Last night, I dreamt an elephant was chasing me all around my house. Or probably I was chasing it, I don’t remember exactly.
It’s probably a coincidence that “elephant” and “eBay” both begin with the letter “e”. And “elephant” and “eBay bid” have the same number of syllables. Yeah, just a coincidence.
PeTS, otherwise known as the Post-eBay-Traumatic-Syndrome, affects me from time to time. Times when I realise that this website is just too unapologetically vast for my liking. Everybody I know tells me that I am spending too much time on eBay – ah, but if only you knew how much time I really spend on the site, heh – and I half-heartedly agree, and promise myself that I shan’t even think of typing in “collectibles.ebay.com” for the next three months. (Now there’s a tip for you, if you’re in India and want to buy comics off eBay, don’t type “www.ebay.com” on the browser, it redirects you to ebay.in. ) Don’t know why, but three months seems to me like a perfect rest-time from eBaying. Not four months, not six months, not even three and a half months, but three months. So I promise myself, and threaten myself with dire consequences, and then of course, I have to go and check out the new listings two days later.
It makes me sit and weep, I tell you. Especially when it’s the end of the month and there is a COMPLETE Groo The Wanderer run up for sale – and by complete, I mean complete, all 120 Epic issues and 8 pacific issues, and even a couple of signed copies and two CGC Graded ones, and a couple of graphic novels to boot – and another original art page at a very decent buy-it-now price. (No, don’t ask me which artist it was, I am pretty sure I would be lynched if I say anything.) (Oh, very well, it was Frank Quitely. I am getting obsessed with the guy, and that’s that.) And then there is a complete Starman run which I need, Starman being very high on my priority list. Then there is the friend of this LJ user from whom I am buying a pile of comics. How do I prioritize? How do I prioritize? Do I buy the Groo run or do I go for the Quitely page or the Starman series or the Wonderful Ashley Wood pages that are being sold for SO CHEAP or that Darick Robertson Transmet page or do I *whimper* forget all about them and go watch Samurai Jack at home?
Ah, well, after that embarrassing display of inner turbulence, here’s something better.
This is Jeon Ji Hyun, the lead actress of My Sassy Girl. *sigh* I think I’ll stare at this picture and let eBay run its own course. For the next three months. Yes.
P.S I wouldn’t mind Jeon Ji Hyun getting me out of my PeTS-mood in her own inimitable way.
(Pic swiped from adgy)
Manjula Padmanabhan’s Suki is the greatest comic you will ever read in India.
I was introduced to Manjula Padmanabhan’s work through Target, the children’s magazine (emphasis on “the”). Now, of course, she’s rather well-known for her play Harvest, for she won an Aristotle Onassis award, and for the children’s books Mouse Attack and Mouse Invaders ( I have both, thanks!) Did not get Suki until last year, and oh my god, I was blown away. This strip deserves respect, and a lot of our attention, so go right ahead and check out one of the collections.It’s witty, it’s completely whimsical, it’s exquisitely drawn, and it’s SO Indian! The strip is full of puns, visual humor, absurdist comedy, and grounded characters all of which feel very universal. I am reminded of beloved strips like Bloom County and Pogo. A huge part of the appeal of the comic is the wonderful hand-lettered dialogue, which almost take on a personality of their own. Look at how the line width changes in the different panels, as Suki gets more and more engrossed in her words. And check out that lovely signature!
I was lucky enough to find a copy of the original Duckfoot Press release of This is Suki, from where these scans have been taken. Penguin has recently released a copy of “Double Talk: The Best of Suki”, it’s priced slightly on the higher side (Rs 250) and available in all fine bookstores everywhere.
I thnk this was in the introduction to the collection – it seems not too many people “got” Suki when the strips came out, in the Sunday Observer in 1982. So there used to be loads of letters of complaint from readers who would yell at the editor for allowing such tripe to run in the periodical. Grrrr. Stupid, stupid rat creatures.
Want to check out more Suki? Check out Ms Padmanabhan’s blog, where she posts the occasional Suki strip. *Sigh* What I wouldn’t do to get one of the original pages….
And just to show you that the lady knows her comics, here’s a slightly-old Rediff article by her about female characters in comicbooks, and her favourite.
On an aside, another cartoonist I remember from Target was Mala Marwah, who did a strip right below the letters’ page. Damned if I remember the name, will just have to go home and flip through my copies. Anyone know what the name of the strip was? It was something like Baiju-Bawra, or maybe a pun on those names.
This is what I wrote to myself last night. I find that planning a weekend’s activities, or at least broadly outlining them in advance tends to make waking up on Saturday a very cheery activity.
Elfen Lied Episode 3-13
Stubbs The Zombie.
The Demon issues 16-58.
Reread The Man In The High Castle.
Ah, well. I started watching Elfen Lied because of the promising tone in one of vrikodhara‘s posts. The first fifteen minutes were a gorehound’s delight – a naked teenage girl silently walks through a prison leaving a trail of decapitated bodies of soldiers behind her. Bullets don’t strike her, and she does gruesome things with a pen (“plop” goes the eye) and even rips a pretty secretary’s head away from her body, and holds the torso up against the hail of bullets that ensues. How can one resist such a beginning, I ask you.
