Comic review: Alex + Ada #13- How can you read a book if you are asleep?

Story and script assists: Jonathan Luna
Story and script: Sarah Vaughn
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 18th March 2015


The closing down of free areas of discourse on the Internet, the use of police swat teams to arrest anybody who wants the freedom to be happy outside of mainstream norms. The refusal to prosecute, or even investigate, criminal wrong doings by corporations that squat over democracy, giving orders, raping and pillaging and doing whatever the Hell they want to do until the entire planet is a wasteland.

People no longer say what they want to say because they fear the wrath of their new God. The corporation is God now. Pay your respects, or we’ll send around the swat team of brave uniformed heroes who will drag you away where you will be caged for the rest of your life. Resist and they will murder you, heroically of course.

What am I talking about here? Alex + Ada #13 or corporate controlled westernised capitalism 2015?

It’s quite obvious. I’m talking about both.

Alex + Ada is set in the ‘future,’ with robot Police dogs and android girlfriends, but it’s not really about the future, it’s about NOW. It’s about what happens when you allow corporations to control governments, when you structure your entire society not around human happiness, but corporate profit and human manipulation, control and enslavement.

‘World peace is none of your business
So would you kindly keep your nose out?
The rich must profit and get richer
And the poor must stay poor
Oh, you poor little fool- oh, you fool.’ (World Peace Is None Of Your business, by Morrissey)

You need to fight, or you need to run. Either way you’ll be dealing with uniformed order following agents of the state who will proudly enslave you. That’s what government is, and whether you set in the past, present or future, the message is always the same.

‘Each time you vote you support the process.’ (Morrissey again, same song)

Yes, you do. So, stop voting, stop supporting the process and stop letting them get away with it.

Alex + Ada #13 is about two lovers running from the state. They live in the future, but their story is very much a story of today. Their story is of an awakening of consciousness, of what happens to a sleeping human being when s/he realises that s/he is a slave to the state. S/he wakes, is horrified, tries to find a place to hide, but government allows no place to be happy outside of their control system. The awakened slave is now a threat. Uniformed order followers are sent in, and s/he runs.

Alex + Ada are the bad guys now, at least, that’s how they would be portrayed in the corporate, mainstream media. They have hurt nobody. All they want is to be free and happy and to live their lives the way they see fit. Because of this they are a bigger threat to the state than any terrorist, or any invading army. They want out, so they must be eliminated.

Any refusal to comply must end in prison or death. Send in the drones, send in the lawyers, and send in the mainstream media to justify slavery. Don’t see this story as a nightmare vision of the future. See it as a commentary on what is happening NOW. If you want to break free from the corporate state with their taxes gained at the threat of violence, and arbitrary laws designed to subjugate individual human liberty and freedom then you will be hunted down, imprisoned or murdered.

Alex + Ada is the story of human awakening, of government, and human slavery. It’s a book that a lot of people won’t ‘get.’ That’s very understandable. How can people read a book if they are asleep?


Rating: 9/10



World Peace Is None of Your Business, by Morrissey:

Punks the Comic #1: Somebody has been watching old episodes of The Young Ones

Story: Joshua Hale Fialkov
Art: Kody Chamberlain & Rob Guillory
Publisher: Image comics
Released: 8th October 2014 


Half-way through reading this book I was getting flashbacks to old episodes of The Young Ones and going to the Cub Scouts on my bike with it’s stupid light dynamo that slowed it down to a crawl. There was something very 1980’s about this book, with it’s references to Morrissey and Glenn Danzig, so I did what we all do now and looked it up on the Internet expecting the book to be a re-make of some old student project in 1986. I got one half of the equation right. It was an old student type of deal, but it was produced in 2004.

2004????????

What the Hell????????

How did something like this get any attention whatsoever in 2004?

Oh yeah, it didn’t. I never noticed it in 2004, and I was a pretty big fan of just about everything comic book related during that time. What were the writers doing in 2004? Did they have a DVD box-set of old Young Ones episodes, a limited budget, and so decided to put a collage based comic book together with references that were completely out of date and had no relevance to the world around them?

It looks like it.

So what is this book about then? It’s about some characters based on 1980’s English student stereotypes living together in a house where they are very bored and are not very successful with the ladies. The characters are physically and emotionally abusive to each other, but in a wacky, comedy way. Crazy things like Gnomes are involved. The dialogue is all one-liners that are trying to be arch, ironic, knowing and clever. It doesn’t work, instead it reads like smart arse witticisms that come from the mind of a Google kid, annoying as f*** douche bag. The narrative involves one of the characters bringing a girl home. All of the other characters are shocked. Before this mess of a book ends we are given some word searches (I’m not joking) and a reprint of the original book from waaaaay back in ye olden days of 2004. That book is just as bad as the 2014 incarnation.

Oh, the characters have fists, dogs and old President’s for heads.

Does that make it original then?

What do you think?

I’ll tell you what I think. I think that ‘Punks the Comic’ is a painfully unfunny student magazine based on an anarchic BBC sit-com of the early 1980’s. That show, as I mentioned in the first paragraph, is called ‘The Young Ones.’ It was great when it first came out. I know, because I was a kid who grew up with it, and compared to all of the other staid and conservative po-faced crap of the time (Blue Peter anybody?) it was the most exciting thing that I had ever seen. But I was about twelve years old, and that was decades and decades ago. If they released the same show today it wouldn’t have anywhere near the same impact, because the socio-political themes, anxieties and concerns would be decades out of date. Plus the humour, that was considered risky and edgy at the time, would now look a bit tame, silly, childish and dated.

