This early work by Hayao Miyazaki was written around the time he was working on translating his manga Nausicaa to the big screen. It's a story told inThis early work by Hayao Miyazaki was written around the time he was working on translating his manga Nausicaa to the big screen. It's a story told in watercolors and spare, fairytale-like narration. Thematically, it has a great deal in common with Nausicaa and Mononoke Hime, and fans of those astonishing films will find many familiar motifs, including a world out of its natural balance and a prince of a remote, hidden people setting out into the wide world on a life-restoring quest.
As with most of Miyazaki's works, Shuna's Journey overflows with dazzling and often deeply-moving characters and ideas. And, as with most of his works, the pieces don't always fit together in a way that completely makes sense.
Nonetheless, this book is certainly worthwhile for Studio Ghibli fans. It essentially reads like the storyboards for a Miyazaki film that never was.
One negative comment - for some reason, the English-language edition is bound on the right side and the panels are to be read from right to left like a Japanese book, which I found pretty weird. I would have definitely preferred them to flip it.
Readers of his Nausicaa manga should know this is a much, much shorter work, which can be read in about an hour....more
Beaton's memoirs of two years spent working in the oil sands mines in Alberta are artfully written and illustrated, yet strangely self-absorbed. SurroBeaton's memoirs of two years spent working in the oil sands mines in Alberta are artfully written and illustrated, yet strangely self-absorbed. Surrounded by trucks taller than four-story buildings tearing enormous pits out of the earth to extract oil and run it through city-sized mazes of pipes and machines, she hardly spares a few frames in this 400+ page book to say anything about that situation or its meaning. She says nothing about what they were all doing there, how it worked, how the camps were laid out, or even what oil sands mining is - the reader picks up on the degree to which this is all incidental to the story she wants to tell. Climate change is not mentioned at all until she half-heartedly waves the topic away in the afterword, and many of the relevant social and environmental impacts are ignored. And she never seems to see herself as a willing contributor to all of the things that the camps were, or to feel any concern about that. To that degree, I don't particularly feel like she takes responsibility for her life. Instead, she seems to see herself as part of an unfair system that left her with no choices.
I don't get it, honestly. What the book is overwhelmingly about is her experience as a woman in a camp filled almost entirely by men, and how it affected her to be the object of constant attention and harassment. This is of course a valid focus, but I found it a bit strange that this was apparently the only lens through which she was interested in viewing that time and place. It's not that she needed to turn her memoir into a treatise on climate change, but to simply leave out that whole side of it and the part she happily played in it created a work that strikes me as quite incomplete, from a narrative perspective. Like if you wrote a long book about the years you worked at a casino and literally said almost nothing about gambling. ...more
I'm never going to be an Alan Moore fan, despite his obvious gigantic influencNote: this review contains spoilers.
"Don't follow leaders." - Bob Dylan
I'm never going to be an Alan Moore fan, despite his obvious gigantic influence on comic book writing in the 80s and 90s. There's something about his tone that I invariably find alienating. There's a kind of sour didacticism that fixates on brutality and violence in a way that both celebrates and condemns it, taking a kind of miserable, voyeuristic enjoyment in the terrible things that people do to one another while also assuming a high moral tone.
Like every Moore work I've read, I found V for Vendetta to be dreary and unpleasant, filled with sadistic characters and distraught characters weeping with self-recrimination in a desaturated world.
But it is at least interesting, and the character of V is fascinating, particularly in contrast to the left-wing fantasy figure of the 2005 film. Moore's V should not be anyone's hero, if they're in sound mental health - he is himself a broken, violent, and profoundly-troubled character, and recognizes himself as such. He's can only destroy, so at least he sets himself to destroy what is evil.
There's an interesting sort of My Fair Lady story, in which V collects a street waif and then brutalizes and manipulates her into becoming another version of himself. He thereby ironically replicates the very authoritarian manipulations that he claims to despise. "Do what thou wilt," he tells her, even as he controls and shapes her development. The thoughtful reader won't know quite how to take it when she literally puts on his mask late in the work. Did she in fact freely choose to do that?
Perhaps she did in some sense - after all, he never really tells her what to do with the conceptual and physical arsenal he bequeaths. As I said, he's an ambivalent figure, and I believe one of the core lessons Moore intended to tell is that the fraught power dynamics in human relationships are not so easy to escape.
This is a message entirely missed by the film, and I can quite understand why Moore had his name taken off of it. The Wachowskis have a tendency to reduce everything they touch to its most simplistic level, as when, say, a complex gnostic fable of liberation from mental slavery collapses in the third act of the Matrix into fist fights and gunning down cops with machine guns. Similarly, in their treatment of the story, V loses almost all ambivalence and becomes just another superhero, of the kind Moore is waving his arms throughout this book to warn the reader about.
