Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Reading Into the Past: Week of 7/29

I've been slacking off on new posts here, but I hope to remedy that. So I'll start doing "Reading Into the Past" yet again...and this week, I rolled a lucky 13, so these are the books I was reading this time of year back in 1994:

Lawrence Block, The Girl With the Long Green Heart (7/22)
We start in the middle of a batch of mysteries (I'd read Caleb Carr's The Alienist and books by Jim Thompson and Robert B. Parker in the days immediately preceding), with a minor early Larry Block novel. In those days, Carroll & Graf was in the middle of a Block revival -- they published six or eight of his very early '60s books as slim mass-market paperbacks (which is exactly what those books originally were, and thus was very appropriate). And I grabbed them all as soon as I found them and read them quickly. Block was writing his way out of the sex-book industry at that point, and his standalone thrillers (like Long Green Heart) were very Jim Thompson-inspired, with femmes fatale all over the place. As you can guess from the title, Girl With the Long Green Heart was very much in that vein. I don't remember a whole lot of any of those books specifically, but they were all fun to read, and Block's always a keeper. (And I see that Hard Case Crime has recently brought this book back into print again -- can't keep a good noir down, I guess.)
Terry Goodkind, Wizard's First Rule (7/23)
What I remember most about this book -- besides that S&M section that everyone still talks about -- is that I was reading it in the middle of a huge heat wave. It was so hot that I just holed up in the bedroom (the only place in my then-apartment with air conditioning) for a day or so and read straight through it. I won't say it's my very favorite epic fantasy series, but it kept me reading, and I didn't want to leave it to go do anything else in the hot parts of the apartment.
Terry Pratchett, Soul Music (7/24)
I think I was still catching up on the Discworld books at this point -- and I know that his publisher certainly was behind -- which may be why I didn't like Soul Music all that much at the time. It was enjoyable, but I got the feeling that it was made up primarily of in-jokes and references rather than a plot of its own. Though I should admit that it's a book I should re-read one of these days, because I expect I'll catch more of the references this time around. (I suspect I tried to read it more-or-less straight, which you can't do.)
Marcia Muller, Till the Butchers Cut Him Down (7/25)
I guess the weekend was over, so I got back into pleasure reading -- and I was in the middle of a big stack of mysteries right then. This was the then-new book in the Sharon McCone series, which I liked a lot then (though I think it floundered a bit under the weight of its own backstory in the later '90s, and so I dropped it). This is the book where Sharon sets up her own detective agency, so, in hindsight, this is the beginning of the ever-increasing cute supporting cast (which is what eventually drove me away). I don't require that PI viewpoint characters be completely aloof loners, but I'd prefer if their books aren't entirely about inter-personal relationships with their interns, spouses, and sisters. Don't start the series here -- get the first book, Edwin of the Iron Shoes, and work forward from there. McCone isn't quite as tough as Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone or Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski, but she plays in the same league, and she was actually there first.
Peter Rabe, Kill the Boss GoodBye (7/25)
I don't remember this book at all; according to the reviewers on Amazon, it's a slim crime novel about the (psychiatric) downfall of a gambling boss. From the descriptions, I can see why I was interested in it -- it reminds me a bit of J.G. Ballard writing with Jim Thompson's pen -- but I do have to admit, again, that I can't actually remember it, and I didn't keep it, so I probably didn't like it all that much.
Robert B. Parker, Paper Doll (7/26)
The then-new Spencer novel. Not the place to begin by any means; the first book in the series is The Godwulf Manuscript, and anyone who reads PI novels more than slightly should probably read the first half-dozen or so of the Spencer books at least. (This one, on the other hand, is #20, so it's for people who've made it all the way up, one book at a time, and are still interested.) Again, I don't have much of a memory of any specific Spencer book at this point; Parker has written more than thirty, and I think I've read them all.
Michael Z. Lewin, Ask the Right Question (7/26)
The Lewin book I can remember is Called By a Panther, and, even there, it's mostly just that I can put the title together with his name. But I did enjoy reading his books in the early '90s, and he had a decent detective (Albert Samson) in a different location (Indianapolis). I haven't seen anything from him in a while, which means either I haven't been paying attention, or he was unlucky to be part of the big chunk of writers who can publish a few novels, but not sustain a career much longer than a decade.
Arthur Lyons, Dead Ringer (7/27)
Yet another PI series I used to read, and haven't seen in a while; Lyon's detective is Jacob Asch, and I think he was based in LA. Actually, it might have died even before I started reading it, since it looks like it was mostly an '80s series. No idea what this one was, specifically.
Vonda N. McIntyre, Star Wars: The Crystal Star (7/28)
One of the middle-rank Star Wars books of the Bantam era; not as good as Barbara Hambly's Children of the Jedi, but it wasn't The Courtship of Princess Leia, either. As I remember, the Solo twins are kidnapped by nefarious sorts (into a black hole or something like that), and they get some little-kid personalities that I don't think had anything to do with their later characterization. (Not to say that their characterization in the YA books is all that similar to "The New Jedi Order," of course.) This is the era of Star Wars books I preferred: plots were resolved in one book, and the villains were always defeated. That's the way I like my escapism...
Jim Thompson, Heed the Thunder (7/28)
This was later in Vintage Crime/Black Lizard's reprinting of all of Thompson's books, so they'd run past his obvious classics and well-known books long ago at this point, and were down to the obscurities and the oddballs. Heed the Thunder was Thompson's second novel, a noirish historical set just before World War I in a small Nebraska town. Don't read this instead of The Killer Inside Me, but it's decent Thompson for those who have already read the obvious books.
Timothy Zahn, Conquerors' Heritage (7/30)
Second in an inventive SF trilogy that I don't think I've seen anyone ever talk about: the first book, Conquerors' Pride, was from the POV of humans, whose star-faring society is attacked, suddenly and viciously, by previously unknown aliens. This book covers many of the same events from the alien's point of view -- and, to them, it was the humans who attacked without warning. (The third book, in which both sides make peace, is OK, but not quite as good as the set-up.)

A typically busy reading week back then; I need to remind myself that I didn't have the Internet (or kids) in those days...but I was also reading about three times as many magazines as I am now, too. What a slacker I've become!

Hugo Voting Deadline Is Tonight

For those of you who are members of the Worldcon this year -- I'm not, and wasn't even before the unpleasantness -- your deadline to vote for the Hugo Awards is tonight at midnight, Pacific Standard Time. (That's what the website says; they may mean Pacific Daylight Time.)

As I type this, you've got about nine hours. If you're eligible to vote, but don't vote, I have to tell you that you completely forfeit any right to complain about the winners, or any other aspect of the Hugo Awards ceremony, or the Worldcon in general. I'm sorry, but there it is: you have to vote now to complain afterwards.

The online voting form is here; if you haven't voted yet, please use it.

Sunday, July 29, 2007

What I'm Up To

My apologies if a flood of Antick Musings posts turned up in your feedreader over the weekend; Amazon decided that I was worthy to affiliate with them, so I spent some time sticking in links for the books I've read this month. (I thought doing it over the weekend would also be the least disruptive.)

I don't intend to go back and put in links to every last thing I ever read over the past two years, for that way lies madness. However, I am checking my stats every day, and things that have gotten a hit are getting links added (because, who knows, maybe lightning will hit twice or something). In the process, I'm also adding bookshots, where I can, to posts that didn't have them, because that makes it feel more like I'm adding useful content and less like I'm book-busking.

Oh, and here's how I hope the affiliate-linky-thing will work: if you're the kind of person who buys a book from Amazon as soon as you decide you want it, and it's my review that makes you say, "Damn, that sounds cool," I hope you'll use my link. Otherwise, either consider it just a visual element or use it to see the opinions of other people (all of them, of course, much less intelligent, witty, and well-read than I am) on that same book.

To Be in ComicMix In the Summertime

My posts there this weekend:

And one review:
The Saga of the Bloody Benders by Rick Geary

Iztkoff Is Invincible!

It's not officially an "Across the Universe" column, but the Itzkoff had a related review in this weekend's New York Times Book Review: he covered Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible. (My ComicMix review. Amazon shill link.)

I don't particularly disagree with him this time, or think he's said anything notably dumb, so I'll just note the existence of this review, wonder if if foreshadows a new, more useful Itzkoff, and move on.

How to Keep Dinosaurs by Robert Mash

I have a soft spot for fake non-fiction books, from The Tough Guide to Fantasyland through the wonderful Dragons: The Modern Infestation by Pamela Wharton Blanpied to the kind of Star Wars books with diagrams about how a lightsaber "really" works. So this book was right up my alley, and I grabbed it as soon as I saw it (a year ago at Lunacon, from the table of the mighty Michael Walsh, lord of Old Earth Books).

The concept is simple and wonderful: Dinosaurs (and related saurians) can make good pets in the modern world, but owners need to choose wisely. The best-known and most popular dinosaurs -- the T. Rexes and Diplodocuses of this world -- are really not suitable to the average suburban house.

Mash's excellent advice is that a first-time dinosaur owner start with a less-difficult species such as Compsognathus or Euparkeria. After succeeding on that level, the adventurous dino-keeper can move up to a Heterodontosaurus, or a Dsungaripterus (a top pterosaur recommendation), or even an Ornithomimus (particularly good for riding). How to Keep Dinosaurs is suitable for trainers at any level, from rank first-timers to safari park owners trying to decide if they're ready to step up to the mighty Brachiosaurus.

The book is divided into eight chapters listing dinosaurs of various types (for beginners, flying pets, security work, eggs and meat, hide and feather, and so on), along with chapters on general dino-raising tips, sicknesses of dinosaurs and their cures, classification charts, and the essential toolkit for dealing with dinos. Particularly welcome in this updated and expanded edition (the first since the 1983 original) are the large photographic illustrations, showing various saurians in their natural state or as adapted to the human world -- I'm particularly fond of the fierce Ornitholestes in his police vest.

Each dinosaur's entry includes a handy set of icons describing its needs and potential problems (some of those icons encode such useful information as "herbivore," "omnivore," "will eat other pets," "likes children," "likes children to eat," "worryingly smart," "worryingly stupid," and "worryingly flatulent"), size and weight comparisons, and detailed notes on their uses, strengths and drawbacks. Additionally, each dino has notes on feeding, housing, breeding and availability.

Quite simply, anyone who hopes to raise or keep a dinosaur needs this book. And even those of us who prefer to keep dinos out of our own homes will find it thoroughly amusing and enlightening. I recommend this book most highly.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Incoming Books, Week of 7/28

This is the week of difficult choices, since The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories by Connie Willis (in a nice review-able ARC from Subterranean) arrived on Wednesday and a little thing called Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows showed up on Thursday (complete with mailman noting its existence and requiring a signature).

On the one hand, I think I've already read all of the stories in Marble Arch at least once. (But it is Connie Willis.) On the other hand, half of the free world has already read Deathly Hallows, so I need to keep up. (But I'm not the world's biggest Rowling fan, and I expect to be disappointed by the ending.)

I suspect I'll finish Deathly first, but I'm reading them simultaneously. (Along with the usual pile of other things.)

