The Dubious Monk
chinese curses since twenty aught twoArchive for comics
i will have to buy a bus pass
I’m done with twenty-minute walks daily and can now look forward to 33% less income. But I’m not complaining. I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. There are worse things that could have happened and I now have an excuse to read piles of manga. Maybe I’ll even grow to like it.
It feels like every manga I’ve read moves glacially. Wait. That’s not true. The only one I read with that problem was Old Boy. Hassie’d recommended the movie and when I saw the manga at the library I took it out and read the first volume. It was so obvious and redundant and dumb. In my memory there were like two sentences per eight pages, and all the images were of people walking down hallways trying to look cool. I’m sorry Old Boy if I have distorted you beyond recognition but I thought you were terrible and was very glad I spent no money on you.
Maybe for the manga club I’ll bring Old Boy in as an example of what I can’t stand. Maybe it’s better than I remember. I wonder if I’ll have to expand beyond manga to the comics I love or if I’ll be able to find enough manga I like for discussion purposes.
book review: shivering sands
Warren Ellis writes a lot on the internet. Shivering Sands is a collection of his essays. They’re very good even though I’d read them all before. He talks about writing about cooking about music and most importantly about the future. This book was a Print on Demand experiment and it hasn’t made a lot of money. But it’s a good little book to take with you places and read and think.
book review: apocalipstick (the invisibles volume 2)
There’s an interview with Grant Morrison in the fourth issue of Coilhouse. It was the first thing I read in there. And before that interview I didn’t realize that his 1990s book The Invisibles was a form of autobiography. If you’ve read The Invisibles you can see why. Anyway, I went out and bought volume 2, Apocalipstick and read it.
The idea behind the Invisibles is that they’re these anarchist mystics. One of the main characters is a Brazilian transvestite shaman, another is a psychic clown from the future and they stop power hungry people from doing power hungry shit, while trying slowly to free everyone.
This book had a voodoo story and a time-jumping tale of drugs and identity in the Brazilian. It’s good, and most importantly weird. I think weird is important.
book review: war powers (dmz volume 7)
War Powers evidently falls somewhere in the second act of Brian Wood’s comic DMZ. The art remains dirty and everything you’d want out of a new american civil war in New York, but I have to admit I feel like Matty Roth (the journalist protagonist) feels like he’s losing his way. This volume he spends doing political work, not being the voice in the wilderness. I don’t know. I’m not saying Mr. Wood is writing it wrong or anything, but I miss the way Matty used to be. In this volume he takes a stand that I don’t agree with, not one bit. It’s still a good story, but I feel like it’s becoming a sad one.
book review: absolute sandman volume 2
Last week I spent a goodly chunk of my paycheque on the second volume of The Absolute Sandman by Neil Gaiman (and artists). I did this for a few reasons. First, I don’t want Xmas presents this year (and am not buying them for anyone). These Absolute Sandman books are mainstays on the Xmas list, but now I could get it for myself. Second, for some reason it’s not available on Amazon.ca at a reasonable cost right now so I noticed it at McNally Robinson. Third, I wanted to read something in a big-ass tome, to feel like I was plumbing the depths of arcanity and such. That this volume of Sandman tales involves the lord of dreams coming into possession of hell makes it a good fit for that “reading a tome” experience.
Sandman comics are things I’ve known about through my entire comic-reading life (which isn’t actually that long). I may have only started reading comics when the original run was ending. I remember the spines of the trade paperbacks in the comic shop. I remember flipping through issues and not really being dragged in. One time at Campaign we were given a trade paperback by one of our book suppliers. I read it (it had the Midsummer Night’s Dream story in it) and I didn’t mind it, but I had other things to spend my money on like Transmetropolitan. So yes, I wasn’t a long-time fan or anything.
And then I started learning how influential it was, beyond the coolness of Neil Gaiman himself. How this was sort of a gothy bible, an artifact of the 1990s that I missed out on. But now I’m reading it. In Absolute form. While I would love to own books like Absolute Watchmen or the giant volumes of Sin CIty or Hellboy, I’ve read those stories, in many cases I on those stories already. But Sandman is this pristine land I’m walking through on these massive pages with their beautiful colouring et al.
