We Are The Sprocket Holes vol. 235

Japanese Auteur Seijun Suzuki Dies at 93

 anyone into the works of Shinya Tsukamoto, Takashi Miike, Sion Sono, and the numerous enfant terribles that populate the underground and outre-mainstream of Japanese cinema should be well acquainted with Suzuki's brutally transcendent offerings.

Negation Aspiration vol. 43

Also like adolescent boys, 4chan users were deeply sensitive and guarded. They disguised their own sensitivity (namely, their fear that they would be, “forever alone”) by extreme insensitivity. The rules, like everything else, were always half in jest. Everything had to be a done with at least a twinkle of winking irony. This was an escape route, a way of never having to admit to your peers that you were in fact expressing something from your heart, in other words — that you were indeed vulnerable. No matter what a user did or said, he could always say it was “for the lulz” (lols). Like (by comparison the tame and sophisticated precursor) “Something Awful” board that spawned it, 4chan defined itself by being insensitive to suffering in that way only people who have never really suffered can — that is to say, young people, mostly young men, protected by a cloak of anonymity. The accepted standard was a sort of libertarian “free speech” banner, in which isolated man-boys asserted their right to do or say anything no matter someone else’s feelings. This meant generally posting pornography, swastikas, racial slurs, and content that reveled in harm to other people.

4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump

Trump’s younger supporters know he’s an incompetent joke; in fact, that’s why they support him.

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! vol. 100

How Infowars Became the Opposite of Everything It Set Out to Be

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! vol. 99

Steve Bannon Wanted Mel Gibson for His Movie About Nazis, Abortion, ‘Mutants’

In 11 pages, the cautionary tale about arrogant scientists tampering with divine design covers Eden, Hitler, mutants, immortality, and the ‘most radical ideology in history.’

Awwww Yeah vol. 56

Because as much as what has been explored here is vexed and rightly resistant to simplification, the notion that sexuality is in anyway antithetical to intellect is one that can only serve to enrich morons in love with a power they wish they could actually have.

Reading The Readers Of Sasha Grey Reading Slavoj Žižek

Published on October 25, 2016  in Ark Review/Essays  by Macon Holt

Negation Aspiration vol. 42 / NERRRRRRRD! vol. 59

Something of Value

On March 26, 1994, after four days of trial and a deliberation of forty, ninety, or 120 minutes, depending on what you read, a St. Petersburg, Florida, jury of three men and three women, each older than the defendant by at least a decade, declared Mike Diana to be the first American cartoonist officially guilty of obscenity.

The judge, an ex-naval officer, ex-prosecutor, and Rotarian, ordered Diana jailed. Diana’s girlfriend, Suzy Smith, wept.[1]  Diana’s lawyer asked for his jewelry so it would not be stolen by his guards.  Diana spent four days in maximum security while the judge pondered his sentence.  The noise was unrelenting.  The lights were on constantly.  His cell had a metal bed with one blanket.  Sleep was impossible.  His company included murderers and rapists.

Because of pictures he had drawn. 

NERRRRRRRRD! vol. 58

How Image Transformed From 90s Cheese to the Most Progressive Publisher in the Game

the unfettered impulse to discredit the 90s comic book boom has long been one of my points of deviation from the contemporary superhero fan hoards. this is absolute bias on my end, as my comic fanaticism sprung from the gritty 80s and blossomed fully in the extreme 90s. though those two times periods are now endlessly (and misguidedly) mocked and derided by the terminally snarky failed comedians of the blogosphere and hopelessly embittered silver age romantics like Alex Ross, they were fruitful and necessary to keep the medium from aging out of relevance in the expanding face of emerging alternative pastimes such as video games and the internet.

Image Comics was crucial to me in the 90s. at last, i could get in on the ground floor with new mythologies, new characters that weren't leaded with decades-upon-decades of creative shifts and continuity-bloat. as much as loved Wolverine, Daredevil, Batman, The Flash etc... they had existed long before me, in multiple iterations, across multiple mediums, and though i could read annotations and summations of previous eras, something was always out of reach. that wasn't the case with characters like Spawn, Savage Dragon, the Maxx, and others. it was the closest to what baby boomer kids in the 60s must have felt when Marvel Comics burst on to the scene. That was for them... Image was for us.

and Image still is for us... having evolved beyond the steroidial anti-heroes of the 90s and focusing on works that are among the most adventurous and subversive in the mainstream comics industry. Walking Dead, Kill or Be Killed, Revenge, The Black Monday Murders, Nameless, Officer Downe... i could go on.

25 years and counting.

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! vol. 98

‘Why let ’em in?’ Understanding Bannon’s worldview and the policies that follow.

Negation Aspiration vol. 41

Is America Prepared for Meme Warfare?