Category Archives: Myself

Books, Events, Myself

Neil Gaiman at the Alex Theater, 27th June 2013

 

You know, I had never attended a Neil Gaiman signing before. Events, yes, two of them, in fact, but I did not have a car back then and waiting in line to get stuff signed and run the risk of missing my last bus on a weeknight did not appeal to me. Last Thursday, at Alex Theater in Glendale, I attended my first Gaiman signing. It lasted till 2:40 AM, they say. I was in the first few rows on account of having gotten a premium ticket, and I headed out of the auditorium at 11:15 PM. Despite the lack of a lunch and a dinner, and various other adventures during the day, I felt great. And more than a little sorry for both Neil Gaiman and his legions of fans, who had stood in line around the block for about six hours, and sat in their seats, patiently, as the ushers invited them up on the stage row by row. It is not without reason that the man is called the most hardworking author in the business – he has earned his legions of fans not only by his writing, but also by the remarkable respect he shows to the people who come to see him at one of these events.

And what a bunch of people! To my right was a lady clutching a hardcover of Fragile Things, who held the guy next to her very close and said “my boyfriend is the best boyfriend in the world, he got us these excellent tickets and surprised me”. I could see she meant it too. On my right was a teenage boy, his teeth in braces, a nervous smile on his face. I met him when he was standing around at the reception, looking lost, an awkward smile on his face. “Go and say hi to Neil”, I said to him. “No”, he replied. “I am not interesting enough.” We were among the last of the premium ticket holders to go in, and consequently ended up sitting together. There was the comics crowd, holding their mylar-enclosed copies of Sandman #1 and Black Orchid close to their bodies; excited Whovians; the dressed-up-in-their-Sunday-best-on-Thursday crowd, white-haired couples sitting next to teenagers – holding Gaiman books and hands. Eyeliner and designer tattoos, summer hats and flower-patterned dresses, black suits and Neverwear t-shirts, I looked around the theater and it felt glorious.

“You are a very clappy crowd”, Neil began, as the opening applause died down. The conversation with Geoff Boucher began with a discussion about a writer’s need for applause, the desire to evoke reactions from his viewers. Neil spoke about the best crowd reaction he had ever gotten, at a reading of a chapter in The Graveyard Book when he stopped at a crucial point in the story. This was followed by long, insightful conversations about things such as how personal and truthful Ocean was (“it is a mosaic that looks pretty, and as you go closer, you see it is made up of blue dots and green dots and red dots, and only the red ones are true”), how hard it is to be fresh and new with his writing, on the advantages of writing in long-hand, with a fountain pen. He mentioned how his first draft of the Neverwhere short story “How the Marquis got his Coat Back” was derailed because he could not work with the paper on the notebook that he used – “And this may sound like I am being a prissy writer, but I am not. A fan gave me this notebook he had constructed out of paper that he had made himself, with crushed rose petals on every page. The only problem with that, as it turned out, was that the rose petals would clog my pen on every line and I had to clean it. I wrote half a page with a description of the Marquis’ coat, and then I gave up and forgot about it for many, many years.” The two other important things about writing in long-hand was that he used different colored inks on different days so that gave him an idea of how much he was writing every day, and it made it easier for him to discard material when he was finally typing it into a word processor, because it was “too much work”. He also talked about why he chooses not to reveal much of what he is working on until he is done. “There was this project that was killed by my agent before I even began working on it”, he said. “She asked me what I was working on, and I told her excitedly about this story I had in mind, about a boy who wants to be famous, and the simplest way for him to do so is to go to Disneyland and kill Mickey Mouse.”  After a long pitch came the punchline, delivered by Neil in the lady’s dead-pan voice: “Not exactly high-concept, is it, dear?”  It led him to throw away the idea and his retelling of it made us laugh like delighted school-children.

