I got some of my comicbook artwork framed. The Transmet page, the Sergio Aragones Groo pinup and the Harry Roland Vampirella pin-up. The framer was extremely professional and knew his stuff thoroughly. Decided on a black frame and black acid-free matte around all the pages. The results were really cool, I must say, and I could hardly contain my excitement after putting them up on the wall for display.

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Munnabhai and Circuit to be comic book franchise.

Freaking idiots. Doesn’t the term “over-exposure” mean anything? I am trying to figure out if the comics will be in English, and if so, will they give Circuit an Irish brogue. Local flavour and all that. You do not get a Mumbaiyya accent in ENGLISH, you numbskulls. ( Am I perturbed? Do I sound perturbed? I am not perturbed, no sir.)

Andrew Arnold’s Time.Comix column comes to an end. Goddamn, I loved reading the guy’s recommendations, and he was one of the truly balanced reviewers who knew not only how to review a graphic novel, but also which graphic novels deserve to be talked about. Andrew, without your column, I don’t think I would have ever bought Persepolis, or picked up Buddha when it was first released in India with a 600-plus price-tag. I might not have agreed with all of his views, but I certainly respected them.

Of course, all his past columns lie archived on Time.com, but…damn it, I will miss the regular articles. I will miss ticking out the entries in the Best of the Year write-ups, the ones I have read. I hope Andrew Arnold contintues to write about graphic novels somewhere.

I feel like gushing, and you will listen to me.

I am sick of fantasy trilogies, tetralogies and pentalogies. I am sick of sixteen year olds writing books about naive young men and women who have a destiny to fulfill and evil Dark Lords who rule the world and can only be defeated by…The One. I am totally bored of reading made-up names with an abundance of Z’s and X’s and Q’s in them, names that no sane person can pronounce and no parent would bestow on their children. Narratives about new worlds followed by pages and pages describing the history and geography of the areas and the day to day life of the people staying there and ….let me just say, that Tolkien’s legacy to the fantasy genre is a little too overpowering. Most fantasy narratives are more about building a new world, in which a familiar story unfolds, rather than an engaging narrative that makes you want to read faster. The end becomes clear by the time you are onto the fourth page – you know the Dark One will be defeated, and your emotional investment in the book remains confined to finding out whether the protagonist will live or die at the end of it all.

The Watch books – in case you haven’t figured out yet – also form a tetralogy. They came out in Russian, written by a gentleman named Sergei Lukyanenko and so far, out of the four books, two have been translated into English and released in the US and the UK (with minor translation differences), and I have had the good fortune of reading both of them. I am willing to lay down my art-reserved money for the next two volumes without hesitation. The Watch books are good. There is a reason why they are bestsellers in Russia, and I think, with slightly better publicity, they can be bestsellers here as well.

Each book seems to be comprised of three or four stories – call them sub-volumes if you will. When you read them, the stories appear quite disjointed, dealing with the myriad characters involved in the storyline, but towards the end of each of the main books, you find out the interlinking between them. And here Mr Lukyanenko does a splendid job of twisting multiple viewpoints into a cohesive whole. Like any other fantasy story, there are rules in the world Lukyanenko creates, and there are also secrets that bubble to the surface as you read on, but in no way do they affect the logical consistency of the world, and they aren’t deus ex machinae for the writer to wriggle out of a corner he has trapped himself into.

The premise – there are Others who live among humans, lower-ranking ones such as vampires and werewolves, and high ranking Magicians and Wizards and Shape-shifters. They derive their powers from the realm referred to as the Twilight, which is something like a different plane of reality which the Others can tap into. The higher one’s rank is, the deeper the level of Twilight one can tap into, and consequently, the greater the power. There are the good guys, those who serve the cause of Light – they treat human beings as nurturers of the world and believe in free will. And there are the Dark Ones, the Others who derive their magic by preying on humans, and who believe humans are resources that can be used to obtain greater power. The irony of the story lies here – it’s ultimately the Dark Ones who are closer to human behaviour and the concept of actual individualism, and the Light ones, with their utopian ways of thought being the ones more removed from reality. And unfortunately for both these sides, there is The Treaty, which prevents them from actively interfering in human affairs. For the Light Ones, it means that they cannot bring about world peace even if they wanted to, because every bit of magic spent for the cause of good has to be balanced by an equal usage of power for the Dark Ones. Stalemate.

Or maybe not. Because the organisations that monitor the lives of Dark Others Light Others – called the Night Watch and the Day Watch respectively – are also involved in a game of conspiracies and counter-moves orchestrated to subversively twist events into their favour. Gesar, the head of the Night Watch and the most powerful Light magician on the planet and Zabulon, his counterpart in the Day Watch are the master-planners in this game, and more often than not, their plans clash with the idealism of their subordinates.

