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Feb. 22nd, 2004
Finished Sun books, reading comics
Feb. 22nd, 2004 01:27 amI finished up Return to the Whorl on Thursday, completing the last of Gene Wolfe’s Sun books.
( Final opinions and specualtions; spoilers, of course )
I was considering starting up Wolfe’s latest book, The Knight, but![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ladymondegreen starting talking about staging an intervention. I started Eleanor Arnason’s Ring of Swords on the way to work Friday morning. This is a copy borrowed from drcpunk; we both copy-edited a really great review of it that should be running in The New York Review of Science Fiction soon. It was one of those great reviews that really sells the book. The author considered the book from three angles: as an SF Jane Austin book, as a parallel to Macbeth, and as Heinlein slash fiction. How could I pass that up?
But I’ll be holding that for commutes. Now I’m catching up on my comics reading. I picked up a pair of Paul Grist collections that came out on Wednesday: Kane: Greetings from New Eden (a contemporary cop story) and Jack Staff: Everything Used to be Black and White (a British superhero comic). These are great. Grist is one of those comics artist who approaches things from a graphic-design perspective, with lots of blocks of solid black or white, and lots of attention to panel and page composition. (Though see page 19 of the Kane book for examples of a nose-shading technique that keeps not working even though he keeps trying it.) His stories tend to bounce around a bit with lots of flashbacks; I was a bit confused by some of the transitions early in Kane, but the ironic juxtapositions of comments and events made it worth my while. I’m only a third of the way through the Jack Staff book, but I’m enjoying it even more. Grist manages to combine bouncy superhero fun with X-Files mystery and an old noirish plot twist and make it all work in true postmodern genre-sampling style.
I really need to start catching up on some of the comics collections I’ve had sitting around. There’s volume 2 of FLCL which I picked up last week, and Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde which I got when it first came out in paperback and still haven’t gotten around to reading. I think I’m still a few volumes behind in Ranma 1/2 too.
( Final opinions and specualtions; spoilers, of course )
I was considering starting up Wolfe’s latest book, The Knight, but
ladymondegreen starting talking about staging an intervention. I started Eleanor Arnason’s Ring of Swords on the way to work Friday morning. This is a copy borrowed from drcpunk; we both copy-edited a really great review of it that should be running in The New York Review of Science Fiction soon. It was one of those great reviews that really sells the book. The author considered the book from three angles: as an SF Jane Austin book, as a parallel to Macbeth, and as Heinlein slash fiction. How could I pass that up? But I’ll be holding that for commutes. Now I’m catching up on my comics reading. I picked up a pair of Paul Grist collections that came out on Wednesday: Kane: Greetings from New Eden (a contemporary cop story) and Jack Staff: Everything Used to be Black and White (a British superhero comic). These are great. Grist is one of those comics artist who approaches things from a graphic-design perspective, with lots of blocks of solid black or white, and lots of attention to panel and page composition. (Though see page 19 of the Kane book for examples of a nose-shading technique that keeps not working even though he keeps trying it.) His stories tend to bounce around a bit with lots of flashbacks; I was a bit confused by some of the transitions early in Kane, but the ironic juxtapositions of comments and events made it worth my while. I’m only a third of the way through the Jack Staff book, but I’m enjoying it even more. Grist manages to combine bouncy superhero fun with X-Files mystery and an old noirish plot twist and make it all work in true postmodern genre-sampling style.
I really need to start catching up on some of the comics collections I’ve had sitting around. There’s volume 2 of FLCL which I picked up last week, and Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde which I got when it first came out in paperback and still haven’t gotten around to reading. I think I’m still a few volumes behind in Ranma 1/2 too.
Sailing to Castletown
Feb. 22nd, 2004 11:00 pmI dunno, I’ve been kinda mopey recently, but today felt great. I know the exact moment it turned around: I was getting ready to do some shopping, and I wanted some music. I managed to find my CD player (which had been eluding me for several months), and I popped in Mark Knopfler’s Sailing to Philadelphia, and the moment the opening notes of “What It Is” hit my ears, I felt like all was right with the world. Thanks, kent_allard_jr! It didn’t hurt that the day was sunny and (relatively) warm.
After shopping, I went to Ground. Chatted a bit with the cute new barrista. Coffee with Splenda is starting to taste good to me. Finished off the Jack Staff book, and man, that was just great. It’s like reading a British Astro City, but more condensed, with the stories all tightly packed and interwoven. And, as I mentioned, with a great sense of design. And that shaded-nose thing he goofs up in Kane? He gets it working in Jack Staff
I also read the second (and, I think, last) volume of FLCL. There’s an intriguing visual drive to it — that’s what attracted me to the book in the first place — but man, it’s just sloppy and incoherent on both the plot and storytelling levels. I hope the anime is better than the manga. The art seems cleaner, anyway.
( And I did some sketching. )
kent_allard_jr! It didn’t hurt that the day was sunny and (relatively) warm. After shopping, I went to Ground. Chatted a bit with the cute new barrista. Coffee with Splenda is starting to taste good to me. Finished off the Jack Staff book, and man, that was just great. It’s like reading a British Astro City, but more condensed, with the stories all tightly packed and interwoven. And, as I mentioned, with a great sense of design. And that shaded-nose thing he goofs up in Kane? He gets it working in Jack Staff
I also read the second (and, I think, last) volume of FLCL. There’s an intriguing visual drive to it — that’s what attracted me to the book in the first place — but man, it’s just sloppy and incoherent on both the plot and storytelling levels. I hope the anime is better than the manga. The art seems cleaner, anyway.
( And I did some sketching. )