He then read from one of the opening parts of Ocean, after asking his audience how many had read the book. (Not too many, though a great number were done with their books by the time they had to queue up for the signing). I had, and after hearing his reading, I was tempted to order the audio-book, just to hear his rendition of the complete thing.

Then there were questions. There was one direct from Stephen King, read out loud by one of the organizers. At the risk of mangling the words, the question asked something like: “Do fantasy writers have a better conduit to their subconscious?”, to which Neil responded with a lengthy – and very funny – explanation of how his recurring nightmares became a fertile source for Sandman situations. “I would dream about a baby in the basement with an incision in its abdomen and it crept towards me slowwwly. And I would think to myself: ‘that’s a good one!’ At some point, the ones responsible for sending those nightmares my way must have given up in disgust.” Another audience question referenced a piece of advice Stephen King gave Gaiman: “You should enjoy this, all of this”. As Neil explained, this came at a time when the relentless Sandman touring and monthly scripting was taking its toll on him, and the term “Fraud Police” came up – the idea floated by Amanda Palmer that with success comes the worry that some day, They are bound to find out that it was a fluke, and They would take you to task for fooling your audience into thinking that you are clever when you are not. He used this piece of advice to make peace with the fact that he was good at what he did, and he liked it, and with it came a bunch of pluses and minuses and he was ok with all of it. “Tea helps. Bee-keeping helps, because every writer needs a hobby that could kill them. Having a dog helps. But I would not recommend cats at all.”

And then he side-tracked into a brilliant explanation of what it is like to write with a dog in the room, against writing with a cat. The dog stays in one corner, looks at you and tells you that you are the best writer in the world, and that you are doing great, and that everything will be fine. The cat, on the other hand, looks suspiciously at you, climbs up on the desk and tries to sit on the keyboard, and finally tells you: “You missed a comma there.” This is truly the highlight of attending a talk by Gaiman – he ends up crafting hilarious, personal stories out of nearly every question. Much like his writing, there is a particular spontaneity to it, the right turn of phrase, the correct pause before a witty response, an unexpected observation about the world that was always hiding under a sofa in your brain and which he, like a guest making himself comfortable in your mind, pulls it out with a flourish and makes you say “Aha!”.

Other things that happened: how the Dr Who episodes came to be. The fact that the boy you see at the back of the book cover is Neil Himself. Another reading, this time from Fortunately, The Milk, his children’s book that is out in September, and which is a response to Father’s Day gifts of The Day I Swapped My Dead For Two Goldfish; it involves aliens, time-traveling dinosaurs, and pirates and I just pre-ordered it. The surprise he felt on being #1 on the NY Times Bestsellers’ list, especially with a Dan Brown book out. (“Take that, Dan Brown”, somebody from the audience shouted. We cheered.) An antivirus warning occasionally popped up on the screen behind him, causing a moment of mirth.

It was time for the signing. There were a good number of rules for the event, everybody could get as many copies of Ocean signed as they wanted to, but only one other item, and only one of these could be personalized. People with mobility issues and with children at home were given preference, and anybody who wanted to skip the signing could just exchange their book (which came with the ticket to the event) with a signed copy outside. The first person to be up on stage was a little girl, presumably because it was a school night. The ushers queued people in order of their rows, and the lines proceeded briskly.

I had had a terrible day. I was in San Jose until the morning, thanks to a conference. A week ago, the time of the event had moved an hour earlier to 5:30 PM (the main reading event to 7) so that the signing could get over early. I re-booked my flight from San Jose from 2:45 PM to a morning flight 3 days before the event, and that flight was cancelled, I was moved to one at 3:45 PM instead (yes, an hour after my scheduled flight). Much gnashing of teeth, pleading and being zen at the airport happened, and I managed to get myself aboard the 1:50 PM flight. Upon reaching the airport parking lot, I found out that my car had a flat tire. Deep breaths when changing it. By the time I got home (I had to, I needed to pick my books up), it was already 4:30. Google Maps showed ETA for the venue as 6:15 PM. At that point, I decided to just forget about the reception and be in good spirits for the actual signing. Reached at exactly 6:15, after some cloggy moments on the freeway. Saw the lines that went around the block and gave myself a high-five for my decision to cough up extra money for the VIP ticket.

