Part two of a vanity post to end all vanity posts. Part one here.
52. It’s very, very, very hard for me to stand still. I constantly shift from one foot to the other, if I am made to stand in one place. It’s worst when I am on a phone call and saunter around from one room to another, like an unstoppable clockwork soldier.
53. I suffer from ophiophobia. It began sometime in my early teens, got so bad that I could not open a book with pictures of snakes in it without feeling completely petrified. It’s come down in recent times, ( I would think it lessened because of the ridiculous Anaconda movies, which I watched without much effect) but I hate to think how I would react if I was on a flight and there were snakes on the plane.
54. I am also terrified when I am driving/riding behind a truck carrying iron bars that’re jutting out. Pretty common on Indian roads.
55. My weight fluctuated between 55-60 kilos until two years ago. I weigh about 80-85 kilos now.
56. For a long time, if I managed to obtain a book that I wanted to read really badly, I would think up ways to postpone reading it. Because if I finished it, there would be nothing else to read. It’s an irritating habit that persists even now, and it’s a constant struggle to convince myself that it’s ok - I can go ahead and indulge becaause there’s a shitload of stuff waiting to be read.
57. I am both a cat-person and a dog-person, with slightly more sympathy for cats because they are so misunderstood. We had two cats named Lobo and Simba, the first out of necessity, because our house was being overrun by mice, and the second one because we had no choice, Lobo just brought a kitten home one day and none of us had the heart to let it go.
58. The only time I’ve been vegetarian was for a whole year, when a rabid dog bit me and various herbal experts ( quack quack) advised my parents that I should not eat meat. It was a tough year, made a little better when three months later, the neighbour’s dog bit my sister and everyone in the family stopped eating meat.
59. When learning geography in high school, my brain refused to understand the concept of latitudes and longitudes until a friend made things clearer using a roundish potato and a knife.
60. I whistle somewhat differently from the normal way most of you do. Most of the time, you wouldn’t realize I was whistling because I don’t pucker my lips. Also, my whistle-pitch is somewhat different, which makes it impossible for me to whistle along with someone else.
61. In order to make myself look cooler, I started to memorize weird acronyms and abbreviations - KGB for Komitet Gozudarstevenonny Bezopasnosti, PT Usha’s full name, all the latin acronyms like NB and i.e. While this did come in handy in quizzes later on, I don’t think it fulfilled its original intent.
62. I created my first comic character when I was 9, a flying man named The Eagle.
63. I don’t like circuses. It’s all because of Target magazine, which did in-depth coverage of the cruel treatment meted out to animals in travelling circuses around India, and appealed to kids to boycott them.
64. I can’t dance, saala. Though lord knows I tried, especially at the height of Muqabla fever in the nineties. I could pelvis thrust continents into oblivion, but my hands and feet refused to move the way my brain told them to.
65. A rickshaw-puller bears witness to the first time I kissed someone. And that’s all I will say about that, other than clarifying that I was not kissing the rickshaw puller.
66. One thing I genuinely envy in some of my friends is their ability to quote verbatim from prose/poetry pieces. I can not, under any circumstances, repeat sentences word-for-word. This is partly the reason why I suck at cracking jokes - more often than not, I flub the punchline.
67. The Matrix and Kill Bill are two films that changed my movie and music tastes radically. A lot of interests - Japanese culture, anime, Ennio Morricone, noise-rock, Italian spaghetti westerns, Kung-fu/jidai-geki/wuxia films, electronic music - was sparked in some way or the other by these films.
68. The first film I remember seeing was ‘Andha Kanoon’ - I believe I was asleep in my mother’s lap in the theatre and I woke up when some lady was running around dressed in a police uniform. ( It was Hema Malini, and I like to believe the image resonated with me because I’d seen my father wearing the familiar khaki outfit. )
69. The one thing I shoplifted was an Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan novel that the bookstore was selling for 50 Rs, even though the official price at that time was 10 Rs, the difference arising because the former was an imported edition and the latter was an Indian reprint. I spent one summer blackmailed by a classmate at school with whom I had shared my secret, and who threatened to tell the teachers if I did not do his homework for him. ( Happy ending: he flunked that year, and changed schools. )
70. I have library-lifted once, and I am terribly ashamed about it, so let’s not bring it up again, yeah?
71. I don’t like rain. I am ambivalent towards summer. Winter is my favourite season. You get oranges in winter, that’s why.
72. When I am in pain, like if I stub my toe or run into a door, I say “aaargh” in my head. Not “aaa”, not “ooooooo” but “aaargh”. The only thing that differs is the number of a’s.
73. When my voice broke, I was really worried that I wouldn’t be able to sing along to Michael Jackson and Bryan Adams songs.
74. I tend to lose my temper far more often than I should, and at very frivolous things. Yes, I am unacquainted with what you earthlings call a “chill pill”.
75. One person I would like to meet before I die: Alan Moore. Another person I would like to meet before I die: Hayao Miyazaki. The first is vaguely possible, the second is unlikely.
76. On one particular occasion, I have sneezed 41 times non-stop.
77. The worst thing you can ask me to do is list out my favourites in any field. My answers will probably different depending on when you ask me.
78. I rarely contradict myself.
79. Actually I contradict myself all the time. Most of the time. Sometimes.
80. My favourite quizzing achievement was winning the Lone Wolf Quiz at IIT Madras, way back in 2001. It was my third time at Saarang and I made it to the finals almost by fluke, in a tightly-fought semi-final round.
81. There was a time I considered buying clothes an unnecessary evil, and relied exclusively on gifts from distant relatives, parents and the occasional gift coupon won at quizzes to buy my clothes. I like to believe I’ve evolved a bit since then.
82. I spent years trying to design the perfect cardboard boomerang. One that would actually return to my hands once I threw it, instead of falling into a sewer or getting lodged in a tree or landing on the roof of the house.
83. Personally, I think panipuri is the greatest thing Indian civilization has offered to the world.
84. For a long time, I was confused between a protractor and a divider in my geometry box.
85. I have broken a door and a shelf ( which is referred to in my part of the country as a “show-case” ) trying to skateboard inside the house. The skateboard, of course, was self-built, using a piece of wood and three ball-bearings. It made an ungodly sound if I tried it on the road and I thought it more prudent to hone my expertise away from curious eyes.
