Size Isn't Everything

I'm going through some of my books to find and record where I'd left off in each of them for my GoodReads page when I came to a particular volume entitled "Vicious Circle" by Mike Carey. This is the second of five novels featuring the occult investigator, Felix Castor, and runs for a lengthy 512 pages, or so. Tracking down my last known place in the book I was reminded of just how god-awful long this thing was, and remembered why I put the book down in the first place. I hit 3 or 400 pages in and just sort of petered out. This is not a story that requires 500 or more pages to tell. It is well written, sure, but I think someone needed to reign him in on this one. It's not even the longest of the series, but it's still a marathon read. I was honestly considering picking it up again to finish it off, but now, probably not anytime soon.

I know it's probably a quirk of my own reading habits, but when there are a dozen other books that are waiting in the wings that I've started, and a dozen more that I'm waiting to get to, "Vicious Circle" just falls a little short on the priority level.

Cheers!

mike

Getting My Read On

I went into something of a reading frenzy on Thursday night. I pulled out a bunch of comics I hadn't yet read, and some books that I'm in the middle of, and stayed up until the wee hours of the night getting my read on. Considering I had to be up at six the next morning, it probably wasn't a wise choice, but I don't have a time machine so, whatever. I then hit the library with my son yesterday with the intention of letting him browse around for some drawing books, and somehow I ended up grabbing a whole schwackload of trades and a Joe Kubert biography which, over the course of the day, I've been having trouble putting down.

I think it is entirely possible that my brain is trying to purge the Star Wars that I've been stuffing into it for two months.

So, with all the new reading material around, I thought I would mention a few of them here, give some thoughts on them, and then be on my merry way.

First up is Simon Oliver and Tony Moore's The Exterminators, which is a strange, disgusting, yet strangely compelling read. I don't know where Oliver got the idea for this one, but I had heard through the grapevine that it was a worthwhile read and I decided to grab it when I saw it. Glad I did, too. It was also a treat to see Tony Moore's stuff in colour. I've only ever seen his stuff on The Walking Dead before this, and it was nice to see another side to Tony's work. Not for the squeemish, though. If you don't like bugs, or exploding organs, stay clear of this one.

I also read Stan Sakai's original GN Usagi Yojimbo: Yokai, which was very nice book to look at (Sakai did it all in watercolour), and a pleasant read, overall, but I think I was expecting something with a little more punch to it since it was a special 25th anniversary book and it just didn't live up to some of the great Usagi stories that have appeared in his monthly book. I'd still pick it up in an instant, and the presentation of it is beautifully done from cover to cover, it just didn't blow me away.

Next up is Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor, a collection of stories from the five (or six, if you count the special as part of the numbering) issues of the Dark Horse series of the same name. I don't know why this was something I ignored when it first hit the stands in the mid-1990s. Could have been the price point, could have been an ignorance of Harlan's work, or maybe I just wasn't into anthologies. I honestly don't remember, although I distinctly remember seeing these original books on the shelves at the comic shop. Regardless of that, I'm about sixty pages into the first collection and I'm enjoying the heck out of it. The stories are decent, sometimes a little bit on the broad side, but the artwork is quite good, the adaptations are well done and the interstitial bits written by Harlan and illustrated by Eric Shanower are fun to read.

The last one I'm going to get into right now is Man of Rock, the aforementioned biography of comics legend, Joe Kubert, by Bill Schelly. I've only just begun to read this one and am about 60 pages in. From a chronological standpoint, I'm around the early 1940s in Kubert's life and he has just been given the job to do Hawkman under Sheldon Mayer. I'm not a huge fan of the writing style or the organization of the information, but I do love me some Kubert so I am thoroughly enjoying learning more about his life and early works. I wasn't planning on picking up and reading another biography for a bit, but this one has kind of grabbed my attention and refuses to let go.

Anyway, those are a few of the things that on my mind and on my reading table at the moment.

Cheers!

mike

100 GoodReads and Counting

Well, having just finished Tales of the Slayer, vol. 2, I dutifully went over to my GoodReads page and tagged it as only to discover that it was my 100th book read/completed this year. I know for some people that's only a drop in the bucket (my wife, for example, has probably read ten times that much for her PHD program, alone), and I'll be the first to concede that they have not all been 800 page novels, but this has been a heavier reading year for me than normal and it was nice to see that triple-digit number there.

I think that GoodReads has probably helped out with that, too. Ever since signing on it's been easier to track what I've read, when I've read it, and all the books that I've started but left sitting on the shelf unfinished. For most people, this probably sounds like it would serve no real purpose for you, but for me and my borderline OCD tendencies, it's like a constant challenge to keep reading, not get too distracted, and to go back and finish off some of those lingering books. It's oddly satisfying to be able to go on and add something as having been read, and to browse other people's reading lists, as well.

