I’m not sure what is required to graduate from “manga neophyte” status, but whatever it is, I haven’t done it. I’m still pretty new at it. I’ve been trying out some new titles lately, but such is my naivete regarding manga that I was unaware that American Manga is to be avoided at all costs (numbers 90 and 6, respectively). Foolishly, then, I wandered unawares into the world of Antarctic Press.

Antarctic Press (AP), from what I can tell, only does American manga. That is, books that attempt to match the look-and-feel of honest-to-gosh manga, but are created by American writers and artists. Honestly, I’m not sure why I all of a sudden seemed to order a bunch of AP books to try out, but here I am with a little stack of them.

The first two titles I grabbed were Neotopia and Legends From Darkwood. Both of these were introduced to me by TJ, who let me borrow his copies of the individual issues, and I enjoyed them enough that when I saw collected digest versions offered, I went ahead and got copies of my own. Neotopia is probably the best of the lot, a charmingly illustrated story taking place in the sort of fantasy-cum-industry world common to a lot of Japanese manga. Its creator, Rod Espinosa, also produced the beautiful The Courageous Princess, which I also have. The comics of Neotopia are up to, I think, volume five, but the pocket digests have only reprinted through volume two (though volume three has been solicited.) TJ says he prefers the art in the larger format of the individual issues rather than the digest-size manga, but I kind of feel the opposite. For reasons I can’t explain, I think Espinosa’s art appeals to me even more at the smaller size.

Legends From Darkwood is another fun fantasy title set in the same kind of world, but with a dark humor element behind it. Only virgins can catch unicorns, so if the most successful hunter wants to keep bringing in the horned animals that everyone loves (to eat), she’s gotta keep her pants on. But when that goes wrong, it’s time for plan B. Again, a light, fun story with nice art that I think continues to look fine at reduced size.

The next title I got was I Hunt Monsters, which is co-created by Rod Espinosa. The idea is a standard one: guy finds out he’s heir to a long line of monster-hunters, accidentally sets a bunch free, now must use his mystical abilities and cadre of oddball friends to round them back up. Unfortunately, this one was so by-the-numbers that I found it to be pointless. There’s not a single original element here, and the artwork, oh my. It’s more of the ACTION!!!! type of drawing, where everyone is constantly in mid-seizure, no matter what’s going on. And there’s one character who’s head just ain’t right. I’m all for stylized art and all, but seriously, the top of this woman’s head is dangerously misshapen. It really started to get on my nerves after a while. With this title, the reduced art started to be a problem. Since every panel was an ACTION!!!! panel, a lot of the action sequences, while possibly very effective and exciting in their original formal, became a crowded jumble of speed lines.

Then I got The Agents. This was a 6-issue miniseries originally done through Image comics a couple years ago. It’s written by Kevin Gunstone and drawn by Ben Dunn, who Antarctic hails in its cover blurbs as “The Godfather of American Manga!” It looks like he’s the creator of Ninja High School, which I’m familiar with only by reputation. The Agents is a pastiche-slash-homage-slash-ripoff of British 60’s spy fiction. Everyone’s here, from Bond to Emma Peel to the Green Hornet(?) to the Thunderbirds. Even Doctor Who makes a cameo appearance (though really, guys, shouldn’t it be Pertwee’s Doctor instead of Tom Baker’s). The plot is, thirty years ago, an Ernst Blofeld-type mastermind successfully nuked Washington and Moscow, ending the cold war and returning Great Britain to the role of sole superpower. Since then, a variety of secret agents with amazing hardware have kept that power strong. But now that same criminal mastermind is dying and wants to share his advanced knowledge with the rest of the world for the betterment of mankind. Can he be trusted? And does mankind want to be bettered? This was originally six parts, and by part two I was seriously rolling my eyes. However, somewhere in part three, everything clicked for me, and I started to have fun. I gotta say, this book’s a hoot. Sure, there’s not a little bit of misogyny in it, and the plot starts to get absurdly complex, but these are 60’s era spy stories we’re talking about here.

