Tag: Pantheon

Panfuturism

Kaeli arrives at the City of the Gods (Pantheon Volume 1)

From the established trunk of Afrofuturism emerges a new branch I call Panfuturism. This isn’t some Ukranian offshoot of avant-garde Futurismo, for what it is worth. Where Afrofuturism is science fiction without the colonial mentality and othering, and reimagined with ancient African traditions with an unapologetic black identity, Panfuturism is also science fiction, but on a global scale, up to and including all our ancient mythologies re-imagined in a post-human future. Continue reading Panfuturism

On Writing Pantheon

Last month, I finally published the first volume of Pantheon: Heterotopia. This blog is the lessons I’ve learned from writing and drawing it over the last few years. Writing Pantheon, at least the very first chapter, was done in a flash of inspiration, and unlocking a hidden treasure. But it wasn’t until long afterwards that I realized that most of the hard work was done before I even sat down to write – it was the reading and imagining the possibilities for years until it finally crystallized as a true piece of art. Something worth endowing with a thousand perfections and to count my blessings with limitless satisfaction. But this was a serious overestimation, as if the first chapter dripped from the honeyed lips of the Muses into my broken ears. Chapter one was just the opening step. Continue reading On Writing Pantheon

Greatest Paradox

Some time ago, I wrote myself into a corner in a chapter from Pantheon, in which a character was forced to solve a conundrum: he had to stay at a location, safeguard a highly sensitive museum, but prevent interlopers from coming inside, while not showing himself to them, or destroy them, or the critical objects of desire. The more I thought about this, the less confident I was at solving this Gordian knot. After all, if the aforementioned options prevented all possible solutions, then somewhere there was an assumption that made the conclusion false.

Continue reading Greatest Paradox

Pantheon and Postcolonialism

Iz'rael and Jalamdhara
Iz’rael and Jalamdhara

A reading of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth inspired a possible story for my ongoing graphic novel, Pantheon, particularly a world full of a sentient species that were ruled by “divinities,” better understood as demigods from our ancient mythologies. Continue reading Pantheon and Postcolonialism

The Post-Human in Pantheon

david-mach-die-harder-web
Die Harder, by David Mach

One of the main reasons of conceiving my graphic novel epic Pantheon is to explore the post-human aspect of science fiction, and I felt this was the most interesting direction to take the stories of mythology towards. For me, science fiction works best when it expresses the future according to our hopes and fears, but mythology works in a different fashion – it comes from some type of a collective unconscious of the human experience. That said, a combination of both elements should be quite rich and dynamic. Continue reading The Post-Human in Pantheon

Existentialism in Pantheon

I had an epiphany a few days ago: the graphic novel I am working on, Pantheon, is a vampire novel. I mean, it doesn’t obviously share with many traditional elements (blood sucking, undead creatures), but they both feature immortal beings that reflect on our humanity in many ways, and most importantly in an existential fashion. Continue reading Existentialism in Pantheon

Pantheon and Christ

I have been thinking about the best or most appropriate way to tackle the relationship between Christ and the gods of Pantheon, and recently I came across a potential approach in Sloterdijk’s “Cabinet of Cynics” chapter from Critique of Cynical Reason where he goes through the five embodiment of cynicism through history. The first suspect is none other than Diogenes, who embodied the low theory version in his decided opposition to the all-too serious discourse of Socrates & Plato. Kynicism was based on the animal nature of man, where the gestures of the body were framed as arguments (farting or shitting or whacking off in public). In other words Diogenes poked fun at his grave opponents, but instead of talking against such idealism, he lived in opposition in an anti-theoretical, anti-dogmatic and anti-scholastic way. Continue reading Pantheon and Christ