I'm pretty sure I've also commented somewhere on this blog (yeah, I looked but can't find the post) how cool it is for me to be collating all of these books and dating them in terms of when I got them, where I bought them, when I started reading them and when I finished them. Not only does this appeal to the aforementioned OCD part of my brain, it has prompted me to dig through bookshelves, boxes, memories and blog posts to establish the correct times for all of these things. In the process of doing so, I've run across a lot of cool things I forgot I had or hadn't seen in ages, or passed by blog posts that jogged some interesting memories.

Good times.

Cheers!

mike

F. Scott the Vampire Slayer

A few years ago, I had a dream in which I was on the set of a movie being filmed that was based on a zombie story written by none other than F. Scott Fitzgerald. I don't know where it came from, why I was dreaming it, or what significance it has on anything. It did plant in my head, however, the idea that flappers and monsters might make for an interesting mix.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one with that notion, as today I had the unique pleasure of reading a short story by Rebecca Rand Kirshner called "The War Between the States". It's included in the second volume of the Tales of the Slayers collection and is, essentially, a vampire slayer story had it been conceived of, and written by, F. Scott Fitzgerald. It takes place in 1922, features an innocent girl from the south moving up to New York and all the excitement that entails. She discovers the party atmosphere and is swept along in its wake, risking her reputation and, ultimately, her life. For, of course, there are vampires afoot, and if one of the characters didn't happen to be a pre-Buffy slayer, things would have gotten messy. Or messier, I guess, seeing as how there's always fighting and slaying when there's a slayer around.

Kirshner may not have been trying to ape Fitzgerald, here, but I highly doubt it. There are way too many similarities in style and tone, and there's very much an "Ice Palace" vibe going on here. Seeing how Fitzgerald's story was originally published in 1920, and there are many similar story elements, it had to have been planned. Kind of like when Jane Espenson did a Jane Austen style slayer story in the Dark Horse Tales of the Slayers anthology book.

I hope to one day get the opportunity to ask her that question and confirm it. I suppose I could also search online for interviews or any comments she may have made to that effect.

In any case, it was a bright spot in my day. Also a well written and entertaining little story. Almost gets me in a Buffy mood after all that Star Wars.

Cheers!

mike

Talking About Dead Mann Walking

A little while ago I received an ARC of Stefan Petrucha's latest novel, Dead Mann Walking, and I had fully expected to have it done and have a review of it up on the blog prior to its October 4th release date. As of this writing, I'm about half way through the book and at least a day late on the post.

The best laid plans of mice and men.

Still, not wanting to stay entirely silent on the subject, I figured I'd post some general thoughts, anyways, and maybe do a wrap up post when I do finish the book.

I've actually been a fan of Petrucha's work for a few years, now. I've enjoyed much of his comic book work, dabbled with some of his novels, and still consider his run on The X-Files with Charlie Adlard for Topps Comics a crowning example of how a licensed comic should be done. So, when I received my copy of Dead Mann Walking I felt like this was a known quantity. In all fairness, I didn't expect to not like it and, so far, I haven't been proven wrong.

The story revolves around a private detective named Hessius Mann, who was put to death for the murder of his wife but was later returned to life when supressed evidence was discovered and he was cleared of the crime. Yeas, that's right, he was brought back to life using a process called a Radical Invigoration Procedure developed by a company who expected to cash in on rich folks who would want to bring back their loved ones. What they ended up with was a new sub-class of 'people' (zombies) that nobody wanted around, but once you've brought them back you can't just get rid of them again. Not unless they go all George Romero feral. They call them chakz instead of zombies, and the chakz (those who can speak) call the living livebloods.

Anyway, in typical noir fashion, Hessius is approached by a client find a deceased person who has been named in his father's will. Since Hessius is still a high-functioning member of the undead community and knows the world of the chakz, he is uniquely suited for the task and takes the job. Then things get interesting.

For what it's worth, I'm really enjoying what I've read so far. Petrucha does a really good job of balancing the noir elements with the horror bits, and most of the humour in the book derives from the combination of the two. The plot appears to be pretty straightforward with all the hallmarks of a good mystery/thriller story, but Petrucha breathes new life into the old tropes by approaching them with an undead perspective. Everyone knows how these detective stories work but when you expect the familiar scenes to play out, you get them, to be sure, but slightly askew, and that's where the charm of this book, ultimately, lies.

There's also an oddly amped up tension to the proceedings. You would expect to not worry about your protagonists life when he has already lost it once, but as Petrucha makes it abundantly clear in the first chapter, there are fates worse then death when your a chak. Death itself has some finality to it, but those who have been through the RIP go on after limbs are detached and bodies decay. It's also a chore-and-a-half for these guys to maintain themselves on a daily basis because they're constantly fighting rot, memory loss, and the fear that at any time they may go feral. Oh, and they also have to deal with a living population who generally views chakz as not deserving of any rights and routinely enagage in violent attacks on undead communities.

