Healy's Journal

Sorry for the missed column last week; I hadn't had a chance to go to the local library last week, so it took a while to gather up enough reading material for a full column. I really stocked up this week, so hopefully it won't happen again.

Currently I'm reading The Boy Detectives: Essays on the Hardy Boys and Others, edited by Michael G. Cornelius. I've... never actually read the Hardy Boys, but I was a big Encyclopedia Brown fan (I remember having a crush on him and everything), so I was hoping this book would have something that touched on him. Unfortunately, it doesn't, but there's still a lot I enjoyed. There's an essay on Hardy Boys adaptations, some of which I've never heard of; an essay on Christopher Cool, TEEN Agent, a little-known book series from the late 60s about a boy spy, and why it failed; essays on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and The Boy Detective Fails; and even a retrospective on the Three Investigators, which I never read, but made it sound like a really great series.

Unfortunately, even some of my favorite essays are marred by an... amateurishness, I guess I'd call it? For example, the essay about the Three Investigators opens with a three page (ha!) digression about the nature of trios in psychology and art, and it's like, okay man, I got your point the first couple of paragraphs in, no need to take it any further. It just felt so self-aggrandizing, and it's hard to imagine how it got past the editor for this collection. It's not a bad read, but it could use some tightening up.

So! It's been a while since I've done this.

I actually finished this book a while ago (in fact, I first checked it out in February), but... currently I'm rereading Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks (edited by David Lavery), a book of essays on Twin Peaks, published a few years after its first run in the 90s. I first got it because I was making a Twin Peaks-inspired game for the Veeder Expo, and reading some books on the show would have been faster than actually watching all 30-something episodes of it. It's sort of a dry book; most of it is made up of essays on psycho-analytical and post-modern readings of the series. But there is one article that I keep coming back to: "'Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?': alt.tv.twinpeaks, the Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery" by Henry Jenkins, a rough overview of the Twin Peaks fandom on Usenet. Theories of literary criticism, it seems, may come and go, but fandom ethnography is forever.

( Click here to see me blab about Gravity Falls )

I'm also reading The Simon and Kirby Library: Horror! (By Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, natch.) It's a bunch of horror stories written before the Comics Code kicked the industry in the keister. They're all weird and nightmarish in a way that kinda bridges the gap between the Golden and Silver Ages. It makes for an interesting contrast between the stories in The Jack Kirby Omnibus Volume One: Starring Green Arrow, which were all written post-Code. The stories in the former get to be gritty and rough in a way the latter never attempts to match. I think my favorite of the collection is a story called "The Head of the Family", which is... well, I'll try not to spoil it for you, but let's just say it's about one of those Kirby-esque weird families that really deserves their own ongoing series. Highly recommended.

Sorry I've been off the wagon for a couple weeks, y'all! I haven't been able to visit my public library since early January at the latest, so it's really cut into my ability to get new books. But I do work at a university library, and yesterday I checked out this neat book of essays on film called Perspectives on Citizen Kane (edited by Ronald Gottesman). As you know, Citizen Kane is often considered to be the Undertale of film, and I find it a fascinating movie, despite not having read much of the criticism about it before. This book is a good primer on that, I think; it's got essays by Bazin and Truffaut, among others, and there's a very good interview with Welles by Peter Bogdanovich near the back.

Best of all, I think, is the book's collection of reviews, written within the first decade of Citizen Kane's 1941 release. It's interesting to see how the critics responded to it; everyone could agree that it was a stunning film in terms of technique, but there were those who declared it a masterpiece outright, those who thought the film enjoyable but found the themes lacking, and those who believed the rest of the movie was a complete mess. Most baffling of all is Jean-Paul Sartre's review, who apparently thought of Citizen Kane as a work of art incomprehensible to the American public, and Orson Welles an artist cut off from the masses, a view that I find incomprehensible. (The man played The Shadow, for Christ's sake!) A fascinating review, and a really good book. Check it out if you can.

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.)

I apologize again for taking so long to write up a new Currently Reading Wednesdays. I've just been feeling kind of "blah" the last few days (maybe because of all the turkey?) and didn't get around to it.

Anyway, currently I'm reading The Jack Kirby Omnibus Volume One: Starring Green Arrow, with art by Jack Kirby (natch) and writing by various. It's a collection of all the various stories Jack Kirby did for DC Comics in the 50s, mainly for science fiction magazines like House of Mystery and Tales of the Unexpected. (There were also a couple Green Arrow stories in there, like it said in the title, but I didn't really get to them.) The inventiveness of the stories and visuals are a real treat, which is to say that everything is properly wacky in that amazing Silver Age way. One of my favorite stories is the one where a guy takes a concoction that turns him into a flat, 2D man. Kirby's art just sells the transformation and really raises up what would have been just a passable short story into something very enjoyable.

