April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers

Graphic novels/comics/cartoons:

Rucka, Greg, writer, Steve Rolston, artist: Queen and Country: Operation: Broken Ground
(that's a lot of colons).


Caldwell, Ben, penciller and colorist, Bill Halliar, inker, Michael Mucci, writer/adapter: Bram Stoker's Dracula
(I was surprised by how much I liked this. It's a stylish, colorful, cartoony adaptation of the material, and I think actually my favorite version of Dracula to date. (No, I have not ever seen any of the movies.) It's worth checking out if only for the art. Caldwell's Jonathan Harker is downright woobie, which makes me care more about his part in the story, and, as that is a fairly large part, more interested in the story altogether).


Frazetta, Frank: Small Wonders: The Funny Animal Art of Frank Frazetta.


Moore, Alan, writer, Oscar Zarate, artist: A Small Killing
(stunning art, particularly the large establishing panels).


Various: Drawn and Quarterly vol. 4
(contributors to this volume include Hincker Blutch, Bocquet, Fromental and Satislas (a collaborative trio), Henry Mayerovitch, Frank King, Nicolas Robel, Miriam Katin, and Ron Rege Jr. Notable pieces include the biographical short "The Adventures of Herge," by the abovementioned trio; "Hester's Little Pearl," which is a weird parody of The Scarlet Letter retold in the style of Little Lulu, and, irritatingly, uncredited; and reprints of some of King's classic Gasoline Alley strips).



Hernandez, Gilbert: Luba in America
(whoops, I'm reading stuff out of order. Well, what the hell, the stories jump around in chronology and memory so much anyway that I don't think it matters.

Have I mentioned that so far, the Hernandez stuff is blowing my mind? It is. I have become ridiculously fond of Fritz and Venus. To think, this stuff has been around for ages, and I'm only just reading it now. What the hell have I been doing?

I love it with far less reservation than Strangers in Paradise. I think it's because it's less of a soap opera and more of a sort of sprawling chronicle of family relationships and individual stories; less rides on you liking or believing in any one character or romance, and the various sorts of bad life choices carry less weight and are less frustrating to watch--you're invested in the family as a whole, not just three or four characters.

It's also so intense and flamboyant that it can't be easily derailed by weird twists. It's like going to a carnival: you expect color and fervor and bizarre spectacles).

It's 90 degrees and humid, and when I try to go out and get exercise, it's dreadful. So I went to the library, which is air-conditioned--not particularly well--and read until they closed, then swung past the liquor store to buy beer so I can make shandy. The liquor store had much better air-conditioning. I should have spent the day there.


Graphic novels/comics:

Baker, Kyle: Why I Hate Saturn
(one of the back cover blurbs was a quote from a magazine or something: "Kyle Baker is God!" I'm inclined to agree.

I was so sure we were going to get through this book with a lower body count than in You Are Here or I Die at Midnight. Nope! Should I be warning people about that? Kyle Baker comics are more violent than you'd think? The deaths can be sad or shocking, more than you'd think when you're on the first page, chucking at Baker's witty dialogue and absurd, sitcom scenarios. I would not want to give the impression, however, that the surprising violence and deaths are any excuse for not reading Kyle Baker comics, because they're just too good not to read).


Peeters, Frederik: Blue Pills: a positive love story
(comics can be good? Hell, comics are good. This one, right here, this is good. What else do you want from me?)

Moore, Alan, author: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier
(maybe it's not fair to say I've read this, since I first skimmed, and then outright skipped all the text bits. The text bits in Moore comics are usually very rewarding if you take the time to read them, but the library was near closing when I started.

It's really clever--it's Moore, what did you expect?--and fun, and funny, and of course very dirty; Alan Moore disses James Bond and then everything goes all Promethea at the end. I wish I'd had 3D glasses).


Seto, Andy, credited as author and presumably also artist, Wang Du Li, credited for "story" and the author of the original novel?, So Man Sing, credited for script. I'm not reading any more of these damned kung fu comics; they take too long to credit!: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
(the art is really lovely--good linework, good layouts, very dynamic, exquisite coloring, which would frankly put a lot of the American color comics to shame, although who knows, that might not be a coloring issue so much as it is an issue of what's being colored. Either the script/dialogue/writing what-have-you was a little spotty or the translation was. Also, I didn't really care. But it's nice to try something new every now and again).


