“Take writer Robert Kirkman, not profiled here though he should have been. At influential boutique house Image, he publishes the creator-owned “Walking Dead,” a gleefully deranged and imaginative comic that redefined the stale zombie concept, spun off into a successful television show and sells to lots of people who don’t normally read comics at all. During a brief stint at Marvel—he now avoids the big houses—he rewrote old “X-Men” comics and zombified the Marvel heroes rather than doing something new. This made good sense: Why sign over the rights to original ideas when he could keep them for himself?”

Still among my favourite series of things ever.

“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’
`But,’ says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’
`Oh dear,’ says God, `I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
`Oh, that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets
himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”

“Also: After his orientation was revealed, Northstar was killed, repeatedly. A story in which he would have contracted the AIDS virus himself was vetoed, but the one in which he was stabbed in the guts by Wolverine and then came back as a zombie? Totally fine, apparently! Everybody who’s anybody in superhero comics has died and returned at least a couple of times, so Northstar’s many demises shouldn’t have been a big deal, but they were symptomatic of a larger problem — once gay people started showing up regularly in comics, they tended to have very bad things happen to them almost as regularly, to the point that their depiction almost became a be-careful-what-you-wish-for kind of situation. And sure, gay characters should face the same stakes as straight characters, and Joss Whedon killing off Willow’s girlfriend Tara on Buffy was good drama even if it was bad activism, but if you need proof that comics aren’t totally comfortable with this subject matter yet, please refer to this extensive list, compiled by novelist Perry Moore, of gay comic book characters and what they were eventually impaled on. It’s modeled on the self-explanatory “Women in Refrigerators” list that comics writer Gail Simone put together in 1999, and it’s no less of a bummer.”

“We people of the SF-reading ghetto have stumbled blinking into the future, and our dirty little secret is that we don’t much like it. And so we retreat into the comfort zones of brass goggles and zeppelins (hey, weren’t airships big in the 1910s-1930s? Why, then, are they such a powerful signifier for Victorian-era alternate fictions?), of sexy vampire-run nightclubs and starship-riding knights-errant. Opening the pages of a modern near-future SF novel now invites a neck-chillingly cold draft of wind from the world we’re trying to escape, rather than a warm narcotic vision of a better place and time.”

Via Warren Ellis