Fayum Mummy Portraits, dating from around 30 BC to the mid 3rd century AD. 

The portrait heads were attached to Egyptian mummies of the Roman period, covering the faces of the deceased In the top pictures, you can see now they were bound to the mummy. Dating from the time of the Roman occupation of Egypt, they are closest to Graeco-Roman artistic traditions. Around 900 are known to survive and they are some of the only surviving evidence of Classical panel painting traditions. Due to their burial in hot, dry conditions with the bodies, many have survived in excellent condition. 

The term Fayum comes from an area of graveyards (necropoli) where they were found in large numbers, buried in communal catacombs. 

What I mean here is that, so often I see pairings enacting romance tropes to the point of heavily altering or downright replacing their original dynamic - as if the people behind it only understand romance as a series of checklists to tick off. Couples like to kiss and sleep in the same bed and flirt with each other, so it doesn't matter who the characters are, if they're a couple then naturally they'll do those things, right??

And that's where the whole thing starts to lose me, because I would assume that the appeal of shipping characters is, y'know... the characters? Rather than just, the idea of a couple? If I'm thinking about how it'd be cool for them to be in love, my first thought is always "so how would they show it," because just like everything else about a person, the answer is going to be different on a case-by-case basis.

Maybe the characters involved aren't really into kissing, but they like arranging date activities. Maybe they aren't committed to the structure of dating at all, and just want to be around each other whenever they can. And even if they are the types to like doing traditionally romantic things, that doesn't suddenly erase whatever else they had going on before they started adding that on top of it.

BRATPACK #1-5

AUG 1990 By Rick Veitch and Gary Fields

Meet the bratpack... they are the sidekicks of four superheroes... very disturbed sidekicks, of very disturbed superheroes. They don't live long... because death sells.

RATING: AWESOME

Boy, I'm not even sure if this review will make it to anyone.

I was always intrigued by the cover of the first issue of Bratpack, but it wasn't until now that I finally made up my mind to read it. Now, reading it is complicated, because this is a story with a revised ending. As in... there is a considerably different ending from the original. It has been that way for a while, because Rick didn't like how it ended, and after seeing he wasn't the only one thinking this way, he decided to fix it.

I have to say that I prefer the new ending.

Apart from that, the collected edition (IDW, 2018) also contains additional pages, with some of them fitting so well in the story, it's almost bizarre they weren't there in the first place.

So, what is Bratpack? At glance it looks like yet another deconstruction of superhero comic-books, but I'd say this was more like an exorcism of what the comic book industry had turn by 1990. In fact, none of this makes sense, without the story of how Jason Todd was killed (and I am not talking about the Joker, I am talking about the people who phoned in to kill him).

The story was almost published through DC, but the deal fell through after the whole Swamp Thing #88 fiasco. The book ended up getting printed by Tundra, and has been in publication ever since (through different publishers, because this is creator-owned).

In his original pitch, Rick said he was somehow inspired by the "seduction of the innocent" book by Frederick Wertham. He wanted to play around with some of the more negative aspects of adult/adolescent relationships in society. He mentioned "The jealous parent" (Moon Goddess), "The hyper-critical parent" (Judge Jury), "The Parent who never grew up" (King Rad), and the "Parent who's sexuality takes precedent" (The Mink). So... that means that the sidekicks of these heroes... are like the kids of those types of parents.

Now, I must warn you that this is a very adult comic book. It's not for everyone, you really need to appreciate very dark humor.

Let's say that, if you survived reading Preacher, or The Boys... this is the original.

The historical context enlightens a lot of things as to the why of this strange, bizarre, disturbing but awesome comic - because even though you also have Veitch's pitch at the end, describing his thought process as to how he caricatured every super-hero into the monster we see in there, this comic remained (at least from where I stood) an obscure work that was presented as coming out of nowhere, not having gone anywhere and remaining in its dark corner not many people wanted to talk about... Which is not quite true but sold it for what it was.