Still, I actually feel on the level of craft, their screenplay is in many ways more polished, effective, and poetic than Moore's work. Key elements of the plot and key characters in the original feel half-baked. I never believed the psychology of the Leader, or could find much to do with Finch. There were some great ideas and a lot of muddy execution.
But to end where I began, my ultimate problem was how unpleasant I found this book to read. It was never fun, and I finished it more out of a sense of intellectual interest in understanding how it fits in the history of comics than out of any real response the material. Like everything Moore writes, it's joyless....more
For me the X-Men will always be the Chris Claremont X-Men, but I hear there's a new day in mutant comics, and this 12-issue graphic novel is the placeFor me the X-Men will always be the Chris Claremont X-Men, but I hear there's a new day in mutant comics, and this 12-issue graphic novel is the place to get started with it. Since around 1995, I've only read a handful of X-Men comics, like the Joss Whedon run (terrific) and the Grant Morrison run (not so terrific), but I'm up-to-date enough to follow.
I also hear Hickman is all the rage these days, and he does deliver a complex and somewhat innovative story in this volume that substantially revises the core X-Men mythology and their place in the Marvel universe. Obviously the central purpose is to reframe Xavier's dream, updated from the homage to Martin Luther King it was originally written to be, and presented in a much more self-confident frame. These mutants don't meekly ask for acceptance - they don't even demand their rightful place in the world. They simply take it, and form their own society in their own way, and if you don't like it, feel free to try to stop them.
I gather this is intended to reflect a more contemporary set of attitudes about diversity and inclusion, and in that sense, it's genuinely fascinating, although, fuddy-duddy that I am, the old frame spoke much more to my heart. The Xavier I grew up with felt a deeper kinship and brotherhood with the humans who passionately believed in universal equality than the mass murderers who also happen to be mutants. So I find it weird to see him sitting at the table with Mr. Sinister, pontificating about putting aside the old disagreements, and I wonder if he remembers the Morlock Annalee, the old woman with the gift of empathy who was murdered along with her young children during the Mutant Massacre. Not completely sure I'm on board with the moral calculus here.
It seems to me that the author assumes the reader will instinctively recognize the rightness of this update, and go along with it, and insofar as this is a living genre that requires the retcon as a device to allow it to keep telling stories, I'll go with it. So then, evaluating the story on its own merits, I'll say it was loaded with interesting ideas, but suffered from some significant problems.
For one thing, it was not just loaded with interesting ideas, it was overloaded. Twelve issues dedicated almost entirely to exposition were not enough to get everything across, so in addition to the conventional comic book panels, each issue includes multiple pages of text giving us a direct dump of reference information. It was, simply put, too much for this short framework to contain and to express, and it should have been pared down.
The first thing I would have cut out is that largely-superfluous add-on storyline set in the far future that takes up maybe 25% of the total length. The story was already overcrowded, and I found that to be a pure distraction.
This is my first time reading Hickman, and the main thing I come away with is that, in this story at least, he shows himself to be a Grant Morrison disciple, which was obvious long before the tarot reading at the end quelled any doubt. It is genuinely interesting to see the work of a writer who obviously came up on Morrison and who shares a major part of his storytelling DNA, but he's inherited the bad along with the good, and this story at times reminded me of Morrison's lesser work - especially Final Crisis, which was similarly an overstuffed story whose sheer density of ideas crowded out the basics of narrative.
Which gets me to my last point - Hickman never bothers to tell us a story with characters. So much happens involving so many people that the closest we get to characters are Xavier, Magneto, and Moira, but we get little sense of them except in the broadest strokes. They speak a lot but do very little, and ultimately this arc lacks any human ... er, mutant characters we can identify with or care about. This contributes strongly to the general feeling that we're getting something more like a data dump setting up a new framework for storytelling than something that's a story in its own right.
Despite its deficits, Hickman swings for the fences and does deliver a complex story that resolves in an extremely interesting way, even if I didn't resonate with what I take to be the vision at its center. Maybe this is what the youngsters are looking for in their mutant comics, fair enough. I'll primarily stick with Claremont....more
Reading this early work of Morrison is like listening to Led Zeppelin's first album - it's all there, it's unmistakably them, but there is nothing theReading this early work of Morrison is like listening to Led Zeppelin's first album - it's all there, it's unmistakably them, but there is nothing there that clearly shows the heights they're going to reach. It's all "Dazed and Confused" and no "When the Levee Breaks."
It's hard not to be astonished by the sheer audacity of this work - there is one issue which is literally just a re-envisioning of Wiley Coyote as the Christ, eternally condemned to die in suffering again and again by being run over by steamrollers or blown up by giant rockets. When you read that issue, you just can't believe that an editor at D. C. in the 80s said, "Sure, go ahead with that one, that sounds good."
There are some truly astonishing ideas in here, like when Morrison takes the very idea of retconning the title character to launch a new series, and he makes it part of the story, bringing it in as some kind of DMT-inspired paranoid fantasy about how sometimes the details of people's lives change because multidimensional beings are manipulating things in our universe for reasons of their own.
