As I've been out shopping for Halloween costumes (for myself or the rugrats), I've noticed a distinct trend in the majority of costumes out there: 1) they're for women and B) they're becoming more and more provocative. Take this advertisement from Party City that came in the mail, for example.
Even the costumes for young girls are becoming more sexualized.
But slutty costumes are really nothing new - Halloween has long been the one night a year that women could let out their inner-exhibitionist. The twisting of classic children's story characters into sexed-up costume-fodder is a little bit newer, though. And it's more wide-spread than just Halloween costumes, it's also a phenomenon in the comic book industry, though it's not especially widespread...yet.
Don't be surprised when you see Little Red Riding Hood looking all grown-up in an adult HBO mini-series in the near future.
Speaking of comic books...
I'm going to take a break from nattering on about books I've read and babble about comics instead.
Since I've been talking about Terry Pratchett so much recently, I'll start out with Alex Ross's Project Superpowers. It has nothing to do with Terry's writing, novels, characters or anything else Pratchett-related, but issue 6 (the most recent and almost the final issue, I think) did feature a quote attributed to Terry Pratchett, which I thought was cool. I'm not sure what the origin of the quote is, but it does sound like something Terry would write.
"Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness."
As you might expect from the title of the book, Project Superpowers (published by Dynamite Entertainment) is a book about superheroes. But not just any old superheroes - it's about superheroes from the "Golden Age" of comics (1930s-1940s) who are all but forgotten today. The superheroes aren't any of the big names you'll recognize (these aren't DC or Marvel creations) - there's no Superman, Batman or Ironman here. Instead, Alex Ross has resurrected a bunch of small-publisher creations of a bygone era and rudely awakened them in the modern world.
I don't normally think much of Superhero comics (Batman is one occasional exception, when a skilled guest artist steps in), but the artwork in these books is very well done (Alex Ross only does the covers, but the interiors are still eye-catching) and the storyline, while not too far from the typical superhero line, is engaging enough. The writing does have its moments, and reflects another book Alex ross was involved in about fifteen years ago, Marvels.
"In World War II we were heroes. There were no doubts of this. No one questioned who we were or the things we stood for. That will end today.
"We will strike today at the fuel source of the modern world. We strike at the crutch that holds up corruption and allows it to walk unfettered in the world that, at best, only limps along. We attack the bureaucracies of nations.
"If only to protect their essence, their people. We will be called villains. We will become targets from this day forward, the outrage of unknowing representatives of hidden corruption. Perhaps this is at the root of what it means to be a hero.
"That at some point, a hero must be misunderstood, must be hated, must be feared. Perhaps at that point, at that moment, they can finally do true good for the world. Free of accolades. Free of Spotlights. Free of the support of the masses of the world."
It also sounds a little like the "fine line between a villain and a hero" dialogue in the Batman or Spiderman movies....and it is a little like it, but not really.
If you're a fan of superhero comics, superhero movies or just comics in general, this is probably a book worth seeking out.
I was going to mention a couple of other comics I'm enjoying, but I've run out of steam.
I started reading The Graveyard Book the day after I finished Nation. Terry Pratchett is probably the only living author who would make me put Neil Gaiman's new book aside (if only temporarily).
While I was more-or-less in the dark about Nation, I had a pretty good idea what to expect from The Graveyard Book due to Neil posting his readings from the The Graveyard Book book tour (and having heard chapter seven read by Neil at Mysterious Galaxy during his Dangerous Alphabet book tour). The novel wasn't available at the time, but I did still manage to get a signed copy of the book later.
The Graveyard Book, chapter 1
I won't be quoting passages from the book this time. Why bother when you can hear the whole thing in Neil's own voice in video files? (For as long as Neil hosts them, anyway.)
The story is similar to many of Neil's others - dark settings, grim circumstances and somewhat scary but still noble characters abound. Unlike Terry's fun-filled-but-still-insightful storytelling, I can't think of any laugh-out-loud moments in The Graveyard Book, but that doesn't mean I didn't thoroughly enjoy it. It was just a different kind of enjoyment.
Another nice feature is the illustrations by Dave McKean throughout the book (not on every page or even every other page - just sprinkled here and there).
And speaking of Neil, I read another book several months ago that he co-wrote with Michael Reaves called...
Interworld
My first impression of Interworld was that is wasn't really very Neil-like, so I suspect that most of the writing chores went to Michael Reaves. There were passages that read like Neil's other stuff, but most of it was more like a young-adult novel: overly simplistic and incautiously worded. Then again, that could have been by design. The target audience may have really been young teens and television executives (the Afterword will explain that part).
AFTERWORD
Michael and Neil first started talking about Interworld in about 1995, when Michael was making adventure cartoon serials at DreamWorks and Neil was in London working on the Neverwhere TV series. We thought it would make a fun television adventure. Then, as the nineties went on, we started trying to explain our idea to people, telling them about an organization entirely comprised of dozens of Jp/e/y Harkers, trying to preserve the balance between magic and science across an infinite number of possible realities, and we would watch their eyes glaze over. There were ideas you could get across to the kind of people who make television, we decided, and there were ideas you couldn't. Then as the nineties came to an end, one of us had an idea: Why didn't we write a novel? If we told the story, simply and easily, then even a television executive would be able to understand it. So one snowy day Michael came up to Neil's part of the world, carrying a computer, and while the winter weather howled we wrote this book.
Soon we learned that television executives don't read books either, and we sighed and went about our lives.
Interworld sat in the darkness for some years, but when, recently, we showed it to people, the people we showed it to thought other people might like to read it. So we brought it out of the darkness and polished it up. We hope you enjoyed it.
- Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves
2007
In my opinion, the Afterword sounds very unlike Neil. It has awkward first-to-third person transitions, odd past tense usage - yet it's presented as something at least co-written by Neil. Weird.
Even weirder is how Neil-like the Author's Note at the beginning of the book sounds in comparison.
This is a work of fiction. Still, given an infinite number of possible worlds, it must be true on one of them. And if a story set in an infinite number of possible universes is true in one of them, then it must be true in all of them. So maybe it's not as fictional as we think.
So if the Author's Note was Neil, but the Afterword and pages between were not...what else did Neil do in the book? Color me confused.
The story itself is a little like the TV show Sliders from several years back, but really...it's also not very much like Sliders at all. It's really more like Terry Pratchett's multiple-universe theory that is expounded upon in Nation, but not really explored beyond just the theory of multiple universes where everything does happen. It would make for entertaining TV or a film, but it's hard to imagine it as anything but animation (Clone Wars is breaking new ground for animation - maybe they could go that route).
I picked up Terry Pratchett's latest, Nation, last Friday. I knew it wasn't a Discworld novel, so I wasn't sure what to expect. From the bits and pieces I'd heard before I finally got it, I thought it might even be non-fiction - which isn't really my favorite reading material. So I hoped it would be as fun to read as everything else terry has written...but I didn't know.
I started reading it on Sunday morning and finished on Monday afternoon - which is something that rarely happens anymore. It took me over a week to read Travel Team, and that book was 85 pages shorter (more about Travel Team later)...so that might clue you in about how I felt about Nation.
It's good. Really, really good.
The Discworld novels deal with serious issues in comical ways. It puts a big, silly fantasy wrapper over everything and - while the stories do make you think long and hard about real things - primarily they just entertain. That's not to say that Nation doesn't entertain. I laughed out loud several times as I was reading the book (which earned me a disapproving look from whoever happened to be in the room with me at the time). But there's no magic, there are no dragons and there's very little in the story that's not completely believeable. Everything in the story feels much more "real" than Terry's other novels. And much more introspective.
He could feel the hole inside, blacker and deeper than the dark current. Everything was missing. Nothing was where it should be. He was here on this lonely shore, and all he could think of was the silly questions that children ask...Why do things end? How do they start? Why do good people die? What do the gods do?
And this was hard, because one of the Right Things for a man was: Don't ask silly questions.
And now the little blue hermit crab was out of its shell and scuttling across the sand, looking for a new shell, and there wasn't one. Barren sand stretched away on every side, and all it could do was run...
Religion and tradition-for-the-sake-of-tradition are huge barriers for people to overcome - especially members of "primitive" societies. It's interesting to see the windows in Mau's mind open as he confronts topics that he's been taught should never been pondered or questioned.
This was not the time to say "I don't know." The brothers had begging, hungry looks, like dogs waiting to be fed. They wanted an answer. It would be nice if it was the right answer, but if it couldn't be, then any answer would do, because then we would stop being worried...and then his mind caught alight.
That's what the gods are! An answer that will do! Because there's food to be caught and babies to be born and life to be lived and so there is no time for big, complicated and worrying answers! Please give us a simple answer, so that we don't have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don't fit the way we want the world to be.
Even parallel universes get a mention. All the parallel universe talk made me think of Neil Gaiman's Interworld novel that I never got around to mentioning here. Maybe later.
"He told me that there were more worlds than there are numbers. There is no such thing as 'does not happen.' But there is always 'happened somewhere else'--" He tried to explain, while she tried to understand.
When he'd run out of words, she said: "You mean that there is a world where the wave didn't happen? Out...there somewhere?"
This was one of the laugh-out-loud moments.
There were meaningless marks on the white oblong, but on the other side were some pictures. Mau knew about messages, and this one wasn't difficult:
"When the sun is just above the last tree left on Little Nation, you must throw a spear at the big wrecked canoe," he said aloud. It didn't make any sense, and nor did the ghost girl. But she had given him the spark-maker, although she'd been very frightened. He'd been frightened too. What were you supposed to do about girls? You had to keep away from them while you were a boy, but he'd heard that when you were a man you got other instructions.
I think Douglas Adams would have really approved of this novel. I still say Terry should have adopted Douglas's Hitchhiker's universe if anyone was going to do it (then again, maybe he was offered the job and turned it down). This last snippet could have come right from Douglas's keyboard (to pre-explain the following, "Imo" is the islanders' main god - sort of a Zeus in their god family).
"Do you believe in Imo, sir?" asked the boy.
"Ah, the usual question. We come to it at last. You know Mau said that Imo made us clever enough to work out that He does not exist?"
"Yes, sir, everyone says that, but that that doesn't help a lot."
"Everything I know makes me believe Imo is in the order that is inherent, amazingly, in all things, and in the way the universe opens to our questioning. When I see the shining path over the lagoon, on an evening like this, at the end of a good day, I believe."
"In Imo?" asked the girl.
This just got a smile. "Perhaps. I just believe. You know, in things generally. That works too. Religion is not an exact science. Sometimes, of course, neither is science."
If I didn't know any better, I'd be wondering if Terry had found religion.
I hope Terry manages to keep writing despite the onslaught of Alzheimer's. A day when there will be no more Terry Pratchett novels to look forward to will be a dark day indeed.
I've started Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, but thanks to Neil's public readings of so many chapters from the book, I'm just not as excited to find out what happens on the next page and the next. I'm enjoying it, but not the same way I enjoyed Nation.
