Random

I've been looking at a few old issues of The Beano, a weekly British comic book that's been running since 1938 (which most Americans have never heard of).

Anyway, the bizarre thing about the comic is one of the regular features, Dennis the Menace. It's NOT the Dennis the Menace we Americans know. So you think, maybe someone ripped somebody's idea off. But get this: the two characters debuted independently (i.e. unrelated creators) in their respective countries just 3 days apart. Hella weird.

Anyway, Britsh comics and advertisements are different.




And this is a great quote I haven't thought of in years but which came back to me yesterday:

"If you want to be successful in life, everything you do must be an act of patricide. You must always kill the father. Every song you sing, every sentence you write, every leaf you rake must kill the father. Every act from the most august to the most banal must be patricidal if you hope to live freely and unencumbered. Even when shaving— each whisker you shave off is your father's head. And if you're using a twin blade—the first blade cuts off the father's head and as the father's neck snaps back it's cleanly lopped off by the second blade."

--from “My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist”, by Mark Leyner

1910

I've read the latest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book, Volume 3: Century, #1: 1910. I don't read comics in Korea because I don't like reading on the computer, but for this I made an exception.



This latest story is pretty good - better than The Black Dossier, but not as good as the first two volumes. I'm looking forward to the 1969 and 2009 books, even if the story's gotten a bit muddied by including just about every fantasy narrative ever, as well as fictions that aren't specifically fantasy-oriented. Virginia Woolf's Orlando has gotten a larger role with each book, and that's one of the primary texts I haven't gotten around to yet. Trying to keep up with all the intersecting media is a bit of a challenge, but that gives us something to do as we wait years for Moore and O'Neill to complete each issue, and to get the essential sources isn't that difficult. Aside from characters from previous volumes - mainly from Dracula, H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain books, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Mysterious Island by Jules Verne, the Sherlock Holmes mythos, and the aforementioned Orlando - this book's primary inspiration comes from Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera and Somerset Maugham's The Magician, which I'm only passingly familiar with. Knowing the sources helps, but part of the enjoyment comes in rereading and realizing who all these people are, and every time I read it I recognize something new.



Throwing in references to Cat's Cradle or The Story of O for the sake of references is of course a bit pretentious, but Moore usually goes beyond this to make the characters his own and breathe new life into them. The throwaway stuff for the annotations is more like ornamentation, and when Moore focuses on telling a good story he always comes through. A lot of this volume felt like setup for the 1969 and 2009 volumes (this one is set in 1910). This issue is really about Captain Nemo's daughter and it's quite touching and disturbing, if a tad predictable.

And Kevin O'Neill's art is always incredible. He's got a huge collection of his Marshal Law stories coming out that looks awesome.

Reading

Here's some reading material. First:

Glomer's Exclusive Interview with Jonathan Ke Quan (Short Round from Indiana Jones and the only Asian in Goonies)
Glomer* proves once again that he's on top of all the news. (*Glomer = J.U.)

Then:

Montgomery Flagg's Nervy Nat comics
Weird early comics from the creator of the "I Want You" Uncle Sam Poster. Click them to supersize... they're peculiar.

Ninja-tek Archive: October 2, 1999: Walnuts

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