Hmpf

Two notes on the translation:

1.) The character who mostly goes by the name of Otcho has a real name, too, although that is barely used at all. The scanlations give his first name as 'Nagaharu', but the German translation as well as some experts on Japanese language/culture, and the Wikipedia article on the series, give it as 'Choji' or some variation thereof. It really doesn't matter all that much, as he never uses that name, anyway. Just thought it an amusing little factoid.

2.) The name 'Diet Building' has nothing to do with supermodels starving themselves to death. Apparently it is what the Japanese parliament/congress is called. *g* (Another bit of information courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Check your PM. ;-)

I'm just joshing with you man,

Girl, please. I'm one of those elusive female comics readers. ;-)

I got four pages in and then caught myself - "You know why this feels like a disjointed read you big muppet ?  No John, I don't, why is that ?  Because you're reading from left to right, dipshit!".

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Heh. Sorry, I should have mentioned that, I suppose. *g*

Just give me a month here so I can adjust to reading from right to left  :-?

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Oh, it's not that difficult to get used to. I got used to it pretty fast, and can now switch from European mode to Japanese mode and back very easily. It only becomes a bit problematic if I've read an awful lot of manga and try to read something else directly afterwards - I tend to read it the wrong way 'round then. Happened to me the morning after I'd finished reading 20thCB - read a webcomic and wondered why the punchline didn't work and the sequence of panels seemed so disjointed... *g*

Hmpf, he has read until the 19 and the story is still changing in each volume.

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Yep, I'm up to the middle of vol. 19 now, too. That's as far as the scanlations are done now, but new chapters are still coming out pretty regularly - and I hope the next volume will come out pretty soon, too. *g* It recently turned into this weird western thing. And one of the main characters (if it *is* him - it's kinda difficult to tell at the moment) is just acquiring layers upon layers of new coolness all the time. I mean, it takes something to appear cool standing up to your knees in rubbish and holding an old umbrella while being confronted by a cowboy. *g*

I agree with andy - I can't even imagine him actually owning a CD player, or CDs, for that matter. I picture him as one of those slightly stuck-in-the-past people who listen to the same stuff at 50 that they listened to at 20. Like all those Beatles dads. ;-) (Not speaking from my own experience here - my father, who is 61, never really stopped developing his musical taste, and he's still occasionally interested in new stuff I discover, although our tastes have developed in different directions. But I know quite a few people of his generation who never significantly changed their tastes since 1968 or so.)

I guess we're even then 

Not really, because the thing that made you jealous can be mended, whereas the thing that makes me jealous can't. Unless I manage to travel to the U.S. sometime and time my visit really carefully so as to coincide with the SPX or something. *cries*

CSM in person is exactly as I expected her to be. She's friendly and pleasant but reserved, yet at the same time clearly operating in her own world. I mean that as a compliment, really I do. At the back of Dream Sequence (IIRC) she talks about "hearing voices" - I suspect she means that literally. By no means is she spacey, crazy, or odd, just in her own world, which is probably more interesting than the one the rest of us live in. If you lined up a group of comic creators and had to guess which one wrote Finder, you'd pick her out in an instant.

That's pretty much what I'd expect her to be, yeah. I get that feeling from the footnotes. I imagine J.R.R. Tolkien must have been a bit like that, too - he's the only other writer I can think of who took worldbuilding to such extremes.

Her companion, whom I suspect is the "Cat Boy" she's mentioned a few times, is definitely the more outgoing enthusiastic showman type.

That would be her husband, I imagine?

Both of them recognize me the instant I walk up to their table, which never ceases to amaze me. It's a crowded convention, I'm never there for long, and I'm just not that memorable!

 

Here are some terrible scans of the few pages of OA I own.

 

All of that delicate linework is totally lost in these images, but they're the best I could do at the time.

