Friday Quotations: Fat Fridays

"It is possibly worth mentioning that in Fat Charlie's world, women did not simply turn up. You needed to be introduced to them; you needed to pluck up the courage to talk to talk to them; you needed to find a subject to talk about when you did, and then, once you had achieved those heights, there were further peaks to scale. You needed to dare to ask them if they were doing anything on Saturday night, and then when you did, mostly they had hair that needed washing that night, or diaries to update, or cockatiels to groom, or they simply needed to wait by the phone for some other man to call.

But Spider lived in a different world."

"Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each."

--From Ananasi Boys, by Neil Gaiman

I was at a bookstore the other day, blissfully spending my X-Mas gift cards, and I had to choose between this book and Guy Gavriel Kay's A Song for Arbonne. I've read them both before, but never owned either. I think Kay's may be the superior novel, but for light, winter break reading, Ananasi Boys just felt right. (Plus, it's miles above its predecessor book, American Gods, which has a more epic plot, but a main character so cardboard that you can hear paper rubbing together when he moves too quickly.)

Oh, and if you're into that sort of thing, Happy New Year.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: There Are So Many Reasons Why Constantine = Keeanu Reeves is the Worst Idea Ever

"Something was hanging in the air like an electric charge. Some force. Some dammed-up potential, seeking its level. It grounded itself in staccato pulses. A librarian in Spain eviscerated himself on live webcam; slowly but with terrible determination. He lived long enough to explain that he was dying for the sins of the world. One of the ambulance men, weeping, asked for his blessing. The other reflected that logically, more deaths would redeem a greater number of sins. A little girl in an Ohio grade school wrote a story and read it out in class. Eighteen of her classmates would later require counselling, and her teacher would take medical leave that would eventually segue into early retirement. Something was squirming through the long dark of the womb. Loping towards Bethlehem. Scrabbling and clawing and straining to be born." --Mike Carey, John Constantine Hellblazer: Staring at the Wall.

What attracts me about this quotation is less the quotation itself as its presentation and function in the story (a comic book arc, wherein Constantine gathers a team to combat the Shadow Dog, the one animal Adam never named). It's a tour de force of writing appropriately for the genre and the medium. The text covers a single page; 5 panels, each panel the entire width of the page, with the final panel about twice as tall as the others. The "wide-shot" nature of each panel serves to establish a voyeur/tableau sort of feeling; you get a sense that the scenes before you are just something you've been allowed to glimpse at, but won't be allowed to see any more of the story. The final panel, starting with the text "Something was squirming" has a picture relatively unrelated to its text; it depicts the DC/Vertigo character Swamp Thing, standing impassively. Thus, without actually making an overt statement, Carey establishes the page's connection to the tradition of DC horror books, and the Alan Moore-esque Swamp Thing in particular. Finally, the two vignettes (little girl and librarian) themselves remind me of those 100-word story challenges--both could be fleshed out into an entire story, but since all we see is this glimpse, we get the sense that we're just looking at the tip of the iceberg, that these events are global. The very brevity and economy of the panels establish the horror setting better than pages and pages of set-up could.

As opposed to this blog, for example, where brevity is never a problem.

Later Days.

Comic Panel Wednesday: Keepin' It Low Key

This page is From Seige: Loki. A bit of background: In the Marvel Universe, the Norse Gods are real, and spent centuries locked in a cycling of Ragnorak. Recently, they broke free of that; now, they live in the real world; they still have a kingdom, but some members have lost their old places. Hela, for example, no longer has a hell to rule. She's made peace with the loss, because while Asgardians may still die, they just won't go anywhere, they will just wander the earth until she finds a new alternative. But to Loki, that's not enough. They're still clinging to old patterns, and he's still condemned to end up in Hel. So, he tricks the Green Goblin into destroying Asgard to create massive Asgardian deaths, resurrects a coterie of soul-devouring women, marries the group of women, trades them to Mephisto for a corner of hell, threatens Hela with the soul-devouring women, and trades her the corner of hell so she has somewhere to keep the souls, just so he can be free of his destined fate. Which is all a very complicated, very bad-ass plan.

But mostly, I liked the way the artist, Jamie McKelvie, puts so much expression into the characters' faces. Loki's reveling in his own schemes, and Mephisto is entirely "well, I'm the worst being in Creation, and you just sold me your wives, so, yeah, I'll see where this goes."

And the writing keeps up to the art. Here's the dialogue for when Loki wins his brides' hands in combat:
"It will be as you wish. You are the victor."
"No. Victory is a small thing. Thor wins. I want more than that."

Mr. Gillen and McKelvie get the most important part of writing mythology-based characters: in any pantheon, the most interesting being is the trickster.

Later Days.