When I got to the reception, the lady at the counter warned me, with a sad look on her face, that there was only 15 minutes before it ended. I got in, however, to find out that Neil had come out to greet everyone just 5 minutes ago. He was being mobbed by hordes of fangirls. “You didn’t miss anything, except the sliders”, a guy standing next to me said. The food was being cleared even as Neil made his way through the room. I managed to catch his eye, and showed him the two pages I was carrying, my Eddie Campbell page that featured him. “Oh, I had never seen this before”, he said, and spent some time admiring it. Then I showed him the Bolton Desire splash, and he gave me some suggestions about how to frame it, because I said I wasn’t too sure. “Good luck”, he said, as he gave me the pages back. “Uh buh guh buh”, I replied. And cursed Google for not releasing Glass yet.

From Eddie Campbell’s Alec.

I met him again for a few minutes, at the signing. He took a short break to meet someone backstage just as it was my turn, and I spent time talking to the lovely Lauren Cook, who was one of Neil’s Elves, working to make the signing events go smoothly. She talked about how much they had to travel and some of the logistical challenges – as an example, they had to remove the table-cloth from the signing table because the big books (like the Absolute Sandmans that some brave souls lugged with them, or its Big Daddy, the Annotated Sandman) did not slide too well on the table and it was slowing down the process. After a while, Neil came back, and took off his jacket, revealing himself to be wearing a black t-shirt underneath. Making sure his pen was sharp and inky, he signed my books. I told him about my day, and he smiled, looked up, and said: “But you are finally here, and that is a good thing.” I told him why the only personalized copy of Ocean was not for me. I wanted to tell him about the story behind my copy of American Gods when he was signing it, but did not want to take more of his time. Just as I was taking the books back, he asked me if I wanted my Eddie Campbell page signed. “Because I kept you waiting”, he added.

Neil Gaiman did to me what he did to every single person in that auditorium. And I can say this with certainty – even though I did not stay back till the end of the signing – because I could see it in the happy, goofy smiles on the face of every one person who came down from the stage that evening. Neil Gaiman Made My Day.

Standard
Food, Myself

TT

Traveling when I was a kid was always special, more so because of something my mom cooked. She made a specific dish to eat during the multi-day train journeys. Nothing special, just spicy fried potatoes, but they lasted 2 days at least, and we would buy freshly-cooked chapatis from train stations and eat the potatoes with that. I even had a name for that particular dish, a name that was considered acceptable by the household. I called it TT, short for Train Tarkaari.  TT attained quite a bit of favor among my high-school friends, when we made our trips to Calcutta and Delhi, for scholarship exams, Brilliant Tutorial tests, for entrance examinations for colleges. Coming back to college after summer and winter vacations were made a little more tolerable because of the tiffin-ful of TT that ma sent back with me. I hated the oiliness of it in my luggage, but what the hey, I loved eating it on the train. Especially on the top berth, where nobody could ask for too much of it, or see how much I had left.

A few years after I began working, I began to cook for myself. Hesitant, tentative attempts at first, and most of the time I would be on the phone with my mother, asking about spice proportions and marination time and the number of pressure cooker whistles. We’ve all been there, right? I got better at it and the distress calls wound down. It would get weird on Sundays when we would have our weekly conversation, and ma would say something like, “I cooked this the other day, you would have liked it”, and I would say, “That’s fine, I will cook it tomorrow” and then she would be like, “Oh. OH. I forget you cook nowadays”. A little accusatory, a little proud and happy.