And then came…Twilight X. Oh, my. On paper, Twilight X looks right up my alley. From the back cover: “Eleven years of war have left the Earth in turmoil. The survivors are left to struggle against hostile forces bent upon claiming what’s left of a ruined, lawless planet.” I like me some post-apocalyptic drama, so naturally this seemed worth checking out. In fact, it appears I ordered TWO volumes of it.

Where to begin? Well, let’s say that post-apocalyptic isn’t quite the right description. In this ruined, lawless world, nothing seems overly ruined. Hard to say for sure, though, since the action never seems to take place anywhere in particular. It’s on…a beach, a boat, some jungle. No clue as to where any of this is supposed to be. The characters run around shooting at each other for no well-explained reason. There’s a LOT of military hardware just laying around. Need a jeep? There’s guaranteed to be one along soon. A helicopter? Take your pick of several. A luxury speedboat? One just happens to be parked at the pier you’re standing by, with the keys conveniently in it.

The characters. There’s Jed Saxon, he’s the hero. Ex-Special Forces, Action Saxon can pretty much do anything. The curious lack of pupils in his eyes suggest he’s a descendent of Little Orphan Annie’s. He meets the other main character, his love interest, when he sneaks up on a car that she and her boyfriend are having a fight in, pulls the boyfriend out, kills him, and then steals the car. This almost immediately makes him insanely desirable to…Toots. Yes, this is her name, Toots. Toots is described on the back cover (her name is noticeably omitted) as “enigmatic,” which seems to mean “vapid”. Toots exists only to worship Jed, offer him sex, and get kidnapped.

The artist can certainly draw military hardware, and can draw manga-style humans about as well as anyone who seems to be interested in doing so can. The artwork is constantly vacillating from “looking very close to at least a somewhat well-done faux-manga webcomic” to “might have looked better in its original medium of Erasermate on 8th-grade History notebook.”

Like I said, I somehow ended up with two volumes of this, and it didn’t improve much with time. If my words here can keep just one person from purchasing this, it will be worth it, though. So is there a good, Fallout-style post-apocalyptic book out there I should look into?

After that debacle, I was hoping to end my tour of Antarctica on a high note, and I sort of did. The final book I got was the digest version of the miniseries, Assembly. It’s the story of a young woman living in an oppressive nation that is at war with its neighbors for unspecified reasons. Despite her older sister’s warnings, she runs off and joins the army, but eventually gets in over her head.

The artwork in here is really nice, with a softness that I wasn’t really expecting. The characters (there are really only one and a half) are well-rounded, with Shon being sympathetic, even though she doesn’t seem to have thought things out very well. But unfortunately, the promise of the first half of the story is wasted by the tragic thud of the second half. Things it seems we’re eventually going to learn about, such as, for example, the nature of this constant war, are never addressed. The main implement of battle is, of course (this is still manga) mechs, and mech-on-mech action is seldom done well. The sketches in the back make it clear that creator Sherard Jackson had very specific goals in mind for the mech designs, but on the page it’s just a jumble of machinery. I had no idea who was who and on what side. Shon is trained in the military as a battlefield surgeon, though you know she’s going to get behind the wheel of a mech eventually, because remember, this is a manga. How does this happen? An officer is so impressed with her skills as a surgeon that he immediately has her reassigned to front-line combat. Zuh? And finally, tragically, all of this is heading towards an ending that is incredibly hokey and predictable. Assembly wants very much to be an Important statement on War, but it’s ultimately extremely shallow. It’s not bad to look at, and there’s a good story that could have come out of it, but it disappoints in the end.

So that’s my adventures in American manga. Six titles, three of which I liked, two of which I didn’t, and one of which was kind of meh. Could have been worse, I think. Granted, in the backs of these I saw ads for other AP offerings that I wouldn’t read on a salary, but still, I’m not sure these odds are that different from any other manga company, American or otherwise, or any other comic company, for that matter.

In addition to being a Godless Communist, a freedom-hating terrorist sympathizer, and one of the only 15 fat nerd comics bloggers who hate everything, I’m also a stoned slacker. So it’s no surprise that I enjoy The Daily Show on Comedy Central. I won’t bore you with the usual accolades; if you don’t know why it’s great, I can’t imagine you’re here reading this.

