{"id":535,"date":"2005-01-10T20:38:00","date_gmt":"2005-01-10T20:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2005\/01\/materialistic-things-to-look-forward-to-in-the-immediate-future\/"},"modified":"2005-01-10T20:38:00","modified_gmt":"2005-01-10T20:38:00","slug":"materialistic-things-to-look-forward-to-in-the-immediate-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2005\/01\/materialistic-things-to-look-forward-to-in-the-immediate-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Materialistic Things to Look Forward to in the immediate future."},"content":{"rendered":"

The last book I read last year was Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and The Birth of the Comic Book<\/i> by Gerard Jones, a splendidly written, very unbiased look at the foundations of the Comic book industry in America. It’s the perfect real-life counterpart to the world Michael Chabon wrote about in Adventures of Kavalier and Klay<\/i>. <\/p>\n

The first book I read this year was Andrew Vachss’s Batman: The Ultimate Evil<\/i> – and I must say I did not enjoy it as much as I had hoped I would. Personally, I found it very hard to equate Vachss’s morally bleak, take-no-prisoners-and-shoot-to-kill attitude with Batman’s black-and-white world. <\/p>\n[A lot of people might think that Batman is this tortured character with shades of gray, but I disagree. Bruce Wayne might be a driven individual,obsessed with his crusade against crime, but sixty years of corporate emasculation (It’s DC Comics I am referring to, folks, not Wayne enterprises. A corporate entity that refuses to tamper with the status quo, and paints anything controversial and un-Batmanlike as an Elseworlds story) has finally convinced me that there cannot be anything grey about a character who refuses to kill, regardless of the ramifications his coda brings to the people around him. Batman, unless something radically different is done to the character’s personality, is the embodiment of a man who spends his life hitting his head against a brick wall. ]\n

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Superman<\/a>, and Frank Miller and Jim Lee’s Batman and Robin<\/a>.
\n
\n
\nI adore Frank Quitely’s artwork.I don’t want to blather on about the mechanics of good artwork and why I find some artists uninteresting, but Quitely’s work, which I sampled the first time in this standalone graphic novel called “JLA: Earth 2”, is just so elegant – the kind of dignified aloofness he grants to his superheroes ( observe Lex Luthor in this sample on the left). Over the past year, I have been trying to get my hands on Quitely’s works. His work on New X-Men ( again, written by Morrison, part of it was reprinted in India by Gotham) was good, though much of the impact was taken away by the rotating art-teams on the series. Getting Flex Mentallo<\/i> was out of the question – the four-issue miniseries is now a very high-priced eBay item because of DC not reprinting the series ( added to the fact that there was a small controversy associated with it).The Authority<\/i> redefined cool – Quitely’s rendering of Jacob Kurtzberg, the pseudo-Avengers blew me away, seriously. <\/p>\n

\"Emma<\/p>\n

He also drew a small segment of Endless Nights, Gaiman’s hardcover collection of short stories related to the Sandman mythos.<\/p>\n

\"Endless<\/p>\n

Undoubtedly, the best example of Quitely’s work is to be found in the three-issue miniseries WE3<\/b><\/a>, again written by Morrison, and the last issue of which is due to be released on January 19th. <\/p>\n

So I find out that he’s doing Superman<\/i>, I say “celebration time, buddies!”<\/p>\n

The Sin City movie by Robert Rodriguez, which seems to be coming out quite well, as the trailer shows. I did an inventory check a couple of weeks ago, and I seem to have all the Sin City miniseries ( the original comicbooks, I mean, not the scans) except for Family Values<\/i> and A Dame to Kill For<\/i>. Ah well. Getting them should not be too much of a problem, right?<\/p>\n

Package from Carthik in the mail.<\/p>\n

Package of 5 Cerebus Graphic novels in the mail. ( three of them signed by Dave Sim, heh) This should be here in the next ten days.<\/p>\n

The Collected Bone One-Volume Edition in the mail, hopefully by the end of the week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The last book I read last year was Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and The Birth of the Comic Book by Gerard Jones, a splendidly written, very unbiased look at the foundations of the Comic book industry in America. It’s the perfect real-life counterpart to the world Michael Chabon wrote about in Adventures of Kavalier […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}