We had five consecutive holidays at the office. Monday was a working day, but someone sent a mail asking all of us team leads to petition for a holiday on that day, and we did so, earning countless blessings in return.
What did I do these five days? Nothing. Unless you count the fact that on Wednesday night, I finished the fifteenth level of the Punisher game after an undocumented number of being killed and respawned and killed again, and am now onto the last level, called “Ryker’s Island”. In other news, inspite of a 256 MB graphics card, Half-Life 2 refuses to run on my machine. Does it require more than 1024*768 resolution to run by default? My monitor ( which happens to be moccacino‘s monitor), was bought just before the last tyrannosaurus rex on earth forgot to breathe and brought about premature extinction on himself, ergo, low-res. GTA San Andreas does run, though, but I don’t want to play it before I complete 100% of Vice City. What? I didn’t tell you? Of course I haven’t completed Vice City! I am a busy man. (Oh wait, that kind of negates the first two lines of this paragraph.)
The kind potnuru agreed to bring along two items from my amazon wishlist on his recent trip to India, and he also agreed to bring them along from Hyderabad to Bangalore. The items in question happen to be the humongous graphic novels Locas by Jaime Hernandez and Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories by Gilbert ‘Beto’ Hernandez. Two brothers, both amazing storytellers, two hardcover publications collecting ten years of stories published in the indie comic called Love and Rockets. I had one of Gilbert’s short fiction collection called Fear of Comics from an eBay sale ( autographed, too, hyuk) and one of Jaime’s, called Death of Speedy – needless to say, I did cartwheels when I heard of both these books coming out sometime in 2004, completist bastard that I am. It’s impossible to get complete runs of the L&R comics, as far as I know, and the early issues go for about 50-60$ each. Have begun reading Palomar, which is the story of a village, and hence has innumerable characters to keep track of. The cool thing is that Beto includes proper pronounciation guides for all the characters as footnotes – I didn’t know a Latin American character named Jesus would be pronounced “Hey-sooz”, for instance.
First pages of Locas and Palomar, and drawing samples of both the brothers…
But honestly speaking, I have NOT read too many of his Batman stories. What I have read are his Green Lantern Corps stories – the run that began sometime in 1984 in Green Lantern, which later morphed to the GL Corps. I was absolutely blown, I tell you, by the premise of not one, but TEN Green Lanterns who come to Earth ( I mean, one GL is supposed to monitor a galaxy – what are ten of them doing on a Mostly Harmless planet as ours?) There was this cartoon-animal story of Ch’pp, a chipmunky Green Lantern who’s the last survivor of his planet along with his arch-enemy, an old villain whose name I forget, but I remember getting extremely emotional about the story. Things start getting interesting when Kilowog, the biggest and toughest of the alien GLs begins to take an interest in Communism and permanently emigrates to the USSR. Which gave us this iconic cover by Joe Staton, who also did the rest of the artwork on the series.