And the new stuff in the "other things" category includes:

Loserpalooza, the new "Get Fuzzy" treasury by Darby Conley
Clubbing, one of the Minx launch titles, written by Andi Watson (whom, so far, I will follow anywhere)
Re-Gifters, another Minx book from the creative team behind the swell My Faith in Frankie
"Shenanigans," a graphic novel by two people I'm not familiar with, which tries to be a Billy Wilder comedy in comics form, and which also was half price
Screw Heaven, When I Die I'm Going to Mars, a big compendium of Shannon "Too Much Coffee Man" Wheeler's comics -- I've never read his stuff before, in part because I don't drink coffee, but with a last name like that, he has to be great
Spent by Joe Matt, of course
and the seventh volume of Powers, even though a quick glance shows that the first few pages take place entirely among monkeys

And that's probably what I'll be reading over the next week or two.

Update, several hours later: Well, I wrote that and headed out the door with the boys to the library...and found two packages with review copies on my doorstep. So I might be reading some other stuff as well in the next couple of weeks. (And if I start getting substantial numbers of review copies, I'll probably be too embarrassed to list them all, so "incoming books" may dwindle or disappear.)

Quote of the Week

"Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad."
- Euripides

Friday, July 27, 2007

In the Wake of Battle: The Civil War Images of Matthew Brady by George Sullivan

Another book I've had lying around for approximately forever; if I stay unemployed long enough, I might actually read my way down to a clean desk. (Now that's a horrible thought, on both sides.)

This is a collection of photographs taken by various photographers during the Civil War that all ended up in the files of Matthew Brady. Brady apparently didn't do any major photography himself, due to eye troubles, but he hired teams of photographers and took the credit for their work.

Everything is very posed, due to the technological limitations of the time, and the close-up had not yet been invented. I was occasionally impressed by how these pictures are of a world two lifetimes removed from us (if someone was born when the Civil War started, lived to age 75, and died, a person born on the first fella's death-day would now be 71), but, really, this is just a lot of sepia-toned shots of people in uniform in the distance and various fortifications.

There are people for whom a book like this will be a joy forever, but I'm not one of them; it was vaguely interesting, but now I'm done with it and the pile is slightly lower. But if you're someone who would like a fat book of Civil War photos, this one is out there, and it's pretty good at what it does.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Work and Other Sins by Charlie LeDuff

As you can probably see from the bookshot, the subtitle of this book is "Life in New York City and Thereabouts" -- and I can't resist a book that uses words like "thereabouts."

Work and Other Sins is a collection of reportage by a New York Times reporter...but I'm not sure how this guy ever got a job on the Times, since his instincts and tastes clearly run towards the working-class, the blue-collar, and the dirty-handed. His stories, in tone, subject, and style, are the opposite of everyone's mental image of the high-toned, snooty Times. He writes a bit like his generation's version of Pete Hamill or Jimmy Breslin, except you never get the sense that he's straining for poetic effect, as those two sometimes do. LeDuff just tells the stories that he finds.

This book collects a large number of pieces written for the Times (one spiked, and first appearing here) from 1996 through 2002. They mostly focus on working-class people: on their jobs (lots of firefighters and bartenders, but also florists, gravediggers, and commercial fishermen), and their lives in the bar, at the racetrack, and sometimes at home. I wouldn't say that LeDuff is writing about "low-lifes," exactly -- these people have their own pride, and a sense of their own lives, and LeDuff respects and understand them -- but I bet most Times reader wouldn't hesitate a second before considering them such. This book contains a lot of good reportage about the kind of New Yorkers that Manhattanites mostly think are fit only to get tipped at Christmas, if that.

The years covered in this book include 2001 and 2002, which, of course, means 9/11 casts its shadow over some parts. LeDuff did some strong reporting both at the WTC site and in a longer-term series about a firefighter's widow -- as I said, he sympathizes with working men, so he's a good choice to report on how 9/11 affected New York.

LeDuff has a lean, no-nonsense style; he's trying to report what's happening, not call a lot of attention to himself. (There's a strain of look-I'm-a-Hemingwayesque-real-man in there once in a while, but not often.) His voice is lower-class middle-America, which makes him closer to the people he's reporting on and gives their stories the authenticity of felt experience rather than the tawdry glamor of slumming. He's a good reporter of stories about people, period.

(I see from the short bio in the book that he's now with the Times's LA bureau, which is not what I'd expect...though, from searching on his name on the Times site, I find that he was doing a series of stories across America called "American Album" through last November.)

I suspect I like reportage, and New York City stories, much more than the people who read my blog. OK, that's fair. But LeDuff is really good at what he does, so, if you have any interest at all in this stuff, he's a great guy to try.

One last thing: I've finally broken down and I'm trying to set up an Amazon affiliate thingy for Antick Musings. (We'll see if they accept me.) I've never made a penny out of this site, but, with things as they are now, I'm hoping it can at least help to pay for the books I ramble on about. (I don't intend to add advertising any time soon; I don't think this blog has enough traffic to make that worthwhile, and I don't like the look of Google AdSense ads, either.) So, if the books I write about intrigue you, now you could buy them directly through a link. (Or just pop over to Amazon to see what other people think -- I'm not going to change what I say about books to get a nickel or two.)

Links to Links -- what the Internet is for!

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

The Thrilling Comic Book Cover Art of Alex Schomburg, compiled by J. David Spurlock

I have no memory of buying this, and it was published in 2004, so it's probably been stuck in the middle of a pile for quite some time. But I finally got to it.

There's minimal text: just an introduction by Spurlock with the thumbnail version of Schomburg's life and career, and captions for each cover. The covers appear to have been reproduced from comics, but the images are nearly always clean, crisp, and color-corrected. (This book doesn't make the error, common to some modern designers, of treating old art as a yellowed, textured design element, but instead thinks of it as art and tries to reproduce it as well as possible.)

From Spurlock's introduction, I learn that Schomburg painted 199 comics covers for Timely from 1939 to 1949, and 296 for Standard over the same period. This book reproduces a hundred and two of those covers, in no obvious order. (It also only contains a handful of covers from 1940 and otherwise concentrates entirely on works from 1945-1948 -- with a few stray 1944 or 1949 pieces -- for no stated reason.) It's really a book for people who would prefer to look at pictures rather than read.

Those pictures, though, are in large part not to my taste. I did like some of the airbrushed work (under the pen-name Xela) of the later years, which prefigures Schomburg's later SF book-cover work. But the bulk of the comics covers are just flat, muddy color over decent pencils, and are very much of their time. The earlier covers also tend to be crowded and muddled, while the later works show much better composition and use of negative space. It's hard to put my finger on what makes Schomburg's "Black Terror" covers bland and something of a similar vintage (say, by Frank R. Paul) more interesting, but I think part of it is that the more SFnal and fantastic Schomburg's work gets (with jungle girls and alien spaceships), the better I like it. His crime-fighters and super-heroes are derivative and uninspiring, but his female heroes are specific, original, and exciting.

(I suspect Spurlock agrees with me, since he generally uses the pictures I think of as better as full-pages and uses the lesser works in a smaller size.)

Anyway, some of this stuff is good (to my eye) and some is not so good. The book will not be of much use to scholars, since there's hardly any text, but it does reproduce the art nice and large on good paper without any design silliness. I do wish the covers had been organized, because I kept flipping backwards and forwards to look at them in sequence. But, all in all, it is a good thing.

Naked Self-Promotion Tries To Put On A Speedo

I've been tagged by Ariel to continue this Blogging Tips Meme (which, honestly, seems more like a chain letter, with its emphasis on creating lots of links).

-Start Copy-

It's very simple. When this is passed on to you, copy the whole thing, skim the list and put a * star beside those that you like. (Check out especially the * starred ones.)

Add the next number (1. 2. 3. 4. 5., etc.) and write your own blogging tip for other bloggers. Try to make your tip general.

After that, tag 10 other people. Link love some friends!

Just think- if 10 people start this, the 10 people pass it onto another 10 people, you have 100 links already!

1. Look, read, and learn. ****

-http://www.neonscent.com

2. Be, EXCELLENT to each other. ******
-http://www.bushmackel.com

3. Don't let money change ya! ***
-http://www.therandomforest.info

4. Always reply to your comments. ****
-http://chattiekat.com

5. Link liberally -- it keeps you and your friends afloat in the Sea of Technorati. ***
-http://chipsquips.com

6. Don't give up - persistence is fertile. **
-http://www.velcro-city.co.uk

7. Give link credit where credit is due.**
-http://www.sfsignal.com

8. Follow your own path. Do anything you want to, it's your blog. *
-http://www.bigdumbobject.co.uk

9. Don't put off until tomorrow what you can blog today. Backlogs are the primary cause of Bloggers' Block.
-http://www.thegenrefiles.com

10. Self-promotion is only good in small doses. (Deliberately creating a "meme" to get your URL spammed across the net is a large dose.)
-http://antickmusings.blogspot.com

-End Copy-

I'm not tagging anyone, since we've hit #10 already. (And I doubt I would have anyway.)

Look, kiddies: none of us are going to get rich or famous from blogging (not matter how much Neonscent desperately wants to be); there are only going to be a very few people like that, and they're mostly already in place. And this kind of marketing-drone happy-speak is death to honest discussions, which is what blogs are supposed to be about.

So, Neonscent, my advice to you is to find something to blog about, instead of just tossing your naked ambition up there for the world to uneasily gawk at.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Reviewing The Mail: 7/24

Even at the rate I'm going, there's no way I can read everything I have -- and certainly not in a timely way. So, assuming I keep getting things in the mail, I'm going to point out some items of particular interest more-or-less as I get them.

For this first installment, these books have been sitting around for a couple of weeks, for example, and I've been poking through them, but I don't want to wait to write about them.

So this will be "Reviewing the Mail" -- a quick overview of the good and interesting stuff that I've gotten recently. The title is from Chuck Klosterman's description of what a rock critic really does.

Ross Macdonald, The Way Some People Die, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, July 2007, $12.95

Ross Macdonald's "Lew Archer" novels are the third, and least lauded, leg of the modern detective fiction stool, along with the better-known Hammett and Chandler. Macdonald took the expansive, socially engaged plots of Chandler but pulled back from Chandler's "soiled knight" hero to a more remote, detached detective in Lew Archer. Nearly all of the novels in this series are great; The Underground Man, his masterpiece, is one of the five or so best detective novels ever written. Underground Man, however, was already in print as a stylist trade paperback from Vintage -- The Way Some People Die, on the other hand, has been out of print for the past ten years.

Vintage sent me their new edition of The Way Some People Dies, the third Lew Archer novel, which was originally published in 1951. The design sense is impeccable, as always with Vintage -- though I suppose I could complain that they always change the design for a series in the middle. (I have ten or so Macdonald books from Vintage, with a very different look -- and Vintage's run of Jim Thompson also changed gears five or six times before it was done.) People like me do want the books to look like they belong next to each other on the shelf. But that's the only thing I could complain about.

The first two Lew Archer books were good, but in The Way Some People Die everything Macdonald was trying to do crystallized, and he seized control of his two great locations: the great American dreamland of California and the often-unbridgeable spaces between people. He's essential reading for anyone who likes serious mystery novels, and this is a perfect place to start.

Sheila Williams, editor, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine: 30th Anniversary Anthology, Tachyon Publications, 2007, $14.95

I don't think I need say much about this book, which collects some of the best stories from the first thirty years of a great science fiction magazine. Maybe just listing a few of the titles will do the job for me: John Varley's "Air Raid." Octavia E. Butler's "Speech Sounds." Bruce Sterling's "Dinner in Audoghast." Kelly Link's "Flying Lessons." Charles Stross's "Lobsters." Stephen Baxter's "The Children of Time."

