I wrote most of this in August but only just got around to finishing it up. I’m currently into Season 3 of Dexter--

I recently watched the first two seasons of the Showtime series Dexter. At roughly the same time I was also reading the manga Death Note (I’m on volume 9 of 12) and I find myself sort of fascinated by the striking similarities and differences between these two series.

( cut for spoilers )

I first read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen when I was working at Cooperstown Baseball Cards and Comics between my Junior and Senior years of high school. That was 1989, which means I’ve been a fan of Watchmen for almost 20 years. During that time, I’ve periodically reread the graphic novel and always found some new nuance or insight to the story. Watchmen is an amazing, complex, highly detailed, novelistic and densely multi-layered work and I will admit I had serious doubts that it could be successfully adapted to the screen. After all, isn’t Watchmen first and foremost a comic book about comic books?

( cut for length and spoilers )

The other day I picked up the first two issues of Serenity: Better Days, a comic book mini-series published by Dark Horse Comics.  It's written by series creators Joss Whedon and Brett Matthews and set between the end of the Firefly television show and the Serenity film.  Overall it’s pretty entertaining though it has the same problem I’ve noticed in the Whedon penned issues of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8 comic book—mainly that his dialogue works best when delivered by actors and doesn’t always make sense when seen on the page. 

 

There is however one bit that really stuck me as untrue to the characters.  Throughout issue two, the members of Serenity’s crew are relate their fantasies of what they would do if they had the proverbial shitload of money. 

 

This is Wash’s fantasy:

 

Based on my understanding of Wash I could see him fantasizing about flying a fancy ship.  It’s been firmly established that he wants children so I can totally see him daydreaming about having a cute lil’ baby to play dinosaurs with.  But a domesticated, maternal Zoe in a dress?   No.  Just no.  I’m sure this is supposed to be sweet and all because Wash is dead and never got any of this (and who's fault is that Joss Whedon) however it just doesn’t ring true.  It makes it seem like Wash wants to see Zoe tamed, but my interpretation of their relationship is that Wash loves that Zoe is a warrior.  He doesn’t want her to be the little wifey—that’s his job.  He’s completely turned on by it and he’s too much of a letch to ever give that up.  Something like all of them looking at the stars while he holds baby (and maybe Zoe in a dominatrix solider outfit) seems like it would have been more like Wash. 

 

Of course I do like River’s fantasy…



As you can see, the art by Will Conrad and the coloring by Michelle Madsen is pretty nice.

I saw Dark Knight  a couple days ago and was more or less blown away. 

 

I grew up with Batman—watching the 60’s television show, reading the comics.  Characters like Batman, Batgirl, Robin, Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, the Joker, Catwoman, Two-Face, Penguin, the Riddler, and Poison Ivy have been a part of my consciousness for over 30 years.  It’s kind of amazing to me that I can still be so captivated by such a familiar story, that there are still new layers to be reveled.

( cut for spoilers and length )

I just finished reading Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume 1 and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume 1 is about the formation of a sort of Victorian era superhero team made up of characters from thrillers of the period- Mina Murray from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Haggard’s African adventurer Allan Quartermain. While the series parodies (and sometimes seems to parrot) British Empire xenophobia, racism and sexism of the time for the most part it’s a straight forward adventure comic except for a prose story at the end which provides the back Quartermain’s opium addiction (which he is in the thralls of when his character is first introduced.) In this story, under the influence of a mystical, time and space bending drug Quartermain encounters H. G Wells’ Time Traveler and H.P Lovecraft character Randolph Carter (as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter who I didn’t recognize, having never read any of Burrough’ book). This prose story is full of Alan Moore weirdness and suggests that the crossover potential within the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Universe might just be limitless.

