Words are inadequate

In which the story of Morpheus, Dream of the Endless, reaches the end it's been clearly aiming for since at least Brief Lives, if not Season of Mists.

I remember disliking the art the last time I read this. Or, not disliking exactly, but thinking it wasn't good enough. It's certainly not photorealistic or drawn-from-life or representative or whatever you call it. "Art deco-ish," I said when I loaned it to Chris, and it is, all sharp angles and solid colours. But it's also exaggerated proportions and bold lines. And it works for the story, it drew me in and it didn't detract and probably added to the mythic feel.

I dunno. It's too big to talk about, especially since it's been so long since I've read the rest. Thirteen issues, drawing heavily on everything that's come before, some of which I remembered and some of which I didn't.

It's basically successful, I think. It reads like a coherent fully-constructed narrative, which the first two didn't; it has actual consequences, which A Game Of You and to some extent Brief Lives fell down on. It probably is the best of the arcs but it relies so very much on what's come before for that impact... it's like saying "The Sound of Her Wings" (tv or comic) is the best Sandman story, but it means so much less without the rest of Preludes.

It's worth reading the rest of Sandman for, though the rest of Sandman is generally good in its own right (my grumpiness aside).

Presumably I'll reread it again sooner than twenty years, this time.

(Not to say that I'm done. There's still The Wake, plus ancillary material: the Death stories, Dream Hunters, Endless Nights, and finally a first-read of Overture. Oh, and I scored a copy of Dust Covers recently as well.)

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.

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.

Links go to trailers:

• In Bruges: a heartwarming Christmas tale of two UK hitmen laying low in a scenic Belgian town after a hit gone wrong. Only for "heartwarming" read "dark and thoughtful and sometimes quite funny and always, always, dark." I enjoyed it, I think; would watch again but not for another year or two. (See also: F***ing Bruges, a 90-second clip of all the swearing in the movie.)
  
• Young Adult: a character study of the kind of woman who was popular in high school and never had to learn how to be an adult. Also funny but that's not really the point. I've enjoyed all of Jason Reitman's other films (Thank You For Smoking, Juno, and the sublime Up In The Air) so I figured, why not? Well done and discomforting and I'm not sure I'd see it again. (I didn't so much care for Juno either, which makes me think I just don't get on with Diablo Cody's scripts.)
  
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: a slow-moving Cold War espionage thriller starring an almost unrecognizable Gary Oldman. I loved it but I'm a sucker for twisty plots and watching people put pieces together, and this had those in spades.
  
• The Artist: there's really no point in making a black-and-white silent movie in 2011 unless it a) is about late-twenties and early-thirties Hollywood and b) uses its lack of sound as commentary. The Artist does both, quite well. I'm glad I saw it, and even more glad I saw it in a theatre: it seems the kind of thing that's a little pointless to watch in the privacy of one's home.

In front of those I got a bunch of forgettable trailers, plus one for Ralph Fiennes's modern-day Coriolanus which I will probably see, and one for a Margaret Thatcher biopic to which I said, out loud, "You have got to be kidding me." I really don't feel like I'm missing anything by not indulging in more pop culture, especially not at $13 a pop for a matinee.

Over Xmas I also read all of Azzarello & Risso's 100 Bullets because I never did get around to finishing it, and then for good measure reread Ennis & Dillon's Asshole Irish Vampire Preacher, neither of which moved me as much as I'd hoped. Cassidy's "Ye're a wanker, aren't ye?" is still the greatest thing one can say to a goth, and 100 Bullets has its own crowning moments of cool ("You can't feel numb. You can only be numb." Or, "...they'll tell you about some noble bullshit that killed her." "How do you know?" "I'm noble bullshit.") but ... I dunno. The glimmers of interesting depth are drowned in gore and patriarchial crap.

The interesting thing about the end of Preacher is that at the end of it... nothing's changed. Tulip and Jesse are back together, and Cassidy's out doing whatever Cassidy does. Sure, the Grail's broken, and God's been shot, but honestly? None of that affects the characters at all. We're /told/ that Jesse and Cassidy have grown up some but we don't actually see it.