Not impressed? OK -- you're hard to please. But the other stories in this book are by Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, Connie Willis, Jonathan Lethem, Mike Resnick, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Patrick Kelly, Michael Swanwick, Lucius Shepard, and Robert Reed. I dare to you find an anthology of stories from the same venue, covering the past thirty years, as strong as that.

If you already have a long shelf of Year's Best anthologies and single-author collections, you might just have everything in this book already. For the rest of you, this is an easy way to get a lot of good stuff all in one place.

Brian Ruckley, Winterbirth, Orbit, September 2007, $14.99

I'm currently on a hiatus from beginning new multi-volume series of big fat secondary world fantasy novels, but this one looks pretty impressive, so I should note it. Winterbirth is the first novel from Scots author Brian Ruckley, and the big launch title for Orbit US, a major new SF/Fantasy imprint from the same people who created the exceptionally successful Orbit line in the UK.

It looks dark, bloody, and pseudo-Scottish, and the series title has "Trilogy" built right into it, so there's very little chance of serious multi-book bloat. I'd say this is for fans of George R.R. Martin, Steven Erikson, and David Gemmell. Any UK folks out there already read it, and willing to give an opinion?

Monday, July 23, 2007

The Best of Ray Bradbury: The Graphic Novel by hordes of people

The Best of Ray Bradbury: The Graphic Novel is a collection of some of the many Bradbury story adaptations from "The Ray Bradbury Chronicles," a series of slim trade paperbacks from Bantam in the early '90s, and "Ray Bradbury Comics," which subsequently came out from Topps Comics. Both series were packaged by (and are copyright in the name of) Byron Preiss Visual Publications, and this book was published some years later by ibooks, another arm of the then-sprawling Byron Preiss empire. The copyright page says it was edited by Howard Zimmerman, and it contains adaptations of twelve Bradbury stories by a very varied (but very respectable) line-up of names. Bradbury contributes a short foreword to each story, about when and how the story was written.

I seem to be alone in this among those who've reviewed this book, but I didn't like it much. Bradbury has a very wordy style which is hard to translate into comics -- or, rather, often translates into comics as lots and lots of captions with straight Bradbury prose. I found the result was generally too wordy to flow well as a comics story, which meant these felt like abridged Bradbury tales with very extensive illustrations.

Some of the stories work better than others; I liked Dave Gibbons's take on "Come Into My Cellar" and Daniel Torres's "Night Meeting," mostly because those stories weren't overwhelmed by the narration. And the art is fine, and varied, in all of the stories. But I'm afraid I really didn't see the point in all this in the first place -- prose short stories and comics scripts aren't the same thing, so there's no reason to believe one would be generally useful as the other.

The Book Topic Every Blogger Is Required to Post About This Week

Yes, I've read the first six Harry Potter books. Yes, I intend to read Deathly Hallows. No, I don't have a copy yet.

But one earmarked for me is on its way from Canada -- it was last sighted at 4:12 PM on Saturday in Mississauga, Ontario (where I hope it said hello to Rob Sawyer on its way), though, oddly, the tracking software thinks it will take until August 13th to reach New Jersey. (Especially odd, since air freight usually goes through Newark Airport and New Jersey is well supplied with interstates and warehouses for shipments coming by truck.)

Why Canada? Well, my personal copies of the first six are all Canadian, to have the original British text, and so I want to keep them matching. (Even though the British/Canadian covers have been steadily getting worse.) And, with as many books to read as I have, there's no way I was going to pay for super-deluxe speedy shipping. So I'll get it one of these days, and read it then.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

The Plot by Will Eisner

Will Eisner was a giant among comics creators, and this is a project he cared deeply about, worked intermittently on, and completed a mere month before he died in early 2005. Unfortunately, it wasn't a great idea to begin with, and it doesn't work all that well as comics.

The Plot is the history of a book, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hateful work of propaganda put together by reactionary Russians over a century ago to convince the Tsar of the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. The conspiracy, of course, doesn't and never did exist, and the Protocols was itself plagiarized from an earlier polemic against Napoleon III.

Eisner dramatizes the creation of the Protocols, and then spends most of the book in quick vignettes of various people, generation after generation, again and again proving that the Protocols is a plagiarized fake. This grows tedious -- nearly as tedious as the dozen or so pages that simply exist to show the ways the Protocols plagiarized Maurice Joly's The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.

There are essentially two problems: 1) the story as Eisner has assembled it is not terribly interesting, and is very repetitive. 2) It's talky and research-driven and doesn't work as comics. I'm not saying an interesting book couldn't be written about the history of the Protocols -- it probably could -- but The Plot, unfortunately, isn't that book. Eisner doesn't delve into the reasons why anti-Semites exist, or why people keep wanting to believe what the Protocols say is true -- his characters keep thinking that this time, once the Protocols is seriously debunked, everything will be fine.

This is just for Eisner completists, I think, and possibly for scholars of certain unsavory bits of literary history.

Note 1: This is essentially the last of the comics collections I had piled up to be read, so, from this point, I'll be reading through the other stuff on that pile, which is very various and has been lying around for quite some time. I doubt anyone actually cares.

Note 2: I'm retiring the "Just Read" tag for books I've read; it's redundant and possibly confusing. (My brother told me that he always reads them as an imperative rather than a statement of fact -- and, much of the time, I'm often not urging people to read these books.) So it'll just be boring ol' title and author from now on.

Reading Into the Past: Week of 7/22

I haven't done one of these in a while, so here's the scoop: I've been keeping a record of the books I've read since the end of 1990, so, once a week (ostensibly) I randomly pick a past year in that span and list the books I was reading the same week that year. With luck, I can actually remember what those books were. This week, the magic number is eight, so we're gonna read like it's 1999:

Clifford Stoll, High Tech Heretic (7/15)
I think Stoll was against the Internet, so something to that effect -- that was what made him a "heretic." After a quick Google, I see that he was specifically against computers and the Internet in schools -- that he thought spending lots of money to have faster computers and connections (money that needs to be spent again every three years or so) for kids in school could be much better spent elsewhere. Hey, whad'ya know: I agree with him there.
Mike Ashley, editor, The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy II (7/15)
It was mammoth, it was comic, it was fantasy -- some large number of stories, nearly all reprint (and a surprising number of them from the public domain) all shoved into one set of covers. I don't remember it well, but I sold quite a lot of them for several years.
Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon, Owlknight (7/18)
The hero had stopped being quite so whiny by the third book in the trilogy -- in the first book, this reader kept wishing someone would drown him in the river, like an unwanted kitten -- but Valdemar was a mass of wish-fulfillment fantasy by this point, so I can't claim it was great literature. But I liked reading all of those books, and I intermittently wish Lackey would write more.
Neil Gaiman, Sandman: The Dream Hunters (7/19)
I read the novella or so of text, without the Yoshitaka Amano illustrations that eventually accompanied it. And I don't remember much about it, now -- I suspect it was a quiet, constrained story, since most of the late Sandman stuff was, but that's just a guess.
James Stoddard, The False House (7/20)
Sequel to The High House, a great first fantasy novel about a house that contains multitudes of fantasy worlds within itself. False was a bit like High warmed up the next day: it was pleasant, and quite fun, but clearly secondhand. I don't think he's published any other novels since, so maybe he didn't have anything else novelistic to say. But, still, if you haven't read The High House, try to track it down -- it's a bit like Gormenghast as written by Michael Moorcock.
Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson, Manhunter: The Special Edition (7/22)
The Goodwin-Simonson "Manhunter" serial from 1973-74, with a new (at the time) dialogue-less story plotted by the two before Goodwin's unexpected death. It's a thin trade paperback with an unappealing all-gold cover, and I only moderately enjoyed the stories. I mostly got this because I was a big Simonson fan from his days on Thor, honestly.
Peter Bagge, Buddy's Got Three Moms! (7/22)
I didn't think the Buddy Bradley stories had the same energy and verve once he moved back to New Jersey...but, on the other hand, Hate featured a major comics character bouncing around my home turf, so that was kinda cool. And Bagge must have felt similarly, since he ended Hate not too long after this; there was only one more collection. I haven't read any of Hate in a while, but I bet it reads like a serious '90s time capsule now.

A fairly typical week, with some work reading (including one novel I suppressed here because I didn't finish it) and a small pile of comics stuff.

More Fun at ComicMix

My most recent emanations:

Watch for one last, insanely long collection of Harry Potter links tomorrow, plus the usual stuff.

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Just Read: Justice, Vol. 1 by Krueger, Ross & Braithwaite

OK, help me out here, folks -- I'm not as up-to-date on long-underwear dudes as I could be. Is the "bunch of supervillains hatch Really Kewl, counterintuitive plot and capture and/or put in jeopardy every member of Super Hero Team" plot as tired and lame as I suspect it is?

(If it's somehow new and exciting, I'll take back all of the snarky comments I'm going to make here.)

This first collection of Justice collects the first third of a twelve-issue series, and thus is a twenty-dollar hardcover that's all set-up. There's not even any middle, let alone an ending. And the plot is, well, that a bunch of supervillains decide to both save and take over the world, at the same time, by combining forces, defeating the good guys (though not quickly killing them, which villains never do because they are secretly privy to the sales figures and so know enough not to kill the golden goose), and doing amazing world-dominating good deeds.

Presumably, the issue after the ones collected here will feature the writer's favorite member of the team (for Grant Morrison, the other time I saw this plot done, that was Batman; I suspect it will be Superman for Krueger and Ross) showing how Wicked Awesome he is and breaking free so that he can go around and free all of his teammates for the big battle at the end. Alternatively, either the Spectre or Dr. Fate could just waltz in and set everything right by waving their hands, but I don't expect that. We'll also see that the villains don't have anyone's good fortune at heart, and end with some sort of sermon that superheroes have to let the world go on as it is, because, gosh darn it, that's the way things are, and so bad things will continue to happen.

Why are people so stupid? Superhero comics are an inherently unstable medium -- they only make sense as long as you don't call too much attention to the underlying inconsistencies. Yes, a world with superheroes would quickly diverge from real history. Yes, that will never happen in a mass-published comics universe. So stop picking at that scab, already. Either do a full-blown alternate universe story or leave those plot points entirely alone, because you're not convincing anyone with the Heisenberg version of the story (half-alive and half-dead).

Oh, and I should also admit here that I got this book free at BookExpo, so complaining about it is possibly unmannerly. My apologies to the fine folks at DC if this is so.

Um, one last thing; I forgot the credits. The story is by (Jim) Krueger and (Alex) Ross, with script by Krueger and paintings by Ross over (Doug) Braithwaite's pencils. It is a sign of how little I understand how art works that I'm not sure why painting over someone else's pencils saves time or is helpful. (Though it clearly does, and is.)

Just Read: Nexus Archives, Volume One by Mike Baron & Steve Rude

Folk are still re-publishing my favorite comics of the '80s, so I'm still re-reading them. (Though I'm waiting for my big Ambush Bug collections -- DC, are you out there? Two fat trade paperbacks, in color, would hit the spot.)

This book, the first of several (I think five volumes are out already, and another one or two solicited), collects the three-issue first series of Nexus and the first four issues of the much longer-running (like, ninety more issues longer) second, color series.

It is both swell and cool, but also engenders a sense of wonder that ourselves and the world was ever that young. (Or maybe it only does that to me.) The stories detail the first appearance and origin of Horatio Hellpop, known as Nexus, the fusion-powered assassin of mass murderers in the star-spanning multi-racial civilization of the 26th century. Most of the major supporting cast -- Sundra Peale, Dave, Judah the Hammer, Ursula X.X. Imada, Tyrone -- is introduced as well, and the general philosophical outlines of the series (to speak very generally: when is violence, especially murder, justifiable?) are outlined. The actual source of Nexus's powers is still unknown as this book ends, but it's fascinating to see how much of the later developments in the series were implied by the very beginnings of the story.