This is probably a good place to mention that the world Petrucha's created here is really well thought out and there's a lot of interesting things he could mine here, if he wanted to. I'm sure there's a lot of backstory he could explore but he wisely shies away from it, for the most part, in favour of advancing the plot. In fact, Petrucha recently posted on his website an excised chapter, or portion of a chapter, that served this exact purpose but found that it slowed down the plot enough that it had to go. For anyone interested, I'll be posting that excerpt at the end of this review.

Overall/so far, I'm really digging Dead Mann Walking. I'm engaged, I'm interested, and it's a great October diversion.

I've also heard that a sequel may have been approved, so it may not be too long before we're discussing A Hessius Mann Novel #2. Me? I'm looking forward to it.

If you're curious, Petrucha has the first chapter previewed at BoomTron, and the following is the aforementioned excerpt discussing some zombie history according to Hessius Mann:

Dead Mann: The Missing Chapter

Crowded, surrounded, attacked, the chakz gave the people what they wanted, proof that they were dangerous. It was as though that group-mind the LBs worried about had actually kicked in. Maybe the ferals just never had the numbers before, or maybe you had to be far enough back to see the patterns. I saw them now.

Flashes of chak-bodies moved in elegant waves, like flocks of migrating birds. The livebloods, for all their higher functions, fled without grace. The big picture pulsed and throbbed. But the personal tragedies played out in tiny spaces, as if the two had nothing to do with one another. In the center of the swirls stood the fair-haired cop I’d seen from the window, bullets spitting from his AK-47. They tore some dead flesh. Mostly, he was hitting livebloods before the ferals took him down.

So was this Ezekiel and his dry-bones rising in the valley of death? Was it then, or later, now, or the future? The edges were arbitrary, the beginnings and endings likewise. But as I watched, this was the shit I remembered.

In 1929 W.B. Seabrook wrote about voodoo cults and resurrected slaves in a novel called The Magic Island. It made sense that Haiti, whose population had recently thrown off their shackles, would have plantation slaves for their monsters. White Zombie

In 1932, Victor Halperin’s White Zombie took it to the white Europeans. The island lust of Murder Legendre, played by Bela Lugosi, put a white virgin’s virtue at risk.

But these were early, proto-forms. There was no blood yet, not like there was on the Fort Hammer plaza. My eyes singled out a male teen, all buff and dressed to shock with Mohawk, tattoos and piercings. He ran half-heartedly, grabbing at the side of his head where his ear had been once. Red liquid dripped between his fingers. Eventually, he slowed and then, simply stopped.

In 1943 Jacques Tournier’s I Walked With a Zombie gave us a dead-eyed scarecrow. It was more a symbol. No savagery, just foreboding. It was Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend in 1954 that took it up a notch. The book was sort of about vampires, but they were so much like zombies that the 1964 Italian film version with Vincent Price, The Last Man on Earth, became the prime inspiration for George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

1968, the zombie had arrived. Romero was the first, really, if you don’t count Ezekiel and all the others. What took so long? Well, in those days, the dead moved slowly.

On the plaza, groups formed and collapsed like cauldron bubbles. I watched two families band together. The mothers carried the little ones, forcing the older children ahead. Weirdly, the fathers carried doors, using them as shields. Two danglers and a gleet banged at them. They even tried the knob.

Romero made it biblical again. Cannibal corpses, old friends and lovers among them, children chewing on parents. The condition spreading like plague, and no one knew why or who to shoot. His sequel, Dawn of the Dead, used the same idea, but more directly as social critique, played out in comic-book colors so gaudy you had to get the joke.

I hoped the family made it. Something should survive, and it didn’t look good for anyone else. The elegant swarms had surrounded the LBs, and as they squeezed in, began to lose their pretty shape. Together now, ferals and livebloods pushed and pulled en mass, so many, so close together, they could barely move. Limbs tangled, the center of the blob tumbled, all together, all at once, like football teams in a joint tackle.

Romero, what could you say? A horde of lesser efforts followed, Fulci’s Zombi 2 notable for an underwater battle between zombie and shark. Then decades passed. 28 Days Later brought some class back to the movies. That was more about plague than the dead, but close enough, and its monsters were fast. The Dawn of the Dead remake followed suit. The books and comics got better – Monster Island by David Wellington, The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and later Charlie Adlard (now on TV!). By then people played video games like Rebel Without A Pulse and Left4Dead, shooting and being shot, eating and being eaten. The great democracy of mass media.

