2 posts tagged “graphic novels”
I have added Frank Miller's graphic novel 300 to my books sidebar. I haven't read it yet, but I'm suddenly intregued, having seen the trailer for the movie yesterday. I'm not sure who directed the film, but I'm hoping it's not Tarsus or anything...the preview is very music-video-y and oddly reminiscent of The Cell. (No, no, according to IMDB it isn't Tarsus, it's some other guy I've never heard of. And lookie here -- that new guy on Lost who hasn't actually been in any episodes yet but is really really cute is playing Xerxes! Cool!)
Anyway, I don't think I'm going to buy the book, as it's only 88 pages and I tend to justify how much I'm willing to spend on a book based on its page count to a certain extent. I'm going to get it from the library. I have never read Sin City, mostly because the artwork turned me off, but I liked Dark Knight Returns a lot. So I'm sort of in-between on Frank Miller. But the preview is killer -- I can't hate anything set to instrumental Nine Inch Nails with oddly pierced and deformed people doing things in slow motion.
I would like to explicate upon the random things I have hanging out in that sidebar over there. One of my main complaints withLJ for years has been the inability to put real honest-to-god HTML in your sidebar, to create nice little "I'm reading/listening to..." collections instead of putting them in the bottom of each individual post. So, presented with that opportunity here, I honestly didn't know quite what to put up. So, there's an mp3 by the Twilight Singers, probably my favorite band. It's a cover of a Massive Attack song, and it's actually sung by Mark Lanigan as well as Greg Dulli.
OK, OK, the album cover up there is from what I bought the other day, the Girl Talk album Night Ripper. It's pretty insane and sure to be pulled from the shelves before long for MASSIVE copyright violations. I plan at some point tomorrow to sit down and figure out how many of the samples I can pick out. It's like Name That Tune! Did anyone reading this ever watch syndicated reruns of Name That Tune? It was pretty awesome. I think if it were 1975 and I was on that show, I would just guess that every song was "Afternoon Delight" and by the law of averages I would come out on top. The one sample that stuck in my mind was where he blended "Heartbeat" by Annie with "My Humps". And there was a lot of Ludacris on there, I think. I've got to listen to it again.
Books, I've got Copyrights and Copywrongs by Siva Vaidhyanathan up there. I'm only two chapters into it, even though I've had it for about a month and a half now. It's not a hard read at all, and it's very entertaining and enlightening. But I just have so little free time to read these days, now that I'm working in a job without a lot of free intarwebs leisure time. I have to get all my tech yayas out at home, and that eats up the normal reading time I used to have. Don't even talk to me about my thesis. That's a whole other thing -- that's writing, not reading. The reading is done, and no, none of those books are going to be listed in my sidebar. Because no one other than me should ever have to read Ben Wattenberg's ideas on neomanifestdestinarianism if they don't have to. And yes, that's a word. I think it usually has hyphens in it somewhere, but the general idea is right. ("Anti-distinctly-minty-monetarism!")
The other book I have in the bar, which ties in with the apparent copyright law theme of my interests as expressed in this post, is Lost Girls by Alan Moore. Yes, the graphic novel porn staring Wendy from Peter Pan, Dorothy from Wizard of Oz, and a very agressively dykedelic Alice from Alice in Wonderland. It's organized into three separate books, kept in one slipcover box. I've read the middle book, because my husband started with the first book but I wanted to read, too. It was a little more short on plot than I thought it was going to be. Don't get me wrong, I knew it was going to be primarily "erotica", as that was Moore's intent. But I thought there'd be a little more narrative, instead of just "Isn't it subversive to have the beloved characters of children's literature fucking each other with strap-ons?" Oh, and then Franz Ferdinand gets shot. Unfortunately, not the band. The duke. And then the war starts, and everybody leaves this hotel in Austria except these three women and some debauched hotel maitre'd-slash-pimp, and they have an orgy. That's as far as I've gotten into the third book. But throughout, I've gotten to see Dorothy do it with the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow (I know I'll be getting to the Tin Man soon) while she longs for her Uncle Henry, and Wendy get jerked off on by Captain Hook and fuck Peter Pan while Michael and John watch. Alice's stories are less entertaining, and mostly she just pisses me off.
Anyway, the copyright issues here seem pretty cut and dry -- Wendy is not a character in the public domain, and the people who own the rights to Peter Pan are NOT happy about this book and are trying to stop it's current publication in England. Alan Moore, being Alan Moore, just doesn't seem to care and thinks they're a bunch of wankers. He's kind of a bad-ass. The book is worth a look, if you can somehow get your hands on it without paying an arm and a leg -- its list price is $75, but it's not being carried many places so add some hefty shipping charges in to that. Unless you happen to live near a decent comic book store in New York City, because I hear there are a few copies floating around. I was shocked to see it at the Kim's where I used to work, because one of my best friends is in the book department and he expressed doubt that they would stock a book that expensive that would probably not immediately sell. I proved him wrong by, well, buying it immediately and getting a nice little discount from a current employee or employees who shall remain nameless. Whatever the circumstances ended up being, I now have the book for under $60 and only had to get harassed by a suspicious security guard to get it. And it's a pretty nice book, presentation-wise and, I suppose, content-wise. I also like the idea of having it if it gets pulled from the shelves and becomes the subject of a cool fair-use trial. All very controversial and fun, I think.
