cerusee: a white redheaded girl in a classroom sitting by the window chewing on a pencil and looking bored (the covers of this book are too far apar)
[personal profile] cerusee
Graphic novels:

Guibert, Emmanuel: Alan's War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope
(in Guibert's introduction, he describes how the stories of WWII that Cope told him were mostly nothing spectacular. He's right, they're not. Guibert's renditions of the stories are simple: black-and-white, illustrative art paired with Cope's unembellished memories. But I think I understand why Guibert wanted to draw them: there is something in war and the lives of people who fight in wars, something about the dull minutia of that daily existence that's very important that we know. This is how citizens become soldiers, this is being a soldier in wartime, and this is what soldiers do with their lives when the war is over. We should all of us know this: it's so matter-of-fact. War isn't drama).


Cotter, Joshua W.: Skyscrapers of the Midwest
(shit, I just don't care. I got through I think five pages and gave up on account of shit, I do not care about your male adolescent traumas told via pupil-less space cat superhero pastiche anomie. For god's sake, I have to read ten books on cataloging this semester, and that's not even counting the class reading. And I have to annotate those cataloging books. I have poor judgement and I started with something by George Lakoff, which is super fucking hard and six hundred pages long and not actually cataloging, but linguistics. It's brilliant and fascinating and dense and did I mention very hard as well as six hundred pages long? I have a week to read it and write a five page paper on it before I move on to the next one. I have no time for dumb shit like this depressed cat thing).


Jung and Jee-Yun: Kwaidan
(or this. The art's bonus, but the story is dull and cliched).


Manga:

Mihara Mitsukazu: Doll vols. 1-2
(I fuckin' love Mihara's manga; she's a breath of fresh air. I don't run into a lot of manga--or a lot of comics, period, actually--that actually live up to science fiction's honorable tradition of exploring the consequences of an idea, not simply using it to entertain.* I have seen Mihara accused of being flat and one-note; I would call her refreshingly restrained, with an art style that complements her storytelling. Here, as with some of the stories in IC in a Sunflower, she's working with the classic idea of the robot, and how human beings react to robots; the theme isn't new, but the emotional insights still don't feel stale to me--the question of what makes us human is more, not less relevant than when science fiction authors first picked it up. The short stories of Doll are variations on a theme, but so were a lot of Asimov's stories about robots, and if you dislike Asimov, we're probably not going to agree on much about science fiction anyway).

*I love being entertained. I just also like being challenged, and in science-fiction-themed comics, challenge is novel in its scarcity.

on 2009-02-06 11:30 pm (UTC)
snarp: small cute androgynous android crossing arms and looking very serious (Default)
Posted by [personal profile] snarp
So I get the impression you are a little hostile towards the depressed cats book.

on 2009-02-07 01:05 am (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] cerusee.livejournal.com
Was I giving that vibe? Oops.

on 2009-02-07 05:32 pm (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] retsuko.livejournal.com
"Matter of fact" is precisely how I would describe Guibert's telling of that story. I found it fascinating, myself, because I've never spoken to anyone who'd had that experience, and reading the book made me feel a little like Alan Cope was sitting there and telling me things. I found Guibert's depiction of scope--the fact that there were so many men and machines, all in service of war--to be the most chilling part of the work. Becoming a soldier is becoming a part of a giant machine, and that's a terrifying prospect to me (and to Guibert.)

on 2009-02-08 04:58 pm (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] cerusee.livejournal.com
I've heard similar war stories, but never directly from the source. And yeah, what you're describing is what I was sort of groping at. It's a subtle thing he's saying.

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