When two of a kind land up on your office desk unexpectedly.
Youth In Revolt
The best book I read last year was Youth in Revolt by CD Payne. I had never heard of CD Payne in my life and I probably never would, had it not been for the US trip. I was bonding with Joel, a colleague who was reading Palahniuk’s Rant during lunchtime and who, when I mentioned I was reading the same book, took me to his cubicle and showed me his current read-list – a huge bunch of novels including Gaiman’s Stardust and King’s Lisey’s Story. We talked about writers we like, and suggested quite a few books to each other, and the name CD Payne came up then. The next day, Joel got me a bunch of Stephen King movie video cassettes, a video cassette player for me to hook up in my hotel room, and Youth in Revolt.
This is how the book begins:
WEDNESDAY, July 18 – My name is Nick. Someday, if I grow up to become a gangster, perhaps I will be known as Nick the Prick. This may cause some embarassment for my family, but when your don gives you your mafia sobriquet you don’t ask questions.
…. My last name, which I loathe, is Twisp. Even John Wayne on a horse would look effeminate pronouncing that name. As soon as I turn 21 I’m going to jettison it for something a bit more macho. Right now, I am leaning toward Dillinger. “Nick Dillinger”. I think that strikes just the right note of hirsute virility.
I was sold, right then and there. Nick Twisp was the nineties, American version of Adrian Mole – and unlike the latter’s exploits, which become exceedingly moribund and forced as the series progressed, Youth in Revolt ups the ante as we go further down the tunnel of horror and rapidly escalating absurdity that is Nick’s life. Every time I turned the page, the thought that came to mind was “Oh dear, he is not about to do that, is he?” and then realise that yes, Nick Twisp just burnt down half of Berkeley, yes, he’s just managed to prolong his virginity by a couple of years; oh yes, it does look like he’s going to bonk his best friend’s mother; oh, no, he’s planning to go back to school like this???
While Nick may be your archetypal geek-hero who’s the self-proclaimed ruler of all that he surveys, he’s as much a survivor ( like his creator, who had to go through a great deal to get the books published), the kind of person who not only refuses to play by the rules, but takes the rulebook, shits on it, and then makes his best friend pay for a peek at the hardened crust. (The scatalogical humour is just metaphor, so chill.) CD Payne makes his characters just the right amount of approachable and unfathomable, there are times when I do not know whether to be exasperated at Nick and his indefatigable attitude or just egg him on mentally. It was a treat reading about characters who, albeit in a fictional world, occupy the same area you do. I finished the book over Caltrain and BART rides ( coincidentally in sections of the book where Nick and Sheena are riding on the BART), deadline-ridden nights, and finally, during a car journey to LA – and then suddenly, deadlines whizzed past ( do deadlines become livelines once they are done with? Ghostlines if they are not met? ) and I had more free time on my hands, and I read one sequel (out of three) and the spinoff Cut to the Twisp in a week, and suddenly it was time to leave the US. Horror of horrors, the books were not available anywhere in the local bookstores, even though CD Payne was a Bay Area writer! Joel told me he had ordered the books directly from the writer’s website and that copies were available on Amazon, but there was no way I could get them in three days, especially when the next two days were Saturday and Sunday. Had to ditch the idea of getting the books, add them to the Wish-list and come back to India.
Fast forward seven months. tandavdancer was in town for the New Year, and one of the entries on his Hyderabad tour guide was to carpet-bomb as many second-hand bookstores as possible with his philanthropic presence. Now let me tell you something about the state of the used-book affairs here in Hyderabad. In a word, depressing. For quite some time, the collection of books has been stagnating – in a given book-sale, I would have to wade through piles of Terry McMillan’s Waiting To Exhale and Rebecca Wells’ Divine Secrets of the Ya-ya Sisterhood. Both are books against which I have no personal enmity, but I cannot but help considering them the poster-children of Dead Bestseller Syndrome, trillions of copies of over-stock being shipped from Canada, Australia, the USA and the UK just because exporters there thought us third-worlders would find the books inspirational or something. Add to this the fact that one rarely finds the titles one wants, the ratio of investment to return is pitiably low, hours of browsing miles of Dead Bestsellers often yielding one decent book, or maybe nothing at all. Another important factor probably would be that I am trying very hard to buy`books that I would want to read immediately, not stock them up until I complete a run or until a trilogy finishes or I get the first book someday. ( I did the last with the Illuminatus trilogy, and when I found the first book after a couple of years of owning the second and third books, I realised that maybe I didn’t want to read the series after all).
