(no subject)
(still x-posting to my dA. :) )
Last November, I got through the pain and frustration of writing by bribing myself. Just flat-out telling myself, "If you make quota, you can have a book." It couldn't be a /deep/ book, of course. It couldn't be a /good/ book, or else I'd get sucked in and want more and more and more and forget writing my own words, there were these over here to read.
So when Uny went and drifted into the manga section of Borders, I followed her. I don't like manga on the whole - I read W Juliet for giggles and eye-rolling at predictability of shoujo culture, and I read Saiyuki for how badly the world sucks, but on the whole, I don't read a whole lot of manga. Especially since Borders stopped carrying both those series, god damn them. So, in a fit of bored - and knowing I'd be bored - I wandered over and around, and made fun of Twilight and all the merchandising, and then, tucked around a corner was a half-finished display, neglected and unwanted, of a mostly-empty bookshelf with stray American comics and the first bound collection of Fables. The register boys - late-twenties fanboy nerds - exploded with JOY at me. It was freakish. o_o;
So for the month of November back in 2009, I fed myself a cookie every time I reached 10k - another copy of Fables, sometimes two if they were in stock and I could afford it and I'd done 20k that week. But never more.
Those books were all the things I love in stories - fractured fairy tales, marital dramaz, politics, war, reclaiming the fatherland, and awesome American art. You have to understand. A lot of you are younger than I am. While you were growing up on Inuyasha and Fuushigi Yuugi and whatever-else-cracktrip-you-can-think-of, I'd grown up with hardly a pinch of Sailor Moon and Voltron - IF you were lucky, and only once I was older than 12 when we finally got cable. Instead, I was reading the Brenda Starr serials in my aunt's Sunday paper and trying to figure out what Prince Valiant was going to do next to ford the river one massive panel at a time. I have great, dear love for Prince Valiant and Mandrake the Magician and the Phantom to this day. <3 And I also have great, dear love for American comic style as a result.
So I read Fables, and I loved it. I found it to be EVERYTHING those crazy fanboy cashiers said it would be - and more. It was like candy. It was delightful. It was fresh. No one had giant-eyes or screwed up anatomy and everyone had realistic issues, despite having fairy-tale super powers. And Cinderella was with the equivalent of the CIA, and the Big Bad Wolf had a soft spot for Snow White, and Little Boy Blue had the most Angst-Ridden backstory since... since I'm sure you can think of someone. o_o; He out-angsted like EVERYONE I've ever read. It was fantastic.
And then the collections became more difficult to find. I bought two of one issue on accident because it had been so long between readings that I'd forgotten where I'd left off (it was a HUNT, because most of the book stores with any inventory are 40 minutes drive out of our little nowhere town <3 ). And then, as I was getting ready for November to start, I decided to buy another copy, and discovered - to my horror and dismay! - that the series was over. OVER!? What!? D:
Perhaps they'll pick it up, they say. Perhaps. But it just wouldn't be the same. The various artists and the fantastic stories that were written for that universe, it was just breathlessly delightful. Just enough crack with just enough contrivance with just enough real life dramaz, it was lovely. So I was sad, but would have to move on, find another thing to read.
It's hard for me to like comics. The art style has to draw me in, but more than that, the story has to draw me in. So back in January, when I was looking for more Fables to read, I instead found another serial by Vertigo (they're seriously a fantastic house for weird, outlandish, WTF literature-esque comics <3 ) called The Unwritten.
The premise is that this author wrote a story about a boy wizard named Tommy Turner, basing him off his real-life son, Tom Turner. But maybe Tom Turner is just another fabrication...
There's books coming to life and fantastic weird CRACK in this story as the worst things in the world happen to the various characters, but more and more and more and more crazy weird stuff happens. It's hard to explain. It's really REALLY hard to explain.
But it's brilliant.
I have to admit, the things that draw me to a series of comics is the same thing that draws me to CDs by artists I don't know - the cover art. And, being by Vertigo, the cover art of The Unwritten was very similar to that of Fables. And that drew my eye, and then the cover of the first issue...? I had a typographygasm. [link] SERIOUSLY? You're going to show me THAT and expect me not to read it? Yeah. Okay. Not happening.
So, since then, I've been on the look-out for more of this, and have (Saturday) finally gotten volume 2 of the collected paperback edition in my hands as my 50k reward.
Oh, the crack. The crack, the sadness, the horror, the confusion, the German history, and the TYPOGRAPHY. The various fonts that are used for various purposes in this story DELIGHTS me. Also the various number of characters in the second volume, and also-also all the different ways they use to make the story stand on its own - there's pages that are facsimiles of webpages, forums, e-mails, and on the whole modern technology. It's a very modern story, but it's so jam-packed with fantasy. And then there's the random side-stories which are cracktrips into OTHER story-universes by OTHER random people who've drifted through the story (specifically Eliza Mae Hertford's "Willowbank Tales" XD which had Uny and I IN STITCHES at poor Pauly <3 ). It's so wonderfun - which is like wonderful and fun at the same time. :)
So, at the end of the day, if you need a break from all your manga, you need to go check the American comics section of your bookstore or comic shop for Vertigo's Fables, but also for The Unwritten. I'm so looking forward to seeing how this story resolves to continue. <3 <3 <3
This was an AWESOME 50k reward. <3
(oh yeah. guess I forgot. I won again. :D Mah Graph, let me show yoo eet. As if you had a doubt. X3 )
Last November, I got through the pain and frustration of writing by bribing myself. Just flat-out telling myself, "If you make quota, you can have a book." It couldn't be a /deep/ book, of course. It couldn't be a /good/ book, or else I'd get sucked in and want more and more and more and forget writing my own words, there were these over here to read.