86. I can play complicated rhythms on wooden surfaces, using my fingers. Many of you might scoff and say there’s nothing to it, but I am really good at it, honest. I try out the acoustics of any new wooden surface I encounter by tapping out a beat.
87. Among the things I’ve written and will never share with anyone else - a prequel to Sholay, an epic retelling of a failed love story in my college days, and a porno version of a part of the Mahabharata. In fact, I think two of them might be irretrievable - I burnt one of them in a folder in a game collection, and there was a virus on one of the games and I threw the disc away, and the other is in a protected zip file, and I’ve forgotten the password.
88. The first website I visited in my life was www.spawn.com. Ah, the follies of youth.
89. I used to be really terrified of chronic insomnia. Yes, because of the Stephen King book. So I made it a point to get my share of daily sleep regardless of where I was and what I was doing. I made it through my college life without a night-out - I would inevitably fall asleep around three thirty in the morning. Then I worked in a project where the rest of the team members worked from the USA and I found it more convenient working throughout the night. For six months, I would work from five in the evening to six in the morning, and then have breakfast at seven and sleep till three. It was an amazing experience, and needless to say, I no longer have my fear of insomnia.
90. Because I’ve never bought a house or a car, I have never had to pay EMIs. But I have made monthly payments for comic art, though; the longest period of time has been 2 years of straight instalments. It gets over this month.
91. I can sing in languages that I do not know. Tamil, for example. Also, Spanish, Finnish and Japanese. I can also sing Mile Sur Mera Tumhara by heart, and it has 14 languages in it.
92. I have a very very irritating laugh. It has provoked people to violence more than once, and over the years, I’ve learnt to modulate it enough, I think.
93. I cannot bring myself to watch television for more than a few minutes at a time. Ad breaks kill my interest in anything that I am trying to watch. The TV shows I like, I would rather watch on DVD, one seasonful at a time.
94. One near-death experience I’ve had - a narrow hilly road, a downhill slope, a truck hurtling down the road, and I decide to run across to be with my father, who was getting some tea and biscuits for us in a small shop on the other side. It was when we were moving from Karimganj to Tezpur, I was 6, and I still remember my mother screaming at me not to run, and my father slapping me really hard after I survived the dash.
95. My general attitude towards new technology - any new technology - is analogous to that of a kid about to dip into a swimming pool at five AM on a winter morning.
96. I have this earnest, I-am-listening-to-you look on my face during meetings, lectures and presentations, which I punctuate with occasional nods and smiles. Maybe it is because I feel very nervous while speaking in public, and become very gratified when someone is paying attention. The downside of this habit is that the presenter tends to look at me very pointedly throughout the bulk of the talk/lecture, which means I need to pay attention throughout. I am still not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.
97. The first time I boarded a plane in my life was with my own hard-earned money. In 2002, when I made my first trip back home after getting a job.
98. One of the things I would like to do is organize India’s first comic-book convention. But I think I am too lazy to do anything about it, and someone else will probably beat me to it.
99. I am very, very, very hesitant to catch up with old friends who I haven’t met in a long time. It could be because I have a golden-haloed view of the past, and that makes me whitewash my memories of friends and acquaintances. It could also be because, after having met a few folks from my past, I realized that ‘real life’ had made them very different from what I envisaged them to be ( they thought the same thing about me, probably), resulting in banal conversations and a half-hearted attempt to exchange phone numbers.
100. Meta Fact: I loved making this list, even though it took me a very very long time to write it. This shows that like nearly everyone else, I love talking about myself. It also tells me how much of myself I am willing to talk about on a public page - obviously, I deleted and redid a lot of stuff just because I thought it would be giving too much of me away. Yep, I guess I like the illusion of being a private person. Whatever.
Steamboat Willie, for those who came in late, was the third Mickey Mouse short developed by Walt Disney and his two-man team of animators after they were kicked off the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series. The first two, Plane Crazy and Gallopin’ Gaucho were fairly straightforward gag reels. In the first, the cheeky little mouse tried to build a plane, succeeded and asked Minnie to ride with him. While in the air, he tried unsuccessfully to kiss her, a somewhat disturbing sequence because you don’t really expect to see the iconic character forcing himself on his soon-to-be-constant girlfriend. Galloping Gaucho has Mickey as a cowboy ( riding a bird, which wikipedia tells me is a rhea, and not an ostrich as I believed), encountering arch-nemesis Peg Leg Pete for the first time, as he abducts bar dancer Minnie. Cowboy Mickey sets off in hot pursuit on a thoroughly-sozzled bird, indulges in a stylish swordfight with Pete and rides off with Minnie into the sunset.
The two failed to evoke much interest because they were too similar to other funny animal cartoons of the time. Disney therefore began work on a third Mickey Mouse short, ambitiously decided to add sound to it, voicing the lead character himself in a falsetto that jars the first time you hear it. With Mickey as a jaunty sailor aboard a steamboat, it had recurring characters Peg Leg Pete as the ill-tempered captain and Minnie as a musical-minded passenger. Though billed as a “talking toon”, none of the characters have much to say. Minnie and Mickey squeal at opportune moments of distress and astonishment, Pete brays in anger and a mischieveous parrot laughs sarcastically at Mickey’s ill-treatment at the hands of the captain. What must have captured the popular imagination at the time, because Steamboat Willie was a roaring hit, unlike its predecessors, was the seamless use of music in the narrative. That, and the zany humour of Ub Iwerks.
Iwerks was one of the animators who stuck with Disney after the botched Oswald deal. Willie is billed as ‘a Walt Disney Cartoon, drawn by Ub Iwerks’, and it’s without doubt Iwerks’ magical hand that makes for much of the charm of the cartoon. At the peak of his career, he was rumoured to be drawing more than 600 figures a day, with Disney and Les Clark both chipping in, of course. While Disney is creditted with coming up with the Mickey Mouse character, after a pet mouse named Mortimer he had, Iwerks was the guy who fleshed out the familiar iconography - the circular ears, the short pants, the scraggly tail. Biographers portray Disney as the ambitious extrovert, the business-minded brains of the organization, while Iwerks was the sturdy work-horse artist chained to his table, demanding the most of his apprentices as Disney Studios began to expand.
