A genuine motivational poster from 1924, as shared here.
If You Could See What I See, What I Feel
Holy crap. From the Guardian:
Trees burn as firefighters continue to battle the fire, which has encroached on Yosemite national park.
Both beautiful and utterly terrifying. Awe-inspiring and horrific.
WAM! BAM! POW! KRONTCH!
COMICS, EVERYONE.
Seriously, Jack Kirby (with inker, D. Bruce Berry, in this case): This is just amazing. Manhunter is something that Kirby did for one issue, an edition of a series called First Series Special, in the 1970s, and it’s this entirely unfinished story filled with melodrama and potential and everything that I love about superhero comics. There’s so much there there.
Plus, that costume design is so, so great.
Busy Doing Nothing (Note: Not Actually Nothing)
So, I may have accidentally disappeared from this site a little last week. It wasn’t intentional, I promise; I just found myself entirely snowed under with work as I started writing for the Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision blog and realized worryingly quickly that I had underestimated just how much additional work that would actually be in reality (I gave up two other gigs in order to free up enough time, but the workload didn’t translate as I’d initially thought). That it was also a holiday weekend – Huzzah for July 4, which came at the right time to stop me feeling completely overloaded – both helped and didn’t help everything, as it frontloaded things onto the start of a week that was already busy but also gave me some breathing room that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Anyway, I’m sorry for disappearing without notice, and will try not to do it again in future. Well, except for next week, which is Comic-Con which I’m working for Wired.com, and therefore will be crazy and quiet and AIEEEEEE.
(That I am now writing for Wired, Time and the Hollywood Reporter, by the way, is both surreal and slightly scary to me. This has to be the peak, right? It’s all downhill from here on, as I flame out in spectacular fashion.)
Beaches, Beans and Bells
Gets In Your Eyes
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
Firefighters spray water on the burning land on the outskirts of Pekanbaru in Indonesia’s Riau province. The haze from fires in Indonesia is currently blanketing Singapore and could persist for some weeks. Photograph: Stringer/Reuters
This is one of those images that looks beautiful on first glance and then you read the description of what is actually happening.
And Remember
My Plaid Morning Jacket
Don’t always be a wiseguy, Harry. It’s like a plaid jacket that goes good with some outfits, but with others it looks like shit. You want to ask an important question, ask it. Don’t always hide behind a plaid jacket.
Words to remember, and maybe to live by. From Outside The Dog Museum by Jonathan Carroll.
“On The Front Line And In Your Face”
Because some people may not have ever seen The Day Today or know of the genius of Chris Morris:
It’s the mix of surrealism and seriousness that appeals to me so much. Morris’ newsman persona captures the mix of the ridiculous and the self-importance of news media, decades before that combination reached the epic proportions of today. I’m pretty sure this show is out on DVD in the U.K. now, but is sadly unavailable in the U.S. It’s a shame; this may be some of my favorite comedy ever.
Station Identification
In the traditions of Warren Ellis, Dylan Todd and David Brothers:
The World That’s Coming is the personal blog of Graeme McMillan, a pop culture and tech writer who gets paid to write for Time.com, Wired.com, Newsarama.com, and Digital Trends (An explanation of the blog’s name can be found here). His work has also appeared in Playboy magazine, Gawker Media’s io9.com, AOL’s dearly departed Comics Alliance, Comic Book Resources and many, many other places. He has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered Weekend Edition, CNN Radio, CBC and Sky News as a guest talking about pop culture.
Three times a month(-ish), he talks about comic books with Jeff Lester on the Wait, What? podcast and once a month(-ish), he participates in a comic book review round table on Kotaku.com with Evan Narcisse and Douglas Wolk.
He can be found on Twitter, Facebook (which he rarely checks, be warned) and Google Plus (which he checks even less often than Facebook). You can listen to his “jams.”
He lives in Portland, OR with his lovely wife Kate and their loud but adorable dogs, Gus and Ernie. If you want to get in contact for whatever reason, you can email him and ask if it’s weird writing about yourself in the third person (It is).