It's friday night, late, and we're listening to Pink Floyd. And not even the "good" records, we're listening to The Wall and The Final Cut. Remind me again what separates this from the Arcade Fire and a few other contemporary bands other than some dated guitar tones. There's a lot here to listen to, again.
We're in the windy city for a wedding tonight, to be held on the 100th floor of the 16th tallest building in the world. Live feeds from the John Hancock Center are here. The brochure about the Hancock Observatory says that the 360 degree views span up to 80 miles and four states. Crazy.
Rose and I are in Chicago and I just played her the Sean Kingston song "Beautiful Girls." I heard this in Atlanta a month ago and assumed it would be a hit and now i can't get away from it and it's destroying my brain. Stop this song before it kills again.
Picked up Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics the other day and I just finished it.
It's pretty much the best book on comics I've read since, probably, Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes. Both books are very personal takes on comic books and their importance to our cultural history. Wolk spends a good degree of the beginning of the book making a stand that calling comics anything other than comics (i.e. graphic novels, illustrated novella, what-have-you) is a classist evasion. In other words, if you like a comic book, and you're an intelligent, cultured, classy type, it can't possibly BE a comic book -- it's a graphic novel.
Good point.
He also does some deep dives on creators who have done interesting work, although the bulk of the authors he tackles are very well established and have been around for a while (a point he notes several times, with the caveat that comics take a long time to create, so it takes a while for a body of work to develop). I would love to see his take on Ed Brubaker, Brian Michael Bendis, Garth Ennis and the rest of the "new" guys.
Over the past couple of years I've read a lot of comics. I started with a couple boxes and at some point in my irritating later months at CNET I started picking up more and more each week -- the romper room in our house upstairs is now knee deep in the damn things, there's barely enough room for the PS2. The thing was, the quality of the writing (and sometimes art - more on that later) had ratcheted up significantly. In the post Frank Miller / Alan Moore world I had abandoned years ago writers with skill and a point of view were popping up: Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Warren Ellis (oh, warren ellis -- read Nextwave and you will understand why he is the best of the best), Robert Kirkman (mostly). These guys were taking the narratives in creative directions and their dialogue was either increasingly naturalistic or startlingly stylized.
Take Nextwave -- the tagline on the cover describes the series' voice and style in 6 words: "Healing America by beating people up." And no, this isn't a serious indictment of US foreign policy; and it's not even a deconstruction of American superhero comics; it explodes the damn things. Take Ellis' description of his own series (from an article references by a Wikipedia entry - how meta!): '"It’s an absolute distillation of the superhero genre. No plot lines, characters, emotions, nothing whatsoever. It’s people posing in the street for no good reason. It is people getting kicked, and then exploding. It is a pure comic book, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. And afterwards, they will explode." It's pure genius so of course it only lasted 12 issues. there are 2 trade collections available (#2 is called "I Kick Your Face").
