Healy's Journal

(Technically none of these books are about Hellboy per se, but they take place in the same universe.)

Currently I'm reading a bunch of Mignola-verse books. First off is Witchfinder: The Mysteries of Unland, written by Kim Newman and Maura McHugh with art by Tyler Cook and Dave Stewart. It's about special agent Sir Edward Grey, paranormal investigator to Queen Victoria, and his misadventures in a newly industrial town that holds a lot of secrets. The art is beautiful, and the story brings that special Hellboy weirdness that I love so much. I don't think it's as good as the previous Witchfinder book (the one set in the Wild West), but I still enjoyed it bunches.

Next, we have the first two books in the Abe Sapien series, The Drowning, by Mike Mignola and Jason Shawn Alexander; and The Devil Does Not Jest and Other Stories, by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, Patric Reynolds, Peter Snejbjerg, James Harren, and Dave Stewart. The first book, Drowning, was pretty okay, but it left me feeling lost at times; part of it may because I'm not too well-read on my Hellboy volumes (hey, I gotta work with whatever my library has in stock at the moment, alright?), but I think Mike Mignola has a tendency to just throw the reader in deep waters without warning when he's writing on his own. With a co-writer, like Arcudi in The Devil Does Not Jest, he seems able to rein things in much easier. The Devil Does Not Jest also has the benefit of being a short story showcase, which I think is where the Hellboy universe really shines. The epic stuff is alright, but it's pretty overwhelming, especially for a newcomer; the short stories deliver the weirdness in these great, bite-sized packages without the bloat. I liked both, but The Devil Does Not Jest is better.

Am I forgetting anything? Oh, yeah, I reread Darwyn Cooke's Parker: The Hunter this week, too. Verdict: still a great crime read, still not as good as Parker: The Outfit, Parker's surprisingly cute in this one, RIP Cooke mourn ya 'til I join ya. See ya next week!

Hi, guys! Boy, it's been a while since I updated this blog, hasn't it? Like, more than a month? Let's get back into it, shall we?

Currently I'm reading Astro City: Lovers Quarrel by Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson, and Alex Ross. It's about a superhero couple, Quarrel and Crackerjack, who run into problems when they get older and can't fight crime so good anymore. Quarrel is mostly resigned to it, though this isn't to say she's happy about aging, but Crackerjack doesn't take things so well, and does something... foolish.

It's a pretty good look at a subject most superhero stories don't tackle; my main problems with it were that the art isn't always so good at conveying how old everyone is, and that Crackerjack's actions came off as a little too extreme, to the point where I stopped sympathizing with him for a bit. Still, it manages to rise above these issues, and the back-up story is about a talking gorilla who wants to play the drums, which is the kind of story you can't go wrong with. Maybe not as good as Private Lives, which is one of my favorite Astro City volumes, but still great.

I apologize for being so late with this post; I was rushing to finish my Yuletide assignment and this blog sorta fell by the wayside. But! I just wrote it up and posted it last night, and while there are a couple hitches in it (namely, I haven't checked it for SPAG yet, and there's an extra scene I should write to make it hang together better), I am fully prepared to call it finito Benito for now and work on other projects. Like Currently Reading Wednesdays! Here's what I was reading the past couple weeks:

Top 10: Season 1 by Alan Moore and Gene Ha: This is the superhero police procedural that Moore wrote at the turn of this century. It's pretty good, and I enjoyed it, but there were a couple things that bothered me about it. Mostly it had to do with all the sexual content; none of it's very explicit, of course, but it permeates the entire exercise (like, say, the Martian Manhunter-esque hooker lady), to the point where it seems like the author can't get his head out of the gutter. (Then again, I might just be a ginormous prude.) Also, the police department struck me as a bit trigger-happy; events from the previous few years have sensitized me to this sort of thing. Still, it's a pretty nice book.

Hellboy: The Wild Hunt by Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo: This was pretty great, and it advanced the story of the series quite a bit, but it ended on a cliffhanger, which bugged me immensely. I'll reserve judgment on this until I read the next book in the series, but I was a little disappointed in this.

Boss Fight Books: Earthbound by Ken Baumann: I used to really love this game as a little kid, and what with Undertale blowing up the internet right now, I decided to read up on one of its primary influences. This is a very good book; it may be a little too "New Game Journalism-y" to some people's tastes (Baumann spends much of the book relating to Earthbound through his own life and experiences), but I thought it was a good fit for something as weirdly personal as Earthbound. I can't wait to read some of the other books in the series.

Rise of the Video Game Zinesters by Anna Anthropy: I actually know Anthropy from her days back at Glorious Trainwrecks, so I was familiar with her work. Anyway, this is a primer on the indie (or alt, they seem to have changed names when I wasn't looking) games scene, with a look at the history of the movement, their games, their goals, and some of the tools used to create indie games. I don't always agree with her arguments, but this is a fine introduction to independent games and game design, and worth a look if you want to make a game yourself.

