The book’s protagonist is an atheist in a Christian private school who just can’t get no respect. He is the laughing stock of his community for his unwillingness to believe in the tenants of the Bible, specifically the Rapture. Things come to a head at a school function when he enters his academy’s official Hell House. A real thing put together by evangelical Christians, the Hell House in the novel is actually less horrifying than the real ones. This is an impressive feat as, once inside, the Rapture  happens and those non-believers left behind are immediately attacked by ravenous zombie-demons. Our hero and his fellow skeptics now have to fight their way through the Hell House and answer the world’s most important question: what comes next?

Art-wise the best part of the book are the demons, each drool spittle and bloody hang lovingly rendered by Tsubasa Yozora. The art skews towards a definite anime/manga style, so may not appeal to everyone.

The book ends on the cusp of a literal new world order, and I cannot wait to see how Ryan and Chad explore their apocalyptic universe further; “Hell House” is out September from Viper Comics.

Cozy out.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For the rest of this week I’ll be at COMICON writing for the wonderful online magazine Comic Book Resources! Come say hello if you are also there; I’ll be the one in the t-shirt with comic book characters on it.

We make lists, giddy with excitement: he’ll be handsome, but not unbelievably so; he’ll be firm yet unconditionally loving; when he enters a room women will swoon, men will want to be him, and foreign countries will bow before his progressive social agenda that forwards global humanitarian goals, yet in no way inhibits his ability to regulate our national financial sector.

I want Mr. Right for Commander in Chief.

In this time of crisis, its easy for us, guys and gals, to look at our elected leader and lament. Right-wingers  hate the President. Left-wingers are disappointed. The middle is just confused: how can a man who is overseeing the unprecedented expansion of green jobs also stifle those looking for transparency with BP?

All I wanted from the man I elected was that he would do what said he would do. Hell, my standards were low enough just to want someone who wouldn’t torture people!

Where was my duly elected Prince Charming?

Gee whiz, what’s a girl to do?

Looking for him, my president, the one I can look up to without any reservations, I scour the past. Abraham Lincoln springs to mind, and I happily look him up, secure in the knowledge that this President is unassailable. I mean, he kept the country together and freed the slaves!

Well…except he suspended civil liberties during the war, appropriating powers no sitting President ever had before. He imprisoned suspected Southern sympathizers and held them without trial indefinitely. And he was willing to keep slavery legal…if it would keep the Union together.

Ok, I think as I close the history book, not the man for me! I like FDR (being a socialist and all) yet I stumble on the same problems: abolishing constraints on presidential power, interning Japanese citizens, etc. Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin’s cousin and creator of the National Parks, evokes a similar response–how can I love the conservationist without hating the jingoistic hawk inside?

President after President, I search for my Elected Official in Shining Armor. Taft almost makes it with his trust-busting, but loses me by installing a Nicaraguan dictator and turning National Park lands over to private interests. The founding fathers kept women out of the Bill of Rights and upheld slavery. Jackson committed genocide, as did Van Buren, Tyler, and Polk. Millard Fillmore joined the political party equivalent of the KKK.

I keep searching, determined to find the Perfect President. Who do people think of when they become nostalgic for the past? It can’t be Ike, who claimed to be fighting Communism while using U.S. forces to overthrow the democratically elected leaders in Iran. It can’t be Kennedy, Bay of Pigs Kennedy, Pentagon Papers Kennedy, CIA backing the Iraqi Ba’athist Party Kennedy. Truman dropped the Bomb, Clinton dropped his pants, Hoover dropped the ball.

And don’t get me started on Nixon.

I can’t even be happy about our secret gay President (James Buchanan) because he let the Civil War happen!

There are Presidents who died too soon to form an opinion, Presidents whose actions contradicted their ideals, Presidents who–quite frankly–did nothing. I’m at the bottom of the barrel, wondering if I can look past Woodrow Wilson’s tolerance of segregation, when I start to question if there will ever be a president I fully support.

Which makes a girl think.

We like to have things in absolutes. We are the good guys and they are the bad guys. We are right and they are wrong. A good person only does good things and is always right; a bad person only does bad things and is always wrong.

But that’s not how humans function. In our everyday lives we understand that to err is to be human. Yet remove us one step, add the abstraction of a title, and suddenly we expect people to start acting like gods.

Some very bad Presidents have had very good policies. Some very good Presidents have had very monumental fuck-ups. I’m not going to find the Prefect President because he doesn’t exist. No human fitting that title ever has, or ever will.

What we look for in a leader must be the same thing we look for in ourselves: stalwart principles, the ability to compromise, and the wisdom to know which to employ. Elector, elected, we’re all in this together: working imperfectly towards a more perfect future.

Unless you find your Perfect President in Jimmy Carter! Excuse me while I gloss over the economy and Iran Hostage Crises–I have a Presidential portrait to gaze lovingly at.

In time for the release of what seems like the worst female-centric movie ever made, comes a ray of hope from the past: the entire animated series of Daria.

