robot-alert!

Finally, they're working on getting it so that you can download your brain to a supercomputer. What have they been wasting their time on since the 1950s?

Ian Pearson, head of British Telecom's futurology unit, told the UK's Observer newspaper that the rapid advances in computing power would make cyber-immortality a reality within 50 years.

Pearson said the launch last week of Sony's PlayStation 3, a machine 35 times more powerful than the model it replaced, was a sign of things to come.

"The new PlayStation is one percent as powerful as the human brain," Pearson told the Observer. "It is into supercomputer status compared to 10 years ago. PlayStation 5 will probably be as powerful as the human brain."

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I was curious to see how people would respond to 'The Mummy' in the context of Drawn & Quarterly Showcase. Publisher's Weekly has just given the book a starred review, the only starred review of the week. Of 'The Mummy': "Charming and funny... Entertaining and wittily executed"

I don't have a great deal of respect for PW as some of the reviews I've seen from them were perfectly retarded, whenever they seem to be given something a bit different from the usual rubbish they slate it, from the little I've seen. But I'm not going to complain about swell reviews...

Every year Drawn & Quarterly offers an anthology of lengthy stories by emerging young cartoonists; this installment is the strongest thus far, and a visually stunning book to boot. Elverum's "We're Wolf" is composed of a trilogy of adult fables about happiness, sadness and companionship drawn in a graceful, languid style. The vibrant colors, rarely seen in comics, give the artwork a fantastic life on the page, and the story announces Elverum as a major young talent. Occupying the middle spot is Kramer's Ergot editor Harkham's "Somersaulting," a tale of two friends and a long summer. Using a muted color palette of yellow, orange and black, Harkham effortlessly controls the story's mood, summoning the languid pace of summer as well as the gradual discovery of love and sex in the suburbs. Neither cynical nor sentimental, this tale plays like a long, clear-eyed tone poem to teenage summers.

After two such dreamy stories, Broersma rounds out the book with the two-part "The Mummy," a charming and funny romp through a mythical mid-20th-century European locale, featuring tongue-in-cheek romance, intrigue and ghosts. Entertaining and wittily executed, it's the perfect complement to the more serious works in this essential new volume. (June)

I've put up a page on mattmatt.com for Insomnia, a new serial publication from Coconino Press, Vertige Graphic and Fantagraphics. It's due out next month in France but that might be a bit optimistic since I haven't drawn the covers yet.
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They've built robots that can make copies of themselves... the fools! Actually judging from the video it looks like they are just assembling other robots like themselves, rather than actually manufacturing the electronics etc, but isn't it only a matter of time before they take control of the factories as well? Or, perhaps, it is really them that are running the experiments on us rather than the other way around?

In the video, at first the robot just looks like a blob of toilet paper, but once it starts squirming around it's kind of spooky.link