ONE DAY TO SHADRACH!

SHADRACH STONE, by me and Jon Proctor, goes on sale TOMORROW, THURSDAY 9 SEPTEMBER!

Here's your last sneak preview. These pages have not been released before.

TWO DAYS TO SHADRACH!

On Thursday, September 9th, SHADRACH STONE will be available in comic shops.



We've been working on this graphic novel for a long time. To recap: Here's a brief introduction to the book. Here's a set of slightly enigmatic profiles of the characters, and here's a recent interview where I Tell All (or Tell Most, or Tell A Bunch of Things, anyway).

And here's a couple of pages you probably haven't seen yet.





SHADRACH STONE, by me and Jon Proctor. Inks by Jeff Dabu; alternate cover by Jon Foster; introduction by Mike Carey. $19.95.

September 9th!

Big Interview

Here's a very revealing interview, where I talk about the heart of the story -- including a very bad day that happened in Manhattan, and how it's important to SHADRACH STONE. Hint:

Interviews!

Here's a nice interview with me about SHADRACH, with new art.



And here's a two-part interview covering my entire career.

Here, a friend talks about me. (Among more important things.)

And here I talk about The 99, another comic I write.

And right here, I shut up for a change!

Cross-Promotion Alert!

I'll be at Jim Hanley's Universe in Manhattan this Wednesday evening, signing the brand-new first issue of NAMOR: THE FIRST MUTANT, my new monthly title from Marvel. Also signing: Jonathan Hickman, Dan Slott, Greg Pak, Fred Van Lente, and Nick Spencer. Come on out, whisper "Force Majeure," and I'll show you some Shadrach artwork.

Listen to Me

Here's an interview I recorded a little while back, focusing heavily on SHADRACH STONE. The Shadrach material starts about five minutes in. The MP3 link seems to be broken, but the Enhanced AAC version works.

And I should have a long, career-spanning interview up on Comic Book Resources soon, to celebrate the release of my new Marvel monthly NAMOR: THE FIRST MUTANT this week. That'll cover SHADRACH, too. Links to come!

Further Reading

From SHADRACH STONE, page 17:



Vida, Shadrach’s girlfriend, refers here to a theory propagated by the late Robert Anton Wilson. Wilson is best known as the coauthor of the Illuminatus! trilogy, but I’ve always found his nonfiction books fascinating. They cover topics ranging from drugs and libertarianism to James Joyce, quantum physics, and conspiracy theories.

I first came across this particular theory, about the relationship between brain chemistry and reality, in Wilson’s book Right Where You Are Sitting Now (1982). The essay “By Way of Summary” begins:

Your brain has 20 billion bits of information. The repeating loops between various bits make up your private reality-labyrinth, the thoughts, feelings and (apparent) sense impressions that you keep encountering over and over, year after year.

You encounter them over and over precisely because they are repeating tape loops.

Ethnomethodology demonstrates that the loops can be broken at any point, a process technically known as breaching. The result is a rapid reorganization as the 20 billion bits quantum-jump to a different order of coherence. A new “you” and a new “external world” appear in the process. [Emphasis Wilson’s.]

There are [ten to the 2,783,000th power] possible permutations; alternative models of “you” and the “external world.”

And just as I was preparing the complete graphic-novel script for SHADRACH, I came across this passage in Wilson’s final book, Email to the Universe (2005):

Every nervous system creates its own “reality.” Out of the billions, or billions of billions, of energies intersecting the room in which you read this, your brain, performing 100,000,000 processes per minute (almost all of them unconscious to those circuits called the ego and recognized as “me”) arranges a few hundred or thousand into the Gestalt which you experience as the “reality” of the room…I call this neurological relativism, or the relativity of perceived “reality.”

SHADRACH STONE wouldn’t exist without Wilson’s writings. They’re highly recommended.