girl eat machine.

My most recent fit of geekdom has involved lapping up every wikipedia page within reach on the subject of underground and alternative comics. Sorry: “comix.” Believe it or not, there’s a difference.

The underground comix scene is the hot bed of subversion you, honestly, probably never heard of. Think: knowing that there are those who can illustrate anything they imagine — and that we alllll can imagine some pretty….well, unpretty things — the possibilities are raunchy and endless.

The comix scene wasn’t just sex, drugs, and stickin it to the man, though. It was about the creation of independent art and social commentary without restriction. “Comix” refers to the small scale of publication and production, often done by the artist him or herself…or by teams of these artists, working together to publish in magazines and anthologies like Mad, EC Comics, Help!, and Bizarre Sex.

This is the world where many of today’s well-know comic artists who aren’t Stan Lee and aren’t sponsored by Marvel or DC got their start. Tell me you know Art Spiegelman, author of the Holocaust memoir-of-sorts Maus? Art left the scene, so to speak, in the late 1970s when

What had seemed like a revolution simply deflated into a lifestyle. Underground comics were stereotyped as dealing only with Sex, Dope and Cheap Thrills. They got stuffed back into the closet, along with bong pipes and love beads, as Things Started To Get Uglier.

Art helped to pioneer the alternative comics movement, what Stephen Holland termed “the real mainstream” of comic production. The idea is this: “mainstream” comics are obsessed with producing superheroes and fantasy with the same intensity of the little boys (and girls) in Superman pajamas with sugar highs and fruit juice stained faces that read them between bounces on the bed. (GROSS GENERALIZATION.) But the real mainstream, as in the mainstream outside of the comic world, deals with genres of drama, romance, thrills, (real) life, and memory and so on. “Real mainstream” comics, then, are freed from radioactive-spider-infused plots and future toy lines. I’m sorry, Spiderman, but it’s true.

And this Best Of History is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, friends.

After the jump: some lessons from the wild world of upside down comic reading. (In which the author accidentally reviews a “comic” memoir of 9/11.) This way » » » »

No, no, no. Read that headline again. Really read it:

Robots that Learn to Work Together in a study of Evolutionary Principles.

Yep, conceptually that’s pretty much an automatic Cardiac Arrest of Glee for my geeky-little heart.

Seriously, though: a recent group of researchers in Switzerland have just programmed a computer to behave as “Nature”, randomly assigning genetic traits to a series of robots. Based on the evolved patterns of kinship, something amazing (though, as blogger Eyder Peralta notes, not surprising) happens:

Over generations, the robots developed altruistic principles to help their kingroups survive. And mind that these were robots of very little brain.

Peralta spoke with researcher Lauren Keller who confirmed that none of this behavior was pre-programmed. “The natural selector computer was responsible for randomly selecting the fittest traits.” You can see it in this sweet video of astounding (read: terrifying?) robotic power.

Effing awesome.

Bonus: the study was published with PLoS Biology.

Most exciting thing I’ve read all day (and I’ve been reading about cryogenics!). Check out the full post here, and be sure to scope out more of NPR’s awesome tech blog, All Tech Considered.