 

http://www.spinningtheinfiniteswitch.com/i.../Finder24-2.jpg

 

http://www.spinningtheinfiniteswitch.com/i.../Finder21-8.jpg

 

http://www.spinningtheinfiniteswitch.com/i...s/Finder2-i.jpg

Wow, you own original artwork? *jealous again*

;-)

Here's a page from Dream Sequence from the Lightspeedpress website that shows the linework quite well:

http://www.lightspeedpress.com/index.php?m...issue=23&page=4

It's not one of the type of pages I meant when I talked about the pages that utilise the text in a special way, though, although Dream Sequence has more than a fair share of those.

Hmpf, have you read the volume of Queen & Country that she illustrated, and if so, what did you think of her artwork on it? It's the one book of Q&C I haven't read yet (drat) but I saw some of the pages at a past convention and it looked very bland, and not at all her usual style, but I don't knw whether what I saw wa a representative sample. Thoughts?

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I haven't read it, as I don't read Q&C and usually don't follow authors and artists I like to series I'm not interested in. But I've looked at the book a few times in comic shops and was never particularly impressed - I like CSM's style, but it's the combination of her artwork and her extraordinary world and characters that makes Finder. She strikes me as someone who's really best at doing her own thing.

EDIT: ARRRGH! I want to know more about Jaeger's daughter, like, now!!! Grrrr...

Sorry. It's just the footnote's are so teasing...

Hmpf, I am insanely jealous that you've read Rescuers already. The highlight of attending WizardWorld Chicago is always meeting CSM and buying the latest TPB (and often a piece of OA), but even though the convention's only about a fifteen minute drive from home I missed it this year.

 

Wah! Methinks it's time for me to order it online.

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Well, on the other hand, I am insanely jealous of *you* now, 'cause you've met CSM and I probably never will.

But, yeah, do order online. She's very reliable and will get your comic to you really quick. It's rarely taken more than a week for a parcel from Lightspeed Press to arrive here in Germany, and if you're in the U.S. it should be even faster!

Uhm... In order to get more people interested in this fabulous comic I have uploaded three chapters of the scanlations to my webspace. I'll remove them again soon - I just want to give people an opportunity to have a look to help them decide if they may be interested. These three chapters should give you a fairly good idea of three of the main charactes without spoiling *too* much. Obviously, *some* spoilers are unavoidable.

http://www.allabouthmpf.com/uncle_kenji.cbr

http://www.allabouthmpf.com/man_in_bangkok.cbr

http://www.allabouthmpf.com/the_ice_queen.cbr

Also, obviously, you won't get much of an impression of the plot from these three short chapters.

Use a comic reader such as CDisplay or rename to zip and read in the image viewing program of your choice.

The Rescuers trade just arrived here today and I just finished reading it (well, I'll need to read it again, probably several times, as with all the Finder books, as there's always stuff you miss). As always when reading a new volume of the series I am struck by how great this series is on several levels. The first thing that attracted me was the world it's set in - it's such a fascinating mix of the familiar and the utterly strange, with many elements that boggle the mind in exactly the way I'm looking for in science fiction. Loved, loved, loved the television kudzu...

I just love the idea of the city domes with their layers upon layers of streets and houses, and I love that Carla Speed McNeil continues to show us new parts of it - like the giant public elevator in this volume. Also, that the cities don't turn into a total, dark dystopia as in so many other future city scenarios. They seem just as multi-faceted as cities are nowadays - maybe not the perfect place to live for everybody, but not a total hell, either.

I also love the enormous complexity of the society McNeil has created - the many clans, cultures, races. Also, the idea of a future culture trying to 'unearth' bits and pieces of our current pop culture to integrate with their own pop culture.

And I absolutely love the amazing full-page compositions she uses. They're not really splash pages, more a kind of cross between a splash page and a page with normal panels, often utilising typography in a very striking way. Carla Speed McNeil often seems to try to capture non-linear, multi-focal moments of perception and she has found some wonderful graphic/typographic representations for them. I wish I had a scanner so I could give the non-Finder readers of this forum some idea...