Baron's stories got somewhat better -- and he didn't hit us over the head with deep, serious quotes every other page once he settled in -- but his work was pretty darn good even here. Rude also got a lot better as an artist, but he was solidly professionally and occasionally brilliant even back then.

It's an expensive book, and I suspect it will only sell to people, like me, who already have (or had) all of the old issues. But it's quite swell, and I don't care who knows that I like it.

Friday, July 20, 2007

ComicMix Round-Up

Bloglines has been a bit irregular lately (though it's spewed out nearly three thousand articles at me so far today, so the LiveJournal problem may finally have been fixed...right after I set up a work-around earlier in the week, of course), so I'm not counting on it to say what's up on ComicMix.

So I may have pointed to some of these things before; my apologies, if so. But this is what's new from me in the last twenty-four hours or so. First, my usual link-lists:

(A lot more of those link-lists are in process, by the way -- which means I've written them, and stuck them into the ComicsMix queue, and they'll emerge when it's time.)

Then, a report on an art museum's exhibition of comics-related stuff:
Super Hero Comics and Art

And one graphic novel review:
The Architect

Quote of the Week

"There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance."
- Hippocrates

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Just Read: 300 by Frank Miller

There's been so much said about this book over the past ten years that I don't know what I could add at this point.

It's not quite as homoerotic as I expected, I guess, but it's still awfully damn homoerotic. I'm not the kind to make armchair psychological evaluations of people I don't know, but...Frank may be seeking something he wants to deny himself.

And, of course, at some point in the '90s, Miller turned into a full-on parody of himself, without anyone noticing it.

Otherwise...eh. It's very nice-looking, but the narration is terribly overwrought and I don't particularly want to be in the head of a bunch of Spartans (particularly Miller's kind of Spartans) for more than a minute or two at a time. It's not a book I expect to ever re-read, and I don't intend to keep it.

How Not to Get a Classic Published

It's the silly season, as they say in the UK, and that very silly plan, "let's type up some old novel and submit it to a bunch of publishers," has come around again. (I guess journalists get as bored in the summer as anyone else.) As always, the exercise results in a pile of rejection slips, and the papers scream "Gotcha."

This is very, very stupid, as anyone who knows anything about publishing can attest. The Penguin Blog does the best job of demolishing the story this time, and Grumpy Old Bookman took it on the last time around.

A book by Jane Austen has a certain value. A book supposedly written in the modern day -- by someone who is not Jane Austen -- that feels like an Austen pastiche, has a very much lesser value.

The lesson here is the exact opposite of what the gotcha types think it is: publishers are not dumb. They have a good sense of what is a plausible seller and what isn't. If that fails to coincide with some outside person's sense of what is "good," then that's not actually the publisher's problem.

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Emergency Mid-Week Quote

It was a filthy profession, but the money was addicting, and one addiction led to another, and they were all going to hell. Turner had gone to hell, and Mike McAfferey had gone to hell. Wes "Green Thumb" Griffin developed a wandering eye, while Antonia Zennario, who used to joke that "all investors are made from Adam's rib," lost her sense of humor, and then her smile, and then her job. Carol Manning miscarried. Coyote Jack began to stutter on his numbers and was moved into management. They had all gone to hell. Sid Geeder hated them all and missed them like crazy. The phone rang constantly and everyone suffered cauliflower ears, neck rashes, and cervical pain, and when the sun came up in the morning and they had already been at their desk two, three hours, they went to the 41st floor window and imagined what it would be like to have to ride a bus or find a parking place."
- Po Bronson, Bombadiers, most of the first paragraph of chapter 1, "Filth"

Just Read: Company by Max Barry

For those of you in senior management, the top-line: Company is not quite as funny as it's been billed as -- and the ending is suspiciously mushy for a satire -- but it's a very pleasant, highly readable modern novel that actually has a point of view and stands for something.

This is a modern satire of capitalism, in which (as usual) a young naif is hired by a nasty, rapacious corporation and soon comes to learn how nasty and rapacious it really is. Too soon, actually -- our hero, Stephen Jones, learns a Big Secret about a third of the way through the book, and everything loses momentum and energy at that point. The plot, such as it is, revolves around Jones as, first, he tries to figure out what Zephyr Holdings actually does, and, second, as he tries to change Zephyr into something better. (There are sub-plots about the other members of the department he joins, but they stay background.)

I don't want to say what that Big Secret is, and it does seem pretty clever at the time of the reveal. But, as the book goes on, having the secret be revealed that early makes the other layers of satire a bit pointless. And the nature of the secret actually works against the book in the long run, by reducing the stakes. (I'll also note that this is yet another media product in which the characters, in a situation where they have information that would be eminently newsworthy and interesting, don't even seem to live in a world with major media that might be interested in such information.)

The best capitalist satires -- the best satires of any kind -- are over the top, full of outrageousness and vivid larger-than life characters. Company, by comparison, sticks a little too close to real life. It has quite a few funny-because-it's-true moments, but no funny-because-it's-better-than-true moments, which are the lifeblood of satire. The best modern satire of capitalism -- I'd even go so far as to call it the Catch-22 of our time -- is Po Bronson's magnificent first novel, Bombardiers. That book is awash in strong personalities, and marinated in a heady stew of vast amounts of money. There's never the same sense of big piles of cash at stake in Company -- this is a novel about wanting to keep a mediocre job, rather than about anything larger. It come pre-downsized, which I suppose is appropriate for the 21st century.

There are a few personalities in Company that could have risen to the needed heights, but Barry keeps humanizing them and trying to make them believable, fully-rounded characters, which works against his satire. He wants to be cutting without cutting anyone in particular, and to say that companies are nasty and soul-destroying without showing anyone whose soul has been destroyed. He can't have it both ways; Company could either have been a novel of character set in a weird company or a really stinging satire, but Barry oscillates back and forth between the two modes. Both are OK in their own right, but each undercuts the other.

Really effective satires of capitalism need to have protagonists who aren't goody-goodies. They can start out as young and naive, but they need to be seduced to the dark side at some point in the book; Jones really never is in Company. (I'll also mention Ted Heller's darkly splendid Slab Rat, as another book that gets this right.)

Once I started picking nits in Company, I started seeing more. Zephyr has the whole of a large building in downtown Seattle, but half of one middle-rank floor is taken up by four cubes, one window office, and one conference room. (I've worked on half-empty floors; they have an eerie darkened quality that would have worked well in this novel. Barry doesn't evoke this, and, in fact, it doesn't seem like there are the large empty spaces that must necessarily be there.) Similarly, Zephyr never considers leasing out some of its space. I might be misled about Oregon law, but a reference or two makes it seem that Zephyr employees work on European-style contracts, rather than American-style "employment at will." (The latter would be much better for Barry's points, too.)

I could go on and on. I shouldn't be thinking about pesky details in a satire, but this one keeps trying to be plausible, instead of visionary, and so the deviations from plausibility -- and there are many of them -- become obvious and grating. Company needed more money, more sex, more violence, just more.

I see I'm being very hard on this book, which is probably unfair: it's a very entertaining read, and I sped through it in three days. It made me think about satire and capitalism, and has some excellent scenes and ideas. But it could have been great, and that's what bugs me. Good books that only ever could have been good won't get me worked up, but a book that could have been much better is like a missing tooth; I can't stop poking at it.

If you think you want to read Company, don't let me stop you; you'll probably like it better than I did. (And I did enjoy every page, so you might well love it.) But the book you really want is Po Bronson's Bombardiers.

ComicMix, ComicMix, Mix Me a Comic

Things from me over there in the last day or two:

And two reviews:

More, as always, will follow.

How About a Free Book Day?

Edward Champion just suggested that the trade book business borrow an idea from the comics world (who probably got it from Ben & Jerry's to begin with) and institute Free Book Day.

I think that's a splendid idea -- if it worked along the lines of Free Comics Day, then each publisher who wanted to participate would create a book (probably short, certainly paperback) to be given away and retailers could decide whether they wanted to participate. Readers would just have to go to the right bookstore on the day, and take their pick. (And, like Free Comics Day, I bet a lot of those readers would spend some of their own money while they were there.)

Penguin could give away something like the 80p classics of a few years ago; St. Martin's could offer Evanovich's One for the Money, and Scholastic Garth Nix's Mister Monday. (I expect giving away the first in a series would generally be a good plan -- it's worked for e-books for several years.) Those are just random thoughts, but every house would have some property that could entice readers to other things, and authors willing to give away a little now to get more later.

Who could get this to happen? It could be be the best thing to happen to the book business since pre-cut pages...

O Hai! I Wuz Takin' Diz Test 4 U

I haven't done a meme in a while (that's what happens when you don't see LiveJournal posts for a while), so I picked this one up from the Amazing Klima:

Your Score: Ceiling Cat

28 % Affection, 40 % Excitability , 35 % Hunger

You are a master of stealth. They never see you coming. But you always see them coming. HEY-O!

Link: The Which Lolcat Are You? Test written by GumOtaku on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Just Read: Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits!

This is credited to Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd; Spiegelman wrote an essay for the New Yorker from which the text of this book was taken. (The changes from the magazine text to the book text appear to be minor.) Kidd, I believe, did the book design and possibly dug out and got the rights for the comics reprints included here.

So this is a weird book -- one part short biography of Jack Cole, one part appreciation of Plastic Man, and one part reprint collection. I'll take each part in turn.

As a biography, it's very short, but OK for what it is. There's probably a lot more of Cole's life to be teased out, but Spiegelman hits the high points, and tells us everything we really need to know.

Spiegelman is not very critical when it comes to Cole and Plas; he loves 'em, and wants us to know it. He is good at getting that enthusiasm across, but not always the reason for the enthusiasm. Sure, Plas is an interesting character, but so were dozens of others. Spiegelman also seems mostly interested in how Plas allowed Cole to design interesting pages, which is of primary interest only to other comics artists.

Lastly, the reprints here are aggressively "timely" (pun semi-intended, since they're mostly Quality comics); blown up to show huge dots, shot straight from yellowing newsprint, and otherwise very much artifacts of a vanished past rather than artworks being reproduced. I hated this in Kidd's Peanuts book, and I hate it here -- I know art directors might like the texture of it, but it uses the old stories and art as fodder for someone else's modern "artistic" design, rather than showing them as works in their own right. For a book that's supposedly about Jack Cole, I want Jack Cole, and not Chip Kidd's interpretation of him. Kidd even adds a dozen or so collage pages, mostly at the end, which are pure self-indulgence. My kid brother did a cut-and-paste "cutting edge" magazine in his high school days; these pages are much the same thing done with professional tools, and even less defensible.

The stories themselves -- two full-length Plas stories, one about Woozy Winks, and a later crime comic with a famous "injury to the eye" panel -- are OK, but I'd rather have a more concentrated dose of Plas, with a less distracting design. There are also some later Playboy cartoons, and lots of other stuff shoved in every which way (this is a heavily, heavily designed book, and can be hard to read because of it).

All in all, I'd have prefered a more sedate, down-to-earth package of the same stuff. The bells and whistles only distract from the content, which is what design should never do.

Just Read: The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part I by Larry Gonick

Yes, that's a long title, but you ain't seen nothing yet! Look for a post on the next book I read (maybe later tonight), which has an even longer one.

