Fables

I want to know how many years this was in the works before they started publishing.  This is one of the best-planned, well-thought out series I have ever encountered.

The first eleven volumes (I think that makes the first 75 issues) were groundbreaking.  The Fables, from the Big Bad Wolf to Snow White, King Cole, the Gingerbread Witch, Boy Blue, Pinocchio, Rose Red, Sleeping Beauty, Beast, and seriously anybody you can think of, have made it into this epic fantasy.

The story begins with them living in New York in hiding.  They were driven from their own worlds centuries ago and are hiding out in the Mundy (our mundane world) to keep the Adversary from killing them all.

What’s beautiful about this series was how every character gets a chance to have the spotlight.  There are very few small characters that stay small, and many of the large characters get shrunken down to size.  At the start Bigby (the Big Bad Wolf and local sheriff) and Snow White (Deputy Mayor) seem to be the stars of the show.  They run Fabletown and have their respective paws and fingers in everything.  And then they have kids and settle into the background and get involved mostly in their own unsettling family affairs.  Flycatcher the Frog Prince is a lowly janitor for the longest time and then comes to rule a grand kingdom.

The politics are sound and in the end, the drama is tight, romances are real, and when the final warfare comes and they destroy the Adversary, I was cheering as much as I ever did for the final sequence of Lord of the Rings.

For a lot of stories, that’s a good run.  You conquer the unconquerable foe and yes, life goes on, but the troubles are never what they were then.

Fables has not taken that road.  They’ve gone the way of Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy.  The first book is incredible; the heroes defeat a cruel and malicious god and free the people from a millennium-long oppression.  Then book two comes along and they found out that they’ve just made things worse.

We’re now in Act 2 of Fables and for every problem they solve they create two more.  Beloved characters die, there are promises that some families will break apart, tempers flare, and we’ve barely made it to Volume 17.

The three threads that interest me most are Bigby and Snow’s children, Rose Red becoming a paladin, and what happens to Oz now that Bufkin the Winged Monkey has been hanged.

Watchmen: The Movie

This was always going to be a tricky story to adapt.  Most superhero movie adaptations have a strong advantage in that they are not obligated to keep to a comic book plot.  Batman and Spiderman and The Avengers have been revamped so many times within their own comic medium that when they get to film, their target audience really doesn’t mind a different plot from the ones they’ve grown up with or loved.  They’re just in it for their characters.  It’s the perk of being a franchise.

Watchmen doesn’t have that luxury.  It had its assigned twelve issues and that was it.  Audience expectations are different.  They don't want just their beloved characters on the screen, they're expecting the plot to translate as well, when the structure of Watchmen is episodic and would work better as TV mini-series than a film.

What impressed me was how they fit as much in as they did, and coherently as well (others disagree, but it made sense to me).  My favorite thing about this movie was how they established the Minutemen within the first fifteen minutes.  The Minutemen are all dead or retired by the main events of the story, and yet, those fifteen minutes hold the rest of the movie on their shoulders.  Nothing has any meaning without those small parts put in.

The major improvement the movie made on the book was eliminating the “space monster.”  No matter how caught up I was in the rest of the book, that was the silliest reveal.  It almost knocked me out of the rest of the story.  Turning Ozymandius’s plan into misusing Doctor Manhattan’s powers was downright genius and had a much more global impact for threatening the world.

What bugged me was Richard Nixon.  In the book, he gets maybe two mentions, mostly to establish that this is an alternate-America where Watergate wasn’t a huge deal and Nixon even managed to repeal the two-term amendment and was on his fifth term.  It was onlypart of the backdrop in a world where America won the Vietnam War and the Cold War wasn’t going to end with the Iron Curtain collapsing.

The movie gave Nixon a much larger role; almost fifteen minutes worth of screen-time, if I’m any judge (which I’m probably not but it was still obnoxious how much time I had to spend with him.)  I would rather have just eliminated those sequences entirely.  After all, they cut the New York crowd who made a good quarter to a third of the comics--my favorite parts of the book.  If they cut on that group to save on time and comprehension, why did they then fill that space with the Nixon crap?

Oh well.  I was happy I watched it.  I might even see it again, though not so late at night.

Barnes & Noble

Retail comes with its own sense of challenges and Barnes and Noble seems to have its own brand of frustration.

