My Top 5 Comics

I love comic books. I am a comic book nerd, of sorts, and I read all kinds. I would consider myself knowledgeable on the subject. Anyway, I had a brief conversation with Avery about her and a friend of hers making lists of their top five comic books of all time, and decided I was going to make my own. I placed a couple caveats on myself when doing this. First, just to make things easier on myself, I decided to only pick one work per creator. I doubt that I would have chosen differently if I hadn’t, but it definitely made the decision process that much quicker and easier. Second, in keeping with Avery’s definition of the exercise, I only included in my judgment comic books that were actual serialized comic books, not graphic novels, even if they were now observed more as the latter due to their subsequent release as collected works. And finally, I decided that my choices had to be comic books that had completed their runs, so that they could be judged on the whole of their narratives as complete works.

So here they are, in a loose order, my top five comic books of all time, with a little something about them to help recommend them to you. I encourage you to read them all.

1) Preacher by, Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon
-My favorite comic of all time. I reread it every year or two. I named my cats after two of the main characters. Love it. All at once, it’s a modern day Western, a ridiculous buddy cop adventure, a twisted morality tale, an epic quest for redemption, a touching romance, and one of, if not the best, explorations into the meaning of what America is and what it means to be American in the last thirty to seventy-five years, and easily the best one ever written by an Irishman. It’s the story of an ass-kicking preacher named Jesse Custer, his gun-toting girlfriend Tulip, and Cassidy, a hard-living Irish vampire, on a quest to find a wayward God and take him to task, and all the insane misadventures they get into along the way. It also features one of the greatest villains, Herr Starr, who is a power hungry, mass-murdering psychopath, a righteous warrior for peace on Earth, and the unluckiest motherfucker who ever lived. Love it!

2) Transmetropolitan by, Warren Ellis and Darrick Robertson
-If Hunter S. Thompson’s alter ego Raoul Duke lived hundreds of years in the future, he would be Spider Jerusalem, the insane, violent, drug-addled outlaw journalist who is the last voice of truth in a world gone mad with commercialization, corporate ubiquity and misguided personal freedom, and which is under the thumb of a government which secretly has no sense of compassion or social responsibility. A wild romp of a read that walks a tight-rope between wacky comedy and deadly political maneuvering.

3) Y: The Last Man by, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
- A plague has wiped out every human and simian male on the planet except for amateur escape artist Yorick Brown and his pet helper monkey Ampersand. With the help of a hard-core secret agent and a scientist who’s research is somehow connected to the plague, he sets out on a quest to find a cure, his missing girlfriend and a way to keep hope alive in a world teetering on the brink with no hope in sight.

4) Watchmen by, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
-Inescapable on a list such as this, it’s heralded as the pinnacle of comics and the point at which the medium became a place for adult appreciation and an exploration of deeper themes and more mature subject matter. It’s that, definitely, but it’s also a dense and intricate narrative, an attack against Cold War politics from the heart of the conflict, an excellent story of intrigue and personal conflict, and an exploration of both the impact that actual costumed heroes would have in the real world and what the truth of peace, justice and morality really is. And it’s accomplished in only twelve issues, which feel as weighty as one hundred but read with the pace and excitement of three. A must read for everyone.

5) (two-way tie) Sandman by, Neil Gaiman (with various artists) and Lucifer by, Mike Carey (with various artists)
-I couldn’t choose between these two because I love them both and can’t decide honestly which one I prefer, and because they are intrinsically linked. Both these books are connected by the character of Lucifer (the Devil), as a supporting character in Gaiman’s story and as the lead in Carey’s, and both are tightly woven yet sprawling narratives of the interaction between a mystical world with epic mythical characters and their interaction with our own ordinary world and the select individuals from it who get caught up in the action. In Sandman, the story centers on Dream, the immortal physical embodiment of dreaming, and his attempt to discover who he is now and reconcile the wrongs of his past after experiencing a life-experience. Lucifer is a Nietzschean exploration of will against predestination and of the struggle between responsibility and convenience. Both of them are great, and when put together create an even greater whole than the sum of their parts.

