Tlönista

I’ve been sitting on this one a while, as you can tell. Broken up into parts for your convenience.

1 “Angoulême is old, old, old”
2 General overview of demographics, genres, comix culture and industry in France
3 A very short glossary
4 Playing the bass
5 Gatecrashing
6 Notes on the panels
7 Schtroumpfs noirs
8 Party in the alt comix tent
9 Readers on the lawn of the Hôtel de Ville
10 “Je tombe amoureuse”

Continue reading ‘Angoulême’

So a while back I finally made it to London’s geek Mecca, the SF/comics/anime/collecting haven Forbidden Planet. Yes, it is spectacular. Yes, I’d rather have Bakka-Phoenix and the Beguiling any day. (Forbidden Planet’s way of organizing its graphic novels – alphabetically by series title, regardless of genre or author – is particularly annoying as you have to browse through all the Marvel shit to get to the good stuff. Same with manga, where Tezuka, the Blu line, and Shonen Jump mingle indiscriminately. And their stock of pretentious indie shit is most sadly lacking. But that’s what nearby Gosh is for…)

Despite my nerd/snob condescension I emerged with a bagful of good stuff and have been consuming that for the past few weeks. Here’s what I’ve been reading (and what You Should Too):

Suburban Glamour #1 and #2. A fantasy miniseries by Jamie McKelvie, the guy who illustrated Phonogram. And since I find McKelvie’s effortlessly smooth, clean-lined art irresistibly sexy, I must follow Suburban Glamour as well. Premise: teenage girl stuck in dead-end town discovers she’s a changeling. The art is a trifle stiff, but fuck, give this kid some time, he’s gonna be good. Unfortunately, the fantasy plotline is rather paint-by-numbers. We’ll see how the following issues go…

The Family Trade. I liked what I’d read of Stross’s alt-history and post-cyberpunk and decided to give his fledgling fantasy series a go. It’s a kind of girl-stumbles-into-magical-vaguely-medieval-world thing, except the girl is a whip-smart thirtysomething investigative journalist rather than your typical boring prepubescent naïf. And the magically gifted “world-walkers” use their talent for drug smuggling. And there’s less prophecy and more political intrigue. And there’s even a touch of, dare I say, romance novel? The Funhouse girls back home will love this setting, and this novel.

(Also, kudos to Stross for satisfying the Mo Movie Rule in the first ten pages.)

Perla La Loca. “They are wild! They are crazy! They are the women of tomorrow!” The third Fantagraphics collection of Jaime Hernandez’s Love and Rockets stories. (For those not in the loop, there’s another three volumes covering Gilbert’s stories and I should be picking up the most recent one soon.) This volume follows our hero as she goes from punker mechanic Maggie to unlucky-in-love, family-troubled Perla. Punk. Wrestling. Beautiful women. What more do you want?

Ash: A Secret History, Mary Gentle. Sarah N. lent me this brick of a novel back in the summer and it’s quickly become one of my favourite books. Conceptually speaking, it’s at the nexus of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, and The Lathe of Heaven.* Ash is very hard to explain: it starts off as the adventures of the eponymous female mercenary leader in fifteenth-century Western Europe, with the framing narration being an academic’s new translation of medieval manuscripts. The quirks and inaccuracies in Ash’s story are initially dismissed in footnotes as interpositions of myth, or mere authorial flights of fancy; then, as Ash’s story diverges and becomes an alternate history, our medievalist translator becomes increasingly hard-pressed to explain all this to his impatient editor – and when some weird archaeological evidence turns up, the story gets a lot bigger and stranger.

But Ash is great in the “ripping good yarn” aspect too – Gentle really, really knows her stuff when it comes to medieval clothing and weaponry and illnesses and food and how armour ought to feel and how heavy a sword really is. There’s plenty of foul-mouthed soldiers (“wall-to-wall bastards…oh, ‘ride me sideways’, that’s another one”), camp camaraderie, blood and gore and all that good stuff, vividly drawn characters, and very sharp emotional drama to counterbalance the more transcendent bits of exposition.

My favourite Ash-ism? When Godfrey chides her for telling off a condescending knight by saying, “You didn’t have to make another enemy,” and she snaps back, “It’s compulsory with assholes.”

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* No, you haven’t heard the last of me raving about Ash; I plan to unpack that last bit. Got working on a little essay about it while in Bruges. Yes, you must all read the book. Yes, it’s over a thousand pages and the proper one-volume edition is only available in the UK. READ NOW