We watch the 7pm incarnation, which is the rerun of the previous evening’s late night one (the show comes on past pumpkin time for me), which is why I’m late on this one. The guest a few nights ago was Peter Jennings, head newscaster for ABC news and Canadian Propaganda Agent according to my friend Chris. Peter Jennings was on to discuss the news story that is so important, an upcoming two-hour report was necessary to give it the serious in-depth coverage it deserves. That story is, of course: The Many Lies of the Bush Administration Are UFOs Real?

Yes, that’s right. While bloggers were busy discovering the existence of a fake reporter in the White House Press Pool who only existed to do the job of a “fluffer” (look it up, kids), Jennings’ crack team was getting to the bottom of this whole flying saucer issue.

I applaud host Jon Stewart for not letting this one sit and asking, pretty much flat-out, “With so many important stories going on right now, why UFOs? Didn’t anyone think that maybe the Iraq war was a bigger story?” Jennings’ response: “NOPE!” Because, and this is still whipping my head around in circles, ABC found out that more people want to hear about UFOs than the Iraq War.

Time was when the media reported on stories the people needed to know about in order to stay informed. In our more enlightened age, we find out from the horse’s mouth that what’s really important is whatever the people want to hear about. They don’t want to hear about boring old lies told to manufacture a fake Social Security crisis so that Republicans can get the elderly and the poor to pay for their own screwing over. Who cares if genocide is being allowed to take place in Africa because nobody will act until we can figure out if it’s really genocide or just sorta genocide. Syria, Iran, whatever. Just bomb whoever you want and tell me more about them Martians and their flyin’ saucers.

And then, oh man, it got even better. Then Jennings has the unmitigated nerve, to start cracking on bloggers! Thankfully, Stewart didn’t let that go either, pointing out that bloggers have done a hell of a lot more actual journalism than the networks have done recently. Jennings’ response to that was a condescending, “Oh, I’m just joshin’. They’re a great bunch of kids and I love their stuff.” Then he added: “But I think they confuse the consumer.”

You see, Jennings is concerned about bloggers as a news source because there’s no quality control. You just don’t know who they are, see. You got no way to check their credentials. Never mind that the stock-in-trade of journalism are facts, that a good journalist (professional or otherwise) lets you know the sources of these facts, and you can verify to see if she’s reporting them accurately or not. Unless you can look at the person and say, “Ah yes, I recognize that journalist as someone who is often on my television” you just have no way of knowing. So while you have no way of knowing whether or not a story you read via Daily Kos about Bush canceling a “town hall” meeting in Germany because they wouldn’t let him script and stage the entire event like he does in America is true, you can be sure that with the Peter Jennings Seal of Quality, you’re getting only the freshest, tastiest UFO coverage.

This is just sad. It was especially painful to see Jennings sitting there making an ass out of himself and not even realizing he was doing so. How can he be saying ridiculous things that belie any integrity he’s had as a journalist - he’s a mainstream media reporter! If it doesn’t matter to him, how can it possibly matter to anyone else? Hell, even though Fox only screams Republican talking points, at least they scream Republican talking points about actual current events and not frickin’ UFOs.

Sometimes, you may have noticed, I say what’s on my mind, without considering first that my mind is often full of dumb things. For some time I’ve gone off on how disinterested I am in indie, autobiographical comics. I may have said some things rashly.

Not all things. I do reiterate that if you’re an indie creator who wants to sell me his tale of woe and rejection at being an outcast geek and not finding love, well, try it again with robots and penguins and then I might be interested. Like all genres, there’s a lot of junk out there, and overwrought autobiographical comics are particularly full of junk. (And, side note, music. What is up with some of these musicians lately? I never thought I would hear someone so whiny and pathetic he makes Morrissey sound like Ministry, but KEXP is crawling with such things!) The McSweeney’s Volume 13 anthology was fat-packed with neurotic creators all putting the exact same pathetic lives on display. Perhaps someone with a weblog shouldn’t be cracking on narcissism, though. What was the question again?

