Whats everyone reading?

[Ghastly McNasty]

Although I loved Kick Ass 1, I've just finished Kick Ass 2 and, not wanting to be a hater, thought it was pretty rubbish. Shame really.

[Professor Bear]

Saga, the latest offering from BKV and Fiona Staples, which is an ongoing sci-fantasy about two fugitives in an alien warzone narrated by their newborn child.  It's rather reliant upon cliche, though that could just be my own genre familiarity scratching at my critical faculties, as one sequence in particular did bring me out of the story to think that it's nice one or more of the creators is a Final Fantasy fan.  An okayish first issue - not great, but not terrible, either.

Serenity: Better Days is also reliant upon cliche - and coincidence - more than is healthy for a story, and somewhere along the lines it stopped being about cowboys in space, too.  A couple of out of character moments occur, though I suspect this is just to give certain characters something to do, even if that means Book has to battle a robot with a sword.  Not great.

[Roger Godpleton]

Read a couple of GNs in the car today, starting with Fanta's Joost Swarte collection, Is That All There Is? which is highly recommended, especially if you're a neophyte like I was. His linework is some of the best you'll ever see, with more than one page leaving me astounded. The humour often seems aggressive, but the cartooning expresses it almost perfectly, effortlessly relaying the intent whilst still conveying the sense of isolation and confusion that I always look for in art and fiction.

Next was Athos in America. Jason is my favourite living cartoonist, and this feels like his darkest and most personal body of work yet, with a rigid four panel page structure being used to a practically bludgeoning extent. It's still hilarious, of course, but never before has he conveyed the feelings of alienation and loneliness that have always been present in such a piercing manner.

A good day's reading, in all.

[GordyM]

Artifacts #14. Glad to see this series picking back up after the mess it became around 6 with nothing more than panel after panel of second-tier characters slapping each other.

[Gonk]

"Waiting For Godot" by Samuel Beckett. Nothing happens in this play. Twice.

[HOO-HAA]

"Waiting For Godot" by Samuel Beckett. Nothing happens in this play. Twice.

Ha! I studied that back in school.

*despairing ah*

[James Stacey]

I studied it too. Nothing happens in both acts but lots happens between them if I remember correctly. I saw a good version in London once with Rik Mayall and Ade Edmonson, but our teacher was very unhappy the line 'People are apes' was changed to 'people are cunts'. I felt it gave it more gravitas.

[Gonk]

Well it brought it to a wider audience with those two in it I suppose. People can always read the original version for themselves if they don't like a particular interpretation of it. Reading some poetry by Sylvia Plath at the moment...


         WORDS

Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes travelling
Off from the centre like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water stiving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later
I encounter them on the road---

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

[Professor Bear]

Rage, the novel based on the videogame of the same name, which I bought because I am a sucker for trash like this in general, but also because I have a jones for post-apocalyptic fiction at the minute.  It's hard to apply objective criticism to something like this, and that is good because by all objective standards of criticism it fails: non-existent plot, typos, poor grammar (on at least one occasion I spent more time trying to make sense of one line of prose than it took me to read the page around it), a nonentity main character, no humour or awareness... and yet even by the relative standards of the expectations I had of a cash-in novel based on a first person shooter that averages a hundred or so words a page and has chapter breaks every five or six pages, it also fails in many ways which can be condensed down to one difficulty it has above all others: it has nothing to do with the game.
While writers could be forgiven for making up their own plot for an adaptation of Jetpac, a 21st century multi-platform videogame comes with a detailed fictional world in which different media like novels, audiobooks, comics, movies, iPhone apps can exist without contradicting each other (see Fallout, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, etc) - making up a plot is a dumb idea even before you get to the problem that the novel's plot is actually worse than the plot of the game, which is saying something.  It does have one thing in common with the game, though, and that's an utterly uninteresting main character who wakes up from a slumber and is told by some people to go kill some other people so that's what he does in both game and novel, though I actually prefer the game's lack of a rationale for the main character to do anything over the novel's lazy cliches.  Action is described in a very pedestrian manner, too, and there are chapters - not every chapter, just the odd one - where for... some reason everybody... speaks with ellipses dropped at... random into sentences and it is impossible... to see what the author intends in terms of the cadence or rhythm... of the speech.  I have read some very entertaining pulp novels tied into larger fictional worlds that helped give the impression the writers weren't just tossing off pages over a beer or ten, but I have a genuine suspicion that the writer of Rage might have given the odd chapter of this to his mates to write while they were all down the pub, which I admit sounds like a great job to have.
All the same, this is a dreadful book, and that is coming from someone who liked The Postman.

[GordyM]

Infinite Vacation: a comic mini-series based around the fantastic idea of buying a holiday in a parallel universe as an alternate version of you. There's some really good storytelling going on in this title but it's been hampered by a terrible release schedule. I'd suggest waiting for the trade.

