PR, a quick note to tell you that I think your comments ( on my previous post) totally rock, and I will reply to them in detail when I get some time to collect my thoughts. I need all my wits about me to address all your observations, and the maniacal level of work right now is completely coherent-post-unfriendly. Bear with me, huh?

Now, a post that does not require any form of wit or thought-collection whatsoever.

For the last eight months, I've stayed away from buying stuff off Secondspin, who have, out of desperation at my withdrawal from their clientele, inundated my inbox with news of special sales. Every week, I get a mail that pleads, yes, I kid you not, pleads for me to buy 2 CDs from their site, for which they will give me 20% off anything else I order and free international shipping and the promise that they will include signed copies of Absolute Sandman with my purchase. Yeah, ok, I kid about the last bit. I've maintained a dignified restraint to all such attempts - a swift mail-delete and a quiet sob being the only responses I've come up with. Secondspin, I am sorry to say, has lost their favourite Indian customer.

On the other hand, I've been buying Moser Baer DVDs like mad, Hindi movies that I had pooh-poohed as overpriced a couple of years ago. For 39 Rs, I am willing to buy any Hindi movie I've been remotely interested in, over the twenty-eight years of my existence. Sheshnaag was one of my first nostalgia-based buys, and I thought the pinnacle of this spree came last week, when I bought Toofan, which connoisseurs of eighties film will recognise as among India's finest superhero movies. Today, I found Oh Darling Yeh Hai India, and proceeded to buy it immediately just so I can listen to the songs again, the Ranjit-Barot scored soundtrack being out-of-print for a long time. Also picked up Padosan, which I've watched multiple times but have never finished. And of course, the reason why I was in the store in the first place, the newest Rahman release Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na. My first CD in a very, very long time.

Checked out the credits first, like I usually do with a new Rahman CD. It's a pleasant surprise to see Rashid Ali back in the Rahman stable. The last time I saw him was singing 'The Journey Home' on Rahman's first world tour, and he's on two songs on the album. Other familiar names - Tanvi, Naresh Iyer, Sayonara, Benny, Anupama, Aslam ( ASLAM?? What's he been doing all these years? ). There's a new singer named Runa, on a song named 'Jaane Tu Mera Kya Hai', the second version of which is sung by Sukhwinder Singh. Hmm, why does Rashid Ali sound like Akon on the first song? Track's pretty funky, though. Genelia plays the lead and if I am not mistaken, Sagarika Ghatge ( the lady who played Preeti Sabharwal in Chak De India ) is in the movie too, but I can't see her name on the credits. Before you ask, Vasu and Sasi, don't worry, the rips will be online by tomorrow, I promise.

Other music-happiness - discovered this electronica band called Plaid through their score for the anime Tekkon Kinkreet. Apparently, the collection of electronica I got back from the US last year( a.k.a Joel's Mega Stash ) had included two Plaid albums and I am listening to them in a loop right now. And downloading obscure Morricone soundtracks from old Italian movies and TV series. Then there's Ivy's 'I've Got You Memorized', that's haunting my non-working hours.

I watched Haute Tension last weekend. A stomach-churning assault on the senses, one of the top-notch examples of gore/extreme violence films I've seen in recent times. I claim to have a stronger stomach than most, but last year's Wolf Creek and Haute Tension both seemed to tear my reserves to shreds. Both these movies take pleasure in dispensing with the security blanket of the standard teen horror movie where, in the first half an hour, it is established who ( the "safe girl", eight times out of ten, and the "unlikely boy" the rest) will survive the bloodbath that's due. After finishing HT, I made this mental promise to myself to lay off gore movies for a while, and then I went and checked my friends' page on Livejournal where adgy talked about another French flick called Inside, that made him squirm. There is a good reason most of my promises are mental.

The phrase 'Torture porn' gets bandied about quite a bit nowadays (along with the synonym I detest - 'gorno'). And the phrase mostly came into being because of the work of these bunch of directors, collectively called The Splat Pack, are reviled by many and worshipped by quite a lot of fans for the horror renaissance they've brought back into mainstream Hollywood. Out of them, Eli Roth is over-rated ( I dug Hostel a LOT, mostly for the concept, but the execution was more over-the-top than horrifying, and the sequel was overhyped and sucked) and of all the directors in this collective, he's the only one to whose work the aforementioned term can be truly associated. I haven't watched any of the Saw movies to pass judgement on Darren Bousman. Rob Zombie is TRULY a genius, and I am looking forward to the works of Neil Marshall and Greg McLean, and post Haute-Tension, I am interested in checking out the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, which I had dismissed as one of those teen slasher movies in the vein of Slumber Party Massacre and What I did Last Summer.

The detractors of torture porn draw attention to the fact most of the violence in recent horror ( well, let's not mull over definitions of "horror" here ) films are directed at women, and bring in an element of sadism and humiliation that appeals to a predominantly male audience. Critics like Roger Ebert and David Edelstein have gone on record saying such films are pointless and not art by any means. I don't agree with both points. When you equate all such horror films with "porn", you are effectively saying that the predominant element, the "point" of the whole exercise, is the violence, the same way there is not an iota of story in a porn film. A horror film, ANY horror film, and in particular the recent ones, have plots. They might be hackneyed or cliched, but they aren't the knock-knock-who's-there-the-plumber-oh-let's-fuck variety that you associate with porn. I look at the horror medium, again, I am talking ALL sub-genres of horror here, as a challenge by a film-maker or a writer to like-minded enthusiasts, a challenge that says, "Ok, you've seen it all, now see if you can take this", and creates something that pushes the cocoon of taste, tolerance and stability that the enthusiast has built up for himself. An author has a tougher job to do so, mostly because he has his words and the reader's mind to play around with, while a film-maker can use both sight and sound to help his cause.

Just an aside. Sometimes, I see people shutting their eyes tight during a crucial scene in a horror movie, to avoid the tension. I cannot. I just have to see for myself. Especially if the sound's on and there is a lot of screaming, in which case my mind conjures up worse things than what I see on screen.

But honestly, such cases are rare, because the challenge comes with a caveat - you have to allow the film-maker into a primal part of your brain, you have to agree to let yourself be scared. It's easy to cheat. Get a bunch of friends together and laugh at the scenes. Think of how the scene would be if a Bappi Lahiri tune is playing in the background. Imagine you are part of the crew of the film ( this one's my favourite cheat, guaranteed to work everytime), and think about what a pain it was to shoot the scene, about how the actors were giggling when they were shooting and what a bitch the makeup artist was. As soon as you dissociate yourself from the reality the film is trying to establish, you are no longer emotionally invested in it and probably you can sit through it without much inner turmoil.

But that's not much fun, is it? Sometimes you need to let the demons in. I did, with both Wolf Creek and Haute Tension ( I even did it with this film called Kaakha Kaakha, where, a pivotal scene was a remake of one in a Hollywood movie, and one done very tastefully. Which in my book means that there was very little blood onscreen, implied violence rather than in actuality). In all these cases, I had to stop the movies in the middle to get some fresh air and calm my stomach. All three movies that I mention have this atmosphere of despair about them until the very end, and I think that got to me more than the gore and the violence. The fact that nothing can be right in this world, the good guys don't always win, and there are no happy endings. And that I believe is what irks the critics more than the violence onscreen, that there isn't a happy ending, which they would interpret as "a point", to all that is happening onscreen. There is no cause-and-effect scenario either - most of the Splat Pack films do not go around explaining the whys and wherefores of the events in them, they are more concerned with getting the viewers to identify with the characters ( to what degree they succeed is moot), the precise tones of blood that would look realistic onscreen, the correct dirty texture of the sets, the perfect sound design. Most importantly, the antagonist in all these films is not a supernatural character or an over-the-top villain. It is someone who is everyone. The boogeyman of the twenty-first century is one of us, these films say, and by watching the events unfold onscreen, you are a part of the violence. In Wolf Creek, it is the jovial local who goes out of his way to help the charactersl; in the Hostel movies, it is someone who has money to spend on an experience of a lifetime. In Haute Tension...well, why don't I avoid the spoilers here, enh?