Reading this doesn’t bring back memories of the first time reading these stories because this is my first time. I don’t know if this is forming the same kinds of memories for when I reread them in the future. Of being wrapped up in a blanket on my couch in my underheated condo, sipping tea and shooing away a cat. It’s not the same as if I’d been 17. Damned fine stories though.
book review: nylon road
Last week I got a copy of a graphic novel memoir about a young woman growing up in Iran. That wasn’t called Persepolis. This was Nylon Road by Parsua Bashi and that Persepolis comparison is all over this book. Persepolis is mentioned in the first line of the book’s back cover summary. In one of the later chapters Bashi has drawn herself reading Persepolis. All through my time reading it I was comparing it to Persepolis, and it definitely comes off the weaker.
Bashi tells her story of growing up in Iran and emigrating to Switzerland in the form of a series of conversations with herself from different ages. It’s a decent enough setup to compare her views now with views she had at different ages. Speaking of ages, the back cover talks about it being a young woman’s struggles but she was 40 when the book was published. The point of view throughout is much more mature than young as she tells us about how she used to think. It’s broken into small chapters that aren’t very sequential. More of a collection of ruminations. Selah.
Art-wise, there’s not a lot exciting going on. She uses a similar simple style to Satrapi’s work in Persepolis, which is fine, but doesn’t help avoid comparisons between the two.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the book. Maybe if Persepolis isn’t available and you need a memoir about a woman growing up in Iran this would be fine. It would also work very well as a secondary source in an essay about the graphic memoir form (in a “in books like Persepolis and Nylon Road…” kind of way).
book reviews: a summary of the past month
I’ve been reading, but not a lot, and for some reason haven’t been real keen on writing everything up as I finish it. Here’s what I can remember since the last review.
Recently I finished Shadow & Claw the first two volumes of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun tetralogy. A classic and one I’m enjoying. It’s got short chapters which help you not feel like you’re slogging through stuff.
I read The Moor’s Last Sigh just before the Salman Rushdie thing. It was the last of his novels I hadn’t read and good. I feel like I’ve said this before about some other book but it feels like the novel is an excuse to get the backstory out there. We need to read the story of Moraes’ grandparents’ love story to know anything about him. It’s interesting to consider in light of SR’s notions of the role of the novel today.
Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut was found at a used bookshop a few weeks ago and devoured in an afternoon. Have I mentioned that I got the first volume of Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing? The new edition that has his first story on the title in it, not just the beginning of his first arc. Also read Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet, and today I finished Nick Abadzis’ amazing comic Laika, which was heartbreaking.
book review: league of extraordinary gentlemen black dossier
I read this because I decided I’m going to do a buy nothing kind of Xmas this year and don’t really want anyone to buy me presents. This means I no longer had to save the Black Dossier for the Xmas list and could read it for free at work. Hooray.
I was leery of this book beforehand because I loved the first two Extraordinary Gentlemen books, and this was different. The previous volumes were steampunky things where they foiled Moriarity and Wells’ Martian invasion. This one takes place in the 1950s. What cool literary characters could they do neat stuff with there?
Well, when you make James Bond a horrible little prick and do Jeeves & Wooster/Cthulhu pastiches in a world where Britain was actually Airstrip One and the big villain may or may not be Harry Lime (from the Third Man) yeah there’s a lot of coolness. There’s a lot of straight prose in here and varying formats (textbook treatises, memos, British sunday strips, pornographic tracts, the whole shebang) as Mina and Quatermain engage in a (pretty thin) chase to get the dossier talking about what they’ve been doing since 1898. It’s all about the backstory here and it was all pretty neat. I wish I knew more early 20th century British fiction because I think I missed a lot.
The only thing I really disliked was the Kerouac (Sal Paradyse) bit. That’s because it was over the top with the misspellings and stuff which obscured whether it felt like Kerouac at all. I felt it didn’t but it was hard to tell.
book review: dmz volume 6 blood in the game
Brian Wood’s SF journalism comic DMZ is my favourite ongoing comic series, and Blood in the Game tickled me in all the right ways. The trades for this book are almost self contained story arcs which is nice. This one is about the election in New York. And this one kind of steps over the line where Matty Roth (who started off as a journalism intern dumped into a war zone, and is now the only independent(ish) news voice in the war zone that is New York) goes into activism instead of just reporting. I expected a shift but I didn’t expect him to get co-opted so quickly.
book review: cairo
I read this book, Cairo, at work the other day. It’s a comic about a few young people doing stuff in contemporary Cairo. There’s a djinn and an accidental Israeli spy, travels to the Under-Nile, a hookah, gangsters, you know. Not bad, though I wouldn’t actually buy it. It killed a break pretty well. My favourite aspect was the under-river because it reminded me of My Winnipeg’s under-Forks.
