Jason Penney's thoughts on writing, life, and other stuff
One of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen, Greg the Bunny, is having a “Reunion Special” on IFC. Set your TiVo!
Update: The special is entitled “Fur on the Asphalt: The Greg the Bunny Reunion Special”, in case you were having trouble finding it.
My friend Dursin has been recommending Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise for quite some time now (not nearly as long as I’ve been trying to get him to read Cerebus, but that’s a different story). I figured I’d eventually give it a try, but the large number of slim collected volumes was keeping me from taking the plunge. Now I have no excuse. I’m a sucker for a large collected comic volume at a decent price, so when I saw this nice thick volume I knew I had to give it a try.
The first volume of the Pocket Book Collection is nearly 350 pages and contains the original three issue run of Strangers in Paradise and the first thirteen issues of Strangers in Paradise Volume II. The issues are presented in a slightly reduced form that’s somewhere between the standard comic book size and the ever more common manga/digest size. The artwork and lettering doesn’t appear to suffer from the reduction.
The story opens with what must be one of the defining moments in the life of Francine Peters, one of the main characters. During a high school play Francine has a major wardrobe malfunction. The story jumps forward a number of years to find Francine in bed with her boyfriend Freddie, while her best friend and roommate, Katina “Katchoo” Choovanski declares war on her alarm clock. Francine and Freddie argue because, even though they sleep together, they’ve never slept together. After Freddie leaves Katchoo comes on to Francine who flips out and leaves. Katchoo tries to brush it off as a joke but it is obvious that there’s more going on.
From there the story covers the degeneration of Freddie and Francine’s relationship, and the length Katchoo will go to protect her friend. Freddie dumps Francine and she takes it very poorly. Katchoo takes this poorly and decides to take it out on Freddie. Along the way Katchoo meets David, who she tells in no uncertain term she has no interest in, but he seems to either not get the hint or he doesn’t care. Hilarity ensues, sort of.
In the second storyline we get deeper into Katchoo’s past, which seems to involve missing mod money. Freddie is getting married. The love triangle between Francine, Katchoo, and David continues to evolve. There’s a lot going on here.
The storylines go to the edge of believability, and come very close to passing into the absurd at times, but the characters are well defined as they take us along on their journey. Just like life, everybody has secrets, and some of them were quite surprising. The artwork is very nice. There is a jump in quality at the start of Volume 2, but it’s pleasant and not at all jarring. The dialog is a cut above the rest, and reminds me why I’m such a fan of the comic medium.
This isn’t a comic genre a read often (I don’t even know of any similar titles), but this is a comic I intend to follow. I can easily see why this series has won so many awards (including the 2003 Inkpot Award for Outstanding Achievement in Comic Arts, a 2002 YALSA/ALA selection for Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults, the GLAAD Media Award for Best Comic Book in 2000, and the 1996 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for Best Serialized Story). While this first volumes ends in a good spot, it left me wanting more (luckily I have volume 2 handy).
My friend Dursin has been recommending Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise for quite some time now (not nearly as long as I’ve been trying to get him to read Cerebus, but that’s a different story). I figured I’d eventually give it a try, but the large number of slim collected volumes was keeping me from taking the plunge. Now I have no excuse. I’m a sucker for a large collected comic volume at a decent price, so when I saw this nice thick volume I knew I had to give it a try.
I’ve redone the page design. What do you think?
The theme is based off of the Gila theme, combined with elements from my old theme, to make it feel more like home.
Please leave a comment if anything is broken or missing or ugly or, you know, if it looks good.
I make no comments on the accuracy of this quiz, but I found it interesting enough to post.
You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.
What is Your World View? (updated)
created with QuizFarm.com
I found this article from the New York Times (hint: bugmenot.com) over at Neil Gaiman’s blog. It was a pretty good read, consisting of the differing opinions on audiobooks vs. reading.
I found some of the quotes irksome enough to comment on.
I just saw that HBO has canceled Carnivale. Why? Carnivale was an amazing show, and while the second season did tie up many of the loose ends from the first season, it also added boatloads of new ones.