All of these so-called torture porn movies have one thing in common - they are genuinely trying to disturb you, they are trying to make you stop munching that popcorn and feel uncomfortable in your seat when you watch it. Whether it changes your life or not is immaterial, really.

I will tell you what kind of films really make me unable to watch them - it's the faux-snuff films. I tried watching some of the Guinea Pig films and shut down the player by the first five minutes or so, and deleted the files as well. The home-video feel to a movie is something I just cannot take, it is one element that makes my eyes water, and my mind becomes unable to indulge in any of the cheats I was talking about earlier. That's a reason why I never got around to watching The Blair Witch Project.

Hellboy is one those series that has always left me with mixed reactions. The concept is stellar – the possible future ruler of Hell – nicknamed Hellboy when he was transported to earth by a ritual gone awry – is unwilling to accept his destiny because of his sympathies with humankind. His decision triggers events throughout the planes, and also, because of his involvement with the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, he has made himself quite a lot of enemies in the netherworld. Writer/artist Mike Mignola draws inspiration from horror stories, folklore and local myths and legends from around to world to come up with a rich supporting cast for the series. The story of Hellboy is a series of quest-stories, each of which contributes to explaining a bit of back-story and also in building up the world the characters inhabit. Mignola obviously has a plan for his baby, and he is taking his time unfolding it to the readers.

But what gets my goat is that Hellboy, as a character, is ruefully underdeveloped. In spite of leading a life filled with supernatural elements, the character has little or no regard for the consequences of his actions. His standard modus operandi in dealing with anything at all is to punch and shoot, no questions asked. This adds a level of shallowness to the storylines that I’ve been unable to come to terms with. I mean, what’s the point of all this world building and plot development if your character is a one-trick pony?

That does not mean I do not read Hellboy. I follow the series very closely, even though it is tough to keep track of all the miniseries and spinoffs that are being churned out. Initially it was just Mignola doing all the writing and artwork, and my oh my, the man is a design god! Alan Moore summed it up perfectly when he said that Mignola’s work combines Kirby’s comicbook sensibilities with German expressionism. The work in Hellboy is the cumulative output of a man who has experimented with his craft for the better part of two decades and has developed a style that’s minimalist and unique. In short, when you see Hellboy for the first time and see Mignola’s chunky blacks adorning the panels, you feel like there is not other artist who can do the character justice.

But then, for the past couple of years, Mignola has been involved with other aspects of his character. He is, I believe, closely associated with the production of both the Hellboy movies, and the animated series, and the various merchandising aspects of his brainchild. It would be a wonderful world if an artist could just sit at his chair and draw and everything would fall into place, but let’s face it, page rates and royalties (and even original comic art sales) aren’t enough to make ends meet, especially if you’re striking out on your own. So one cannot begrudge Mr. Mignola his lack of output, he has a business to run after all. What makes it all good for the fan is that he is personally supervising the choice of artist for the ongoing stories –Hellboy, its companion BPRD, the limited series Lobster Johnson and Abe Sapien, and also co-writing most of them. There has been quite a gap between the last Hellboy series – ‘The Island”, and the latest “Darkness Calls”, and apparently that’s because the previous artist short-listed for the job did not quite make the cut, or the deadlines. Editor Scott Allie tells us in the letters page of Darkness Calls #1 that after the artist turned one issue in, he was replaced by British artist Duncan Fegredo.

Duncan Fegredo has had a checkered career. His work on Grant Morrison's Kid Eternity and Peter Milligan's Enigma, two miniseries published in the early nineties, brought him critical recognition, but not really the kind of fan following an artist of his caliber deserves. He then went on to do painted covers for a number of series, Shade the Changing Man, Lucifer, Star Wars, to name a few. But in terms of a career-defining assignment, Darkness Calls is definitely the first to come Fegredo’s way.  I was skeptical at the choice – like I had mentioned before, Mignola had always been the definitive Hellboy artist, and though there had been other artists doing short stints on the character ( as with the miniseries ‘Weird Tales’, a collection of short horror tales involving the character and written and illustrated by a gazillion different guys, including the likes of Alex Maleev, P Craig Russell, John Cassaday, Scott Morse and JG Jones) , Darkness Calls was core Hellboy, and it was difficult to envisage anyone else carrying off the mood and tone of the character.

When I flipped open the first page of Darkness Calls, I gasped.

This was not Mignola. This was like someone who had captures Mignola’s aesthetics, the spirit of Hellboy, so to speak, and made it his own. This was Mignola Reloaded. Ok, enough with the clichés already, yeah? Fegredo brought a manic intensity to the proceedings with his keen eye for detail. For instance, a forest scene that occurs in the first issue. While Mignola would probably have filled in blacks for the most part, and trust me, he can convey a LOT with minimal brushstrokes, Fegredo literally goes apeshit with his detailing. You can almost see the individual leaves crackling under Hellboy’s feet as he tromps through them, while in the background the bony branches of trees alternate as spider-webs of dark and light.  Fegredo got all the tricks of the trade right - the Mignolian leitmotif of an aspect panel transition to a close-up of a sculpture or some ancient gaping creature. His designs are fantastic – I don’t know how many of them were Mignola’s, but considering the kind of talent he has on display, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was given complete freedom to come up with his own panel layouts and character sketches. And trust me, the artwork just gets better, more confident and intricate as the series progresses. It is as if Fegredo, unsure of how people will react to his interpretation of this iconic character, had held himself back in the first issue and then feeding off the positive reactions, just cuts loose.

Ok, the story, which in case of Hellboy has always managed to disappoint me. Darkness Calls begins with some characters you wouldn’t know were relevant unless you have read the stories that came before – thankfully, there are editorial notes that explain which segment of Hellboy some piece of dialogue references. Then Hellboy enters the story and there you go, that same old pigheadedness about the character - he refuses an offer by a group of rather disgruntled women saying, “Leave me alone!” puffing on his cigar, not making an attempt to understand what they are asking of him. Then things begin to get interesting, when an old, old foe makes a bargain to have Hellboy transported to her world. It’s Baba Yaga, the old witch from Russian folk tales, who Hellboy had blinded once upon a time and who wants his life in return.

It’s interesting to note, at this point, that there are two American comic book series that uses Baba Yaga as a pivotal character – the other being Fables, another excellent series that you should be reading, and the characterization of the lady in both the series is dead-on – she’s evil, she’s powerful, she’s old and there are very few ways to keep her off-balance. In the Hellboy series, Baba Yaga is shown, much like her original Russian version, as traveling around in a pestle. Which gives me this insanely happy feeling in my tummy because this is the old witch I know.

So we have Hellboy stuck in Baba Yaga’s Russia, and it is but obligatory that we see other characters from Russian folklore popping up as well. Remember Koschei the Deathless, whose soul was hidden by Baba Yaga in a very, very secure location? Vasilisa the Beautiful, who was helped by a fairy godmother throughout her life and was one of the few girls who could actually escape Baba Yaga’s clutches? Don’t worry, I haven’t given out any spoilers, just that these two characters make their appearances. There are others, but you can find them out for yourself.

