Venus Hum is a band that has made me extremely happyall of last month. The songs ‘Turn Me Around’ and ‘Pink Champagne’ from their 2006 album The Colors in the Wheel has been on a continuous loop in my playlist. Wonderfully enough, someone just uploaded all their albums today, including an EP where the band does covers of Christmas songs. I have a feeling that ‘Silent Night’ is going to add itself to my repeat-until-ears-bleed list like, right now.
What else? Reading early volumes of Usagi Yojimbo, The Complete Bite Club, Scott Pilgrim ( about which I talk about in my next Rolling Stone column), Criminal and Path of the Assassin. The early Usagi stories are unbelievably good – hard to find a creator like Stan Sakai, at the top of his game all throughout his career. I nearly teared up while rereading Homecoming part 2, the first Usagi story I ever read. It was printed in this comicbook called Critters, which I found in a bookshop in Guwahati. I think I vaguely remember passing over a copy of Miracleman #1 to buy this issue and Neal Adams’ Skateman # 1 ( obviously, the MM copy had disappeared the next time I was there), and reread both of them to bits. This story apparently is the first time Usagi’s childhoold sweetheart Mariko is introduced, along with her husband Kenichi and son Jotaro.
Bite Club is vampires embroiled in organized crime, Godfather-level conspiracies, and loads of sex; plus it has the hottest female protagonist I’ve been introduced to in quite some time – Risa Del Toro.
It’s written by Howard Chaykin, and touches upon themes similar to those in Chaykin’s earlier Black Kiss, one of the most explicit comics to be published in the mainstream comicbook market in the eighties. The artwork is not by Chaykin, though, David Hahn, an Oregon-based artist, whose simplistic style reminds me of the work of Bruce Timm and Cameron Stewart. The series was published as two miniseries – Bite Club and Bite Club: Vampire Crimes Unit, both of which are collected in this TPB volume.
Ed Brubaker and Sean Philip’s Criminal is the logical progression to the duo’s earlier noir series Sleeper. While Sleeper was superhero crime fiction, meant to appeal to the continuity crowd, Criminal has no cape fixation, and concentrates on telling stories of capers gone wrong, of individuals with secret pasts, dark sides, and dead-end lives. I am on issue 7, in the middle of the second arc, called ‘Lawless’, and I am going slow because these are the last three issues I have. The series has gotten a really good boost by word-of-mouth and positive response from readers, and has won Eisner award for ‘Best New Series’. One of the cool things you get with the original issues ( I don’t know if the TPB has them) is articles at the back, by folks like Warren Ellis and David Goyer, about noir books and movies they like.
Apart from that, nothing much really. I keep telling myself to be patient about the Indian postal service, and I tell myself that all is not lost just because the last Born Again page is sold out. I live.