And of course Jaeger is still fascinating - and CSM is very sly about giving us more info about him. This is the second volume now in which there have been intriguing glimpses of Jaeger's, well, let's call it family life, for lack of a better word, but we still know next to nothing...

Oh: Salon.com reviewed the series recently: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2005/08/...l/index_np.html

Tideland, yeah. and in the last interview I read with him he said something about still wanting to make a flick out of Good Omens.

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Whoah. Can you imagine that? Gaiman/Pratchett/Gilliam? Geekdom around the world would go mad with anticipation!

I was stalked by Terry Pratchett at Worldcon, btw. Well, not really, but he always seemed to cross the hall exactly when I did, only in the other direction, on the first day. *g*

Brilliant. I think I've found religion. *g*

I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with the concept of fanvids. These are music videos edited from clips from a show or movie to a song that is deemed fitting by the fan editor. Usually they're made from movies and TV shows, but recently webcomic fans have started making fanvids for comics, with some pretty impressive results. I'd now really like to see some Hellblazer vids... but I don't have the know-how or the time to do it. However, maybe someone around here has?

Here's some examples from the webcomics world:

http://zebragirl.keenspot.com/fanmedia.html - See: 'Show Me How to Live', 'A Girl Like You'

http://www.frombearcreek.com/video/vid_index.htm - See: 'It's Walky' and 'Tribute to Angst'

Uhm... because I'm weak and a geek and thrilled by the idea of putting some Hellblazer image on my wall I'm actually thinking about getting a proof of no. 214 now... I haven't *quite* decided yet as I really don't have much money right now (mostly because I've just returned from a way too expensive stay in that way too expensive country, Great Britain) but I'm sorely tempted. Just letting you know so you won't finalise this mass order deal before I've made my decision. Will try to come to a decision within a week, okay?

(Technically I'm not in Britain as you can see from the fact that I just went there on holiday, but I often have international purchases sent to some of my friends in Britain rather than to my own address in Germany so as to save on postage, and then collect the stuff at my next visit.)

Ade sent me some pics of the street used, I'll have to upload them soonish.

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We should all go there and write our names on the wall...

Yes, I think Jkhristian said it well. Any comic can be made into a film - or some other as long as it is done by someone who cared.

 

I also agree with your LOTR remarks.  Exactly my quibbles as well.

 

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Yay! *Two* people who share my criticism of the depiction of Frodo in the movies! Far, far too passive and useless; more baggage than Baggins in most of the first movie.

I have no money.

*cries*

I'm sorry, I can't shorten my list to four, but I'll *try* to put it in some kind of order:

1. John Constantine, from guess what comic, tied with Jaeger Ayers from Finder - both complex, contradictory, and not always entirely on the right track, morally speaking... both men you could spend ages exploring. John Constantine gets extra coolness points for being a magician and having been a punk once, while Jaeger gets extra coolness points for being a nomad in a far-future high tech world, always on the move, fitting in nowhere.

2. Kenji Endo and Otcho, both from 20th Century Boys, because they're heroes I can actually root for, forced into a life in the underground (I like rebels). Also, Kenji can't sing but never stops trying, which is somewhat touching and sometimes borders on the heroic, and Otcho saves people from thugs and then steals their watches. What's not to like? *g*

3. Walky from It's Walky - a screwed up kid who tries to avoid a harsh reality by refusing to grow up, a goofy superhuman hero who is fascinated by body excretions, and *still* gets the girl.

4. Jack the Plaid from Zebra Girl - because he has *the* best wizard's name ever, and has returned from death like Gandalf the Grey, and can apparently make his body insubstantial when he goes to other dimensions, and do cool stuff with his magical plaid shirt. Also, wizards are inherently cool (see 1.) He also angsts prettily and grows convincingly from good-for-nothing slacker with a porn obsession to powerful wizard.