(Note that the next two weeks may be pretty busy for me, given that it's the holidays. But I'll try to put out at least one more installment of Currently Reading Wednesdays out before the end of this year.)

Currently I'm rereading Darwin Cooke's adaptation of Parker: The Score again, but since I already covered that book before (in Currently Reading Wednesdays 11.75, true believers!), I thought I might as well cover the book I read last week, Lobster Johnson: Get the Lobster, written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, with art by Tonči Zonjić. I don't think I've ever covered the Lobster Johnson series here before, so here's a quick overview: Lobster Johnson (or just the Lobster here, as he won't be called that for a while) is a hardcore pulp superhero who kills gangsters and burns a lobster claw insignia onto their foreheads. He works with a crew of allies and helpers to hunt down crooks and other malicious ne'er-do-wells.

Anyway, this one's actually a later book in the Lobster Johnson series, and I gotta admit I was pretty confused with regards to who everybody was. But I got over this pretty quickly, and had a pulpy good time. Overall I'd recommend this one to anybody who enjoyed super-violent pulp fiction stories and wanted a fix, but I'd really advise them to read The Iron Prometheus and The Burning Hand first.

Currently I'm reading Alan Moore: Conversations, a book of collected interviews edited by Eric L. Berlatsky. It runs the gamut of his comics career, from the early 1980s to 2009, a few years before this book came out (2012). It's actually a fairly interesting look at a guy I'm not a big fan of. Probably the most interesting interviews for me are the earlier ones, where he talks about his early stories for off-beat British magazines 2000 AD and the like. The other interviews I liked were the one where he digs into his thoughts on Watchmen, and the one where he explains what he was trying to do with Lost Girls. The latter makes me more inclined to check it out, although perhaps not any time soon. Anyway, it's a good book, and there's few of the paranoid rants that put me off of his interviews back when I was still in comics fandom five years ago. Give it a read, you might enjoy it.

This week I'm currently reading Cross Game (Omnibus Volume 1), by Mitsuru Adachi. It's a sports manga about a young layabout who gets into high school baseball after a personal tragedy. It's a pretty entertaining read so far (I just now started what would have been the original volume 3), although I had a little trouble keeping track of all the characters. I don't know if this is a function of the original, the translation, or just my tired and lazy brain. Regardless, I would have liked to see a cast list, or maybe even translation notes. I understand that might be hard to do in an omnibus volume like this, though. Anyway, I'll be sure to check out the next volume once I'm finished. A recommended book, especially if you're familiar with baseball.

Sorry I've been away so long; I've just had trouble gathering the energy to update it or do much of anything besides playing old RPG Maker games and making snarky forum posts. So, what have I been reading over the past week (or two, or three)?

You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When it Monsoons by Mo Willems: This is a book of one panel cartoons the author drew, one for each day, when he took a year-long (give or take) trip around the world. The subjects range from locals to fellow backpackers to bad detours the author took and more; there's usually commentary under each cartoon, which can actually be pretty informative. It's a really nice look at different countries and cultures, I thought, especially those in Southeast Asia.

Oishinbo: The Joy of Rice by Tetsu Kariya and Akira Hanasaki: Another entry in the venerable Oishinbo series. It's a little weak in parts (the three-part rice ball competition at the end is pretty boring, for instance), but most of it is still pretty good.

The Last Night by Will Eisner: It's an adaptation of Don Quixote by the late, celebrated Will Eisner. It's a little simplistic; it started out as a children's introduction to Don Quixote, and it shows. The plot is stripped down to the bare basics, and it rushes through events with an alarming speed. I can't say I enjoyed this one; maybe it's better if you have a kid you could give it to?

Explorer: The Hidden Doors, edited by Kazu Kibuishi: It's an all-ages anthology of short comics that deal with secret doors in some way. I was a little disappointed in this one; I liked the earlier books in the series, The Mystery Boxes and The Lost Islands, but most of the stories in this one felt dull and unimaginative, in ways I'm still trying to shake out. Maybe the artists were struggling with the title subject. The stories by Jen Wang and Johane Matte are pretty good, though.

Video Classics: A Guide to Video Art and Documentary Tapes by Deirdre Boyle: Mostly I picked this up because there was an entry on Jane Veeder, who has the same last name as a guy I know, Ryan Veeder. Anyway, I don't think they're related, but I was struck by the coincidence, especially since her video art has a glitchy, early video game feel. The book itself I thought was rather too snobby. Perhaps I'll go into it in a later post. Anyway, I guess if you want an entry point into the early world of video art and documentaries, you could do worse than this book.