A lot of weirdness pervades the six and a half minute Steamboat Willie. Pete barges in on the happy mouse whistling a tune to himself, infuriated by his carefree attitude at the rudder, he pulls at Mickey’s midriff, stretching it out like rubber. Which Mickey stubbornly rolls and puts back in his pants. Pete chews a wad of tobacco, a tooth magically slides open to allow him to spit the juice out, and the spittle richochets back into a hanging bell. Much amused, Pete tries it again, turning to the bell to see it ring again; the juice lands squarely on his face. Seventy years later, the sequence still manages to make me ( and the eleven-year-old son of a friend, who is watching it with me ) double up in laughter. Much unpolitically-correct hilarity follows when Minnie boards the boat - actually, Mickey helps her board with the help of a rather bashful hook, and a goat chews up her sheet music. The scene then becomes what Disney productions would soon be famous for - their song and dance sequences. Mickey proceeds to make music out of the most unlikely instruments - a washboard, squealing piglets, a cow’s teeth, even by whirling a cat by its tail.
The groan-worthy bit is that Disney evidently found that the song and dance sequences were more crowd-pleasing than the completely irreverent humour in the short. The flurry of Disney shorts that followed - sixteen in 1929, with twelve of them featuring Mickey, including The Barn Dance,The Opry House, When the Cat’s Away, The Karnival Kid - were all productions that showcased some musical set-piece with the characters. In most, notably The Opry House and The Barn Dance, the music was the only glue holding it all together, the gags far apart and added almost as an afterthought. They evoke an occasional smile, but do not enthrall you the way Steamboat Willie did, with its frenetic pace and no-holds-barred humour. Needless to add that Mickey Mouse, having become the official “face” of Disney, would no longer be the rascally Iwerks version he was in Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willie. Ultimately he would become a mouthpiece for energy conservation ( in a free comic distributed by Exxon in the late 1970s) and even a presidential candidate. One might argue that Disney’s clear-cut, family-friendly animation that kept the American cartoon industry stuck in a rut until the 90s, until the likes of Groening, Lasseter and Parker/Stone made the medium relevant again with their seminal vision, but financial success never eluded Disney and his legacy well until the eighties.
Ub Iwerks had a fall-out with Disney in 1930, just two years after Mickey Mouse came into being, when he chose to found a short-lived animation studio of his own with the help of a financier who was on the verge of bankrupting Walt Disney. Nothing much came out that venture, while Disney went from strength to strength. Over time, it’s not even evident that Mickey Mouse was a co-creation, not just one man’s vision, especially because latter-day releases on video and DVD avoid Iwerks’ name altogether. Iwerks did return to the Disney studio later, and worked on some visual effects for the company, but a host of talented newcomers had taken over most of his old ground.
This is one of the failed collaborations that bring to mind ideas of what might have been had the two friends remained partners - would Disney have come out of the song-and-dance template that it sank into in the decades that followed, had Iwerks been around?Or would Iwerks have faded into obscurity anyway, the way non-business-minded halves of partnerships seem destined to be? ( think Kirby/Ditko and Lee, Waeerkar and Pai).
( thoughts brought about after downloading a 36 GB gigatorrent of Disney shorts)
A bit of a cheat, this panel's actually a 2-page spread
Eric Powell’s The Goon is an achievement in itself. You’ve heard this story before - aspiring comic creator comes up with a character idea that evolves from doodles on sketchpads to something more fully-fleshed-out, the pitch is rejected by mainstream comic publishers, creator improves on his ideas, self-publishes his comic, and a phenomenon is born. The only variant to this starry-eyed story is that Powell’s creation was first published by Avatar Press at first as a black-and-white series, and after three issues, Powell stopped producing new material, waited for the contract to expire and then began to self-publish the series himself. By this time, the positive buzz on his horror-comedy series was high enough for Dark Horse comics to come a-knocking at his door, apologetic about passing on his series the first time he pitched it to them. The very first issue of the Dark Horse debut won him an Eisner for “Best Single Issue” in 2004, and since then, Powell’s been getting better and better. The Goon has consistently maintained its balance of outrageous farce, over-the-top violence and fine storytelling and the artist himself has evolved considerably since the early Avatar days.
Because the series is mostly a one-man show, Powell allows himself to indulge in all kinds of visual experimentation in his issues. His art style, once rough and punctuated by scratchy inks, morphed into a lush painterly look as he began to use ink washes. His figures have a three-dimensional quality, as you can see in the panel above. The backgrounds are very understated, and it’s interesting to note how much he manages to imply with his minimal strokes and shades. Look at the background closely. A few clouds, the outline of an house, both rendered with a smoky feel that brings out more character in this snow-covered scene than a million spelled-out details ever could. At this stage, Powell was doing everything, including the colors - and oh good God, the colors are gorgeous! They do not have the murkiness that you see in many modern comics, the over-use of photoshop filters that end up making the final product look kitschy or just too dark to make out anything. ( The colors are now done by Dark Horse veteran Dave Stewart, to allow Powell more time to concentrate on the story and the art. )
Just like Mike Mignola does in Hellboy, Powell uses a very distinct look for his lead character, Goon, who’s the one hurtling through the fence above. The character’s appearance is fairly unchanged throughout, the cap shielding his eyes, the scar across his face, the gloves, the working-john’s clothes - in a way, I think of the Goon as the twenty-first century version of Popeye ( and I refer to the original the Segar strips here ), a laconic, violent rough-neck who can take a punch and dish it right back, with an extra one thrown in for luck. You can be sure that all these blood-thirsty little freaks get their just desserts in the next couple of pages.
Part of the appeal of this particular panel - yeah, ok, two-page spread - is the way the violence intrudes into the reader’s ken. The few pages that lead to this one is a slow set-up, featuring a nifty tribute to a memorable sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, in which Tippi Hedren is smoking near the school and the birds begin to congregate, slowly, on the jungle gym. Here, it’s the lady you see in this panel and these vicious-looking creatures gathering around as she smokes a cigarette - you don’t know anything about her, just that something bad is about to happen, and you mentally prepare yourself for the inevitable end to which unknown supporting characters are subjected to in examples of the horror genre. And then Powell has to go and introduce our burly protagonist in a spectacular fashion, shattering genre conventions, and our expectations in this magnificient panel.
Do yourself a favour, and pick up The Goon. The early Avatar issues are a little rough, but by the time you come across this panel, you will be ready to worship Eric Powell. And while I know this sounds very cliche, The Goon just keeps getting better and better, as Powell begins tampering with the status quo he has laid down in the initial years of his saga.