Oh, right. Well there are two entities I seem to have tarred with that brush that I now know, thanks to the Springfield Public Library, I was wrong about. Unfortunately, neither of these is a surprise to anyone else, so I’m not enlightening here so much as confessing.

The first is Paul Hornschemeier’s Mother, Come Home. This was getting rave reviews about the time I finally checked out Craig Thompson’s Blankets, which was getting similar rave reviews. But my coolness towards the latter (I didn’t dislike it, just don’t know why everyone is having fits over it.) tainted my reasoning about the former. I assumed it was of the same ilk, and I now know I was quite wrong.

Mother, Come Home is a notable book for many reasons. First and foremost is the story. This is a truly mature book about a young boy coming to terms with his mother’s death and with his father’s inability to come to terms with it. The thing that struck me about the story is that I don’t know if it’s “true” in any sense of the word, based on actual real-life events and I don’t want to know. It doesn’t have to be true, and I hope it isn’t, because more writers need to be looking less to their own lives and more towards telling quality stories. The “autobiography” here is a non-issue. It’s simply an adult story of loss and grief told in a graphic form.

The comparison to Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan are unavoidable. Both artists use a similar style of highly-detailed trivialities in their artwork, expressing human faces with a few expertly-chosen lines and inanimate object with more. Both stories describe abysses of longing and loneliness. And both, I would argue, couldn’t be told as conventional prose novels.

Prose, at least for me, is noisy. Even when nothing is going on, when the characters are, for example, lost in the desert with no hope in sight, words continue to barrage the reader. In these books, however, where silence and emptiness are an integral part of the story, the barren, wordless panels help shape it.

It also goes without saying that the subject matter…the loss of the mother and the effect on the two survivors, is expertly handled. Mother, Come Home, is a study in grief and acceptance, with the realization that “acceptance” does not always mean positive things. It doesn’t deserve to be placed in the same category as so many of the other autobiographical or even pseudo-autobiographical works out there. It’s something else.

The other book I got was American Splendor by Harvey Pekar. This is the anthology from 1991, which is all the library had on the shelf. I’ve seen and enjoyed the movie and was sort of interested in checking out the actual books, but again, I was leery of how much I wanted to read not only an autobiographical book, but one in which the author was purposely making it so.

Once again, I was wrong. While we certainly do get bizarre glances at Pekar’s life, with the trivialities and neuroses that encompass it, we also get his observations of others, which are quite interesting and astute. Pekar presents this false persona of some Everyman schmuck, just trying to get by, but he has knowledge, interests, and passions that go beyond simple day-in-the-life anecdotes. Unlike some of the other autobio works I’ve sampled, there’s no need for him to stretch to encompass others into the solipsistic narrative, because Pekar is interested in other people. At the points when he seems to be at his most obnoxious, on the Letterman show, he’s actually trying to steer the conversation away from him, towards a topic which affects far more people, and is frustrated by his inability to do so. Instead of hitting small targets and pretending to hit big ones, Pekar does the exact opposite. It’s no wonder he’s managed to attract such a wide range of talent to his cause, and I’m now eagerly looking forward to getting more.

(Pekar also appeals to me in another way. He states straight out that the reason he’s in his “crummy, dead-end job” is because he makes enough to support himself and values his time more. Preach on, brother! )

My avoidance of autobio comics on general principle, while overzealous in these two cases, still holds. In general, I’m not interested in movies, books, or TV shows in which the human spirit triumphs, hearts are broken and mended, and parents are ultimately appreciated. I admit I like things a bit more slam-pow than that, in most cases. There’s a fine line between “character-study” and “navel-gazing” and I’ve been on the wrong side of that line more than a few times (having once been a teenager and all.) I also think it’s a shame that if a story comes along in which real people interact in real situations with real results, and no zombies, aliens, secret agents, or superheroes wander in at any point, we assume the result is “autobiographical,” as though comics writers are incapable of the imaginative leaps required to create a main character that isn’t themselves. No one assumes Joyce Carol Oates actually went through every experience described in her fiction. That is, after all, why it’s called “fiction.”

