Words are inadequate

Anton Corbijn (dir.), Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) (trailer)

Look, I'm a compulsive reader. As a teenager that meant I read CD liner notes, and I remembered things like the album artist credits on Pink Floyd albums for "Storm Thorgerson" (Lapse of Reason) or "Hipgnosis" (Dark Side, Wish You Were Here). At some point I learned that these were pretty much the same person: Hipgnosis was Thorgerson's design studio, specializing in album covers.

When I heard that there was a documentary on Hipgnosis I said "huh, might be interesting" and pulled it up. I hadn't realised it was done by Anton Corbijn until I saw his name in the opening credits. It took me a bit to remember where I knew his name from, too: photo credits for U2's The Joshua Tree.

Most of Squaring the Circle consists of filmed interviews with a couple dozen people who were involved with Hipgnosis. They're shot exactly like the Joshua Tree photos: black and white, high contrast, skillful use of shadow and light sourcing. I adore chiaroscuro so this is entirely my jam. The parts that aren't interviews, or sometimes archival footage, tend to be Ken-Burns-effect pans and zooms over Hipgnosis's psychedelic artwork, and that's pretty great as well.

Storm Thorgerson's been gone for a decade now, so most of the history's filtered through his co-designer, Aubrey 'Po' Powell. Po's interview clips are interspersed with folks like Paul McCartney and the extant members of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and occasionally other folks Hipgnosis worked with. Noel Gallagher of Oasis turns up as well, gushing about how awesome records in the sixties and seventies were.

It's all a bit ridiculous: the sheer amount of money being thrown around rock stars, and Po and Storm's savvy at putting themselves in the way of it. Which isn't to say they weren't making some stunning artwork as well. But the wild scale of the whole thing, tens of thousands of 1970s UK pounds, all for a twelve-inch-square image. Amazing.

The documentary closes with this classic exchange:

INTERVIEWER (offscreen): Why didn't you use Hipgnosis for your album covers?
NOEL GALLAGHER: (laugh) I couldn't afford them.

Visually stunning, occasionally hilarious, and overall a fascinating angle on the UK music industry. Recommended.

Neil Gaiman, David S. Goyer, et al, The Sandman (season 1)

I originally wasn't going to watch the Sandman series. The first trailer looked like they'd done a decent enough job with it, but it just wasn't grabbing me. Then Erin and I watched a couple of clips, one of Death and one of Lucifer, and that piqued my interest enough that we binged the whole thing this past weekend.

So. It's ten episodes, covering Preludes & Nocturnes and The Doll's House. And it's... look, if you know the comics, it's probably the best possible adaptation, in the same way that Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring was the best possible adaptation of Fellowship. (I'm specifying Fellowship and not LotR because twenty years later I'm still mad about a number of unforced errors script choices in Two Towers and RotK. Fellowship was generally alright, though.) They went to a lot of trouble to take a bunch of visuals direct from Kieth & Dringenberg's art. The midpoint episode "The Sound Of Her Wings", incorporating the Hob Gadling story as well as the eponymous issue, is some seriously excellent television.

In some ways the show is better than the comics. They've made the Corinthian the antagonist of the whole series, weaving him through the Preludes episodes and giving him a more active role in Doll's House, so it all feels less bolted together and more like a narrative. They cut some extraneous stuff that you don't even notice and spend just enough more time on minor characters (Jed Walker, Unity Kincaid, Hector Hall) to give their storylines some substance. Turning John Constantine into 'Johanna Constantine' is a neat choice, and (speaking as a devout John Constantine fanboy) probably a good one? It helps that Jenna Coleman pulls it off with a great deal of panache.

I didn't like '24 Hours' in Preludes, and I still didn't like it as '24/7.' Though here it's more "that just didn't work for me at all" and less "this is horrific and unnecessary," so I guess that's an improvement? And while Patton Oswalt does a fine job as Matthew the raven, there's something about his voice or his delivery that's just a step out of phase with the rest of the show.

I assume next season will be "Season of Mists and some random issues." I'm looking forward to it, and to Brief Lives and The Kindly Ones. And who knows, maybe they'll come to their senses and skip over A Game Of You.

Meanwhile I should get on with rereading The Kindly Ones.