Since most of these are probably unknown to most readers of this forum, here's images and links:

Jaeger: http://www.lightspeedpress.com/ - That's Jaeger in the top righthand corner.

Kenji: http://www.classicmanga.com/20thcenturyboy...ters_kenji.html

Otcho: http://www.classicmanga.com/20thcenturyboy...ters_otcho.html

(Spoilers, obviously! Also: Weird English Warning.)

Walky: http://www.itswalky.com/d/20040404.html

Jack: http://zebragirl.keenspot.com/d/20041126.html

Whoaaah. I come back from holiday to find that I'm famous! ;-)

I think that just about made my week. I would say it made my month, but I've had an exceptionally nice month, what with Worldcon and all, so it's more like the cherry on top of the cake or something. But, wow, what a *nice* cherry. *g*

Also, I feel unworthy - I'm such a newbie still!

I'll be at Worldcon in Glasgow till Monday. If anyone happens to be there and wants to meet me and talk Hellbazer/comics/whatever, I'll be at the Farscape fan table in the Concourse Area intermittently and I will be making a fool of myself in public on the Battlestar Galactica: military vs. civilian authority panel (Sat. 14:00) and the Farscape panel (Sun. 12:00) - I'll be the (relatively) young woman with no clue and a German accent. ;-) I'll probably wear a nametag with 'Hmpf' on it, as well.

I'm more or less active in loads of places, actually.

A selection from my bookmarks:

http://www.blanklabelcomics.com/community/viewforum.php?f=4

http://www.comicforum.de/index.php?

http://forums.scaperoute.com/kansas/index.php?board=1

http://forums.keenspot.com/viewforum.php?f=72

http://forum.sf-community.de/

http://www.gallifreyone.com/forum/index.php

http://www.livejournal.com/community/20thcenturyboys/

http://www.livejournal.com/community/_finder_

http://www.watchfarscape.com/forums/

Et cetera. There - I've just made stalking me that much easier. *g*

And of course:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/hmpf

http://www.allabouthmpf.com

Just got the issue. Actually, I rather liked it. It had more John than last week's ;-), and I think Leonardo Manco's John is finally starting to look more like 'my' John. Not sure if it's due to my getting used to him or Manco's getting used to him... *g*

I didn't mind the 'phoning dead people' bit at all. But then, I really liked the voodoo tv, too. (I *want* a voodoo tv!)

I read the first two chapters (volumes? I don't know how manga is classified). It was alright. Nothing orgasmic. But my manga friend is basically forcing me to read the series. So I'm sure I'll grow to enjoy it.

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It builds very, very slowly (but continuously - that's what's so great). Starts as a humble, unassuming slice-of-life story, then slowly turns into a still not too spectacular conspiracy thing (that's where you are if you read the first two volumes), then adds a healthy dose of dystopia but still doesn't go *that* far, and then it suddenly turns into a child's game writ large and gone completely mad, complete with an army called 'Earth Defence Force' who believe they're protecting Earth from an alien invasion, with laser guns and silly seventies SF movie uniforms. It gets quite surreal in parts. Pop culture reimagined as a totalitarian nightmare.

It could be divided into three main parts so far, and you've only seen a part of the first part, the prologue if you will, if you read the first two volumes. The first real 'jump' happens in the fifth volume, where the story jumps about 14 years ahead in time and changes protagonists at least for a while, and then there's another large 'jump' in time (and tone) in volume sixteen, where it gets totally weird (but in a good way).

The real joy is in seeing the story develop, really. Yeah, it's slow, but it's precise as clockwork.

Whoah. I just *can't* keep it short, can I? *g*

Hey, another thing I just thought of: This series has one thing in common with HB: a niece who idolises her formerly wannabe-rockstar uncle and tries to live her life based on the template he provided. Only the niece in question here does not take up magic but freedom fighting.

I'm totally blown away by this series at the moment.