This limitlessness comes to fruition in Black Dossier. Set in the late 1950’s it follows the still youthful Allan Quartermain and Mina Murray as they retrieve a book called the Black Dossier that documents the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s history over the centries. Volume 1 was a comic book with a single prose chapter that mimicked adventure stories of the period Black Dossier is made up mostly of the sort of pseudo-ephemera documents that began each chapter of Watchmen. These documents—chapters from novels, 1984 retold as a Tijuana Bible, postcards, official reports, a Shakespeare folio and a section in 3D-- basically set forth the history of a parallel world where pretty much everything Alan Moore ever read seems to exist all at once. It’s almost as if Moore is striving to do for pulp/pop fiction what Joyce did for literature in Ulysses. Maybe he succeeds too well, because as with Ulysses, 90% of the references are probably going to be lost on the casual reader. I recognized a few of Moore’s allusions—Metropolis, James Bond (not a favorable portrait to my delight), Shakespeare, Jack Kerouac, the gender shifting and immortal Orlando, Fanny Hill, O’Brien and Big Brother of 1984 but missed even more as I’m not familiar British boy’s adventure books, the meta-verse of Michael Moorcock. The Avengers (as in Emma Peel not Iron Man) or fictitious French arch-criminals (to name just a few of the references that were significant enough to the plot that I had to look them up—who knows how many more were made in passing that I just skipped over).

I can’t say I would really rank either book of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in what I consider Alan Moore’s best works (Watchmen, early Swamp Thing, V For Vendetta, Promethea, and From Hell) but reading them has given me more ideas. One of the thing I find really interesting about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is that it’s a legitimate derivative work. It’s fan fiction in that it uses familiar characters yet it places them in an original context beyond the novels they originally appeared in. And of course since all the works referenced are public domain, it’s perfectly legal.

Almost makes me think it would be interesting to do some sort of a feminist revisionist crossover based on some of the books that were important to me when I was young. The titles that immediately come to mind are Little Women, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series and L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. Just imagine what could happen if mega-brats Amy March, Nellie Olsen and Jellia Jamb all joined forces in a sort of Legion of Obstinate Schoolgirls.

Another interesting idea would be to bring together some of the female characters from the novels I had to read in high school. Even when I was fifteen with no knowledge or understanding of feminism I could tell there was something wrong with the curriculum. All the books and plays we read seemed to be by and about men. The Shakespear plays we read were Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar. Merchant of Venice at least had Portia who uses her wits to save her fiancé’s ass of course she has to pose as a man to do it and the fact that she ends up making a Jewish character convert of die sort of soured the whole thing for me. On the plus side novels like A Separate Peace, The Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men kind of put the idea of homoerotic subtext into my nasty little mind but still it always bothered me that women tended to be passive love interests, victims or just plain nuts. I think the only novels by women we read were Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar In a Sieve and Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth both of which painted infinately depressing pictures of the lives women in India and China. Equally down-trodden was the heroine of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, one of the few books I remember that had a woman as a main character.

It would be sort of cool to write a story with zombie versions of Tess, Ophelia, those pathological schoolgirls from the Crucible, and ass-kicking versions the long-suffering Rukmani of Nectar in a Sieve and O-Lan from The Good Earth.

I’ve developed something of a passion for the manga of Ai Yazawa, mostly Nana (I’ve devoured the first eight volumes) and also Paradise Kiss (which I’ve read the first volume of). 

 

Her series Nana was recommended to me based on a bit of Princess Tutu yuri I’d written and right before I lost my second job at Biff’s office I decided to take a chance and secured copies of the first eight volumes of the series from e-bay.  A rather significant risk, I might have hated the series, but as luck would have it Nana turns out to be one of the better manga series I’ve ever read. 

 

Basically it’s about two very different 20-year-old women, both named Nana who come to Tokyo, meet and whose lives become increasingly intertwined.   No science-fiction or supernatural elements, just a pair of girls trying to build their lives and become themselves. 

 

Nana Komatsu is an exuberant but essentially aimless young woman.  Good hearted but clueless she allows herself to drift through life in the wake of whoever she happens to be in love with.  When her friends, including her boyfriend, move to Tokyo to attend art school, she follows them.  On the train to the city she meets the other Nana, Nana Osaki.

