Bran the Blessed

Finished The Life of Polycrates by Brendan Connell yesterday. I definitely enjoyed the title story above everything else, a lot of the latter pieces were either uninteresting in concept or bungled in execution, and the stream of consciousnes writing sometimes randomly wedged into the middle of a paragraph can get very grating sometimes.

My more in depth summary and what I thought of all the stories individually can be found here

http://theweirdandwonderfulblog.blogspot.cz/2018/01/the-life-of-polycrates-and-other_23.html

And just to resurrect this thing again to make an observation:

Not a single title for this imprint is planned for 2018. But you know, gotta get that eight hundredth edition of Christmas Carol out there.

On 12/22/2017 at 7:31 AM, Pooka said:

You haven't had to watch hours of Suprise Blind Bag opening with your girls? I envy you. 

I hope this be no dig at Ashens : P

Then again I don't know if you letting your kids watch a man burning crap tat with a blowtorch and making fake 80's video games about the crushing weight of existence would make you a good parent or a bad one XD

On monday I finished Bradshaw's The Goddess of Atvatabar which only gets interesting about halfway in, as the whole first half is tediously slow in describing the Utopian society. The civil war is the only thing that livens things up a bit. Also some of the illustrations are extremely detailed and impressive.

Also just finished Robert Murray Gilchrist's The Stone Dragon. It's entertaining, but more like a lower key version of Fletcher's God's Failures or Katharine Tynan's An Isle in the Water. It's a good collection of short, tragic stories, alá conte cruel, and theres a good preponderance of allusions to witchcraft and supernatural happenings, but on the other hand some of the stories just stop, without a propper resolution and it's extremely jarring when that happens.

4 hours ago, dogpoet said:

It does have a nice account of Buzz LightyearAldrin punching out some conspiracy nut who's going around trying to get the former moon men to admit that the landings are faked, though...

A man after my own heart then.

Cause if I was in his place I too would not take this kinda shit : P

Finished The Ice King by Michael Scott. I liked it well enough, though perhaps it was a trifle too formulaic as a "creature" type of book. I will say the bit inside the World Tree was the best part of the book, and it never got quite as good after that.

Anything else the two wrote together ? I think Dom mentioning another one of theirs is how I got to hear about this book in the first place.

Also should add that that bit from Beowulf Jocelyn Brooke used at the beginning of his Image of a Drawn Sword would fit much better as an intro here but whatever.

So I just read Lore of Proserpine (1913) by Maurice Hewlett, a werid mix of essay, biography and story collection where the author repeatedly claims Fairies exist, and that he himself had some amorous doings with a daughter of Posseidon.

http://theweirdandwonderfulblog.blogspot.cz/2017/11/lore-of-proserpine-1913-by-maurice.html

2 minutes ago, Christian said:

Yeah, Morrison basically reinvented the character from scratch, but Midas was an old Iron Man villain. Morrison created his daughter though.

He first appeared in Iron Man #17.

What year did this "final showdown" take place exactly ? : P

Also, has Bendis just gone completely to shit ? I've not read a ton of his stuff but I kept hearing really positive things about him around the mid 2000's.

On 11/14/2017 at 3:42 PM, dogpoet said:

The really weird thing is that they're replacing male characters with female ones, rather than just starting new titles around their existing (and often underused) female characters.

I assume it's their attempt to have their cake and eat it took.

Start up female centered series in line with the editorial mandate.

And still keep the old title technically around and hope the old fans and subscribers will stick around.

Since last time I've read

* Hammed, A Tale of the Crusades by by Francois Le Fere: Nice setup with the manuscript and the modern day author finding it via an accidental run in with an exact duplicate of the guy from his dreams, but the book itself is a weird, oversexed, confusing hodgepodge of ideas which only has any kind of movement in the first part during the Crusade. After that, the knight who spent the first half of the book setting up his friend to marry his wife if he dies gets cuckolded, and then people switch from good to diabolical and back to good again, adopt several false personas and a new character poisons the main female lead a couple of pages before the end. This one was confusing and kind of hard to get through.