That’s my list. Read them, know them, love them.

Thank you for allowing me to indulge in this distraction.

–> N.

British Poetry

Willie sent me this link to the website of an odd British poet.

His stuff's pretty fun, especially the poem this link goes to:

http://www.timkey.co.uk/index.php?paged=2

Check it out.

Go Cote!

Some of you know Cote. Those that don't know him should. He recently got a story published and got interviewed. Here's a link:

http://www.one-story.com/index.php?page=story&story_id=118

Atlantic Monthly Article

Here's a link to a pretty interesting article from The Atlantic. It's about the origins of the section of the Constitution which deals with Presidential powers and why/how it should be changed. Good stuff.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901/founders-mistake

McSweeney's Hudson River plane landing Conspiracy theories

US AIRWAYS
FLIGHT 1549:
IT JUST DOESN'T
ADD UP.

BY MILES KAHN AND STUART MILLER
- - - -

A plane leaving the New York area crashes into the Hudson, but not a single other plane crashed into the Hudson that day.

The guy who landed the plane, this guy Sullenberger, just happened to be a pilot.

We've all heard of American Airlines, but US Airways?

Before the landing, passengers heard four loud booms coming from the right engine. You know what else makes boom noises? Police Academy's Michael Winslow. Where was Michael Winslow that day? And, while we're at it, what happened to the guy who played Commandant Lassard?

The Hudson just so happened to be full of water, making the landing feasible. A little too convenient?

One engine was still missing days after the accident, yet there's one place reporters never bothered to look: Sullenberger's house.

Following the accident, US Airways stock shot up 13 percent. You know who works for that company? The pilot and crew of Flight 1549.

Sullenberger's father was a dentist and his mother was a grade-school teacher. Coincidence?

Fact: Tickets to the presidential inauguration were nearly impossible to get. Fact: Sullenberger somehow obtained tickets ... from the president-elect of the United States.

Sullenberger just happened to be an experienced glider pilot and just happened to be over a body of water with no engine power that day. Coincidence?

The passengers are said to have escaped on rafts. That actually seems to hold up.

Add up the middle numbers in Flight 1549 and you get 9. Add 8 to the 1 and you also get 9. Now flip over the 999 and you get 666. Add up those numbers and you get 18. Coincidence?

Oh, by the way, it turns out that George "Commandant Lassard" Gaynes is scheduled to appear in Police Academy 8 in 2011. It's true. Check IMDb.

A hundred and fifty-five people wanted to go to Charlotte? Really?

A poem by Mark Cox I particularly enjoyed

The Garglers

The sun rises on a professor gargling. Because it is morning,
gargling makes perfect sense to him. Overnight
a great drama has taken place in his mouth-- growth,
decay, procreation-- the whole gambit, schmear, shebang.

As he gargles, he hums his morning mantra
which helps him disregard the mob with torches in his mouth.
I have my health, he hums, and you can't take that away from me.
He consults his watch-- almost two minutes now, nothing
can have survived above the gumline, surely by now
he more or less has his mouth to himself.

In fact, the lining of his mouth itself
has begun to question his jurisdiction over it.
A terrific stillness has fallen over the bathroom,
as if the sink and every pipe are waiting for him to spit.

He's just approaching a critical octave change
when his wife leans in and asks, "Do you love me?"
He nods, pointing to his watch, but with a look that says,
"You know how important fresh breath is to rhetoricians."
"If you really loved me," her looks says, "you'd say so.
You'd splatter whatever was keeping you from telling me
all over yourself in order to keep me."

He looks from his underarm spray to his cologne and back again.
It is morning. Gargling makes perfect sense. But he expectorates
and says, "I love you, do you love me too?"
But it's too late, because his wife already has a mouthful
and is gargling and pointing at her mouth as if to say,
how could you ever doubt it. . . .