The Talisman

           

       

             I really was going to review The Orange Eats Creeps, I promise. It's actually a pretty cool book from what I've read of it. But I realized something: This past Friday was Halloween, marking my fourth year writing for Geek Rage/Strange Library. And this past month? Stephen King month. And these two things led me to remember something I've said again and again, something I should have scheduled into the month, and something on which I should finally deliver. I've been saying "I'll get around to it" for years. Four years, to be exact. I think anyone would want me to, well, finally get around to talking about it. So I decided, emergency executive decision, first to do a video review of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon because I have an awesome collector's-edition pop-up book of that, and then, after that, on the spur of the moment, to finally talk about the book that gave Stephen King and Peter Straub my undying respect. The book that made me a King fan to begin with. A book that has stayed with me for a little under an entire decade now. 

I think it's finally time, dear readers (all two of you) to talk about The Talisman.

                      I think it's brilliant. It's a book I've read more than Harry Potter, topping out somewhere around the mid-double digits. Even though I know the plot, even though every twist and turn in the novel is one I've already experienced, even though I know how the story's going to end. It's lurid at points, yeah. It's really dark at points. There's one section that still really disturbs me, and a section that grossed out my dad when he read it to make sure it was okay for me. The villains are despicable, the heroes are severely underpowered, and the plot-- while a little formulaic-- seems fresh and insane enough to be well worth the read.  It's a book that has affected my life in a great number of ways, and it's a book I couldn't see my life being the same without. While not particularly complex and while the individual elements aren't particularly impressive, this book has affected me in a way that few books have managed to. And I know, it sounds like I'm overselling it here, and maybe I am. But if I wanted to talk about books that have affected me (and I do), I would have to talk about The Talisman, and it would be high on the list. 

Why? 

Well, more, as always, below.

100 Bullets

     

          As many of you may have guessed, I'm a huge fan of crime epics. Most of my consumption is in the form of TV-- I'm a huge fan of The Wire due to its tight writing and its handling of characters, for example, and Boardwalk Empire for the same reason-- but I like the books and comics that deal with the form as well. A good, gritty crime story with a lot of characters and conflicting motivations slamming together at high speeds over a longer period of time than usual and I am hooked. Similarly, a good mystery with a slight edge that could be weirder than normal is another thing I'm a sucker for. 

             And a crime epic, as a form, is a much different animal than its mythological cousin. Where a mythological epic follows a group of people or a single faction in the overall events, a crime epic is a lot more overarching. The characters involved can be criminals, police officers, independent operators, or just about anywhere on the spectrum. Similarly, the crime epic's events don't always have to be as closely related. The idea in a crime epic is to show that everything has ripples and effects that move outward from the central premise, a series of wide-ranging and often tiny events that have huge consequences later on. While it can sometimes follow a central group, it prefers to examine all the elements of crime in various ways until it leads to a climax that, more often than not, is a question rather than a conclusive answer. 

            100 Bullets is, in this mode, fairly by-the-numbers. It examines criminals, cops, the upper class, the lower class, and everywhere in between. But the book's brilliant execution, bizarre underground-comics art style, and tight-as-a-drum writing push it above and beyond the usual crime books, a slowly-unfolding and sometimes grisly story of power and responsibility that is so markedly American and darkly, scathingly funny at points that it's well worth a read, and even a re-read. It's a story of what happens when power corrupts, and it deserves your attention*.

The Sandman

                 

       When I decided I was going to review The Sandman, I realized that I'd kind of set myself up for a fall. 

                          It's an incredibly well-known series. You can't really get past that. Every time Neil Gaiman, the book's head writer and creator, even mentions the words "Sandman" and "movie" in the same sentence, the internet blows up with eighty thinkpieces and articles on speculation* about it because it is that well known and that beloved. This is the series that put Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, among others, on the mainstream map. It's the series that gave DC Comics both their depiction of Death and one of the better sex-ed PSAs I've ever read. It is the only comic book ever to win the World Fantasy Award for "Best Short Story" (They changed the rules after "A Midsummer Night's Dream", a standalone about Morpheus and Shakespeare, won. The dicks). Most of the things that could be said about Sandman have already been said in countless introductions, essays, reviews, and of course college essays that people wrote purely for the purpose of being able to read graphic novels to up their grades in English courses**.

                          It's also a work with a huge fanbase, so if I get anything wrong, I feel like I'm under the gun a little. It's kind of the reviewer's curse-- if you love something they love or hate something they hate, then they applaud you for it and say you're doing the right thing. If it's the other way around, well...

Heaven help you.

                          So I suppose I'll start out with this: The Sandman, conceived by Neil Gaiman, isn't one of the best graphic novels I've read, or one of the best works of fantasy I've read, but it's one of the best mythological tragedies I have ever read, and I'll give it that accolade willingly and with great fervor. With The Sandman, Gaiman and his team of writers proved that where most were able to play with existing mythologies and build off of them, they could create new ones. Complex ones. Ones that then spun, as all good mythologies and epics do, into other works and whose elements popped up in regular comics. While this was mainly in the form of Death as a breakout character that now happily occupies most DC Comics universes, and The Dreaming (the land everyone visits when they go to sleep, ruled by Morpheus, the titular Sandman) making it into more "mainstream" comics, it's still significant. On top of that, it's well worth the read. Why? Read on...

