Showing posts with label stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stories. Show all posts

Monday, January 3, 2011

Romantically Apocalyptic: a webcomic about staving off post-nuclear boredom

I've seen this story before when I was perusing Vitaly Alexius artwork. But there wasn't quite as many pages to the story.

Via: Sometimes the best way to survive the end of the world is just to go crazy and roll with it. After all, the denizens of the lushly painted webcomic Romantically Apocalyptic survive with gas masks, ingenuity, and batshit insanity.

Vitaly S Alexius illustrates Romantically Apocalyptic using a combination of live actors, stock footage, green screens, and Photoshop. The result is a beautiful bit of disaster porn, with crumbling buildings and piles of human skeletons.

A nuclear holocaust has destroyed most of humanity, leaving behind just a handful of soldiers: the Captain (the looniest of the loony), his Pilot, his Sniper, and his Engineer. Well, there are also a group of cultists living underground, but they worship a shredded lemonade label and hardly count. Instead of looking for other survivors or trying to rebuild some semblance of civilization, the crew occupies their time meandering through a ruined city making their own fun. Their own very peculiar brand of fun.

The crew, especially the Captain, often halfway pretend the apocalypse hasn't happened. They still go to the movies and try to drive cars and order from McDonald's. But there are dangers in this newly destroyed world. Forget the slow death from lingering radiation, these guys deal with flesh-hungry atomic monsters and alien abductions.

It's the Captain's relentless disconnection from reality that helps him survive these close encounters, but during the less violent downtimes, he can wear on his fellow survivors' nerves. In fact, the greatest threat in the nuclear post-apocalypse may be one man's inanity.

Monday, December 20, 2010

Neil Gaiman Short Stories

Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite writers, and this holiday season he has posted 5 of his short stories on his website for free. (One of them is even an audibook file too!)


This is a story called "The Case of Four and Twenty Blackbirds". It was first published in 1984, in KNAVE and was my third published short story. It was reprinted in 1993 ANGELS AND VISITATIONS (although I didn't put it into Smoke and Mirrors) and it's been collected in anthologies a few times since then.

or What's A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47° 9' S, Longitude 126° 43' W)?

A Study in Emerald - [5.1 MB PDF file]
Written by Neil Gaiman, Illustrations and Layout by Jouni Kopnen - Requires the Adobe PDF reader available at Adobe.com.

Cinnamon was a princess, a long time ago, in a small hot country, where everything was very old. Her eyes were pearls, which gave her great beauty, but meant she was blind. Her world was the colour of pearls: pale white and pink, and softly glowing.

"Come on," said Vic. "It'll be great." "No, it won't," I said, although I'd lost this fight hours ago, and I knew it. "It'll be brilliant," said Vic, for the hundredth time. "Girls! Girls! Girls!" He grinned with white teeth.

Download the full audio of How To Talk To Girls At Parties in parts: