Monday, November 16, 2009

The Comic Book Reading List...

To be more accurate, my comic book reading list. I haven't abandoned this blog. I've just been very busy writing short fiction lately and reading. Reading. Always reading. Currently I'm reading Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, Kurt Vonnegut's Armaggedon in Retrospect and Bernard Malamud's The Natural.

It may surprise you to know the Roy Hobbs in Malamud's book is an asshole. Much closer to the familiar modern athlete with his selfish appetites than the semi-mystical knight-errant of the Robert Redford movie.

But since this is ostensibly a blog about comic books (yeah, we needed another one of those), here are the comics I'm currently in various stages of reading and writing about for future entries:

1) Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind volume 1 (Viz's "Perfect Collection" version)
2) Le Chevalier d'Eon volume 1
3) Nana volumes 15, 16 and 17
4) Watchmen for the millionth time
5) Love and Rockets New Stories volume 2
6) New Mutants issues 2, 3 and 4.
7) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910
8) 20th Century Boys volumes 1 and 2

And now for your entertainment, the Japanese trailer to Miyazaki Hayao's science-fantasy masterpiece, Kaze no tani no Naushika:

2 comments:

Pete Mullins said...

The Robert Redford movie introduced me to the theatrical works of Randy Newman. (...and then to his cousin Thomas, son of Alfred).
Great score!
Hey and re: your post on old horror comics. I can't remember where these stories were published (probably Warren B/W comics), but they sure gave me the heebie geebies when I was a kid:

A story about gremlins on a WWI bi-plane flying over the killing fields of France. I remember this great panel showing them crawling all over the plane and pilot, ripping them both apart.

Another story about this pest exterminator (who I think was abused as a kid...man what they could get away with as entertainment in the 70s)who really got into torturing bugs. He meets his end when a rather sexy looking femme fatale turns out to be a human-spider-thing that traps him in her web and then devours him.

Jeez, talk about warping a young developing mind!!
As always with your blog...a fun and enlightening read.

Unknown said...

Ah yes... Randy Newman. He's amazing. That movie is shameless in its crowd-pleasing and mythologizing and a lot of its effectiveness is due to Newman's score. I still think of it whenever I'm attempting to do something to the utmost of my abilities!

I want to try to find those stories you mentioned! They sound gruesome!

And thanks!