Having been completely vexed by this turn of events, I chose, sometime in the middle of last year, to stop going to second-hand bookstores here altogether. Maybe an extreme step, but people close to me will tell you how prone I am to indulge in practices that are Spartan. Uh, madness, I mean. I stopped altogether, which meant no visits to the Sunday market, no periodic dropping-in on MR or Best or Frankfurt ( that’s the bookstore, not the city), and even completely ignoring the outlet that had opened up right opposite my office, in ( what I thought was )a somewhat bizarre display of temptation and show-me-your-jalwa-type competition from the United Booksellers Association of Hyderabad.
So, on the first day of the year, when my friend wanted to visit the bookshops here, I accompanied him to the bookstall right opposite the office. It was about fifteen minutes away from where I stay, and from what I’ve heard, had a decent collection. The first thing my eyes focussed on when we entered the place was a pristine copy of Howard Chaykin/Mike Mignola’s adaptation of Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser. This Fritz Leiber fantasy series, adapted by the duo sometime in the nineties and was brought back into print by Dark Horse pretty recently in a trade paperback collection, and, you guessed it right, was pretty high on my wish-list. Mignola’s style had just begun to change in this period, it was in that transitional phase between his early superheroic style and the later-day chunky blacks and whites that would define Hellboy. Bookstore: One, Beatzo: Zero ( or -400, which was the sum of money I was out of )
Emboldened a little, we decided to go downtown ( or is that uptown? )where the bulk of the shops were. On an impulse, I eschewed the Abids outlet in favour of the one on Liberty crossroads, it was operated from out of a cellar and was, especially when there was a powercut, scary enough to make a non-claustrophobic individual like me gasp and cry uncle.
While we were going around, I bemoaned the distressing lack of selection among the titles and was just about to suggest leaving when…there it was. Youth in Revolt by CD Payne, piled under a mountain of romance novels, and I swear I saw a Waiting to Exhale in that same pile. A hardcover Doubleday first edition copy, and priced at 50 Rs! tandavdancer bears witness to this – I nearly wept with joy at the miraculous operations of Hyderabad bookstores. My faith was renewed, hallelujah!
Of course, this happy circumstance was followed by my discovery of the second volume of the Myth Adventures compendium by Robert Asprin and a couple of Flashman books, which my friend happily added to his pile. By the time it was evening, I had further widened the rip in my resolve by dropping in on the Drongo Warehouse, and picking up Adrian Tomine’s Summer Blonde, Rick Veitch’s Maximortal and Hellblazer: Rare Cuts, the only Hellblazer TPB I didn’t have.
All this on the first day of the year. Not bad. And Joel didn’t even know there was a hardcover copy of Youth in Revolt, bwahahaha.
On perfect endings
I read the first 16 issues of Y The Last Man in white-heat mode one 2004 night. After that, every couple of months, there would be an influx of fresh issues that I would consume as soon as I could. I said this then, and I will say it again now – I had no clue of where the story was going or how it would end, Brian K Vaughan’s plots devilish enough to batter my mind into enfeebled submission at the end of every issue. I generally pride myself on figuring out the inner workings of a story, having subscribed to and mapped Campbellian ideas of myths and storytelling from the time I figured out who Campbell was and where I could get ahold of Hero Of A Thousand Faces. ( Damn, I sound like a sanctimonious bastard, don’t I? Nothing new about that, eh? ) But BKV stumped me at every turn of the plot, his characters becoming more than heroes and villains and bad guys and good guys and….uh…I meant bad girls and good girls, sorry about that.
And then I decided, at the end of issue 39, that enough was enough. I couldn’t stand it any longer. None of that waiting business for me, Mr Cliffhanger-Loather. So I gave up reading Y. Let it finish, I said to myself, and then I’ll finish it, in a single session of orgasm-inducing eye-humpery. The series was scheduled to last 60 issues, and that was just another two years or so away.
So issue 60 of Y The Last Man came out this week, and after getting my hands on it today, I sat down and did what I had promised myself I would, and read all 60 issues at one go.
I love you, Mr Vaughan.
