[read] words and pictures
Being offline has been wonderful in many respects; my blood pressure is nice and healthy now that I'm absent from the standard hysteria, my wordcount output is *waaaay* up, and I've been reading nearly as much as I should be. I've been dipping in and out of Warner's Trouble With Normal and Robb's Strangers, and gazingly longingly at Jameson's Politics of Utopia, but what follows are reviews/notes on works I've actually *finished*.
I've read a lot of
Captain America v.5 #26 - This issue pretty much wrecked me, from the sight of Steve's corpse to the wake, roiling with dislike and recrimination (and the Thing inna tie, aww), to Jessica's return for the secret wake to, oh, *god*, Bucky's violent meltdown (and offpanel collapse into Sam's arms, I'm sure). Brubaker continues to own me, heart and soul.
Checkmate v.2 #14 - I really love what Rucka and Winick are doing in this crossover; the character work found in the Sasha-Dick interaction is some of the finest I've seen in a long time. Owen was actually useful(!), Jo and Tommy keep on rocking, and there were lots of explosions. *happy*
Robin #162 - Unpopular opinions ahoy: Beechen *gets* Tim in all his deliberated hope and fretful cynicism, and Williams's art just gets better and better -- the lines are muscular and unafraid of expressive motion, his background faces are vibrant, and some of the angles he chooses for flight and confrontation are cinematic in the best kind of way.
Countdown #something - I have thoughts aplenty about how much I rue the day in 197x that Kirby jumped ship to DC and brought his Big Cosmic Concerns with him. Enlarging the universe to include near-omnipotent beings like Darkseid & the New Gods -- and, in Countdown's context, the Monitors -- introduces the danger, I think, that the heroes diminish in emotional resonance. They become, as the first issue of this series said flat-out, *pawns*, and I don't want to watch puppet theatre, you know? The situation's fairly similar to what happened in Angel s5, when the Senior Partners/Powers That Be/Wtfever became the organizing system of control and fate, so the characters we actually cared about diminished to little more than nothing.
I'm stuck, though, because I really like Ray Palmer and Mary Marvel and Jason Todd, even Piper & Trickster, so --. This kind of sucks.
Back Issue #22. The cover LIES. It is a lying cover of deceitful lies composed by liars; while there's quite a bit of material about Robin and an interview with Breyfogle, there's not much at all about Tim Drake. LIES. Thought it makes my Clark/Tim shipper heart go pitterpatteryes That said? Dude, this magazine is fun. It feels like a throwback to zines, in that it's dedicated to a subject that the creators clearly love and know a lot about. This issue in particular is chockful of goodness that could have been consciously designed to please me. Dick Grayson's troubled time at Hudson (he joined a commune for a bit, but otherwise, neither the lefty radicals nor the rightist reactionaries liked Robin. *Aww*), a nice in-depth article about Cap & Falc, that interview with Breyfogle and Alan Grant, and a long piece on the magic that is Blue Beetle/Booster Gold.
I need to read in greater depth the Grant/Breyfogle interview, but one really interesting thing jumped out. The development of Tim's character was a secret collaboration between O'Neil and Wolfman, such that Grant created Anarky hoping that *he'd* become the next Robin.
and Chabon's new
The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I can't, really, express how damn *good* this book is. It's much less flashy than Kavalier & Clay, and I suspect it'll receive less attention than that book did (both inside fandom, because there's no tragic gay protagonist, and outside, because of its aggressively [secular, profane] *Jewish* focus and refusal of mythmaking and redemption), but that would be a shame. I've admired the grace and Nabokovian clarity of Chabon's sentences since Mysteries of Pittsburgh, but this book's style is a quantum leap beyond even K&C. He's trimmed any hint of flab to the point that this is almost a new language -- an immediately accessible, comprehensible language, but still a new one, composed of English and Yiddish and...something else. (Offhand, this reminds me of what Rushdie does in Midnight's Children and VN in Pnin and Lolita -- testing the tensile elasticity of English and, if I may go all High Modernist, making it new.) The world he has conjured, a Jewish district in Alaska, a history where Berlin was A-bombed in April, 1945 and Zionism failed in 1948, is palpable as anything but so *lightly* drawn -- the details are conveyed with offhand references, as if "you really already know this, let me just remind you" -- that I can't even call it "worldbuilding". The effect is much more organic than that would suggest.
And his *characters*, oh, man. I know I've been in fandom too long when I notice that there's not a single conventionally-attractive character to be found; that's a pretty depressing thought right there. They're fleshy and passionate and deeply, deeply flawed, and I think I'm a little in love with all of them, even the villains. (Ahaha, that's another sign of fannish immersion; there's much that I could say and think about the characters, but I'm shorthanding it with "in love".)