Well, it seems the wifi on my computer stopped working; I'm connected to the internet right now through a wire connected to the router. Looks like we're about to reach Computermageddon slowly but surely. Least it's taking it's sweet time. I figure I can wait it out until the newer model laptops come in. In the meantime, here's what I've been reading the past couple weeks:

Infinity Gauntlet, by Jim Starlin and George Perez: I'm not a big Marvel fan, but after seeing this in the library one day I thought, why not? It turns out it taps into all the weird, off-the-wall ballistics I love superheroes for. It got a bit repetitive, though, and I couldn't help but be amused by the fact that almost the whole plot is about Thanos trying to impress some lady with his god-like powers, with Mephisto egging him on ("you should totally fight that group of superheroes at like half strength! chicks'll dig it!").

Snarked, by Roger Langridge: I got the first and second volumes of this out of the library a few years ago, but only recently was I able to find the final volume. This is a delightful romp through the world of Lewis Carroll, starring the walrus and the carpenter as two con-men who team-up with the young queen Scarlett (about 8) and her little brother, Rusty, in order to save the Red King from his untrustworthy advisors. It's a very funny series that's poignant in places, especially near the end; I highly recommend it.

Adventure Time: Sweet Shorts v. 2, by various: This is a collection of short comics featuring the Adventure Time cast by a wide variety of comic writers and artists (Frazer Irving draws a story!). I particularly liked the cute little comic by Kory Bing about the Earls of Lemongrab having a picnic at the beach. Most of the stories are of pretty good quality, but I'm not sure how much a reader who isn't already familiar with Adventure Time would like them.

You might be wondering when that one post I promised at the end of my last review is coming up. Well, for whatever reason, I can't seem to find my writing mojo this week; I'm also trying to get my Shufflecomp game done before the April 25th deadline (I've already greatly simplified the concept for it). Given this I can't expect that I will get around to writing it before Sunday, April 26th; in the meantime, let me review the books I've been reading this week:

Uncle Scrooge: The Seven Cities of Gold by Carl Barks: This is a solid collection of adventure and humor comics by the master of the Disney Duck comics, Carl Barks. Like most people nowadays I got into Barks through Don Rosa's superb The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck; Barks' comics are generally more old-fashioned, for lack of a better term, than Life and Times, but no less good. Not all of the stories are big hits, and some of them are a little... racially sketchy, let's call it, but they're all cracking entertainment.

Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture by Will Brooker (re-read): A rather fussy book about the myths and motifs we carry about Alice in Wonderland and her writer, Lewis Carroll. Goes into a bit of detail about the pedophilia allegations that have cropped up around Lewis Carroll over the past century, although it's far from the only subject discussed. There's a chapter that's devoted to the then-recent video game American McGee's Alice; as someone who is only familiar with it through the Old Man Murray Review, I found it rather amusing. There are also chapters about Alice adaptations, Lewis Carroll societies, and a rather touching one at the end about sites associated with Lewis Carroll and the Alice books. The author also wrote a book about Batman, which I'd like to read.

Last week I reread The Best of the Spirit, by Will Eisner. It's got a bunch of some really good stories about the sorta superhero The Spirit; a couple of my favorites are The Story of Rat-Tat, a comic done up as a children's book about a toy machine gun that longs to be real; and Fox at Bay, about a "rational" criminal who kills several men and hides himself away as some sort of experiment. There are some uncomfortable racial caricatures stereotypes, but they play a minimal role in the stories in this collection; I think some of them may have been edited out.

I also reread Parker: The Score, adapted from a Richard Stark novel by Darwyn Cooke. It's about super-smooth criminal Parker working with a top-notch team to rob an entire town. Of course, these plans rarely go off without a hitch, and and Parker and his gang runs into a real doozy of one. I wasn't too impressed with this one on my first read, but after rereading it I think that was just because I was disappointed that it wasn't as good as Darwyn Cooke's second Parker adaptation, The Outfit. The Score is a good, solid thriller that any reader of crime fiction would be pleased to have on their shelves. (Outfit's still better, though.)

Last but not least, I'm getting deeper into my reading of the Oishinbo series. I finished the Ramen and Gyoza volume, and am just getting started on the one on spirits and wine. My opinion of it hasn't changed from what I said last time I reviewed this series. After thinking it over, I think part of what makes Oishinbo so good is that it always remembers to bring some human element to the stories about cooking and eating. Like, there's one story that begins with Yamaoka and friends helping a down-on-his-luck gyoza restaurant owner get an edge on his competition, that quickly spirals out of control when Yamaoka's jerkface of a dad wants to get in on the action. The conflict gets transposed from the gyoza restaurant owner and his competitors to Yamaoka and his dad, but the author still remembers to keep focusing on the humans that populate the story. Am I making myself clear here? It is pretty late. Well, regardless, these are pretty good books.

Also: I want to let everyone know that I'll still be doing selections from 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die (over here). Just comment with a page number and I'll tell you what selections were on that page and what I think of them. Ciao!