Comic bio of Jack Parsons, rocket scientist and magician
Jack Parsons (1914-1952) was a pioneering rocket scientist and co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He was also a deep devotee of Aleister Crowley and worked some heavy duty occult rituals with none-other than L. Run Hubbard. Parsons had an amazingly strange life that writer Richard Carbonneau and artist Robin Simon are now translating into comic form. "The Marvel: A Biography of Jack Parsons" is now online as a serialized Web comic. I hope it eventually gets published as a graphic novel! The Marvel: A Biography of Jack Parsons (Webcomics Nation via Damn Data)
Previously on BB:
• Book review: Strange Angel, a Jack Parsons biography
the latest
latest episodes
I wouldn't argue that Hubbard didn't lead an incredibly strange life but shouldn't the name at the beginning of the thrid sentence be 'Parsons'?
Just a little editing nitpick...
I 2nd that emotion. I'd rather read about Parsons...a bit sick of Hubbard.
Yes, error. Thanks.
How long before Marvel sues them over that title?
BRETT BURTON @4, that would be funny given that Marvel is actually Parsons' birth name: Marvel Whiteside Parsons
If you care to read more about the interplay of scientists at JPL during this time period, I highly recommend M.G. Lord's Astro Turf. At this here Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Astro-Turf-Private-Rocket-Science/dp/0802777392/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219878836&sr=1-2
David Duchovny and Marilyn Manson were trying to do a movie on Parsons based on the book Sex and Rockets. Scientology no-likey.
"I hight Don Quixote, I live on peyote,
marijuana, morphine and cocaine,
I never know sadness but only a madness
that burns at the heart and the brain.
I see each charwoman, ecstatic, inhuman,
angelic, demonic, divine.
Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon
that brims with ambrosial wine."
As a JPLer, I would LOVE for this to be published... In it's current state it looks like it has much potential.
There's also a great little strip by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie on Parsons - it was due to be published in Tomorrow Stories as a Cobweb tale, but that didn't happen (fear of something or other on the publisher's part, I imagine) and it ended up in the cheap anthology Top Shelf Asks The Big Questions.
@Hotpants, never heard about the Duchovny/Manson thing but Kevin Smith of all people actually wanted to make the Sex and Rockets movie:
There was a book that I really liked that I wanted to option. It’s a great book and would make a hell of a flick. It’s called SEX AND ROCKETS. It’s about Jack Parsons, the second most important rocket scientist in history who designed the jet propulsion system they still use today on the space shuttle who also happened to be a practicing Satanist. It’s just a weird fuckin’ movie and it’s something that when I read an article about it in Mean magazine and I dug it and I was just like “This is a weird fuckin’ American story. You know it’s about the ultimate separation of church and state--in this case it’s like the church of Satan. But it’s also just a weird tragic American figure, who led this bizarre double life and never quite reconciled it. There’s a magazine called Mean magazine and I read the article in it and then I saw the book a few months later and I saw it in a comic book store in Los Angeles and picked it up. It’s called SEX AND ROCKETS and it is a great read and a weird story and it just really quietly kept speaking to me and it’s a movie that somebody should make and I don’t know if it’s made but somebody should definitely make it. And then I spoke to Don Murphy the other day and he’d optioned it and I was so happy that somebody thought it was worthy of trying to turn into something.
- http://www.viewaskew.com/press/aicn.html