The story goes on towards a predictable climax – Hellboy punching with all his might. There is another revelation, but more importantly, while he’s exiled in folklore-Russia, things are afoot in his…our world, when something really really evil is being let loose. Darkness Calls, like ALL other Hellboy miniseries so far, ends on an incomplete note, with threads of stories to come. Like I said, this becomes frustrating for a casual reader who wants to read a story with a beginning and an end. Ah, well, so we wait for the next Hellboy series to come by, I guess. And read the BPRD stories that are coming out pretty regularly. *sigh*

More pieces added to my Comic Art gallery!

You know how much I love The Authority, right? The series was to comics what summer blockbusters are to Hollywood - filled with over-the-top action sequences, superheroes facing apocalyptic, planet-threatening problems and dealing with them the simplest way possible - maximum violence. You might argue that the premise of such a series has as much substance as a Michael Bay film, but therein lies the difference. The writers in the first 29-issue run of The Authority were Warren Ellis and Mark Millar, two writers who know how to use comicbook ( I nearly said 'cinematic' just now) violence to maximum effect, AND write a worthy cerebral story. The first twelve issues that Ellis wrote were illustrated by Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary. Millar took over on issue 13, after a major change in the status quo, and along with Frank Quitely, Gary Erskine, Chris Weston and Art Adams, set to make his run a worthy successor to Ellis's.

Enough with the blabber already. Those of you following my art collection avidly know that my Quitely Authority page kickstarted Mark two of my collecting phase, the phase where I spiralled downward towards complete art addiction. Recently I got my hands on a Bryan Hitch Authority page, from issue 11, a page that features the whole team. Love it! Then there is a Gary Erskine page from the last issue of the run, #29, which features Angie, the character we know as The Engineer brought back to take her rightful place in the team.

I picked up a page inked by Gary Erskine, over Chris Weston's pencils. The series is called The Filth, and it's one of Grant Morrison's most convoluted storylines. Chris Weston is a highly-underrated British artist whose eye for detail and realistic penmanship brings to mind the works of Brian Bolland. The page features the first appearance of Dimitri, who is a talking chimpanzee, and an assassin, and a staunch communist to boot. Dimitri, needless to say, is a character whose coolness levels will make you weep. There was also a splash page from the second volume of Invisibles, also by Grant Morrison and Chris Weston, that I added to my gallery. I love Weston's work more and more everytime I see his blog. He's currently doing a series called The Twelve, which I will pick up once it's complete.

There's also a Starman page by Gene Ha, one of those classic pages from a classic story that lands in your lap when you're least expecting it. It's a piece I had been eyeing for the better part of a year, and suddenly was put for sale at nearly half its original offer price. Needless to say, I jumped on it faster than you can say "bundolo!".

There's also a neat Warrior woman pinup by Ernie Chan, that I picked up last year at Super-con, and got around to scanning just a couple of weeks ago. Three sequential Daredevil pages by the wonderful Gene Colan, again picked up sometime back, but these took quite some time to wend their way to India.

Last, for now at least, is a cover from Boneyard, a horror-comedy series written and drawn by Richard Moore. It's a light-hearted comedy series, not too well-known, but featuring witty writing and engaging characters. This cover, incidentally, is that of the first issue of the series, which means that it features first appearances of all the characters.

Whaddya think?

Reading davenchit's comment about where the animated gif in one of my earlier posts was from made me rack my brains like crazy. Generally, if I surf the net and come across something interesting, it either gets saved to my del.icio.us account or, if the site in question is one that's regularly updated with consistently good content, adds itself to my Google Reader. Interesting images - which includes hilarious LJ icons, animated gifs, screen-caps, celebrity por...uh..., you know, stuff - get saved to a temporary folder, which I later consolidate into a single folder somewhere. That stays on disk forever. Well, until the next drive crash, in which case I just think of them as collateral damage and continue with my life.

But hey, if you point to a particular image and ask me where I got it from, I would say, like I told davenchit before, "some random forum". That's because the above schema does not allow me to remember the source.

Today however, I wanted to find out where the image originated from. Out of ideas about searching for forums - do I look at comic art stuff or at scans_daily or at torrent forums or comic blogs or...how HOW?? A little creative googling to the rescue. The gif was linked by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing a couple of years ago, and the creator happens to be a guy named Paul Robertson. Yes, he has a Livejournal. Yes, the journal has a ton of other gifs too. There is also an artblog run by him and a couple of other guys that's pretty swell. And Paul apparently has made animated movies featuring arcade-game-style fights, blood, gore, mayhem and complete bedlam. I got one of them here. There is another, available on torrents as well and you can get more details of it here. The movie I got was 12 minutes long, and though the style gets a tad repetitive, I wouldn't call it boring AT ALL.

Amazing stuff.

I did not read any more of The Drawing of the Three this weekend. I was busy writing Java code for a project all weekend, and dished a pretty bug-free version. And then came the actual hard part - writing out the project report. Drawing state diagrams. Class diagrams. README dot texts. Fuck, no wonder I hate going back to academic life. But it was all for a noble cause, and the project submission went well.

Didn't stop me from checking out the first four episodes of Supernatural season one. Decent premise, and the effects just stop short of dissolving into standard American Horror Cheese. I think the atmosphere the makers of the show tried to put forward is more of a Hellboy-ish monster-of-the-week formula, which is bound to get tiresome unless there is some kind of a unifying thread to it all. Until episode 4, the primary motivation of the brothers Winchester appears to be "Let's kick some evil ass", with the seemingly half-bakedsubplot of finding their missing father. Unless there's something more interesting in store, I think I am going to get tired of the series pretty soon.

Done with 18 episodes of Basilisk, with 6 left to go. The series veers into flashback territory in the middle, adding quite a level of poignancy to the doomed love story of Kouga Gennosuke and Iga Oboro. We get to see the other side of the supporting cast, most of whom are already dead at this point. There's also the explanation behind Gennosuke's powers, and quite a bit of character developement of all the people concerned. I likes.

You know, I've never really liked Iron Man. The only time I tried reading the character was the alcohol-abuse run, which to my fifteen-year-old brain was nowhere near the level of coolness Claremont and Byrne's X-men was. Iron Man had lame villains, lame powers. Sorry, the only people I liked to see wearing iron armour were the Knights of the Round Table. I had quite a bit of fun teasing a friend, whose sympathy for Iron Man exceeded mine by a great length, with lame Iron Man jokes all of last month. There were also barbs fired in the vein of "I can't wait to see The Dark Knight kick Iron Man's ass this summer."

You know where this is going, right? Like the rest of the world, I thoroughly dug Iron Man when I saw it this Saturday. Every single minute of it. And I seriously hope The Dark Knight manages to strike the same high note that its predecessor did a couple of years ago. Face it, Iron Man has indeed raised the bar for how to make GOOD superhero movies with intelligent scripts and uncringeworthy effects. I salute Marvel for keeping the comicbook fans happy, with that little bit after the credits. If that's where the Marvel movies are leading to, colour me impressed!

The Heavenly Voices Mix, now playing on my Muxtape.

(Before you ask, you can download from Muxtape, you know. You just need to find out how.)

The mix features all-female vocals,voices like the magnificiently breathy Kirsty Hawkshaw, Beth Hirsch on one of her non-Air collaborations, Portishead's Beth Gibbons on a solo project. While the focus is on ambient/electronic music ( Psapp would be the most experimental of the lot), exceptions are Eva Cassidy's folk-tinged cover of Songbird, and Blonde Redhead's Kazu Makino on Elephant Woman. And because every female-vocal compilation deserves her presence, we have Susheela Raman on, too. And Venus Hum, yeah.