Manga:

Miekura Kazuya: Wild Adapter vol. 1
(I've held off on reading this for ages because I wanted to buy it, and the bookstore never had it when I had money, and I always bought other things. I was afraid I'd read volume 1 and freak out because I don't have volume 2. I was right; I should have waited. I WANT VOLUME 2. NOW. Minekura work is oh god, always so very sexy and fine).

Nishiyama Yuriko: Harlem Beat vol. 1
(I find I have no desire to revisit the early 90s in the form of the world of Japanese street basketball).

Kizuki Hakase: The Demon Ororon vol. 1
(everybody is drawn like a broom. I was quite sure the main character was a boy until she was identified as female. It doesn't make anything more interesting).

Koike Kazuo, author, Kojima Goseki, artist: Lone Wolf and Cub vol. 1
(it's a Koike Kazuo comic, so the men are stoic, the women are whores, and severed limbs go flyin' everywhere in a spray of blood. Despite this, I am tempted to read more. I liked Lady Snowblood more--I like that art better, and somehow, it actually helps that the assassin protagonist is a woman in that--but this is an engaging read.

Graphic novels/comics:

Tomine, Adrian: Shortcomings
(someday, I'll read a Drawn and Quarterly publication where the characters aren't all self-absorbed jerks. It's a good book, though, and I'm pretty sure Tomine didn't expect me to feel a lot of sympathy for Ben).


Rucka, Greg, author, and Steve Lieber, artist: Whiteout
(possibly volume 1? Not sure. Good art, good writing; the most interesting part of the book to me was actually Rucka's afterword about searching for an artist capable of illustrating this specific story--they had to be able to do B&W, to draw cold, to draw women--as in, human women, and not the superhero fare Rucka presumably has a lot of experience with--and who would do the research necessary for getting the visuals right. He is clearly happy with Lieber on these counts (and so am I!), but it really made me want to see a roundtable with Rucka and Lieber discussing this, and the interplay of the words and story that Rucka wrote and how Lieber made it into pictures on a page. I always want to read that sort of thing, because this particular kind of collaboration is fascinating to me...oh well.

This is Oni Press, by the way).


Aragones, Sergio: The Groo Festival
(as always, I lol'd. And every exchange of "...as any fool can plainly see!" Groo: "I can plainly see that!"--always funny).

Graphic novels/comics/cartoons:

Barnes, Bill and Gene Ambaum: Unshelved: Book Club
(this is addictive).

Clugston-Major, Chunna: Blue Monday: Absolute Beginners
(another Oni press. I've heard Chunna Clugston-Major's name a lot in good circumstances, and I had high expectations of this that were not fulfilled. This is not the intro work, and although it's supposed to be a stand-alone mini-series, the total lack of introduction to the characters or setting left me confused about where and when it was set for most of the book; I still have no clear idea why various characters speak in different dialects.

I don't go much for teen sexy comedy as a rule, but this teen sex comedy really didn't click with me; I literally did not even chuckle once for the whole book. I had to struggle to care even a little bit about the female protagonist and her foul-mouthed, violent best friend; I utterly loathed their male friends, who are the sorts of slimy, cruel manipulators who would not only spy on their shy female friend while she was bathing, but videotape it, lie about erasing it when she begged them to erase the tape, tell everyone at school about the tape, and then eventually publicly distribute it, deliberately and maliciously humiliating her in the worst possible way and for no stated reason. The female protagonist is unpopular at school, by the way. These male friends also subject the female protagonist to constant, unwelcome sexual harassment and wonder why she's not more receptive to their sexual advances, since for no reason I could decipher, it is assumed by all the characters that the female protagonist is interested in dating one of them. This felt less like a teen sex comedy and more like a gang of kindergarten bullies who hit puberty about eight years too early.

There is also, inexplicably, pointlessly, uselessly, a pooka (sic) in the form of a giant otter, running around creating chaos which isn't as funny as the author thinks it is. Someone with a seafood allergy is deliberately fed seafood, which gives him hives, but in circumstances in which the person pranking him had no reasonable way to know that the allergy in question was not systemic, making it not just a nasty prank, but a potentially life-threatenting nasty prank.

I hate everyone in this book, including the pooka.

The blurb on the back of the book says that the first miniseries won several awards, including an Eisner and a Friends of Lulu. I assume that it was better than this, or that the competition was light that year. The art, for the record, is excellent, being expressive and lively; character designs are clearly manga-influenced, although it's otherwise western in style).


