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Interview

Supanova p1

READERSVOICE.COM aims to collect a few interesting reading tips. This issue features book tips from authors and artists at the latest Supanova, Brisbane, which is a comic-con style event featuring the fantasy and sci-fi genres. These events are open to any artist and writer who cares to hire a table, so the best creative people have a chance to show their work. And they feature all sorts of guest speakers, like animation voice actors, and writers and artists for tv, comics and novels. It's a good place to learn from creative professionals, and find out the best of recent sci-fi and fantasy books and comics.

Writer and publisher of Silver Fox Comics, Sorab Del Rio is the creator of the comic Sydney Zombie Apocalypse.
At a talk with some other great comics artists and writers, he said he kept a lot of notepads and other devices at hand, for collecting his ideas. He gained some of his best ideas on a hillside near his home.
He liked the comic series Fatale, written by Ed Brubaker and with art by Sean Phillips. It was a 24 issue noir comic book about Jo, a seemingly immortal femme fatale from the 1930s. She has the supernatural ability to hypnotise men into becoming infatuated with her. Meanwhile she is pursued by a violent cult that worships cosmic gods.
Another favorite was a manga called The Flowers of Evil by Shuzo Oshimi. It’s about a bookworm Japanese middle school student named Takao Kasuga whose favorite book is Les Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire. He’s forced into a “contract” by fellow student Sawa Nakamura, when he is caught stealing the gym clothes of a girl he likes, Nanako Saeki. He is blackmailed into committing crimes.
Sorab Del Rio was also a big fan of Frank Miller and not just Sin City. He also liked comics like Wolverine and the Jack Kirby-illustrated comics in Tales of Suspense.
Another author at the Supanova, Matthew Hellscream, funded his novel, Metro 7, on Kickstarter. It’s a scifi thriller. The crew of the Icarus are transporting a war criminal across space when they receive a distress beacon from a city-sized ship called the Metropolis Seven, which is on a 10-year voyage across the galaxy. The Metro 7 has 100,000 passengers and crew but it’s all silence on board.
The author said that as a kid in the 1980s he would watch any sci fi, fantasy movies around, like Predator, Aliens; not to mention Dinoriders and Transformers. He was highly influenced by these space thrillers.
Matthew Hellscream liked the Nemesis Saga by Jeremy Robinson, the first of which is Project Nemesis. He also liked Infected, a 2008 science fiction novel by Scott Sigler, along with Contagious and Pandemic by the same author.
Another favorite was Write the Fight Right by Alan Baxter, which is a fiction writer how-to book.
And he liked the SNAFU series by Cohesion press. These are anthologies of stories in the military horror subgenre, and eight anthologies have been produced.

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-copyright Simon Sandall.