I can't believe I stuck with this project for so many years, through all its personnel changes and changes in my life: the first installment came out a half year before the invention of apps! It began, really, with Rian proselytizing the gospel of Kirby, convincing me that his later, unhinged work for DC was where his soul might be most easily viewed, particularly in his 1976-1978 opus The Eternals. I noticed that Jack Kirby's breakneck publishing pace and furious storm of ideas left lots of weird inconsistencies and unexplored gaps in their wake, and Rian and I talked about a way to explore these in a series of our own (which we'd talked about doing since high school). I also noticed, in the purity of the heroes in that series, that the timeworn binary of good vs. evil which exists in all superhero comics was here amplified to an almost absurd degree. We thought it might be cool to critique this by inverting it, and reframe the villains from Kirby's version into misunderstood and persecuted good guys in ours. We'd turn Kirby's outsized vision that privileged (awesome) caricature and (glorious) cliche into a less black and white understanding of heroism. We changed the name to Internals on the idea that looking inside the skin of an antagonist would force you to see him differently.
Thanks and respect to Nathaniel Goldblatt, who drew the first four episodes, recreating the Kirby look/vibe with enough panache to legitimize all flights of fancy. And to Dan "The Fixer" Osborn, for his lettering, Photoshopping and pushes for polish. And to Jake "The Fixer" Austen, who continues to include us in the best (last?) of the red hot fanzines, a pre-digital vision of rock communalism that is more necessary than ever.
Thanks and respect to Nathaniel Goldblatt, who drew the first four episodes, recreating the Kirby look/vibe with enough panache to legitimize all flights of fancy. And to Dan "The Fixer" Osborn, for his lettering, Photoshopping and pushes for polish. And to Jake "The Fixer" Austen, who continues to include us in the best (last?) of the red hot fanzines, a pre-digital vision of rock communalism that is more necessary than ever.
"The Internals"
Winter 2007 "My Daughter, The Deviant"
Summer 2008 "A Breaking Point"
Winter 2008 "Notion of Circular Time"
Summer 2009 "The Girl Can Help It"
Fall 2010 "Inherited Traits and Altered States" Summer 2011
"Lost in Apocrypha"
Winter 2011 "At Viator's Bedside"
Spring 2012 Roctober 47 Cover
Summer 2009 |