* The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson. A fun little diversion, and sometimes even a bit funny, and avoids the pitfall of many wanna be surrealists to just throw random crap on every page with no rhyme or reason and hope that someone will call them brilliant because of it.

* The Childhood of Rome by L. Lamprey. An interesting idea, exploring a more rationalised early history of Rome leading up to the disappearance of Romulus, which starts off by telling different parts of the story from different time periods and perspectives before settling on Romulus as the chief focal point.

* The Sacrifice of Fools by R. Manifold Craig. The basic set up for this is an engineer, suffering from the same hereditary madness that drove his father to suicide, is made to marry the daughter of the woman that caused his father to kill himself in a bit of soap operatic scheming thought up by his mother. He takes his wife, mute african servant and, as it later transpires, a pair of african Gorillas to colonial India, but after the failure of the road project he was attached to he buggers off and he and his wife move to a forgotten rock temple in the middle of the jungle. Sadly, this set up comes crashing down when the husband dies halfway through the book, thus removing the entire main dramatic hook from the story. What follows is a hundred pages of setting up the bloke who randomly comes across her while looking for her to be the next person she marries, and to a boring, trite murder mystery plot about some people killed twenty years before whom no one in the story ever met. It's annoying how an interesting premise can just be so savagely torpedoed.

* The Image of a Drawn Sword by Jocelyn Brooke. As much as I think the Guardian are a load of wankers, to use a fitting Colloquialism, I was interested in them talking this one up as this bizarre story of a man getting recruited by a shifty person to some recruitment due to a nebulous, kafka-esque "state of emergency". The story is kind of in that vain, the main hook being why no one can remember or recall the main character's friendship to a chap named Archer, not even Archer himself, and how suddenly this same Langrish finds himself in places and areas which seemed to follow naturally from previous events, but which somehow have all the markings of a great many years having passed inbetween. Now, this theme is never utilised as much as it should be, and if Brooke was not going to make it as clouded and confusing as a Kafka story, he should have thought to actually at least try for something akin to an explanation, because as it stands it's sort of halfway between these extremes, writing-wise.

* The Adventure of Wyndham Smyth by S. Fowler Wright. A story about two people's attempts to survive in a machine driven future after the entire human races votes to commit suicide to give God the middle finger. It's kind of in the vain of what I imagined Collier's No Traveler Returns would be like, had it been written well, and the only negative I can say about it is that the part of survival in an empty, automated world controled by nigh unstoppable self guiding machines could have gone on for a bit longer. The title blurb for it especially is a tiny bit misplaced as the fight for survival against the machines per se comes at the very end and takes up only a few pages. Still this one was actually highly enjoyable and disturbing on a basic level.

* The Little People by John Christopher. The very fact this book was described to me as being about Nazi Leprechauns caught my attention. Well, more accurrately I ran across this cover on accident and had to read it.

While the book doesn't quite deliver on the premise, it's certainly not as terrible as some critics seem to think, though the action is a bit static. I like the scenes of mental torture towards the end of the book, but those come and go rather quickly.

A full review may be found here.

http://theweirdandwonderfulblog.blogspot.cz/2017/11/the-little-people-by-john-christopher.html

10 hours ago, Christian said:

No, you have a valid point. I agree with most of what you wrote. The fact that Riri Williams was a black girl wasn't the issue though.

They could have had manly Republican Joe Six-Pack take over as being Iron Man, and the same thing still would have happened with Iron Man.

I don't mean that race was the issue here, beyond the fact that they thought it necessary in the first place, and that they used the character's race for some really bad writing from what I've seen, but again, it's the way they handle these things that is the issue. I've no problem with a black/asian/whatever character, as long as they don't randomly replace a character I read, not because the creators have a reason for wanting to do so organically, but because the company tells them to do it in order to virtue signal.