The mob in the plaza had formed a single creature, like one of Colby Green’s orgies, many limbs, many mouths, some screaming, some chewing. Stray Livebloods and ferals tried to pull the bodies free, but for different reasons.

The cop with the flamethrower stood at the edge of the mass and stared, unsure what to do. He tried to help, used his free hand to grab a hand and yank, but when a feral came free, a chunk of dripping meat in its mouth, he’d had enough. He let loose with the thrower, turning it on the writhing pile. Before the cop could barbecue the lot, a liveblood clonked him with a crowbar, then dived into the smoldering mess, screaming that he had to find his girlfriend.

I’d like to say all the books and movies fade against the reality, but maybe it’s the reality that fades. After all, who could forget the surprise hit, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? This is the shit that gives us shape, that let’s us understand the world, even build it from scratch. Shakespeare told us. We are such stuff as nightmares are made on, and our little life is rounded with a scream.

The plaza had reached critical mass. The blob broke and scattered. Bodies, some moving, spilled across the street, then onto the long black hospital entrance ramp that had kept the scene arms distant. The tide was coming in.

***

Cheers!

mike

Seeing The Strain

I've been reading Guillermo del Toro's vampire trilogy and, while cruising the internet for added value material, stumbled across a couple of videos that were available on the website HarperCollins put up for the first book, The Strain. The videos were cheaply done and don't have a lot of production value to them but there is one recognizable actor (which is kinda cool) and, best of all, we get a look at what del Toro envisioned for what the strigoi actually look like.



I'm sure Roy Dotrice did this because he had a previous relationship with del Toro, having played King Balor in Hellboy II. In this second clip, I just love how he appears from, seemingly, out of nowhere to lay on the exposition.



I thought I would include the last video on del Toro's YouTube channel where he talks a bit about why he decided to explore vampires and novels.



It's funny but, a year ago, I probably wouldn't have recommended the trilogy to anyone because of a knee-jerk reaction I had to the first book in the series. I loved the procedural/outbreak handling of the vampire plague but when a more classic (clichéd?) element was introduced about half-way in, I resisted it, threw my hands up in the air and put the book down for a while. Since then, I've become more accepting of the things that I won't get into because there could be spoilers attached, but I'm now into the second book, The Fall, and looking forward to the release of the third, The Night Eternal, when it comes out this October.

Now, I would gladly go out on a limb and recommend the series to fans of del Toro, suspense, horror, vampires, and stories about pandemics. I think the reviews comparing the books to a cross between Stephen King, Michael Crichton and Bram Stoker are pretty accurate and Hogan and del Toro have incorporated only the best traits of all three for their epic. Especially with Hallowe'en coming up and the conclusion of the series, it might be worth checking out.

Oh, and as a side note, it will also be a comic book series soon from Dark Horse Comics, so if you don't want to trouble yourself with the books, that might be another way to experience it.

Later!

mike

I Get By With A Little Help...

I quoth the Beatles as my subject line for this post because I wanted to stress how important it is to create relationships with the people who work at the establishments you frequent.

Case in point, I was having some trouble with accessing my library account earlier this week when I wanted to renew a few books I had out. For whatever reason, the online service was shutting me out of the system and claiming my account was already in use by the system. I couldn't renew, I started accumulating fines. This went on for a couple of days and I finally got a chance to go in to my local library and talk to the folks that I deal with there on a regular basis. I explained my situation, they trusted me implicitly (as they should), and they not only erased any fines that accumulated during the problem period, but also anything else that was lingering on the account.

It helps that we're also well known for paying off any fines that gather up, and we generally have no problem doing so because we basically look at it as a donation to the library since those funds do help them continue to function in the capacity they do. So, that, combined with a healthy bit of face recognition and a good reputation, pretty much went a good ways to making my day today. It was a nice way to cap off a rather strange day at work (something I won't expand on).

I guess the moral of the story (possibly a first for a Meanwhile... post) is to not be a jerk, be friendly and courteous, and what goes around will come around.

Or, as another famous rock group is known for saying, be excellent to each other.

Cheers!

mike

Reading The Art of Jaime Hernandez

I've always admired the work of Los Bros Hernandez, even if I've never been an avid follower of their Love & Rockets comic book series. By the time I started noticing the brothers' work, the series seemed daunting to jump into. They would occasionally do one-shot stories but, more often than not, each story was another chapter in the continuing lives and adventures of Maggie the Mechanic or Gilbert's fictional world of Palomar. My main intersection with the brothers has been through works done for other publishers than Fantagraphics such as Gilbert's Vertigo work or Jaime's Mister X issues.

So when I saw The Art of Jaime Hernandez by Todd Hignite at my local library, I had to grab it. Not only am I a fan of the artwork but I love to read about cultural history and this book covers a stream of the comic book narrative that I was, more or less, unfamiliar with.