Just like this comic.

How the Hell is this supposed to be a post 9/11 book? It’s not. It’s a 1980’s book, it just so happens to have been written in 2004/2014 by a writer who cannot get in touch with what is going on in the world today.

Leave your house for five minutes and have a look at the world mate. Please. Read a book. Watch a documentary. Get on the Alex Jones infowars website http://www.infowars.com/  for a day of research. PLEASE DO SOMETHING. Get with the bloody times.

Goddamn it, Goddamn it, Goddamn it.

This book says everything you need to know about the comic book industry as it is today. Backwards looking, irrelevant, out of touch and completely stuck up it’s own arse.

Rating: 1/10 (for the cover)

Morrissey- World Peace Is None of Your Business- Album review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEbve574h7c

http://pitchfork.com/news/55510-morrissey-performs-new-song-kick-the-bride-down-the-aisle-live/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Peace_Is_None_of_Your_Business

Album released: 15th July 2014

The problem with listening to Morrissey is that although he’s undoubtedly a bit of a poet, he’s also a bit of a pessimist as well. His view on human nature can be summed up by the following lyric from his new album, World Peace is None of Your Business.’ That lyric is from the nihilistic ‘Mountjoy.’

‘What those in power do to you reminds us at a glance how humans hate each others guts and show it given the chance.’

I would strongly argue that this is really not the case. Sure there are a minority of sociopathic and psychopathic personality types that gravitate towards positions of power and authority just so they can satisfy their need to abuse people, all done in an official capacity of course, but these people are not the majority, they are a very sick minority. The problem with humanity is that we allow this sick minority to have power over us because we vote to give them that power. The first track on this album illustrates that point with its refrain, 'Each time you vote, you support the process.’ That’s the problem with humanity, not that we hate each other, but that we give our power away to officially commissioned sociopaths who get together and call themselves ‘Government.’

Morrissey is getting there, but pessimism still dominates his work. Here are a couple of examples of that pessimism. In ‘Staircase at the University’ a girl throws herself down some stairs because she fails to get the three ‘A’ grades that her uncaring family and boyfriend demand of her. This observation is not exactly insightful, and it rings hollow as well. Do her family not care about her at all? This case is an exception, as most families care about each other, a lot. Why shine a spotlight on a depressing aberration?

‘Oboe Concerto’ looks bleakly at the failure of the dying generation that came before him, with a conclusion that his generation is also going to fail. I really don’t see how this helps anyone, as it’s looking on the unhappy side of life, telling people not to bother trying to change anything because it’s all hopeless and we’re all doomed anyway. Do you know who loves that kind of attitude? The control system known as ‘Government.’

Morrissey needs to concentrate more on the socio-political side of his lyrics and stop being gloomy just for the sake of being gloomy. There are some valuable insights into human nature and relationship dynamics on this album that say a lot about life without telling you that it’s probably best if you don’t bother getting up out of bed in the morning. The best example of this is in the song ‘Kick the Bride Down the Aisle’ where he shines a cutting beam upon a woman who picks a man not for love, but because she wants her own personal house slave who will do all of the hard work for her.

‘She just wants a slave to break his back in pursuit of a living wage so that she can laze and graze for the rest of her days write down every word I say.’

And yes, I will write it down, because that’s insightful and I agree with what you are saying here Moz. There are lots of people in the UK today who are exactly like the woman you are describing. So why knock out a song with the title ‘Earth is the Loneliest Planet?’ It’s a good tune for sure, but boy is it depressing, and you know what? It’s not even true. The last line of the song is, ‘And there is nothing anyone can do.’ I disagree; there’s a lot you can do. Learnt helplessness is something that the elite’s love, so stop indulging in it yourself Moz.

A quick wrap up of the best tunes then, although for long-time Morrissey fans you know what you’re getting here. Lyrics that seem forced because the content is more important to Moz than the flow of that lyric (‘Wolf down, wolf down T-bone steak, cancer of the prostate’), and songs that don’t quite work (‘Neal Cassady Drops Dead’ has very oddly compacted lyrics with Morriseey coming perilously close to rapping). There are a lot of musically interesting jingles and jangles on the album as well, so there’s some musical creativity going on, although let’s be honest, it’s the lyrics we’re buying this album for, not the musicianship.

The best song on the album is the title track, ‘World Peace is None of Your Business,’ both lyrically and musically this song just works. A lot of the other songs are ‘growers.’ The one’s with the most potential being the jaunty ‘Istanbul and the ‘Vauxhall and I’ reminiscent ‘Kick the Bride Down the Aisle.’

It seems like a strange thing to say, but Morrissey is almost getting there. He’s still a pessimist, but I see some light in his lyrics now. ‘World Peace Is None of Your Business’ is an excellent song that really captures the zeitgeist of our times in a way that is missed by the vast majority of contemporary pop songs that still obsess over teenage anxieties and bad boyfriend issues. The album as a whole has buckets of pessimism, but there’s wisdom there as well, littered amongst the nihilism of course. One of the most enjoyable things about the album is to discover the nuggets of gold amongst the black crumbly rock dust. I’ll begin to wrap up this review with one of those nuggets. You’re not quite there yet Moz, but you are well on your way.

‘World peace is none of your business, you must not tamper with arrangements. Work hard and sweetly pay your taxes, never asking “what for?”

People are starting to ask that question, and real change is coming. And after all this time it’s nice to see that good old uncle Morrissey is coming along for the ride.
Rating: 8/10