Lucas Pope, Return of the Obra Dinn

Sometime in 2019 I read a review or two of Return of the Obra Dinn, and I figured it sounded like it was right up my alley so I picked it up. I proceeded to play it for an hour or two and got past what's basically the intro scenes. At which point I said "this requires brain power, perhaps i'll dig into it next weekend when i have time."

As you may or not recall, "not enough time/space/energy/brain" has been a consistent refrain of mine for several years now, which is why I didn't pick up Obra Dinn for at least two and a half years. But time/space/energy/brain has been returning of late, which is why I picked it back up this morning and played through the whole thing in one ten-hour burst.

The plot: it's 1807 and the schooner Obra Dinn has just returned to London... empty and deserted. You're an insurance investigator sent to find out what happened. To aid you, you have a journal that fills in automatically as you find things out, and a ... spirit compass ... that lets you hear someone's last words and wander around in a freeze-frame of their dying moment.

So you're wandering around this ship, putting names to faces (the journal includes a ship's roster and a few sketches that cover everyone on board). As you find more corpses / death-spots, you find out more and more of what happened to the various crewmembers, and to the ship itself. It's atmospheric as anything. The art's in a deliberately lo-res dithered line-art style, which isn't my thing but is a very specific aesthetic, and it ... it doesn't detract. The sound's great, but then it would have to be.

And ... it's a puzzle-game. Observation and deduction. Everything matters. Languages, accents, clothing, scars. (Faces don't matter, thankfully: the game helpfully matches each person to a specific sketch in the journal, so even if you haven't figured out who they are you can say "ah, this is the same Russian as previously" or whatever.) It's really well-done.

It's set up so that you /can/ guess if you really want to but it won't necessarily help you much. There are sixty people on the ship, each of whom needs to be matched with their name/picture and their fate (plenty of options, ranging from "spiked by strange creature" through "electrocuted" and on to "alive and well in Africa"), and the game confirms your anwswers in groups of three. So when you get stuck the answer is generally "go work on something else and you'll make some progress, and maybe figure out something about how to sort out those four functionally identical sailors." I blind-guessed (from a limited selection) ... mm ... maybe a half-dozen times? And I went to the internet for hints on the last two deaths, one of which was badly clued and the other I could have brute-forced but I was ready to be done.

The pacing's a little odd towards the end, I think. Though that's inherent to it being a game, I think. "Okay, I have all the pieces of the story, now I have to wander around and find the clues I missed. And... done with that, and now I get the epilogue, which ... isn't puzzly at all. Boo."

It's also ... there's a distance to the story. I mean, nature of the beast, but... the ending hangs together and makes for a satisfactory resolution to the Obra Dinn... but I'm just an observer. At the end of the game my avatar literally puts the journal back on the shelf. I guess I'm looking for more of a sense of agency from a game.

Still. Recommended, if you're at all into puzzly things.

An interlude between Fables & Reflections and The Kindly Ones. Individual tales with a framing story to connect them: varied travelers lost in a storm take refuge at the Inn of Worlds' End.

So it's another anthology collection, but one with a frame story. To be honest the frame story only mostly worked for me. I appreciate how it ties in to the larger world and to Dream's forthcoming funeral procession, but ... eh. "People from our world get caught up in magic and refuse to believe it" is a theme that just doesn't do much for me anymore.

I found the individual stories mostly memorable but not brilliantly so. Nothing that grabbed me as much as the tales from Fables & Reflections. The worldbuilding in the Cluracan's tale and in Cerements is fantastic, of course, and the city's dream is pleasantly unsettling, but ... eh. Just didn't quite gel.

Or I'm just in a grumpy mood. Also always possible.

In which Delirium and her big brother Dream go in search of Destruction, their brother who walked away from his duties and his family three hundred years ago.

I don't know why it took me a year to get around to reading Fables & Reflections but I'm glad I did. Both because I like it a great deal and because it got me moving on the rest of the saga.

Having said that ... this one didn't really catch me and I don't know why. It's got good minor characters in Ruby and Ishtar (and Barnabas, Destruction's canine companion), it's got an interesting expansion on the mythos of the Endless, it's got a good Death scene. It's got Dream denying that he's changed at all in the face of increasing evidence to the contrary. Maybe that's what frustrated me? Like A Game Of You, it's a very 'nothing has changed' story.