Now TT, that was something I never cooked for myself. I would get the recipe every single time I was at home. Day 3 would be around when ma would serve it on the table, usually at dinner. (Day 6 was when I would get completely sick of home-cooked food and long for some biryani) And it tasted great, of course. Every time, I asked her the precise steps – and it was simple – no onions, just ginger and garlic. Mustard oil if possible. That’s it. But somehow, somehow, TT was her’s specifically, the memory and taste of it associated with Guwahati and train journeys. I never even tried to cook it myself.

I met my mother at Amsterdam last month, for a day. She was visiting my sister in Brussels. I was on the last leg of my trip, and met her on a rainy Sunday morning, after having spent the whole night dancing like mad at the Sensation White festival. For some demented reason, my sister wanted to visit the Heineken Experience. I had absolutely no desire to go myself – the hotel receptionist’s horror when I asked for directions to the place was reason enough (“It’s shit! Don’t go!”, he shrieked. “I have to meet someone there”, I said. “Well, tell them to not go! It’s shit!” “Too late, they are already there”) I went there, waited an hour at a delightful pub next door – it was a rainy day, and the cup of coffee and the apple and nutmeg pie cheered me up despite the tiredness I felt. I had not seen ma in a year and a half, and as it turned out, she had woken up at 6 AM that morning and cooked some TT for me, along with fried chicken and some puris. We sat in the car, rain pouring around us, and wolfed down the food hungrily. I did not care much for the chicken, the fried potatoes hit every pleasure center in my brain. And then some.

So I’ve been lying around at home thanks to a bout of chicken pox. (I know, right? Who on earth gets chicken pox at age thirty goddamned two, forgoshsakes) And the craving hit me. I needed to eat some TT. Which also meant I needed to cook me some TT, and I did. But I got adventurous too, and added cauliflower to it. And sausages. Some thinly chopped carrots. When it was done, I finished the whole dang thing with a packet of microwaved tortillas. I made some the next day too, and finished it in two meals. And later that week, I called up my mom and told her that I had made my version of TT. Or as I called it, TT2. Fuck yeah.

Standard
Books, Myself

The Great Book Transfer

I sold a lot of books before I moved to LA. A ton of reference books, lots of comics that I knew I would be able to buy again or owned multiple copies of, a bunch of books I was pretty sure I won’t read again. There was also a year of minimal book-buying – I think I bought about 5 or 6 books in 2010, just because it was getting out of hand.

It took about a year to move my books here. I was undecided about whether I should cart them off to my parents’ or my sister’s place. Chandru, over in Chennai, offered to put them in cold storage in a room at the office, but I wasn’t sure how I would get them over. A lot of people had conflicting opinions to offer about moving stuff to the US. Some said books in bulk were not allowed to be imported, others reported packages being returned to India after months of sitting in customs. I spoke with second-hand book sellers – none of them had experience taking books into the US, just exporting them out of the States. Thankfully, pal Ajanta had no problems babysitting the books, but time was running out – even she was to move out by end of the year.

I am not sure how I stumbled onto the R2I forums, but that got things moving. Based on the positive experiences people had with movers in some sticky threads, I emailed a couple of the names mentioned there. 21st Century Relocations, based out of New York was the first to respond, and their responses left me pretty confident that they would do a good job. They went to the apartment one weekend, sent me a reasonable quotation and a week later, packing was complete. I did not even have to mail a check, just sending a scan was enough. Had to printout, sign and scan in a boatload of documents, but they did all the running-around for customs clearance. Things got a little complicated because my departure ticket to LA was not a direct flight – I had to stop at Romania for a month, and my ticket was through Delhi, while the books were in Bangalore.

But it all went well, and by end of November, the books were enroute.

They arrived end of January, in a truck whose size made me very nervous about whether all the books would fit in the apartment. But fit they did, though my room looked like a cardboard hurricane hit it.

I had a Minor Adventure while buying bookshelves from Ikea, where the gentlemen with the pick-up truck decided to hijack my items and go make three other deliveries on the way. With me in the truck too, of course. And then proceeded to give me a ride to a movie theater, with a convoluted 20 mile side-track. It was a weird day.