Customers have an unwarranted sense of entitlement in the store where they feel comfortable treating the place like they do their bedroom.  This doesn’t shock me overly much; I worked at a grocery store and I am well aware that finding the cereal box in the cannery aisle and the gallon of milk going rotten next to the loaves of bread is not an uncommon problem.  So I’m not surprised when I find books on the floor or a mystery novel sitting on the Christian Life section.

I am going to throw a fit about the magazines.  Folks tend to grab ten at a time from different sections and when they’re done, they put all of them back on only one shelf, covering all other product on display.  But at least when they do that, the magazines stay in the magazine section.  I am fed up with the mags that make it all over the store, especially the kids’ section.  It’s hard enough to keep Kids’ clean when it’s just the children’s items.  Bringing in outside material is going to give the employee responsible for Kids’ an aneurysm.

This especially drives me nuts when the material is not age appropriate: leaving an issue of Penthouse lying next to The Berenstein Bears is grounds for a swift kick in the crotch.

(This issue was outside of its shrink-wrap, too… now this goes across the board: the products are wrapped for a reason!  We don’t want them opened until they’re bought.  The wrap ends up on the floor and leaves a mess for us to clean up, and many times, the wrap has the pricing information on it and not on the book.  Without the wrap, it is such a hassle to find out how much it really costs.)

The one good thing that comes from magazines is that I find them easy to sort through.  Most of my coworkers disagree but it’s much easier for me to find a place for each magazine; part of that may be because the covers all face out so I just have to match cover with cover, unlike books, where the spine is usually what faces out (unless they’re on a promo, (man, I do a lot of parentheticals) but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.)

As for the Kids’ section, it is my favorite place to work in the whole store.  I love seeing all the kids books, it’s nice to have my own designated corner that’s all my own for that shift, and because I am the ultimate backup, I never run out of things to do or people to help.  But you can’t turn your back for a second or the kids’ are going to leave half the shelf on the floor.

Okay, the kids are five and six, or ten and eleven.  Whatever.  They’re kids.  I know they are not that responsible or considerate and they make messes.  That’s fine.  But what are their parents doing?  I know their parents are never more than five feet away from them to make sure they don’t get lost or kidnapped.  They are watching their little brats commit their infractions and rampages with the Newberry awards and plush dolls.  When are they going to teach them that this is not their house?  I’ll bet these moms get so frustrated that their hellions won’t make their bed but what do they expect?  They’re learning that they can get away with trashing a place open to the public, why should they care about their own private residence.  Or rather, they’re not getting the message that cleanliness is a way of life rather than a custom for certain circumstances.

(As she reads this post, my mom wonders how my own room looks at my place.  Answer: good enough for me.)

Maybe I could have said this all in one sentence: I want customers to keep the store neat.  It’s considerate.  I mean, it’s not like you bought any of those books that were lying around so it’s the least you can do there.

But, lest you think that customers are the only ones that bother me, there's plenty of grief that my own store lays on me.  Or rather, there are some horrible things they're doing to our customers that has to stop.

I worked at the registers for a long stretch of weeks and this was not a huge surprise to me.  Cashiering was the one retail skill that I already came into the job with.  The registers are not at an actual cash stand, but sit on one long counter with cashiers on one side and customers on the other.  In front of every register is a cashwrap, or a bookshelf with the current magazines or mass-market paperbacks the store is trying to get rid of.  The cashwraps are so bulky, especially at the bottom that the customer is likely to trip on them as soon as they turn to leave.

This is not a joke.  Three to four times per shift that I’m at a register, somebody bangs their foot against the blasted things and the worst is that they’re typically old ladies.  I am terrified that one of these days, one of them is going to fall and bruise a hip, or worse.  The cashwraps are genuine hazards and I am not the only employee saying so.

One of the first things they train us on is that safety comes first.  What a laugh.

I understand why they have them up there.  Reading the magazines while waiting in line is a classic way to kill time, and not just in bookstores.  Hey, the customer may even decide that they want to buy this issue Time.  I just don't think they should have to pay for it with their lives.

Glamour in Glass

Mary Robinette Kowall’s pitch for her first novel was “Jane Austen with magic.”  And that’s fair.  Not accurate, but it’s fair.  After all, there was the beautiful prose, the manners, the rich characters with their foibles and skeletons in the closet, and of course, romance.  And the magic was not used traditionally; magic, or “glamour,” was used as a type of art, much like sculpting or painting, so it fit very well in this setting.