And I've updated my fic site with stories dating back to February. Let me know if you find something you like.
I've read a lot of
Captain America v.5 #26 - This issue pretty much wrecked me, from the sight of Steve's corpse to the wake, roiling with dislike and recrimination (and the Thing inna tie, aww), to Jessica's return for the secret wake to, oh, *god*, Bucky's violent meltdown (and offpanel collapse into Sam's arms, I'm sure). Brubaker continues to own me, heart and soul.
Checkmate v.2 #14 - I really love what Rucka and Winick are doing in this crossover; the character work found in the Sasha-Dick interaction is some of the finest I've seen in a long time. Owen was actually useful(!), Jo and Tommy keep on rocking, and there were lots of explosions. *happy*
Robin #162 - Unpopular opinions ahoy: Beechen *gets* Tim in all his deliberated hope and fretful cynicism, and Williams's art just gets better and better -- the lines are muscular and unafraid of expressive motion, his background faces are vibrant, and some of the angles he chooses for flight and confrontation are cinematic in the best kind of way.
Countdown #something - I have thoughts aplenty about how much I rue the day in 197x that Kirby jumped ship to DC and brought his Big Cosmic Concerns with him. Enlarging the universe to include near-omnipotent beings like Darkseid & the New Gods -- and, in Countdown's context, the Monitors -- introduces the danger, I think, that the heroes diminish in emotional resonance. They become, as the first issue of this series said flat-out, *pawns*, and I don't want to watch puppet theatre, you know? The situation's fairly similar to what happened in Angel s5, when the Senior Partners/Powers That Be/Wtfever became the organizing system of control and fate, so the characters we actually cared about diminished to little more than nothing.
I'm stuck, though, because I really like Ray Palmer and Mary Marvel and Jason Todd, even Piper & Trickster, so --. This kind of sucks.
Back Issue #22. The cover LIES. It is a lying cover of deceitful lies composed by liars; while there's quite a bit of material about Robin and an interview with Breyfogle, there's not much at all about Tim Drake. LIES. Thought it makes my Clark/Tim shipper heart go pitterpatteryes That said? Dude, this magazine is fun. It feels like a throwback to zines, in that it's dedicated to a subject that the creators clearly love and know a lot about. This issue in particular is chockful of goodness that could have been consciously designed to please me. Dick Grayson's troubled time at Hudson (he joined a commune for a bit, but otherwise, neither the lefty radicals nor the rightist reactionaries liked Robin. *Aww*), a nice in-depth article about Cap & Falc, that interview with Breyfogle and Alan Grant, and a long piece on the magic that is Blue Beetle/Booster Gold.
I need to read in greater depth the Grant/Breyfogle interview, but one really interesting thing jumped out. The development of Tim's character was a secret collaboration between O'Neil and Wolfman, such that Grant created Anarky hoping that *he'd* become the next Robin.
and Chabon's new
The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I can't, really, express how damn *good* this book is. It's much less flashy than Kavalier & Clay, and I suspect it'll receive less attention than that book did (both inside fandom, because there's no tragic gay protagonist, and outside, because of its aggressively [secular, profane] *Jewish* focus and refusal of mythmaking and redemption), but that would be a shame. I've admired the grace and Nabokovian clarity of Chabon's sentences since Mysteries of Pittsburgh, but this book's style is a quantum leap beyond even K&C. He's trimmed any hint of flab to the point that this is almost a new language -- an immediately accessible, comprehensible language, but still a new one, composed of English and Yiddish and...something else. (Offhand, this reminds me of what Rushdie does in Midnight's Children and VN in Pnin and Lolita -- testing the tensile elasticity of English and, if I may go all High Modernist, making it new.) The world he has conjured, a Jewish district in Alaska, a history where Berlin was A-bombed in April, 1945 and Zionism failed in 1948, is palpable as anything but so *lightly* drawn -- the details are conveyed with offhand references, as if "you really already know this, let me just remind you" -- that I can't even call it "worldbuilding". The effect is much more organic than that would suggest.
And his *characters*, oh, man. I know I've been in fandom too long when I notice that there's not a single conventionally-attractive character to be found; that's a pretty depressing thought right there. They're fleshy and passionate and deeply, deeply flawed, and I think I'm a little in love with all of them, even the villains. (Ahaha, that's another sign of fannish immersion; there's much that I could say and think about the characters, but I'm shorthanding it with "in love".)
And I've updated my fic site with stories dating back to February. Let me know if you find something you like.