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Tula Lotay’s Supreme: Blue Rose over at Image is my favorite book currently running for Nerd Reasons. She’s doing all kinds of great stuff with color separations and holy shit, Warren Ellis’s story is amazing, especially if you’re an Alan Moore fan who wept bitter tears after Supreme was canceled and then desecrated by Erik Larsen. Check out her poster for classic Dario Argento pic Suspiria.

It’s been a while since I posted some old-fashioned comic art, so here’s a particularly good cover from Bryan Talbot’s magnificent character-driven sci-fi extravaganza, Heart of the Empire. HotE is a sequel to The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, a much more experimental and weird book, but it stands alone both as a solo work and in the annals of comics history so far as I’m concerned. Talbot’s an incredibly gifted draftsman as you can see here but no single page or spread is going to give you an idea of the breadth of the story, in which the Restoration has come centuries late and Glorianna is a terrifying, vampire-like monster.

There’s a big new gorgeous edition of the whole saga just out from Dark Horse, if you’re so inclined.

Lengthily subtweeting several of my favorite writers and thinkers here:

So you know how, sometimes, you have that teacher who is a mean, rude snob and attracts to her all the mean, rude snobs in the class and makes clear how deeply she reviles anything base or low, and how she exclusively promotes the work of apple-polishers and brown-nosers and kids of her friends, and how suddenly people who aren’t smarter than you—who are dumber than you, in a lot of cases—are getting promoted and paraded around like they’re God’s gift to the world and you’re getting passed over and ignored, and everyone pretends it’s because you have bad manners or don’t dress well enough and it just sets off all of your insecurities even though you *know* it’s because you weren’t born with the right credentials? And you know how that makes you feel crude and unsophisticated and base, which are all the things she doesn’t like?

Remember how angry you got when she told the whole class that Moldova was in South America and like all of her little minions defended her, and how being right was actually no comfort at all when you needed to sit next to someone at lunch?

When she gets fired, it’s still really mean to fart loudly as she walks out of the room.

Me: Do you like it here?

Ethiopian cab driver: I like America very much. But Las Vegas? No. Vegasians, they are not like other people in Boston or Kansas City. A doctor is supposed to be a doctor—he gets his first degree, he goes back to school for five, six, seven years, he gets his MD. Here, they ask me to take urine and blood tests for this job. When I was in Virginia, I give urine, I give blood, they send the results to the company. Here, I go in to the doctor’s office, he says, “Did you pay the girl at the front desk?” I say, “Yes,” he says, “Does your back hurt? Anything else?” I say, “No.” He writes down the”results” on a piece of paper and tells me to leave. 

Me: He didn’t take your blood or anything?

ECD: No. Nobody cares here.

Me: It is sad to see homeless people in all of this, uh, stuff. And the looks on the faces of the girls serving drinks in the casino pits…

ECD: This city: it does not exist anywhere else, and it is the Kingdom of the Devil.