Today was the day Peter Parker's aunt was born. My company apparently is not too big on Spider-man, they are more of DC fans, ( the FREAKS! ), so we didn't get a holiday today.

Deli 9, right near my office, is becoming my lunch-zone these days, except when their a/c isn't working. Their menu's limited, but the waiters are courteous, know just when to refill my glass of water and get the food at just the right time. They don't get the bill unless I ask for it, and the waiters don't look askance when I don't leave a tip, which is most of the time. I spend about forty-five minutes there everyday with a book or two, sometimes with the DS. Those forty-five minutes are like an oasis of sanity in the mad work-day rush, and post-lunch, I find myself much more courteous and people-friendly. Except today. At three o'clock or thereabouts, I got a monkey on my shoulder, a monkey called Don'twanna. Don'twanna is a bad, bad shit chimp, who whispers dirty thoughts in my mind, thoughts of running away to a tropical island ( or the preferred second choice - home) and dipping my feet in cold water and sipping Lipton tea, with Cocorosie playing and the complete Starman in front of me waiting to be read. Don'twanna makes me sink deeper into my seat when someone calls my name, he makes me sigh heavily when someone comes over to my cubicle and crinkles my face, subtle enough to hint at my world coming to an ignominious end if I choose to respond to anyone calling my name. I hate Don'twanna when he's not around, but when he comes sits on my shoulder, I just ...um...don't wanna. Today, I just wanted to quit everything, go home and read The Drawing of the Three in peace. Yes, world, I am reading the Dark Tower again. I have figured out how to get into the series again without stopping after volume 1. I just skipped it this time and went straight to volume 2. Muwhahahah. Fingers crossed.

I am really beginning to enjoy Basilisk, and not just because of the grotesquery and the action sequences. The emphasis in the series is more on the unrequited love between Gennosuke and Oboro ( and between the previous generations of the Iga and Kouga clans ) much like a Japanese version of Romeo and Juliet. The story happens in the rains, and the animators render the sequences in a dreamy, watercolour-based palette that's stunningly beautiful. I need to go back and rewatch Shinobi ( the live-action film based on the same book) after I am done with this. A lot of characters have been shuffled around, if I remember correctly.

After a very long time, I read a Jeffrey Archer book, a collection of fairly-recent short stories, Cat O'Nine Tails. I used to like love Archer when about ten years ago, his novels were The Real Thing, his stories just the perfect level of heartwarming content and hair-raising endings. We ( a rather naive bunch of Guwahatians) used to rate short stories based on whether they were Archerian enough. O. Henry definitely was, as was Maugham. Saki was, at times. Ruskin Bond would try. I did say naive, didn't I? Cat O'Nine Tails...sigh, well, it tries so hard to be like Jeffrey Archer that it made me groan at times. Nearly all the time. Despite telegraphing its intentions from the first page - it's basically a compilation of con stories that the writer picked up during his stint as prisoner FF 8282, and it goes without saying that all the cons he writes about end in a stint in jail - despite telegraphing its intentions, Archer pretends he is writing stories that might lead somewhere else or end in a way that you didn't expect was coming, but guess what? They don't. Meh. There's only so much white collar crime I can take in one sitting.

Once in a while - rather, most of the time - there is this inexplicable urge to sit still and consume a series from beginning till end, without falling for other consummables on the side. Be it a comicbook series, or a bunch of thematically-linked movies, a TV season or an anime series. Last week, it was one anime series, and one comicbook run. I finished thirteen episodes of Genshiken, the anime based on the manga by Kio Shimoku. The storyline follows that of the comic very closely - I have not been able to find the last few volumes of the manga, so I don't really know how it ends in Shimoku's version. Anime based on manga have this notorious tendency to veer away from the storyline of the work , mostly because the manga is slower to release, and the directors of the animated version have to come up with their own story once they overtake the written word.

Genshiken appealed to me primarily because of the glimpse it offers into the otaku culture. The stock of characters cover a diverse spectrum of otaku-levelness - from the strictly-anti-otaku Saki Kasukabe, who joins the Society For Study of Modern Visual Culture to keep tabs on hot gamer boyfriend Kousaka; shy, introverted Sasahara who wants to come to terms with his bizarre tastes in otakuness; the bespectacled, hardcore Madarame, obsessed with manga and doujinshi and games and Kujibiki Unbalance, the greatest anime-within-an-anime series ever. There are other members of the Genshiken, all of whom come with their own baggage and come to know each other against the backdrop of cosplay events, Comifest, doujinshi-hunting in Akihabara and general slacking around. While not really an engrossing series per se, Genshiken is the kind of anime ( and manga ) that you probably won't enjoy unless you know a little about otaku culture - the series abounds with references to games, series and comics. A meta-anime anime, so to say.

And now I am watching Basilisk, another series that is a victim of the bought-first-couple-of-volumes-unable-to-find-rest syndrome. ( Damn you, Indian Booksellers! ) 24 episodes in this series, and I was done with 6 last night. I should take about three more days to finish this one. Lots of ninja action, the kind of ninja action that has grotesque creatures fighting each other with strange powers. So far, there is a ninja that controls his body hair to behave like tentacles, there's a spider-like character whose primary power is to spit glue-like phlegm towards his enemies, there's a short-lived character with no arms and legs that keeps his sword inside his gullet and fights with his tongue. Hrmm. Your cup of tea? Don't think so.

One was the sale of Hergé's original cover to Tintin in America in a recent auction for 650,000 EU ( technically, I should write the amount as 650.000 EU. Europeans apparently use decimal points where we use commas, and vice versa). Along with the auction premium price, the total came to 780 000 EU. At the prevailing dollar-EU exchange rate, this makes it the first piece of comic art to cross the one million dollar mark.

There was a lot of discussion among the American collectors about whether any US comic art would ever make it to that level. Quite a few of them were of the opinion that if the cover to Action Comics #1 ( the issue that marked the debut of Superman, way back in 1937), or Amazing Fantasy# 15 ( the first appearance of Spider-man ) ever came into the open market, they could easily bring a million dollars, both being cornerstones of American historical memorabilia and twentieth century popular culture. Until the Tintin cover sold, the most expensive comic art pieces were John Romita Sr Spider-man covers, one of which made 100,000$ a few years ago, and Peanuts Sunday pages which are currently at an alarming high because Charles Schultz's estate is buying off almost every Schultz page that comes into the market. Of course, the comic art community is notorious for its secretive under-the-radar deals, so one can only hypothesise based on public information available through auction data.

My take on this, which I posted to a message board I frequent:

It's not hard to imagine why (this Tintin cover) would command so high a price. Just as an example:
1) If John Romita Sr drew only 23 Spider-man comics in his lifetime, including covers and interiors,

2) if ALL of the art were locked up by the artist's estate.

3) these were the only Spider-man comics to be published by Marvel

4) Romita Sr's Spider-man was the kind of comicbook that parents would recommend to their kids and grandchildren for decades, thereby making those 23 comics a part of generations of readers and fans, spanning all ages.

With all these in mind, isn't it natural that prices would skyrocket beyond belief if a single cover came out into the market?

There are only this number( 23) of Tintin covers, after all, and add to it the fact that they are Essential Comics, known and loved for 70+ years, and with translations in over fifty languages, one can hardly be bemused at the kind of hysteria an original Tintin cover would elicit from collectors.

