G A N Z E E R . T O D A Y

Excerpt from Ho Che Anderson's afterword for THE SOLAR GRID:

Ganzeer’s The Solar Grid, tells the story of a future we’re going out of our way to create. One of environmental collapse and a rabid technocracy in which humanity is expendable if it means fulfilling the whims and fantasies of an enlightened elite. What upsets me about this reverie of Mars, aliens, and space lilies, is how real and current it all feels, replete with shitty oligarchs and imperialists who always fail upwards, gorge on corporate welfare, and gaslight as they promise a glorious future. What they leave out is that the coming glory will be promised to us, financed by us, but denied us, reserved only for the other masters of the universe and their curated plebes and acolytes. All for them, none for you, the enemy, from whom they must steal to ensure their protection.

And what an OGN, visually inventive, filled with audacious design choices, and armed with a confident range of styles, including some Kirby-inspired collage. It’s a game I like to play, trying to spot the sources and inspirations behind the work I’m taking in. Half the time I’m off by a light year but it doesn’t make the game any less fun. And I swear I noticed some Matt Wagner, Sergio Toppi, Ridely Scott (of Ridleygrams fame) in the mix. A little Caza, Rizzo, Basquiat, Philip K. Dick, and maybe even a smidge of James A. Corey. I thought I noticed a sprinkling of Miller, Moebius, Darrow, Otomo and Matsumoto. Am I stretching beyond all reason in seeing a little Kubrick and Gerry Anderson, creator of my beloved Space: 1999? Probably. But even if I’m wrong about their direct influence, the spirit of some of these creators and what they brought to the popular culture lives inside Ganzeer’s lines and storytelling.

What I really dug about this comic was the world building. It’s the kind of project that bears rereading to properly grasp the layers you missed the first time around. It reminds a little of Watchmen with its devotion to text-based spreads, headlines, and faux magazine and online layout, using the ephemera of this society to comment on its complexity.

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Read it in full in the pages of THE SOLAR GRID hardback, now available for pre-order.

#tsg

From the introduction by Sim Kern:

Speculative fiction started pulling its punches in the 2010s. Stories were scrubbed clean of any grit. Authors sanded down sharp edges, and the safest bet was to write low-stakes, low-conflict, “cozy” fiction—a label that came to define a booming sub-genre.

Don’t get me wrong—these aesthetics stemmed from legitimate critiques of genre fiction that had come before. Western scifi, fantasy, and horror stories of decades prior often did contain white supremacist, sexist, etc. elements, and so conversations about avoiding harmful tropes were long overdue. The culture of interrogating authors’ identities and questioning whether they were “allowed” to write about people unlike them, came from the desire to make room for marginalized voices in a publishing industry that was (and remains) dominated by white people. And the demand for trigger warnings and cozy options in genre fiction was an understandable reaction to the extreme, graphic violence—especially, the gratuitous sexual violence—that dominated the fiction of some of the most successful speculative authors of the decade prior: Frank Miller, Cormac McCarthy, and George R.R. Martin.

But something had clearly gone wrong when these legitimate concerns became strict commandments, used to crush dissent, flatten literature, and destroy the burgeoning careers of young, marginalized authors they were supposed to help. In his book Elite Capture: How the Powerful took over Identity Politics (And Everything Else), philosopher Olúfémi O. Táíwò calls the weaponization of identity politics “deference politics,” which he defines as, “an etiquette that asks people to pass attention, resources, and initiative to those perceived as more marginalized than themselves.” Táíwò argues that deference politics winds up harming marginalized people—by tokenizing them, reducing their value to the sum of their traumas and oppressions, and by directing “what little attentional power we can control at symbolic sites of power rather than at the root political issues that explain why everything is so fucked up.”

When well-meaning people fall for deference politics, it’s easy for elites to position themselves as the most marginalized person in the room, grab the mic, and direct liberatory energy towards symbolic struggles, while those same elites materially rob, poison, enslave, and kill us. Back in the 2010s, the Twitter literary community was a small legion of well-meaning activists, and we could’ve been doing any number of things with our time—organizing to feed and house people, boycott evil corporations, or seize political power, to name a few ideas. Instead, we each spent hundreds of hours online, focusing our collective ire, not on the pedophilic oligarchs, war profiteers, and oil-and-gas corporations dooming our planet to mass extinction, but on debut twenty-two-year-old authors who’d written space adventures and dragon stories for our amusement.

Ganzeer was evidently aware of these forces, because in 2016, as he inked the first pages of The Solar Grid, he offered one of the most incisive critiques of deference politics I’ve seen in fiction.

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It's a big one, coming in at 3147 words, and it is awesome. It can be read in full in the pages of THE SOLAR GRID hardback, now available for preorder.

#tsg

WHERE THEY CREATE is a blog, book, and Youtube channel which unveils the working spacing of artists, architects, and other creative types. My new porn has been found.

#radar

Excerpt from the foreword by Warren Ellis:

900-odd years from now, Earth is just a power station for Mars. Something that occurred to Ganzeer after recalling a teenage trip to the Aswan Dam and seeing a giant, impossible machine that he later learned was an environmental disaster. A machine to generate and transmit power. A machine whose construction displaced 100,000 people and caused significant ecological and health issues. We follow two young people subsisting in the glare of the Grid. The future’s killing everybody on Earth. This is the oldest and purest form of science fiction: taking a new angle on the present condition to light it in different and awful ways. Even absurdity brings clarity.