At times, the book bordered on hagiography (look it up) but, overall, I think Hignite put together a really nice package to showcase one of the luminaries in the field. And, while Hignite does an admirable job of covering Jaime's story from childhood to present day, where the book really shines is in the wonderful photographs and artwork that have been included in this volume. Everything from the childhood photographs of Jaime and his family to the rare and unused artwork and concepts are a real treat and make this book an indispensable, and highly entertaining, resource. Lastly, the oversize nature of the book lends itself well to the material. Not only did much of it first get presented in magazine format through Love & Rockets, but it gives readers a nice sized page to read, or just to admire Jaime's exquisite linework. Instead of squinting at word balloons, or struggling to see detail, Abrams Books makes it effortless to enjoy these pages.

I'm going to leave you with my favourite image from the book. It's a panel from an unused page where the character Hopey is writing a letter to her friend, Maggie, while she is on tour with her band. She's telling Maggie about all of their misadventures and the panels are arranged vignette-like, giving tiny glimpses of the events she's describing.



What I love the most about this image is the way the line effortlessly leads you through the panel. Hopey's posture is evocative and implies movement despite it being a very static image. This is sequential storytelling at its best. Plus, the image just rocks on a purely aesthetic level.

Anyway, if you have a chance I definitely recommend the book to anyone who loves art looking for a day or two of reading, and a bunch of eye candy.

I think I'm going to really dive in and read some Love & Rockets. It's about time I did.

Cheers!

mike

*Hernandez image blatantly lifted from the Criterion website.

Curses, Spoiled Again

So, I'm reading The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan and more-or-less enjoying the experience so I hit the 'net and check out the official site to see if they have any fun stuff there. They kind of do and kind of don't, but that's neither here nor there for this story. I clicked over to their Facebook page and was just browsing through pictures and poking around when I see a wall post by some d-bag named Vojtěch Weiss who totally drops not one, but two, spoilers in one blow, effectively spoiling a good chunk of the last 20 pages of the book I am just about to finish.

Not only that, but the second one ruins a plot point from the second book, The Fall, which I recently purchased and was going to start reading very soon.

This development makes me cranky. I'm not usually a spoiler sensitive person but something about these two were just touchy enough to make me surly and get my stomach acids bubbling. I guess I should know better than to recklessly peruse online but I did, and I did so without taking the proper precautions.

That'll learn me.

Later!

mike

Confessions of a Media Junkie

That's the title that's milling about in my head at the moment. I still haven't done a search on it online to see if someone else is using it, so it may change, but I've been giving some consideration to writing a column, of sorts, here or on another blog (one that I'd create seperate to this one). In it I would do something similar to what Nick Hornby does with his Believer columns, "Stuff I've Been Reading", but instead of books (or exclusively books) I would cover DVDs and Blu-Rays. I'm always buying new discs and do not always watch them immediately after doing so. In fact, they often sit on my shelf for a very, very long time before I even take them out of their wrappers. I do the same with books and comics. The only things I get into right away is music.

So, that might be coming on the horizon. We'll see how things go.

mike

Now That I'm On GoodReads...

Tintin: A Biography by Harry Thompson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Not a portrait of the artist so much as an analysis of Hergé's work. Granted, Hergé was not a person who spent a lot of time doing interviews or talking about his life, so the source material Thompson used to inform his book is sparse. Add to that the fact that the author did not have access to Hergé's estate and you have a book that is big on enthusiasm but lacking in any real meat-and-potatoes biography. The analysis of each album in the series does give Thompson an iron-clad structure and he manages to offer up some valuable information for the art/cartoon/comic historian/enthusiast. Still, for as much as it says about the artist and his work it still feels lacking. An enjoyable read, overall, and a good primer for the TINTIN neophyte, but I'll probably keep looking for the Hergé bio that sates my appetite. Not a bad thing, necessarily.



View all my reviews

Later!

mike

Recent Acquisitions

Among other things, this weekend involved some new acquisitions which I thought I would make mention of here. While out and about with Jen we hit a local used bookstore and I found a very nice copy of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, something I've been meaning to buy but never have gotten around to. I took the book out of the library once, years ago, and had to return it before finishing it so I look forward to taking another crack at it. Maybe I'll watch the movie when I'm done. Not the Farrely Bros. one, the one starring Colin Firth.

I also grabbed the first issue of what appears to be a new Batman Beyond series. I had not heard of this (which shows how unplugged I am from mainstream comics these days) but I curious and excited to explore what lies within. Writer Adam Beechen knows his animated properties and the artist, Ryan Benjamin, looks pretty decent so I have high hopes for reading it. I was, and still am, a huge fan of the television series this comic is based on and any chance to see Terry McGinnis again (as long as it's not complete shit, anyways) is a nice surprise.