So the reasons for making the decline that much more speedy, in my opinion can be summed up as

A) Replace most well known characters with non white ethnic/female characters that no one actually reading cares about or wants to see take on the roll by editorial mandate, and prioritise the skin colour of a character to actual quality writing

B) Force in talking points about feminism and opression and talking points about how lesbian relationship are somehow inherently superior to straight ones etc. in order to appeal to professional online campaigners who don't actually buy the books but only care about putting down another "victory" in their statistics

C) Get really confused why people aren't buying anymore.

Not having read the O'Neil run, I can probably chalk this up to it being something the creator wanted to do by himself for the sake of good writing, and that's where the difference lies really.

4 minutes ago, Christian said:

Yeah, that's not what happened to Marvel Comics. That's what the editors at Marvel decided to blame instead of looking at their own self-destructive business decisions. The alt-Right idiots just decided to jump on that comment as a way to make a political point. Most of those people don't even know about comics, but hearing "diversity is being forced on a corporation and killing its profits" was an orgasm waiting to happen for them.

It's the same as the LGBTQ community whining and complaining about John Constantine not being "bi-enough", and they won't read the book unless John is fucking men, when, in reality, most of those people had never even read Hellblazer before.

The fact is that monthly comic books are a dying medium, and it's not going to change. Marvel and DC both rely on quick fixes so they can see that they hit #1 on the sales charts for that month, not bothering to think about what's going to happen the next month, when "Cap is a fascist!" or "new #1 issue!" or "Marvel Legacy begins!" isn't there to draw in the collector crowd.

Comic books used to be a lot more diverse actually. Not with minorities or anything like that. But, there used to be horror comics and sci-fi comics and crime comics and girls comics and romance comics. Something for diverse tastes. And, they sold so many damn books! They also weren't charging money so that only single middle-aged people can afford the damn things either!

Then, it ended up where superheroes are the only thing that a major comic book publisher can publish, which cuts down on the amount of fans who are going to be interested in the medium. Especially, when comic books cost $4 an issue, which means that kids can't read comic books anymore.

The idea of publishing comics that appeal to females or black people or gay people isn't a negative idea, in the least. In fact, many of these "diversity books that are killing Marvel's business" that they like to make excuses with are actually selling pretty decently as Trade Paper Backs in retail book chains, but Marvel and DC are solely obsessed with the monthly sales charts, which continue to decline all the time.

Diversity isn't Marvel's problem, and until they wake up and look at themselves in the mirror, they're going to see monthly sales decline all the time.

But, hey, then Disney might get word that they have a bunch of incompetents in charge of something they own, and Disney might start axing these idiots who don't have the first idea about how to run a profitable company. As long as Disney sees the profits they're making on the movies though, they don't have to take a hard look at why Marvel Comics is failing. So, braindead editors can start using all the excuses in the world about why they can't manage to publish comic books that anyone wants to read....."Hey, it's not my fault! It's the blacks and the queers! They're the ones who hurt Marvel!".

That's why most of us fans who actually love comic books as a medium are cutting down on our monthly buys and turning to a company like Image which comprehends the simple idea that creativity is the most important aspect to any literary medium, and isn't concerned about the next cross-over and relaunch to help save a comic book Universe which they've bungled and mishandled for about a decade now.

Thing is, I've seen some examples, especially from the series America, where tortured language and contortionist back bending is heavily applied to force non issues into issues while putting down some of the most idiotic phrases I've seen in a professionall published work.

And I'm just gonna say that I honestly think that this may very well have played a significant part in lowering sales, if for no other reason then due to replacing a character people liked with a new one they didn't care about. Everything I've seen of Riri Williams makes me want to reach in and punch her for being so annoying, and my affection for Iron Man is rather platonic at best. Someone reading the series monthly, year in year out, well I can see why they'd drop it once they'd hear Rori being an annoying pissant, whinning that her teacher isn't racist enough for her to have some heroic struggle to succeed at.

