Noir

A surprisingly great noir-style comic set in the world of Pokémon

Ray Bruwelheide puts the usually colorful Pokémon in black and white, telling the start of a story that isn’t about battling, but about crime. It’s just getting started, but there’s a lot of promise in Bruwelheide’s approach to the superpowered pocket monsters. The first two pages of this brief intro comic are below. You can…

Books & Comics Lauren Davis Feb 3

Copernicus Jones is a hardboiled android detective battling the robot mob

There are eight million stories in the Future City; this is one of them. Copernicus Jones is your typical wise-cracking private eye: he’s got a weakness for betting on sports games and he can’t say no to a leggy dame with a fat pocketbook. But beneath the hat and trenchcoat, he’s all robot. Matt Wilson…

Books & Comics Lauren Davis Dec 31

Sleep No More = LARP + Shakespeare + Absinthe + Orgy Masks

Since March, Punchdrunk theater company’s immersive Shakespeare adaptation Sleep No More has converted an entire Manhattan loft building into a 100-room abandoned hotel from the 1940s. During this almost three-hour performance, audience members must wander through six floors of bugfuck creepiness wearing Venetian masks and following dancers who wordlessly reenact scenes from Macbeth, which star…

io9 Cyriaque Lamar Nov 13

The webcomic The Man of Many Shades is a grizzled noir set in a little girl’s happy drawing

When Happy escapes from jail, he finds himself in a place much worse than prison. Now he’s trapped in the waxy, dystopic world of a little girl’s drawing ruled by a maniacal unicorn, and he’s desperate to get back home. Matt Ellis takes the sweet, crudely drawn pictures of small children and puts a darker…

Books & Comics Lauren Davis Sep 24

Shooting Challenge: Film Noir

Forget the cheesy fedoras and femme fatales for a moment. Film noir was, at its heart, about light and shadow, hope and despair, good and evil…and the difficulty of distinguishing everything in between. For this week’s Shooting Challenge, rediscover noir. The Challenge Capture a photo in the film noir style. That means black and white…

Tech News Mark Wilson Aug 10

Dark City, Cool Art: Awesome Neo-Noir and Urban Fantasy Cityscapes

When you’re in the city that never sleeps, you might want to keep one eye open at all times. Many of the best futuristic cities and urban fantasy stories take place in dark, dystopian cities. Check out some of our favorite neo-noir and fantasy noir art — and remember: The city is watching you. Top…

io9 Katharine Trendacosta and Charlie Jane Anders May 20

First Guns-Blazing Shot of Bruce Willis in Rian Johnson’s Looper

Bruce Willis means business, in the first image from Looper, the time-traveling noir adventure from Brick director Rian Johnson. You can see the full-size image over at Empire, along with a brief description of some footage they saw at Cannes. https://gizmodo.com/rian-johnsons-looper-is-the-futuristic-noir-movie-weve-5693692

io9 Charlie Jane Anders May 13

How to save noir fiction from irrelevance

Anybody who cares about noir fiction should read Domenic Stansberry’s scathing rebuke to the calcification of the genre. (And since noir is the fundamental inspiration for a ton of urban fantasy right now, as well as much of the cyberpunk genre, pretty much anybody who’s interested in well-written science fiction and fantasy should care about…

io9 Charlie Jane Anders Feb 1

DC Comics jewelry wraps Gotham City around your finger

If you’ve got the money, DC has a collection of sparkling comic book-centric jewels you can adorn yourself with. Our personal favorite are the bedazzled Cat Woman claws, and this Gotham City ring. For more go to the website Noir Jewelry, where you can purchase your very own set of kitten claws. [Via Geekologie]

io9 Meredith Woerner Dec 20

Noir Jewelry

Cat Woman Claw $150-280 Gotham City Ring $225 Bat Girl Ring $143 Bat Girl Dome Ring $300 Wonder Woman $165 Wonder Woman $143 Wonder Woman Logo $165 Super Girl $500 Wonder Woman Earrings $275 Bat Girl Bracelet $215 Wonder Woman Cuff $185 Super Girl Studs $70

io9 Meredith Woerner Dec 20

All new concept art for post-apocalyptic noir The Last City

One man takes on the ruler of post-apocalyptic New York City, in a quest for vengeance that may turn into a hope for salvation. Check out this new concept art for the post-apocalyptic pot-boiler The Last City. It’s great to see concept art that shows off the muddy, fiery palette of this film. Here’s a…

io9 Quiet Earth Jul 8

Cyberpunk detective novel Altered Carbon really is all that

For years now, people have been telling me to read Richard K. Morgan’s cyberpunksploitation novel Altered Carbon, and I’ve been meaning to get around to it. But holy fuck, it really is that great. Spoilers below. So yes, to everyone who’s been recommending this book to me, you were totally right. The only reason I…

io9 Charlie Jane Anders May 19

How Important Is Mute’s Futuristic Setting?

