Connect Polish film-maker Krzysztof Kieslowski and the Marvel superhero Daredevil.

Before you say “Red” and spoil the mood, the answer is The Decalogue. Kieslowski’s 10-volume work influenced Brian Bendis, the current writer of DD, to come up with an a six-volume arc called The Decalogue, which chronicles a year in the life of Daredevil. Why six volumes instead of ten? Because it’s easier to sell six books together as a trade paperback later. This storyline is told from multiple viewpoints, and focusses on the period of time in DD’s life which Bendis had tantalizingly skipped over between issues 50 and 56 ( 51-55 were by David Mack, and the storyline had mostly nothing to do with the ongoing tale, and issue 56 began a year after the events in issue 50)

I have plans to pick up the last 10 issues of the Bendis-Maleev run on Daredevil, already have 26-70, and I have tried my best to stay away from discussions about the storyline of Decalogue – but some random surfing today led me to the covers of issues 71-75, and I just had to share.

images, not too heavy.

The defining quality of American comics is also the most exasperating – the monthly serial format. Not only is the average 32-page comic over-priced ( at prices between 2.50$ and 7$, the exchange rate brings the price of a comic to 110 INR and above. This is one of the reasons why you only find outdated pre-1999 issues in Indian bookstores at low prices), but the way it makes you wait ONE WHOLE MONTH between the story is terrible. I have no idea how people who were reading, say, The Invisibles or Preacher or Transmet when these comics were coming out monthly managed to keep themselves in control between stories. Both these comics ( and countless other good ones) have the juiciest cliffhangers ever, at least during the story arcs.

Is there some kind of a commercial drawback to producing comicbooks in self-contained story-arcs released as “books”, instead of the monthly 22-page thingie? I can think of the following –

• More advertising revenue, because 22 pages of comics includes about 10 pages of ads.
• User feedback remains consistent throughout a monthly comicbook. Though it does not impact the structure of the story, the creator is gratified by the fact that people are reacting to the story, through the now-almost-extinct letter column, and internet Message Boards of today.
• Increased revenue by issuing the same storylines in a variety of formats. The monthly comics, followed by a hardcover release, followed by trade paperbacks.
• Last, but not the least, pandering to the speculator market. That is, the people who buy comics in the hope that they can later be sold for 10 times the cover price, and consequently define good comics as the “hot” ones, and make it a point to buy variant covers of the SAME comicbook for the aforementioned reason.

Let me not be hypocritical – I got into serious comic-collecting because of the speculator thing – it’s always a good feeling imagining that something you buy for 10 rupees can someday be sold for 500 Rs. But hey, I was a kid then, alright? I still insist on buying the original comics in most cases, but that is because of the sheer novelty of reading the story in exactly the same way it was written, following the crests and troughs as they come. But cliff-hangers can get tedious after sometime – almost as if the writer knows that he has to try extra hard to get his audience to react to his story, and therefore is under a compulsion to introduce a shock moment after every 22 pages. And, boy oh boy, it can be a bitch too, like when you are at part 4, the penultimate episode of the storyline and part 5 is nowhere to be found. Of course, digital comics have done away with this for now, but I still cannot wait until a complete series gets over before beginning to read it, can I?

I am quite taken with the idea of Season-based comics, as opposed to the monthly format. Seasonal Comics, much like TV Show seasons, are story arcs that are published as monthly issues for about a year by the same writer/artist combo. And then there is a gap, followed by the next season with either the same or a different team of creators. Was Ultimates the first in this genre? So far, I have read Sleeper seasons 1 and 2, an excellent superheroes-meet-crime-noir saga of a double agent trapped in a criminal organization made up of super-powered bad guys, each with a quirky tale of his own, and motivations much distanced from the usual Rule-the-world mish-mash. I have a strong feeling that people who loved Infernal Affairs would love this series and identify with Agent Carver a lot, it has brilliant moments, strong characterization, and a very engagingly narrated storyline that jumps timelines and gives you the complete picture slowly, leisurely. I would have gone berserk if I had to read it an issue a month, let me tell you. And the ending to season One was clever. Clever without being smug.