But that's just my opinion on that, and it's not even on topic.

1 hour ago, Christian said:

I didn't say you were a "fat pride"-type. Fat chicks are hot, to my tastes! Nothing political about it, I just like to see a woman with some nice flesh, so I have my own personal reasons for not wanting to see a world of all skinny females.

Yes, it was just poorly done and in bad taste.

The Valiant comic was Faith. My girlfriend read the first issue, and I think she liked it. I don't really know much about it though.

There's nothing wrong with presenting a broad spectrum of people in comic books, who are relatable to different types of people. Seeing every woman in comics being so skinny isn't exactly a realistic representation of current-day society.

I thought it prudent to point that out, since people could think I'm one of those people forcing Marvel into economic suicide with feminising or brownwashing 9/10ths of their biggest titles in recent years all in the name of "diversity".

49 minutes ago, Christian said:

Yeah, the idea was that she was obsessed with John and eating because she couldn't control her emotions or herself. It was also the idea that John got the last laugh on that girl, because she was fat now, so John wouldn't possibly want her anymore.

There's nothing wrong with portraying a realistic depiction of a larger female character. Comics are far too lacking in positive portrayals of "overweight" women. It's been well known on this site my propensity for big women. I would never have an issue with a pretty woman being portrayed to have gotten fatter!

Showing Angie as getting fat, and treating it as just natural and not a big deal would have been fine. Sure, maybe Angie put on weight over the past few years. Nothing wrong with that. It was Milligan's attempt that was the problem, to shame Angie.

Even if it was an attack from Milligan to Carey, in some fashion, using Angie gaining weight, as if that's the worst thing that could ever happen to an attractive female (!), is still puerile.

It seems most likely that Milligan's intent was simply to tear down John's past love interests to show the superiority of Milligan's little "mary sue" character. Kit was the queen, but she realized she must bow down before the true goddess, and Angie is denigrated, so it's a good thing John didn't stick with "tubbo".

Well that does sound rather nasty, it does.

I agree with your suggestion by the by. I know Valiant are/were publishing one starring an overweight female superheroine.

And mind you I'm not one of those leftie Fat Pride types either. I just think what Milligan did with that wasn't very good, at all.

I will admit that bit was not the best written and while I don't personally mind a gal with a bigger gravitational, she was made somewhat pathetic, and it may seem like it was a Gotcha from Milligan to Carey ? I dunno.

11 hours ago, GottaGetAGrip said:

The Newcastle two-parter is one of the Hellblazer stories I'm not too fond of for the reasons you mention, probably the worst of the twenty or so issue stretch that made up the Diggle era, though it was actually written by Jason Aaron. Though I did like how Aaron just magically resurrected John's old landlady, last seen dismembered via Nergal in the Delano days! (Carey also had a similar Unexplained Dead Character Resurrection though unlike Aaron he promptly returned said character to the dead)

My favorite issues of Diggle's run were his opening arc (I treat the mobster opener and Ravenscar Casino as one story) plus the "Mortification of the Flesh" two-parter - it was nice seeing John and Ellie working together to scam the Vatican. With Diggle's Hellblazer, it's quite clear that he was a fan of Constantine and his stories were all competent but as you've mentioned the many callbacks and reuses of Hellblazer's past didn't always work towards his run's favor.

While I didn't mind the changes brought about in the Ravenscar Casino and the Demon Baby arc that much, I wasn't too fond of the big reveal at the end that the Golden Boy had secretly been manipulating John the whole time post-Delano. I found it more powerful/relatable when the downward moments of John's life were the result of his own fuck-ups, rather than his multiverse abortion twin trying to break his spirit. Diggle's run began with swagger but I always felt that it ended on a bit of an abrupt anticlimax.

Wait did Diggle not write his stories himself ? I'm a bit confused there.

And I'd assume that he may have just not known she got offed by Nergal. Honestly I wonder if any of these writers had any thorough knowledge of the Delano stories when taking over, seeing it was a bit of a competely different animal by then.