It is SUCH an example of the "gritty, edgy 90s super-hero comic", you can't help but think of the other "edgy super-hero comics" as pseudo-edgy. That is why it is DEFINITIVELY not for everybody, this is a gleefully dark, irreverent, offensive, odious little comic that is a brutal takedown and vicious caricature of the American super-hero codes and culture... But for me it works, because I feel it has what is required to make a "grimdark" work - it has the self-aware passion, the meta-humor. I will return to what I said when I pointed out why Abercrombie's First Law universe worked as a grimdark fantasy whereas I couldn't lock in Game of Thrones: to really make a grimdark story work, you need to have some sort of extravagant, daring, clownesque (in the profesionnal sense of "clown" not the common one) approach. You can have a gruesome and bleak story about suffering, hopelesness and depravation work well as long as you don't take yourself too seriously and are very much aware of what you write about, thus creating this distance and this connivence with the reader as there's an honesty about how absurd and enormous what you are dealing with is. Thus you must rely on obvious meta-references, winks-and-nods with the reader's culture so they get what you are subverting or making a morbid joke out of, and thus it gives the work a sort of... "honesty" I would say that allows for a lot more gruesomeness and "Oh my gods they did NOT dare" to be accepted.

As usual I am digressing, but yes. This comic is TRULY for edge-lords, but not for THAT kind of edge-lords. Because it is for these type of people that allow themselves to go far in the dark comedy precisely because they enter the "pact" with the author that it is all a "comical horror", and thus won't take overtly seriously the subject (unlike THAT kind of edge-lords). Essentially, just like "The First Law", it felt at the time as someone deciding to play cynically and subvert in disturbing realism well-known tropes and archetypes in a given genre, but then pushing it more just to reach the boundaries that the darkest humor can allow you to cross for a morbid Grand-Guignol. But it lacks the type of dry and grandiloquent seriousness other works of this type can too easily fall into - it is about depraved people, in a fucked up system, making kids suffer, and it is about well-known, depersonalized archetypes hiding monstrous secrets.

But it doesn't dwell on this for long, and that's what makes this type of work "better". It is a very short comic, a mini-series. So that what gives off some "good taste" in the purposefully-awful-bad taste of the story - it is a little intense, pure glimpse of darkness, but we do not linger on it too much and don't delve too deep so that we can't wash ourselves off when we get out. There's a joke, there's a caricature, it is a presented to us with the subtext criticism and the logical conclusion, then we move on and it's over. For how offensive and disturbing it can become, it has the decency to not linger for too long and to not dwell, because it understands that no long-running series or full-fleshed world could possibly work on such a basis.

François de Nomé (1593–1644), “Les Enfers” (Hell), 1622

Norman Saunders (1907–1989) - Mr. Maddox' Phony-Finish

A couple years back, I posted the original paperback collections of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, so now that the set of deluxe hardcovers from Centipede Press is complete it seems only fair to post those too.

As with all of Centipede’s publications, these books are impressive physical objects, but they also act as pretty definitive collections of work about the Twain. In addition to the stories themselves, there are interviews, poems, introductions, essays, notes for a film adaptation, and on and on. A feast. In addition to these seven volumes, there are two more coming, a reprint of Robin Wayne Bailey’s posthumous continuation of the saga, Swords Against the Shadowland, and a final volume of ephemera. And when that’s done, we’ll have the final word on Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. A bit melancholy, honestly.

Propagande Visiteur : le piti sourire charmeur, le côté "j'ai pas pris une douche depuis 6 mois" (bah oui dans le futur déjà les sceaux à caca c'est du luxe, alors t'imagine une douche...), la petite tendance à l'exagération (légère), franchement tout est bon là dedans

Propagande Esteban :

des daddy issues, un cœur grand comme le monde, et avec ses deux besties ils cherchent à trouver un trésor pour la connaissance, contrairement aux méchants capitalistes espagnols. et on va pas parler des olmeks parce que c'est pas le sujet voilà

le mec a un pouvoir qu’il ne sait pas maitriser ne veut pas maitriser et nie posséder pendant l’intégralité de la série et ca c’est fort. parce que son vrai superpouvoir c’est sa bonté et son indépendance.

plus ou moins polyamoureux si on se contente de s1, ou juste vraiment avec le pire slowburn de l’histoire de l’animation française- mais on l’aime pour ca.