Duncan Jones has described Mute as inspired by Blade Runner, but how important is the futuristic setting to the film’s plot. A script reviewer finds Mute was originally set in the modern day, and told a very similar story. Script review site ScriptShadow compared two versions of Mute, which Jones wrote with Mike Johnson. The…

Movies Lauren Davis Nov 12

Beasts, Giant Secrets And Alternate Futures Await

Ignore your familiar superheroes this week; the Comics We Crave are all about unfamiliar faces (or unfamiliar takes on familiar faces), the stories we never saw on television and even an alternate history of the 21st Century. Who could resist? Let’s get the familiar names out of the way first, shall we? Marvel have the…

Books & Comics Graeme McMillan Sep 15

Take a Trip Down the Lynchian Rabbit Hole

Fans of surreal mysteries like Lost and The Prisoner would do well to check out Sin Titulo, Cameron Stewart‘s creepy noir comic involving malevolent nursing home employees, teleportation, and people psychically connected through a vision of a dead tree. Along with Karl Kerschl, of the previously mentioned The Abominable Charles Christopher, Cameron Stewart is part…

io9 Lauren Davis Sep 2

L.A. Is A Magical Cesspit, And Sandman Slim Is Its New Champion

Richard Kadrey was at the vanguard of the noir-tinged cyberpunk back in the day, so it’s only fitting he’s helping to shape noir’s next frontier, urban fantasy. His novel Sandman Slim brings Hellspawn and trash magic to L.A. Spoilers below… Sandman Slim follows the adventures of Jimmy, aka Stark, aka Sandman Slim, who was dragged…

io9 Charlie Jane Anders Aug 26

Strangely Hairless Concept Art From Frankenstein’s Film Noir Revamp

Classic monsters are being revamped into a dark detective flick where Dracula is a crime lord, Frankenstein’s monster is a detective and we can only assume the hairless bride of Frankenstein you see here is his sexy undead secretary. This concept art shows Patrick Tatopoulos’ vision for his noir film, based on the comic book…

io9 Meredith Woerner Aug 11

23rd Century Muslim Cyborgs in “Budayeen Nights”

“Blade Runner meets Casablanca written by Nelson Algren” would be the Hollywood pitch for Budayeen Nights, a collection of stories by the late George Alec Effinger. But there’s much more to these hard-boiled, lemon-scented tales. Recently re-released by Golden Gryphon Press as a trade paperback, Budayeen Nights is a vivid collection of nine tales set…

io9 Grey_Area Feb 27

KOP And Ex-KOP Are Pure Noir Candy

Science fiction noir doesn’t come much nastier than the KOP novels by Warren Hammond. The adventures of a bent cop on a rotten planet, they’re like Dashiell Hammett mixed with Philip K. Dick. Spoilers ahead. I’m pretty much a noir addict, especially the works of Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, Stark and MacDonald. (I also loved Frank…

Books & Comics Charlie Jane Anders Feb 13

Sexual Repression Is Science Fiction’s Secret Hyperdrive Fuel

Richard K. Morgan (author of Altered Carbon) did an interview with the StarShipSofa podcast, and it’s pretty thought-provoking stuff. He explains why trying to write short stories before you write novels may be a waste of time, why noir SF has made a comeback, and why he doesn’t mind being called a pornographer. Commenters on…

Books & Comics Charlie Jane Anders Dec 1

A surprisingly great noir-style comic set in the world of Pokémon

Copernicus Jones is a hardboiled android detective battling the robot mob

Sleep No More = LARP + Shakespeare + Absinthe + Orgy Masks

The webcomic The Man of Many Shades is a grizzled noir set in a little girl’s happy drawing

Shooting Challenge: Film Noir

Dark City, Cool Art: Awesome Neo-Noir and Urban Fantasy Cityscapes

First Guns-Blazing Shot of Bruce Willis in Rian Johnson’s Looper

How to save noir fiction from irrelevance

DC Comics jewelry wraps Gotham City around your finger

Noir Jewelry

All new concept art for post-apocalyptic noir The Last City

Cyberpunk detective novel Altered Carbon really is all that

How Important Is Mute’s Futuristic Setting?

Beasts, Giant Secrets And Alternate Futures Await

Take a Trip Down the Lynchian Rabbit Hole

L.A. Is A Magical Cesspit, And Sandman Slim Is Its New Champion

Strangely Hairless Concept Art From Frankenstein’s Film Noir Revamp

23rd Century Muslim Cyborgs in “Budayeen Nights”

KOP And Ex-KOP Are Pure Noir Candy

Sexual Repression Is Science Fiction’s Secret Hyperdrive Fuel

‘Kamen Rider’ Is Ready to Take on the World

Twitter Just Can’t Stop Leaking Movies

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