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Whats everyone reading?

Started by Paul faplad Finch, 30 March, 2009, 10:04:36 PM

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positronic

Quote from: JOE SOAP on 06 June, 2017, 01:31:42 PM
Quote from: positronic on 02 June, 2017, 09:09:12 AM
it seems clear to me that Robocop (1987) was influenced by the role of media played in Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns released just a year earlier

The news/media breaks and adverts that interject and inform RoboCop's story were more likely taken from the frequent and integral FasFax segments in Howard Chaykin's satire American Flagg - a comic that heavily influenced the tone and corporate ownership theme/plot of the film (Howard Chaykin gets a thank you in the end-credits) and was first published in 1983. It also features a Robot Cop as a supporting character. The Corporate Wars

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Flagg!



And Chaykin's American Flagg! (which I loved, and coincidentally had just ordered the Image hardcover collecting of the first 14 issues, a week ago) always seemed a little influenced by (or maybe "a reaction to" would be more accurate) Judge Dredd to me. At least it seemed to have a similar satirical bent to it. In terms of being well-known however, it was greatly overshadowed by TDKR.

It's funny you use the example page you've shown, because that really doesn't resemble the way the media breaks appear in Robocop -- but they DO resemble the way Frank Miller drew the media commentators in TDKR. In American Flagg! the media commentary focuses on the interviewees, not the broadcasters, reducing the latter to tiny heads almost like what you traditionally see in comics where a sequence is being narrated through captions by another character.

JOE SOAP

#6181
Quote from: positronic on 08 June, 2017, 11:44:14 AMAnd Chaykin's American Flagg! (which I loved, and coincidentally had just ordered the Image hardcover collecting of the first 14 issues, a week ago) always seemed a little influenced by (or maybe "a reaction to" would be more accurate) Judge Dredd to me.


The influence of Dredd is acknowledged, if I remember correctly, in an op-ed/letter published in the first or at least one the early issues of American Flagg - as is both Flagg and Dredd's influence on RoboCop by Howard Chaykin:

Howard Chaykin: Conversations excerpt 1

Howard Chaykin: Conversations excerpt 2


Quote from: positronic on 08 June, 2017, 11:44:14 AMIt's funny you use the example page you've shown, because that really doesn't resemble the way the media breaks appear in Robocop -- but they DO resemble the way Frank Miller drew the media commentators in TDKR.

In American Flagg! the media commentary focuses on the interviewees, not the broadcasters, reducing the latter to tiny heads almost like what you traditionally see in comics where a sequence is being narrated through captions by another character.

On the contrary, Flagg's FasFax inserts clearly resemble the media breaks in RoboCop and they function with the exact same intention of using news media and ads as diegetic disruptions: mixing the idea of trashy commercial TV with cinematic/comic drama, yet also forming a significant part of the narrative whole.

As an influence on RoboCop, American Flagg was also more than likely an influence on Frank Miller - there's similarity between the design of the Go-Gangs and The Mutants in TDKR - so it's swings and roundabouts in the mid 1980s zeitgeist but American Flagg got there first and was clearly in the minds of the writers of RoboCop when they were writing the script between 1984-1986. TDKRs later influence was more a compounding of those ideas formulated in Flagg.

The fourth draft of RoboCop was done by 10 June 1986 and contains interstitial segments titled 'Media Breaks' - TDKR was concurrently being published as individual issues.

http://www.robocoparchive.com/info/robocop1-script.pdf




Huey2

"just finished the first book of Injection by Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey and it is bloody brilliant! I realise with the first book it's just really started, but what a fantastic introduction to the world and characters with a brilliant core idea"

Injection is great!
I'd also recommend Ellis' prose novel "Crooked Little Vein" which is a cracking story.

Mikey

Oh, don't worry - I've read Crooked Little Vein too!
To tell the truth, you can all get screwed.

Colin YNWA

Well Locke and Key just keeps getting better and better bloody hell. I can't remember I had such a physical reaction to comic as I did at the end of Book 4. Good lord that was so impecibly timed, so utterly tense - so bloody fantastic. The art still isn't 100% for me but its not at all detracting from Joe Hills brilliance and I therefore have to admit Rodriguez's storytelling is astonishing, even if his style isn't for me, he's conveying story and emotion to perfection and so engaging me regardless of my superficial distaste so to a degree he deserves even more credit...

...wow...

any way enough I can cram in another couple of issues tonight I reckon...

Colin YNWA

And I've just finished it and I'll call it now. Locke and Key sits alongside Grendal, Concrete the first 200 issues if Cerebus and the 70s writing of Jack Kirby as one of the best comics ever. I'd no doubt amend and add to that list, Nikolai Dante, John Smith's 2000ad work, Wagner Dredd etc but basically the specifics are not important the quality of the peers is all that matters. Basically what I'm saying is that Locke and Key is amongst the very, very finest comics ever.

Just brilliant.

The Adventurer

Yowsa, that's some seriously high praise. I might need to revisit it sooner rather then later.

THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Tjm86

Currently reading Stephen Baxter's Titan as I'm slowly working through his back catalogue.  It always amuses me how cynical he can be at times.  There's almost a nihilist vein to his work.  Then midway through the book I have to do a double take.  I begin to wonder if I've picked up a paper instead as I read about the election of an American President that is highly isolationist, aggressive and controversial and builds a wall between America and Mexico.  He wrote this 20 years ago as an alternate history!

