Jamie Delano: Under-rated as fuck

Jamie Delano is perhaps one of the more under rated comics writers out there. A radical critic of States and Capitalism, his output is less prolific than the other British Masters (Ennis, Morrison, Moore, Gaiman) but still profound.

Of special note is is influential run on Hellblazer, hand picked by Alan Moore to write the spin off he more or less created the character of John Constantine we have today, the best anti-hero in comics.

His run on Animal Man, while less well known than Grant Morrison's third wall breaking run, is superior I think. He takes the character to a series of deaths, rebirths, into a new human form and the character even founds a new religion and threatens to have the animals overrun America. And Animal Man becomes one of only two characters I'm aware of that gives birth to himself (the other being Swamp Thing.)

Rawbone, a blood thirsty pirate comic is a recent gem, as is the original graphic novel Hellblazer: Pandemonium. Delano's series Outlaw Nation features a wide cast of characters, part of a long lived family struggling against their centuries old patriarch who rules the country from the shadows. The protagonist is a Vietnam Vet whose main talent in life is the ability to write schlocky Westerns that have a profound influence on reality.

Jamie Delano: under-rated as fuck.

Essential Anarchist Texts

Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice

by Rudolf Rocker

Not a very contemporary theory, the move from industrialism to customer service economy largely took the bite out of it, I think. Noam Chomsky claims to be an Anarcho-Syndicalist, although the anarchist writer he references most is Bakunin.

Anyway, AS is a fairly economically simplistic system, sort of a half brother of Anarcho-Communism, stating that the workers should seize control of the means of productions by expropriation. By controlling the means of production, profits would be proportional to the amount of wealth created by the firm, as opposed to the wage, the smallest amount anyone is willing to accept for the equivalent amount of work. Rocker specifically deals with Industrial and Agricultural work, and the IWW was probably the largest organization with explicitly syndicalist sympathies in the history of the USA.

Unlike a gift economy, currency would still be used. Rocker never seems to get into explicit detail how this would affect other non employment aspects of our lives. Still, to be a well rounded bomb-thrower I think everyone should give it a read.