nixsight

I’m a little behind the herd when it comes to Cormac McCarthy’s work. Despite watching and loving “No Country For Old Men“, I was totally oblivious to the fact that it wasn’t a Coen Brothers original until a few days later. Though I’ve heard stories about his mythical, apparently perfect novel “The Road“, I have to admit that the main reason I picked it up is because I heard about the imminent film of the book.

I’ve a standing rule that where possible, I’ll watch the film version of a story before I’ll read the book that it’s based on. Most of the time the, book is the original – and as such the intended, definitive – version, and generally this makes the book the purer, smarter version of the story. Or at least it’s difficult not to see it that way, if you encounter them in chronological order.

However, I think that a film can be a good example of its medium and still be a disappointing adaptation of a book. Knowing this isn’t enough, though – it’s really difficult to seperate the two in your head as you go. Even if you know that intellectually you should enjoy each on its merits, reading is a much more active mental and emotional process than watching a film, and after living a novel for the amount of time it takes to read it, it’s impossible not to have expectations when taking that experience into a cinema.

My feeling is that the effort to process all this while watching a movie is more hassle than it’s worth, so I reason that if I watch the film first, I’ll get to enjoy both. You have to be a certain sort of lunatic to retroactively dis-enjoy a film if when you eventually read the book you find it’s different – why would you do that to yourself? – and as I’m almost immune to plot-twists, it isn’t as if having a plot laid out for me in film is going to ruin my enjoyment of it in text.

(To clarify, I don’t mean that I’m immune to plot-twists because I work them out – I have never understood the desire to outsmart a story that so many people seem to have – it’s a story, people – it’s not a destination, it’s a ride. The way my mind works, it’s constantly ticking over possible places the story can go as I enjoy it, so a film falling in line with one of the vague thoughts I had about it is a pleasant buzz, not a groundbreaker.)

It’s one of hundreds of little tricks I use to make living among your species bearable – this way round, trying to work out why they made certain changes during the adaptation process can be an enjoyable exercise, rather than the disappointment spiral it can become if I’ve already got an emotional relationship with the original when I get to the copy.

So, anyway, that’s why I wasn’t going to read “The Road” before the film came out, but I’d heard so much about it that I put it on my birthday wish-list anyway, because I half expected not to get it till much later anyway.

When it turned up unexpectedly, my resolve held – it sat on the side with “No Country For Old Men” and “Let The Right One In”, waiting till some time in the distant future.

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More and more, the SD header becomes a misnomer… these clearly aren’t books I’ve read in the last seven days – seven weeks wouldn’t even cover it – but they are books worth praising.

Generation Kill by Evan Wright

The last non-fiction book I had read before this was David Simon’s “Homicide – A Year On The Killing Streets”, and prior to that, you have to go a few years before you get Michael J Fox’s biography “Lucky Man” – yes, yes, I have incredible taste.

The truth is, I wouldn’t have even heard of Evan Wright or “Generation Kill” if it hadn’t been for Simon’s own TV adaptation of this exceptional book.

Wright’s beautifully nuanced piece of war reporting describes the invasion of Iraq through the eyes of First Recon, who were among the first US soldiers to make their way across the confused social and physical geography of the country to take Baghdad in the early weeks of the war. Wright was an embedded reporter for Rolling Stone with the First Recon, and through a rigid journalistic approach to his experiences, he paints a picture of highly competent young men placed in the most extreme of circumstances, at the mercy of the sort of bureaucracy and leadership uncertainty that most of us face in our own much less life-or-death careers.

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I know I haven’t been great about reviewing stuff, lately, and as such failed to tell you that I read and enjoyed Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s first issue of “Batman & Robin”.

The second issue came out this week. Don’t have the time to review it properly, but whether or not you’ll like it will depend on whether you like this next image:

That’s right: Robin is fighting conjoined triplets… who can kick-box holes in walls!

Don’t worry, though… there’s still plenty of time to make up your mind about the new series. Just bear in mind that next month:

BAT-QUAD BIKE-GOD!!

It’s been sufficiently long enough that I can no longer be accused of being current or timely if I talk about some of the books that I bought at the Bristol convention last month.

The Sea #1-3/Flower Eater – Will Kirkby

Will Kirkby’s “The Sea” sneaks up on you. Each book is a cute, horizontally bound half-sized mini-comic, allowing the story to unfold in the three-panel chunks normally reserved for joke-centric funnies or webcomics, and indeed the first few strips in each follow that micro-delivery formula pretty well, although the joke set-up is used to deliver an immediately pretty macabre story.

This, for example, is the first page:

The simple, expressive cartoon lines, often taking a fixed view of the main character through each micro-chapter, adds to this sense of a fairly basic story, about a man adrift at sea with his somewhat troubled past – a claustrophobic monologue carrying us along.

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Ah, balls… Started this post a couple of weeks back, then lost the bugger in a stupid saving mishap. Let’s try again…

Y The Last Man Vol 9: Motherland/Vol 10: Whys & Wherefores – Brian K. Vaughan & Pia Guerra (with Goran Sudzuka & Jose Marzan Jr)

For a few months, “Y The Last Man” was my obsession.

With a high-concept premise, a mission-critical set of mysteries, and subplots and character arcs that flowed alongside and across each other in a perfectly natural way that washed over the reader like stir-fried genre-mashed awesome, the series was that rarest of things – an extended narrative that almost makes all of the cliches, like “page turner” and “couldn’t put it down”, acceptable to use.

Add to that a setting and scenario that couldn’t help but breed satire, social commentary and thought-provoking conflict, and characters that actually have their own characters, rather than just being extensions of the writer’s personality, or puppets at the service of the story, and you’ve got about the best long-form narrative in mainstream comics in probably over a decade.