This is essentially the fourth volume of Gonick's long-running Cartoon History of the Universe, re-launched as Volume 1 with a slightly different title for what I presume are pure marketing reasons. It's otherwise exactly like the earlier books, with Gonick as the narrator (occasionally on-panel) and guide through history.

Gonick has a bias towards tolerance, peace, and prosperity, which can be a handicap for a historian; history is generally the record of the opposite of all those things. (I also suspect Gonick will come across as more of a contemporary liberal the closer that his history gets to the present day, but that isn't much of an issue when he's writing about squabbles between kings and popes. This is overview-level history, covering a couple of hundred years across the entire globe, so it can get sketchy at times. But Gonick is good at providing telling details to anchor the reader, and just putting the history into comics form works in his favor -- we can see the different characters, so he doesn't have to continuously repeat who they are.

I wouldn't rely on this as your one reference for world history in the 1500s and 1600s, but it's a nice overview, and I do like the way Gonick tells these stories. (Even if the stories themselves are about war, pogroms, genocide and other unpleasantnesses far too often. But, then, that's what history is: the record of what assholes humans are to each other.)

Monday, July 16, 2007

Just Read: Pirate Freedom by Gene Wolfe

Reviewing a Gene Wolfe novel is a tricky business; he's a writer who works almost entirely by indirection and the slow accretion of incidental details. At times, Wolfe can seem to be playing a game against the reader -- if he can conceal the true importance of the events of his plot, he wins. And so even a thoughtful and careful reader hedges his bets and says that a new Wolfe novel seems to be about X, or appears to feature a character who is secretly Y -- because, with Wolfe, there's always the chance that you're completely wrong.

And yet we still read his books. Why? I can't speak for everyone, but the thing I enjoy more than anything in fiction is voice, and Wolfe is a master of voice. His best books are all intensely narrated, told from very particular, and never completely reliable, points of view. Latro, Patera Silk, Severian, the narrator of "Book of the Short Sun:" -- Wolfe's best books are all in some particular voice, stories told by one specific man, in one specific place, obscuring some details and confusing others for his own ends. I also can't deny that the challenge of teasing out the truth from the labyrinthine corridors of Wolfe's plots is appealing; reading Wolfe is, in some sense, like matching wits with him, and reaching the end counts as a win...or at least a draw.

Pirate Freedom is Wolfe's new book for this year; it will be published in November by Tor, his long-time publisher. Since it's not available yet, I'll need to be somewhat vague. (I could blame the vagueness on Wolfe, as well, or claim to be trying to provide a Wolfesque experience...but I won't; it wouldn't be true.)

Our narrator this time is Chris -- Father Chris, Captain Chris -- who is writing in our near future, but telling the story of what happened to him several hundred years ago. (Some things, I have to tell you, just will not be explained in a Wolfe novel, and the precise reason for that temporal oddity will never be clear -- though a careful reader will put together the timeline and figure out the important facts.) The Chris who is writing the story is a Catholic priest, in some American city. The Chris of the tale is a younger man, first growing up in a school/monastery in Cuba, and then traveling. Look: the word "pirate" is in the title, yes? You and I both know that Chris will eventually fall in with pirates, right? So take that as written -- but I won't tell you how. There are adventures, gold, combat on ship and shore -- all the things you expect from a pirate story. But this is a Gene Wolfe pirate story, told as a confession, years later, by a man whose intentions are not to dwell on the blood and gore, but to list and atone for his sins. Oh, and Chris's last name? We're never told it specifically, though I suspect someone with all of the clues and the right outside information could work it out.

Similarly, a student of the period could probably tell you exactly what years Chris was active in the Caribbean and thereabouts; all I can tell you is that it's after Sir Henry Morgan sacked Panama (1671) and presumably before the death of Blackbeard (1718). And that same student, I don't doubt, would be eager to point out the historical sources for events in this story, which I also cannot help you with.

One thing I can talk about, and want to come back to -- I said above that Wolfe's best books are all told in the voice of one specific man. And I mean "man," not person, because Wolfe rarely writes in a woman's voice. (I can think of Pandora by Holly Hollander, a pleasant but minor novel, but not much else.) For that reason, among others, Wolfe has been accused of sexism in the past few years, and it's not an entirely unfounded accusation. Wolfe's narrators are usually men, and their attitudes towards women are not that of equals to equals. His novel narrators are typically a bit more chivalrous, more honorable, and more pious than is the norm in their societies, so they're generally not debauching and raping women (which is sometimes going on, nearly unremarked on, in the background). But women are the cause of troubles more than they are friends and comrades, and women in Wolfe's stories are essentially unknowable. You can sometimes predict a woman's behavior, if you're a particularly smart and thoughtful Wolfe hero, but you can never understand her. I suspect Wolfe has more male fans than female, simply because his women are so secondhand, so intensely Other. A woman, to a Wolfe hero, is, at her best, someone you love, someone you have sex with, someone you protect and cherish, but not someone you ever entirely trust.

Again, I'm talking in vague generalities, because the book hasn't been published yet, but Pirate Freedom is a novel in which sexual relations play a part, and I'm sure the women of Pirate Freedom will be much discussed. (So perhaps what I'm doing here is sending up a signal flare to the Secret Feminist Cabal -- because this is a good novel, with many strong points, and there's a lot of interesting material to work with here.) Wolfe, I know, is himself a Catholic, and this book is more overtly Catholic than many of his works -- perhaps the virgin/whore dichotomy would be a useful tool for sorting and explicating the women in this book. (Though, among pirates, you don't find many virgins.)

As I said above, Chris is just slightly too good to be true (much like the heroes of Wolfe's last series, "The Wizard Knight"). There's also the odd fact that far too many of the people he meets seem to like him and believe him on sight, which is a bit unlikely. Perhaps that's another unreliable narrator trick, and I was meant to figure out something else from that odd fact, but, if so, it escaped me.

Lastly, I'll have to warn you that this has a Gene Wolfe ending, and that Wolfe is inordinately fond of circularity and returns in his endings. It's about what I expected, but it's not what one would expect from a rip-roaring pirate tale. Then again, you don't go to Wolfe for rip-roaring anything.

Now I'm Sure I Won't Be Able to Find The Links Now That I Want Them...

But I'd love to introduce
a) the people who think that the way to fix the book trade ordering system is by eliminating returns to
b) the people who think that the way to fix the comics direct market ordering system is by instituting returns.

(Yes, of course there can be some kind of semi-returnable medium state; what amuses me is that the two sides generally don't seem to know the other exists, and aren't aware of the pitfalls of the other system.)

Sunday, July 15, 2007

My Fingers Are Typing Away Madly for Your Amusement

It's just that they're doing it over at ComicMix, and not here, the last couple of days. (That's my way of noting that I didn't post for two days, and moving on.)

My ComicMix posts were:

And a review of:
Will Eisner's New York

Look for another review there within a day (once I wrestle it into shape), and, with any luck, my thoughts on Gene Wolfe's Pirate Freedom here before the end of the night.

Just Read: Lucifer, Vol. 1: Devil in the Gateway by Mike Carey and various artists

Someone -- and I don't know if it was Mike Carey specifically -- clearly did a lot of study of the early issues of Sandman before launching Lucifer. You've got your aristocratic, distant, magically powerful main character loosely interacting with what could be either a more serious version of the DC Comics cosmology or a cartoony version of Christian cosmology, and making wry, biting comments along the way. You've got horrific side-plots going on among the mere humans who cross the main character's path. And you've got just a bit of philosophy to keep it all going.

I'm afraid Lucifer left me cold: I didn't like or care about the main character, and, what's worse, I didn't actually believe him as the ex-ruler of Hell. He just felt like a slightly more powerful and assholish John Constantine. (And his assistant, the half-face woman, has a really annoying speech pattern that I just gave up on trying to comprehend after a few pages.) I didn't really care, specifically, about the normal people Lucifer dealt with, either, and the other angels had no angelic qualities I could detect.

So, all in all, this was a big blah for me, and I won't be back for the later volumes. (No foul; I can't read everything.) I'd bought this book a few months back because I was looking for something new to read, and this looked likely, but it turned out to be not for me. (I don't think it's bad -- the art is uniformly good, and Carey clearly can write well -- just that it is very much not for me.)

Just Read: The Trouble With Girls, Vol. 2

To keep the title from getting ridiculously long, I dropped the credits down to here: this was written by Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones, pencilled by Tim Hamilton and mostly inked by Dave Garcia, just like the first volume.

I read Checker's Vol. 1 a few weeks ago, and explained the background in excruciating detail then (so I won't repeat myself). This book reprints issues 8-14 of the original Eternity series from 1988, in which Lester Girls battles enemies, romances gorgeous women, and searches for the truth about his past. It's still as much fun as the first volume, for those who aren't offended by the whole idea to begin with.

The cover design is awfully low-rent, though; I'm not sure if it implies that Tim Hamilton has completely fallen off the face of the earth (and couldn't be found to do a new cover), or that this project had such a low budget that all they could afford was a quick cut-and-paste job with bits of the original art. (Tending to argue for the latter: none of the original covers are included in this book, even in black-and-white versions.) I guess if everything from the '80s is going to be reprinted -- and we seem to be heading in that direction; I'm expecting the big Boris the Bear Archives and a deluxe Pre-Teen Dirty Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos hardcover any day now -- they're not all going to get the nice deluxe treatment. This is still OK -- the printing is clear and the binding is solid -- though those fancy extras would have been nice.

Bonus Quote for the Weekend

"In the bowels of the company, a computer is about to be murdered. It's a simple computer, a PABX. Its job is to route phone calls. It is running software that was once as clean and functional as a mountain stream, but over the past decade has been patched, tweaked, and customized into a steaming, festering jungle, where vines snag at your feet and snarling, fanged creatures live in the shadows. There is a path through the jungle, a clear, well-worn path, and if you follow it you will always be safe. But take two misdirected steps and the jungle will eat you alive.

"The software prevents two phones from forwarding their calls to each other, which would create what is known as an infinite loop, a particularly brutal way to kill a computer. In IT, infinite loops are the equivalent of manslaughter: death through foreseeable negligence. So at this point on the jungle path there is a strong wooden barrier. What the software does not prevent -- not anymore, not after ten years of quick hacks to meet ever-changing departmental wish lists -- is a forwarding circle, where person A (say, Roger), forwards his phone to B (Jones), who forwards his phone to C (Elizabeth), who forwards her phone to A (Roger). There is no barrier here, just a deep, dark ravine where things wait with glittering eyes and sharp teeth.

Right now a mid-level manager in Travel Services is dialing her Training Sales representative. She is thinking of ordering some training for her two telesales staff. They don't really need it, but she's caught wind that Training Sales is trying to cancel orders., This manager has been in Zephyr Holdings long enough to know that if someone doesn't want you to order something, you8 grab as much of it as you can and hang on tight. It was the same way with office chairs.

Her finger pushes the last digit, a six. The phone clicks in her ear. There is a pause. Then the building's lights go off."
- Max Barry, Company, pp.50-51

Quote of the Week

I missed posting this on Friday, so there will be this post, and then a bonus quote. (Which has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they're both from the same book, and that I couldn't decide between them...nope, not at all.)