You cannot extend this logic to other highly influential American creators - Kirby, Charles Schultz ( whose work I think is slowly approaching that level, because of the scarcity in the market introduced by the mass-buyout), and even Frank Frazetta because their volume of work is huge compared to Herge's. It cannot even be extended to historic items like the cover of Superman #1, well, yes, that's a historic cover, but there are other options for the discerning Superman collector - a landmark Curt Swan cover, or a Murphy Anderson splash, or even a Byrne cover. In case of Tintin, these 23 covers are ALL that there is, this might very well be the only chance a collector has, in his lifetime, to pick up an original Tintin cover, drawn by the only artist associated with the character. I know I would go all the way if I had the money. :-)

And the baseline is - the words 'Tintin' and 'Herge' elicit much more response in the non-comic-book reading masses ( outside the US, that is) than 'Romita' or 'Schultz' would - even though Spider-man and Peanuts are equally well-known and loved characters as the boy reporter.

Yesterday, there was the news that an anonymous collector had donated all 24 pages of Amazing Fantasy 15 to the Library of Congress, putting paid to all rumours of whether the art would ever surface and how much its value would be. The collector apparently refused to submit the pages for an official valuation( he doesn't even get a tax benefit this way, and probably he does not even need it! ), and before the donation, even contacted the artist Steve Ditko to find out if he wanted them back. Ditko, a reclusive creator who refuses to be photographed, interviewed or bothered in any way whatsoever by fans, has a history of subjecting his own artwork to mutilation and it's probably to everybody's benefit that he did not claim any rights to the pages. It's official - the first appearance of Spider-man now belongs to the American people. Half the collectors are now swooning over the fact that they can actually SEE the pages for themselves, the rest just crossed off the item from their wish-list.

This is particularly significant because nobody really knows where most of the art from that period is, and how much of it actually exists. Comic art was seen as disposable items once the print negatives were created, and were thrown in the trash, shredded or given away. It wasn't until the seventies that artists like Neal Adams started the trend of the publisher having to return the art to the original artists. And once the comic art collectors' market took off in earnest, there was a lot of art stolen from Marvel's warehouses. To this day, the majority of Jack Kirby's pages remain locked up in private collections, the owners fearing lawsuits and finger-pointing if they display the art to the world.

Machine Girl.



The Dark Knight.



Dororo volume 1.



The April/May Comiclink Featured original comic art auction.

Venus Hum is a band that has made me extremely happyall of last month. The songs 'Turn Me Around' and 'Pink Champagne' from their 2006 album The Colors in the Wheel has been on a continuous loop in my playlist. Wonderfully enough, someone just uploaded all their albums today, including an EP where the band does covers of Christmas songs. I have a feeling that 'Silent Night' is going to add itself to my repeat-until-ears-bleed list like, right now.

What else? Reading early volumes of Usagi Yojimbo, The Complete Bite Club, Scott Pilgrim ( about which I talk about in my next Rolling Stone column), Criminal and Path of the Assassin. The early Usagi stories are unbelievably good - hard to find a creator like Stan Sakai, at the top of his game all throughout his career. I nearly teared up while rereading Homecoming part 2, the first Usagi story I ever read. It was printed in this comicbook called Critters, which I found in a bookshop in Guwahati. I think I vaguely remember passing over a copy of Miracleman #1 to buy this issue and Neal Adams' Skateman # 1 ( obviously, the MM copy had disappeared the next time I was there), and reread both of them to bits. This story apparently is the first time Usagi's childhoold sweetheart Mariko is introduced, along with her husband Kenichi and son Jotaro.

Bite Club is vampires embroiled in organized crime, Godfather-level conspiracies, and loads of sex; plus it has the hottest female protagonist I've been introduced to in quite some time - ( Risa del Toro )

It's written by Howard Chaykin, and touches upon themes similar to those in Chaykin's earlier Black Kiss, one of the most explicit comics to be published in the mainstream comicbook market in the eighties. The artwork is not by Chaykin, though, David Hahn, an Oregon-based artist, whose simplistic style reminds me of the work of Bruce Timm and Cameron Stewart. The series was published as two miniseries - Bite Club and Bite Club: Vampire Crimes Unit, both of which are collected in this TPB volume.

Ed Brubaker and Sean Philip's Criminal is the logical progression to the duo's earlier noir series Sleeper. While Sleeper was superhero crime fiction, meant to appeal to the continuity crowd, Criminal has no cape fixation, and concentrates on telling stories of capers gone wrong, of individuals with secret pasts, dark sides, and dead-end lives. I am on issue 7, in the middle of the second arc, called 'Lawless', and I am going slow because these are the last three issues I have. The series has gotten a really good boost by word-of-mouth and positive response from readers, and has won Eisner award for 'Best New Series'. One of the cool things you get with the original issues ( I don't know if the TPB has them) is articles at the back, by folks like Warren Ellis and David Goyer, about noir books and movies they like. ( And of course, Philips' painted covers are to die for. )

Apart from that, nothing much really. I keep telling myself to be patient about the Indian postal service, and I tell myself that all is not lost just because the last Born Again page is sold out. I live.

I like to think I've outgrown superhero comics. That's not true at all, though. It's badly-written superhero comics that I do not enjoy - note that the definition of 'badly-written' does not extend to characterization that contradicts past continuity, storytelling directions that take radically opposite directions from the characters' past- heck, I can even overlook sixty years of complicated continuity. It just means that when I see the writer insulting my basic level of intelligence with his dreck, or when my minimal requirements of entertainment are not being met because of the detracting elements of the creators' personal quirks, I lose my patience and either throw whatever it is I am reading across the room and fume, or, as the case mostly is nowadays, just delete the offending cbr files from my disk and get along with my life. It's that simple.

Case in point - Brad Meltzer's Justice League of America. I am willing to go on record and say that the ten-odd issues I read last year were The Worst Comicbooks Ever. Any comic in which Red Tornado is called "Reddy", and has a story arc in which three characters sit around a table looking at photographs and passing slavishly fawning comments about each other deserves to be pissed on. The One More Day brouhaha in Spider-man turned me off because the premise appeared completely brain-dead ( Read this for complete details. ) I tried reading Planet Hulk/World War Hulk, but lost interest the minute I realised the 'World' in 'World War' means Manhattan. X-Men Messiah Complex was interesting for about 2 pages, before I gave up.

I like to think I've outgrown superheroes. But occasionally I am reminded of how much I really love reading them. The Sinestro Corps War, for instance. This was a crossover between the Green Lantern titles last year, and after having heard good things about it from various sources, I gave the scans a try. While the writing is clunky in parts, the series strikes just the right balance of continuity-enslavement i.e drawing upon the Green Lantern stories that the writer Geoff Johns ( for the most part) grew up reading, the gosh-wow factor of seeing events that affect the status quo, and a heady good-vs-evil conflict. I liked the way the tension builds up throughout the series, when all odds seem to favour the upstart Yellow Corps, when Superman-Prime is freed from his space-prison ( not that I didn't see it coming ) and rendezvouses with the secret leaders of the Corps. I totally dug how two Alan Moore short stories from the eighties, muhuahaha, yeah, stories I read in my childhood, are major plot-points in the arc. It's also gratifying to know that the entire Sinestro Corps war is actually the second of a trilogy of Green-Lantern-Corps tales ( Rebirth being the first, and next year's Black Night the last ).