(Originally published in Rolling Stone India, April 2008)
Absolute Sandman Volume 1 Writer: Neil Gaiman Artist: Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones et al. Publisher: DC/Vertigo
“I will show your fear in a handful of dust.”
In 1987, when DC advertised a new horror series with this tagline, accompanied by an image of a pale, gaunt man with dark eyes and wild hair, not many readers recognized the source of the words (TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, in case you didn’t either) and no one really thought the series, a re-imagining of a lesser-known Silver Age DC character would go on to become the flagship title of Vertigo comics and one of the cornerstones of graphic literature. Two decades later, Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman is being republished as a set of four over-sized ‘remastered’ hardcover books - referred to as the Absolute Editions. The first volume covers the first twenty issues of this seventy-five part series, which introduce us to the world of the Sandman and some of its cast of characters.
The story of Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming, the anthropomorphic manifestation of dreams begins in tragedy, when members of a cult, in 1916, capture the dream lord and ensnare him in a magical barrier for the better part of the twentieth century. His subsequent escape seventy years later is not the end of his troubles, because without his tools – a helmet, a bag of sand and a ruby, all of which were taken away by his captors - he cannot regain control of the Dreaming. The first seven episodes of the story then takes the form of a fairly straightforward quest, in which Morpheus interacts with the various beings in the DC Universe, including the mage John Constantine and the Justice League of America, and visits Lucifer in Hell – all to reclaim his rightful powers.
In the eighth episode, Gaiman produced a quiet, introspective story that introduces Dream’s sister, Death, re-imagined as a kind, perky sixteen-year old girl, contrary to genre conventions. The positive reactions to that story made Gaiman bolder - like Alan Moore, his spiritual guru in comics, he began to experiment with different techniques, weaving an intricate tale of 22-page chapters that hop across centuries and include an immense cast of characters, taking his own sweet time to create a world that built upon the previous history of the character. The Sandman began as a horror title, and believe me, there are moments of creeping terror in the early arcs – like in the Dr Destiny sequence ’24 hours’ or the Cereal convention subplot in The Doll’s House, but as it progressed, the series slowly morphed into something that was a combination of literary wit, high fantasy, mythology, and solid storytelling. Greek myth, Shakespeare, superheroes, Biblical characters and African legends rub shoulders in these early stories, notable ones being ‘Calliope’, in which Gaiman tries to answer the perennial question faced by writers – “where do you get your ideas from?” and the heartbreaking ‘Dream of A Thousand Cats’, in which, and this is all I can say without spoiling your first-time experience, the origin of the world is explained.
The refurbished collection, encased in a faux-leather cover is a bibliophile’s (dare I say it?) dream come true. The volume has series colorist Daniel Vozzo redoing the murky colors on the first eighteen issues, originally the result of primitive printing techniques. One of the mainstays of the Sandman series is the use of rotating artistic teams for the different storylines, each artist interpreting the characters in their own style. The art nouveau influences of Charles Vess and Michael Zulli are used in period pieces set in medieval times, the dark, sooty ink-work of Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg bring out the malevolent nature of the early storylines, and Dave McKean’s abstract imagery graced all the 75 covers. The high-quality paper and the larger size of the Absolute Edition make the artwork leap off the page with spectacular clarity. Adding to the joy is 70 pages of extra material at the end of the book, which includes Gaiman’s original proposal for the series, concept sketches by various artists, and to top it all off, the original script and art breakdowns to Sandman #19, the only comic to win a World Fantasy Award. What more could you ask? Buy this book before it goes out of print, your bookshelf will thank you for it.
The Complete Don Martin Writers: Don Martin, various Artists: Don Martin Publisher: Running Press
Mad Magazine treads into coffee-table territory with a series of hardbound collections called Mad’s Greatest Artists. The first such offering, The Complete Don Martin is a gorgeous behemoth of a book, collecting the entire oeuvre of the great creator in a two-volume slip-cased edition. Printed on high-quality paper with flawless reproduction are all of Don Martin’s strips, the all-too-rare TV and movie adaptations, cover paintings, posters, postcards, and even pencil prelims. A neat bonus is the inclusion of occasional essays by Martin’s colleagues (‘the usual gang of idiots’, to use Madspeak), with names like Sergio Aragones, Dick DeBartolo and Al Jaffee relating anecdotes and opinions about the great artist’s work.
Martin, often billed as ‘the maddest Mad artist’, started his career with the venerable magazine in 1956. As you leaf through the early reprints, you realize that the first years suffer from the malaise common to most long-running strips – that of the creator trying to find his groove – and floundering in parts. These early strips, while funny in their own right, have Martin experimenting with verbal gags, a little unsure with his figure structures and trying his hand at extremely dark humour. While these are far from unfunny, they are nowhere as bizarre and laugh-out-loud as what his later work would be, and one feels the urge to skip these parts as quickly as possible.
From the sixties, the change in his style becomes apparent, the figures attaining their trademark extended shape, the strips hitting their stride, and the trademark sound effects – exploding flowers (SKLISHK!), dead fish ricocheting off a face (GLUP! SHPLIPPLE! FLADDUP!) and my personal favorite, two frogs catching each other with tongues. (ZAP GING GING TWONG SPLAT!). By the time we are into the second volume (which covers 1975-1988), Don Martin has become the Don Martin we all know and love.
The Art of Sin City Writer & Artist: Frank Miller Publisher: Dark Horse.
In case you’ve not read Frank Miller’s Sin City yet, do yourself a favour. Stop reading this right now and go buy the series. Miller’s chiaroscuro masterpiece is not only a ripping good yarn; it’s also got the most eye-catching artwork in comics today. And after you’ve read all nine of the trades and are tempted to pick up The Art of Sin City, my advice would be to save the trouble, and buy something else.
Art books based on comics aren’t uncommon –Alex Ross’s Mythology and Mike Mignola’s Art of Hellboy comes to mind as two of the recent good publications that raised the bar for creators and publishers. But unlike these two, and all the other art books that actually give an insight into a creator’s mind and a deeper understanding of his craft and his process, The Art of Sin City concentrates on reprinting key panels from the actual series, blown to full size, with an odd preliminary pencil drawing or two thrown in. This, truth be told, is not entirely a bad thing if you are looking to admire the minimalist style that goes into the making of Sin City. Also, some of the images are from trading cards, alternate covers and advertising artwork, most of which are hard to find, making this the only book in which you will get to see them.