 

Nana Osaki is a punk rock singer with very definite goals.  Her previous band, Blast, was a local success in the small city she is from but that ended when their bassist Ren left to join the major label band Trapnest.  Ren was also Nana’s lover and he asked her to come with him but she declined as it would have meant being relegated to “rock star’s girlfriend.”  Their affair was put on hold and in Tokyo, Nana O is determined to become a success at least equal to Ren, with her new band.    

 

Nano O is guarded as Nana K is open, sharing little about her painful childhood or her personal life.  Yet her music has the ability to move people deeply.  Through her music, she seems to speak for them. 

 

While there’s some cutesy stuff, overall Nana is much more adult- as in grown-up, than most manga I’ve read.  Also it’s more novelistic, things seem to develop, grow and deepen with each installment. 

 

Also it has a sensibility I love. 

 

While so much manga seems to focus on students in school uniforms who aspire to the student council, Yazawa’s characters are hip bohemians, artist and musicians in Nana, an enclave of edgy fashion designers in Paradise Kiss.   They shop at thrift stores and vintage shops and garner inspiration from the Sex Pistols and Velvet Goldmine- definitely my kind of scene.  In a way Nana reminds me somewhat painfully of my college years, especially Nana K’s desire to be included in Nana O’s circle of punk musicians.  

 

Though I’m quite late to the party, I’ve started watching the BBC series Torchwood.  I polished off the first season on DVD and am two episodes into season 2 via downloads.  Overall I like it quite a bit.  Season One was fairly uneven.  There were some good episodes but some truly baffling suspensions of logic were required (I’m sorry, but any solution that involves reading the complete works of Emily Dickinson aloud is not acceptable).   Still, it’s amazing what you can forgive of a show that makes just about everybody in its entire cast more or less bisexual.    

 

And when I say everyone I mean everyone.  The leader of Torchwood (an alien hunting organization that’s sort of the UK equivalent to Men In Black) Captain Jack Harkness  openly admits to lovers of both sexes, is sexually involved with a member of his team but still manages to have a kind of “unresolved sexual tension” thing going with Gwen.  In addition to holding up her part of the UST with Jack, Gwen has a boyfriend and has an affair with the team’s medic Owen.  This doesn’t stop her from kissing a woman processed by an alien in the second episode of the show.  Computer expert Toshiko, who seems to have a crush on Owen has an affair with an alien who is female in human form.    An episode is devoted to another team member, Ianto’s efforts to resurrect his girlfriend but it’s gradually revealed in future episodes that he’s become involved with Jack.  Even Owen, a compulsive womanizer and seemingly the straightest member of Torchwood makes out with a guy in the series premiere and during an apocalyptic moment suggests that both Ianto and Toshiko have end of the world sex with him. 

 

I sort of love this kind of stuff. 

 

Season One had a lot of promise which I hope Season Two will deliver on.  It definitely seemed to be off to a good start in the first episode (appropriately titled “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” when Spike (yes, that Spike—Buffy Spike) shows up looking for Jack to be his Drusilla.  Okay, it’s not Spike.  His name is Captain John Hart.  He’s brunette and American.  And he’s not a vampire, he’s some sort of time agent thing that I’d know about if I’d actually watched Dr. Who before watching the spin-off but basically it’s Spike engaging in violent making out with a really cute (if full of himself) guy and in my book, that is pretty stunning. 

 

On the literary front I just finished reading Sarah Water’s novel Fingersmith.  It’s the third novel I’ve read by Waters (I admit it, I have a thing for Victorian lesbians).  The others were Tipping the Velvet (my favorite) and Affinity.   

 

I’d seen a BBC adaptation of Fingersmith a couple of years ago so I knew the basic outlines of the plot, which is probably a good thing.  I’m less concerned with being surprised than I am with knowing what’s going on and Fingersmith is full of the sort of twists and turns and reversals that often times confuse the hell out of me.  Knowing where the story was going freed me up to focus on the characters, the wonderful period dialogue and the rich atmosphere that Water’s evokes.  This atmosphere is by turns sensual and sickening.  Water has a way of making you smell the 19^th century and what with chamberpots and close rooms on rainy nights reeking of dog and unwashed bodies it doesn’t always smell good. 