Murphy, Mark: House of Java
(good art, stupid and uninteresting writing, with no consistency of theme or subject or atmosphere across the stories, which are too short to be bundled together this way with nothing binding them together).

Novels/prose books:

Christie, Agatha: The A.B.C. Murders: A Hercule Poirot Mystery
(I liked Roger Ackroyd better, but this was pretty good).


Graphic novels/comics/cartoon collections:

Barron's editors: Barron's Book of Cartoons.

Addams, Charles: The Groaning Board.


Spiegelman, Art: Maus I: My Father Bleeds History
(yes, it's everything it's cracked up to be. I am having an Eisner moment, where I have the rare experience of reading a classic work that has been so highly praised so universally that I've begun to doubt it can live up to my expectations...but it does.

Maus is such a personal, specific work about people with distinct personalities that it's in no danger of feeling generic, no matter how much other material exists on the same subject. It's both the story of Spiegelman's father, Vladek, a Holocaust survivor, and the story of Spiegelman hearing the story from Vladek. There's a bit early on, after Vladek has described an early love affair that predated his marriage to Spiegelman's mother, Anja, when Vladek asks Spiegelman not to put that part in his work. Spiegelman replies, no, that it's good material, and it will help to make the rest of the story more real.

He's absolutely right. It's the context of his parents' lives that make the story worth telling, and not just a stock rendering of historically recorded atrocities. Knowing about Vladek's textile business, his love affairs, the post-partum depression suffered by Anja after the birth of the elder brother that Spiegelman himself never met--this is the stuff makes them people.

Thinking about this helped me to finally make sense of something I'd read about while researching a paper on oral history for class this semester--the life narrative as a form of oral history. I'd dismissed it as being of little importance to my focus, which was the historical value of oral history as a source, but I realize now I made a mistake. Oral history as testimony on the recent past gives you focus on the historical events, which is useful and helps to bypass some of the issues with evaluation and reliability. But life narrative is about contextualizing history within individual people's lives. When you take any history, including historical atrocities, out of the context of people's lives, it loses power. Maus--which is, among other things, Vladek's life narrative as told to his son--has power because it places the overwhelming historical events of the Holocaust--events so massive and horrific they create a narrative that eats up everything else--within the context of Vladek's entire life. It is not the story of how Vladek survived the Holocaust, it is the story of Vladek. History is lived by people. That's important.)


Manga:

Kanari, Yozaburo, author, Fumiya Sato, artist: Kindaichi Case Files: The Legend of Lake Hiren
(Kindaichi Case Files are like popcorn--pre-popped popcorn from supermarket with the greasy bad cheese on it; not that good, but you keep eating it anyway).

Tamaki Chihiro: Walkin' Butterfly vol. 2.

Miki, Tori: Anywhere But Here
(I only wish I were smart enough to get these. I got maybe one out of ten, I think?)

This everything I can remember reading since...oh, March or maybe a little before? Probably no earlier than February. I jogged my memory by looking at my bookshelves; if it was from a library, or elsewhere borrowed, I may have forgotten about it. I borrow more novels/prose/nonfiction than I buy, so this list is a little slanted towards comics and graphic novels, which I buy more often, because less of what I want to read is available from the library in a regular and timely fashion.

It's also slanted towards comics and graphic novels because I read a lot more of them.

School-related/academic reading: uncounted multitudes.
Poetry: like you care.

Novels/prose books:

Kipling, Rudyard: Kim (reread), The Jungle Book.

Eddings, David & Leigh: The Belgariad, The Mallorean (rereads).

Stephenson, Neal The Diamond Age, Zodiac.

Can't remember the author: Keturah and Lord Death.

Alexander, Llyod: The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio.



Comic strip collections/comic book collections/graphic novels:

Various: The Big Book of Hoaxes.

Eisner, Will: The Spirit Archives vol 1, The Building.

Ishida Tatsuya: Sinfest, Sinfest: Life is My Bitch (all the Sinfest is technically a reread, since I read the strip online).

Warren, Adam: Empowered vol. 3 (damn! just...damn. Adam Warren's obscenely talented. I am interested in his ideas, and would like to subscribe to his newsletter).

Buja's Diary.

Geary, Rick: I cannot remember their damn names, but the Jack the Ripper book, and the Lizzie Borden book. Which reminds me,

Graphic Classics: the O Henry, the Lovecraft, and the Stoker.