Hard Time Season One is another good series that weds superheroes with another genre, in this case – the prison novel. The prime accused in a school shooting incident that goes wrong, a 15-year old boy named Ethan Harrow, is sentenced to a maximum-security prison for fifty years. Steve Gerber, the writer knows just what buttons to push to keep the story from degenerating into either of the two genres it forms part of. Characters like Cindy, the boy who wants to be a girl; a maniacal preacher whose idea of baptism gives me the creeps, the power cliques in the prison – Nazis against the Minority groups; and even Ethan Harrow himself, a socially-maladjusted guy who cannot get along with anybody because of his smart mouth – are etched out beautifully – the subplots that move parallel to the main storyline are in themselves a social commentary – for instance, one of the first people Ethan’s uncanny power saves – hold on, did I forget to mention that? Ethan Harrow has a supernatural force within him, a being that manifests itself only when he is asleep, or unconscious, and he has no conscious control over the being – now this being goes and saves a guy who raped and killed a black girl, from being murdered by one of the only people in the prison who has any sympathy for Ethan. The only person who writes to him in prison, at least initially, is a survivor of the Shooting, a girl who has been remanded to a sanatorium because of the trauma, and she wants to know why he did it. The storyline progresses most unexpectedly, and part of the enthu I have is because there seems to be no clearly etched line on who is good and who is bad in the series. Hurrah for moral ambiguity!

The worst part of going shopping or eating out, at least for me, is the soulless music that plays as background music in most of these hangouts. I always used to wonder who on earth buys those Brian Silas piano renditions of popular Hindi songs or eighties “classics”, tripe like Lionel Ritchie and George Michael. But the more I go to malls and eat-spots and any commercial outlets that play piped music, the more convinced I am that the “bad instrumental covers” section of the music store flourishes entirely because of these places. The same way that all these “College Classics”-type compilations seem to be bought by lazy pub DJs who can just play one of these albums from beginning to end and go smoke with his pals. So I make it a point to mention, in one of those rare occasions when feedback forms are available, to explicitly point out that the music was terrible.

“How bad can it be?”, you ask.”After all, nobody is really too concerned about what music is playing when one is at shopping, or eating out, yes?” Hmm, maybe you’re right, but I, in my delusionary state of mind ( “I-am-right-and-you-are-not-so-I-shall-be-excessively-verbose”) shall put forward the theory that good music always helps individuals do things well, definitely better than when they are listening to terrible music. Now hold on, before you call this a nonsensical theory, let me point out that workers becoming more productive when they listen to proper music was a patented observation made in 1922 by Major General George Squier, and that gentleman went on to create a company called The Muzak Corporation. Later on, of course, “muzak” became a much-vilified term, a synonym for bland, soulless music, but Major Squier’s intentions were noble, I must say.

So I am thinking about an alternative career for myself – a sonic texture designer. Someone who decides what music an establishment can, and should, play. A playlist, probably a mix-CD at regular intervals of time with well-researched, good music. Something that ensures that people associate the experience of being at that place with the song that was playing when they were there. It’s definitely not as live as deejaying gets, where there is the constant crowd feedback, but at least it’s better than listening to tepid crap on public speaker systems. If people can hire interior designers to jazz up the physical surroundings, they can sure hire a sonic architect to enliven one’s aural environment.

I frighten myself with my rational thinking these days.

Guwahati had its share of second-hand bookshops. There were four of them located near a cinema theatre called Anuradha, and I learnt of them sometime when I was in my last school year. Which also happened to be the Slog Year, the time when you are supposed to forget everything else and stick your nose so far up your textbooks that the smell of the pages never quite leaves you during your waking and non-waking moments. As you can easily figure out, it was not an auspicious time to learn about the availability of second-hand books. My first visit to those shops yielded a huge collection of Mad magazines from the seventies, Eric Van Lustbader’s The Ninja ( of which I had read a couple of rather….interesting pages from a friend’s father’s collection), and a couple of Sidney Sheldons. ( Oh, I loved Sidney Sheldon back then, especially the hot bits he managed to fit into his stories) All of them for a grand total of forty rupees and therefore cause for much rejoicing.

So from then on, I would latch onto any excuse to hang around near Anuradha cinema, which was about seven minutes by bus from our house. Mother wants a loaf of bread from the bakery? Birthday gift for cousin? Trip to a relative’s place? Off I would whiz to sniff around the four bookshops, looking for the new stuff they had, after which I would tend to the job I came there for in the first place.

And one fine day, I found a magazine.

