I read Good Omens for the first time just after it was published by the Science Fiction Book Club in the nineties (I was young, poor, and couldn't afford hard covers, so I bought the SFBC hard covers which were slightly smaller, slightly less robust, but were hard covers of a sort). I was, at the time, a big Fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books (the couple that had come out) and was unfamiliar with Neil Gaiman (who hadn't done much to be familiar with at that time). I gave the SFBC hardcover to my sister and bought a paperback copy for myself a few years later. And I just recently re-read that one a few months ago.
One thing that has always intrigued me about co-written books (Terry Pratchett's current Long Earth/Long Mars series is another one) is "who wrote which bits?" Neil Gaiman (who I am much, much more familiar with now that he has written many other books that I've read and enjoyed) has answered my questions regarding the Good Omens collaboration in the announcement of a 6-part BBC radio broadcast of a Hitchhiker's-like dramatization of Good Omens (okay, so I'm woefully behind the times, but I'm on the left coast of America, not in England - so I try to keep up with this stuff as well as I can).
So, for those of you who don't like to follow links, here's the gist: Neil decided to become the Douglas Adams/Terry Pratchett of humourous Horror (SciFi and Fantasy having already been claimed by the aforementioned authors) and wrote Good Omens. This was before he was anybody so he gave it to Terry to read. Terry read it and re-wrote it, pretty much doubling its length. And then they got together and re-rewrote it some more together. Along the way, characters were transformed, renamed and added by Terry to the story. Specific characters are identified by Neil in his article, so if you want to know more, follow the link.
In other news, I've read a few books and sold a few comics. I gave up on CraigsList soon after receiving several extreme low-ball offers for the whole collection. It's possible the total of everything I sell will end up being less than what these guys were offering, but I'm willing to take my chances.
I was going to mention the similarity of a couple of books I'd just read (Anathem and The Long Mars), but it's Christmas Eve and I've got stuff to do. So maybe later.
update - 12/30/14
Here are MP3s of the 6 epsiodes. I've tried to edit them to be listenable, but let me know if you listen to any of them and they have odd noises in the recording, longs gaps of silence, or any other problems.
Many moons ago, I started reading comic books. It all started with a friend's comic book called Trollords, published by a long deceased company called Tru Studios. I don't know why I chose that book from his collection to read, but something about it appealed to me. The trolls in the title are three bumbling rip-offs straight from the Three Stooges - hair styles, mannerisms and everything. It was silly, but introspective at the same time, and completely unlike any of the comics (Archie, Spider-man, etc) that I'd come across before. And I was hooked. Comics went from being a disposable distraction purchased to fill the time during the drive on family vacations to something I cared about and kept safe with my other prized possessions.
I'd never set foot in a comic book store until my late teens. But now that I'd been bitten by the comic bug, I started popping into the local comic shops to see what else they had. Most of what I found was pretty non-inspiring, but every now and then I would come across a title that I really found interesting. For much of the 80s and 90s, my comic collection grew very slowly. I picked up a few books here and there, but didn't really buy much.
And then Dark Horse started publishing Star Wars comics, beginning with Dark Empire. I'd seen the Marvel Star Wars comics from the seventies/early eighties and had been unimpressed. But these Dark Horse comics were worlds apart from Marvel's stuff. They had painted card stock covers (beautifully rendered by Dave Dorman, who does far too few covers these days). The interiors were less polished, but still beautifully done water colors, not the crudely inked stuff that so many big publishers churned out and continue to churn out to this day. And they followed this title with a bunch of other Star Wars titles, most of which expanded the Star Wars universe and didn't just rehash the same stuff we'd already seen in the movies.
I discovered many other Dark Horse titles (the previous post is about another one I love, Conan) that were interesting and always found myself more drawn to the independent section of the comic shop than to the Marvel/DC section. So that's a vast majority of what I picked up over the years. Even the big two managed to publish a few titles that piqued my interest (though most were later in the 90s and early....man, you'd think there would be a cool way to say 2000s by now). In the last few years, I've become much less selective, so a lot of books I wouldn't have looked at twice in the nascence of my comic-buying, are now collected in their entirety. But nearly all of them have some aspect that did or does appeal to me, so I don't feel cheated.
