...and nightcrawler too

I’m going through another comic book phase. This one is being greatly facilitated by my discovery of Comixology… an app that provides a fantastic way of reading this stuff on a tablet / smartphone. I’m not going to preach at you though and tell you that this is the cat’s whiskers, mind. The one format isn’t inherently better than another and both are just different ways of accessing the same material. It’s exactly the same with books: I’m happily able to switch between reading books on the kindle and reading an actual, honest-to-goodness physical book made of paper. Ultimately, both formats do the same job.

Having said that, I won’t lie to you: sometimes it’s just super convenient to finish reading one thing and download the next one in the series almost immediately so you can push on through. It takes up a lot less shelf space on an iPad too. And comic books look *amazing* on a retina screen.

My first download was an old classic, and the comic book that truly got me started: Frank Miller’s “Dark Knight Returns”. For some reason, it was 69p for the first volume, and all four together cost less than the collected “graphic novel” version. From there, although I was sorely tempted to download Watchmen or Sandman or other classics that I already own, I started looking around for quality stuff that I might well have missed. Luckily, Comixology seems to sell almost everything and has a very comprehensive library from any comic book imprint you might care to mention. I thought I’d start with some Eisner award winners:

Superman: Red Son.. a re-imagining of a classic hero based upon the “what if” scenario of Kal-El landing in 1950s Ukraine instead of Kansas and growing up as a Soviet icon. Superb.

Y: The Last Man… a dystopian future where all male mammals have suddenly and (thus far) inexplicably dropped dead across the whole planet, apart from one teenager and his pet monkey.  Imagine that: 495 of the Fortune 500 CEOs dead; 95% of all commercial pilots; 85% of all government representatives; 100% of Catholic priests; 2.9 billion people.... dead in an instant.  The series follows this boy and the surviving women as they try to make sense of a radically altered world. Promising.

100 Bullets…. A somewhat noir concept where, as Wikipedia says, “the core concept is based on the question of people willing to act on the desire of violent revenge if given the means, opportunity, and a reasonable chance to succeed. In each issue, the mysterious Agent Graves approaches someone who has been a victim of a terrible wrong. Graves gives them the opportunity to take revenge by providing a handgun, 100 bullets, and documentation about the primary target responsible for their woes. He informs the candidate the bullets are completely untraceable by any law enforcement investigation, and as soon as they are found at any crime scene investigations will immediately cease”. I’ve struggled with this in the past, but I thought I’d give it another go. Jury’s still out for me after one issue

My favourite though is a series called “Fables”. Wiki again: “a comic book series created by writer Bill Willingham, published by DC Comics's Vertigo imprint beginning in 2002. The series deals with various characters from fairy tales and folklore – referring to themselves as "Fables" – who have been forced out of their Homelands by "The Adversary" who has conquered the realm. The Fables have traveled to our world and formed a clandestine community in New York City known as Fabletown. Fables who are unable to blend in with human society (such as monsters and anthropomorphic animals) live at "the Farm" in upstate New York”

Old King Cole is nominally in charge when the series starts, but the show is really run by Snow White with the (reformed?) Big Bad Wolf as the community’s sheriff. Other characters include Pinocchio, Little Boy Blue, the three pigs, Prince Charming (successively married and divorced by Snow, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty), Sinbad, Beauty and the Beast, Goldilocks…. The list goes on. I’m sure I won’t do it any justice at all by trying to explain why I love it, but it has a dark edge and embraces the Grimm-style original, bloodier tales and I think the whole thing works rather well transplanted into a modern day New York.

Of course, the danger with being able to download these on demand is that I’ve been doing exactly that and my paypal account is taking something of a hammering (and, a little like Amazon’s pricing strategy for kindle books*, the e-comics are not as cheap as you might imagine). Well, it feels like a good use of both my time and my money to me, and I happen to think that things like this have a value and it’s a price I’m prepared to pay.

So yes. I’m 40 years old and I spend my time reading comics. It’s brilliant, innit?

* Yes, I do know that Comixology has recently been purchased by Amazon and that there has been uproar about their withdrawal from Apple’s in-app purchasing (you buy your comics through their website directly). It might not be quite as convenient now, but it works well enough if you ask me.

sleep with one eye open...

In case you haven't noticed, I'm on something of a fairy tale kick at the moment.  Growing up, one of my favourite books in the whole world was "The Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were" (by Michael Page and Robert Ingpen).  I've been reading it again, my much-loved edition slightly battered and inscribed on the title page with a dedication of love from my parents dated "Christmas 1985".  I was eleven years old, and I was both mesmerised and slightly scared by some of the entries: Lilith creeping into your room at night, wendigos, red caps, banshees, kobolds.... I can't think of another book I have owned that has played quite such a large role in firing my imagination.  As I start to search around now to discover what I want to write about, I find myself coming back, time and time again, to the idea of writing something fantastical.

Perhaps - now that I think about it - not entirely coincidentally, I have also been dipping into my edition of the "Children's and Household Tales" by the Brothers Grimm.  I was both delighted and slightly horrified to discover yesterday morning that Philip Pullman has just published a book featuring his (faithful) retellings of fifty of his favourite Grimm stories: delighted because I love his writing and I very much want to read this book, but horrified because I'm just shaping ideas to write in this direction myself.  These folk tales are as old as the hills, of course, so they're hardly likely to become old hat now... but even so.  I nearly downloaded the book to my Kindle this morning, but read that the hardback edition is beautifully bound, and in honour of my much-loved old encyclopedia, I've bought that instead.  I think I might re-read the Angela Carter re-tellings too, whilst I'm at it.