"It is a terrible thing to be fired, like your parents saying you have to clean out your room and leave the family, and it's worse if the company happily continues on in your absence, not even noticing the difference. This is like passing your ex-family in the street and they're laughing and heading out to the movies. What you really want, following your sacking, is for the company to undergo a quick, public financial implosion directly traceable to your departure. But as a substitute, someone crying as you leave the building is pretty good."
- Max Barry, Company, p.35

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Other Voices, Other Blogs

Stuff from me at ComicMix today:

Just to whet your appetite, both of the Harry Potter link extravaganzas contain pictures of Daniel Radcliffe showing an unusual interest in Emma Watson's recent growth spurt. Someone needs to point out to the boy that you can't stare (especially with cameras around). Perhaps this game (possibly not safe for work) will help.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Just Read: Psmith, Journalist by P.G. Wodehouse

This is the first book that I've ever read completely electronically -- and I say this as a guy who's had a Palm (three of them, in fact) for the past four years, and e-books on them the whole time. It took Wodehouse to finally get me to finish something that way; it's not that it's all that inconvenient, or difficult; it's just that, given any choice, I'd rather read words on paper than on a tiny screen. But I read chunks of this when I didn't have a choice -- while waiting for the 4th of July fireworks, or at kids' events, or whatnot -- and I got through it in about three months of on-and-off reading.

This is a very early, and transitional Wodehouse book; it was originally published in 1915 (between Psmith in the City and Leave It To Psmith), and is one of his early attempts to write about a different setting. In this case, that's the lawless world of gangland New York City, and Psmith's blithe superiority doesn't always mesh well with on-page gunplay and pummelings. Wodehouse wrote many gangsters after this point, but he mostly brought them into the situations he knew and could write about well, rather than having his characters head into their world.

The setup in Psmith, Journalist is that Mike (remember Mike? hardly anybody does, but he was supposed to be the hero of the series until Psmith sauntered in) and Psmith are in New York on the summer break from Cambridge; Mike to play cricket and Psmith to...well, to be Psmith, basically. In some way I don't remember, they meet the sub-editor of a juvenile daily paper, who is minding the store while the editor is on an extended vacation, and Psmith convinces the young sub-editor to change Cozy Moments into a muck-raking, pugilist-supporting rag focused on the horrible conditions in NYC tenements. (And the serious subject matter doesn't work well with Wodehousian lightness; this novel mostly trivializes the serious issues instead of getting any boost in purpose from them.)

Anyway, the owner of the tenements in question is secret, and wants to stay that way. He's a corrupt politician with gangsters on his side, but Psmith and friends also have some gangsters (and an up-and-coming boxer) on their side. There are more fights and chases than expected in a Wodehouse novel, but good, of course, eventually prevails.

Psmith sails back to England, where he belongs. And Wodehouse mostly avoided setting novels in the USA (especially the gritty side of it) after that point.

Just Read: The Dog Said Bow-Wow by Michael Swanwick

Swanwick is one of our great short-story writers, and I've been annoyed that I've fallen so far behind on reading his short works. (I've got two or three of his other collections sitting somewhere, waiting to be read.) So, when this came in from Tachyon Publications -- they'll be publishing it as a sleek and cost-effective trade paperback in September -- I knew I had to get to it quickly, so I didn't fall any further behind.

The Dog Said Bow-Wow collects sixteen recent Swanwick stories (the oldest is from 2001), including excellent examples of both science fiction ("Tim Marsh") and fantasy ("The Bordello in Faerie"). It also has three fine "Darger & Surplus" stories, about a pair of rogues in the post-Utopian future. It has one new novelette -- "The Skysailor's Tale," just as good as everything else here -- and one story, "Urdumheim," which will be published in F&SF at about the same time this book is available.

On top of all that, it has a cover with a dog on it, and one of my most trusted colleagues swears that books are always more successful when they have dogs on the cover. (The best thing is when the author's photo includes a dog, but the front cover is good as well.)

I was very happy to get this book and thoroughly entertained while I was reading it. Swanwick is one of our finest writers -- and now all I have to do is wrangle a copy of his upcoming novel The Dragons of Babel (which grew out of a story from an original anthology from my ever-nameless former employer).

Another Day at ComicMix

Posted there since yesterday's round-up:

Son of Harry Potter Mania!
Interviews on the Links! (I know that one wasn't my title)
F&SF News & Links

And one review: Grendel Archives.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

If This Is Tuesday, It Must Be ComicMix

I clearly cannot be stopped:

As always, links, ideas, complaints and praise may be e-mailed to me at the address in my profile (to the left). Objects with physical solidity would need to travel through other types of mail, but those could also be accommodated.

Just Read: Luba: Three Daughters by Gilbert Hernandez

This is the third "Luba" collection, the 16th book collecting Gilbert's Love & Rockets work, and the 23rd Love & Rockets collection overall. So there's a lot of history here; even the great L&R hiatus is about a decade old at this point.

I hesitate to say that someone could pick this up and enjoy it without previous knowledge of the characters, but I always seem to have completely forgotten who all of these people are between volumes, and I can figure it out (and enjoy the books) every time. And I also have to admit that I don't always remember the little bits of history that the characters allude to (as real people will) -- I know that a couple of past deaths mentioned in this volume probably weren't exactly as they are described here, but I didn't bother to pull out the older book to check the details. Getting everything out of this book requires some study, a better memory than I have, and time to think, but getting a lot out of it only requires reading it with an open mind and an interest in stories about real people. (Well, most of them are women with notably large mammary development, but you can't have everything.)

As usual, Gilbert is a master of characterization and dialogue; he has a large cast (which, as I said, I don't always remember from book to book, and certainly don't remember all of their odd interconnections -- Gilbert's people are real, and live in a real world, and so are connected in the usual unlikely real-world ways) that he keeps distinct at all times and maneuvers well through lots of mostly shorter stories. If I have one complaint, its that I'm not quite sure of the time-line; I suspect most of these stories take place a few years ago, but it could be 1991, or 1997, or 2004 (or all of those in different specific stories), and I don't know which. I'm sure Gilbert knows, but his fictional universe is getting large enough now to require a concordance.

(Past Gilbert Hernandez books at Antick Musings: Sloth, Luba: The Book of Ofelia.)

Monday, July 09, 2007

Your ComicMix Weekend o' Fun

Stuff from me at ComicMix over the past couple of days has included:

SF&SF Book Reviews (which I don't think I titled that, originally, though I like the Zen repetition of it)
Science Fiction/Fantasy Book Reviews
Science Fiction & Fantasy Interviews
F&SF Magazine News
SF&F News & Links
Reviews: Graphic Novels & SF/Fantasy
Comics News & Links
Science Fiction/Fantasy Interviews

And two book reviews:

I think they've caught up to me now, so I'd better go throw some more posts into the hopper...

Saturday, July 07, 2007

What's Good About Heinlein

Originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written 9/16/03, as a reply to someone who asked what was the big deal about ol' Robert A. I've dragged it out of the closet and brushed the dust off of it to post today for what I hope are obvious reasons:

He was one of the first genre SF writers whose characters talked like human beings -- they tended to be smart-asses, but they sounded like for-real human beings, not cardboard manifestations of the plot. His dialogue was almost always good, and you could generally tell what character was speaking from the dialogue itself, without looking at the attributions. (Which is the kind of skill mostly noticed when it's not there.)

He was also one of the first SF writers to take everything in human life as fair game -- he certainly had his own blind spots, and cherished ideas, but no part of human behavior was off-limits for his fiction. (This, post-New Wave, tends to sound like "he wrote about sex & drugs," but it's much more than that -- Heinlein was interested in people and how they related to each other, and that's what drove his fiction.)

Add those together, and what you get is a writer whose characterization was miles ahead of the competition, and still respectable today, when the bar is set much higher. (Many of his people have ideas and attitudes alien to today's world -- either because they are from imagined future societies or because they were very much like early 20th century people -- but they're still consistent, coherent and believable.)

I think that's why the #1 problem with Heinlein is still "he had only four characters" -- his people are so clearly defined that's blindingly obvious when Lazarus Long shows up, in slightly different form, in some other novel.

Friday, July 06, 2007

Friday's ComicMix

Since I last linked, my review for Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible has gone up. (And, yes, I believe this is the first time I've admitted writing a review.)

Also:

And, in the exciting not-me portion of ComicMix, you'll also find Michael Davis on whether Donald Duck is racist and Glenn Hauman on the origins of comics piracy.

Quote of the Week

"By convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness, but in reality there are atoms and space."
- Democritus

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Movie Log: Ratatouille

I've been a big Pixar fan since Toy Story 2 hit video (my kids were just a bit too young when it was out in theaters), so I was sorry to say unkind things about Cars last year. (Though I still stand by them; Cars is a decent animated movie, but also Pixar's biggest artistic failure to date.) So I was thrilled to see that Ratatouille was a return to form, and another contender for the crowded throne of "best Pixar movie ever."

(Parenthetically, Brad Bird's Pixar track record is now 2-for-2, with this and The Incredibles, while Pixar high muckety-muck John Lasseter is only 2-for-4, counting Cars and A Bug's Life as relative disappointments compared to the two Toy Story movies. And now I really do have to find time to see The Iron Giant, even if my kids don't want to.)

Ratatouille is a joyful, fun movie from beginning to end; it creates an incredibly detailed and real world to delight in; and only the fact that it's about talking animals (and is animated) really pegs it as a "kids" movie. It's not, really -- it's not even a "for the whole family" movie, since that usually means "the kids will like parts, and the adults will like other parts." Ratatouille is not a movie of parts; it's one story, told right, about a character who wants something it would be nearly impossible to have...but manages to do it.

I knew this was a good Pixar movie because I teared up -- as I did (I'm not proud) during Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc., and Toy Story 2. This time, though (without giving anything away), I got misty-eyed because of the emotions of the bad guy, which was really surprising.

I can't really talk about that turn at the end, which is absolutely wonderful, and shows an amazing generosity from Bird and the Pixar team, without giving it away, but it is splendid, and it pulls Ratatouille even further from the plot-by-numbers insipidity of most animated films.

In short: Ratatouille is a great Pixar movie, which means its as good as anyone's movies. (And it also has the advantage that even my nine- and six-year olds could appreciate and enjoy it, which most great movies don't.)

Just Read: Amy + Jordan by Mark Beyer

If I'm not depressed enough to appreciate these comics this summer, they'll never work for me.

This book collects what I think are all of the "Amy + Jordan" cartoons by Mark Beyer, which originally appeared in The New York Press from 1989 to 1996. Now, I read the Press for a big chunk of those years, and I remember this strip...but, still, none of them were familiar.

Beyer has a deliberately crude style. (At least, I think it's on purpose, and not just because he's really bad at drawing.) It's not inappropriate for the content: odd, aggressively "underground" (or "downtown" or something else that means ugly and unpopular) strips about a couple who live in a city (presumably New York) and to whom bad things always happen.

Amy + Jordan was never actually funny, and it's not really poignant, either, since the nasty things that happen to the characters are usually surreal and weird. Really, what this strip was is the serious, hipster version of Mr. Bill.

As a side note, I realized while reading this through that Amy and Jordan are supposed to be a heterosexual couple, and that I'd had no idea what their relationship was when I used to read this strip in the Press -- I guess I vaguely thought they were sisters. That tells you something about the characterization and depth of relationships here.

Oh, another note: the strips in this book are clearly not in order -- it starts in 1989, but goes back to 1989 at least twice -- and it doesn't matter. Each strip is completely independent, and none of them lead to any of the others. That's potentially a good thing, but I don't think it actually is in this case.

This book is only for those who both miss the wildest extremes of the undergrounds and still smoke above eye level. I grabbed it as a bound galley at work in 2004, and it wasn't even worth taking up space in my house for three years.

