Pages to Panels - Linkage (4)

I'm working on a new book to comic comparison post, but in the meantime I decided to share some of the links I've acquired over the last few months while working on this feature. They're all over the shop really, some are helpful recommendations for how to navigate the comic world and others are about comics and mental health or science. Definitely worth a read if you're wanting to immerse yourself into this world a little more.

 *From The Mary Sue a helpful guide to reading crossover events (Via The Mary Sue)

*Another handy guide from Jordan at TMS about the importance and unimportance of continuity in comics (Via The Mary Sue)

*Need some more help working out what comics to read? Here's a handy list of some of the web's best comic sites (Via Make Use Of)

*An interesting article on the portrayal of mental illness in comics (Via Slate)

*Varying slightly, this article looks at the use of comics and superheroes in children's therapy  (Via The Daily Beast)

*Moving into the science world, can comics ever replace scientific journal articles? (Via Science Nordic)

*Comic demographics are shifting and the increase in female audiences is having a huge impact on the comic world (Via Business Week)

*Wired wraps up the best comics of 2014 (Via Wired)

*shifting away from comics proper, Empire runs through 40 surprising films that have comic book origins (Via Empire Online)

*Marvel films had a bumper year in 2014 with the release of GotG and Cap America and their announcements for the future of the MCU. According to Devin Faraci, 2014 was the year Marvel redefined themselves (Via Badass Digest)

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Read my previous Pages to Panels posts: 

Pages to Panels: A Bookish Guide (1)

Pages to Panels: Superheroes (2)
Pages to Panels: Jump Right In (3)

2015 Reading Resolutions - Diversifying my TBR

Okay, remember when I said I didn't have any reading resolutions and that making fixed plans probably wouldn't work out how I wanted them to? Well I decided to throw caution to the wind and write up a post of books that I want to read that will help me diversify my regular reading status quo. I'm trying to make up this list with books I already have in my possession since I really, really need to stop spending so much money on books I don't read for several years after purchase and the rest I'm going to endeavour to get from my library.

My aim isn't necessarily to read all of these books, although I'm hoping that by writing out such a long list I will be "in the mood" for at least one of these books per month. That way if I'm having an especially white/middle class/American/male month, at least I'm getting a little variety in my diet. The idea isn't that these are the only POC/female/non-fiction reads I'm interested in nor are they the only ones I'll read all year. I might end up reading very few of these particular books but still bring up my end of year stats with other books that I discover throughout the year. Basically, I'm hoping that by listing out some diverse reading options here I'll be able to switch something on in my brain that will subconsciously lead to me picking up more of these types of books.

As for the types of books on this list, I'm aiming for more non-fiction, more female writers and more non-American and POC US writers. Ideally those non-American writers won't simply be Australian/English/Canadian authors, but let's not shoot for Pluto when we haven't yet walked on the Moon. And as you'll see from the list, technically some of these books fulfil two or three of the criteria which is just an awesome bonus.

The Anatomy of Motive by John Douglas

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay

House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films by Kier-La Janisse

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy and the history of comic book heroines by Mike Madrid

Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Ewles

Superheroes!: Capes, Cowls, and the Creation of Comic Book Culture by Laurence Maslon, Michael Kantor

Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found by Frances Larson

Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin

Dear Life by Alice Munroe

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

Bringing up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Panopticon by Jenni Fagen

The Night Gwen Stacy Died by Sarah Bruni

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Odaatje

Under the Skin by Michel Faber

The Returned by Jason Mott

We by Yevgeny Zamytin

Popular Hits of the Showa Era by Ryu Murakami

Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

(Audio)book review: The Martian by Andy Weir

The Martian

Written by: Andy Weir

Read by: R.C Bray

Published: 2011

Synopsis: Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first men to walk on the surface of Mars. Now, he's sure he'll be the first man to die there.

It started with the dust storm that holed his suit and nearly killed him, and that forced his crew to leave him behind, sure he was already dead. Now he's stranded millions of miles from the nearest human being, with no way to even signal Earth that he's alive--and even if he could get word out, his food would be gone years before a rescue mission could arrive. Chances are, though, he won't have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old "human error" are much more likely to get him first.

But Mark isn't ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills--and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit--he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. But will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him? (Via Goodreads)

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshipped

. It hasn't been an easy road, reading this book. I had seen it around the internet for awhile but it wasn't until glowing reviews popped up on Alley, Meg and Sarah's blogs that I made a conscious decision to see what all the fuss was about. This coincided with me having a credit on Audible and deciding that yes, a book about a guy being stranded on Mars was exactly the kind of book I wanted to listen to on my bus rides and runs. But then the worst happened, I hated the audio reader. HATED him. I got a couple of minutes in and I found his voice so bland and boring that I couldn't believe that he'd be able to convincingly make the audio read as funny as everyone has said the book is. 