Preacher

   

       

         
                           The first time I'd ever heard of Preacher, I didn't know what to think. It was described to me as "A preacher, his gun-toting ex-girlfriend, and an alcoholic Irish vampire set out to find an absent God". That didn't exactly light a fire under me to read it, no matter how highly it was praised by The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror for that year, nor how it was doing in the numerous comics publications that got the word out about Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's lurid and highly mature American heroic epic (very well, despite the backlash Garth Ennis now enjoys for writing lurid and highly mature works). It just sounded kind of...well, not quite my thing. So I let it go until two years later the brilliant minds of Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum brought it up in their well worth the read webcomic Unshelved. Then, because I'd had multiple sources confirm that yes, this was worth reading, I fired up the Inter-Library Loan client at Maplewood Library, and...

                          ...promptly looked at the sheer number of books and trades and side-stories, and promptly ordered Sandman, because at least I knew where to begin with that. It wasn't until years later where, jaded into apathy by Joss Whedon's utterly depressing run on Astonishing X-Men, I wandered into a comic book store looking for a pre-screening ticket to Grindhouse and decided (being completely flat-out skint) to talk comics with the guy at the counter while my friends browsed around the store. When he mentioned Preacher, I said something dismissive about that I didn't really feel like reading about a minister, only for him to jump in with "with the Voice Of God! He's a preacher with the voice of God!" And now that I knew that, the comic became intriguing. I wondered how anyone could get sixty-eight issues out of a preacher with the voice of God travelling around to find his creator when He abandoned the throne. So I looked into it, and what I found...

                  What I found blew me away. I have yet to encounter something like Preacher before or since-- a loud, brazen assault on the senses; a tale of a world gone mad in the absence of its creator, and the bluntest solution to the problem of theodicy I have ever seen. And yet...there's a softness to it. A humanity. These are people trying their hardest to put the world back together in spite of forces literally beyond their control. And for this reason-- as well as others-- it is one of the best comics I've ever read before or since. And I will defend it beyond reason and sense, tooth and nail, because of this. It's nasty, insane, brutal, lurid, and at the same time incredibly touching in its own way. It's vulgar, but with a heart. And I love it. Read this. Or try to. It'll probably be too graphic and sick for most people, but if you can see past this, there is a book with a lot of heart and a lot of heavy subjects in here. 

More, as always, below.

Prelude to Epics Month

              When I came up with the idea of devoting an entire month to comics holding true to the epic form, as with any major project that would allow a person of distinction to read comics at work, I had to set out certain rules for myself. Not just any comic can count as an epic. In fact, many don't. And while some of the longer titles are certainly operatic and massive in scope (Hi, DC), I chose not to do them because the open-ended nature of many comics leaves a lot up in the air. While I could review stories in each comic, and explore the form that way, I'd feel like I was just doing a single chapter of The Iliad and calling it a day. No, I wanted to get deep. Comprehensive. Get some dirt under my fingernails (figuratively). 

               So as part of the project, I did some research. I had to make sure I was using the word "epic" right, and not in another wrong way, especially as these days there have been some fast and loose uses of the word "epic" to mean "something that is awesome or imbued with powers beyond the regular forms". So I had two criteria I had to come up with to judge if these comics fit the mold I was looking for, and if they counted as an epic. And also to determine what series I would use or even be able to use. This may sound like overthinking a little, but I wanted this to be special, since I'm essentially devoting three to four weeks to me reading graphic novels as opposed to doing more with books. I know that this is sort of my "soapbox", mostly for lack of outside input, but I am the kind of cultured man-about-town who believes that even on the internet, one should have standards*.  More, as always, below.

Imajica

 

           
       Okay, the rundown is as follows. This is a brilliant, beautiful work. It's also really huge, but Clive Barker manages to fill each page with something while perhaps not compelling, at least interesting to read. The story is of John Furie "Gentle" Zacharias, a con man with mysterious powers; and his friend, guide, and eventual lover Pie'oh'Pah. It is also about the various people in their lives, and how they may be affected by an event known as "the Reconciliation", the time for which is quickly approaching. The good are the brilliant imagery, lavish descriptions, complex characters, and dense, epic plot. The bad is that this is a slow read at first until it eventually gets going. And the pacing is still weird after that.

                But in the end, this is a book well worth your time. And your money. Buy this, read it, and enjoy a hallucinatory fantasy epic with some genuine surreality and darkness to it.

More, as always, below. 

Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom

            Okay, so the rundown is as follows. Chung Kuo is a future history on an epic, operatic scale. The book traces the start of the "War of Two Directions", a conflict between the Confucianist stasis of the ruling Chinese empire and the upper-class Europeans who wish for progress, change, and to take back their birthright. The book features a huge cast of characters and a scope that, for the first book in a seven-book series, shows remarkable restraint and control while still spanning slightly over a decade in time. 

               The good points are that it takes next to no time at all to get off the ground and manages to cover the massive amount of territory despite a small lull in the action after the prologue, that it follows a huge cast of complex characters without ever once feeling like it's repeating itself or reusing characters, and that it keeps up a level of tension without having to resort too much to excessive vulgarity. It also keeps just enough uncertainty in the plot to make it interesting. The good guys are never on the verge of winning, and neither are the bad guys. And both sides are complex enough not to be "good" or "bad", but to be driven by their own motivations. Except one.

             The bad parts are an ending that seems to arbitrarily set up the cliffhanger for the next book just so one side doesn't seem to be in too much of a position of strength, and a single character, Major Howard deVore. de Vore seems to be an unrepentant monster, manipulating both sides of the conflict for little more than his own gratification. He appears to derive pleasure from human suffering and sick power games, and thus stands out against the rest of the cast. Also, there are two or three scenes that get really brutal and nasty, so I feel like I should warn that they're there.

More, as always, below.