In the course of the week, shelves were assembled, cartons were unpacked, muffled curses echoed through my chambers. It’s not an easy task, arranging 70-odd packages of books on your own, but I managed. Strangely, I managed not to get distracted by the books I hadn’t seen in a year. Though I confess I felt complete when I arranged the Walter Moers volumes on the top shelf, and smiled at the Tom Sharpe collection, putting them aside to reread Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure. Srividya Natarajan’s No Onions Nor Garlic joined the maybe-I-will-read-soon pile, as did the Lee Siegel books. Some left me rolling my eyes – what on earth was I thinking when I bought the Clarke Gable biography (called Long Live the King) or the book on Obie award-winning plays. Or the piles of Star Wars novels. Oh well, at least 2004-version of me must have been a happy camper.

And it was done. Almost. The comics and manga were in my room, and the books went to the living room. The DVDs (the manageable pile of originals that I had the nerve to get into the States, the rest being disposed off quite some time ago) were still packed (2 boxes), and about 4 more boxes of comics remained still – I had run out of shelf-space. There was no way I was going back to Ikea any time soon, and so these boxes remained unpacked for a few weeks, affecting my zen calm every time I entered my room. Last weekend, I figured I had had enough – went to Target, bought a non-Ikea shelf and finally, finally, it was done. My preciouses were home! मेरा पिया घर आया! やった!

And now, presenting a bunch of pictures. Whee!

Standard
Myself

Financial Shenanigans

My copy of Dune is a hardcover. It’s the first three books collected in one, and like all books that get talked about on this blog, this massive tome has a story behind it.

It was on display at Modern Book Depot, Guwahati, for as long as I could remember. Modern Book Depot was a place where popular books went not exactly to die, but to hibernate. The place smelled a little damp, if memory serves me correctly, and there was a sort of moldy feel towards the back of the shop, where the sun never shone, and piles of books lay unsold. This was one of the few bookstores that refused to add on the 10% discount that came as a godsend during the Annual Guwahati Book Fair. Sure, a part of the collection would get the discount, but those would be the dregs of literature, the John Grishams and the Robin Cooks, the Dick Francis and the who-ever-buys-this-shit copies of some random book. The ones you really wanted to buy would get a measly 5 percent, and no self-respecting book buyer would fall for that.

So, this copy of the Dune trilogy was on sale for 300 Rupees, for the longest period of time. I remembered seeing it when I was in school. In 2001, that sum of money went a long fucking way, especially for a guy who never bought first-hand books. 300 rupees was at least ten books, not three. So while I drooled over it, I never bought it. Someone bought that book for me. Two someones, both of them college seniors. Carthik was one of them, he was traveling to Guwahati that year to get acquainted with his future in-laws travel through Assam. Udatta was the other. Both of them figured that I was too much of a cheapskate to buy the book, and both of them wanted to read it too, so it turned up one morning on my table. With personalized inscriptions inside. At that time, I hated inscriptions in my books, but this one was special. Specifically what Udatta wrote. “Dear Evil Guy,” the inscription read. “Please do not sell this book.”

The reason behind this deserves a flashback-within-a-flashback, so here goes.

The year I joined college was also the year everybody seemed to figure out that owning a personal computer was the coolest thing to do on campus. Look at statistics – when we joined, our senior year had two students who owned computers on campus (one of them happened to be the illustrious Palaka Sasidhar, who then became tech advisor for everybody on campus, including college professors, and made use of his enhanced accessibility to the 64 Kbps college internet connection to download the complete Calvin and Hobbes from a pirated site, causing everyone’s emails to be backlogged for about a week as 150 MB of gifs downloaded at a glacial rate). By the time our ragging was over and the last remnants of  the fresher parties had been up-chucked around the lawn, there were almost 30 people on campus with their own computers and that number increased every week. (All numbers, obviously, are pulled out of my Memory Hat. But then, it’s the spirit that counts, so bear with me, please) It got to the point where even I contemplated getting one – though the thought of spending 30,000 Rs or so on something made me feel light-headed and weak-boweled. (I hate to think what 1998-version of me will think of the art collecting bug that’s infected me, post-2005) (I did buy mine a year later, with some scholarship money)