What a ride! BKV tells his story as if he has all the time in the world, negotiating a huge supporting cast and a multitude of subplots with the skill of a Chess Grand Master. Needless to say, this series ranks up there with Vertigo’s finest – Moore’s run on Swamp Thing, Gaiman’s Sandman, Ennis’s Hitman and Preacher – the last one having been cited by Mr Vaughan as one of his inspirations for his approach to the series. It shows in the narration of the origin sequences of the characters, as we are given layers of their motivations and lives peeled away little by little towards the beginning, and the denouement that begins about halfway into the series, as small things fall into place. Red herrings and MacGuffins abound throughout, because this series is in part a mystery, or rather, a series of mysterious events unfolding one after the other. When I read issue 1 again today, I was struck by how much of groundwork Vaughan lays down in the very first issue, something Ennis did not do in Preacher until the end of the first arc.
As the series draws to a close, there are single issues devoted to tying up loose ends to EVERY SINGLE subplot and character that was introduced, I kid you not. The most important MacGuffin is revealed, quickly followed by one of the saddest moments in recent comics. The ending to issue 58 – mother of God, Vaughan, how could you??
There was something I had been agonizing over the last couple of months – what if the payoff, the ending to this great series is something that completely pissed all over the reader? The cover to issue 60 really freaked me out, because it can be interpreted in a very very nasty fashion. But you know what? The last issue was Perfect. The last panel actually had me gaping at the page for quite some time and just trying hard not to tear up. I am really really glad that I didn’t read anything at all about where the series was going and avoided all the buzz until today – it helped. A lot.
And oh, let me not give Brian K Vaughan all the credit – it was in equal parts the contribution of the co-creator and penciller Pia Guerra and inker Jose Marzan Jr, supported by occasional guest artists Goran Sudzuka and Paul Chadwick. One of the coolest things about the book is how the art looked remarkably consistent throughout, even with the guest artists around. I suspect Jose Marzan Jr has to be given credit for that, for it was his inking that was the constant all throughout these sixty issues. Major brownie points also to the cover artists who designed such memorable paintings – starting from JG Jones on the initial 20-odd issues, Aaron Wiesenfeld on some of the middle ones and then series regular Massimo Carnivale.
I know you guys are busy and shit with your life and work and your families and about how precious your time is and how you cannot be spending too much money on buying graphic novels, but you know what? Give up a day of your life and read this series. You will be glad you did.
I am about to leave for Assam tonight on a longish vacation. No work for quite a few days, whew. No internet access there, so probably will check my mail once every couple of days. I shudder to think of the art deals I will miss in that time, considering the kind of discounts that come up during the holiday season. But hey, I had already decided that the year’s last art purchase is done, so I should be ok. No, really.
It’s nearly been two years since I went home. Plans to go there early this year were scuttled because of the US trip. Am eager to see how Guwahati has changed from the time I went home last. A lot of Evil-Relative Visits are in the offing, and also a family wedding. *sigh* There go my plans of doing a Pinky Violence Movie Marathon during the period.
Which brings to mind the two-movie marathon nine of us did at the private theatre in Cinema Paradiso recently ( yes, technically two movies can hardly be called a marathon, but bear with me, huh? ), and watched The Triplets of Belleville – a French animation movie that SCREAMS to be watched. Please, please, if you have not seen The Triplets of Belleville yet, go and do so. Right frickin’ now. And followed it up with a Spanish movie called Di Que Si, which turned out to be a Hindi-movie-made-in-Spain. And of course, we came back home and had to follow up the evening’s proceedings with a Korean movie….
And that reminds me, how many of these do you have?
And I finished off the volumes of Torpedo I got from my friend in the USA. What a great comic! Luca Torelli, the eponymous torpedo ( slang for ‘hitman’ in the 1920s) in the series is a bastard of the first order. He’s a rare antiprotagonist – I don’t know if I have to root for Luca as he goes around dispatching his hits and his enemies, or if I ought to feel sympathetic towards him the numerous times he finds himself with the short end of the stick, or be repulsed by his misogynistic actions and outright unapologetic villainy. Sanchez Abuli writes these stories, each of them a couple of pages long, mostly unrelated other than the lead character and his sidekick, Rascal, as the two cut a swathe in the crime scene of New York in the roaring 20’s. There are occasional flashback stories, that illuminate Torpedo’s life and aspects of his character and his parentage – these lead to some moments of great emotional resonance. I read volumes 1,3,5,6 and 7 out of 15 published volumes, and they were consistently good. And the art…sigh.
