"Why do you think I wear a target on my chest -- can't armor my head"

[jazzfish]

The incomparable Teresa Nielsen Hayden has what will, I hope, be the last word on the du Toit nonsense.

Been reading Frank Miller's classic Batman tale The Dark Knight Returns, because I keep hearing that it and Grant Morrison & Dave McKean's Arkham Asylum are the best things ever to come out of superhero comics (Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons's genre-busting Watchmen excepted). I'm maybe a third of the way through DKR and it's quite good. If the American public had any interest in seeing a sixty-year-old Batman, it'd make a great movie.

What really gets me, though, is page 47. A lot of small panels of the Joker behind wiremesh/glass, with short green hair and pale skin, smoking a cigarette. . . the resemblance to David Bowie circa 1980 is frightening. Scary monsters and super creeps, indeed.

Comments

Comix

[jazzfish]

*thinks* I've definitely read Watchmen (excellent, excellent stuff), V For Vendetta (several years ago, and it was 'okay-to-good' but I need to reread it in light of my newfound social conscience), and From Hell (creepy, and does in fact require a lot of concentration. I recommend reading the endnotes along with the individual pages; without them I would've been all but lost). I think that's-- oh, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was a delightful game of Spot the Victorian Literary Reference wrapped 'round a spy story. And a short prose piece for the Liavek series. That, however, is all the Alan Moore I've read. I'm almost certain.

Watchmen totally rocked my world. It did so many things with superheroes, so well, that I felt like there was no point in finding other superhero stories; I'd seen the absolute best the genre could possibly offer. I am now wise enough to recognise that even the best isn't all-encompassing. So, now that I've discovered that there were good comic books before Sandman ("Next you'll be telling me there was industrial before NIN!") I'll have to find more. Kingdom Come I've heard of before; Marvels is new to me, though.

If you've got time/inclination/cash you might ought to look into Transmetropolitan (slowly being collected in graphic novel format; number nine of ten will be out next month). It's sort of Hunter S Thompson in a darkly funny dystopian future. (And everyone should read Sandman, of course.)