One evening, after dinner was over, I was sitting around in my room when Udatta sauntered in, smoking a cigarette. Burugu Bhaskar, my room-mate was also inside. He was this nice, clean-cut local fellow who made sure to study after dinner, while I pored over my Stephen Kings, both of us humming along to whatever was playing on my modest tape-recorder. Probably Dil Se. I glanced at Burugu when Udatta got in, because we had exchanged words about Udatta a few days ago. Specifically, about his smoking in our room. “Hey, Chetri”, he said. “Your senior, man. Tell him to not smoke when he comes in, man.” “He is my senior”, I reparteed. “You tell him.” So when Udatta came in, Burugu and I looked at each other, and then he looked at Udatta and then he walked out of the room. Couldn’t blame him, because you didn’t really mess with the U-man and his considerable bulk even back then.

“Chetri”, Uddu began. Everybody called me Chetri back then. I hated it. “Chetri is my father’s name, goddamn it”, I would grumble. “My name’s Satyajit.” But nobody cared. I was doomed to be Chetri forever. “Chetri, what’s up?” He didn’t really say “what’s up?”, nobody did. What he really asked me was what the eff I was doing, spiced up with some choice words in Axomiya that we employed with each other, involving hair and bananas. Harmless good fun, except you had to remember not to use those words in front of your parents.

I said nothing was really up. At which Uddu asked me if I was interested in deflowering his computer. I was totally up for deflowering his computer.

Allow me to explain. The situation at this point  was that you bought a computer, with the official excuse (to your parents) being that you needed it for your courses. But what really happened was that you used it for other stuff. Like renting VCDs and watching educational films. But mostly porn. And the first time you played a porn movie in your computer was when you “deflowered” it.  Remember, this was the Pre-internet Age, still about a year away from when browsing would get pocket-friendly enough for us to be able to go someplace and surf the internet without blowing up a month’s allowance in one night. Porn VCDs were the only way this particular itch could be scratched. And if we were lucky, the VCD wouldn’t be scratched and we wouldn’t feel like we didn’t get our money’s worth. Obviously, nobody would really have the patience to watch the whole thing from beginning to end, but still. Uddu’s computer had come in about a week ago, and the most he had done with it was to install a bunch of shareware from Chip magazine CDs and pretend like he was having fun. Chip magazine CDs were our default source of fun those days.

We deflowered Uddu’s computer, and it cost a grand total of 23 Rs. This included auto fares of 4 Rs per person, one way, and a 15 Rs charge for the VCD. We split the money. We were happy. I bet the computer was pretty happy too. And then Uddu handed over the VCD to me and said I could go return it the next day. I would have, I totally would have, except –

I went back to my room and asked Burugu, back at his desk and intently going through his Engineering physics homework, if he wanted to watch a porn movie. He blushed, and nodded vigorously. I asked him if he knew of any friends who might want to watch a porn movie. Of course he did. I then went to visit my classmate from Goa, the first guy in our batch to own a computer of his own, bought two days after his fresher’s party. Goa always had the first fresher’s party because there was only one guy from the state, and said junior would bond with his senior the first day and both of them would declare each other cool enough to bestow the honor of being welcomed into the college fraternity without posturing and macho rituals that plagued the rest of us. Of course he was okay with us using his computer, provided he got to see it for free. He was the only one that did not need to pay for it – I charged everyone 4 Rs each, for the viewing. The room was filled with everyone from the block, about 20-odd people. Everyone was happy. With eighty rupees in my pocket, I was pretty darn happy too.

