Solid State: Jonathan Coulton's album/graphic novel against nicey-nice fascism

Jonathan Coulton 4:01 am Wed Mar 29, 2017

Jonathan Coulton is known for a myriad of distinct accomplishments. The tech professional-turned-musician once conducted a Thing a Week experiment, in which he recorded and published a new song every Friday for a year, produced a cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" infamously adopted by the Fox series Glee, regularly contributes to the NPR quiz show "Ask Me Another" as its very own one-man band, and runs his own fan cruise aptly called the JoCo Cruise.

On April 28 he will release a new album Solid State and today he shares a video for the first single "All this time" (below).

The upcoming album is linked to a new graphic novel written by Matt Fraction and drawn by Albert Monteys. Solid State narrates a trippy epic, a psychedelic, futuristic narrative about two men whose fates are linked over time (and who are both, as it happens, named Bob) and the God-like artificial intelligence that both protects and abandons them. It's a Neal Stephenson/Ray Kurzweil/Kevin Kelly-inflected fable that is located at the end of the world, much of it deep inside a city that has been sedated by what Coulton calls "nicey-nice fascism" — locked-in, medicated, machine-run-and which is ringed by a raw, ruined apocalyptic landscape. The graphic novel is a story about how we got there from here. Today we have a preview of the novel.

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