Another Geoff Johns title I enjoyed thoroughly was Booster Gold, the new ongoing series. At least the first six issues of it, collectively called 52 Pick-up ( the reference is to Elmore Leonard AND the weekly DC miniseries). I never really liked the character of BG, except when he was used as a basis for comedy, as in the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire run of JLA, and grudgingly like his plotline in 52. But in this series, Johns manages to infuse the character with a near-Shakespearean level of pathos. Okay, maybe I exaggerate, but still. The twist that Johns introduces is this series is that Booster Gold is probably the sole reason why the world and its heroes are saved from total annhilation, because he is a behind-the-scenes worker in the timestream, flitting in and out of the past, present and future to make sure no supervillain damages existence by tampering with the natural order of time. The catch is that nobody can know about his heroism, and he has to maintain his klutzy image throughout. The six-issue arc sees Booster Gold averting a meeting between Sinestro and someone who would go on to become an important character in the DC Universe, saving the grandparents of another famous character by teaming up with ( of all people ) Jonah Hex, trying to ensure his own existence by hooking up his ancestors, and making a tragicomic cameo in one of the DC Universe's most chilling shoot-out ( Hint: "Smile" ) I am hooked.

Speaking of characters I don't like, another one happened to be Iron Fist, a kung-fu expert from the Marvel Universe whose existence was based on the success of martial arts movies of the seventies. I used to find Iron Fist a pointless character, with occasional redeemable guest-appearance potential ( See: Civil War, Daredevil ). Enter the three-man team of writers Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction and Spanish artist David Aja, whose ongoing series The Immortal Iron Fist KICKS EFFING ASS. Brubaker is a writer who comes from a crime/noir background, as is evident from his work on Gotham Central, Sleeper and Criminal, but of late, he has excelled in mainstream superheroes, especially the kind of gritty street-level superheroics of Daredevil. Fraction is a demented ( I think) indie comicbook writer whose Casanova is a acid-trip of a Bond movie. Together, the duo mesh the character of Danny Rand, the Iron Fist into something so diabolically cool that it makes me wonder about the potential of other, poorly-handled characters that have faded away or don't really get too much attention. The term "Kungfu Billionaire" is the hook, and the creators proceed to take the best of Shaw Brothers films, a dash of Marvel Universe super-villainy ( Hail Hydra, indeed! ) and pump it up with back-story, tonnes and tonnes of it. Turns out, there has been sixty six Iron Fists throughout history, every generation spawning a hero who has to undergo the same rite of passage in the mystical city of K'un L'un to gain the power of the Fist. We are introduced to an immense cast of characters, both old and new, including Luke Cage, Misty Knight and Colleen Wing, Danny Rand's former colleagues, The Steel Serpent, an old foe who has gained a new way of augmenting his strength; Orson Randall, Rand's predecessor to the legacy of Iron Fist is still alive, and is being hunted by those who target Rand's company. The first arc, called 'The Last Iron Fist Story' is about Randall, and how he guides Danny to recognise his destiny, and his potential. The second arc takes Rand back to K'un L'un, where he learns that the city is one of seven cities of Heaven, and he has to participate in a contest that will determine the fate of his city. The bizarre cast of characters in this arc includes the Crane Mother, a fearsome crone, Lei Kung the thunderer, Rand's master, and a breakout character called The Prince of Orphans, John Aman, who was created in the 1930s by Bill Everett as a character infused with superhuman powers by Tibetan monks and was reintroduced by Brubaker and Fraction into this series, a move that reeks of genius, I daresay.

Truth be told, none of the concepts introduced are too unfamiliar or 'out there' - the first thing Neil Gaiman did after coming onboard Spawn was to introduce a similar generational idea to the existence of Spawn, and before him, there was Moore and his Swamp-Thing-as-plant-elemental-throughout-the-ages retcon. ( Did Samit Basu indulge in similar gimmicry in Devi? Anyone? ) What propels The Immortal Iron Fist to greatness is the seamless blend of these ideas with David Aja's artwork. The guy is good, bringing a smoky atmosphere to the proceedings - his work brings to mind the dynamic photorealism of Michael Lark and John Cassaday with the atmospheric stylings of Guy Davis. I am in the middle of the second arc, The Seven Capital Cities of Heaven, which will conclude soon, and it's a pity the trio of creators will move on after issue 16.

Now that psasidhar brought with 32 kgs of my comics last week, I am tempted to reread Starman and Usagi Yojimbo, masterful series both. SINGLE ISSUES, woo hoo! And there's also the near-complete run of Peter David's Hulk, and the new Punisher MAX issues, and the Invincible trades, and...

I like to think I've outgrown superheroes. Hah, what a laugh!

From IMBD: Yukihiko Tsutsumi ( Memories of Tomorrow, Black Jack) and Ryuhei Kitamura ( Versus, Azumi ) each finished their contributions to the short film anthology Jam Films (2002) in record time. As a result producer Shinya Kawai gave the two directors a proposal to each create a feature length movie with only two actors, battling in one setting and filmed entirely in one week. The undertaking was called the Duel Project. As a result, Kitamura created Aragami, a story about a samurai warrior battling and Tsutsumi 2LDK.

I chanced upon this piece of information last week, and circuits fried in my brain at the thought of a Kitamura flick that's one long fight sequence. (Oh wait, wasn't Versus a single extended fight? Whatever!) I didn't have Aragami, but 2LDK had been part of a bunch of movies that a friend had given me early this year, so I watched it Saturday.

The term "2LDK" refers to the Japanese version of what we Indians call 2BHK - an apartment with two bedrooms, a hall and a kitchen. The movie, true to the conditions set on the filmmaker, takes place in a flat over a single night.The occupants are two aspiring actresses, and both have auditioned for the starring role in a production - the kind of make-or-break role that might launch one's career and rejuvenate the other's - and are waiting for a confirmation phonecall from their agency. A conflict had been brewing for quite sometime; when the movie begins, we see the different temperaments and motivations of the women - one meticulously writes her initials on eggs before storing them in the refrigerator, the other flies off the handle at the visible drop in the level of her bottle of Chanel No 5. And then we find out that it's not really a good idea to stay in a flat that has katanas and sais hanging on display.

In a film like this, it's difficult to create backstory without the characters breaking into lengthy exposition. Tsutsumi does not fall into this trap, however - he uses voice-overs to convey the characters' thoughts, making for some interesting dialogue overlaps when the women say the opposite of what they are thinking. Cellphone conversations and text messages make for part of the storytelling, the camera lingers on the flatmate's actions, telling the viewer volumes about the inner workings of their mind. All of this makes for some very rounded characterisation, allowing us to sympathise with both the women in turn, and make our own judgements about their flaws. And then the violence begins, and things just keep getting better. The ending was a little too predictable, but hey, I can live with that!

And now that I have Aragami - I know I just said I didn't have that movie, but that was on Saturday, dude - I am going to watch it tonight, hoo ah!

Why on earth did Disney have to make a movie called Sky High? It screws up my search results for Kitamura's movie, the one about the afterlife and serial killers. Faugh!

Sha Po Lang was another film I saw Saturday. Stars Donnie Yen, Simon Yam ( the guy from Election ), and Sammo Hung. Perfect mix of cop drama and martial arts, and brilliant pacing.

So all of today morning, I watched terrible films. The first was Underworld, which I had somehow missed out completely when it came out, and because I like the concept of leather-wearing hot woman kicking ass, I was trying to get to it without spending any money. Has to be the worst vampire movie I've ever seen. Ever. Do you know what I mean by 'Ever'? I am the guy that has seen the complete Lee-Cushing Hammer films, I have sat through Alyssa Milano's shenanigans in Embrace of the Vampire, Hong Kong Kung-fu vampire movies - goddamnit, I've come close to gouging my eyes out watching Sorority House Vampires. But hey, you know what, all of these had some redeemable thing about them (before you ask, yes, Sorority House Vampires has a high T&A quotient). Underworld doesn't. It should have been a movie about doped-up Europeans baring their teeth and wearing leather and firing their uzis pointlessly at each other before being shot in the face by Kate Beckinsale, but the makers apparently found it necessary to dress it up by adding vampires and werewolves, with some convoluted backstory about a war that's been raging between them for centuries ( presumably about which among the two makes for a cooler franchise ). And they used a colour-blind cinematographer who films the movie in black, blue and white. I wish there was some way I could go erase data from DVDs, because I cannot bear the thought of owning this movie. Probably I will just break the disc, as a symbol of total protest. I know it's probably too late to tell you this, but Underworld sucks, and by theory of Induction, probably its sequel does, too. If you haven't seen the movie yet, your soul is still not corrupted, and I PROMISE to send you a copy of Kung Fu Vampire Killers as a mark of respect.