Udatta came to know about my profit-making venture a few weeks later. He tried to demand a cut, but by then, the money had been disposed of. I did tell him he was my favorite senior, and that I would let him read any of my books any time, which mollified him a bit. But I could no longer talk him into any joint financial venture without him trying to figure out exactly how I will undercut him and make a profit, and therefore, the inscription on the copy of Dune. “Please do not sell this book.”

I didn’t.

Standard
Comics, Myself

Groan

It’s been quite a day, again. The kind of day in which time seems to acquire a viscosity of its own, sucking you in, gulping you down. A day-long meeting, with multiple sub-meetings scattered in between.

The day shouldn’t over yet. Because tonight’s the night Brian K Vaughan arrives at Meltdown Comics in Hollywood for a Q&A, followed by a signing. The event is the midnight release party of Vaughan’s new comic book Saga, the previews of which show a lot of promise. Oh, and the Q&A is being conducted by Damon Lindelof, you know, the co-creator of this little-known TV series about a bunch of people on an island. I had been excited about this event for quite some time now – actually, excitement is too mild a word for what I am feeling right now. I was all set to buy issue 1 of Saga, and I was planning to get my Y The Last Man and Pride of Baghdad hardcovers signed.

But what happened was this – I came home, had my dinner, showered, got ready, and put the hardcovers in my backpack. Walked out of the apartment. And then I realized that I was too tired to consider going across town for a signing. Brian K Vaughan could wait. Saga can wait. My body needs to rest.

I feel all grown-up. I feel old. One of these is not that bad, and the other sucks. I hate being grown-up.

* * *

Despite the meetings, I did find time for some liberal credit-card abuse. Scott Dunbier, Keeper of the Artists’ Editions that I had mentioned a few days ago wrote to the comic-art mailing list about a special Wondercon edition of both the Romita Artists’ Edition, which came signed by Stan Lee and John Romita. And sketched in by John Romita as well. The Wally Wood book also has a special edition, and the ebaywhore in me howled at a metaphorical moon as I hastily pre-ordered both. The rational side (if there is any) probably whimpered for mercy somewhere in the corner of my brain. And I learnt of another pre-order today – Titan Books is coming out with an Artist Edition of its own. Back when the first Ridley Scott Alien was released, writer Archie Goodwin and artist Walt Simonson teamed up to adapt the book into its comic. It was a fairly good adaptation, considering that this was the pre-Watchmen era, Simonson’s art in particular nailing the kinetic moments of the film. I learnt that Amazon UK had it for sale at less than half of cover price, sighed to myself and ordered. Come on, it was just 22 GBP.

IDW is on a roll. Up next, after the Eisner and the Born Again editions, there’s the Groo The Wanderer Artist Edition coming out in June.

* * *

Speaking of Watchmen, you should read this transcript of a 90-minute long interview with Alan Moore. This is basically Moore’s side of the story of the Watchmen prequels that DC announced a few weeks ago. Go on, read it, it’s 8 pages long.

Are you back? You don’t have to be. I am too tired to right anything about the interview at the moment. I should probably go get some sleep.

* * *

I am not disappointed about missing the Meltdown Comics event, not at all. Because Wondercon is this weekend, and I am primed for it. Oh yeah, old age and grown-upness, you don’t scare me. Not at all.

* * *

The saddest news this week has been the news of Moebius’s passing. Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud was one of the finest artists who ever drew a comic-book, and it guts me to think that we lost him this early. His shadow looms large over a lot of memorable films of the eighties – Blade-runner, Dune, Akira, The Fifth Element, mostly for the visual design that they liberally borrowed from his works. Among the tributes and articles about him all week, here’s an archive of photographs of the master with other legendary creators. Pay close attention to the ones with Hayao Miyazaki, Osamu Tezuka, Uderzo and Hugo Pratt.

I should really sleep now.

Standard