Of course, it’s no secret to anyone that a large portion of any particular genre of material isn’t very good, even stuff people proclaim is amazing. In fact Sturgeon’s Law blah blah blah Dave’s Corollary to Sturgeon’s Law blah blah blah. And I made a mistake in dismissing these two works out of hand. Not that I assumed people were wrong about them and they weren’t good, just that they didn’t seem like something that would appeal to me. They did and do, and if that encourages someone just as skeptical to pick them up, all the better. I got no problem being wrong and finding good reads as a result.

Addendum: the Pekar anthology ends with this thought, which really turned my head around: “Q: How can Democracy function in a nation full of people who believe that their lives and their neighbors’ lives are insignificant? A: In such a situation Democracy functions imperfectly at best.”

When your pizza place doesn’t take anything except cash, you are saying the following three things:

1) We have decided to make the ultimate no-hassle food decision slightly more hasselous.

2) We enjoy being robbed.

3) We prefer dealing only in a method of exchange that is a mere one step above having you bring in pigs and chickens to barter.

And on top of this, when I come in after fifteen minutes to pick up my order and discover you haven’t even put it in the oven yet, it tells me this:

Since all pretense of convenience has been removed from this meal, you’re patronizing our pizza place why?

Lately it seems I’ve been approaching things in terms of projects. That is, I’ve identified something I wanted to do, figured out what I needed to do to get it done, and then made the effort to do it. Some recent projects have been the Mix CD cover project, converting the blog to WordPress (and re-designing it), and sorting my Legos (still in progress; I’ll talk about why soon).

This probably doesn’t sound like much of a big deal to most people reading this, but for me, it is a kind of accomplishment. I suffer from chronic depression, which is not as bad as it used to be for a number of reasons, one of which is medication. An effect of this is a difficulty for me to do a lot of long-term thinking. Since my view of the future was always grim and my mood unpredictable, I found it hard to really see anything more than a few days away. As a result, any task that would take longer than that, in my mind, may as well have taken a hundred years. It’s hard to accomplish much this way. It’s also difficult to stay focused on a task. In addition, the wild mood swings I experienced before starting on medication meant I would often get very excited and into a task for a few days, throwing myself into it full-force, only to crash a soon afterwards and abandon it, half-finished.

I am still trying to re-learn a lot of behaviors I developed during my particularly bad times. This sort of “project management” system seems to be working for me. I’m able to identify a task, a visible goal, and a method for accomplishing it which makes it seem much smaller and accessible. And through this method, I’ve been able to accomplish other things. For example, a goal for me for some time has been “learn CSS.” (”CSS” = “Cascading Style Sheets,” a system for presenting material on the web.) That won’t work for me, because how do you “learn CSS”? That’s too vague and big a target. However, “redesign my site” was a fine target, and adding “using CSS” on it allowed me to focus, and sure enough, I now know me some CSS.

The reason the Lego-sorting project hasn’t gone well is now obvious to me. There’s not a good goal there. The part that has succeeded is telling: I organized all the parts for my minifigs, as you can see in this photo. That task had a goal, because I know how I wanted to be able to access my minifig parts. But for the rest of the pieces, organize them how? By color? By type? Both? What’s wrong with just having them all dumped into a big crate or two? Since I didn’t (and still don’t) know what I wanted the end product to look like, I never got very far.

This isn’t to say that I’ve now become super-productive. The project: “balance the checkbook” with it’s clearly-stated task, goal, and method, still doesn’t rouse me to action fast enough. Most of the projects I’ve talked about are, for the most part, under the category of entertainment. (Yes, I consider figuring out CSS to be entertainment and I don’t like watching TV. Go figure.) But I have noticed the things that seem to make my brain work better, which is quite exciting for me.

My current project, as in, I’m doing it as I type, is ripping CDs. I decided the other day that I wanted to load up this hard drive with the many CDs I own, so I started today ripping them one by one. It’s nice because I can do this while I work without having to significantly interrupt my work. Today alone, on day one, I ripped the following:

A3 - Exile on Coldharbour Lane, Alphaville - Forever Young, Apollo 440 - Gettin’ High on Your Own Supply, Ashtray-Babyhead - Radio, Bad Religion - Stranger than Fiction and The Gray Race, Barenaked Ladies - Greatest Hits and Stunt, Barry Andrews - Haunted Box of Switches, Bauhaus - Greatest Hits vol 1 and 2 and Burning From the Inside, The Apples in Stereo - Velocity of Sound, The Balanescu Quartet - Possessed, and The Beatles - Hard Day’s Night, Revolver, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, and The White Album (just finished). That’s a fair amount of music, with plenty more to come (next up: Abbey Road.) This will probably take a while, even at this rate (we have a LOT of CDs) but still it’s a task I can focus on and accomplish.