Update: Just read it and I'm pleased! Art and story were well done. A little out of my comfort zone style-wise to really embrace it as 'of the series' but I'm very much looking forward to seeing how this six-issue series pans out.

I also grabbed an official guide to Battlestar Galactica which covers the relaunch, the mini-series and the first season, if I'm not mistaken. So far, from what I've read, it's pretty darn good. Moore is not pulling any punches and, short of covering all the failed attempts to bring the series back, it's an informative read coming from primary sources.

Nabbed a couple of albums by Pinback, which were recommended to me by Jen. The jury's still out on the band but so far I'm liking what I hear.

Kate picked up Lego Rock Band and we have been rockin' out for most of the evening to some cool tunes by some of our favourite bands. I have to say I'm happy to see The Kooks, Vampire Weekend, Glasvegas, Blur and Phoenix all represented amidst the Big Ones that you expect to see. It warmed the cockles of my heart.

Oh, and while she was doing that I picked up a discount copy of Mothra vs. Godzilla for, like, $5. I haven't opened it yet but I doubt I'll return it. Simon might have fun watching it with me, he's a bit of a Godzilla nut. I mean, he's 9, what do you expect?

So that's it. I could mention the cannelloni dinner I made today, which was fabulous, but that's less of an acquisition and more of a 'see what I DID today' kind of thing. Maybe post on it later. I'll be taking some samples in to work to let the proles sample some of my wares.

Anyway, on that note, I will depart. Take care, stay warm, keep fit and play safe.

mike

To Return Or Not To Return

Last week I ordered a couple of books through Amazon.ca and they both arrived today, albeit in a damaged box. There was a big gaping wound in the corner, probably from someone putting a heavier box on top of it and it just popped. As a rsult of this packaging malfunction, the corners of my book are a little beat up and I'm trying to decide whether or not to return the book and, hopefully, get a new un-crunched version, or if I should just suck it up and keep the book as is.

I'm sure most people would look at the 'damage' and just shrug it off, but I'm a little anal with my stuff and it was an expensive coffee table book, so my expectations are a little higher than if it was a $5 paperback. I'm dying to rip the plastic off and check it out but I need to make the call before I do that, which leads me to this post and my very public ruminating on the subject.

I may leave it 'til the morning to decide.

In the meantime, I think I'm gonna go watch some Fringe or Clone Wars or something. I may even play the new AvP demo I downloaded.

Take care!

mike

World of Disappointment #3467

[This post may contain small bits of hyperbole]

I saw this in the bookstore today and, after briefly catching my eye as a possibly interesting thing, I set it down again and walked away disgusted.

Originally I thought to myself, "WTF, yet another Dracula edition?" before having my eye caught by the Jae Lee cover and the promise of an illustrated text. This could be a cool little thing to have, especially at the bargain price they were offering it for. I opened it up and saw that virtually every single image that Jae drew was a figure drawing with no background and very little detail in anything but exposed bits like hands, faces, etc. Any item of clothing being shown is just a grey tone shape and anything that is not humanoid in shape is a silhouette. How cheap is that.

I know he did some astonishing work on the Dark Tower comics and I've followed the guys work in the past so I know he's just totally phoned these images in. It probably shouldn't, but it bugs me.

Anyway, if you see this item and get tempted to pick it up, buyer beware! Flip through before purchasing. Or better yet, ignore it and grab the one illustrated by Ben Templesmith.

As an addendum, I wanted to add that some good did come from my bookstore trip since I grabbed a copy of Pullman's Once Upon a Time in the North, a copy of Christopher Golden, Stephen Bissette and Hank Wagner's Neil Gaiman wankfest, Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman and the lavishly illustrated and very eye-catching children's book, Varmints. I almost walked out of there with Hornby's new one, Juliet, Naked, but I have to finish The Beautiful and the Damned before getting into a new book. I read the first chapter sitting in the bookstore waiting for my daughter and I just knew I would get home and keep reading it with Fitzgerald odyssey of love and excess feeling the full on force of how fickle I can be.

Later!

mike

Joe Hill

At the library the other day I saw a copy of IDW's Locke & Key. For those of you who don't know, the book is written by Joe Hill and features artwork by Gabriel Rodriguez. It's the story of a family who survive a major tragedy and move to a relative's house that has some special characteristics. At Keyhouse, there are certain keys (if you can find them) that will open certain doorways that lead to other places and states of being. Within the grounds of Keyhouse exists an entity that wants these keys and uses its influence to achieve its goals. This is where most of the action and drama come into play.

In the introduction, there is some discussion on how the writer, Joe Hill, is a brilliant young novelist in the genre and everything he touches is golden. Well, seeing as I thought the first few issues of the comic reprinted in the collection were pretty good and not absolutely astonishing, I took these comments with a grain of salt.