The first story in Day Watch is about a beautiful Dark Witch named Alisa, who was once Zabulon’s lover and was cast off by him following a botched operation, which was detailed in the first book Night Watch. Alisa and the rest of her team suffer immense casualties in a new field operation, one of them being the complete loss of Alisa’s abilities to tap into the Twilight. But after the incident, Zabulon shows renewed interest in her, and sends her away from Moscow to a youth camp to recuperate, where Alisa slowly leeches off the emotions of the young girls around her to regain her powers. She meets Igor, another camp counsellor, and her interest towards him is quickly reciprocated. Love and all that. Until she discovers something odd, and finds out just how the Day Watch functions.

The second story is also told in the first person, with occasional jumps to third person in the narrative – it’s about Vitaliy, a Dark Magician from outside Moscow who cannot remember anything about his past life, and who slowly finds out that he might very well be the most powerful magician, Dark or otherwise in Moscow. A number of run-ins with the Moscow unit of the Night Watch makes him a suspect in a couple of casualties, but nobody can prove anything. The Night Watch is also concerned about a magical artifact named Fafnir’s Talon, which is intended to upset the balance between Light and Dark – with an unknown tip-off that leads to the artifact being smuggled into the city. Anton Gorodetsky, one of the key characters in Night Watch plays a major role in this storyline, Anton’s relationship with the Watch is put to the test when Zabulon approaches him with an offer that might potentially help him get back together with Svetlana, a Light Sorceress.

The third story is the one that brings the threads hanging around from the first two stories together. All through the book, we have been given hints – what role does Fafnir’s talon play in the complex plot? Why is Edgar, a second-level Dark Magician chosen to be Zabulon’s second-in-command, superseding other, more experienced Dark Magicians? How are the four Regin brothers, who brought the Talon into Moscow, connected to the scenario? What role does Igor have to play? Anton Gorodetsky and Edgar have to travel to Prague, to meet with the Inquisition, the body that watches over the Treaty, and defend the actions of the watches. Alliances are made, secrets are divulged, and we learn new things the nature of Death for an Other. The culmination is low-key, yet glorious.

What totally pwns in the series so far – the seamless mapping of the world of the Others to our world, a world where two World Wars have actually been fought and bad things happen to people every other day. I also loved the way old myths ( the story of Sigurd and Fafnir, for instance) are cast in a new light. Anton Gorodetsky, the cynical Light Magician, central to the narrative since the first book becomes the reader, in a way, a character whose enquiry into the motives and nature of Dark and Light becomes synonymous with our own efforts to bring the pieces together. The translation seems to be bang-on, no half-baked theatricality in the lines or the monologues. I know for a fact, having seen the first couple of minutes of Night Watch, that the movie diverts quite a lot from the book, and as always, I am glad I read this.

And now to wait for Dusk Watch. In the meantime, I suggest you non-fantasy-loving folks go and check out both Night Watch and Day Watch. They’re worth your time and money.

For those who came in late, or have been living under a rock the past two decades…

Once upon a time, two gentlemen and comicbook enthusiasts named Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were playing sketch-a-superhero in their fledgling studio. They were broke, they were unemployed and they were completely out of ideas. One of them ( nobody is too sure who) sketched a snarling Turtle in a goofy mask, standing on two legs, and wrote the words “mutant turtle” underneath. The other was amused, and immediately added two nunchucks in the characters’ hands and the word “ninja” to the name of the character. Both of them cracked up – but the idea remained, and morphed itself into a multi-million-dollar industry.

It was 1984, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had arrived.

At the height of the Turtles phenomenon, Eastman, one of the richest people in the comicbook industry, was also a comic art collector, amassing quantities of art by the masters – Bisley, Wrightson, Miller, Windsor-Smith, to name a few. He later became the publisher of the magazine Heavy Metal and went on to collect more art from fantasy artists like Milo Manara, Rich Corben and Luis Royo. Let’s just say that Eastman was a collector who had the money to indulge himself, and he did, in style. ( Eastman also married porn star Julie Strain, by the way)

The artwork to the first issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the comicbook that launched this empire, and went on to influence the whole independent comic scene of the eighties ( Cerebus came first, of course, but it did not have the same level of pervasive influence as the Turtles) was posted on Eastman’s site, with an asking price of 1 million dollars. Which was another way of saying “Not for sale.” Comic art prices haven’t really crossed 100000$ – the most that was offered was 95 thousand for a Romita Amazing Spider-man cover, just last year. Eastman’s asking price was ludicrous, and quite a few collectors would go and salivate over the pages on display.

But last week, this was put up for sale on eBay, with an initial price of 20000$ and a reserve price of 250000$, which was met some time back. There have been 41 bids so far, and the amount stands at 250000$. Not only is this a high price, it’s also the highest amount ever bid on a zero feedback eBay user. Phew! Four days to go before the auction ends, and prices escalate like mad in the last couple of minutes of an auction. I am betting it will cross 500,000$. I am also betting that this is a publicity stunt for the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, which is due to release this year.