So I put it aside. I moved onto other physical books and audiobooks and hoped that someone would send me a copy for the ninja bookswap or for my birthday. Or if I could get my act together I'd remember to pick it up from the library after putting my name down on the wait list. None of those things happened, so I didn't get to read it. And then I found myself getting ready for a run without a podcast or audiobook to accompany me. Emily had just mentioned The Martian on her blog and I decided "screw it" I'd give it another try. At the very least the crappiness might be enough to encourage me to run faster so I can get home and turn it off. But this time I didn't hate the reader. I still don't think he was necessarily the best pick for the part, but I pushed through and the awesomeness of the book overwhelmed the mediocrity of the reader*.

The book isn't quite an epistolary novel but I think that was actually the best call Andy Weir could have made. Rather than try and frame everything within log entries, Weir combines this epistolary technique with regular narrated chapters. I think it could have been an interesting experiment to read an entire book as Mark writes the entries into his computer, especially when NASA begins to contact him and struggles to find a method of rescue. But by combining his logs with regular chapters from the perspective of several characters on Earth as well as his ex-crew who are in transit, it becomes less on a "will he/won't he" survival story and more of a scientific investigation. As much as I loved listening to Mark recount his day on Mars, I found it equally fascinating to see his daily achievements (bacteria in the soil is alive! Potatoes are beginning to grow! Still have air!) side by side with NASA's attempts to first communicate with him and then to come up with a viable rescue plan. Because this book is heavy on the science and light on the science fiction, Mark's role was pretty limited - It's not like he could rebuild a space ship from junk on the planet and high tail it back home in time for Christmas. But because the book is so heavily focused on scientific possibility it's even more amazing to see what he does manage to do. I'm pretty sure I would have just given up and curled up into a ball. Maybe that's why I'm not an astronaut (it's definitely why I'm not an astronaut).

I think a great helper in this department was the fact that I had so recently finished Chris Hadfield's book. While I am definitely no expert on the science in this novel, the way it and the astronauts were portrayed seemed to be in the same spirit as Hadfield's very realistic autobiography. This novel is, at times, brutal in depiction of life as an astronaut. If the events that instigated the novel, i.e. the dust storm which led the team to think Mark was dead, had happened on Earth there's very little chance that they would have left him behind even if he was dead. But when you're dealing with a foreign environment and space crafts which are built to carry precise weights and loads, you have to make the hard decisions. Do you bring back the body of your team member or do you have a lighter load which means less chance of mechanical issues on departure? And that's probably my favourite aspect of the novel. Saving Mark isn't as simple as turning around the space craft and heading back. There are so many tiny considerations that need to be discussed and possibilities that need to be explored. While Hollywood makes it seem like there's a rocket and a team of astronauts ready to go at any available moment, this book shows the reality of the situation. It's almost impossible to send a probe with food out immediately, let alone actual people who need to survive for the year or so it'd take to travel to Mars and back. But in direct contrast to this, people outside of this world won't see it this way. They see a man stranded on Mars and they want to know why you haven't saved him yet. Why aren't you turning the ship around or launching a new one? How could you even leave him behind in the first place? While this quandary doesn't really feature too heavily in the novel (and it's mostly framed through a NASA PR employee) it's one of the reasons I'm happy the novel wasn't a standard epistolary told through Mark's logs.

But the book isn't all potato crops and PR drama. Well, it is all potato crops and PR drama, but it's also hilarious. Who would have thought a book about a man stranded on Mars with about a 2% chance of survival would be funny? Mark might be facing death. but he's not about to be a morose bastard. He's hilariously dry about absolutely everything. Toilets, farming, music, survival - you name it and he's made a self-deprecating or droll comment about it. It's the humour at the heart of this novel that makes it stand out from the hundreds of other high concept science fiction novels and makes it approachable for people who wouldn't normally dream of reading a book like this. So if this book doesn't instantly speak to you on a personal level I recommend that you come for the humour and stay to watch fictionalised versions of the brightest people on Earth puzzle over how to save a man a gazillion miles from home.

*R.C Bray if you ever google yourself and come across this, I'm sorry. I'm sure you're a great guy and a fantastic reader but you reading this book + me = NOPE.

December and 2014 in review

Any year down guys, another whole year has zoomed by in the blink of an eye.

This year is probably the year I most noticed by study interfering with my reading. I was just so busy and so tired that I went for huge stretches where I'd only read comics or watch TV shows in my spare time. Still, while it maybe wasn't a spectacular year for a blogger it was a damn sight better than most people.

But first the December stats.