Why do I bother to watch TV? I should just wait for shows to finish, and buy the DVDs. I don’t mean seasons, I mean shows. That way I’d know in advance that a show that planned to tell it’s story over six seasons was canceled after two. Then I could decide if that made it worth my time.
I’ve been a big fan of many of HBO’s television series, but Carnivale was hands down the best of them all in my opinion. It had to have been the best sci-fi show since the X-Files. It had just the right mix of mysterious atmosphere and interesting characters to make every episode seem far to short. It was well written, well acted, and I looked forward to it. All of these are signs of early cancellation, except it was on HBO, so I was safe, right? Apparently not.
If you haven’t seen the show by now, I still recommend it. The first two seasons were great, and they do tell a (mostly) complete story. I envy those of you who watch it for the first time on DVD and are able to just watch the next episode with no waiting.
You may have noticed that I got really quiet after posting almost every day. Well, I was participating in the “March Madness” writing marathon over at Forward Motion. If you’ve been keeping an eye on my progress bar at the top of the site, you may have noticed it moving quite a bit. My goal was to write 1000 words a day for 7 days, and I pulled it off! That means I pretty much doubled my daily output, and didn’t miss a single day for seven days. That’s including working about 50 hours this week, and spending 2+ hours a day cleaning the house. Phew! I hope to keep it up, but I’m giving myself a lower goal for this weekend as it’s a bit crazy.
I hope to have more detailed reviews, but in case I don’t get to
it I finished a few books since my last post. First, I finished
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Wow. It was an amazing book filled with surprises of
various kinds.
More recently I finished listening to
Ender’s Game: Special 20th Anniversary Edition by Orson Scott Card. I’ve always wanted to read this,
and my friend Matt had
recommended it. When I realized that Audible had the majority of
the series available unabridged I decided to give it a try. I
really enjoyed it. I’ve read some of Card’s books on writing, but
this is the first novel of his that I’ve read. It’s the story of a
young boy being schooled in the art of warfare to fight a war
against an alien race he has only seen on propaganda films. Ender’s
story is filled with interesting and fully realized characters. I
thought I saw the ending coming, and while the events I suspected
did happen, it was not the ending at all. Great stuff!
Half way through
Ender’s Game I knew I’d want more, so I already had
Speaker for the Dead
on my iPod and started it after taking some time to
digest the ending of Game.
More soon, unless I’m busy, then more later.
I need to get one of these for my wife. She’s not good at getting out of bed, and this could be the perfect solution (unless she smashes it to little bits).
I’m a long time hater of alarm clocks. I don’t like be awoken to the standard alarm noise. It fills me with rage almost the second I wake up, which is a crummy way to start the day. See, I’m not a morning person until I get out of bed, and then things change (usually). I’m quite happy with my Digital Zen Alarm Clock. At least I was, until just now, when I saw they have a new verison with a silent strike mechanism. It wakes me up with a single peacful chime, which will repeat itself at progressivly shorter intervals if I fail to get up. It very rarely chimes more than once.
Look, I’m as excited as the next person to get my hands on the next Harry Potter (although no one seems to be offering the audiobook for preorder yet), but why did I just see the cover on the news? Why did every bookstore, online and off, feel the need to email me a copy of said cover? The book has two different covers in the UK, neither of which is the cover shown here.
Why are the “news” stories making a big deal about the fact that the cover may have something to do with the story. It’s the cover. Most books seem to have covers, and a lot of them have images on them. Sometimes they have something to do w ith the book. Not news.
Author: Robert Kirkman
Year: 2004
Category: Graphic Novel
Publisher: Image Comics
ISBN: 1582403589
You may not know this, but I love a good zombie movie. The kind where the whole world is turning into zombies and small bands of isolated humans try to survive. I love them for the stories. Tales of people cracking under the pressure of seeing everything and everyone they know destroyed before their eyes. Happy stories, where you start to see the line between human and zombie blur. The greatest of these films is probably George Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead. I can’t avoid mentioning the greatness of Shaun of the Dead either, but I’ll save that for later.
