{"id":798,"date":"2008-04-21T18:41:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-21T18:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2008\/04\/nothing-much-really\/"},"modified":"2008-04-21T18:41:00","modified_gmt":"2008-04-21T18:41:00","slug":"nothing-much-really","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2008\/04\/nothing-much-really\/","title":{"rendered":"Nothing much, really"},"content":{"rendered":"

Venus Hum is a band that has made me extremely happyall of last month. The songs ‘Turn Me Around’ and ‘Pink Champagne’ from their 2006 album The Colors in the Wheel<\/i> has been on a continuous loop in my playlist. Wonderfully enough, someone just uploaded all their albums today, including an EP where the band does covers of Christmas songs. I have a feeling that ‘Silent Night’ is going to add itself to my repeat-until-ears-bleed list like, right now. <\/p>\n

What else? Reading early volumes of Usagi Yojimbo<\/i>, The Complete Bite Club<\/i>, Scott Pilgrim<\/i> ( about which I talk about in my next Rolling Stone column), Criminal<\/i> and Path of the Assassin<\/i>. The early Usagi stories are unbelievably good – hard to find a creator like Stan Sakai, at the top of his game all throughout his career. I nearly teared up while rereading Homecoming part 2, the first Usagi story I ever read. It was printed in this comicbook called Critters<\/i>, which I found in a bookshop in Guwahati. I think I vaguely remember passing over a copy of Miracleman #1 to buy this issue and Neal Adams’ Skateman # 1 ( obviously, the MM copy had disappeared the next time I was there), and reread both of them to bits. This story apparently is the first time Usagi’s childhoold sweetheart Mariko is introduced, along with her husband Kenichi and son Jotaro. <\/p>\n

Bite Club<\/i> is vampires embroiled in organized crime, Godfather-level conspiracies, and loads of sex; plus it has the hottest female protagonist I’ve been introduced to in quite some time – Risa Del Toro.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It’s written by Howard Chaykin, and touches upon themes similar to those in Chaykin’s earlier Black Kiss<\/i>, one of the most explicit comics to be published in the mainstream comicbook market in the eighties. The artwork is not by Chaykin, though, David Hahn, an Oregon-based artist, whose simplistic style reminds me of the work of Bruce Timm and Cameron Stewart. The series was published as two miniseries – Bite Club<\/i> and Bite Club: Vampire Crimes Unit<\/i>, both of which are collected in this TPB volume. <\/p>\n

Ed Brubaker and Sean Philip’s Criminal<\/i> is the logical progression to the duo’s earlier noir series Sleeper<\/i>. While Sleeper<\/i> was superhero crime fiction, meant to appeal to the continuity crowd, Criminal<\/i> has no cape fixation, and concentrates on telling stories of capers gone wrong, of individuals with secret pasts, dark sides, and dead-end lives. I am on issue 7, in the middle of the second arc, called ‘Lawless’, and I am going slow because these are the last three issues I have. The series has gotten a really good boost by word-of-mouth and positive response from readers, and has won Eisner award for ‘Best New Series’. One of the cool things you get with the original issues ( I don’t know if the TPB has them) is articles at the back, by folks like Warren Ellis and David Goyer, about noir books and movies they like. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Apart from that, nothing much really. I keep telling myself to be patient about the Indian postal service, and I tell myself that all is not lost just because the last Born Again page is sold out. I live.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Venus Hum is a band that has made me extremely happyall of last month. The songs ‘Turn Me Around’ and ‘Pink Champagne’ from their 2006 album The Colors in the Wheel has been on a continuous loop in my playlist. Wonderfully enough, someone just uploaded all their albums today, including an EP where the band […]<\/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-798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798","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=798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}