It's tempting to compare this to Season of Mists, the previous Dream-centric arc, which also ended in a reassertion of the status quo. But for whatever reason I liked Season of Mists a great deal more. I dunno. Peter Straub, in his Afterword, also got a lot more out of this story than I did.

Mostly this past month I read a bunch of webcomics.

I enjoy the combination of 'ongoing plot' and 'daily gag'. Plot with no gag just gets frustrating, same as most serial media: I want the rest of the story now dammit. Gag with no plot is fine, but I appreciate the sense of building towards something. And if I'm on an archive binge, well, mixing humour and gravitas is a time-honoured storytelling tradition. Like in Hamlet, where, on his way to duel his best friend and hopefully kill his father, Hamlet and his buddy Horatio stop to trade one-liners with the gravediggers.

Anyway, at some point this year the awareness that the comics I currently read will eventually end, or at least trickle off into near-nothingness, started to permeate. So, hey, why not pick up some long-running comics from the Golden Age of Webcomics (roughly, the early 2000s)?

R. Stevens, Diesel Sweeties

For reasons that are pretty much opaque to me, I started here. Diesel Sweeties is way over on the gag-a-day end of the spectrum. It's got a gigantic cast of characters, most of whom are quickly recognisable through various personality quirks ("Indie Rock Pete!"). It's not always terribly original; in a lot of the early strips the gag is either "and then they go have sex" or "they just had sex". But it's still fun, and the occasional surprising bits of plot are maybe more effective for their rarity.

Danielle Corsetto, Girls With Slingshots. Read on Erin's recommendation. Enjoyable but I find a lot of it's dropped from my memory, which is awkward since it's ongoing. (Well, kind of; the original black-and-white run was 2004-2014, and then it immediately went into reruns and got colorized.)

Jeph Jacques, Alice Grove. Excellent skiffy comic; some really great worldbuilding. The ending sort of peters out, but the journey is worth it.

Jeph Jacques, Questionable Content. Back in, um, 2005, I actually read all of the extant QC (up til around #600, I think). The end of my binge happened to coincide with "Marten gets a job at a library full of polyamorous lesbians," and for some reason it felt weird to read a comic about a (usually) single dude and his horde of female friends. I am pretty sure that 2005 Tucker had more male friends than Marten did, which is saying something. Anyway, I recalled both sorcyress and James Nicoll reading it, and I figured maybe I had overreacted.

So I read the 4000+ archive strips over a couple of weeks.

I'm glad I did. It's a fun ride. There still aren't a whole lot of dudes, but there are a few. And it's got what looks to me like pretty good representation across the board.

Rich Burlew, The Order of the Stick. Explicitly fantasy, set in an explicitly D&D-esque universe. OotS is I think my favourite of the batch (Alice Grove might have tied it if it had stuck the landing). It's got a strong plot arc, and good character arcs for all the PCs. And it does the thing where a universe that appears to be just a stage full of scenery made of painted boards turns out to be boards that were deliberately painted that way by someone in-universe, for a reason, which I can appreciate. I'll be sad when it ends in six or eight years, but I also expect to feel good about the ending.

John M. Ford, Growing Up Weightless

Growing Up Weightless is a damnably opaque book, even for Ford. On the surface it's the story of Matt, a kid on a Lunar colony who wants to go to space; he and his role-playing friends sneak off for a week-long train trip, and at the end of it he unexpectedly, almost accidentally, achieves his desire. And behind and underneath that... I have read the book maybe a half dozen times now and I am not sure I could explain the "plot," which I think revolves around Luna's push for self-sufficiency and the Vaccuum Corporation of Earth's attempts to exert control. (I believe that at one point Mike said something like "No one in Weightless knows all of what's going on. At the end of the book Albin constructs a narrative of events, that's plausible from his perspective.")

And the last twenty pages still make me cry every damned time. I suspect that's as simple as seeing Matt get the freedom he so badly wants, and how that affects his (supportive but hurt) family and (wildly varied) friends. It's a Me Thing, is I guess what I'm saying.

I mentally file Weightless as a companion piece with The Last Hot Time, which is only right in that they're both about growing up (different angles on it, though). I think it's really that they both invoke Orwell at the end, almost in passing: "The object of power is power, and the object of torture is torture."