As I was looking for reviews of Pullman's book online, I found this quote, taken from a piece he wrote last Friday for the Guardian on the challenge of re-telling the Grimm fairy tales:

"The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put a robin redbreast in a cage. A fairy tale is not a text."

I like that.  Now I want to try to create some tales of my own.  New tales.

I just might die with a smile on my face after all....

We came home from Running Club this evening to the sight of our cat, flat on her back with her legs akimbo, showing her foufou to a couple of passing strangers.  Slut!  When she saw us coming, she tried the same trick with us, but when you know that she lets it all hang out for complete randoms, you're much less likely to be seduced by the little harlot's charms.

Honestly.  Cats.

The New Yorker seems to like cats too, as these cartoons demonstrate. It's not just high-brow profiles of people you've never heard of that have been keeping me away from my Joseph Heller, you know.

Of course, this being the New Yorker, they do sort of spoil things by somewhat over-analysing things. Even after quoting E. B. White’s famous adage that “Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”... they still come up with this graph.

Hmm.  On reflection, maybe it's because of things like this that I like reading the New Yorker.  You might not have noticed as I think I hide it very well, but I'm a smart-arse, you see.

In case you needed to ask, I like the stuff on the top-left hand side of the graph.

Of course I do.

just like a paperback novel....

I’m stuck in a book.

Judging from my booklist it looks like I started “Something Happened” by Joseph Heller at some point in March of this year. When I picked it up yesterday, I reckon that I’m something less than 25% of the way through. Progress, clearly, has been slow.  This isn’t the first time this has happened to me, and I’m sure it won’t be the last… like most people I go through phases…. but it’s always frustrating to be stuck like this.

 Sometimes this happens because the book you’re reading simply isn’t very good. The solution to this is easy: put it down and start another book. Life’s too short to read crap books. I learned that the hard way when I slogged my way through the “Da Vinci Code” even after hating it from the very first sentence (“Renowned curator….” What kind of a way is that to start a book?). Sometimes it’s not that the book in question is a bad book per se, it’s just that you’re reading it at the wrong time for you. I can remember hating Dickens when I was forced to read “Our Mutual Friend” at school, but found him to be a delight when I picked him up many years later.  Reading a classic voluntarily, it seems, can make all the difference (although I still don't really care for "Emma").

Mind you, even with Dickens, I had something of a sticky patch with “Great Expectations”. In the end, I enjoyed the book enormously, but I won’t deny that I found it somewhat heavy going reading it relatively soon after finishing David Copperfield, which I loved. With the best will in the world, Pip and David’s stories follow a fairly similar curve, at least in part, and for a while I found it somewhat turgid wading my way through another set of false-starts and wrong-turnings made by a young lad from the country when he first arrived in London and set himself up in a trade.

There’s nothing wrong with “Something Happened”. I’d been warned that the title is somewhat ironic and that, in fact, nothing happens…. But the writing style is engaging and the subject matter is something – the utter futility of corporate life – that I think I might want to have a go at writing about myself (well, if the quality of Heller's writing doesn't make me feel desperately inadequate, anyway). It’s just that, well, I’ve put the book down and haven’t really picked it up in three months.

To be fair, that period does coincide almost exactly with my subscription to the New Yorker, so it’s not as though I haven’t been reading at all (and the pressure of the new edition arriving onto my iPad every Monday without fail is a marvellous incentive to keep reading, even if the quality of the writing itself isn't plenty motivation enough)… it’s just that I want to spend more time reading books.

Inspired by the article about great American novelists I was reading the other day, I actually picked up some more books at the weekend. I thought about downloading them directly onto my Kindle, but it turns out that my hardback copy of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy was actually about the same price as an electronic copy of one of those books… so I bought the hardback copy. I’ve read “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men”, both of which I very much enjoyed, so I thought I’d read more of his stuff. I also picked up a hardback copy of “A Farewell to Arms” for £2, which seemed like a bargain to me and I'm justing setting out on a Hemingway voyage, having loved "The Sun Also Rises" and with the short stories on my TBR list. I also have a desire to re-read "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Catcher in the Rye" and probably some more Steinbeck too.  There’s so little time and so many books.


When I was a teenager, I used to read a lot of science-fiction and fantasy novels… which is fine… but I had a moment of clarity when I was about twenty that I hadn’t read anywhere near as widely as I might have done and felt intellectually and culturally poorer because of it. There’s nothing wrong with reading Terry Pratchett novels or Dragonlance or David Eddings or David Gemmil or Gerorge RR Martin or whoever, but I promised myself then and there that I would read more contemporary literature and Twentieth century classics. I started with “The World According to Garp” by John Irving, who remains one of my favourite authors… but that was just the start and from there I went on to discover Paul Auster, Kurt Vonnegut, Salman Rushdie and other fantastic, inspiring writers like them. I like reading books. For as long as I can remember, I have defined myself as a reader, and I just don’t feel like I’m reading enough. 

Perhaps less time in Skyrim would help…perhaps  not entirely uncoincidentally, I bought that game at around about the same time I started reading "Something Happened".  Hmm.  Well there’s 170 hours or so I could have spent in a good book, eh?

I’ll start tomorrow, maybe.  There's still a few more Draugr I need to deal with first....not to mention the fact that I haven't even started last week's New Yorker yet....time, time, time, see what's become of me.