And this book does have absurdity. Stylistic shifts pile up, jokes clatter about, it gets goofy and funny. But don’t be fooled. Ganzeer is fucking furious. The book is jagged with it. THE SOLAR GRID is big and full, it pushes boundaries and it absolutely crackles with the anger of an artist who’s been watching his world go stupid and cruel and mad for far too long. So he gives us a book that amplifies that stupidity and cruelty and madness but never lets us lose sight of where it all emanates from and where it lays today.

THE SOLAR GRID is an immense undertaking that combines so many different styles into a coherent whole that I think it alters the conception of what a big graphic novel can be, and rich enough to be one of the few graphic novels that deserves the term “novel.”

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An old acquaintance from the science fiction literature field actually cut ties with me over this. Fuck him.

The foreword can be read in full within the pages of THE SOLAR GRID hardback, now available for pre-order.

#TSG

The chair that was eagerly awaited for so long remains underutilized, because we are back in the throes of the 1000mph club where I will likely stay until the end of the year.

Alas, settling into my old age will have to wait.

Chain used to hang my floorlamp has been replaced with a rope, which I think looks much nicer now.

Okay, back to work.

#journal

Book launch/signing for THE SOLAR GRID hardback tentatively lined up... in Denmark! Probably around early-summer next year.

Social media campaigning has been spreading me a little thin. You'd be surprised by the amount of time that goes into shooting and editing a 30 second reel. I'm gonna need to pull away and focus on finishing up writing, drawing, and designing TIMES NEW HUMAN, which—as per my agreement with EUNIC—will need to be launched, at least locally, before year's end.

Look at me excel-sheeting my journal to track progress for Christ's sake. Also got a couple of fantastic-looking advance-reader copies of things friends sent me that I need to read.

The thing with social media is you can't rely on having just the one “ad” and repost. You gotta vary your “content” for sustainable engagement. Traditional promotion has been flipped over its head. It's why film studios don't just give us the trailer anymore; no, they give us clips of Christopher Nolan talking about some of his latest filmmaking techniques and Tom Cruise joking about how much fun he had performing in a fat suit. Easier done of course when you're a juggernaut with immense resources, but it doesn't absolve everyone else from needing to use somewhat similar strategies to get noticed. And here's the thing; if a giant like Christopher Nolan—who is notoriously known for not even having a smartphone of his own—understands that being visible on social media is imperative to the success of his already-well-promoted film... what makes us little guys think we can get away with having no social media presence at all and still make a living?

It's hard though when you're doing everything yourself. The mental shift from creating to promoting and back again is, admittedly, a little too much for me to handle. So I'm gonna need to land on a system that won't fuck with my head too much. Maybe dedicate one single day a week to shooting and preparing material and scheduling it in advance, so the rest of the week is free to write and draw. Something like that.

I like systems. Systems are good.

#journal #work

A few years back, Ahmed Naji (author of ROTTEN EVIDENCE), asked me to provide an illustration for an awesome short speculative satire he wrote for Art of the Working Class. Titled THE TANTA MUSEUM OF WHITE HISTORY, it is both funny and piercingly perceptive, and he just made it available on his substack.

It'll make you laugh-cry in the best kind of way. Highly recommended reading.

#work

I may have unlocked promotional god mode.

Since I started posting on instagram more regularly just a handful of days ago (especially with the reels), orders for THE SOLAR GRID hardback have been pouring in (at an average conversion rate of about 10%) and my follower count has made a 5% jump (And we're getting so many applicants for the producer job).

The danger of course is getting too swept up by the social media sinkhole. We are after all, only human, and it is exactly the seductive lure of social media sinkholes that forces us to run for our lives away from these platforms from time to time (my old Z Flip actually helped immensely with weening me off social media; you're less inclined to reach for your phone every few mins if there's no big screen on its face calling out to you). Shunning social media is certainly a necessity when you'd like to lock in on a project and just get to work with as little distraction as possible. A little less of a necessity when work on the project is done and it's time to get the word out about it.

Instagram can be a time suck, especially if you're making reels for it. Quite the workload in its own right. Difficult to add more work to your plate when you're in the middle of working on something else, let alone something big. But once you're done with said big work (especially big work you might've poured 10 years of your life into), isn't it worth it to put just as much effort into promoting it?

What can I say, I'm kind of an all-in sorta guy.

#work #tsg

Samsung's Z Flip3 has been my phone of choice for the past 5 years. Good battery life, sturdy construction, great camera, and compact when its folded and not in use.

After a couple days of failing to find a replacement in the Z series (they just don't have them out here, anywhere), I settled for the S26. A flat slab of a phone, which I loathe, but it was the lightest and smallest 2026 phone I could find. Battery life is good, as is the camera.

I actually considered digging out my old battered S8 to use as a temp, at least until my next trip where I could get the latest Z Flip.

Okay, I did more than just consider it; I did indeed dig it out and even managed to transfer all the data from my dead Z to it (which took many, many, many hours), until it became evident that its pitiful condition extended to more than just the exterior.

The S26 is fine. I'll probably still nab a Z Flip on my next trip anyway, and keep the S26 as backup.

#journal

Shit, I can hardly log in to anything right now. Almost everything is set up for “two-factor authentication” whether you like it or not.

I feel like I'm witness to the doom that is soon to come to many.

#journal