HU News
I’m pleased to announce that we have two new columnist joining HU. Michael Arthur is going to be writing monthly about all things anthropomorphic and furry. Subdee is going to write monthly about whatever strikes her fancy. Both have written for HU before, but we’re looking forward to seeing them here on a regular basis. Welcome aboard!
On HU
Featured Archive Post: Charles Reece on pop culture and alienation in Ghost World.
A complete index of everything hated in our hatefest.
Me on how Van Halen, Ke$ha, and Ina Unt Ina are all hot for teacher.
Me on the end of our festival of hate.
Kritian Williams on the moral costs of heroism for Mad Max, Lisbeth Salandar, and Rorschach.
Jeet Heer on the underground literary tradition of hating Shakespeare.
Michael Arthur discusses race in Blacksad from a furry perspective.
Ng Suat Tong lists this quarters nominations for Best Online Comics Criticism. Nominate your own selections in comments.
Voices from the Archive: Matt Thorn on how he selected the stories for the Moto Hagio anthology A Drunken Dream.
Me on meat, money and Eli Roth’s Hostel films.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Reason I reviewed Michael J. Klarman on the pluses and minuses of pushing for gay marriage as a strategy for the gay rights movement.
At Splice Today I talk about pols like Claire McCaskill who put party before country.
Also at Splice Today I got to write about Cut Copy’s In Ghost Colours, an album I’ve been obsessed with this week.
Other Links
Jessica Abel and Mike Madden have up a list of notable mentions from this year’s Best American Comics anthology. Our own Derik Badman is on there…as is this James Romberger contribution to our Wallace Stevens roundtable.
Lesbian parents don’t ruin your life, in case you were wondering.
Matthias Wivel on Fabrice Neaud and Galactus.
Sean Michael Robinson is blogging as he busks his way through Europe.
A recreation of sorts of the 1920s Krazy Kat ballet.
This Week’s Reading
Finished Kate Soper’s Humanism and Anti-Humanism, which was a little disappointing (too far into the weeds on Marxist theory — my patience for that stuff has pretty strict limits.) Read a short Everyman Library volume of Swinburne’s poetry. Also read Fanta’s forthcoming edition of Moto Hagio’s Heart of Thomas, which I hope to review somewhere or other. Finally have been reading Ax Cop #1.
From Wallace Stevens and James Romberger’s Madame Le Fleurie
Not much time for reading right now…
Only finished Paul Hornschemeier’s Life With Mr. Dangerous for reviewing purposes. Seems to me like being the intersection of The Three Paradoxes and Mother, Come Home.
Still hoping for a collected edition of those Huge Suit strips he did for a Germany newspaper in 2009: http://www.graphic-novel.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/hugesuit_clip1.jpg
Oh y?
Reading: Playing at the World by Jon Peterson http://www.amazon.com/Playing-at-the-World-ebook/dp/B008PN6K9Y/ a long and detailed history of Dungeons & Dragons, that by way of getting to D&D is also a history of war games, miniatures game, fantasy literature, and role-playing (and maybe more). Who knew that H.G. Wells invented the miniature war game? Not me. I’m only about a quarter of the way through, but I’m learning a lot, especially about the precedents for all kinds of D&D terms and concepts that I always took for granted.
One interesting part discusses the connection between the anti-war counterculture and how that played into the adoption of the fantasy genre as an alternative to more realistic war games.
I also finished Chris Ware’s Building Stories, which I wrote briefly about on my blog: http://madinkbeard.com/archives/2012-10-10-building-stories-first-read/
I’m reading “The Ash-Can,” a story arc from the “Carol Day” British newspaper comic strip (Peter Menton, script; David Wright, art).
Here’s a site dedicated to the series.
I forgot to say that what I’m reading is the All Devon Comic Collectors Club’s edition (# 175 in their Daily Strips collection). The above site titles the story “Off-Stage.”
Oh, I’ve looked at that Carol Day site before. Some of the art on those is great.
I find the following quite funny: “According to Patrick Wright, David’s son, “even though the Hearst Newspaper did attempt to head-hunt my father in the early 1950s, it was felt Carol Day was too sophisticated for the American market!””
Just finished Frank Stack’s “New Adventures of Jesus.” So there was at least one grown-up in the Underground Comix scene back then. Well, him and Dan O’Neill. Not enough to fully redeem what one thinks of that scene, but oh well…
I think I’ll write mostly about over-the-top comics (manga) and comics (manga)-inspired music videos because those are fun to write about. I thought writing a collumn about new and zeitgeisty things, but that would probably become a bit forced. But we’ll see.
I am reading The Devil on the Cross by Ngugi wa Thongo, a satire about widespread corruption and cronyism in Kenya in the post-colonial era. Ngugi wa Thongo wrote Pearls of Blood which is one of my favorite books, about how religion is a spiritual balm that ignores people’s material conditions but communism fixes earthly problems while neglecting people’s spirits (not quite but close enough). The Devil on the Cross is more like an attempt to write a modern folk story. It’s very political and I’m not totally on board with the politics. The framing story is: Five people meet on a bus from the capital to the province of Illmorog, where it turns out that they have all been invited to a competition for Moderm Thieves and Robberies. At the competition, corrupt politicians, strongmen and property speculators actually meet in an honest-to-God cave to brag about how they exploited the people’s trust to make money, it’s very Illuminati-like, but also sad and hilarious. On of the five speculators is a farmer, another is a worker, another is a would-be petty capitalist exploiter, another is a B-school graduate, another is the music student son of a rich man and the last is the rich man’s former mistress. They debate how to handle the situation. The book is very disillusioned and perceptive about capitalusm, but also very militant that the *only* legitimate non-theft work is to work with your own hands to feed yourself, and also quite traditional in its values surrounding, for instance, woman. The book was written from prison on roll of toilet paper, though, so I don’t feel like I can criticize it too much.
Typing on my phone so please forgive typos!
I’m reading (when I’m not reading school reading cuz I’m back in school) The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, which deftly blends “literary” fiction with lush SF pulp in a story within a novel within a novel. If I’m making it sound tricksy and pomo then I’m selling it short; it’s a fat book about an old woman’s reminiscences yet it moves along briskly.
I’m also reading Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. It’s a proto-zombie movie with gigantic shambling Venus Flytraps instead of animated corpses, plus most people have gone blind. It’s a kind of Libertarian fantasy, but it isn’t dishonest about the dreadful human costs involved in a look-out-for-#1 crisis mode. It came not too long after The Blitz, and it shows how England’s confidence was as shaken as the USA’s after 9/11. And it’s one of those SF novels where the author’s particular sex fantasies are “The only logical thing to do if Humanity is to have a future!” I always get a kick out of those.