Up next was Shoot 'Em Up, which could have elevated itself from brain-destroying, soul-sucking boom-boom-fest to mind-altering high concept had the makers just gone the whole distance with the carrot motif and replaced Clive Owen with Bugs Bunny, Paul Giamatti with Elmer Fudd, and Monica Bellucci with ...I dunno...Jessica Rabbit? Yes, yes, I know, movies like this are supposed to be fun and adrenaline-pumping and all that. Dude, I would have been perfectly fine with the movie had it been animated, like I just suggested, or if it were a silent movie with heavy metal playing in the background. Even Max Payne has better dialogues than this clunker.

I started watching Superman vs Doomsday, the animated movie that's the recreation of the whole Death of Superman saga. And within 5 minutes, I was hating it because..urm, ok, this might sound really infantile, I hated the wrinkle marks they put on Superman's face. Like so.



Turned it off after about half an hour because The New Frontier had raised the bar for good animated DC/Warner movies, and Bruce Timm can do (and has done) much better work than this.

I watched Acacia next, a Korean horror movie which was the supposed inspiration for Vaastu Shastra. I didn't find anything similar to VS other than the recurring foreboding shots of the tree, and the movie is more a whodunnit than a horror movie. I figured out where it was going about half-way through it, and managed to stay awake until the ending, which was exactly what I thought it would be. The acting is pretty one-dimensional all throughout. The last good Korean horror movie I saw still remains A Tale of Two Sisters, and after wading through the likes of Cinderella, Arang and Memento Mori, I think I am giving up on K-horror and sticking to sappy romantic comedies and violent crime dramas from Korea.

Which is not to say that the day was bad per se. I missed out a lunch appointment just because it was a drizzly day, had a kick-ass breakfast at home ( fried bacon and eggs, mashed potatoes, and chicken sausages) and also managed to read The Freebooters by Barry Windsor-Smith. In the evening, I made onion pakodas, something that's a must on rainy days and assuaged the pain of Acacia with 'em and some iced tea. I am going to watch Zatoichi after dinner, the first movie in the Shintaro Katsu series. Watching any of the Zatoichi movies is like reading Terry Pratchett - I start watching the early movies one by one, and then I lose interest for a couple of months, and then when I want to continue, I feel guilty if I don't begin again from the beginning. I must have read Color of Magic at least five times so far, and have watched the first Zatoichi three times. The payoff, of course, is that I know neither of them disappoint.

The Comics Journal, arguably the best magazine on comics being published right now, has announced online subscriptions, and at half the price of its regular price. 30$ for 10 issues sounds EXTREMELY cool. I am probably opting for this starting next month. And they have also released issue 288 of TCJ online for free, just so you can check out how an issue looks online.

One of the nagging doubts I had about the Absolute Editions that DC is bringing out has been cleared. I bought Absolute League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol 1 from a mall in Gurgaon, when a major discount was going on - ended up paying about 47$ for the volume, the original retail price being 75$. Imagine my surprise when I check out eBay prices and see that it was being sold for 180-250$. Absolute Planetary and Absolute Authority wre selling for even more. This was madness! This was Sparta! Why, I thought, was DC not keeping the books in print, considering the demand? Neil Gaiman provided the answer a couple of days ago, on his blog ( yes, Mr Gaiman tends to answer questions rather well ). When asked by someone the merits of buying an Absolute Edition of Sandman over buying the individual comics or the trade paperbacks, he said -

I'm not entirely sure that the Absolute Sandman replaces the trade paperbacks, any more than the trade paperbacks replaced the comics (because the covers and the ads and the letter column and all that stuff gives you an experience you don't get from a trade paperback) and I don't want to start turning into Elvis Costello, who has now sold me all of his music at least four times in ever-more-upgraded formats with extra bells and whistles.But if you want a permanent copy for your bookshelf, the Absolute Sandmans are as good as it gets. I don't think they're going to vanish from the book and comic shops immediately -- DC have overprinted healthy amounts, certainly good for a few years to come -- but they are probably too expensive per unit to go back to press in Hong Kong for smallish reprints.

That makes sense. And yeah, I am reading Absolute Sandman vol 1 right now, and gaaaaaaaaaah, I almost didn't buy this?? It's just a breathtakingly beautiful volume, the page and print quality mesmerizing, and with the extras that add value for money. Can't wait to buy volume 2 when I have some spare cash.



The current To-Buy-Or-Not-To-Buy Object of Desire: The Complete Terry and the Pirates. Published by NBM publishing in 25 volumes covering the dailies and two colour Sunday hardcovers, I have a mailing list member selling 7 volumes plus the hardcovers for 100$. Now, IDW publishing is reprinting the series again in very beautiful hardcover editions. The downsides - a price of 50$ per 400-page volume, and I would have to wait for the reprints to get over, they are published quarterly and the current count is 4, I think.

Terry and the Pirates is one of the series I picked up through, surprise, Mad magazine parodies, much like Prince Valiant and Little Orphan Annie. It might be dated, but it's a classic strip, Milton Caniff's storytelling pure genius. To buy or not to buy, that is the question...

Update: Apparently, the 100$ price is for ALL 25 volumes plus the hardcovers. Nyahahahahah.

Barring Graphic Rampage, I have still been on hiatus from quizzing, except on two instances. One was when I did four quizzes at IIT Kharagpur this January. I almost did not enjoy the proceedings, partly because of the steady downpour that nearly drowned out the organisers' hard work, and partly because of the disorder that persisted on stage in all but one of the quizzes. I guess I was to blame as well - I am not too much of a crowd control person, but it really gets my goat when teams bicker with other teams while onstage, or draw attention to themselves by being extra-loud, or just do not listen to the other teams' answers. Come on, people, you can save yourself lots of bad guesses or get a hint at the right answer just by listening to the wrong ones. And does it really kill you to shut up and LISTEN when the quizmaster is explaining a round? Feh.

Or maybe I am just getting crankier in my old age...

I did a quiz at IIT Kanpur a week ago, and enjoyed myself quite a lot. Kanpur tends to do that to me, I love the campus and the people there. Some of them I know personally, and because I did not make it to Antaragni last year, I could not meet a couple of them who have passed out by now. Some of them are in their final semester. One of those unknown people I love with all my heart is the guy who shares kickass anime series on the Kanpur LAN using the monicker 'Vash_the_stampede' - dude, if only I could tell you how much I dig your taste. One of the weird reasons I love quizzing in Kanpur is because the travel involves slightly more time - mostly wait-time for trains or flights. Nothing, I tell you, NOTHING beats reading a book while travelling. I did a Terry Pratchett retrospective this time around, managing to reread The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Mort, Faust Eric and Moving Pictures over a span of two days.

I just downloaded a blu-ray rip of Tekkon Kinkreet which apparently refuses to play on both my three-year-old P4 and the laptop. The resolution of the rip is 1920*816 or thereabouts, and both the computers' monitors just can't take that kind of load. Just my luck. Reminds me of six years ago, when I nearly harakiri-ed myself when a hard-to-find divx rip of Night of the Living Dead could not be rendered by my 366 MHz, 32 MB RAM Celeron machine. Deja vu! Upgrades are just what the doctor ordered.