In fact, though it’s a shade more populist than “Sandman”, and a tad less profane than “Preacher”, it’s a more consistent work than either of those hallowed books – it never quite hits Ennis’ best excesses, or Gaiman’s literary verve, but it never suffers the – however rare – terrible dips in quality that both of those books suffered, especially just prior to their final acts.

And the final two volumes of “Y” are no exception. Vaughan keeps things popping as much as in previous books, and Guerra does a good job of keeping the large cast and by now impressive array of plots and subplots coherent with clean lines and consistency of characterisation.

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Incognito #1 – Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips

“Incognito” is the latest collaboration by Brubaker and Phillips, and is being released alongside their noir masterpiece “Criminal”, through the Marvel imprint Icon.

This book, however, is a return to the smart, hard-nosed real-world super-hero narrative of their earlier work on “Sleeper”.

“Sleeper” was a gem of a book, making tough choices issue after issue with the pre-existing Wildstorm Universe, that was only minimally limited by the requirements of working with franchise characters – mainly because Brubaker and Phillips invented most of the ones that they used in the book, and mainly because Brubaker is that damn good at this, and very versatile.

However, there was always the fact of that broader continuity pressing down on the book, and while it didn’t affect one’s enjoyment of the series, it did mean that it was hard to see it entirely apart from the rest of that universe.

“Incognito” is something entirely new, and at this point totally self-contained, and it benefits from this from the off. This isn’t Brubaker scratching at the fringes of someone else’s superhero world, and forcing it into his vision, it’s him building his own from the ground up. Or from the protagonist out, really.

Brubaker’s usual superb characterisation is at play again, here, as he explores an intriguing idea – what if there was a “witness relocation” programme for super-villains, but one of them got bored? – which might be cool but ultimately gimmicky in another writer’s hands, but in his becomes a very real and layered examination of a nihilistic and misanthropic psyche, the nature of villainy, and of boredom, and otherwise a damn good yarn.

It always feels like Sean Phillips is upping his game when you see a new book by him, but then, it always feels like he is, and if one looks at his work between books, I think the quality is actually pretty consistent. I think this is just what it looks like when someone is really very good at their craft – a natural born artist.

Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t take a lot of work – Phillips has been doing this for a lot longer than one would think, considering his age – but every illustration, and the layout of every panel, is so well considered and beautifully drawn that it’s as if he’s doing it purely by instinct – comic art as air.

There is prettier art, but hardly anybody straight up draws comics as well as the man, and maybe the feeling that he keeps getting better is actually that the level of his storytelling is so consistently great compared to the rest of the field.

I actually can’t wait to see what happens next.

Kick-Ass #5 – Mark Millar & John Romita Jr

John Romita Jr is another example of a great artist who favours storytelling over bells and whistles, and I am a long time lover of his art, but I have to admit that his work on “Kick-Ass” hasn’t been my favourite of his, up till now.

However, I don’t know if it’s the remains of the Christmas spirit, the relief at finally seeing a new issue, or a nonsensical and uncharacteristic amount of goodwill built up in me for Mark Millar by the not-actually-awful “Wanted” movie – nonsensical because I’m deeply aware that the good things about the movie were mostly where the film totally deviated from his comic – but I really enjoyed this issue.

After a really reaching and agitating couple of issues, things seem to be moving again, and the book is living up to it’s potential strengths once more. The “real-life” aspects of the titular character’s life once again ring true – to at least a “decent teen drama” level, if not a really authentic teen lifestyle one.

I was particularly enamoured of the dilemma of what to do when faced with performing a potential act of heroism that wouldn’t involve simply beating up a street thug, and as such could potentially be instantly and arbitrarily fatal – though I think the fact that Millar couldn’t resist slipping a particular and hackneyed superhero rescue trope in there, as if treading hilarious new ground, was a sign that he hasn’t dropped all of his bad habits overnight.

But yeah, I really liked this issue. On balance, I think this series is going to make an at least enjoyable trade paperback.

Posting this remarkably late – on the fourth of the New Year – for which there is no excuse. Except, of course, there are plenty of excuses – it is, after all, hard drinkin’ season.

For the sake of organisation, I’m predating the post to a little earlier. Of course, I’ve long since realised that I’m the only person who cares about these things, but it feels only right to mention it!
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“The Cute Manifesto” is a collection of reflective works by James Kochalka.

Kochalka is an artist who is used to sharing his life and process with his audience – for years now he has been posting and publishing daily diary strips, sharing the most intimate details of his life with his wife, cat and kids, as well as his personal – and often not particularly flattering – personal musings.

As well as this, it’s fair to say that the majority of his other output has been keyed in to Kochalka’s own real world, with fictionalised extrapolations of his relationships, friendships and even existential personal crises making up the core of many of his books.

It’s fair to say that this isn’t a guy who makes comics to make a living – he makes comics because he has to, and has found that he can make a living doing it almost incidentally. Even when he’s making stuff up, you get the feeling that it’s still happening for him, at some level.

So then there’s this book. Which is, I suppose, an even more open examination of what Kochalka’s relationship to his work is, disguised as a mixture of journal pieces that are a little longer than his daily strips and editorial/manifesto pieces.

The name of the collection is a bit misleading – the book itself seems more defined by the contrast between the definitive and proclamatory nature of his two “Craft” essays, and the more expansive and meditative “Reinventing Everything” stories. The “Cute Manifesto” itself, more than anything, seems to give the book it’s aesthetic product design – in which Kochalka allocates each story with an image of his son. The tract that takes the name, also included, is worthwhile, but doesn’t carry the same weight as the previously mentioned items.

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Not reading as much as I am writing at the moment, but I did take time out to play a couple of games.

As always, I’d love to hear what you think!

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