Getting Things Backwards

To my left is today's editorial cartoon from Dick Locher (who, incidentally, has a great idiosyncratic style for an American cartoonist. And his editorial panels are big enough to let him cut loose more than he can on Dick Tracy).

Not to be rude, but I think Mr. Locher meant to letter the sign "You Must Be Less Than This Wide To Enter." As it is, #35 is in like Flynn...

This Weekend

I will not be at the Heinlein Centennial (and associated festivities; I know the Sturgeon and Campbell Memorial Awards will be given away then as well, and my failing memory suggests other fun things may be happening as well).

I will be at Readercon. I'm not on the program (since I didn't make the decision to go until the last minute), but I may try to weasel my way on, especially if whoever's doing programming is someone I know. (It's all about who you know in this world; don't let anyone tell you any different.)

I'll probably post here a few more times before I go (and pile some more logs onto the ComicMix fire as well), but blogging will stop here at about noon tomorrow and not resume until late on Sunday (if at all). I do have a Heinlein post (another reprint from rasfw) to toss out dated Saturday, his centennial, but Blogger doesn't actually hold posts to their publication dates, so it'll probably be the last thing I throw up before I leave.

Be good while I'm gone, OK?

Just Read: Fables, Vol. 9: Sons of Empire by Willingham, Buckingham, and others

This is a whole lot of middle -- it's pleasant middle, and artistically interesting middle, and middle filled with characters we know and like and want to see more of -- but, still, there's no beginning here, and there's no end here.

At this point in the Fables saga, the ground rules are pretty well established: the Adversary (revealed to be Gepetto a couple of volumes back) is in control of most of the worlds of fable and folklore (or at least the main European ones), and our heroes are the plucky band who fled his forces to come to what seems to be the only world inhabited by non-magical people and live in a small, hidden enclave in New York.

(Now that I type that out, one thing does seem very suspicious -- there's only one world of "mundanes?" One, and precisely one? That seems tidy in a very unlikely way. I also wonder about more modern, more technological tales -- is the Steam Man of the Plains out there somewhere? Or the WWII Gremlins? Or a million even more up-to-date things?)

This volume collects two storylines, "Sons of Empire" (four issues) and "Father and Son" (two issues), plus two single-issue stories (one a Christmas story and the other a series of questions from readers). In the first story, Gepetto makes war plans against Fabletown, and then has to revise them -- but they're long-term plans anyway. In the second story, Snow White, Bigby Wolf, and their unruly children visit the paternal grandfather's homestead for family bonding and family history. All pleasant, all interesting, but all still middle; we can see things moving about for large confrontations, but those confrontations won't happen for a while yet.

Doing a long-running series like this is a delicate balancing act; the overplot and the individual plots need to share importance. In Fables, the overplot is currently vastly outweighing the individual plots, so all of the little stories feel a bit like distractions (or like wasting time) while we wait for the other shoe to drop.

I'm in no danger of dropping this series, but, if it is going to have a large, central over-arching plot, that needs to be the focus, and it needs to move forward. (This may end up being a problem, since the Fabletown/Adversary conflict is at the heart of the series, but once you pull Chekhov's Gun off the wall, you have to fire it pretty quickly.)

ComicMix Links

The Slush God always lists and links his other writing over at his blog, so I don't see why I shouldn't do the same...

So far today, there's only been Science Fiction/Fantasy Magazine News.

Yesterday, for the Glorious Fourth, I had:

Tuesday featured:

And Monday saw:

On Sunday, there was:

And, on Saturday, I had Science Fiction/Fantasy Book Reviews and Interviews.

That takes us back a week, and covers most of what has gone up at ComicMix so far; I've got another bunch of posts in the pipeline (including two book reviews), so we'll see when they emerge. I'll try to remember to link 'em as they come along.

Movie Log: Happenstance

Yes, Audrey Tatou again. What can I say? She's awfully cute. We saw Happenstance because we'd liked Amelie (it was made by some of the same people, and of course starred Tatou), and because it wandered to the top of the Netflix queue almost without us noticing.

As is too common with these posts, we saw this movie a good week ago, so my memory is not as fresh as it should be. And it's a meandering, loosely-connected movie -- that's the whole point of it -- so it can be difficult to recreate all of those small connections later on. This is a movie centered around four or five characters (who don't all know each other at all), and concerning itself with their random connections and a series of unlikely events that all take place (I think) during one day.

Most of those people, my wife and I started to agree, are jerks at best -- although, I should admit, that I'm not sure if we took into account the fact that they are all French, and the bar for jerky behavior is set higher there. Tatou and the male character who is the least obnoxious do end up together, finally, at the end, which seems to be the whole point of the exercise.

Happenstance is a very light, airy movie -- it mostly consists of scenes of people talking to each other, or going about their daily business, and those scenes are pretty loosely connected. Don't go see it if you want serious drama, but it's a pleasant way to spend a few hours, and the characters are all engaging and real, even if most of them aren't all that nice.

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Just Read: The Pulse, Vol. 1: Thin Air by Bendis and Bagley

Jessica Jones returns, in a very thin soup that has little to do with the character from Alias. But there are more superheroes this time! And Mark Bagley draws in a solid but bland middle-of-the-road long-underwear style! And there's a Big Fight Scene! So this must be better than Alias!

Eh. Not so much.

You might guess that I didn't enjoy this as much as I did Alias (even the last story), and you would be right: it's too much standard superhero-universe furniture, with nothing terribly interesting or special about it. On the other hand, I did get it for half price, so that was about right.

This is an ensemble book, so it doesn't focus on Jones all that much to begin with; the other major characters are Ben Urich (the Marvel-verse's go-to reporter) and his boss, the slightly-less-caricatured-than-usual-but-still-not-what-one-would-call-a-rounded-character J. Jonah "I Hate Spider-Man with the Heat of a Thousand Exploding Suns" Jameson. Jameson is starting a weekly section in the Daily Bugle to focus on the super-powered crowd, to be called "The Pulse" (for no obvious reason), and Urich will write for it and Jones will...hang around, not write, and provide some nebulous insights that I imagine several dozen people in Marvel NYC could do better. (Hell, Urich knows as much or more about super-folks than Jones does. She really doesn't have a reason for being in this book, I'm sorry to say. It would have been better if she were supposed to be a writer for "The Pulse," which would at least make some sense.) The character interactions are a bit larger than life, but not completely ridiculous; these are reasonably good superhero comics (or, rather, comics set in a world with superheroes around every corner, but without any in this story all the time).

Again, Eh. I still liked Jones as a character -- she was very human and fallible -- and we don't see much of her here. (It's still the same person, at least, but she's one of many people, and not at the center of things.) Urich could be interesting, but not the way he's going here; he's too holier-than-thou to be really good. And Jameson is a buffoon; always was, always will be. Marvel can't allow his opinion to be taken seriously, because it just makes more sense than what is usually supposed to be public opinion in the MU. (Seriously -- if there were people who could destroy small countries with a thought, would you think they were wonderful and nice simply because they're supposedly good guys? I don't think so.)

Finally, no offense to Bagley, who I think is quite good at what he does, but it's not something I enjoy very much. It's clean, crisp, mainstream superhero comics, with differentiated faces but a whole bunch of panel compositions we've all seen a million times before.

Movie Log: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

It's been more than a week since I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, and it's not a movie that remains deeply in the mind.

The Wife and I dropped the boys off at the various grandparents, had a nice leisurely dinner without kids, and then went to the wrong theater to see this movie. Not only was what I laughly call "the theater" the size of my living room, with the screen much too close, but a large family up front (and I write that, as if there was some substantially distance between us) seemed to think it was their living room, as they passed food around and tried to make sense of the movie. But my wife shushed them until they stayed shushed, and it finally settled down.

It took at least half an hour for my eyes to adjust to looking at the screen as close as it was (I'm going to claim it was slightly unfocused as well), but, luckily, nothing important had happened by then.

Let's be honest: At World's End is very much the least of the three Pirates movies. It's pleasant, and the actors are all game, but they're not given a whole lot to work with. The fact that the movie doesn't seem to want to consider anyone a villain, or allow any conflict to be all that important, or last very long, before confusing it with complications and sub-conflicts that no one at all cares about, makes it sag long before its unnecessarily long running-time is over.

I know I had more specific complaints when I saw the movie, but they don't stick in the memory, just like the movie itself. If a fourth one is ever made, I'll pay more attention to the reviews before I decide to see it -- I assumed the reviews this time were because it's a big, dumb summer sequel, but they were absolutely correct.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Just Read: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

If there's one thing that distinguishes McEwan from all other English writers, it's his pessimism. No other writer of his era has so thoroughly assimilated that sophomore realization -- that we all will die, that everything ends -- and turned it into a model of a world. Though his last novel, Saturday, ended less unhappily than it could have, that's very much the exception for McEwan. In his worlds, everything ends badly, because that's what endings are. Endings are deaths, and deaths are never pleasant.

On Chesil Beach takes place essentially in one evening -- at dinnertime, and afterward, of the wedding day of two ordinary people, in an English sea-side town in 1962. Their tragedy is that the world is about to change around them, but it won't change in time to save them from themselves.

This is a book about sex. Not about triumphant, glorious sex, or sweet, loving sex, or even funny, awkward sex. It's about dreaded sex; the sex you think is going to happen, or fear might happen, or are sure will happen even though you'll do anything to stop it. Even more so, it's about what you think sex is, or will be, before you have any -- especially in a world where talking about sexuality at all is more than slightly naughty, and never done between the sexes. Florence and Edward know less about sex, and about each other, than they should, and they live in a time and a place when they simply can't tell each other what they need to say. They each have their own fears that they couldn't possibly explain, and, unfortunately, they are in a Ian McEwan novel, where the worst happens with clockwork regularity.

What most impressed me about On Chesil Beach was that aspect of communication. Writers have used the term "idiot plot" for years, to describe a story in which all the complications would disappear if only the characters would sit down and tell each other simple things. Miscommunication, or lack of communication, doesn't inherently create an idiot plot, of course: the traditional farce is based on characters who can't say the important things until the very last moment. But On Chesil Beach is something else; it's a book in which the barriers to speaking, the things this couple simply cannot say to each other, even after they're married, are a living, almost physical force in the novel. In another time, or another place, the story of Florence and Edward would not be a tragedy. But in Dorset, in 1962, it was, and had to be.

On Chesil Beach is an amazing achievement: a short book with all of the power and emotional force of a longer novel, a book that implies not only its own world of 1962, but all of the changes from that world to our own. This is what a major novelist can achieve at the height of his powers; it's simply brilliant.

A Note To Those Reading Me at ComicMix via Feeds

The feed currently is only picking up the first page, and not the jump, so some of my very long lists (and other people's long things as well) are being truncated by the feed. My advice is to click on anything you find interesting; you may discover it's longer than you expected.

Fred Saberhagen Is Gone

I've written a more formal obituary for ComicMix, but I feel like there are things I haven't said.

Saberhagen was one of my very favorite writers when I was a teenager, and I feel now like I've neglected him since then, maybe because he wasn't as "cutting-edge" as other writers I liked. (Saberhagen was always good, but never hip.) I loved the Berserker books to death, and Empire of the East, and Coils, and especially The Veils of Azlaroc, which is a book I think about (mostly that amazing, wonderful concretized metaphor at its heart) once a week or so even now.

And how can you not love a guy who says "I have had no prophetic dreams about breakfast this morning"? That is a clever man, and a class act. I never managed to meet Fred -- I was very rarely in his part of the country, and I don't think he came East much -- so now I never will.