1 minute ago, Ixnay by Night said:

I dunno, Ennis could bring the horror when he wanted to, like "The Diary of Danny Drake".  That one is still pretty chilling, especially with David Lloyd's artwork on that final page.

Is that the one where the dude sacrifices infants ?

Cause if so that was rather meh from what I remember.

1 hour ago, Christian said:

Ennis certainly had an axe to grind, as a lapsed Catholic. I can't blame Ennis for deciding to put himself in to the character of John Constantine, as that has often been a recurring motif for different writers on the original Hellblazer series. Just as Delano made John a socially-aware, Existentially despairing, Socialist because those are the concerns that Jamie Delano has as a person.

Most of the Western esoteric tradition was based on Christianity too. From the Church turning competing deities in to the demons of Hell, the usage of the angelic powers, or the invocations of the countless demons who were dreamed up to try to explain how things in Nature worked to a fearful populace during the Middle Ages.

The idea of earlier multi-ethnic (as opposed to Hellenism) pagan ideas or Eastern concepts being incorporated in to the Western esoteric tradition didn't come along until later.

Of course, Delano is the far better writer and a much more cerebral person, but what better character for Ennis to work out his own frustrations and questions about his own organized religion with than a character like John Constantine?

Not that this makes me enjoy the Ennis run anymoreso. It's a pale reflection of what Delano and Jenkins brought to the title.

There were also moments of pretty intense genuine horror, like the Ghosts from Vietnam story.

Or this

Ennis will just have a huge cock monste rape you until your eyes explode.

Honestly the Fear Machine is far more engaging than anything Ennis ever did on the title, and I completely forgot about it. Almost have a hankering to go re-read it.

56 minutes ago, dogpoet said:

The other big issue with the supernatural stuff under Ennis is that became a lot less eclectic during his run: the FOTF is just part of that. Suddenly all of the occult stuff was deeply Christian and the whole thing is about the war between Heaven and Hell, and nothing else, which seems a bit reductive after all of the various flavours of paganism (and even African animism) in Delano's run. You could even read Midnite's presentation during his reappearance as being a sort sniffily Catholic "all this voodoo stuff is really just satanism in disguise" approach given that he sends John to Hell rather than the more ambiguous afterlife voodoo mythology involves.

(I'm always a bit surprised that isn't talked about more, as it's the thing from Ennis that was dropped immediately somebody else took over as writer: Campbell had a demon in his story and a satanist's ghost in his story, but he also made a point of dragging in an aboriginal seer and a load of new age ecological mystics as well, as much to stress that these approaches to the infinite are just as valid as the christian ones Ennis spent his run favouring over everything else. That set things up nicely for Jenkins' diversions into Celtic mythology and the matter of Britain, and Ellis' apparently feeling that there is no religious content at all to the hermetic magic tradition that provided the supernatural underpinning to most of his stories in Hellblazer.)

Remember the story of the guy dragged away by Winnie the Pooh because a court of fictional characters declares he's not real ? Ennis would never write a story like that.

The thing with Ennis is he doesn't really care about the supernatural or mythology. He just likes to say how much they suck and have someone literally piss on them. I haven't read his more recent stuff but that was his MO during this time period, where he was at his most acclaimed.

Also I hate how Ennis screwed Midnite over and killed him so easily.

On 9/13/2017 at 1:10 AM, JasonWanderer said:

Jenkins – A solid run overall, not necessarily anything spectacular, but that was more because nothing in it was awful as well. “How to Play with Fire” had a very well executed anything (even if the story itself was a bit messy), that sums up John’s life perfectly. As a whole, Constantine was characterized incredibly well, but none of the other main cast really provided much. They weren’t bad by any means, but they weren’t spectacular either. Still, a tear does come to the eye thinking about Astra’s soul being released.

