NEAR THE FRINGE

Do you remember the first time you held those delicate, thin pages of sunburst color in your hands? They were a Daliesque fission of strange dreams and wish fulfillment, a multi-sonic synergistic barrage of chaos and joyful anarchy. Do you remember when comic books were fun, weird and dangerous? Discarded ray guns from other dimensions; cyborgs with nuclear hearts; multi-men with brimstone eyes. This was the wildness of my youth and when I look at the mundane and banal “art” in other media, it’s no wonder that comics have been a strange, twisted multiverse that I’ve yet to journey back from! 

Oh, hi! I’m Alex Smith! Sorry, I noticed you were wearing a Green Lantern t-shirt and I just went super-in on ya with my post-everything, retro-futurist take on the dream that is comic books! I am a writer, artist, DJ, activist, poet, singer (kinda--if you call screaming in punk bands “singing”) and I live in Philadephia, PA. Currently affiliated as a founding member of a collective of multicultural sci-fi and speculative fiction writers known as Metropolarity. I’d like to welcome you to my new endeavor for XION, a column I’ll call NEAR THE FRINGE. In this column I will be talking about the kinds of comics that are being made now that reflect the energy, spirit, and vehement independence of the comics that gang-jumped me into the medium in the first place! We’ll talk about issues like diversity, multiculturalism, space travel, encroaching dystopia as well as LGBT and gender and race issues, having fun along the way.

Before I go any further, I want to say that Near the Fringe is actually so named, not because our office is an asbestos lined, mildewing broom closet with a paint can for a slop bucket, where we share a cot with a guy named Sal; no, our beloved leader Shawn Alleyne, founder of XION Comic Book Network would never do that to us. *Cough cough* Please, if you will, imagine a barbed wire lined border on some outland in a far off dust strewn dystopia somewhere, or the moat outside of the great titanium walls the 1% will soon erect to keep the rest of us mutants, nanobots and vagabonds out of their controlled air utopia. It’s here where we’ll be unearthing the gems, like for instance the work of JOE KEATINGE (you liked that segue didn’t you?). Keatinge’s latest work is SHUTTER, a somewhat bizarre, kitchen-sink kinda tale, where the writer throws in pretty much everything he can manage: robot assassins, talking cat butler operating systems, tiger-head gangsters, and death oracles, all of whom center their activities around a young woman named Kate who has inherited all these freaks as remnants of her father’s anthropological lust for unearthing the strange and the unknown. Whew! Armed with a camera and her wits and the fact that she’s been doing this Indiana Jones styled maraudering since she was a child at her father’s side, Kate struggles to make sense of a world that accepts all these things as normal. Overall the pace of the book is super hectic, not as meditative as Keatinge’s GLORY was, or as deliberate as his other post-teen romp, HELL YEAH (all three from IMAGE). It’s LEILA DEL DUCA’s art and the strange, dark hues of OWEN GIENI’s colors that give the story it’s foreboding undertone. Were it not for an art team that sought to render each of the quirky characters with sincerity, “Shutter” would read a lot campier. The realistic dialog of the more human characters also helps rein it in. If you’re interested in exploring the works of Joe Keatinge, a writer whose women characters are well developed, “Shutter” is a great place to start.

OK, thanks for journeying with us out here Near the Fringe! Oh yeah, I’m also a writer interested in collaborating with artists! Check out some of my own short story work featuring all original characters here: http://theafterv3rse.tumblr.com/ Til DC hires another-- just one!-- writer of African descent, make mine.. Uh, I mean, see you on the Fringe!