Uno Morales!

Sean T. Collins interviews Uno Morales in The Comics Journal:

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Moralez’s genius, and I don’t mind using that word in his case, evidences itself in how his work reads like a Serpentor-style amalgam created using the combined DNA of Suehiro Maruo, Nicholas Gurewitch, David Lynch, Andrei Rublev, and the evil videotape from The Ring. Unquestionably menacing and monstrous figures lurk smiling in shadowy rooms, bodies and objects arranged in inscrutable ways that nevertheless imply an unimpeachable in-story logic. It’s the logic of nightmares, yes, but whether we’re talking about his standalone images, his animated gifs, or his keyframe-style comics, they give off the sense that what’s happening makes sense to the individuals involved, which is the most fascinating and harrowing thing about Moralez’s work. The distance from here to there seems insurmountable, but he bridges it time and time again, in a lo-fi digital style that makes it seem like these images are woven from the fabric of the Internet itself.

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The Things

The Things by Peter Watts:

THING, THE (1982)

I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.

I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.

The names don’t matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.

I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair.  MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I am being Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world.

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Secret Societies

Gary Lachman in The Daily Grail:

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Secret societies have existed almost as long as society has itself. The initiates of ancient Egypt; the priest-kings of China; the acolytes of the Greek Mysteries; the shamans of humanity’s early dawn; the holy masters in their inner sanctums in the hidden cities of the world – all are alive today, and work their strange practices and issue their commands, unknown, unsuspected, and undetected by us.

The Secret Chiefs, the Hidden Masters, the Inner Circle, the Illuminati, the King of the World: we know them all today, perhaps in different forms and perhaps by different names. But we know them. They are the ones in control. They are ones behind the closed doors and within the locked rooms. They are the ones with the secret knowledge, who speak a secret language. They know the magic symbols that unlock the gates that lead to worlds beyond our own. They have passed through the trials and ordeals of initiation. They have found the Holy Grail, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Emerald Tablet, the dreaded Necronomicon and the lost continent of Atlantis.

Many have belonged to this school. Some say Buddha, Christ, and Plato were its students. There were others too, names so great that to mention them in the context of secret schools would shock the uninitiated. All received the secret knowledge and kept it from profane hands. They have spoken with the angels and listened to the music of the spheres. They have traveled to the interior of the earth and brought back the precious metals of the mind. They have confronted the awful Dweller on the Threshold and they know the song the sirens sang. They have taken the Journey to the East and followed the bark of Ra as it sinks into the west. They have set their controls for the heart of the sun. They built the pyramids and the Sphinx, Stonehenge and Notre Dame, the lost library of Alexandria and the labyrinth at Chartres. They are the elite. They are the elect. They are the few who know, who dare, who will – and who keep silent.

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