So let’s talk about the artist, Jordi Bernet. He’s a Spanish artist, and a year ago, I hadn’t heard about him. And then, one day, I read a bunch of Torpedo scans and the art looked like someone had taken the meanness of a Joe Kubert figure and the dynamism of Alex Toth and the drop-dead gorgeousness of Dan DeCarlo. Which is another way of saying that his work was effing brilliant. His layouts blow out so-called giants of the American comicbook industry out of the water. You can see his influence in Risso’s work, the same way you can see the origins of his style in Kubert. His loose, fluid inking suits the gritty nature of the series perfectly. Alex Toth drew the first two stories, and dare I say it, Bernet’s art elevates the series to a new dimension altogether. By the fifth volume, we start getting the stories in colour – none of that murky American computer colouring shite, this is beautifully done. ( Though I will be damned if I knew who the colorist was – Bernet himself? ) And that brings me to another observation – most artists who look really good in black and white have some portion of their work downgraded by color – can you, for instance, think of From Hell in color? Jay Anacleto also comes to mind here, one of the most promising new masters of black and white I’ve seen in recent times, whose work positively glows in black and white but loses some of its sheen in color. Not so with Bernet – he recently did a series of chapters in the ongoing Jonah Hex series, and the art looks fresh and striking in full color.
I read Crooked Little Vein on Friday. It’s a short, nasty quest novel, filled with twenty-first century urban legends ( Warren Ellis claims most of what he wrote is based on things that really happened ) and a menagerie of over-the-top Ellis-ian characters. To an extent, (ok, putting on the critic hat here ), Ellis’s characters here are stock reproductions of his template cast – the hard-talking evil-hearted bossman character ( Think Dirk Anger, Spider J, Henry Bendix), the tough-as-nails, tech-friendly female lead ( Aleph, Channon/Yelena), the cokehead Presidential wannabe, the down-on-his-luck protagonist, right down to the resilient rat in Mike McGill’s office, the one that begins the proceedings by peeing in his coffee – it’s familiar territory for Ellis readers. But the good thing here is, the man does his job well ( as if there was a doubt ). The throwaway nuggets of information Ellis scatters in his narrative leave you gasping with laughter – provided you laugh at things like tantric sex with ostriches and godzilla bukkake and saline injections in one’s private parts. It interrupts the narrative only once, I thought, at the point where Michael meets another detective on a flight, who thinks it fit to describe his career experiences in vivid detail to our protagonist. Or maybe I just could not figure out what it is that Ellis was trying to do here – mock the Hammett/Chandler genre, or update it for the new century?
But hey, deep down, Crooked Little Vein is actually a mushy love story, so there.
I also reread the first volume of Powers yesterday. The deal with my copies of Powers is this – I bought ( at an insanely low price ) issues 7-37 of volume one some years ago. Read the lot then, but had to read the first six issues off scans. Then I bought volume one again, because Brady was offering all of the 37 issues at 50 cents each. Who can refuse such temptation? So I read the lot again yesterday, and it was so much fun. Because it’s a creator-owned series, Bendis and Oeming are not bound by any conventions of the superhero/detective genre – and the tale goes places. Trust me on that. Especially the Forever arc, which is an origin story of the superheroes in the series, which completely took me by surprise. Can’t wait to read vol 2, which I have not read before.
I installed an old favourite, Unreal Tournament on my machine. My ex-flatmate had downloaded quite a few maps and mods ( quite a few? More like ALL the mods available at that time on the internet) and it’s kind of a zone thing – firing up a practice session on Unreal tournament, with the bot-level set at ‘masterful’ ( associated skill level comment: “I hope you like to respawn.” ) Unreal Tournament used to be my favourite mode of release, right from the days I played it in demo mode in a window, because my celeron 333 MHz 32 MB machine just couldn’t run it. There were only two arenas available in the demo, and I loved playing them all day. The background music was kick-ass, the bots splattered with pretty realistic screams, and most importantly, the flak cannon was among the most satisfying weapons I’ve ever used in a deathmatch, producing the kind of squelshy virtual gore that’s made up for years of therapy.
I am in the middle of watching Ratatouille. Watching it in controlled doses, every day at dinner. I had completely lost it with Pixar after cars, but Brad Bird is someone I will never doubt again, I swear. What a beautiful movie! I missed out on seeing it in the theater because a bomb exploded in Hyderabad the day I had booked tickets and grrrrrrrgh, we didn’t go.