And the latest on the 300 hysteria is the Only Piece of Original Frank Miller Art associated with the comic that has been put up for sale. Seems the seller participated in a contest in 1998, the first prize for which was the five issues of 300 signed by Miller and Varley and a piece of original art by Frank Miller, a 11 by 19 inch pin-up of Leonidas. He’s put up all of them for sale now, and the art piece is up to 4202$, with a day to go.

A member of the art mailing list that I frequent posted a message recently about a couple of comics that he wanted to give away to overseas comicbook fans, so long as they covered the postage charges. I wrote in, and he immediately shipped them over. A couple of weeks passed, and today the package arrived at the office. I am now the proud possessor of…. Continue reading →

Reading Day Watch – going very slow, and am totally loving the twists that come with it. The cover of the book is a terrible photographic collage, with a male model, wearing sunglasses with a flashlight in hand. ( Remove your sunglasses if it’s dark around you, moron!) There’s an owl on the cover as well, and I know one of the characters is an owl, but that character appeared in Night Watch, and doesn’t even make an appearance so far ( I am about half-way into the book). The book is in first-person, just like NW, but the people speaking are different – seemingly-minor characters from the first book. Anton Gorodetsky, the protagonist of the first book does appear, but the important point is – this book is about the enemy, the Bad Guys, so to speak, especially if you were rooting for the Night Watch before. But I am still surprised at Lukyanenko’s world-building audacity, he’s managed not to contradict himself even once, with all the rules that he has set up in the world of The Others.

It gives me great pleasure to know that Dusk Watch, the third book in the tetralogy, is coming out in June. Day Watch is also being released in the US at about that time, I believe.

You know how awesome it feels to have a smashing three-day weekend and to come into the office and find out you got an art package in the mail? An art package that was sent just four days ago from the US, at that.

Rahman’s Water soundtrack has been out for quite in music-stores for sometime now. Just after the Oscar nominations were announced, in fact. I had gotten the German release of the OST thanks to fus, and at the back, it had “Not for sale in the Indian subcontinent”. Well, the Academy awards seem to be a great plus-point for the Indian authorities to realise that – you know, the movie might actually be good. So they’ve finally released the OST, and the movie’s out too, I guess. Or will be, soon. Check out the soundtrack, Rahman named it his best effort so far.

Also out is the Pray For Me Brother single, in a barebones CD and a special edition that has a free DVD. Strangely enough, I was not at all tempted to buy it when I saw it in Music World, and good thing I didn’t. Chandru already had a copy, and I took it home to burn check it out, and the song is just so-so. The lyrics really make me cringe. What’s it with the terrible rap that Blaaze sings? I mean, is it mandatory for a song aimed at an international audience to have a rap piece in the middle? And what’s with the video anyways? Why does it end with an about-to-seperate couple making up tearfully after seeing Rahman in the middle of the road? What’s that got to do with world poverty? “Bharatbala has got a thing for wind machines”, Rahman giggles in the interview on the bonus DVD, referring to the shots in the desert where ARR, dressed up in jeans and jacket, puts up his hands in the air ( like he just doesn’t care) and lip-syncs terribly to the song while huge winds blow sand in his face.

Instead of picking it up, I bought a CD of Ishqa Ishqa, which is now rebranded as Gulzar’s Ishqa Ishqa, maybe because in its earlier release as Rekha Bharadwaj’s debut album, it didn’t really burn up the charts. Rekha Bharadwaj ( not to confused with Reena Bharadwaj, she of the Meenaxi: Tale of 3 Cities fame) is Vishal Bharadwaj’s wife, whose husky voice made ‘Namak’ and ‘Lakad’ the pleasure-point-stimulators of last year, and this album has Gulzar’s lyrics, her voice and Vishal’s compositions, all for 145 Rs. What’s not to like? Interestingly, I read the liner notes to find out that the dancing lady on the cover is Manjari Chaturvedi, who performs Kathak to Sufi music, and I attended one of her concerts in Hyderabad last year.

Moser Baer has bought rights to quite a few Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi movies and is bringing out DVDs for 34 INR and VCDs for 28 INR. Truly mind-boggling prices, and offers stiff competition to the shops at National Market and their ilk. I bought the DVD of Armaan last night, just because I could not find the soundtrack to the film anywhere, and played it for a bit. The discs seem to be double-layer ones with very good picture quality, points to Moser Baer. Has chapter and song breaks, one more points. No audio options, minus one. No subtitles, which totally kills the reason why I would want to buy a non-Hindi title. Also, there is the irritating “moser baer” watermark on the top left of the screen, pretty common in legit Indian DVDs, though I think the DVD spec prohibits it. Collection’s not really up to par as of now, but I am assuming other companies will have to slash prices to keep up. Bueno!