 And then there was this explosive ending that I can never picture Jane Austen doing, complete with standoffs and gunplay.  Not Jane Austen, but still awesome.

Glamour in Glass is Kowall’s sequel, and is very much not Jane Austen.  I feel like that Kowall’s characters have grown into their own world now.  It takes place in France during the time of Napoleon, and while there is romantic tension, it’s a different flavor.  Instead of trying to get married, Jane (the main character, not Austen) is in the middle of her honeymoon.  It’s not about getting married, the romance is in making the relationship work as newlyweds.  And that is no easy task considering the danger they find themselves in with a war looming ahead.

I read it in two days.  Had a hard time putting it down.  You don’t necessarily have to read her first novel to get into this one; Glamour in Glass stands on its own quite well.

I have two complaints but not about Kowall.  I’m having issues with the marketing.

First is the cover.  I’m an art lover as well as a reader, and I am not ashamed to say that I will buy a book because of its cover.  Maybe you shouldn’t judge a book by it but the truth is, if a good artist took time out of their day to create something beautiful for a novel, it speaks highly of that story to me.

The cover is fine.  Looks gorgeous even… but it doesn’t fit.  The story is about a plain woman in a country at war with itself, trying to create wonderful magic with her husband (you can take that any way you want.)  The cover is a fashion model in princess clothes walking down a flight of stairs and bubbles floating around her.  Completely wrong tone from the outset.

The other is… well, you know what?  I can’t even remember what else was bothering me.  Guess it wasn’t as important.  Check the book out sometime.  You’ll be glad you did.

Homecoming

I intended to read the Homecoming series by Orson Scott Card a long time ago.  I bought all of them during college (along with Alvin Maker, Ender and Shadow series, the various short story collections and many of his stand-alone novels.)  But for some reason, I just never made time for them.

Then I went on my mission to Texas, and mission rules being as strict as they are (no recreational reading among them), I realized that I’d run out of time to read that particular series.  So I set them aside and promised myself that as my reward for serving those two years, they would be the first thing I read.

Almost two years after my mission (which makes nearly four years since I made myself that promise) I finally got around to reading the blasted books.  And yes, they were fantastic.

There are five books in the series but, really, they are two different stories: the first four books are the saga of the Wetchik’s family and the last book is centuries after and their descendants are busy screwing things up.

On the planet Harmony, humankind is on the verge of repeating Earth’s history where they could bring about their own extinction.  The Oversoul, the computer system programmed to protect them from that, is failing.  The Oversoul selects one family to leave the planet and return to Earth, where they can rebirth their homeworld and the Oversoul will find guidance in how to proceed with the human race on Harmony.

The real story is much more small-scale: Wetchik’s family is divided among itself as to whether they should endure the hardships of continual migration the Oversoul commands them to, or remain where they are in relative comfort and ease.  The division is so heated that it comes to murder by the time the journey is through.

I could see Card raising the bar for himself in this series.  When discussing writing, he often makes the case for how every character is the hero of their own story.  In a society of sixteen, he managed to give them all a moment in the spotlight and prove that he could make each character the hero of their own tale.  True, Nafai, Elemak and Luet are the principal movers and shakers of this piece, Rasa, Zdorab, Shedemei, and Eaidh all felt just as important when it came time for their part in this orchestra of family drama.  It was fascinating to see it all come together.

If I had to pick, The Call of Earth was my favorite installment, mostly for the wonderful setting of Basilica, the City of Women.  This place is a matriarchal society where Rasa, the matriarch of Wetchik’s family, is clearly the boss.  The politics are intriguing and it is heartbreaking to watch how everything she’s worked to sustain falls apart around her.

And yet, while there is an approaching army, many of the problems are self-induced.  The marriage custom is the driving force that ruins them.  Part of the control women have in this society is that they only enter into one-year contracts with their husbands.  If they want to keep with the man, they sign on for another year, but if not, they move onto the next eligible man.  It totally eradicates the need for divorce, but creates some complicated family relations, and it’s really this custom that causes most of the fights within Rasa and Wetchik’s own family long after emigrating from Basilica.

The Wetchik saga may be about the decades’ long journey to go to Earth, but what the story is about is a family practicing a new order of monogamy and discovering the joys that come from obeying it and the tragedies that occur when they don’t.