 

In Fingersmith, Waters seems to deliberately set out to write a sort of post-modern  Dickensonian novel brimming over with melodramatic contrivances such as switched babies, ghastly uncles, and dastardly plots as well as expanding Dickens social themes to include issues of gender and sexuality as well as wealth and class. 

 

Another bit of post-modern pseudo-Victoriana I’ve indulged in lately is Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige, about a pair of rival illusionists.  This was my second viewing of The Prestige.  I have to admit my first left me rather baffled.  As I said, I’m not so good a following plots and The Prestige is extremely complicated, a puzzle of a movie in much the same way Nolan’s Memento was.

 

The film’s complexity is encapsulated by its framing device—much of the movie concerns a man reading another man’s diary about reading his own diary.  Follow?  Of course both diaries were intended to be read and are full of deliberate misinformation.  Appropriate for a film that’s central themes are doubles, the creation of illusion and how things are not what they seem to be.  I definitely got much more out of the Prestige by seeing it a second time and I’d like to watch it again just to clear up some details I didn’t really follow.  Also having watched it, I’d rather like to see Nolan’s contribution to the Batman mythology.  I’ve been intensely interested in Batman as a sort of masculine   archetype since I was a teenager but somehow I never got around to seeing Batman Begins. 

An update on what I’ve been reading lately.

 

I finished re-reading John Nathan’s biography of Yukio Mishima quite quickly.  I find his story is so fascinating, his desire to move from the realms of fantasy and creativity to those of action and physicality, from thoughtfulness to what William Butler Yeats would call “a mind that nobleness made simple as a fire.”   Given the state of the world today I really do find something disturbingly relevant in Mishama’s conscious decision to embrace nationalism and fanaticism. 

 

Currently I’m about two thirds of the way through Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens, a stiletto sharp, whip smart riff on the end of the world which I’m enjoying very much.  I think Kevin Smith’s Dogma, which I love, must owe a certain debt to Good Omens.  The portrayal of the workings of heaven and hell and the tone seem similar to me. 

 

Between Mishama and Good Omens read the first two volumes of a really interesting manga series called After School Nightmare.  It’s a really bizarre and psychologically complex story about a school where certain students are brought to a subterranean infirmary to participate in a special class they need to pass before they can graduate.  In this class the students enter a dream where they appear as they truly are and compete with each other for a key that unlocks a door they must pass through to graduate.  After a student graduates, they’re completely forgotten by their classmates so the school is eerily full of empty desks and lockers.

( cut for spoilers, pictures )

A couple of weeks ago I was read the manga Earthian.  It’s an earlier work Kouga Yun the mangaka (writer/artist) responsible for Loveless, a series I’ve had an ambiguous fascination/revulsion relationship with since I started reading it last year because of the eroticized, highly romantic manner in which it deals with the relationship between a 20 year old man and a 12 year old boy. 

 

Earthian was disturbing in different and similar ways.  Like Loveless, Earthian focuses on male characters but what bothered me was the manner in which the primary female supporting-- Aya, Elvira and Miyuki-- were portrayed. 

( cut for length and spoilers )

Things I’ve been reading lately:

( The Bull From the Sea by Mary Renault )

( Stardust by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess )

( Strangers in Paradise Vol. 11-16 )
( Veronica by Mary Gaitskill )

In one of the bouts of reckless extravagance I’m unfortunately prone to I bought all five volumes of Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III’s graphic novel Promethea on Ebay a couple weeks ago.   I started reading it on the plane to New York last Friday and finished it up earlier this week.  I definitely don’t regret buying it.  While not a perfect series (like Watchmen), Prometheus was still wonderfully witty, with excellent art and some really cool characters and ideas.  ( cut for length, spoilers, images... )