I don’t mean to bore you with how my brain works, or fails to. But I know it’s hard for people who have not experienced depression to understand it. It’s hard to explain how deep it goes, that it’s more than just “a bad day that doesn’t end.” And that people who do suffer can’t just “cheer up and think happy thoughts.” Our brains literally function differently and things that are simple for a regular person are not just difficult for a depressed person, they may be actually impossible in a way.

Hopefully this wasn’t too much of a downer of an entry. I’m actually pretty stoked about things! This is presenting itself as a strategy for accomplishing some of the things that have been hanging over my head, a method for examining them and seeing what I need to do to get things done.

…that Kurt kicks ass.

All the posts from the previous blog have now been transferred to this one with no muss and no fuss.

Also many thanks to the folks who tested out comment stuff, critiqued design, and to this guy for his Category Images plugin that got me my topic icons back!

I’ll have a real update later today, but thanks were necessary immediately!

Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide yesterday.

I am sad to admit that I’ve only read one book of his, Generation of Swine, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it. It’s a series of his newspaper articles from the mid-80s, in which the Iran-Contra affair unfolds before his eyes. Thompson describes the events with glee, giddily excited at the fact that Reagan and his henchmen are going to go down in flames. The glee then turns to shock and horror as everyone involved walks away unscathed, and the execrable Oliver North emerges a “hero”. If an event can shake up someone like Hunter S. Thompson, you know it’s serious.

Unfortunately, whenever I tried to find out more about Thompson and his work, people I spoke with only wanted to let me know how crazy he was and marvel at the whole guns, booze, and drugs persona. I was more interested in his actual journalism and couldn’t find people to discuss that aspect.

Like most icons, I’m somewhat more familiar with the characters that have been based on him — Uncle Duke in Doonesbury and Spider Jerusalem in Transmetropolitan — than I am with the actual person. In the case of the latter character, I never quite got into Transmetropolitan because firstly, it seemed like it was more interested in “shocking” me than telling a story and second, if I wanted to read Thompson, I was more interested in reading Thompson, not Warren Ellis’ parody/homage to Thompson.

I know, I’m rambling and not saying much. Blame the cold medicine. I feel bad, though, because I know we’ve lost someone important, and because I know I am tragically unaware of exactly how important he was. In this age of a media that does little more than reprint press releases and a citizenry that thinks the first amendment “goes too far,” we can’t afford to lose any more people like Hunter S. Thompson.

I’ll let others fire guns in the air and pour libations of alcohol to him. I’m gonna head out to the library.

Welcome to the new weblog!

The other day I was thinking that my site was starting to look a little cluttered, and I wanted to clean it up a little. At the same time, I was thinking of changing my blogging software. So I did both.

The old blog (still here) was run using Personal Weblog, which was suitable for my purposes for a long time. However, I’ve decided to switch to WordPress for a number of reasons.

I’m still playing with the design, so some things may still change. The other pages on the site are going to get cleaned up a little. There are a few WordPress plugins I might try out (including one to give me my topic icons back.) I moved in all the entries from 2005 from the other blog, and I’ll move the rest in as soon as I can figure out how to do it without having to re-timestamp and re-categorize all 400 of them.

The new URL is:
http://slithytoves.sytes.net/~dave/wordpress

However, eventually www.legomancer.net will point there as well. I think.

The most notable difference to you the reader is the ability to become you, the commenter. This new blog software has comments, and I’ve enabled them on a trial basis. Since my readership is pretty small, I don’t expect much from them, but who knows? You may learn about all kinds of online pharmacies and casinos with them!

We’ll see how this transition works out…