I don't love Growing Up Weightless. I like the well-thought-out worldbuilding (except for the overly compressed timescale), I like the depictions of role-playing and of one-sixth-gravity theatre. I'm happy to spend time with the characters, and to keep trying to tease out the "plot." But I reread Weightless for catharsis. It's a personal book for me, and I expect most people to say "huh" or "that was neat" and be done with it. I'm okay with that.

Patrick McHale et al, Over the Garden Wall

Ten 11-minute episodes, plus the noncanonical pilot. Animated.

Teenaged Wirt and his young brother Gregory wander through a fairy-tale-esque forest, trying to find their way home.

I ... enjoyed? this. It felt slow at times, especially given that it's eleven-minute episodes. I blame the occasional musical numbers, coupled with the rural-americana aesthetic. But the dialogue's fun, the characterization's well done, and there's a surreal quality to the storytelling that just works for me.

This falls into the same category of stories as Labyrinth or Susan Cooper's Seaward, where it looks suspiciously like It Was All A Dream but there are enough unexplained things afterwards that it clearly wasn't. I appreciate that a lot.

I'm still thinking about it several days later, so it certainly made an impression.

In which Morpheus goes to Hell to free his lover, and receives an unexpected gift.

• Harlan Ellison's introduction adds nothing. Oh well.
  
• Okay, it looks like I just don't like anyone's Morpheus-faces except for Sam Kieth, and sometimes Mike Dringenberg (honorable exception for Charles Vess). I can accept that. *checks wiki* I'll just spend the rest of the series grumbling that Morpheus looks wrong.
  
• This just overall feels like a Sandman story. P&N has a quest narrative that doesn't fit with the general mood, and Doll's House... it's good but it flails around a lot. Season of Mists has a coherent narrative and an appropriately mythic scope, and the telling of it feels complete and tight. Like the loose ends are deliberate choices rather than everything getting out of hand. I appreciate that a lot.
  
• I think this is the first time I've really noticed the lettering. I mean, Morpheus's white-on-black is blatant enough that you can't miss it, and Matthew the raven's caws fit him so well I hardly saw them. Here, with all the deities and entities in one place, with their varied fonts... it's a lovely effect.
  
• The various resolutions are, I think, perfectly done. The disposition of Hell, the reunion with Nala, Loki... and as I recall, Nuala the fae remains a minor character, which is nice.
  
• I wonder if Loki turns up again? I don't remember him doing so but that means very little.
  
• Now I want to reread Lucifer. Unfortunately, those trades were Emily's.

I'm happier with it than I expected to be / remembered being. I think I mostly recalled it as a slight story, an interlude before things got really good with Season of Mists. There's some real humanity in here, and some solid tension.

I'm unimpressed by the ending, by Dream's insistence that the Endless are servants of humans parallelling Rose's "we're just toys to greater forces". You look at the actual distribution of power and it becomes clear that Rose is right and Dream is full of it. (Yes yes, The Kindly Ones. We're not there now.) So far I feel like Sandman is at its best when it treats its stories as specific tales of specific characters and lets the universality emerge from that ("The Sound of Her Wings," or Morpheus deciding he wants a friend in Hob Gadling). It's weak when it tries to make universal statements, as here, or "if there were no dreams in Hell it would hold no power".

Misc thoughts:

• This must have been mindblowing as single monthly issues in 1989. It's still impressive today.
  
• Either I've quickly gotten used to Mike Dringenberg's Dream, or he's adjusted his style to fit better with Sam Kieth's. Either way, I'm pleased by the art.
  
• The couple of pages where Rose is dreaming and the page is rotated ninety degrees? Very nice.
  
• I'm not sure what the Hob Gadling story is doing in here. I like it, but it doesn't seem to fit in with the arc.
  
• Oh right, the cereal convention. It's... squickier than I recall. Perhaps I've gotten more sensitive.
  
• Again, lots of echoes of things to come. I appreciate that.
  
• Rose can ... just remove the vortex from herself? This seems to undermine the whole premise of the "and now i have to kill you" thing. (Resolving plot points without invoking character agency is a consistent problem I have with Neil's early writing: see also Neverwhere.)
  
• I am not sure what I think of the "So I'm going to decide it was all just a dream" ending. It irritates me, but I think it's the right way to end Rose's story.