Category: Comic books & strips

Posted on

Explain that to St. Peter, mon General

It’s all a bit of a blur after I invented wine.

–Bacchus

Doing the Islands with Bacchus, a collection of comics by Eddie Campbell, is one of my all-time faves. Consisting of a travelogue of Bacchus and friends around the Greek islands, the comics relate the “real” stories behind some of the Greek myths, along with digressions on the history of fashion, the art of vinoculture, the discovery of champagne, and the nature of the afterlife (or afterdeath, as it turns out). Importantly, Campbell achieves this while keeping his characters as characters. That is, they don’t simply recite facts, but rather bring different perspectives and styles.

The Last of the Summer Wine, a 24-pager narrated by Bacchus’ companion Simpson as he, Bacchus and Hermes travel to Naxos by boat, is a marvel. The story manages to convey the glory of ancient Greek culture, make wry observations (verbal and visual) about the power of myth, and lead to a wonderfully poignant conclusion about the essence of love. Maybe it’s that inner classics-geek I’ve been referring to lately, but the final page of that comic always chokes me up.

I bring all this up because Campbell recently wrote about one of his major influences on those comic strips: the books of Walter James. I’d never heard of James before this, and with good reason. Sez Campbell, “He was an Australian wine maker who wrote several volumes of diaristic thoughts on just about everything, but mostly about winemaking and his enthusiasm for reading. They were published between 1949 (Barrel and Book,) and 1957 (Antipasto) and amounted to six volumes, of which I’ve managed to find four.”

Give Eddie’s post a read, take some delight in the excerpts of James’ writing, and tip a little libation to Bacchus, wouldja?

Posted on

Hot Gates, Hot Box Office?

A few posts ago, I mentioned that I was going to mark-out for 300, and that Amy & I would likely go catch it this weekend at the local IMAX, so as to get the full theme-park experience of Thermopylae on a giant screen.

This morning, I went online and discovered that every single IMAX screening this weekend is sold out.

I have to admit, my powers of prognostication aren’t the greatest, when it comes to movies and other pop phenomena. I mean, Ghost Rider looks like a godawful movie, and it’s based on a godawful character from Marvel’s nadir. So of course it ran away with the box office and is going to pass $100 million in sales this weekend. Did I underestimate how bored and/or stupid teenagers can be in February? I guess so.

But 300? Projected to pull in $60 million in its opening weekend? I’m happy that it’s getting so much exposure, but I’m just afraid that it’ll give Frank Miller so much Hollywood cachet that he’ll pursue a bigscreen version of Give Me Liberty.

Posted on

Not just tan: Spartan

In keeping with my inner classics-geek of that previous post, here’s Victor Davis Hanson on 300, the movie adaptation of Frank Miller’s comic book about the battle of Thermopylae:

[T]he impressionism of 300 is Hellenic in spirit: its buff bare chests are reminiscent of the heroic nudity of warriors on Attic vase paintings. Even in its surrealism — a rhinoceros, futuristic swords, and an effeminate, Mr. Clean-esque Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) who gets his ear flicked by a Spartan spear cast — it is not all that different from some of Euripides’ wilder takes, like Helen or Iphigeneia at Taurus, in their strange deviation from the party line of the Homeric epics. Like the highly formalist Attic tragedy — with its set length, three actors, music, iambic and choral meters, and so forth — 300 consciously abandons realist portrayal.

I don’t remember a ton of the comic book. The one time I read it, I was at a friend’s house in Auckland, NZ, trying desperately to stay awake till nightfall, so as not to get wrecked by jetlag. Fortunately, he was one of the greatest cartoonists in the antipodes, and had a room full of comics that I hadn’t read.

And, yes, I’m thinking of catching 300 at the local IMAX. Sue me.

(Here are some terrible pix from the premiere.)

Posted on

Major, Burns!

Charles Burns, one of the finest cartoonists currently practicing the craft, recently released a book of “paired photographs” called One Eye. Chris Ware, another of the finest cartoonists around, wrote about Burns and the photos at Virginia Quarterly Review. Some of the photos are in the article, and they’re gorgeous, so check it out.

Posted on

V for Vitamin

Those of you who pretend to know me through this blog pretend to know that I’m a creature of habit. When something works out for me, I stick with it till it fails. Then I kick it to the curb. When I break from this practice, I tend to get screwed.

Last week week, for example, I switched from Breathe Right brand nose strips over to the private label brand at CVS. I should’ve known something was wrong when one of the instructions was “line up the bump” and another was “hold in place for 20 seconds.”

By morning, the strip was half off one side of my nose, and removing it left a nasty mark on the bridge (where I lined up the bump). So it’s back to the same old.

Now, if you’ve made it through this far, then you know there’s gonna be some sorta payoff. In this instance, it involves fluorescent urine and potential liver and CNS damage.

See, the same day I bought the cheap-ass nose strips, I also needed to restock on my multivitamin. I had just finished a 200-count bottle of One-A-Day Men’s Health. It’s only in the past year or two that I got into the habit of taking vitamins. I can’t detect any effect, but it’s possible I’d be a deteriorated wreck by now if I hadn’t been taking the darn things.

Amy & I checked out the local health food store, since she’d never been inside. I took a look at the vitamins while she was checking out some rice. The clerk directed me to Ultra II dailies from Nature’s Plus. It cost $25 for 60 tablets, which took me aback. But I bought them, figuring “at that price, they must be good.”

That was Saturday. Wednesday evening, Amy asked how the new vitamins were. Besides expensive.

I said, “They seem fine. I gotta say, though, I had no idea my body could produce a yellow that fluorescent.” She chalked it up to the B-complex in the vitamins. I thought maybe it was polonium-210, and that the FSB was ready to silence Virtual Memories for good, but I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Unless she was in on it. . .

Okay, so maybe I was getting a little paranoid.

I figured that having fluorescent urine would make for a fine party gimmick, since we do have that Super Bowl bash next Sunday, but Amy decided to give my new vitamins an extra look.

After a few minutes on the laptop, and she announced, “You need to stop taking those.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, it says here that the upper daily limit of vitamin A is 10,000 IU. And your new vitamin has 25,000 IU.”

“. . . Wow! There’s a Teratology Society? Is that like the Monster Society of Evil?”

“Sigh.”

I think I’d be worried if Amy did get some of my references.

We checked out a few more reputable sources, plus wikipedia, and determined that it was probably best if I don’t risk liver collapse, osteoporosis, CNS damage and, most important, hair loss (gotta have your priorities straight). So it’s back to the same old.

(Just wondering: if they’re pseudotumors, that means they’re not as bad as regular tumors, right?)