I seem to be less impressed with comics than I used to be. I'm almost afraid to reread Sandman, it's been so long.

Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts: 1950-1952
The Complete Peanuts: 1953-1954

Yay Peanuts! The first four-plus years of my favorite comic strip collected in one place (starting in October 1950). Watching the characters turn into their familiar selves is fascinating: Lucy in particular grows up from being a baby that Charlie Brown has to keep an eye on to "World's Greatest Fussbudget." Amazing stuff, and still quite funny fifty years later.

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Jeph Loeb / Jim Lee, Batman: Hush

Eh. Apparently a super-hyped story with a SOOPER SEKRIT villain. News flash: if you introduce a random new guy from Batman's past, people are going to assume he's the bad guy, because they've seen this schtick before. Other than that, it felt like the typical cavalcade of villains, plus the obligatory fight between Batman and Superman. Unimpressive, especially considering it was released in two volumes. I pity the people who spent money on this.

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Jeph Loeb / Tim Sale, Batman: Haunted Knight

Far better. Three (four?) one-shot Halloween stories, including one genuinely creepy one involving Scarecrow. Short Batman stories are generally better than the long arcs, I'm finding. [Obvious exceptions exist, like Year One.] Good to know that Jeph Loeb's reputation isn't wholly unfounded.

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Neil Gaiman / Yoshitaka Amano, Sandman: The Dream Hunters

Fantastic take on a traditional Japanese tale ("The Fox, the Monk, and the Mikado of All Night's Dreaming") with gorgeously painted artwork. The saddest thing I've read in ages.

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Jeph Loeb / Tim Sale, Batman: The Long Halloween

An exception to the 'short Batman better' rule I just came up with. Thirteen issues, each about a differnt holiday (well, except that #1 and 13 are both Halloween), each another grisly murder (except for April Fool's). Good stuff, well-written, and a good mystery.

Gene Wolfe, In Green's Jungles

Short Sun vol.2. Continuing with the half-and-half treatment from the first volume. Horn's lander is taken over by inhumi [alien creatures, more or less like vampires] and diverted to their home planet of Green, rather than heading straight for the Whorl. Horn escapes the inhumi and wanders in the jungle, eventually dying and passing into the body of an old man on the Whorl. Meanwhile, the protagonist leads a war against another colony-state on Blue, and mentally journeys to Green and to Urth in the time of Severian.

Still confusing but I'm getting a handle on it. Parts seem irrelevant but probably aren't; parts that feel especially relevant aren't fleshed out. Frustrating. But still a damned good read.

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Barry Hughart, Eight Skilled Gentlemen

The third of the Master Li and Number Ten Ox books; the second [The Story of the Stone] is essentially out of print. It's not as lighthearted as Bridge of Birds and even more steeped in Chinese mythology, but the humor and heart are still present. I'd really like to read more of these.

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art spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers

Oversize comic, collecting some of spiegelman's work for the New Yorker [I think] in the months after the fall of the World Trade Center. It's alright, but the last eight or so pages are reminiscences and 'classic' comics, and I clearly lack the erudition to really understand [say] Little Nemo, or the depth of Krazy Kat and Ignatz. The first half is worth the read; the second not so much.

Neil Gaiman and Gene Wolfe, A Walking Tour of the Shambles

This is the sort of book that says something utterly outrageous, laughs a little too loud, and then abruptly stops laughing and stares directly at you, so that you're pretty sure it wasn't really kidding. It's ostensibly a guidebook through a scary section of Chicago ["mysteriously untouched by the Great Fire. 'Ya can't burn Hell,' one resident joked"'], and is in actuality a chance for Gene and Neil to write something fun and creepy. Probably not worth $16, but what the hell.

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David Callahan, The Cheating Culture

Perhaps the most fundamentally depressing book I've read in ages. Callahan explores the widespread epidemic of cheating in modern culture: he looks in-depth at sports, education, and finance, and mentions other areas as well. I found the "how the heck did we get here" section especially enlightening: I'd heard Jonathan expound on the combination of sixties individualism and eighties greed before, but Callahan also excoriates the conservative focus on "values" for its tacit insistence that only results matter. Plus there's the Red Queen effect, where if you don't cheat and everyone else does you're handicapping yourself . . . it's an ugly mess. He offers some potential solutions in the last chapter, but overall this isn't a solution book, it's a problem analysis book. Everyone should read this one.