Nothing so special about it, let me tell you. Just one more in a pile of other tattered and semi-tattered books and magazines, most of which were doomed to lie there, dusty and unbought till the end of time. Why did I even look at the magazine then, you ask? Because it had the letter ‘X’ in its name. For a 15-year old, any word with ‘x’ in it is the visual equivalent of a Siren’s song; you don’t let go until you have actually figured out the source, in the hope that there would be a nekkid chick or two singing it. The name of the magazine, in case you are wondering, was “Reflex”. It seemed like a music magazine, but when I opened it, at a random page, there were a couple of music listings – a couple of music reviews, an article on Dub music, whatever that was – and, strangely enough, a couple of articles on comics. Comics I hadn’t heard about till then. A brief writeup on some character called Madman, whom the reviewers called The Best New Character of the Year. Some interview with a fellow named Gaiman about some guy who committed suicide after reading some issue of some comic of his. Interesting, I thought. And promptly left the magazine back in the pile and ran home, because it was already late and I had spent about half an hour more than I was supposed to.

I still wonder why I didn’t buy it then, the first time. Maybe because at that time, five rupees was a lot of money for me – you could get a PG Wodehouse at the same place for ten to fifteen rupees, and a DC comic at a regular store for the same price, and paying half of that for a magazine, on a whim, was too much for this penniless student. So yeah, that was that.

It’s easy to guess what happened next. Every six or seven minutes, I would pause in the middle of my textbook-reading, and think – “Darn. I should have bought that magazine.” That classic beatzoic state-of-mind – if I would have bought the magazine, I would be pausing every six-seven minutes and think – “Darn, I shouldn’t have bought that magazine. What a waste of five rupees.”

Whatever. I went there the next day and bought it. Paid five whole rupees, too, because the guy there had seen me reading it the last day and knew that if I was there and asking him for it, it sure was good stuff.

Smuggled the magazine home ( parents would kill me if they found I was corrupting my mind with non-textbook matter during the Slog Year), and spent the afternoon reading it. Turned out it was a pretty good thing I bought it. This Gaiman guy seemed really interesting, he wore black t-shirts throughout the year, which seemed really cool to me, and he also wrote this comic called The Sandman which drove people to commit suicide. He also knew Alan Moore, it seemed. ( How did I know Alan Moore at that time? Because I read all the blurbs and advertisements on all the comics I read, dummy – and this Moore fellow was an Eagle Award winner, which meant he was a pretty good writer) Then the magazine also had a five-page write-up on an artist called Dave McKean. I remember spending quite sometime trying to figure out whether the artwork on display were mangled photographs or not, because not a soul I knew could paint comics the way McKean seemed to.

Wait, the good stuff does not end there. The cover story in that issue was about an author named Philip K. Dick, and apart from the intriguing nature of his work, which the writer of the article could not stop raving about, there was also an excerpt from “A Scanner Darkly”, which I could not figure out at all. I really didn’t understand a thing of what Philip K Dick wrote, and I must say I was mighty ashamed. Also quite a bit of stuff on music and bands I had never heard of, and was never interested in the first place.

Then there were the ads. About comics called Zap, drawn by a man named Crumb. And with mighty shocking cover images at that. Of a new Dark Horse comic called The Mask. A single page comic strip by a guy named Matt Howarth. All in all, this was value for money, I was sure. Five rupees well-spent.

The only problem, of course, was that there were no more issues of Reflex to be found anywhere.

I tried. Oh, I tried very hard. Any magazine store that had its share of old or new foreign magazines, I would ask about Reflex. Uncles going abroad, I would ask them to find copies of Reflex. Any new city, with its share of bookstalls, I would keep an eye open for the familiar logo. When I learnt the secrets of the internet the first time in my life, and what a search engine was – the third word I searched for was “Reflex magazine” ( the first was “Batman”, and the second was “Spice Girls naked”, before you ask.) But no, no mention of this magazine anywhere, except for a couple of interview mentions on fansites of different musicians.

But on the way, I also searched for the dope on Neil Gaiman, and Sandman, read some of Gaiman and McKean, quite a bit of Philip K Dick, managing to understand his writing this time; learnt more about Robert Crumb and read some of his stuff too, and about Michael Allred, the guy who created the Madman comics. Also came to know that the two guys who wrote that review were named Evan Dorkin and Kyle Baker, both of whom have created some incredible comic books.

Would any of my (ahem) tastes be different had I not bought that issue of Reflex? Alas, I know not. And who cares anyway? “You do, beatzo”, the masses respond. “Why else would you chew up my friends’ page this way?” Hmm, maybe you’re right. I certainly worry about time-travellers in the future going back and buying that issue of Reflex before I did, thereby contributing to my stunted intellectual growth and much ignorance later on in life. ( You realise I have begun blabbering, don’t you?)