Azzarello – I don’t particularly like condemning writers, but this set of issues was a pain to get through. I’m sure Brian can write, but certainly not for Hellblazer. That’s really all there is to say about it. The first few words of the first issue alone had me already think that something was “off”. Ultimately, I’m sad to say, I couldn’t finish this run properly and ended up giving in and skipping over to when Mike Carey started.

I think Jenkins' run is underappreciated. He certainly did a lot of good shorter stories.

And I also agree on Azzarello. I heard he can write pretty well but this really seemed like he was trying to write a different series and just got saddled with John Constantine, hence why the setting and characters are all so unfamiliar and divorced from the usual Hellblazer fare.

As for Ennis, well, I think Ennis was kind of the catalyst for a bit of a dip in overall quality. Because he was the one who introduced his "Devil but not the Devil but much more Deviler than that Gaiman's Poser devil, honest !" character and the First remained a rather unimaginative go to shorthand for most supernatural events that happened in the series after that.

As for Carey, I actually enjoyed the fact he was making the series more plot centric. I did feel, especially during the Ennis run, that sometimes certain issues were like little more than filler, like the pointless gun factory story where the dude ends up gouging out his eyes at the end.

Somehow Constantine really didn't get much plot heavy stuff.

On 9/14/2017 at 9:41 PM, Lou K said:

 

This, IMO. Dangerous Habits always felt like the definitive Constantine story to me. Kind of has it all.

 

A massive re-read of the good stuff is in order, to remind me why I loved this character to begin with. Then I am chucking the floppies in favor of the trades. Simply no room at the inn.

 

[edit] oh, and welcome.

Floppies ? As in actual floppies, or a term of endearment for old single issues ?

I'd say to not chuck them, if only for the insight into the weird obscure shit Vertigo was publishing at a given time, which may be fun to look up and also as a bit of a time capsule of what the readers thought at the time via the letter's column.

At least for as long as they had it.

On 9/19/2017 at 1:50 PM, Ixnay by Night said:

 

Azzarello's run, to me anyway, was a real mixed bag. "Good Intentions" and "Ashes and Dust" are abominable outside of the Frusin artwork, probably two of my least favorite Hellblazer stories. But, then, Azz also has the really fucking excellent "Freezes Over" and "Lapdogs and Englishmen" in the middle of his run (even "Highwater" was pretty good, I thought).

 

 

I quite liked Carey's run on the book, but he was much more concerned with plots than with characterization. Everything had to tie back into his two mega-arcs (Shadow Dog and Rosacarnis) with very little room for side stuff. Compared to Delano, Ennis, or Jenkins, who all had the space to meander out into other areas of interest, Carey was all about Point A to Point B to Point C.

I think the bit where he has John fuck another dude was a bit weird. I mean, he's always been a bastard but I can't see him going that far, given he's always shown to be obscenely into women, just for the sake of a story.

Not being homophobic here,, just saying that added onto the whole feeling of it being wholy out of the ordinary and unlike anything that came before.

Also had no idea about the Ellis controversy with "Shoot".

Why was this necessary again ?

Also finished The Scarlet Plague by London yesterday. Interesting, but a trifle short. Lord knows this could easily have been twice as long.

Yep, I really enjoyed the fantasies that he co-wrote with DeCamp. The Compleat Enchanter and Land of Unreason should both be on every fantasy fan's "must read" list.

I've got Land of Unreason lined up to read after The Scarlet Plague and possibly "HAMMED" A TALE OF THE CRUSADES by Le Fevre.

The Well of the Unicron by Fletcher Pratt.

Read it five years back and can't remember a thing about it, which is odd as it seems rather good...

The same Fletcher Pratt who co-wrote The City of the Living Dead that I read recently ?

Also finished The King of Thomond, about a young girl going to be the governess of a Doctor owning a small island, only it turns out both the daughter and her mother are made of wax and the Doctor has gone crazy after trying to bring them to life following his reading of Frankenstein.

It gets a bit too romantic, but there are definitely good things here.

....Why did the culture board get flushed down into this subsection again ?