But staring at 150-odd pages of poster-quality artwork of naked women and men with guns with gets tedious, especially when apart from the preface, there’s no text to be seen anywhere. Miller’s conceit seems to be that his drawings alone have the clout to justify a price tag of 39.95$ (roughly Rs. 1350). Strictly for completists and hard-core Sin City fans.
I tend to do things in spurts. For instance, when I read a book that I like a lot, I have to follow it up with another book. And another, and another, until the flow is broken by a Door-stopper. When that happens, the frenzy stops, and I have to start all over again - and a new interest takes over, like a new computer game, or an urge to work on FL Studio. This is why, before heading for a bus journey or a flight, it takes me some time to select a bunch of books - I either don’t get the time to read any of them, or I bulldoze through them with the enthusiasm of a cute little spaniel running after a frisbee.
Inkheart was one of those Door-stoppers that completely killed a bout of reading fever that struck me a month or so ago. I had finished a bunch of Pratchetts and Sharpes and a Tim Dorsey, decided that I should get out of the absurdist humour rut and picked up this highly-recommended book. Funke is a German writer, and this book - and its sequels - had received praise both in its home country and abroad. The English translations were by Anthea Bell - she of Asterix fame - and I had nothing but high hopes for it. Unfortunately, Inkheart happens to be one of the flattest, most one-dimensional children’s books I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading in my life. I haven’t read an Enid Blyton in years, or I could venture to say that I would probably enjoy reading a Famous Five story much, much more than I liked reading this book.
Where do I begin? Let’s start with the premise, some minor spoilers follow. Inkheart is primarily about a book-binder named Mortimer and his daughter Meggie, and their love for books is covered in the opening chapters in detail. Things turn upside down for them when someone named Dustfinger turns up at their doorstep, addresses Mo as Silvertongue, and talks about someone else named Capricorn who wants a book from Mo. A book called Inkheart. So far so good, and it turns out that Mo has the power to manifest things out of books when he reads them aloud, and nine years ago, he conjured a bunch of villainous characters out from the story of Inkheart. An unwanted side-effect was that his wife was transported into the book. So far, Mo had avoided the villains who were trying to find him and his daughter, and he had kept his secret from her, lying about her mother’s disappearance. They run away again, and go seek the help of Elinor, Meggie’s aunt on her mother’s side, who is borderline obsessive about books.
The first thing that completely turned me off was the complete lack of personality of all the characters involved. The only thing we know about Mo, Meggie and Elinor is that they are all crazy book-lovers. Hey, you like books - that’s great, that’s just hunky-dory, but when you’re discussing books while running away from someone who is out to kill you, it’s not a healthy sign. Mo’s power is glazed over, with nothing to show that it’s special or fun or life-altering in any way. If you imagine that someone with this power, especially someone who likes books, would experiment with it, try to find its limitations, you are obviously not Cornelia Funke. Meggie is more concerned with how lucid Mo’s reading skills are, rather than being awed by the extraordinariness of it all. There’s no reasoning, or explanation behind why only certain people are brought to life by Mo’s reading. Just when you think he can only bring living characters out into the real world, in one segment, Capricorn gets him to transport gold from the pages of Treasure Island. There is a vague implication that the transfer from the written word to the real world also involves a reverse transfer to balance it all out, but no such thing happens later on, when Meggie is imprisoned by Capricorn and finds out that she has the same power.
The villains fare no better. Capricorn is an irritating generic villain who wants gold and terrorises farmers and policemen by employing incendiary persuasive tactics. His grand plan, as the story unfolds, involves getting a lot of gold out from books and to invoke an assassin called the Shadow into the real world. Yawn. He has a lieutenant named Basta, who has a way with knives and a ridiculous fear of the supernatural - the closest thing to comic relief the book has ( and this is the way I can use the word “relief” in this book’s context). Dustfinger provides the moral grey area that the book apparently needs to call itself “young adult” instead of being a good-and-evil children’s book. I will admit, he was the only character in the book that, instead of putting me to sleep, made me want to wring his neck.
Another jarring aspect of the book is its setting, which is never made clear. The story plays out in small Italian villages, with very little real-world implications of whatever’s happening. At one point, the characters talk of cellphones and travel in cars, but it is almost as if they inhabit some strange parallel world where nobody else exists, except for people who are directly connected to Inkheart. Fenoglio, the writer of the book, joins the motley crew somewhere in the middle, and finds himself drawn into this business, and things play out exactly the way you would imagine. Go ahead, think of a possible ending to a story where there are characters created by an author, in the latter’s presence. Yep, that’s exactly what happens.
The complete lack of imagination throughout the book made my head hurt. I mean, here you have this wonderful power, and murderous people are after you - your first reaction, I should think, would be to read something like Jason and the Argonauts to life and let them loose on your pursuers, instead of reading Hans Christian Andersen and bringing little tin soldiers out. Sheesh. The movie, which came out early this year and suffers from the same lack of audience credibility that the onscreen versions of Eragon and The Golden Compass suffered at least tries to ratify some of those mistakes, but I cannot see any way in which it could have made the story more appealing. The translation is lacklustre, no one has any distinct voice to speak of, and the random quotations from different books ( from The Never-Ending Story to Watership Down) that began every chapter grew more and more irritating as the book progressed.After nights and days of trying to get this book over with ( yes, I have this bad habit of finishing everything I start), I finally managed to do it yesterday - nearly a month after I began reading it. Phew. Hello, goodbye, Ms Funke. You will not be missed.
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Saving the world at $11 an hour.
The awesomeness that is the second season of Chuck ruled all of last week. Epic frustration prevailed when there were multiple powercuts in the evenings - from 8 PM to 1 AM in the morning, so we had to change schedules to wake up a little early, take some time out to watch an episode and then head to the office. And on Saturday, we finished the season finale. What. A. Trip.