Daria was sarcasm personified. She’s the person everyone wishes they were: the girl with the witty comebacks, summoned instantly for any situation. She didn’t care about petty things, she didn’t care about pretty things–most of the time she just didn’t care. But she was funny, savagely so. And smart. And unafraid. And for six glorious years, she influenced an entire generation of girls.

I spent the formative years of my life watching her, buying anything remotely tied to her, dressing like her for Halloween and costume parties. She was me; in a sea of Brittneys and Fashion Clubs she spoke to us girls who wanted more. We were the girls who talked to adults like equals. We were the girls who didn’t understand why it was SO important to attract the attention of the boy-of-the-month. We’re the girls who actually liked reading books, especially books that made grown-ups uncomfortable. We’re the girls who refused to adhere to standards, normal or double, because that’s not who were were. We’re the girls with band-aids on our knees, pulling our dresses over our heads because they’re hot and silly and we want to play in the mud.

Generation Daria is older now. We’re among the first wave of women to outnumber men in college. We’re climbing our way into the ranks of male-dominated fields, along with our older sisters, winning attention and accolades and praise.

At the same time, we have to do more. There is a whole generation of girls now growing up with Bella, not Daria; waiting for their Vampire to come instead of realizing that finding Mr. Toothy Charming is not important; who are told their only wish is to aspire to the ranks of that cult of Jimmy Choo, the girls from Sex and the City. They have no Daria; they have no My So-Called Life, or Powerpuff Girls, or Alex Mack, or Scully, or Alias, or any inkling that women are allowed to be just as complex as men. The “heroines” of our little sisters fail the Bechdel test every time, and unless we can show them life does not revolve around hollow romance and lip-gloss, we’ll have failed them too.

They need a Daria, and if they can’t get a new one, hopefully watching the old one will suffice.

You know what’s not an act of god? The Gulf of Mexico oil leak.

The oil disaster taking place on our shore is entirely our fault. Clearly our fault. Brilliantly and embarrassingly and completely mindbogglingly our fault. Despite attempts to shove it under the rug of divine catastrophes by Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry, the Deepwater Horizon leak is in no way, shape or form an “event outside of human control,” as per the legal definition. It was not an Act of God when BP refused to adhere to new rules proposed by the Interior Department regulating off-shore drilling. It was not an Act of God when the rig was found lacking basic blow-out prevention tools because they weren’t mandatory, thus not included. It wasn’t an Act of God when the cement filling in the area cracked, as they were warned it would, nor was it an Act of God that oil spreads, nor was it an Act of God that we were drilling off-shore to begin with. The leak, if anything, is an Act of Stupidity. One of the most prevantable disasters in living memory, every safety precaution available was ignored not by God but by Humans; the Angels did not descend from the heavens to kill off the livelihood of Louisiana.

We, especially in America, are quick to label things an Act of God when it’s obviously an Act of Us. Global warming is not an Act of God when we’re the ones creating the carbon emissions. The hole over the Ozone layer is not an Act of God when it directly sprang from CFCs (and, since we eliminated them from aerosol and other cans, has immediately shrunk to near-obsolescence). The recession is not an Act of God just as the Wall Street crashes are not an Act of God, just as Goldman Sachs and the failure of capitalism is not an Act of God, unless the last one is a result of charging usury (specifically forbidden in the Bible) and God has been reincarnated as a Senator on the GS Fraud Hearings. In which case you’d think there would be more turning into pillars of salt and less angry highlighting of passages from emails (Senator Collins works in mysterious ways).

So where do we get off blaming things that are obviously our fault on this God guy? Like a kid pointing at her brother for spilling the milk (sorry Luke), we’ve descended into a state of national immaturity, passing responsibility faster than a ball in a game of hot-potato. It isn’t just that we label sticking our tongues to freezing poles as an Act of God; we get mad if we have to pay taxes, get vaccines, even vote (no taxation for no representation!). And while it would be easy to blame it on our ADD media, or corporate interests, or terrorism, or capitalism, or socialism, or any number of things, this would accomplish nothing. Because we’d be doing the same exact thing we did before (Rick Perry is an act of God!).

We live in a Republic which, no matter how watered down, demands that The People shoulder responsibility for The People. If we feel powerless then it’s up to us to take back that power, through protests, through votes, through demands to our Government, through boycotts against the interests that threaten our environment. I’m not talking about Tea Parties, those descendants of the Know-Nothing Party, who excel in responsibility-shirking, or about those groups that form around hot-button issues and turn them into stalemates. I’m talking about realizing that our world is messed up, and its our fault. It’s about supporting those who are making a practical difference in our world. A Government is only as good as its people, and if people can get their Acts together, we could make a pretty good Government and a half-way decent planet.

So no more crying that Deepwater Horizon is an Act of God, a disaster no one can be held accountable for. We can hold BP completely accountable for it. But we must also hold our regulation-shy Government accountable too, and hold ourselves accountable for changing it. Otherwise, millions of years from now when intelligent life finally reaches us, there will be nothing left, and our extinction will be recorded in an alien log-book under the heading “Act of God.”