[the 'artist' formerly known as Slips]

Currently reading Guant's Ghosts Founding by Dan Abnett.  Its err... OK probably better than OK.  But its not a riproaring page turner, which would suit my hour on the train!
Im not normally a Warhammer Fan, so maybe my unfamilairity with the source material doesnt help! 

[judgefloyd]

Me, I'm reading Amo, Amas, Amat, a jocular book about learning Latin, by Harry Mount.   It has interesting moments, but suffers from the author thinking he's PG Wodehouse (he isn't) and from overquoting of funny stuff he's heard - like the Latin-Pedant-Centurion scene from Life of Brian in it's entirety. 

I'm also checking out 'Modern Manners' from back when PJ O'Rourke was funny.  All the Reagan and cocaine jokes seem a little dated (especially the latter) and there is a bizarre attempt to English-ize it; so 'episocopalians' become Angicans, Dartmouth becomes Sussex, that sort of thing.  Not only does this weaken the book a bit, it seems pretty unneccesary because it's obviously not a British effort and surely poms would be able to work out the American dialogue.  Oh well, must have been before he was famous.

Also reading the Guardian Weekly and the London Review of Books, both of which are terrific.

[TordelBack]

Thought I'd swim against the current of the forum these days and post something about 2000AD...

I've just finished a re-read of my very small selection of non-Casefiles Dredd GNs.  These are Blind Justice, The Pit, The Hunting Party and The Scorpion Dance (also have America, but that's a seperate tale).  I bought most of these after my return to squaxxdom in 1999 in an effort to bring myself up to speed on the supporting cast Dredd seemed to have accumulated while I was away (Guthrie, DeMarco, Edgar, Buell etc.). 

Anyway, read together those four books make for a fantastic ongoing series, with a strong central theme of the ageing Dredd's role within Justice Department, as both mentor and antagonist, explored through a wide range of settings and situations.  DeMarco's story is much more coherent than I remembered, and it's a pity that she hasn't really found a home as a post-judicial character despite variable efforts in DeMarco PI and The Simping Detective.  Maybe she could meet Beeny and Vienna for cocktails in the Quite Nice Bar every now and again, have a natter and a moan.

It's really engaging stuff, and I enjoyed seeing the lead-up to The Pit in 'The Cal Tapes' (which I hadn't noticed before), and it's brilliantly reversed epilogue in 'Beyond the Call of Duty' and 'The Scorpion Dance'.  Looking forward to seeing all this in order in the Casefiles.

One of the big surprises for me was the art on The Pit.  I'd always thought that Lee Sullivan's and particularly Alex Ronald's art let down what was otherwise a brilliant story, bookended by divine Ezquerra work.  Now, returning with a critical eye after a dozen years, I find that's not the case at all.  There's some problems with computer colouring that doesn't quite gel with Ronald's lines, especially on faces, but overall it's all pretty good stuff, with some nice character work and action.

I feel bad about my years of dismissive attitude, and wonder what has changed in my own tastes that I see real strengths in both artists' works that I completely overlooked before.   

One question I had, and here I hesitate lest I awaken the shade of Sc*j*, was about 'The Cal Tapes': do we ever find out if Dredd actually looked at the DNA evidence indicating Polders was his aunt, not his mother?  It seems to be left open as to whether his dismissal of the accusation as faked by Cal is based purely on determination or knowledge.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

I should dig out some of my old progs. I remember really enjoying The Cal Files and all the intrigue. Does anyone know if Edgar's still alive? She and Dredd had a fantastic dynamic going on between them. Talking about this era of 2000AD, does anyone remember Luke Kirby? I enjoyed those stories. Must find out if they ever released any trades.

Anyway, a recap on my own reading, because I just know you're dying to hear about it.

I'm up to speed on the Song of Fire and Ice Saga, having read all 5 available books. To be honest I think he (GRRM) could have told the same story in three and a half books, but then again, I haven't read the whole series so some of the 'extra' threads might be needed to tie the whole thing together at its conclusion. [spoiler]E.g Arya Stark, I have no idea what the point of her plotline is. She's learning to be an assassin now, but its not clear how that's going to fit in with the rest of plot.[/spoiler]

Also read The Wee Free Men by Pratchett. Lots of fun. Hat Full of Sky next and I'm looking forward to it

[TordelBack]

Does anyone know if Edgar's still alive. She and Dredd had a fantastic dynamic going on between them.

Alas Judge Edgar died of natural causes (in 'The Edgar Case') back before Tour of Duty (but not before eroding Dredd's powerbase in the upper echelons of the Dept, leading into the Sinfield situation...).  And you're right of course, Cal Files, not Cal Tapes (thinking of The Falucci Tape there).