BOOKS: 

DECEMBER:

What I Read:

*Hawkeye: L.A Woman (3) - Matt Fraction
*The Martian - Andy Weir
*Outlander: Cross Stitch - Diana Gabaldon
*My Friend Dahmer - Derf Backderf

Book Stats:

75% male / 25% female
100% American / 0% International
25% ebook / 25% audiobook / 50% physical
75% fiction / 25% non-fiction
50% graphic novels / 50% novels

What? How did I only read 4 books? Four books which I'm almost certain I mostly read in the last 4-5 days? I actually thought I'd nailed it again after a successful November but I must have been busier than I thought! On the plus side, all four books were great. I really enjoyed all of them and for the most part they were completely unchartered territory for me. After my first attempt at listening to The Martian I didn't think I'd be able to go back to it in this format, but the reader eventually won me over. My Friend Dahmer was a Christmas present and I don't think I'd ever seen this book before, or if I had I hadn't noticed it. And Outlander. This wasn't a book I really expected to like but I was curious enough to give it a shot (being a free book on Netgalley also helped). So yeah, successful final reads for the year!

2014: 

What I read: 

Number of books read: 39

Number of comics read:39 

Number of pages read: 18380

Longest book read: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (771 pages)

Book Stats: 

71% male / 29% female

67% American/ 33% International

84% fiction/ 16% non-fiction

50% graphic novels / 50% novels

Breaking my reading down into stats is something I only started this year so I've never broken my full year down like this before. I knew my percentage of lady writers would be down, but what's interesting is that the majority of fiction books I read (53%) either revolved around a female centric cast (think How to Build a Girl or Boy, Snow, Bird) or had a female primary protagonist (think Wonder Woman or Rat Queens). So my interests clearly lean me towards books about women but they're often written by men. I think it might have been my comics that skewed this percentage the most, which is an interesting occurrence on its own. I guess the boys club mentality still hasn't truly been broken through. I'd like to say that next year I'll try and read more books by women and international authors, but to be honest I tend to pick books up on a whim so I don't know if actively trying to change my stats will really work. I'm definitely going to try and buy more diversely though. When and if I read those books in anything resembling a timely matter is a completely different story though. 

How did everyone else go with their reading this year? Hitting the usual highs or experiencing some road blocks? Any book resolutions for the new year or are you as lazy and ill prepared as me?

LIFE: 

 2014 was a busy year. I kept working on my PhD but I also made trips to the US (well, finished a trip to the US) and Japan and spent a week back home for my birthday and best friend's wedding. I hosted costume parties and movie nights and we played a tonne of boardgames. I nursed hang overs and went on road trips up the coast and Tom and I finally bought a new adult couch (i.e. not one that was 10th hand) and mattress for our bed. Lots of change but lots of progress. Wider picture wise it wasn't as great a year. There have been far too many accidents and atrocities and human rights violations across the globe. But I dunno, maybe I'm being crazy optimistic but it feels like the tide is changing. It isn't quite as easy to be a racist or sexist or homophobe and expect to get away with it. The hostage situation in Sydney the other week was a great example of that. While some people began to blame an entire group of people for the action of a single mentally ill man, the majority started the #Illridewithyou campaign and made an effort to prove that Australia is the multicultural country we say we are. Baby steps, sure, but baby steps are better than hiding our heads in the sand.

In front of a Kabuki theatre in Tokyo March 2014.

Book Review: I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

I Feel Bad About My Neck

Written by: Nora Ephron

Published: 2006

Synopsis: With her disarming, intimate, completely accessible voice, and dry sense of humor, Nora Ephron shares with us her ups and downs in "I Feel Bad About My Neck, " a candid, hilarious look at women who are getting older and dealing with the tribulations of maintenance, menopause, empty nests, and life itself.

Ephron chronicles her life as an obsessed cook, passionate city dweller, and hapless parent. She recounts her anything-but-glamorous days as a White House intern during the JFK years ("I am probably the only young woman who ever worked in the Kennedy White House that the President did not make a pass at") and shares how she fell in and out of love with Bill Clinton--from a distance, of course. But mostly she speaks frankly and uproariously about life as a woman of a certain age.

Utterly courageous, wickedly funny, and unexpectedly moving in its truth telling, "I Feel Bad About My Neck" is a book of wisdom, advice, and laugh-out-loud moments, a scrumptious, irresistible treat.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“…the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.”

I grew up primarily watching three types of movies, Disney, sports (thanks dad) and romantic-comedies (which only made dad double down on the sports films). I have a bucket load of memories of me sitting on the couch with my mum watching Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally. I doubt I really understood the majority of the films (the "I'll have what she's having" scene definitely went flying over my head) but I still loved them. I watch them now and they make me weep at what passes for romantic comedies now, clumsy women who trip over their feet and men who do little more than smile in their direction to deserve their adoration. We are in desperate need of a revival in smart and funny romantic comedies.  I Feel Bad About My Neck only further establishes that fact - maybe we could get some of the superhero films to funnel money into some worthy projects? Oooooh, maybe a superhero rom-com in the vein of Nora Ephron? Yes please, I'll take 5.