A few days later I was shopping at Indigo! and I noticed a collection of Hill's short stories called 20th Century Ghosts. It was on sale for $7.99 and Christopher Golden (one of my favourite genre writers) spoke incredibly highly of him and the work in the introduction. I thought if everyone seemed to be praising everything Joe Hill does, I might as well try out this short story collection and see where that leads me.

Well, I'll tell you where that leads me. I am now a huge fan of the work of Joe Hill. This guy is everything they say about him. I have yet to read his full-length novel, Heart-Shaped Box, but these short stories are superb. His expert handling of the genre is a refreshing surprise considering so many of his contemporaries (literary and cinematic) go for the jugular and try to give you as extreme an experience as possible while sacrificing mood, and story. Hill knows what it means to build to something and make the reader an active participant in his storytelling.

Finishing Locke & Key I was treated to some of the same surprises that I had seen in his short story work. I assumed that L&K was going to trade on the nasty bits with lots of killing and abuse and cruelty, but that's just not the case. There's a mood to it, a quality that feeds off of the darker points but also shows a lot of humour and sensitivity and I'm really looking forward to seeing where this story goes. I have another storyline to catch up on ("Head Games") and then I'll be up to date.

Oh, and if you haven't read his short story "Pop Art" then you must go out and do so now. You really, really must.

Later!

mike

Jon J Muth

I've been on a bit of a Muth kick of late (some of that has to do with the reasons why my mind has been blown, if you're curious) and I ran across these neat videos of Jon that I thought I would share...



...and this one is a bit of an EPK style promo discussing his latest Zen book...



That's all for now. Catch you later!

mike

Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead

The cover art has been released for Indy's latest literary adventure to be written by Steve Perry and looks like so:



Not as cool as the Drew Struzan covers from the previous 12 books, but if the stuff inside is half-decent I can't complain.

mike

Lucas Centric Post

This post is going to cover a few George Lucas related topics from Indy to Red Tails, so if you're just not in the mood, skim this one or pass it over.

Everyone else, read on...

I went out and saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on its last night at the second run theatre in town and it got me in a bit of an Indy mood (surprise, surprise). I enjoyed the film immensely on opening night but found that I liked it even better the second time around. Little details I didn't absorb on my initial viewing popped up, enriching the experience somewhat, and things I may not have liked before were greeted with a little less irritation this time around. It's amazing how knowing what will happen will take the edge off of what may have previously been perceived as "bad scenes".

Still on my Indy buzz after leaving the theatre, I got home and hit the web looking for more info, interviews, and behind the scenes stuff on the film and the expanded universe but found myself running into the same brick wall I've been hitting for years; a lame, uninformative official website. Yeah, I know there are a few decent Indy fan sites out there that pull their respective weight (TheRaider.net, IndianaJones.de and IndyFan.com being a few of the best) but there is so much information and cool stuff that the official site could have, it's really, really disappointing to see the few videos and factoids that reside there.

When the Star Wars prequels started production, the Star Wars site ran web diaries, weekly teaser/set images, and other cool behind-the-scenes stuff. By the prequel trilogy's end, the site launched the Hyperspace fan club, exclusive material like deleted scenes and animatics, the ability to watch the original Clone Wars cartoon before they aired on Cartoon Network, newsletters, DVD ROM features, fiction, videos, web strips...I could go on. It was a website that I enjoyed visiting regularly until they changed it a few months ago, but that's another story.

The Indiana Jones site briefly tried to be as informative a resource as the Star Wars site back when they released the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and the Indy trilogy on VHS. There were many similar features started but not very much of the extras ever materialized. Then, with the anticipated release of the new film, they shut the old site down and we had to wait until they relaunched it as the Crystal Skull site. I always thought that was a bad idea since, as a series, they should have one big umbrella site with mini sites for each film, but what do I know, right? It's not like it didn't service the Galaxy Far, Far Away's site for a decade.

I mean, where are the interviews with cast and crew? Where are the web diaries (one Frank Marshall clip does not count, guys), the development extras, the exclusive web features, the continuing news updates, the archival material, the depth text commentaries, the production blog?

In my desperation I turned to the Indy-Cast, a fan produced podcast on all things Indy. Some of the news bits are interesting (although I can't say as I heard anything on the Indy-Cast that I hadn't already gleaned from other sources), but most of the show is an hour-long marathon of the host reading peoples press releases and e-mails talking about what they think the fifth movie should be about, what the best Indy fist-fight was, random ramblings and what Indy related foodstuffs they had for breakfast. All to a looping backdrop of the John Williams score.

Ugh.