I realize that Chuck is probably nowhere close to the cerebral fan-space that a series like Battlestar Galactica, Lost or The Wire generally occupies. But what gets me every single episode in the show is the element of fun that permeates every single minute. Crackling humour. Funky soundtrack choices, including a great paean to Rush’s ‘Tom Sawyer’ ever, possibly the most kick-ass onscreen utilisation of the Prodigy’s ‘Smack My Bitch Up’. The kind of sizzling on-screen chemistry between Agent Walker ( Yvonne Strahovski) and Chuck Bartowski ( Zachary Levi) that frustrates and wows you at the same time. A hilarious, well-developed supporting cast. Stolid-faced John Casey (Adam Baldwin, last seen in Firefly) whose quips, like his efficiency, just get better as the season progresses. The parallels between Chuck’s moonlighting and Morgan’s shennanigans at the Buy More. The unprecedented battalion of guest-stars as the show progressed - Chevy Chase, Scott Bakula, Nicole Ritchie, Arnold Vosloo. The development of the “mythology”, which is the core ingredient of any show that wants to elevate itself from a generic sitcom to something really epic.
By the time the last episode came along, the ride looks like it has all but stopped. Because unlike other shows which sticks to the status quo, and makes you wonder about how they’re going to shake things up, Chuck was building up the kind of golden finish that leaves every plot thread tied up, every conflict reaching its logical conclusion - the happy ending that is denied to every character in sequential fiction. “How is it humanly possible”, I thought, “to continue this story further?” I was actually worrying about how the writers would maintain the status quo - by the time I was watching this, news of a third season had percolated into my internet-attuned senses. How? How? HOW?
And of course, the last 20 minutes of the season finale. From a tribute to ‘Domo Arigato Mr Roboto’ ( they could start a spin-off series called Jeffster and I would watch it, no questions asked) to an epic sequence that pays tribute to The Matrix, the three words - “to be continued” have never left me so frustrated with the normal 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year rule that we earthlings follow. Why cannot March 2010 be tomorrow, goddamnit? So now, while I wait for Chuck season3, I listen to the Cake song ‘Short skirt, Long Jacket’ ( which is the title theme to the series), download pictures of Yvonne Strahovski for my wallpaper, and read up on interviews with creators Josh Schwartz, Chris Fedak and various cast members. I have also started watching Leverage - the first two episodes of which kick major ass, and so far it appears to be a caper series that does not piss all over its audience with its smartness ( *cough* Ocean’s Twelve *cough*). Also in the queue, Jake 2.0, Extras seasons 1 & 2 ( done with half of season 1) and The Big Bang Theory season 2.
The more I read comics, the more I realize that Batman and Superman cannot possibly exist in the same universe.
It will take me ten minutes to tell you who Robin is, right now.
It will take me five minutes to explain whether Batman is dead or not.
After reading Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader, I think Neil Gaiman should stop writing superhero comics. He should have after 1602.
I absolutely HATE how, in DC, every superhero fawns every other superhero. Superman is so awesome?? Wow, we didn’t know, Flash.
And nobody in the JLA uses superhero names anymore - it’s all Connor or Bruce or Diana or Clark.
I think it was Brad Meltzer who began both these trends with Identity Crisis, and now everybody seems to be doing it.
I want to read all the low-key superhero comics released in the last 5 years. Blue Beetle, Manhunter, Ant-Man, The Order. That shit is all good.
Captain Marvel and MI-13 is getting cancelled with issue 15? Just when I was thinking this would be one of my regular monthly fixes.
Now that 100 Bullets is over, I am waiting for the opportune moment to read the complete series. In one sitting. The last time I did that was with issues 1-50.
I also need some time off to read Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life, an 850+ page autobiographical manga that goes into detail about the beginnings of the manga industry in Japan.
Am still looking for the first two of the three Tatsumi collections that Drawn and Quarterly brought out - I regret not buying them in Blossom when I saw them, way back in 2005 and 2007.
I recently did a Top Ten Superhero Graphic Novels list for a magazine. I am still feeling guilty about the ones I left out.
Did I tell you about the time I found a better-than-decent issue of Batman 181, the first appearance of Poison Ivy, for 10 Rs at the Sunday book market?
Hayao Miyazaki has returned to drawing manga after a long time, with a biography of an aircraft designer released in early 2009.
What is it with Miyazaki and flying?
Comicbook culture would have reached its peak the moment all of Tezuka’s works and all the Koike/Kojima collaborations are translated and in print.
Another manga-ka whose works are begging to be translated - Sanpei Shirato. The dynamic storytelling in Kamui, the only one of his works translated so far, still manages to leave me breathless.
Blade of the Immortal is in its final arc in Japan, a couple of more years and Dark Horse will come up with the last volume. Fist-pump!
Now if only Kentaro Miura would get off his ass and finish Berserk.
Alan Moore’s Miracleman scars you for life. Don’t read Miracleman if you want to keep enjoying superheroes.
The densest work Miller has ever written is The Dark Knight Returns. Elektra: Assassin is a close second. The 8th issue has got to be one of the greatest endings ever.
Like everyone else, I also hated Miller’s Spirit. The nadir was the part where the female cop says ‘Elektra complex’ some eighteen times in a row.
And this whole cliche of naming minor characters and landmarks in superhero movies with names from the comicbook industry makes me spew.
Yes, all that was fan-service.
Neal Adams, Norm Breyfogle and Kelley Jones are the three greatest regular artists to draw the Batman.
Brian Bolland never did a monthly stint on Batman, so there. Mazzuchchelli did only four issues, and Don Newton died too early.
JH Williams 3, Frank Quitely, and Darwyn Cooke are three names that will make me buy a comic without stopping to check what lies within.
Chuck’s bedroom ( in…uh…Chuck) has a poster of Y The Last Man.
Juno’s bedroom ( in…well…Juno) has a poster by Tara McPherson, she who did the Snow-Rose-Totenkinder story in Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall.
I own a first printing of Will Eisner’s Contract With God. Should I still buy the new reissue of the Dropsie Avenue trilogy?
It started with a small cloth bag that belonged to my mother. It was fascinating to me as a child because it was covered with brownish stains - sealing wax, but we thought they were the wrong kind of brownish stains - and that’s how she would discourage us kids from handling it during those occasions when she took the bag out. There was a tiger claw inside, and a bit of a rhinoceros horn, some odd-looking heirlooms and, as I found out one day, coins. Old coins, of different sizes, shapes and colours - and one even with a hole in it. There was a small one paisa coin that boggled my mind - “When I was in school, we would get two chocolates for a paisa”, she explained. There was a yellow 20-paise coin from 1948, the year MK Gandhi died, with a lotus on one side and his face on the other. Brass, not gold - she said, before I could ask. The oldest coins were from the forties - the hole-in-the-centre was one pice, from 1944, when they were trying to save metal because of the War. There were interesting inscriptions all throughout, and inscribed heads of various Georges and Edwards.