Post-script: Early this year, tired of searching eBay for non-existent back-issues of ‘Reflex’, I called on divine help. Namely, mikester, who proving my point about great minds that read alike, mentioned that he had a collection of back-issues that he might off-load. As a result, two months later, a package of 10 Reflex magazines arrived at the front desk of the office, beautifully packed in the Mighty Mike Sterling Manner. Life, I swear, never seemed so good. Does the term “full-circle” make any sense to you?

Blossom Book House is now selling first-hand Del Rey editions of manga titles for 250 Rs each, which compared to the Landmark price of 400-450 Rs is really cheap, AND they are stocking series. As in, not scattered volumes of a title, but complete runs. That is why I picked up five volumes of Ken Akamatsu’s Negima on Sunday.

Now let me be frank, my experience with manga has been with the well-known, occidentalised ones. Like Blame, Lone Wolf and Cub, Kamui, Blade of the Immortal and Katsuhiro Otomo’s works like Domu and Akira. These titles were brought out by American companies like Dark Horse, Marvel, First and Eclipse in the late eighties and early nineties, and were read, like other American comics, from left to right. Any manga buff worth his salt will tell you that the correct way to read manga is from right to left, which is the way they are generally created in Japanese. Fans therefore look down on “flopped” manga, the Americanization of the artwork so as to enable readers accustomed to reading comicbooks to carry on reading manga the same way(i.e lazy buggers like myself). So when publishers like Tokyopop, Viz and Del Rey got into the manga reprint business, they tried to stay as close to the source material as possible, and published titles with artwork that run right to left, and have the cover image at the back, and the book description (which is traditionally on the back cover) on the front. If you open one of these manga as you would a book, the first thing you see is a warning saying: “This is the end of the book, please turn to the other side to begin reading.” – or something like that.

Initially I found that reading right to left was really difficult. My eyes were just not conditioned to read that way, and the panel ordering on the first manga of that format that I read, Fumiko Soryo’s Mars was just too much for me. Then I downloaded fan scanlations of manga like GTO and Ichi The Killer, and got even more confused, because trying to figure out which manga has been flipped and which is not is a herculean task because they occasionally make sense both ways. But I kind of accustomed to the right-to-left reading, and so, Negima was a very good read for me. I have finished the first three volumes.

Negima is short for ‘Magister Negi Magi’. Negi Springfield is a 10-year old Welsh kid who happens to be a wizard. Now hold on, before you begin harrying me with the obvious comparisons, Negima is not about prophecies and Dark Ones and magic spells. The premise is that this ten year old prodigy is given a rather unusual career option when he passes out of Wizarding school. The charge that he is entrusted with, the one that will lead him to becoming a Magus is – teaching English. At a girls’ School. At a girls’ High School. Now how cool is that?

Needless to say, the levels of acceptance he gets from his students vary from brotherly affection to major crushes to out-and-out hatred. The first problem Negi encounters is a student named Asuna Kagurazaka, with whom he has to (gulp) share rooms. (Because, very conveniently, the school authorities have run out of beds in the teacher’s quarter, and….you get the drift.) Asuna has an unrequited crush for the previous English teacher, and therefore has a very low tolerance level for the new guy, who is something of a runt in her eyes, and also has some very strange things happening around him. Like the odd way in which everyone’s skirts fly up whenever Negi sneezes. (or in Asuna’s case, how she manages to lose her clothes once when Negi sneezes right in front of her, and everyone discovers she wears bear panties) Or how fast he is, for a small boy. Or why he carries around a long staff with him wherever he goes.

The storyline develops quite well, with Negi getting to know all of his students slowly, and discovers quirky things about all of them. He takes under his wing the Mighty Morphin Baka Rangers, a group of students who score really low on studies, and have to receive tuitions in English from the new teacher. At the same time, he comes to terms with the difference between using magic to solve his problems ( and some of his spells do backfire, like the time he develops a love potion for Asuna to woo the old English teacher, and drinks it himself), as opposed to good ol’ common sense and honesty. Things start getting a bit more magical by the time volume 2 ends, but that was to be expected, I guess.

I read the first three books with a smile on my face throughout. There are times when the stories get sentimental, but the humour shines through every panel. Ken Akamatsu excels at details, and the translation appears to be excellent, as even the minutest of sound effects ( and there are a TON of them throughout!) are given their English equivalents. The books do not fall into the “Hey y’all” trap, you know, making all the characters sound All-American – the Japanese antecedents of the school, and the students, are all left intact. The cuteness factor is really high.

A real fun read, and you know what, I think I’ll go and pick up a couple of titles more today evening, probably Genshiken and The Wallflower.