So when Uny went and drifted into the manga section of Borders, I followed her. I don't like manga on the whole - I read W Juliet for giggles and eye-rolling at predictability of shoujo culture, and I read Saiyuki for how badly the world sucks, but on the whole, I don't read a whole lot of manga. Especially since Borders stopped carrying both those series, god damn them. So, in a fit of bored - and knowing I'd be bored - I wandered over and around, and made fun of Twilight and all the merchandising, and then, tucked around a corner was a half-finished display, neglected and unwanted, of a mostly-empty bookshelf with stray American comics and the first bound collection of Fables. The register boys - late-twenties fanboy nerds - exploded with JOY at me. It was freakish. o_o;
So for the month of November back in 2009, I fed myself a cookie every time I reached 10k - another copy of Fables, sometimes two if they were in stock and I could afford it and I'd done 20k that week. But never more.
Those books were all the things I love in stories - fractured fairy tales, marital dramaz, politics, war, reclaiming the fatherland, and awesome American art. You have to understand. A lot of you are younger than I am. While you were growing up on Inuyasha and Fuushigi Yuugi and whatever-else-cracktrip-you-can-think-of, I'd grown up with hardly a pinch of Sailor Moon and Voltron - IF you were lucky, and only once I was older than 12 when we finally got cable. Instead, I was reading the Brenda Starr serials in my aunt's Sunday paper and trying to figure out what Prince Valiant was going to do next to ford the river one massive panel at a time. I have great, dear love for Prince Valiant and Mandrake the Magician and the Phantom to this day. <3 And I also have great, dear love for American comic style as a result.
So I read Fables, and I loved it. I found it to be EVERYTHING those crazy fanboy cashiers said it would be - and more. It was like candy. It was delightful. It was fresh. No one had giant-eyes or screwed up anatomy and everyone had realistic issues, despite having fairy-tale super powers. And Cinderella was with the equivalent of the CIA, and the Big Bad Wolf had a soft spot for Snow White, and Little Boy Blue had the most Angst-Ridden backstory since... since I'm sure you can think of someone. o_o; He out-angsted like EVERYONE I've ever read. It was fantastic.
And then the collections became more difficult to find. I bought two of one issue on accident because it had been so long between readings that I'd forgotten where I'd left off (it was a HUNT, because most of the book stores with any inventory are 40 minutes drive out of our little nowhere town <3 ). And then, as I was getting ready for November to start, I decided to buy another copy, and discovered - to my horror and dismay! - that the series was over. OVER!? What!? D:
Perhaps they'll pick it up, they say. Perhaps. But it just wouldn't be the same. The various artists and the fantastic stories that were written for that universe, it was just breathlessly delightful. Just enough crack with just enough contrivance with just enough real life dramaz, it was lovely. So I was sad, but would have to move on, find another thing to read.
It's hard for me to like comics. The art style has to draw me in, but more than that, the story has to draw me in. So back in January, when I was looking for more Fables to read, I instead found another serial by Vertigo (they're seriously a fantastic house for weird, outlandish, WTF literature-esque comics <3 ) called The Unwritten.
The premise is that this author wrote a story about a boy wizard named Tommy Turner, basing him off his real-life son, Tom Turner. But maybe Tom Turner is just another fabrication...
There's books coming to life and fantastic weird CRACK in this story as the worst things in the world happen to the various characters, but more and more and more and more crazy weird stuff happens. It's hard to explain. It's really REALLY hard to explain.
But it's brilliant.
I have to admit, the things that draw me to a series of comics is the same thing that draws me to CDs by artists I don't know - the cover art. And, being by Vertigo, the cover art of The Unwritten was very similar to that of Fables. And that drew my eye, and then the cover of the first issue...? I had a typographygasm. [link] SERIOUSLY? You're going to show me THAT and expect me not to read it? Yeah. Okay. Not happening.
So, since then, I've been on the look-out for more of this, and have (Saturday) finally gotten volume 2 of the collected paperback edition in my hands as my 50k reward.
Oh, the crack. The crack, the sadness, the horror, the confusion, the German history, and the TYPOGRAPHY. The various fonts that are used for various purposes in this story DELIGHTS me. Also the various number of characters in the second volume, and also-also all the different ways they use to make the story stand on its own - there's pages that are facsimiles of webpages, forums, e-mails, and on the whole modern technology. It's a very modern story, but it's so jam-packed with fantasy. And then there's the random side-stories which are cracktrips into OTHER story-universes by OTHER random people who've drifted through the story (specifically Eliza Mae Hertford's "Willowbank Tales" XD which had Uny and I IN STITCHES at poor Pauly <3 ). It's so wonderfun - which is like wonderful and fun at the same time. :)
So, at the end of the day, if you need a break from all your manga, you need to go check the American comics section of your bookstore or comic shop for Vertigo's Fables, but also for The Unwritten. I'm so looking forward to seeing how this story resolves to continue. <3 <3 <3
This was an AWESOME 50k reward. <3
(oh yeah. guess I forgot. I won again. :D Mah Graph, let me show yoo eet. As if you had a doubt. X3 )