A page from issue one of Biomega. The art in this series, a prequel to Blame, is unparalleled.

Heavy Liquid
graphic novel by Paul Pope

Paul Pope won accolades recently for his visionary Batman: Year 100, a sort of insane futuristic cyberpunk Batman tale that had undertones of a surveillance society. This is an earlier work, a five-issue series on Dark Horse that takes place an indeterminate amount of time in the future. It concerns a man named S, a semi-criminal “finder” who has recently ripped off a bunch of “heavy liquid,” a mysterious substance and perhaps one of the most valuable on Earth.

Pope’s illustration style is very unique and very eye-catching. The stylized but grounded black-and-white artwork is tinted with one or two colors, and his talent for scene-setting is excellent. If you see it in a used book store or comic place, at the very least flip through it. Or buy it for me.

Garkov replaces the text of a few Garfield strips with text in Markov chains, “a probabilistic model well suited to semi-coherent text synthesis.” I’m not sure exactly what it means, but it’s semi-random and completely weird. Here are a few good ones I turned up.

If you get a good one, you can’t just “save image,” you have to take a screenshot; the text is not part of the image so you’ll get a blank one.