"Enough good things cannot be said about the art in this issue. From the blank stare of Dr. Nikken to the crying of the baby elephantmen, the art brings the issue to life in a way that is as painful to the heart as it is amazing to the eye. (10/10)"
Rather than fill our bookshelves here with recommendations of all the comic books and creators we like (although if you do want those recommendations, just check out our Balloon Tales site), we thought we'd share some of the books and music that informed the creation of HIP FLASK in general and UNNATURAL SELECTION in particular.
My reading in the fields of genetic engineering, evolution and conservation often brought up the same names again and again. Douglas Adams, Richard Dawkins, Desmond Morris and Edward O. Wilson are just a few of the authors I was either already aware of or discovered recently that proved not only capable of making intelligent points but also of making them accessible to readers who don't share their scientific or better-informed knowledge.
A Year With Swollen Appendices by Brian Eno
I would also like to refer you to Brian Eno's thought-provoking essay "The Big Here & The Long Now" from which the forthcoming HIP FLASK mini series takes its name. It is an essay I discovered through the book "The Clock of the Long Now," which I bought on Amazon just because I liked the title. That book inspired me to pick up Brian Eno's Diary "A Year with Swollen Appendices" which is packed so densely with thoughts and ideas, I am still only up to November after two years! I always thought Eno was just the weird guy who left Roxy Music before they made it really big, and I was amazed to discover, after reading his book, that he was also either a composer, collaborator or producer of dozens of albums and pieces of music which I already had in my collection for many years. I also recommend that you follow the link from Eno's essay to The Long Now Foundation and, from there, to the All Species Foundation.
"This book should be read almost as though it were science fiction. It is designed to appeal to the imagination. But it is not science fiction: it is science. Cliche or not, 'stranger than fiction' expresses exactly how I feel about the truth. We are survival machines -- robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." — Richard Dawkins
"The great problem with the future is that we die there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence. Its very life emphasizes our helpless death. The power granted to humans by foresight is enormous, but so is the cost." — Stewart Brand
"Even if it's a billion years until the Earth becomes uninhabitable for humans, that is not much time. Any writer will tell you a billion years is nothing. We'll get down to 999,999,999 years and we'll say, 'Oh, well we better get on that.' That's how writers and most people tend to work." — Douglas Adams
"Under normal conditions, in their natural habitat, wild animals do not mutilate themselves... attack their offspring, develop stomach ulcers, suffer from obesity or commit murder... The zoo animal in a cage exhibits all these animalities... that we know so well from our human companions. Clearly then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo." — Desmond Morris
"In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations." — Albert Einstein
"There's a point in your spiritual evolution where you have to walk away from the old system, otherwise you're constantly being jangled by the dichotomy of who you really are as a spiritual being and what you have to pretend to be in order to fit in. The more infinite you become in your spirituality the more difficulty you'll have adapting to the restrictive and manipulative society of tick-tock." — Stuart Wilde
"In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer that for anything I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for anything I knew the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone?" — William Paley
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson
"Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become." — Edward O. Wilson