(One has to, however, when early-morning calls are scheduled.)
I finsihed Serious Sam: The First Encounter recently, and decided I had to play Stubbs the Zombie next. The game’s an anachronism of sorts, in that there is not really a set of objectives for you when the game begins, not even a storyline – other than the very basic “go-forth-and-chomp-on-brains” motivation. Yes, in Stubbs, you play as the zombie, and do rollicking things like throwing your head like a bowling ball at hordes of gun-toting humans, farting really bad gas to lay them low, lobbing clunks of faecal matter at them through a Sod-mobile, and of course, eating brains and creating your own zombie army. I am currently in the middle of the game, and having peed zombie piss all over a water reservoir, I am now being beset by scientists weilding antigravity guns and screaming “I will show you hard science!” at me. Fun.
The Demon issues, well, I got a 20-pounder package in the mail recently, thanks to th_gunslinger, who had held on to an eBay package for about a year and a half, and sent it off eight weeks ago. (Yes, dude, it got here fine, thanks so very much.) It contained a near-complete run of Hitman ( missing the last eight issues, gah! I am so desperate to own those!) and the complete run of The Demon, and a couple of miniseries like Ennis’s Fury and Daredevil:Ninja ( which I already had) I finished reading 15 issues on Friday morning, and have another 43 issues to complete. Alan Grant rocks! And I can’t wait to read the complete Ennis/McCrea run (this was the series where Hitman made his debut, by the way, so it seems fairly logical that a rereading of Hitman is in order after this one, heh heh)
I began reading Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle again, after I bought a second-hand copy of the book recently at Abids, for the grand price of 10 Rs. I had read it a couple of years ago as an e-Book, and it’s fantastic.
But yeah, most of my plans got waylaid today morning, when I got a call from Chandru in the office. Seems a package had arrived from secondspin.com. Which gave me a right tizzy, because I had ordered it just last Friday! Delivery within a week, how cooler can it get??
One of my favourite words is “anthropomorphic”. Never mind that for a long time, I was mispronouncing it as “anthromorphic”, missing the “po” in the middle. The meaning of the word is to do with representation of an idea, or a concept, into human form. For example, all the Indian minor gods are essentially anthropomorphic representations of the natural phenomena they represent. Vayu, the wind, Agni, fire and so on. Or you might say that the members of The Endless, in Gaiman’s Sandman books are anthropomorphic representations of Dream, Death, Delirium, Destiny, Destruction, Desire and Despair. ( Woo-hoo, I didn’t have to pause while typing that!)
The reason why I bring this word up right now is that I have a vague feeling that the anthropomorphic representation of the term “stupid” would be….ME!
You see, I own a 128 MB USB drive, a small thingummijig that helps me transport data of minor import from home to office and vice versa. And because it’s so small, I am usually very careful about where it is kept, at any given point of time. Last night, I remembered that I hadn’t seen it in quite sometime, and proceeded to search through my stuff – the usual spots where I might have left it. Checked the drawer on my computer table, which is the kind of black hole that attracts Things That Disappear For Months. Nope. Checked the pockets of the shirts I had worn the last week. Nope. Checked the top parts of every shelf. Nope. Wallet. Nope. Top of CD player. Uh-huh.
This is the chain of thoughts that followed.
“Hmm, maybe it’s in your jeans pocket, you know.”
“Which jeans pocket?”
“Oh, the pair you were wearing last week, dum-dum.”
“Ahhhh, but that can’t be! I put it in the washing machine half an hour ago myself, and there was no USB drive in any of the pockets.”
“Well, half an hour ago, you weren’t thinking about USB drives, sonny. And you didn’t check any of the pockets, so there.”
“Oh shut up, I am pretty sure it’s not there. It should be there in my office drawer. Yes, I am pretty sure it would be in my office drawer. That‘s the other black hole, after all.
Hmmm.
*silence*
“Say….”
“Yes?”
“Didn’t you just go through your office drawer today morning, when you were looking for that printout?
“Grrrr, I did, but I wasn’t careful enough!! And NO, I am NOT looking in the pocket of my jeans. It’s been soaking there for half an hour and I am pretty sure it’s not inside any of the pockets and I am NOT putting my hand into soapy water.”
“Suit yourself.”
An hour later, when I was taking my clothes out of the washing machine and hanging them out to dry, there was a clatter, as the USB drive plopped out of the washed jeans. There was also a fifty-rupee note and a one-rupee coin among the other relics at the bottom of the washing machine. And the voice begins again, louder – “Stupidstupidstupidstupid” and the other voice whimpers and says “Ohmygodohmygodwillitworkornotohmygodohmygodishouldhavecheckedthepocketsdamnbotherandblastohmygod”.
Well, I let it dry throughout the night, just to make sure, and today morning, it worked. It worked! It’s still working! All the data still intact! Yes! YES! YESSSSS!!
Stupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupid. Shut up. Stupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupid.