The last novel, Earthborn, is a fitting conclusion for the series, but more as a way of tying up loose ends that weren’t necessary to be tied up in the fourth book.  Starting in The Ships of Earth, there were hints of two alien, or rather, evolved species they would encounter on earth: the bat-like “angels” and the rat-like “diggers.”  Card doesn’t deal with different sentient species much, but when he does, he goes the extra mile to make them real.  And when Wetchik’s family meets them in Earthfall, forming relations with the two species is intriguing and almost as much fun as the other stuff.

Earthborn is about Wetchik’s descendants rebuilding their society to make the humans, diggers, and angels equal with each other, and that becomes no small task especially with the opposition involved.

Note to the Latter-day Saints: this story is based off the Nephi story, or the first 50-60 pages of the Book of Mormon, and Earthborn is based on Alma the Younger’s redemption.  Some I’ve talked to who’ve read the series were incredibly annoyed by that.  To all ye in that camp: get a life.

Webcomics

I have loved comics all my life.  And, of course, the place I first came to know them was the Sunday newspaper, specifically Peanuts, Garfield, and Calvin and Hobbes (less than a year later, Bill Waterson retired from that strip; typical.)

It wasn't long before I discovered that comics weren't just a Sunday thing but an everyday treat--although Sundays were superior for two reasons: color and more than four panels.  Still, when my family had stopped ordering the newspaper, I rode my bike to town and spent my quarters for the daily paper.  I dutifully examined the titles for the other articles, but truth was, it was all for the Funnies.

I love having daily comics but there is something lacking in the newspaper comics.  I'm not going to ennumerate all the reasons for those here, but as it goes, the only comics I still enjoy these days are Luann, Heavenly Nostrils, Pearls Before Swine, and Dilbert.  But those, while good, are not quite enough to fulfill my needs.  Not when I grew up used to at least twenty great strips per day.  What to do?

Go to the saving power of the internet.

The internet really has been a boon to webcomics.  Of course, webcomics are not a perfect replacement for newspaper comics.  With newspapers, all of the comics are in one place for your reading pleasure.  Webcomics, you have to do some searching and go through numerous different sites to read the ones you like and finding new comics to enjoy is difficult.  Most of the comics I enjoy came by recommendations by friends.  The rest is from advertisements on other websites.  This latter option is a little wearying, though.  Maybe 1 in 20 of the comics I find through these means are worth going back to.

For those who care, though, here's the strips I think are worthwhile:

Schlock Mercenary.  This is the only daily comic I read and is a great satire with guns, explosives, aliens, and talking elephants.

Sluggy Freelance.  Started out as a parody of all geekdom but then accidentally started telling powerful thriller/romances to make you really care about what was going on.

Girl Genius.  I'm honestly not a steampunk fan but there is something about the Heterodyne's world that I can't keep away from.  I especially like Bangladesh Dupree and the Jagermonsters.  "Dis is turnink into vun of dose plans... de kind vere ve keel everybody dot notices dot ve's killin' people... and how do dose alvays end?" "De dirigible is in flames, everyboddyz dead an' I've lost my hat."  "Und any plan vere you lose you hat is?"  "A bad plan?"  "Right again!"

Quantum Vibe.  Not a comedy.  A smarter-than-it-needs-to-be sci-fi.  Cool mysteries and intrigues, and a multiverse idea with exciting possibilities that I haven't seen before.  I look forward to every strip.

Within A Mile of Home.  I hate that it only comes out on Tuesdays but it's kept me going for months now.  No other once-weekly comic has ever been that addicting.

Supermassive Black Hole A*.  A one-panel sci-fi strip whose story is as dark and beautiful as the illustrations are.  I worry from time-to-time that the plot has lost its focus ever since Vero disappeared, but Selenis is such an intriguing character that I'm willing to trust the artist a little longer and hope that the bigger picture arises.  And maybe Vero will return.

Shadowbinders.  I just discovered this one last week and am all caught up.  A lot of swashbuckling adventure juxtaposed with the pains of high school.  This one could run ten years.

Dominic Deegan.  It's ending soon and about time really.  I'll admit that it got to be quite an exhausting strip.  It suffers from the same thing most superhero stories suffer from: four apocalypses in a row stops being intense, especially when you know a fifth will follow after they prevent this last one.  Still, this strip started with Dominic and Luna's romance and that is what keeps me coming back despite all the other silliness that crops up.  Although I must say, the biggest surprise is how Stunt has stolen the show every time he appears.  Easily the most despicable character for ages, he's slowly become the Inigo Montoya of this tale.