What I wouldn't give to be a content developer (or one of the schmoes producing it) for an Indy site, particularly the official one, which should be the ultimate resource, in my opinion. Lucas Online, you listenin'? One dedicated content droid sitting idle and looking for work. Call me.

Anyway, the DVD will be coming out on October 13th, so maybe I'll get my Kumba-ya-yas out in a few weeks (although, I'm cheesed off that the Blu-Ray has exclusive content not available on the standard definition disc...grrrr).

Update: I picked up an issue of the official Indiana Jones magazine this evening and one of the features inside was a storyboarded, but unused, sequence from Temple of Doom. I seem to recall seeing this stuff up on the old website before it went the way of the dodo and I can't help but theorize that all the really fun content was pulled in favour of showcasing it in something like the magazine for $7 rather than on the web for free. It's a cynical viewpoint, especially when you consider there's a Star Wars magazine that's been running forever and it never impacted the website, but I can't think of anything that makes more sense.

In other Indy related news, I just found out that they will be producing a new set of expanded universe books, which has me all aflutter. I really enjoyed the original series (not quite done all twelve but almost there) and anxiously await the first of the new batch, Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead written by Steve Perry. More good news on the novel front is that Rob McGregor, writer of the Last Crusade novelisation and the first six books of the first set, will return to the character. His book should be the next up after Perry's so we'll see how that works out. The first one should hit bookstores in May of 2009, so there's still a few months to wait. Still, good news for an Indy fan, overall.

By the way, does anybody know if there is going to be a volume two to the Indiana Jones Adventures series? This digest sized gem was one of the best Indy stories I have read in some time. I thought I posted about it a while back but it doesn't appear that I have, so I'll have to post a review of it sometime soon. I'm working on my next Indy Comic Revue so I might slip it in at the same time. Back to the point, though, I haven't seen any news regarding a #2 on the DHC site or in the press, so I'm throwing it out there in case one of y'all happen to know anything. I want to see more of this stuff.

I was going to talk a bit about Clone Wars, but I'm going to pass on it for now and just finish off with the good news I've just heard regarding Lucas' pet project on the Tuskeegee Airmen, Red Tails. It has a writer, John Ridley, and a director, Anthony Hemingway, so we just might be seeing a non-sequel Lucas project in cinemas sometime in the next few years. To be honest, I've been waiting for a non-Star Wars or Indy project from George for almost as long as everyone else wanted the prequel trilogy. I still love Tucker and Radioland Murders remains a guilty pleasure of mine, so I'm really looking forward to RT. You could do a lot worse than John Ridley on script-chores, too.

I gotta run, so I'm going to end the post there. I'll be back to add some images if you happen to be reading this sucker bare and if you are, I commend you.

Later!

mike

Indy High Then Burn

I have been a fan of the Indy novels since I first discovered them lo those many years ago. Part of what I enjoyed about them was the fact that they weren't like the Star Wars books. It wasn't this literary machine just churning out Indy books from all periods, it was the work of, primarily, one guy, Rob MacGregor. He was followed up by Martin Caidin (the guy who wrote Cyborg) and then the last writer to work on the book series, Max McCoy. Although I didn't totally agree with everything MacGergor did in his stories (Indy purists beware, there is a wedding and a tragic end, a la James Bond, which may, or may not, fit in with your vision of the man with the hat) I thoroughly enjoyed the 5 or 6 stories he wrote and always kept an eye out for the subsequent books in the series.

Now, with the new movie coming out, the books have been brought back into print and are available at one of my local booksellers. Armed with this information, I headed down to the McNally Robinson and grabbed myself a copy of Caidin's first offering, Indiana Jones and the Sky Pirates. I've been enjoying reading it for the last couple of days and decided, tonight, that I would peel off the annoying little price label that they stick on every one of their books. I don't usually have problems with them but this time it peeled the finish right off the back cover.

Now, for anyone who knows me, I'm pretty picky with my stuff. And even though I've had this problem before with books I've purchased there (I was pretty ruffled when my Abadazad peeled - grrrr) this one really irks me. Perhaps it's because of how long I've been trying to finish the series, maybe because it's Indy, and maybe because I just need one thing in my life right now that is the way it's supposed to be, I don't know. What I do know is that I'm pretty perturbed about it and I hate to be an idiot and spend another $9 on a book that I already own, but it also burns my butt everytime I see the damn thing now.

You can't see it in the picture. It's just over the explosion, though.

Of course, when I brought this up to Jen expecting a little sympathy, it degraded into a fight with her saying some pretty awful things (yeah, I know how ridiculous this problem is, but come on, give a frazzled mind the proverbial shoulder to lean on) and now I'm down here posting about it and checking out how much it would cost to order the last 5 books that I'm missing from Amazon (5 includes the Sky Pirates).

I need to go chill out.

Until next time...

mike