Professor Bear

#6188
I really liked Damnation Alley, so gave Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes In Amber a go seeing as Lord Of Light looks like too large a page count when I have a small mountain of Stephen Kings and at least 80 of the top 100 science fiction novels of all time still to get through, but more fool me, as it's the first in a trilogy of 10 books.
Though possible not at the time of writing, the plot seems in these days to be a well-worn path - practically urban fantasy in its early days - but I don't really read enough proper fantasy to judge it, as I don't particularly fancy books in my life about giant-titted redheads going on a quest to find secret treasure while pursued by the Ork King or whatever fantasy books are actually about.  I didn't know the full plot and went into it cold: a seeming amnesiac grifter wakes up in a hospital and gradually pieces together who he is and blah de blah - it's basically the kind of thing I could see a tv producer pitching in a fit of desperation after all his other shows got knocked back and he had to pull something out of his ass and somehow kept talking and got from Lost to Lord of the Rings before getting the green light, and the plot progression - with its occasionally arbitrary jumps in time and major events and battles dismissed in a sentence here or there - seems like the kind of thing that would happen in a mid-budget telly show.  It actually reminds me very much of Wayward Pines in the abstract, though I suspect if I actually watched Once Upon A Time more of this might seem familiar to me.

An enjoyable enough page-turner not harmed by its overly-familiar tropes.  Zelazny has a good writing voice and keeps things cracking along, at least enough to keep me going into Guns Of Avalon, which continues the story but effectively ends on a cliffhanger of sorts, or at the very least lacks any solid jump-off point.  Whatevs, I think I'll pause at this point and re-evaluate going any further, even though I am reliably informed you can stop reading at the fourth or fifth book when the Corwin character runs his course.  I am not sure I want serialised fantasy in what I laughably refer to between drunken sobs as my life.

Also Star Trek: Kobayashi Maru, which is a testament to the kind of shit you can find in charity shops, and also a testament to the need of writers to keep them Benjis rolling in even when they can't force their heart into a project.  Essentially a retread of Galileo Seven but with the arguing and boisterous giants replaced with short stories about how each character tackled the titular no-win scenario in their Starfleet days, I had two takeaways:
1 - each character in this substandard literary landfill from the late 1980s has a better approach to the simulation than the Kirk character in the Trek reboot movie, though Novel Kirk's resolution seemingly hinges on his being the kind of egomaniacal knuckle-dragging simpleton and two-dimensional misrepresentation of the TOS character that the Trek reboot assumes him to be, and
2 - Trek writers really, really struggle with the idea of post-race humanity, as this is like the third tie-in book where Sulu's backstory is reduced to knuckle-biting racial caricature, though arguably nowhere near as bad as that Mike W Barr thing where Sulu remembers his youth in an internment camp YES THAT WAS A THING.
Anyhoo this wasn't very good.  Unlike other Trek tie-in novels, he added with a suspicious lack of earnestness.

Smith

I finished BPRD,and I have to say,Hell on Earth cycle is not worth it.  :(

I, Cosh

Quote from: Professor Bear on 18 June, 2017, 12:02:29 AM
I really liked Damnation Alley, so gave Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes In Amber a go seeing as Lord Of Light looks like too large a page count when I have a small mountain of Stephen Kings and at least 80 of the top 100 science fiction novels of all time still to get through, but more fool me, as it's the first in a trilogy of 10 books.
Lord of Light may be a bulging sackful compared to Nine Princes in Amber but is barely a footnote alongside the bloated discharge of yer man King. It's comfortably Zelazny's best, would be pretty high up my all-time sci-fi/fantasy/whatever list and does not simply stop halfway through to be continued in the next volume. The vaguely counter-cultural grifter with a heart of gold is very much the archetypal Zelazny protagonist though.
We never really die.

TordelBack

Quote from: I, Cosh on 20 June, 2017, 07:55:12 AM
Quote from: Professor Bear on 18 June, 2017, 12:02:29 AM
I really liked Damnation Alley, so gave Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes In Amber a go seeing as Lord Of Light looks like too large a page count when I have a small mountain of Stephen Kings and at least 80 of the top 100 science fiction novels of all time still to get through, but more fool me, as it's the first in a trilogy of 10 books.
Lord of Light may be a bulging sackful compared to Nine Princes in Amber but is barely a footnote alongside the bloated discharge of yer man King. It's comfortably Zelazny's best, would be pretty high up my all-time sci-fi/fantasy/whatever list and does not simply stop halfway through to be continued in the next volume. The vaguely counter-cultural grifter with a heart of gold is very much the archetypal Zelazny protagonist though.

Everything Cosh said. Take a deep breath and dive in - once you've the first dozen pages read you won't even notice the rest. Zelazny's best book by some measure.

JOE SOAP

#6192
Instead of the world getting a Jack Kirby theme park Ben Affleck got an Oscar.




TordelBack

Hey now, that's neither fair nor accurate.



He has two.

Professor Bear

Masters of the Universe was a Fourth World movie.  That'll just have to do.