Ma saw my curiosity and, I really don’t know why, told me to keep them. “Start a collection”, she said, probably thinking I would lose interest and misplace them soon enough. I was eleven years old.
What happened was quite the opposite. I was enthused enough to look up coin collecting in the Britannica set at the local library, and found out that numismatics had a long and detailed description. When I look back, the fascination was probably because of repeated readings of Treasure Island - old coins tinkling in your hand is the closest a boy can get to becoming Jim Hawkins. My collection, therefore, was in equal measure a role-play and a serious pursuit. Over the weeks, I grew more and more fascinated with coins. My small collection expanded via contributions from my relatives and neighbours - strangely enough, everybody had a coin or two stored away, either old or from another country, a relic of the past or a souvenir from a family trip, that they would willingly give away, seeing my eyes light up when I held them. One of the good parts of staying in the North East was being surrounded by so many nearby countries - very soon, I owned coins from Bhutan ( which were very, very easily available), some from Nepal, Tibet, Bangladesh and Myanmar ( Burma then) and even a few from China, which was a little tougher to get. My father made a few trips to Delhi every year, and he would buy a few every time - I got a few Pakistani coins, a few Russian roubles and more examples from the British era. My collection was an equal focus of foreign coins - the plan was obviously to own a coin from every country - and old Indian coins.
Initially my coins, all ten or fifteen of them, would fit into a small container my mother gave me. But very soon the number increased to a quantity where I had to hijack my geometry box - which we had to take to school only once a week, on Friday - and used it to store my collection. And one day, I decided to carry the coin-filled geometry box to school, after which things got very interesting. Mild digression - our school had a mixture of Assamese, Bengali and Marwari students. One of the good things that came out of this was that we spoke in English to each other, because the Assamese students were wary of their poor Hindi - even though we could watch Hindi films and TV serials, there was a major complex about actually speaking in the language, probably because our accents were bad enough to evoke laughter among the Hindi speakers. The same thing held good for the Marwari kids - their attempts at broken Axomiya made us giggle. The Bengali kids somehow managed to speak in three languages, but out of an unspoken contract, we would speak in English most of them time, to avoid possible violence and “miss-he-laughed-at-me”-type complaints.
Coming back to the topic at hand - the first day I took my coins to school, I discovered two things - one, there were a lot of my classmates who had coins at home - “my father has been to Somalia, I think there are some coins lying around”, or “My grandfather gave me a few old coins, you can have them if you want”. So in a very short time, a lot of those stray pieces made their way inside my geometry box. The second thing was that some of them, mostly the Marwari students, already had coin collections of their own, and over the weeks that followed, they let out that they were interested in trading. Or “exchanging”, as we called it.
The weird thing - well, weird at that time, but natural now that I look back at it - was that within a few weeks, the number of coin collectors in the school increased radically. I am not taking credit for that, mind you, probably there was already a network in place and I was made part of it the day I brought my coin-box to school. But the strange thing was that classmates who were becoming my ’sources’, who had brought me coins from their elder brothers or parents or relatives, either stopped or in some extreme cases asked me to return the coins they had given me - because they were starting collections of their own. Dang and blast! Coin collecting became a school fad, much like quizzing after Siddharth Basu’s India Quiz or exotic weapons after Amitabh Bachchan in Toofan ( to which I contributed as well).
And with open season came Fucked-uppery of the highest order. “I have some coins for exchanging”, someone would say, looking disinterestedly at my collection. “Do you want?” “I will see”, I would reply and proceed to feign disdain at the ones he was offering. This was probably my first exposure to the cut-throat world of collector politics, and I can’t even begin to imagine how much this prepared me for my future life. Things got more complicated. Exchanges would have to be conducted in secrecy, because rival collectors were always waiting to offer bigger and better deals to the unsuspecting newbie who has been convinced that a 1970 US dime is very rare, much rarer than the Italian coin his father gave him. Exchange deals were also marred by the crowd-swipe, which goes like this - some guy comes with bunch of friends and says he wants to see your collection. Everybody surrounds you, and as you show the coins one by one, somebody palms something. It needed eagle eyes and steel nerves to maintain one’s collecting enthusiasm in the face of such strong competition. On top of it, most of the well-to-do children were taking to buying coins - apparently, in a corner in Fancy Bazaar, the commercial centre of Guwahati, there was a shop called Bargola, whose owner sold coins at high prices, and quite a few of my fellow collectors sourced stuff from there. I was in no position to put any money into my hobby; finances were tightly controlled by my parents until quite a few years later and they would probably just take away collecting privileges if I insisted on pumping their hard-earned money into it. I had to figure out creative ideas to expand my collection.
My inspiration, at that time, was Tom Sawyer. Taking a cue from the book, and Tom’s entrepreneurial abilities, I had a bright idea. On a rainy weekend, I took about 10 Bhutanese copper coins, a hammer and a metal block. At a safe distance away from my usually-sensitive-to-sonic-bedlam parents, I proceeded to pound the coins until they became uniformly flat, with a few grooves remaining here and there. I then kept them buried for a few days, which took the sheen off. In school, a grand story was woven. “We had water in the house because of the rain, the other day”, I said. “And when the water was gone, I found a pot full of old coins just near the verandah. It was probably buried at the back and the water uncovered it.” School-children are a gullible lot ( heck, I was gullible enough to believe a lot of weird things - remind me to tell you about them someday) and by the time I repeated the story to a couple of people, the buzz was strongly positive. On top of this brazen yarn-spinning, I also kept my escape options ready. The collectors in the senior class, and the more retribution-prone among my classmates were told that my parents had strictly prohibited me from displaying or exchanging any of those artifacts. Some of the easily convinced classmates were promised that they would get preference for the eventual trade, if and when that happened. When I finally got two of the mutilated ex-Bhutanese coins, demand was sky-high. I remember getting an 1837 East India company coin, with “Victoria Regina” inscribed on it ( the later coins I had, from 1891, had something else inscribed on it, I forget the exact words) in exchange for one of them. The classmate I got it from asked me once, after many many years, the real story behind the treasure trove, and I finally confessed to the con. He shook his head sadly. I think he hates me now.
