedly went “all-in” on Sharleton’s signature “splattercore” horror, including a scene where Garfield grinds up Liz Wilson alive in a meat grinder and bakes her flesh into a lasagna he then serves to Jon. The presentation to Davis was described as “one of the most disastrously miscalculated meetings in modern Hollywood,” with Davis stopping the trailer midway to ask the room “are you people completely fucking insane?” before storming out.

Reflecting on the meeting years later, an anonymous former Warner exec said “we knew it was a long shot, but we really felt like the only way to sell the concept was to push it as far as possible. In retrospect I think yeah, we did let it go too far. We were so absorbed in it that we didn’t realize how jarring it would be for a guy like Jim Davis to just be thrown into this cold. I think it was a mistake to open with the Nermal blender scene, but we wanted shock, and we thought… I don’t know, everyone was doing a LOT of cocaine back then. Well, everyone except Jim Davis."

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NOTE: This alternate reality horror story is part of my NightmAIres narrative art series. NightmAIres are windows into other worlds and alternate histories, conceived/written by me and visualized with synthography and Photoshop.

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