Different Is Good

Comic Bookery

I twittered about some of this stuff earlier, so maybe this won't be new for you. I'm going to reread Watchmen before the movie comes out. I read it every few years anyway, since it first came out. I've been poking around it at the store, rereading my favorite line in all the works of man - Rorschach (To an entire prison population): "None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with you. You're locked up in here with me." You have to read the book to really appreciate it, but fuck, that is bad ass. If you haven't read it yet, what the hell are you waiting for? You have less than two weeks to swallow it down so you and I and the rest of geekdom can be sufficiently disappointed with the movie. Hurry up!

Process Five, some of you may remember, began as a comic book script. I had an encouraging half a bite on it too, before a certain line of a certain publisher bit the certain dust. Because it was a comic script, I wrote Process Five's lines in first person present tense, a mainstay of gritty story-telling throughout the past thirty years of four-color heroism. I tried it that way in the story I'm working on now, with other parts being third person past tense. Then I decided to can the other points of view, so it was all going to be first person present. Then I thought I should put those other parts back in and entire thing should be third person past tense. The other day I realized Process Five's parts should again be first person, but in past tense, while the other parts should remain third person past, save for Process Five's dream/memories which should be first person present. Are you following me? What all of this means is that I keep going through this goddamned story, changing piles of pronouns and verbs again and again and this isn't the first time I've gone through this with a story. Gaaa!

With this post I realize I don't talk nearly enough about comic books here. They were practically my life for fifteen years or so, and now I hardly ever pick one up. For much the same reason I don't watch much TV or see many movies or even read much. I'm too tied up with work, householdery, writing and wasting time online. But man I have some happy comic book memories. I want to tell you about Watchmen. I want to tell you about Andy Helfer's brilliant nineteen issue run of The Shadow and Kyle Baker's magnificent art on that book, the excitement of an honest to goodness comic book space opera near the end of The Omega Men with the wonderful round-bodied cartoony artistry of Shawn McManus, Gaiman and McKean's Black Orchid, Englehart and Rogers' magnificent Batman stint. Ah well. Some other time then. I need to catch my breath.

Son-Of-A-Who-Cut-Your-Naval-String!

Loads of random shit (literally) and colons (but not the shitty kind):

The former wife, my daughter and I took their pug for a walk today. You wouldn't believe how much poo can be kept inside of a dog that small. It was like Christmas day with a new Play-Doh Fun Factory.



Today io9 has this headline:
You'll Never Guess Which Mutant Plays A Key Role In Wolverine!
I'm going to say . . . um . . . Wolverine?

I took the daughter to the library today and grabbed A Clockwork Orange for myself. Saw the movie when I was a teen, but never read the book. I just read a few pages into it at the library. I'd often heard about the language thing, but didn't realize it was so thick. This might require a second read. Here's something embarrassing: When I read William Golding's The Inheritors, large chunks of it went right over my head even though the language is quite simple. It's told from the point of view of one of the slowest of a small group of Neanderthals as they encounter their first Cro-Magnons. It's a hell of a time to figure out what the protagonist is seeing as he describes technology beyond his ken using his limited vocabulary. He sees boats as trees and oars as leaves and so on. That's a second-reader to be sure, but I haven't yet jumped into its second reading.

Just a reminder: This is the last chance you'll have to read this sentence for the first time. See. Told you. Next time you'll listen to me.

Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book won the Newbery Award today. Son-of-a-who-cut-your-naval-string! (That's a Trinidadian expression, of course. You people need to get out more.) Congrats to him!

Truth in advertising: The Hanes Beefy-T should really be called the Hanes Fatty-T. And by the way, if it really was the Beefy-T, these would not be the models for it. I mean, one guy is actually dressed like Gilligan. Nobody thinks, "Look at that Gilligan. God, but he's beefy!"

And I'm spent.