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Ted Naifeh, Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things
Courtney Crumrin and the Coven of Mystics
Courtney Crumrin in the Twilight Kingdom

Three wonderful comics featuring a junior-high-school outcast studying witchcraft. "Coraline, only not by Neil Gaiman and a comic book" is how I once described it. Courtney's a far more believable character than the average angst-ridden teen. She's genuinely unpleasant to people, for starters. And when you see her emotional fragility it feels genuinely fragile, and not like something that can be solved by whisking her away to someplace magical.

The first volume is a collection of four short tales; the second is a complete story arc. The third is curiously inbetween: its first issue was a separate story, and then the next three belong together. The second was probably the strongest of the three but I can see an argument for preferring the third one. Good stuff all around, though.

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Terry Bisson, Bears Discover Fire

The best short-story collection I have read in a very, very long time. Witty prose and ideas, good characters, and just plain fun. Includes the brilliant title story, as well as "They're Made of Meat" which can be found online, and a weird piece entitled "Coon Suit" that appeared in F&SF when I had a subscription. A lot of the shorter stories in the book have an eco-theme; in the Afterword he says that this is because A) he's conserving paper and B) if they got longer they'd get preachy. I dunno; some of them are a bit preachy already, but it's hard to see thme becoming any more so.

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Jeff Smith, Bone

Sixtyish issues of epic comic book story. Originally published in nine volumes. I'd probably feel gypped if I'd had to buy nine books to get the story told here, but in one volume it's worth having. It's at its best when Smith's laying on the funny ("Stupid, stupid rat-creatures!"); about three-fifths of the way through the plot starts to get pretty serious, and I think the story suffers as a result. I do like the art, though.

Mario Puzo, The Godfather

Picked this up at work one day and flipped through it, and decided I needed to sit down and read the whole thing. The prose has a lot of the same fluid quality of the dialogue in the film; I don't know if I can really describe it. It flows through the book like olive oil. You think, oh, that odd word choice or word order is just an affectation, nobody really thinks like that. But they do. Precision. Cold rage. "And perhaps someday, a day which may never come, you will do a favor for me" is an only slightly exaggerated example. I adored this book. Now I'll have to find something else interesting by Mario Puzo to see if the style can hold my interest for more than a single book.

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Andy Diggle and Jock, The Losers: Island Life

Nine through twelve. I fear the comic may degenerate into a series of fetch-quests for the next Maguffin: this time they're after the contents of a safe, mostly because the Goliath corporation is also after it. There's bits of metaplot that trickle in, and this story arc has a volcano which makes everything better. I keep reading, and enjoying, but I start to worry.

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Andy Diggle and Nick Dragotta, The Losers: Sheikdown

Two-part story, issues thirteen and fourteen. New artist. Bleh. I hadn't realised how much of my enjoyment came from Jock's art-nouveau characters [like The Kindly Ones, only good]: having full faces and less sharp angles feels jarring after a year of pointyness. The story is better, too, with a solid supporting-cast member or three.

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Leonard Mlodinow, Euclid's Window

In which the author of Feynman's Rainbow documents the history of geometry. Which is kind of interesting stuff, to me at least. He sprinkles nifty factoids throughout [one guy "proved" the parallel postulate by positing an alternate form of the postulate and then deriving Euclid's statement of it from that, for instance] and uses his children in all his examples, but I still wasn't too thrilled by the book. I got even less thrilled when he tried to relate geometry to Einstein's relativity [which makes sense] and then to string theory [which doesn't, much]. Part of the problem may be that I still can't conceive of Lobachevskian ["hyperbolic"] spaces.

I'm mostly fascinated by the idea that not only is the parallel postulate [given a line and a point not on the line, there's exactly one line parallel to the line that goes through the point] unprovable in Euclidean geometry, but that breaking it gives you wonderfully consistent alternate geometries, which may even represent space better than Euclidean. If anyone knows of a good introduction to Lobachevskian geometry, I'd love to take a look at one.