Moore, Alan and Rick Veitch, Swamp Thing (whatever that first Moore volume is titled).



( Manga. This is where it gets long. )


And yes, this is typical.

I was rendered absolutely unable to take Owen's nihilistic rage-angst seriously by, immediately prior to watching this episode, having read a book of cartoons from 1951 themed on the childishness of men who've been rejected by their lovers. ("Mama, mama!") It doesn't help that Owen's a git. I'm sorry, but nobody cares about you and your pixie angst.

On a side note, I've noticed that the 1950s seem to have been a very good decade for cartooning. I've read quite a number of cartoon collections and prose works illustrated with cartoons from that era, and Im awfully fond of the style. Anybody who is actually under the impression that the '50s were staid and repressed should hunt some contemporary cartoon art down for an eye-opener.

Still watching:

Lucky Star:

Of course. A girl needs her humor fix. And while the status quo of a four-panel joke slash sitcom show may never change (Konata is an otaku, Kagami is her straight man--and for some reason, the darling of my heart--and everyone else is kind of dumb in a different way), the plot of Lucky Channel is becoming positively epic. Plus, various new takes on the show's joke of an ending theme are threatening to displace the show proper as a source of comedy.

Rurouni Kenshin:

This is sort of on a temporary hiatus, since I've been Netflixing this one, and I recently accidentally dropped juice on the DVD player's remote, and it turns out that it's impossible to adjust the language settings on my DVD player without that. I've been enjoying it, though. Oro!


Picked up:

Seirei no Moribito:

My god, this is so good. This show is so quiet and understated, and it's beautifully crafted in every respect. It's a little like watching Mushishi, both in its sort of moody, evocative, anti-history setting--it has kind of a feel of what I believe is supposed to be a particular era of Japanese history, but distinctly sets itself as fantasy--and in the way that while I don't burn to watch new episodes of this show, it is totally engaging for each and every minute of every episode. Even when most of the screentime in an episode is literally spent with minor characters standing around and telling stories about anonymous people, I'm enthralled.

Flash burns itself out, but real craft lasts forever. Like Mushishi, like Fantastic Children, like Planetes, this is a show that I believe will stand the test of time.


New section!:

Books being read:

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction:

Okay....Rasputin. Nobody ever did that before. Will I like the plot more in books that weren't co-written by John Byrne? This is stylish and different, and the art can certainly have all my babies, but volume one didn't rock my socks enough to explain why someone was inspired enough to make a movie based on this series. Hellboy himself, I like, but as of volume one, he's more image than person.

All sorts of Georgette Heyer: Does this really require explanation? Well, the last time I was at the library, checking out yet another set of Georgette Heyer frothy Regency romances, the library assistant noted that Heyer was classic, but that she herself had never read any, and asked were, they anything like Jane Austen? To which I immediately replied, "Yes, but more frivolous."

And there you have it. If you've ever secretly wished, while re-reading Pride and Prejudice for the fifth time, that you could get the same story, but just a little bit sillier and with more fun, go to Heyer. Her romances are certainly formula, but her plots are neatly crafted, and the characters do have distinct personalities--yes, you can probably guess each pairing within the first three chapters, even without the aid of the dust jacket, but her heros and heroines are not all alike, and that's better than you can say for most romance writers. If you like ton, you'll like Heyer.

The odd Agatha Christie:

...proving, I suppose, that Josephine Tey was not unique in her love of passing judgement on people. Tey is nothing short of brilliant as a writer, but her unyielding contempt for the common person always left a sour taste in my mouth, and I marked it up to her theater background--20th century theater, finding itself so much on the rarified end of the cultural divide, always seems to need to justify its unpopularity with the masses by condemning the masses. Christie, on the other hand, is as popular culture as book writing can get--genre, formula genre, and popular formula genre; she certainly should feel no need to justify her position to people. So why the disdain for people, common people, falling moral standards, etc? The repeated observation in Hallowe'en Party that there seem to be more insane people around today, casually murdering the innocent, where are the asylums, etc, etc, why aren't mothers looking after their daughters, is, well, so ahistorical as to be moronic. It also totally puts to shame Arthur Conan Doyle's digs at Americans for being judgmental puritans; nothing, nothing, I tell you, can beat out a British mystery writer when it comes to feeling superior to the rest of humanity.