I've been exploring the world of manga for a few months now, but there have been very few mangas I've really been impressed by. Quite a few were fun enough to read, but most didn't impress me deeply and certainly didn't make me want to immediately buy the series.

20th Century Boys by Naoki Urasawa, however, did/does. Now, it's a bit unfair to rec this to English/American readers, as there is no English version officially available yet. It's been licensed, but the publishing company has agreed to release all of Monster, the author's previous series first, and that's one hell of a long series. So, it will probably take a couple of years before there'll be an English release. Which is a crying shame, as 20th Century Boys is far, far superior to Monster, at least from what I have seen so far (I've read 14 volumes of Monster and 16 or so of 20th Century Boys).

This is a manga that's clearly geared towards an older audience than your average manga, or at least than the average manga that gets published in Germany or America, where publishers mainly seem to aim for the teenage market. Older comic readers here often aren't even aware that there are mangas beyond Dragonballz(?) and Sailor Moon, and so, when a series like 20th Century Boys comes along, it often fails to find an audience - the teenage fans don't 'get' it, and the potential older readers aren't aware it exists. The series was already almost cancelled once in Germany.

Well, as I said, the series isn't out in the English-speaking world yet, but there are scanlations, and as the series isn't available in stores yet I believe that reading scanlations is mostly tolerated by the publishing companies. If you like the series like I do you can still buy it when it comes out (which I've begun to do now), and in the meantime, you can spread the word, and create buzz for its eventual publication (which I'm trying to do here *g*).

So, to get to the actual recommendation:

20th Century Boys is the story of a bunch of people (not all of them male, btw *g*) who try to prevent the end of the world. But, hold on. Despite the clichéd summary this may be a bit different than you expect.

The 'heroes' of 20th Century Boys are in their 30s as the story begins, and grow a lot older as the manga progresses (the story spans decades), although there is a couple of younger characters to balance the bunch of old guys in later volumes, as well. ;-) They're rather unremarkable people, too, most of them - owners of small family businesses, office employees, a businessman, a small-time criminal, a customs officer...

The artwork is drawn in a more 'natural' style than most people expect in manga - huge eyes and impossibly long limbs are completely absent (some female characters have *slighly* larger eyes than most of the male ones, but it's not taken to extremes). Actually the faces are reminiscent of caricatures sometimes, that is to say, the charactes all have a very unique, characteristic look - there's no perfect beauty here, and some of the heroes could be called downright ugly: One of the heroes is a really fat guy, another is a tiny little man with a huge moustache and Einstein-like shock of hair and thick glasses, and after volume 7 or so most of the protagonists are fairly old and look it, too.

The one manga cliché that does feature in the story to a huge degree is the Evil Plot of Apocalyptic Proportions. Here, it's a dubious sect aiming for world domination, or possibly for an actual apocalypse. Their Evil Plan is based, bizarrely, on the games the group of heroes played as children in the summer of 1969, and recognising this is what makes the heroes leave behind their unremarkable lives and try to prevent the apocalypse they imagined as children. However, their heroic deeds fail, and whatever they do, the situation always seems to get worse. Soon the sect is ruling Japan, and our heroes are wanted as terrorists.

One of the great strengths of the series is that it takes a lot of time to flesh out the characters and make them real. It allows them to be heroes yet be fallible and human at the same time, and there's a theme of nostalgia and regret for the past (for their youth) running through the whole story that provides an emotional touchstone.

Also, Urasawa is brilliant at creating and sustaining suspense - the slow but inexorable progress of the apocalyptic threat is a constant source of tension, and Urasawa knows just when to interrupt the flow of the story to keep the reader guessing, and when to give the reader a breather to let some new information or situation be assimilated to increase its resonance.

Well, I could go on, but this is already far too long and I've probably lost you already. ;-) For some examples of the artwork, go here and click on the covers:

http://www.s-book.com/usbook/sbc_searchV1?...&subcont=&lpc=1