There are seven shades of love, the Sufis say - and my love for coin collecting crossed the first four - Hub (attraction), Uns (infatuation), Ishq (love), and Adiqat (reverence) - with a small hop and a skip, deftly sidestepped the fifth - Ibadat (worship) - and landed squarely into Junoon (obesession). Unknown ( or probably not) to those who knew me, I became possessed of a Gollum-like lust for my preciouses. The geometry box, once brought surreptiously on random days, to avoid confiscation was now always in my school bag. The teachers were aware of the rampant trading going on during school hours, and though they did not discourage the hobby, they kept any non-educational contraband in the school cupboard until you went and grovelled and apologized and shed a tear or two - but I brazenly brought the box everyday. Everyone knew about it. Geometry boxes have loose hinges, and occasionally a coin or two would slip through them and land in my bag. When I would search for particular high-point of my collection and discover it was not there, my heart would leap to my mouth, and I would frantically search the bag and heave a sigh of relief when I would find it, stuck between the pages of a notebook. I cannot give you any logical reason behind why I did all this - maybe it was the carelessness of boyhood, the ingrained belief that nothing bad will really happen to you until it actually happens.
The seventh stage - Maut (death) - was bound to come, and it did soon enough. One day the school bell rang, and all of ran for the school bus - a hasty boarding entitled you to better seats. School would be over at 3:00 PM, and the bus would start at 3:10. At 3:09, I remembered, with a sinking feeling in my heart, that I had taken my coin collection out of my bag and had kept it inside the desk, because the teacher in the last class had the tendency to randomly check bags. I stayed a very long distance away from school, no direct city buses - and my sister had seen me in the bus, so I could not even claim there was some after-school activity involved. I took a deep breath and made the worst possible decision of my life. “I am sure the box will still be there tomorrow”, I told myself. “Who on earth could possibly take it?”
The next morning, as you must have guessed already, the box was not there.
I cried a little, picked fights with a couple of collectors who others claimed had some of my coins mysteriously appear in their trades. Nothing much came out of it. It could have been anyone who took the box of coins and I had no proof anyway. The teachers clucked and made sympathetic noises and came up with the obvious question - “why did you have to bring it to school?” I had two choices - to start all over again, or to give up and pretend it did not really matter. I chose the latter, obviously.
There is a semi-happy ending to this, though. Two semi-happy endings, actually. My father and I went to Nepal in 1996, just after my board exams were over. He has an elder sister there, whose husband was ( he’s not alive anymore) a renowned editorial cartoonist and had great taste in literature - I did not meet him for too long, but I enjoyed every minute that we spent together. Anyway, so I was walking around Kathmandu with the pater, when we saw an old man with a bunch of coins on the pavement, and stopped to look at what he had. Strangely, the man was selling a lot of newer Indian coins - my father picked up a five-rupee coin, issued in 1984 with Indira Gandhi’s face on it, and asked him how much he was selling it for. “200 Rs”, he said. Both of us were amazed - we used to come across those coins very frequently, and well, they generally were used for their face value. There were other commemorative Indian coins there - the highest was a 100 Rs coin which had some insane price tag, but most of the rest were all fairly common coins, some we hadn’t seen in use at all. We looked around a bit, and realized that the high prices were fairly standard there - and quite a few of them got sold too. My father, after we came back to Guwahati, started a coin collection of his own, focusing on Indian commemorative coins post-1947. He continues to this day, and I remember to keep newly-issued coins aside for him when I come across any.
The other semi-happy ending is that because I had to fill the void left behind by my missing coins, I began to collect comics, which I had treated as very disposable reading material so far. And this time I was careful - no publicity, not much fuss, no evident enthusiasm when some classmate brought bound volumes of Dell comics of the 60s. That collection, obviously, continues to this day. Ain’t life grand?
This panel is from Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, among the most revered comic strips of the early 20th century, from a storyline called “The Witch Queen of Mongo”. Hard to imagine that it was published in May 1935, and appeared in family-friendly Sunday newspapers considering the kind of hullaballoo made nowadays over much more innocent imagery.
Why I like the panel so much is in part due to Raymond’s god-level figurework - Dale’s posture as she undergoes her punishment resembles a figure from a classical painting. The movement of the woman with the whip is captured without the any visual trickery - no speed-lines or sound effects that you see in modern comics. Raymond keeps the background to a crisp minimum, using stray crosshatching and Dale’s shadow to convey the presence of the wall to which she is bound. The other reason is because of the obvious way in which it is constructed to appeal to its target audience. At that time, I am betting that the greater percentage of readers following Flash Gordon comics was teenage boys - and isn’t this image just a right mix of taboo and titillation? If I were thirteen and I saw this panel in my Sunday newspaper, I would make sure I cut it out and keep it safe before the newspaper gets trashed the next day. And I know I would look at it again and again, when I was sure there was no one around. When I saw this page while flipping through the book for the first time, I had to pause and stare, for quite some time. I have to admit that the scan above does not do the actual color artwork justice - not to mention the fact that Raymond’s actual inked pages still have it in them to make eyes of grown men pop with awe and disbelief.
Indrajal comics never printed these original pulp stories in India. They got the Dan Barry run, which is good as well; but it was Raymond’s run that laid down the mythology of Mongo and its inhabitants and stands on its own as a fascinating, self-contained bunch of space yarns. One cannot really call the somewhat-repetitive storylines worthy literature. A standard template of a Raymond Flash Gordon story would go this way - Flash, Dale and Zarkov meet a hitherto unknown tribe on Mongo, and one of whom is a hot woman who falls for him; a rival in the tribe first envies Flash and his obvious charisma, and then either repents or dies, and there is a final showdown with Emperor Ming who shows up to conquer the tribe but fails, thanks to Flash’s uber-Aryan combination of brains and brawn. But it would also be wrong to dismiss them as vapid pulp - there’s definite plot development, the trio even come back to to Earth and use Mongo technology in WWII, and Flash and Dale’s romance grows over the episodes. What’s most striking is the iconic artwork of Alex Raymond, whose brush strokes brought the fantastic creatures and landscapes of Mongo to life, and who fanned the flames of adolescent desire and imagination with his skill.
Checker Books has reprinted the complete run of Raymond’s Flash Gordon in seven hardcover volumes, and it’s well worth your time to pick them up if you can. My collection has five of the seven volumes - Book 3 is apparently out of print, and Book 1 was not available along with the rest in Odyssey, where my girlfriend picked them up for me in February.