As I've indicated in posts from years past, I was for many years an enthusiastic attendee of the San Diego ComicCon. But I haven't been now for several years, due to the evolution of the Con to primarily a big media event (movies, TV, video games) and much less a place where you can meet the guy who writes/illustrates a favorite comic book. I've even found it increasingly difficult to fine retailers who stock any of the indie titles that I buy (when I have missed an issue or two in the series). Not to mention the crowds. Or the fact that you now have to buy your pass the day after the show ends to have any chance of getting a pass. In years past, I would wait in a moderately long line on the day I wanted to attend and get a one-day pass with ease. Those days are no more. So I stopped attending.
Also, over the past few years, with my increased appetite for so may different comics and my decreased time to devote to reading those comics, I accumulated a huge backlog of unread comics in my collection. I probably had over a thousand unread comics (that I wanted to read, but had never found the time) in my collection.
So I made a decision. I now had over 20 long boxes of comics, taking up space that I needed to store all the other stuff having a wife and kids leads you to acquire. And was continuing to buy comics that I might not ever even get around to reading. So I stopped. I spent many hours integrating the unread comics with the read comics (they had been stored in separate boxes so I would know which I hadn't read yet) and verifying the list I'd kept off the books in my collection was accurate. And I shopped it around to a couple of comic book retailers.
Big disappointment. Huge! I was offered a fraction of what I'd paid for the comics (cover value - not the few I'd picked up at premium prices). And told by several parties that this was reality. The titles I'd collected just aren't that marketable.
So I decided to just put up a CraigsList post with a small piece of the list and a link to a web page I created with the full list. I may stick a few of the books up on eBay if I don't get any real interest in the collection as a whole. Once I start putting books on eBay, it just makes it really hard to entertain offers for the collection in its entirety.
My expectations are low. But we'll see what happens.
What the...two posts within a week of one another? What's going on here?
Just after I posted all those scans from The Bloody Crown of Conan, I received an email about a new Dark Horse Conan comics adaptation that's coming out this month, Conan and the People of the Black Circle.
Here's Dark Horse's teaser for The People of the Black Circle:
Assassins, dark magic, and a beautiful noblewoman mean trouble for the Cimmerian barbarian unlike he's ever seen in this full-tilt escapade through the mountains of Afghulistan!
* Conan like you've never seen him”fully painted by Olivetti!
* A new miniseries set a decade after the Conan ongoing!
All this Conan stuff put me in the mood for reading some Conan comics, so I went to the longboxes of recent unread books (I'm up to three or four longboxes of comics that I haven't gotten to yet) and grabbed the recent issues of King Conan. I hadn't realized that the current King Conan books were actually adapting another story from The Bloody Crown of Conan, The Hour of the Dragon. Having recently read the actual Robert E Howard prose, I went back to the first issue and re-read the series (up to the fifth issue). Issue six, the final in the series, comes out soon. As always, there were a few people, places and scenes I had imagined differently in my own head. And a lot of the slow moving parts of the story are skipped altogether. But the comic adaptation is about as close as one would expect a comic (or movie) to be to the original. If you're not a comic book fan, but you are a Robert E Howard fan, the Dark Horse adaptations are definitely worth a look. This one especially.
Here are the covers for each of the issues of the comic adaptation (the actual cover scans as well as uncluttered preview versions of a couple of them).
And unlike most comic books that lure you in with gorgeous painted covers and then let you down with abysmal interior art, this book really delivers. Here are a few of my favorite pages from the first 5 issues.
I expect more great things with the adaptation of The People of the Black Circle, but the teaser pages and cover have me wondering already if the artist/writer were familiar with Robert E Howard's Hyborian geography. This story takes place in Howard's version of India and the middle east. And while the turbans and the dot on the princess's forehead seem appropriate, the princess's features aren't very Indian, and the weird Darth Maul-looking guys on the cover were nowhere in the story I read.
Judge for yourself.
I am digging that last teaser page, though. Olivetti captures the essence of Conan there.
And on a completely unrelated note, I'm still really digging the Protopage "start" page I've set up. I've abandoned everything but Protopage for my bookmarks, RSS feeds, etc., so I hope they don't disappear in the night. I haven't been able to find anything about their business model, so I'm not sure how they're paying the bills with freeloaders like me using their stuff.