And I got a Nintendo DS as a Very Belated Birthday Gift. Woo hoo! And thanks to The Serious One, a bunch of DS games wended their way into my ken. Now if only I had the time to sit and play games. *sigh* And it's slightly depressing to think of buying games at 1200 Rs apiece when Madman Gargantua still eludes my grasp, as does The Complete Little Nemo.

The animated version of Darwyn Cooke's DC: The New Frontier is beautiful. Take my word for it. If you've read the comic and liked the idiosyncratic style, you will completely trip over this movie. It uses Cooke's designs straight from the book, and the editting is superb - the animators knew which bits would work in the narrative, and they chop some characters completely - and still manage to pack in almost 90 percent of the book into one and a half hours of glorious movietime. If only Superman/Doomsday were half as good as this! If only The Judas Contract is still greenlighted!

Oh, and I am doing the graphic novel column for Rolling Stone India. The first issue's already out, though only in Bombay. I reviewed League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier, Essential X-Men Vol 1 and the first Lucky Luke volume Jesse James this time around. And I also did this review of Amruta Patil's graphic novel Kari for Tehelka. I liked that book much much better than Sarnath Bannerjee's sad offerings.

I just made an important Art Deal. The offer was to buy two key panel pages from a brilliant series, featuring the first appearances of the primary protagonists. The seller and I had been negotiating the terms since the beginning of the week. I had initially enquired about two other pages, but these two had attracted me when I saw them a couple of months ago so I went ahead and asked him if there was any chance he would lower prices. He came down to an amount that was about midway between what I had quoted and what the initial offer price was. On top of that, he would give me the two other pages I wanted, the ones that led to this enquiry in the first place, for free. He gave me until Wednesday to decide.

I made the Art Deal. I refused the offer and ultimately agreed to buy just the two cheaper pages.

This, I think, taught me two important lesson. One, to not overcommit myself, out of blind lust for something that has just come out into the market. This was a problem that had plagued me all of last year. 2007 was a good, no, an AMAZING art year for me, but it also meant that all of last year, I was committing my money to pages that caught my fancy without giving myself a clear set of Collecting Goals. I promised myself that this year would be different, that my money would go into clearing just ONE time payment and that's that. There was one weak moment, the cover to Hitman #50 - it came on eBay last month and made me sweat until the last minute. I bid an amount that I was pretty sure was the fair market price for that cover, but it went for a 100$ more. Which only means that my Hitman covers right now are worth about triple of what I paid for them - not a bad thing. I knew my limit, I made my call, and I was breathing easy after the auction ended - which is a darned good feeling, let me tell you.

And that's one thing I would like to tell aspiring comic art collectors who look at this post - hahahaha, I nearly crapped myself while writing this last line - patience is a virue ( the missing 't' in 'virtue' is an art collectors' in-joke, if you get it, consider yourself part of the club. ) Pieces come out on dealers' sites and CAF members sites with alarming regularity, and it requires a herculean amount of self-restraint to know which piece is the right one for you and which can be passed over. Yes, every piece of comic art is unique, and most likely when they are sold, they will stay locked in some collector's portfolio for a very, very long time. But while an art piece can be unique, a first appearance can be unique, an artist's ouevre, thankfully, is not confined to a single good piece or a single pathbreaking series. Which is to say, unless said artist is dead, there will always be more artwork being produced, hopefully better than the one you briefly lusted after and were beaten to. Live with the defeat, and keep your eyes open for the next good piece that comes your way. Fire-sales are not uncommon in the field, when a collector needs some quick money and is willing to offload part of his prized pieces. And one of those prized pieces could be the one that got away the last time.

The second thing I learnt is the importance of discussion. All throughout the last two days, I talked about this deal with my friends, the ones who have some amount of opinion about my art collecting - opinions other than derision and skepticism, that is. I heard a great deal of different opinions, a fair amount of them encouraging, and all of them lucid, tangible arguments that helped me come to my own decision. To all those who helped me out, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I am glad I have you guys to fall back upon in times of need.

A few more words about why 2007 was such a good art year. If you have been following my various art update posts, you would have seen quite a lot of new pages that I got.

Some more that I haven't talked about, at least on this blog:

John Totleben - Vermillion page. What is Vermillion? A mind-bending scifi story written by Lucius Shepherd, published by the Helix imprint of DC comics. Helix was extremely short-lived, with its only successful offering ( in terms of length ) being Warren Ellis's epic Transmetropolitan, which moved to Vertigo once the former folded. I never really got into Vermillion, but the high point of the series was the two issues drawn by John Totleben who, if you will remember, is one of my favourite artists. The page I bought is, in my opinion, a mindblowing piece of work. Look at the design of the lower panel - but you will be able to do that if you can tear your eyes away from the central figure, a face inked with such loving detail that the face seems three-dimensional.

Another John Totleben page, a Tarzan cover prelim. Normally the idea of a preliminary work is to provide the artist with some idea of how the final piece should look like. Most prelim pages you will see are sparsely pencilled works, with stick figures and quick strokes that vaguely allude to the finesse of the final page. But this is Totleben we are talking about, and his concept of a prelim is a detailed inked piece that is a scaled-down version of the final painted piece, that you can see here. Compare the two. I like to think that the painting is a lightboxed version of the ink piece, which makes my cover prelim the original original art. *grin*

A double-page spread from Shade the Changing Man, by Chris Bachalo. I don't think this eminently frameable piece needs words to accompany it.

Another 100 Bullets page by Eduardo Risso. Muhwahahahaha.

A Dan Brereton page from The Black Terror, his earliest work. When I received this page in the mail and opened it the first time, I got a little weak-kneed and had to sit down for a bit. Brereton's watercolors are beautiful - much, much more detailed on the actual page than you would ever see in a scan.

And, the Highpoint of the Year, and currently the glory of my small collection - an original watercolor painting of Daigoro from Lone Wolf and Cub by Goseki Kojima, the co-creator of LW&C. I attribute this acquisition to just one thing - Plain Dumb Luck. When at Super-con, I was hanging around the comicbook and toy stalls, occasionally asking about Studio Ghibli figurines to sellers who had some amount of anime-related merchandise on display. One of the sellers said he didn't have them right now, but I could get in touch with him later, and gave me his card. The name on it looked familiar, and I realised it was a comic collector, one I had bid against for the Transmetropolitan piece in my collection, and he had also left a comment on the page in my gallery. Introductions and an enthusiastic conversation followed, and after we looked through each other's portfolios, he pointed out that I would probably like to meet another CAF member who had tastes similar to mine. And that's how I met Felix.

Felix's portfolio had one great piece after another. A full-page splash from The Boys, a James Jean print, a a couple of Supreme Power pages, and then, finally, two Kojima pieces.

I collapsed.

Some quick negotiations ( "Please please sell this to me." "Ok." "How much?" "<high four-figure amount>" "Excellent, I will pay." ) and I owned the page, at least in spirit. It took another six months to complete the time payment and yay, I had something that I had only dreamt about. Believe me, getting a Kojima piece at this stage of my collecting career is like a major threshhold - I can actually feel pride in my collection right now, and think I am going about art collecting the right way. As Felix himself says, it's near-impossible to get manga artists' works. He travelled to Japan multiple times looking for Kojima pages, and finally hit the paydirt through a friend. He found a couple of pieces done on plain paper, and a couple done on 14" by 16" art boards. Mine is one