I know you're fascinated by this Ghost World saga and relieved to know I'll have a brand new copy sometime in the next two weeks thanks to my good friends at Amazon Japan and Sagawa Transport. I also ordered New Mutants Classic volume 4, two Marvel Masterworks Uncanny X-Men books and John Byrne's Compleat Next Men 1. What a dork!
Along with those I sent for Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank and On the Beach by Nevil Shute. I'm not just a sucker for comics about disaffected youth and mutated super-beings with soap opera-ish personal issues but also for the nuclear combat toe-to-toe with the Russkies. I'm a big fan of the apocalypse. When you grow up party to a murder-suicide pact involving you, your government, its chief ideological rival and every other higher order of life on the planet, you tend to find such concepts as missile gaps, fallout, mega-deaths and half-life fascinating and fun. My first words were, "Mein Fuhrer! I can valk!"
So I've read On the Beach multiple times, but I read Alas, Babylon only once, when I was a child. All I remember about it is someone gets blinded by staring at an atom bomb blast. Probably some punk teenager. Teenagers are always staring at things.
I remember that, and Chef Boyardee's Little Pizzas, which were a staple of my summertime diet in those days. The rich, probably artificially-flavored with chemicals later proven to be carcinogenic tomato taste of Chef Boyardee's Little Pizzas is forever linked in my mind with Alas, Babylon and the novelization of George Lucas's early film THX-1138, my copy of which apparently had a few pages missing. I assume the movie has a happy ending like most of Lucas's other films, right? I stole Alas, Babylon from my older brother who read it for a high school class and THX-1138 came courtesy a used book sale at the public library.
Holy moley, I'm like Proust with brain damage.
No comments:
Post a Comment