Allport Authority

Not usually one to bring up Stephen King outside of mentioning that he’s actively working on a musical with John Mellencamp, I happened across a copy of his graphic novel “The Dark Tower: Gunslinger Born.” Now, I didn’t find this exact title, but I managed to extract it from a very long conversation with a professional graphic novel salesman. I presume that he was attempting to bounce as many titles off of me as possible to figure out what I wanted to read and not that he expected me to purchase every book he offered. It isn’t that I didn’t recognize the authority of his suggestion, I simply wanted to constrict the size of the fistful of dollars I could have potentially spent in that store.

I had intended to drop in and pickup two of the books I had ordered (for anyone that clicks on that second link, I swear that my copy does not have anything about Blade Runner on the cover) and then leave. Having been inside once before to set up ordering my pulls, I had noticed that they maintained a complete selection of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. I was pretty excited about that. Tony had repped them pretty hard last Spring and I had started reading them. I stopped reading Sandman because I had been waiting to borrow the next trade and had started reading something else instead. Swamp Thing I had to give back to him because I was too worried about bending the cover. In each case, I had gotten just far enough to become seriously engaged by the story. I had gotten roughly 22 issues into Sandman, so that wasn’t too hard to take since I already had several story arcs notched, but I had only gotten 3 or 4 issues into Swamp Thing. Halting that readthrough was jarring.

I ended up by additionally buying the first Swamp Thing trade and Stephen King’s Gunslinger Born. I’m almost finished with it. It’s really good. Shane read it and was thusly inspired to make repeated visits to the Curious Book Shop to get books 1, 2, and 3 from the Dark Tower series. It follows a vein of post-apocalyptic survival stories that is able to blend the immediately necessities of perpetually high doses of radiation (and other survivally things) with a mystical worship of force and pseudo-naturalist behaviors. I’ve been encountering this kind of display in The Walking Dead, Fallout 3, World War Z (which I recommend to everyone, it was very fun), Left 4 Dead, Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, and a healthy dose of Isaac Asimov. These were all read or played fairly recently. And they are not the only ones – I’ve forgotten many. Even my looming Dungeons & Dragons campaign is going to be set in the Dark Sun setting astride a land comprised almost entirely of desert as the sun feeds corrupted magics with the blood and the tears of those who would live there.

Suffice to say, I’ve been thinking about the end of the world. I’m hoping to tell you about what I’ve come up with. I have a plan to do so.

I intend to construct a graphic novel sans illustrations. In their place will be an arrangement of photographs with comic lettering. It will be a photographic novel. I’m hoping that it will kick ass. I also think that it functions to combine all of my areas of interest into one tidy project. I’m going to be writing regular updates on how the project as a whole is progressing, and I’ll probably be consulting any potential readers of those posts to contibute feedback on nuanced story material – although I’m hoping to avoid having to do that second part too often so as to avoid disclosing too many integral plot details. I will no doubt disguise them, as though they were ninjas looming in dangerous proximity to you – lashing out with a practiced strike aiming to end your life as if this blog post were naught but a distraction designed as they closed in to cut your throat as you finish this sentence!