It's easy to draw a straight line between that kind of postmodern psychedelic mysticism and his later, greater series "The Invisibles," but what that latter series has that this one lacks is a confident command of story beats and development. The characters are underdeveloped and lack a human core, and the narrative lurches forward in fits and starts that don't always make good dramatic sense. The first several issues are a complete mess, and it only even begins to find something like a recognizable shape around issue ten.
There are some incredible ideas at play here, and Morrison shows himself to be a brilliant writer with a very unique take on the world of superheroes. He just needed to work on how to tell a human story, and how to get his political ideas across without sounding didactic....more
Although I am not a big Alan Moore fan, I was beguiled into giving Neonomicon a try by its fabulous premise - a modern-day, Lovecraftian tale of mysteAlthough I am not a big Alan Moore fan, I was beguiled into giving Neonomicon a try by its fabulous premise - a modern-day, Lovecraftian tale of mystery and madness.
Moore apparently believes that the best way to build upon Lovecraft's legacy is to add long episodes of truly horrific sadism and sexual violence. In general, I'm deeply put-off by Moore's fascination with such material, and his tendency to dwell at length on wicked characters doing really monstrous things.
I do not object to such portrayals in fiction if it's done to some purpose, but Moore gives the impression that he simply enjoys it; or rather, that he is obsessed with it, and can't stop himself from returning to the scene of the crime, to stare repeatedly at some great wound in the human heart.
Readers looking for the epic postmodern architectonics of Watchmen will find a work of much more modest scope - it contains enough plot for a short story of about eight pages in length. There are some strong ideas in it, but on the whole I found the experience of reading it stomach-turning and entirely without joy.
I was also not impressed by the undistinguished, cartoonish artwork, which did little to convey the shocking intensity of Lovecraft's creations. ...more
Because this book is so well-known, I won't give a lengthy review - just want to say that it's one of the best autobiographical graphic novels I've reBecause this book is so well-known, I won't give a lengthy review - just want to say that it's one of the best autobiographical graphic novels I've read. It provides a fascinating, intimate, and deeply-personal look at life in Iran during and after the revolution, seen through the eyes of a young woman gifted with loving parents of considerable means, extraordinary good luck, and a deep sensitivity and honesty. Highly recommended. ...more
When I read a book, I like to do the author the courtesy of taking it seriously in the terms in which it's presented. So when Grant Morrison offers a When I read a book, I like to do the author the courtesy of taking it seriously in the terms in which it's presented. So when Grant Morrison offers a history of comic books shot through with scattered observations about metaphysics, cultural history, comparative religions, and psychology, my impulse is to take those observations seriously and evaluate them as such.
On that basis, I simply can't get behind his "reality as useful fiction," which, whatever he might think, owes a lot more to his absorption with comic books than his reading of Nietzsche or Dzogchen. His musings are often facile and misinformed, drawn from the smorgasbord of culture on the basis of what entertains and inspires, with little concern for the facts of the matter. And even as someone with an apophatic commitment, I still have the old-fashioned belief that there are facts of the matter.
When you peer behind the curtain at an artist's creative process, you often experience something of a disappointment. A great work like "The Invisibles" speaks for itself, and attempts to account for it simply diminish its scope. Many artists understand this and refuse to entertain questions about the origin or meaning of their work, but Morrison is surprisingly willing to play this game. Often, his work is concordantly diminished, as the stage mechanics of what seemed like divine inspiration come to light.
I get the sense that he gave in to the temptation to write this novel-length self-analysis because it gave him another outlet to elaborate and play with his public persona. As I read Supergods that increasingly seemed like his primary commitment, as little else binds this book together.
Morrison presents a roughly-chronological and fragmentary history of superhero comic books, offered in breathless drive-by analyses of whatever topic catches his interest for two or three pages. It consistently reads like he narrated the entire thing into a tape recorder, and an intern typed it all out.
Supergods occasionally delivers a top-rate insight, but it's too fragmentary and disorganized, too incoherent in style and subject, to qualify as guilty pleasure. Mostly I feel relieved to be done with it. ...more
Highly recommended to fans of the show. A continuation of the story after season 7 with Joss Whedon at the helm, the Buffy series is remarkably effectHighly recommended to fans of the show. A continuation of the story after season 7 with Joss Whedon at the helm, the Buffy series is remarkably effective at retaining much of the charm of the TV series. Considerably better than Whedon's Firefly comics, and his X-Men outing. ...more
This is the best comic book series ever written. Best. Ever. Every single good idea in the Matrix trilogy was "borrowed" from The Invisibles. The WachThis is the best comic book series ever written. Best. Ever. Every single good idea in the Matrix trilogy was "borrowed" from The Invisibles. The Wachowskis are responsible for the bad ideas. ...more