Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Shatter

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
-- William Gibson, Neuromancer



They don't advertise for killers in the newspaper. That was my profession. Ex-cop. Ex-blade runner. Ex-killer.
-- Fancher and Peoples, Blade Runner



A temp has many names for many jobs -- and usually keeps his real name a secret. Nobody calls me Shatter.
-- Peter Gillis, Shatter





Comic Pimp Extraordinaire James Sime has posted a preview of Shatter, the legendary computer-illustrated graphic novel from 1985. This is as much a cultural landmark as a technical one, and I was glad when Mr. Larry Young sent me an email a few moons ago hinting that it might be coming from AiT/PlanetLar. This book found me in high school in Elmhurst, Illinois and it was exciting. It was a damn good time for comics in general, but Shatter was something special, and not because it was drawn on a Mac. It was special because it was the purest expression of cyberpunk that I had seen in a comic, and it stands as one of the perfect examples of the genre that was pre-Snow Crash cyberpunk. American Flagg was close, but it was too colorful, too individual, too Chaykin. Cyberpunk was the zeitgeist, and Shatter didn't feel like a comic ... it felt like the real thing.

Thanks, Larry, for publishing this. I'll be picking it up, and even if it only holds up as a museum piece ... it's the museum of my teenage years, and it'll be damn fun to visit again.

And yes, the price is $14.85.
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