The Walking Dead is an attempt to do a long form zombie story. The goal, as stated by writer Robert Kirkman in the introduction, is to keep the story going and not roll credits “as soon as it starts getting good”. Although The Walking Dead is listed as a horror book, it’s not designed to scare you. It’s about the characters, and that’s what makes it work.
The book opens with Officer Rick Grimes being shot in the line of duty. On the next page he wakes up in an empty hospital, having been in a comma for some time. This seemed right out of 28 Days Later (which is great, but is not a zombie movie) but I’m not really sure which was released first. Rick witnesses some zombies, freaks out and heads on home. He finds the house empty. He meets up with a father and son squatting in his neighbors house and they fill him in on what’s been going on. People had been ordered to evacuate to larger cities so they would be centralized for protection. Rick assumes his family will be there and heads on into Atlanta.
Rick finds the city over run with zombies, and is rescued for certain death by a young man who offers to take him back to a camp where he and some other survivors are living. This is where the story really starts going. Rick’s wife and son are at the camp, along with Shane, Rick’s partner. They weren’t able to get into the city, and met up with some others.
There’s a great cast of characters here, all learning to survive together. There is a large amount of tension between Rick and Shane. Rick wants to move away from the city, but Shane insists that the government or the army will come to save. Shane is also in love with Rick’s wife, and neither of them expected Rick to come back.
The artwork by Tony Moore is nicely done in toned black and white. The tones remind me of early Mirage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which I always found moody and evocative. Here it fits like a glove. It really helps focus the attention on the story, and not the gore. I don’t think I’d like this book nearly as much as I do if it was in color.
Overall I really enjoyed the first volume. It didn’t start out great, but it got there in the end. My only other complaint is that it moves a bit too fast. I wish there was more time taken to enjoy the character development. I’ve got the second one, and I’ll try to review that soon.
Author: Robert Kirkman
Year: 2004
Category: Graphic Novel
Publisher: Image Comics
ISBN: 1582403589
You may not know this, but I love a good zombie movie. The kind where the whole world is turning into zombies and small bands of isolated humans try to survive. I love them for the stories. Tales of people cracking under the pressure of seeing everything and everyone they know destroyed before their eyes. Happy stories, where you start to see the line between human and zombie blur. The greatest of these films is probably George Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead. I can’t avoid mentioning the greatness of Shaun of the Dead either, but I’ll save that for later.
The Walking Dead is an attempt to do a long form zombie story. The goal, as stated by writer Robert Kirkman in the introduction, is to keep the story going and not roll credits “as soon as it starts getting good”. Although The Walking Dead is listed as a horror book, it’s not designed to scare you. It’s about the characters, and that’s what makes it work.
The book opens with Officer Rick Grimes being shot in the line of duty. On the next page he wakes up in an empty hospital, having been in a comma for some time. This seemed right out of 28 Days Later (which is great, but is not a zombie movie) but I’m not really sure which was released first. Rick witnesses some zombies, freaks out and heads on home. He finds the house empty. He meets up with a father and son squatting in his neighbors house and they fill him in on what’s been going on. People had been ordered to evacuate to larger cities so they would be centralized for protection. Rick assumes his family will be there and heads on into Atlanta.
Rick finds the city over run with zombies, and is rescued for certain death by a young man who offers to take him back to a camp where he and some other survivors are living. This is where the story really starts going. Rick’s wife and son are at the camp, along with Shane, Rick’s partner. They weren’t able to get into the city, and met up with some others.
There’s a great cast of characters here, all learning to survive together. There is a large amount of tension between Rick and Shane. Rick wants to move away from the city, but Shane insists that the government or the army will come to save. Shane is also in love with Rick’s wife, and neither of them expected Rick to come back.
The artwork by Tony Moore is nicely done in toned black and white. The tones remind me of early Mirage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which I always found moody and evocative. Here it fits like a glove. It really helps focus the attention on the story, and not the gore. I don’t think I’d like this book nearly as much as I do if it was in color.
Overall I really enjoyed the first volume. It didn’t start out great, but it got there in the end. My only other complaint is that it moves a bit too fast. I wish there was more time taken to enjoy the character development. I’ve got the second one, and I’ll try to review that soon.
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