Been trying to keep myself busy and distracted from my fucked up laptop( it needs a new hard drive. Oh joy)
And the continuing saga of "Guess What Needs To Be Fixed Now" with my car.
So I've been re-reading the comics from my collection, and today I focused on the Indy section of my collection with Ballistic by writer Adam Egypt Mortimer and well-known artist Derrick Robinson( The Boys, Transpolitian).
If you've never heard of it, it's a true indie book that was put out in 2013 by small indie publisher Black Mask Studios.
This was, according to series writer Adam Egypt Mortimer, all came about during a discussion with a friend in which Mortimer's friend theorized if tools were alive, they wouldn't allow people to use them to harm or kill. To which Mortimer says " If our tools were alive, those tools would be as insane as we are."
So springing off that discussion, Mortimer, with the artistic help and imagery of Robinson, created the crazy and very fucked up futuristic world of Ballistic.
In this world of Repo City, people are constantly upgrading and modifying their bodies using the latest trendy technological upgrades and programs. It's like Blade Runner on acid with a dash of the Matrix thrown in.
It's very much the same theme and concept Warren Ellis has also explored in his own work, like Doktor Sleepless, for example.
Our guide into this hip and crazy ass world where you can download real porn viruses that infect you, and you can create vegetable avatars to stand in for you, is Butch, a tech-tinkerer and HVAC repairman who's partner is a drug-addicted, talking gun with an attitude named Gun (but of course it is) who cracks wise, "killing things and looking cool doing it".
Things start out already going south for Bitch and Gun when he botches what's supposed to be a simple bank robbery. From there the fun begins for the reader and doesn't stop until the last issue of the series, #5.
I highly recommend you guys look it up and seek it out for yourselves. You won't regret it.
And hey, it boasts being Grant Morrison's favorite comic of 2013. Honest!
Anyways in lieu of the incredibly big farce that is this year's elections, one quote from #5 by the main bad guy responsible for the creation and evil within Repo City, Maxwell Vanderbilt, seemed to me at least, to pretty much sum up my thoughts on the current state of America in 2016.
"Remember the United States? The land of psychotic innovation and heroically unhinged expansion?
Anyone insane enough to travel there and kill people to make a home in that land survived long enough to pass down those genes and form a whole kingdom of wing nuts.
I know. I was in it when it lost its mind."
Yeah pretty much how I see this country right now.
2 comments:
Such a cool, slept-on series. Wonder how the trade sold?
I'll have to look that up actually, but considering it wasn't published by the big or even a big Indy publisher, probably not. I just assume if you didn't already know or see it, it just flew under the radar.
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