I'm also reading Get Real, a Dortmunder book by Donald Westlake, who also wrote the Parker books under a pseudonym. It's pretty good, but it's a rougher read than I expected. Apparently this was the last Dortmunder book Westlake wrote before he died, so that probably explains it. I'll keep an eye out for earlier books in the series, and see if they're any better.

I'm also play/reading Jay's Journey an early RPG Maker game. It's okay, and the humor is actually pretty good for an RPG Maker game from 2002 or something, but I keep having trouble figuring out where to go, which is really not something that should be happening in a game as linear as Jay's Journey. Most of the time it seems to be due to some underclued puzzle solution, like when I spent 15 minutes in one room only to find, when I looked it up later, that a switch I thought didn't do anything actually did something, I just couldn't see it. A hint guide would have helped here, whether in game or just in a text file. Still, I like it enough that I'll probably go and finish it.

Note: Due to IF Comp reviews, Currently Reading Wednesdays have been pushed back to later in the week. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Currently I'm reading Astro City: Private Lives by Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson, and Alex Ross. It's a sort of superheroes-as-slice-of-life book; many of the stories contained in this volume and others focus on smaller characters than the larger-than-life superheroes: sidekicks, down-and-out supervillains, and other folks who live on the fringes of regular superhero stories. Some of the stories in this volume are stronger than most (the one about the lady who fixed up old supervillain robots and puts them on display in a makeshift museum is a particular favorite), but all of them have their moments. Plus there's a bit of a tie-in with the storyline set up in the Through Open Doors volume, which I thought was nice.

Also, I'm continuing on with the Sherlock, Lupin & Me books, with the third book, The Mystery of the Scarlet Rose. The central mystery, about the bizarre return of an old criminal gang, was engaging, but the puppy love subplot was pretty blah; the romance junk was pretty easy to ignore in the older books, but here it seemed to jump to the forefront. Anyway, despite these flaws, I enjoyed the book. I'll keep reading these as long as my library stocks them.

Note: Due to IF Comp reviews and Yuletide, Currently Reading Wednesdays has been postponed to Sunday. We're really sorry for the inconvenience.

Currently I am reading various Lupin III specials and movies.

What? They got subtitles, they count. Bro I will fight you on this.

Anyway, here's what I watched:

( Got those Loops on the brain )

Note: Due to IF Comp reviews, Currently Reading Wednesdays is currently moved to Tuesday.

Currently I'm reading Sherlock, Lupin, and Me: The Dark Lady by Irene Adler (nee Alessandro Gatti). It's the first in a YA book series about Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler, and Arsene Lupin teaming up as kids. Unfortunately, for a concept so great, the execution is a bit lacking; the text is very awkward, even for a book translated from Italian, and there are little quirks and flaws that bring the book down. One of them is the author's weird little asides about events and discoveries long in the future, like this:

"And it would be many years down the line before I knew that the secret behind the floating teapot was because the baron had a magic tea set. I know this is an extremely jarring aside, and maybe I could have waited until later to point this out so it'd be a surprise, but I really wanted to let you know this like right now."

I guess the author assumes the reader to be aware of these things, because they're working with established characters, but it still felt really odd. Still, the mystery wraps in a satisfyingly convoluted manner, despite a rocky start, so I'll probably check out the next book, at least.

Currently I'm reading Mishima: A Vision of the Void by Marguerite Yourcenar, about the life and death (mostly death) of infamous Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima. Truth be told, I didn't like it very much; there was this unfortunate snobbery that infected even the good parts of the book. And while Mishima's death by seppuku after a failed coup is certainly important in any discussion of the author, Yourcenar seems to treat it like the main event. The most embarrassing part, for me at least, is the chapter where she tries and fails to convince that Mishima wasn't a fascist. I also found the criticism of his books mostly vague and unhelpful, but that may be because I haven't read any of them yet.

Verdict: I should have checked out Confessions of a Mask instead.

Currently I'm reading Dragons Beware by Jorge Aguirre and Rafael Rosado. It's the sequel to their Giants Beware from a few years ago. Both of them star Claudette, a young warrior-to-be; Gaston, her younger brother, who is good at cooking; and Marie, her friend, who is practicing to be a princess/diplomat. Also featuring Claudette's father Augustine, a blacksmith who lost his legs and an arm in a fight with the titular dragon. Among other characters. (*Pant, wheeze*)

Anyway, the plot gets kicked off when an evil wizard threatens the town they all live in. Augustine sets off on his own to find the one thing that can stop him, a sword that can stop any magic that is now in the belly of an unbeatable dragon, and Claudette and her friends decide to follow him. It's a charming little fantasy romp, with a twist or two along the way. Just a word of advice: You'll probably want to read Giants Beware before this one, as that book does a better job of setting up the characters.