Walking on the Moon

I’ve restyled all my pages to more closely match the look of the blog here. I’ve got more stuff up than I remembered, including a couple rants from the past that I liked some.

Let me know if anything’s illegible.

Looks a little more lunar here today. I finally found a look for the blog that I like. I’m sure I’ll occasionally tweak it some more.

I should mention that I was just flailing around until I fired up the old POVRay ray tracer to make the banner. From there it was pretty easy.

You may want to check out their Hall of Fame to see what the serious folks can do with it.

If you see something I missed, please holler.

Ylum is now running Apache’s http server version 2.2.4.  So far only a few minor bumps.  Let me know if you see something unusual.

A actually put stuff into the longbox this week, so comics aren’t strewn across the room.

• The Flash #231 – After Bart Allen got the shaft, we’re rebooting the Flash proper. I basically picked this up because it’s a Mark Waid Flash book, and I usually enjoy his take on the character. So far things are starting slow, which isn’t a great sign in a book about speed. Daniel Acuña is doing the art, and while it’s beautiful, it’s also a little static. Maybe I’m just longing for some Mike Weiringo art, which Acuña can hardly be blamed for. If it weren’t Waid, I’d be tempted to drop this, but I’m willing to let him find his feet.
• Black Summer #2 – Warren Ellis’s Black Summer continues to be a wild ride. We’ve met most of the surviving Seven Guns now, and the different viewpoints on John Horus’s deeds and their general position as the hunted are starting to come out. Still, the pace is fast and there’s not a whole lot of jawing yet. Definitely a thriller with something to chew on. Honestly I’m hoping to see a little more thinking before this is over, but there’s no reason to believe Ellis will disappoint.

That’s up in Bell, Book and Candle.

I finished The Vintage Bradbury. A review is up on Bell Book, and Candle.

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.2.2.  Holler if anything looks weird.

I mentioned a while ago that I’d bought but not read Warren Ellis’s and Raulo Caceres’s Crécy. Leaving it unread didn’t last very long, but I haven’t written anything about it.

It’s quite phenomenal, actually. Scott McCloud is fond of talking about the uses of comics beyond entertainment, and Crécy is an example he should point at. Exactly what it’s an example of is hard to describe pithily, but it’s certainly excellent.

Crécy is a little bit of historical fiction, a little bit of dramatic sociology, some military history, a discourse on the longbow, and a lot of Warren Ellis ranting. The focal point of all this is the 1346 Battle of Crécy. You can read all about that battle on Wikipedia some time, but frankly, unless you’re a big fan of 14th century history, you’ll be hard pressed to finish the article. I guarantee that if you sink the seven bucks to buy this comic, you’ll be able to describe the battle, its technology, and its implications for weeks afterward. You may just corner random people and start ranting about it. It may be difficult to shut you up about it.

Ellis tells the story from the perspective of a fictional archer in the battle, but one who is aware he’s talking to 21st century readers and is cognizant of the intervening history. It’s more effective than it sounds. He deftly manages to keep the reader in the 14th century slogging through the mud to what any contemporary would assume will be a slaughter and connecting the dots between that world and ours with humor and insight. Humor and insight are only two of the techniques, actually, but they’re the strongest.

Ellis is a formidable voice, and an artist could be overwhelmed by him; Caceres is more than up to the challenge. His art is beautifully detailed and cleanly laid out. He gets a fantastic amount of detail on to the page without cramping it. Furthermore, in service to Ellis’s far-reaching goals for the work – part tactical and technological study, part illumination of the human condition – Caceres has to communicate everything from detailed drawings of demonstrations of 14th century armaments, to comprehensible maps of the battlefield, to vivid images of human beings in close combat. He spans these styles with an aplomb that trivializes their difficulties.

The result is an illuminating, entertaining, thought-provoking description of an event that I’d assumed only held interest to the D&D crowd.

Get a copy and enjoy.

I’ve posted reviews of Wealth and Democracy, Babbitt, and Don’t get Too Comfortable on Bell, Book and Candle.  Been a long time coming.

What a good week.

• Love and Rockets #20
  • Saying bad things about Love and Rockets is kind of hard to do.  The art’s beautiful and the characters are all familiar and well written.  It’s strange to be writing that nothing happening is the biggest down side of this thing, after just finishing saying how watching nothing happen in Captain America is a good time.  I really should go to the graphic novels.
• Grendel: Behold The Devil #0
  • Another 80’s weakness of mine is Matt Wagner’s Grendel.  This is a preview for a series due out in November featuring the Hunter Rose Grendel – that is the original Grendel – perhaps revealed through the research of the Christine Spar Grendel.  The framer here is as nice an intro to Hunter as one could expect.  I even jumped and I’m a veteran Grendel reader.  Nice lead in.  I’ll look for the series.
• Black Summer #1
  • Warren Ellis’s new superhero project for Avatar gets off to a cracking start.  The preliminaries set the stage nicely for this issue’s confrontation between Tom Noir and the forces stirred up bu John Horus’s assassination of the President.  It’s a fast-paced episode where we hit the ground running with Tom.  There’s also just the right amount of backfill to tease the Seven Guns’ history.  This is a rarity:a first issue that one would have to buy the next issue.  I’m committed already, but I think readers who pick this up will have a hard time putting it down.
• Doktor Sleepless
  • Warren Ellis is touting this as his next effort in the vein of Transmetropolitan, and I’m interested in that.  There’s a lot in here that people who read his blog (guilty as charged) have heard snippets of and his vision for the title is broad and exciting.  He’s aggressively tying the print material to an evolving wiki and other web resources and generally trying to create an example of a new media.  I’ll be sticking around for it, but I’m a little concerned that the first issue wasn’t terribly effective as a narrative.  It’s clear that our man Sleepless is up to something, but it’s very unclear what he’s up to or why I care.  OK, I care because it’s Warren Ellis writing as a futurist, but why someone else cares is open to question.  I’ll be around to find out, though.
  • Sig file fodder: “Electricity can only be replenished by whisky.  This is actual physics.  Do not argue with me.  I am a Doktor.”

And I haven’t even gotten to Crecy yet.