Sorry I never met you, Fred. And sorry I wasn't out there talking up your books as much as I probably should have been.

Monday, July 02, 2007

Anyone Have an Older Laptop For Sale?

I've come to the conclusion that having a laptop (so I can work when I'm away from my basement hideaway -- either in the backyard, watching the kids in the pool, or actually out and about) would be very useful right now.

I've been checking out Craigslist for a decent used one (I certainly don't need anything new), but I figured I might as well ask you folks, to see if anyone has one sitting in a closet I could buy.

I'm agnostic on the Mac-Windows question; the computer I'm typing on now is a Mac (all of my home computers have been, partly to make things easier and partly out of pure inertia), but I used Wintel boxes at work, and there are certainly more of those out there. I'm just looking for something that isn't too slow, has a battery that still holds a decent charge, and has WiFi.

(What I'd mostly be doing with it is web-browsing, blogging, and maybe some word processing -- the standard stuff)

If anyone has such a thing they're already looking to get rid of (and is either in the New York area, or will be at Readercon this weekend), please e-mail me at acwheele at optonline dot net. (And then we'll see what The Wife thinks about my plans...)

Sunday, July 01, 2007

My Name Is In the Mouth of 19th Century Caricatures!

My Elves Are Different -- which is to the SF/F world what Wondermark is to self-absorbed hipsters, I guess -- has noticed the end of my exile.

This marks the first time I've been mentioned by name in a webcomic, though My Elves did obliquely refer to me once before...

Read in June

This was the month I was trying to read a comics collection (or something similar) every day, plus other books as I got through them, so it will be a long list. No time for exposition: full steam ahead!

Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid (6/1)
Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima, Path of the Assassin, Vol. 4: The Man Who Altered the River's Flow (6/2)
There's something of the aura of spinach about this manga (being as it's Important Japanese History), but it's also Sexy Ninja Action, which makes up for it. I have to admit that I had trouble keeping up with the political maneuverings in the first few volumes, but most of those people are now dead (I think), which makes things easier to follow. (Though I'm still not clear on the passage of time in this series -- each story seems to only take a few days or weeks, but there are clearly years passing somewhere.) So it intermittently confuses me and makes me think I should be learning something...and yet I keep reading it. (Again I refer to the Sexy Ninja Action, plus Big Bloody Battles and Kewl Obscure Eastern Philosophy.)
Roger Ebert, Your Movie Sucks (6/3)
Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny? (6/4)
Scott Kurtz, PvP. Vol. 4: Goes Bananas! (6/5)
I hate catching up on a comic-strip series's reprint books. Now I just get to read PvP online and wait for the next book. This is just as much fun as the previous books; I think PvP is easily the best webcomic currently running (Sheldon is the only thing close), which means it's better than 99.9% of the strips running in newspapers, too.
Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima, Path of the Assassin, Vol. 5: Battle of One Hundred and Eight Days (6/6)
See above. This volume consists almost entirely of one story -- two hundred and forty pages long. (And that's good, since it means there's less to keep track of.)
Adrian Tomine, Shortcomings (6/7)
Bruce Eric Kaplan, Edmund and Rosemary Go to Hell (6/8)
Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, & Guy Davis, B.P.R.D., Vol. 6: The Universal Machine (6/9)
I explained the whole Hellboy-B.P.R.D. thing as well as I ever could in my post on Vol. 5, so see that for background. This one is a relatively low-key story -- as I recall, the Earth itself is never in danger at any point -- with nice art by Davis and some good character stuff.
Grant Morrison, Richard Case, et. al., Doom Patrol, Vol. 5: Magic Bus (6/10)
Similarly, see my post on Doom Patrol Vol. 4 for the history there. The choice of issues to reprint in this series is getting annoying -- both the last volume and this one ended on cliffhangers -- but the stories are still good, and I prefer my superheroes existential and oddball to begin with.
Brian K. Vaughan, Tony Harris, et. al., Ex Machina, Vol. 5: Smoke Smoke (6/11)
Dittto ditto Vol. 4 ditto ditto. The larger story is not advanced at all in this volume, leaving me to wonder if there really is any larger story, or if this will just run on as long as people are reading it. (That won't be so bad, I guess, but the other way around would be better.)
Charles Stross, Halting State (6/11)
Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima, Path of the Assassin, Vol. 6: Life's Greatest Difficulty (6/12)
And this one beats out Vol. 5 by having a two hundred and eighty page story take up most of the volume.
Rick Geary, A Treasury of Victorian Murder, Vol. 9: The Saga of the Bloody Benders (6/13)
Haruki Murakami, After Dark (6/13)
Eddie Campbell, The Black Diamond Detective Agency (6/14)
John Ostrander & Tom Mandrake, The Legend of Grimjack, Vol. 6 (6/15)
After the disappointment of Tom Sutton and a quick sequence of one-shot artists (see Vol. 5), Grimjack settled into its second long-running artist, Tom Mandrake. I believe this was the first time Mandrake worked with Ostrander for an extended series, though they teamed up again for a long run on The Spectre (and, as I understand it, have also worked together on Martian Manhunter, Firestorm, and Batman). Mandrake isn't a Tim Truman clone, but he has some of the same strengths -- dynamic action, a strong sense of atmosphere, and a willingness to be either very detailed or sketchy as needed in a particular drawing. Ostrander also moves forward strongly here, after the relative wheel-spinning of the previous volume, getting rid of supporting characters and killing John Gaunt off for the first time. (Hey, this is comics, remember?) It's a good action-adventure series about a guy who always wears the same clothes, has odd and distinctive abilities, is the center of a circle of other interesting characters with odd abilities and backgrounds, generally helps people and saves worlds on a regular basis...but, please, the guys at the comic store would like to be sure that you understand that this is nothing like a superhero comic...
John Ostrander & Tom Mandrake, The Legend of Grimjack, Vol. 7 (6/16)
Remember how I said John Gaunt (our main character) died in the previous volume (just above)? Well, he gets better in this book. (The next time he dies, though, he doesn't get better -- someone else does. But we'll get there in another three or four volumes, if this series continues long enough.)
Bill Willingham, et. al., Jack of Fables, Vol. 1: The (Nearly) Great Escape (6/17)
Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Avon Oeming, Powers, Vol. 6: The Sellouts (6/18)
In case you haven't noticed, I'm mostly bumping down the "next volume in a series" books to paragraphs in this list, rather then giving them individual entries. (I'm also typing these bits as the month goes along -- right this moment, it's 1:45 on the 24th of June -- if anyone cares.) I did give Powers Vol. 5 its own entry, but that was a very short one. I only have slightly more to say this time: This is the "Superfriends" arc (my, flippant, title), in which our cop heroes investigate the murder of retired not-Batman and eventually learn that the murderer is exactly who you're thinking of right now. It also has an ending more like all of those post-Watchmen revisionist superheros than the usual street-level stuff for this series, and the status quo of superhero policing is completely changed at the end. This is pretty much as good as superhero comics can get, without the shackles of company-owned characters that have to always appear to be in the middle of changing but never actually change enough to screw up the licensing revenue. And I guess I'm on board for at least one more volume, because I liked this one. (Although, looking at it in the comics store, it looks like the next volume is a really bizarre right-hand turn into something totally different.)
Osamu Tezuka, Buddha, Vol. 1: Kapilavastu (6/19)
Kazuo Koike & Ryoichi Ikegami, Crying Freeman, Vol. 1 (6/20)
Osamu Tezuka, Buddha, Vol. 2: The Four Encounters (6/21)
See a couple of lines above for Vol. 1; in this one, Siddhartha starts out young and sickly and grows up to both fall in love and get married (as well as finding out about the fundamental inequities of life). At the end, he's run away from home for the last time, shaved his head and become a monk -- in other words, the prologue is over, and the main story is about to begin in Vol. 3.
Tom Perrotta, The Abstinence Teacher (6/21)
Jacob Chabot, The Mighty Skullboy Army (6/22)
Marguerite Abouet & Clement Oubrerie, Aya (6/23)
Will Jacobs, Gerard Jones, & Tim Hamilton, The Trouble With Girls, Vol. 1 (6/24)
David Petersen, Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 (6/25)
John Stanley and Irving Tripp, Little Lulu, Vol. 9: Lucky Lulu (6/26)
Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible (6/26)
A blackout kept me from finishing any books on the 27th.
Osamu Tezuka, Ode to Kirihito (6/28)
Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach (6/29)
Dave Kellett, Pure Ducky Goodness (6/29)
Andy Hartzell, Fox Bunny Funny (6/30)

And that was June; I only managed to read eight "real" books this month (and most of those were pretty short), but, with luck, July will be better. On the other hand, I will be house-sitting a nice inground pool for about half of this month...

Just Read: Pure Ducky Goodness by Dave Kellett

Pure Ducky Goodness is the first collection of the Sheldon strip -- which, if I've got things correctly, started as a newspaper strip but has recently transitioned to web-only. (I discovered it on the web, and bought this book because I liked it.)

The main character, the eponymous Sheldon, is a ten-year-old software billionaire. (In the first strip, it's stated that he wrote software to "speed up the Internet," but, wisely, after that, Sheldonsoft's products are about as specific and identifiable as those made by Dilbert's company.) He's being raised by his grandfather, his best friend (another ten-year-old, Dante) appears intermittently, but the best character is his talking duck, Arthur. (Like most good humor strips, describing it is mostly listing character traits, and doesn't sound all that appealing -- but these are interesting characters, will well-defined personalities that bounce nicely off each other.) Sheldon also has a good line in sly, general-geek humor -- it's mostly on the level of Star Trek and Star Wars, not as specific (one might say opaque, if one were being unkind) as Penny Arcade -- that could make it the heir to Foxtrot for that kind of thing.

I don't think Kellett has done anything major in the cartooning world before this, but his art is quite accomplished. There's an appealing solidity to his lines, and a tendency to bold angles and corners rather than curves to outline his figures. I can't find anything to complain about with his drawing; he's good at differentiating his characters, excellent at wringing humor and character out of his poses, and quite good at showing motion and energy, even within the confines of a daily strip.

The writing is equally accomplished and funny; the earliest strips here are as good as his current work. In my experience, that's rare -- most cartoonists need some time to work into their strips, to figure out what works best and get the rhythms down. Pure Ducky Goodness is not a complete collection -- it collects approximately 43 weeks of comics from the first three years of the strip -- so perhaps Kellett has already weeded out the ones that weren't as good. However it came together, it's a very entertaining book.

This, and the second book The Good, the Bad, and The Puggly (a third book will be published in the next few months) were published by Small Fish, which seems to be Kellett himself. I found Pure Ducky Goodness in my comics shop (Midtown Comics in Manhattan), and it seems to be available from the usual online retailers, but I suspect Sheldon books would be difficult to locate in your typical mall bookstore. Kellett does sell them directly through the Sheldon site (link up top), so I recommend you buy them through that channel if you're interested in the strip.

Networks & Contacts

Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Previously on Antick Musings...

Recurring Motifs

My Life As a Twit

Links, Damned Links, & Statistics

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Friday, July 27, 2007

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Monday, July 23, 2007

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Friday, July 20, 2007

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Your Score: Ceiling Cat

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Monday, July 16, 2007

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Monday, July 09, 2007

Saturday, July 07, 2007

Friday, July 06, 2007

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Monday, July 02, 2007

Sunday, July 01, 2007

Reader Surveillance Program: Activated