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Calexico + Iron & Wine

Fantastic concert. First Iron & Wine did an acoustic set, then a plugged in set. Then they did a couple of songs together with Calexico. And then a fantastic Mexican singer called Salvador Duran did a couple of songs acoustically and I do believe that he might have gotten the biggest applaudes that night. And then Calexico entered the stage and was marvellous. It was a long concert and since it was in Copenhagen and I had to catch the last train back to Sweden I didn't see it until the end. So I bet they played "He Lays in the Reins" after we'd left. But it was a very very good concert.

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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

Ahh! Watch the spoilers, bro!

Oops. Wrong thread.

Lets see. Since my last visit, I bin reading volumes of Astroboy and One Piece. Astroboy= good, One Piece = good pictures, boring episodic writing.

I also picked up some volumes of Lupin III, by Monkey Punch (no, not that Monkey Punch). I've only skimmed these, but man, Monkey Punch's artwork is phenomenal. The anime version is funny, but it completely fails to do his incredible, eccentric-yet-articulately-crafted linework justice.

Read a few issues of Berlin, by Jason Lutes. Is okay, not something I can read in large doses, so 20 page issues are a convenience.

I just read 8 Ball by Dan Clowes. ALthough I'd read a few bits & pieces before, I hadn't noticed the way in which his stories were arranged, the type of details he chose to present. Being someone who messes with writing, his style appealed to me in that you don't need to be over the top to attract readers.

Liked the artwork too.

Currently reading Fables, which is a really great, twisted little comic, and it's spin-off, Jack of Fables, which gives the series' loutish anti-hero, Jack, his own story, and is also a great satire on Walt Disney.

I like Dan Clowes. Which 8 Ball story did you read? (8 Ball is just like an open forum that Clowes uses for all his comics, but some issues are just 1-shot dealies and others serialize his graphic novels like ghost world and david boring.

It was... hmm, I forgot to check the number. It had MCMXLVI in it, but a quick google search isn't helping. I shall have to procure.

Been a while since I posted here...

I read through a good deal of The 'Nam, recently. Old 1980's Marvel book. The first twelve issues are brilliant, then when the series' original artist, Michael Golden, left and took his idiosyncratic art style with him, the book suffered. The art became bland and amatuerish, and I lost interest despite the fact that the writing was still good.

Also plowed through the entire run of Preacher again, cause you can never read that too many times.

lots of manga. picked up hakai (naoki yamamoto: sex, psychic powers, two waldo (of where's waldo) lookalike thugs....), and have very slowly been working on it.

DC: The New Frontier volume 1, written and drawn by Darwyn Cooke. I haven't read a mainstream comic that's as good as this in a long long time. It seems to be a sequel of sorts to James Robinson's epic miniseries the Golden Age, and also it seems to round out the unofficial trilogy of revisionist super-hero books which ends with Alex Ross' apocalyptic Kingdom Come.

Sometime before June last year I stopped reading comics but since January this year I've gone through a couple. Exit Wounds, by Rutu Modan occurs in the aftermath of a terrorist bombing that doesn't effect anyone in the story directly. The protagonist is an Israeli taxi driver probably in his late twenties who is informed by a female soldier that his estranged father may have died in the bombing, and the two of them go about trying to find out what happened to his dad (him reluctant and sceptical, her the desperate child/lover). It has nice full color artwork but while there are some ambiguities that lend shading to the characters' behavior it's not that complex or amazing. It was fun while I was reading it in the library but not something that I was thinking about for the rest of the weekend after I put it down.

I Killed Adolf Hitler by Jason is even better but still not quite great. It's a brief but convoluted time-travel epic with a somewhat dry/schematic feel but still manages to be somewhat touching.

I've been reading fewer and fewer comics lately. The "big Two" are completely unreadable, bogged down in endless confusing crossovers, and even books I really liked have seen their quality decline. (Looking right at you, Daredevil...)

Last comics I've read were:

The Umbrella Academy - this is just batsh*t crazy stuff. It's probably the most insane comic since Grant Morrison's series Doom Patrol. It moves along at a brisk pace for it's six issues, but it isn't untill you stop to think about what you've just read that it hits you, this is absolutely genius. An emotional sucker-punch wrapped in a super-hero story.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 8 - Joss Whedon and his crew (Drew Goddard, and Brian K Vaughn) have done the impossible and made the first really great "licensed" comic book series. It seems like a logical continuation of the series, with some shocking plot twists and major character development. Joss Whedon has stated that once this series ends, "season 9" is already in the works.