I Feel Bad About My Neck hasn't really got anything to do with romantic comedies, unless you count the story about her love affair with a rent controlled apartment in New York or the one about falling out of love with Bill Clinton. But it's funny and sharp and self-deprecating and god, so New York. It has the same essence of all of those brilliant romantic comedies in the 1980-90s. Or maybe I just tie Nora Ephron so tightly to the romantic comedies she wrote and directed that I can't help but see that same essence here. *shrugs* This is so not important, MOVING ON.

This book is a wonderful collection of short stories that centre around Nora Ephron becoming older. There are stories about dealing with an empty house after 20 years of raising noisy children. There are stories about the death of her best friend and realisation of her own mortality. There are stories about the endless stream of make up aimed at women over 40 and the vanity that is just as much a part of a woman's life at 50 as it is at 25. The stories range from funny and silly to serious and sombre, but they're all very warm and personal glimpses into her life. Speaking of, I saw a few reviews on Goodreads that really pissed me off which I mentioned on Twitter during the minithon. They were scoring the book low and criticising Nora Ephron for writing about handbags and make up instead of abortions and human trafficking. First, Nora Ephron was under no obligation to write about "serious" feminist issues just because she's a well known feminist. This isn't Bad Feminist or PRO: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, it isn't being marketed as a book of critical thinking and feminist theory. And second, fuck right off with your ranking of important issues. Obviously human trafficking is horrific and has traumatic implications for the people involved, but that doesn't mean discount all of the other squicky things done against women, even if it's something as simple as women feeling badgered by beauty companies about needing their products to remain attainable and youthful. And unlike the countless books and articles and short stories that look at the harmful influence of images on young women and children, it is rare to come across anyone writing about how it effects older women. Feminism isn't only for the young, nor is it only for the life and death issues.

NOT IMPRESSED

What a mess of a review, I should probably start over, but who has time for that? NOT I. So read it. Read it in spite of it not covering Very Serious Feminist Issues and dealing with silly and frivolous topics like ageing and price gouging in real estate and the expectations children, spouses, family and strangers have. Or read it FOR spite, because nothing would make me happier than people ignoring the complaints of those sour puss reviewers. Read it because it might not be When Harry Met Sally but the wonderful woman who wrote that also wrote these stories. Or at the very least read it because Nora Ephron emphatically understands how important reading books is to people like us.

“There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book.”

Pages to Panels: New Comics to Jump Straight Into

One of the biggest hurdles I had to get past in comics was working out where to start. I think that's probably why I began with one off graphic novels like Maus (shhh, I got volume 1+2 in a single volume so it counts) and From Hell. But one of the things I love about comics is how sprawling the narratives are. They don't have to wrap everything up in 300 pages or limit themselves to a trilogy. They can expand for years, even decades, and restart when things are starting to get stale. While the impatient part of me loves reading comic series which have wrapped up already so I can just read straight through, I think my love of getting into a series early trumps the joy of spending an entire weekend reading through volumes 1-10 of Transmetropolitan. Following along on that unfolding adventure is one of the true joys of comics. Waiting for the next issue and then devouring it in a single sitting brings back memories of the Harry Potter releases when I was younger, and anything that reminds me of that kind of joy and excitement is obviously getting a huge thumbs up from me.

You can definitely still get this joy if you jump into an established (but still ongoing) story, but I thought I'd share some of my recent first issue finds that are shaping up to be pretty excellent arcs that'll be sure to captivate. 

Bitch Planet (Kelly-Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro) came out a week ago and damn, do I love it. It's essentially a 1970s exploitation film infused with a brand of feminism you'd be unlikely to find anywhere near one of those films. The titular Bitch Planet is where the disobedient (and outright criminal) women are sent. It's essentially an outer space Australia (minus the men), complete with people being sent for downright dog shit reasons except instead of it being poor people being villainised for stealing a loaf of bread it's women being villainised for getting in the way of their husband's affair. Well, they aren't all quite so innocent but the-whole-planet- for-disobedient-women is shady as hell. As DeConnick says of the 5 female protagonists:

“there are five women, all ridiculous and real, and all very different. One shouldn’t be there. The other four are unrepentant and guilty as Hell.”

 I really enjoyed this first issue. It's about as subtle as a punch to the face and it's insanely campy but SO GOOD. But if you don't think a neon pink holographic depiction of the Madonna-whore complex used as a confession program in a women's prison is the dopest shit around then this is not the comic for you.

But don't just take my word for it: AV Club review

Black Market (Frank Barbiere and Victor Santos) is technically up to its fourth issue, but that's still pretty close to getting in at the ground floor. It's ground floor adjacent, it's basically the mezzanine floor. Black Market is what I'd describe as superhero adjacent. It's not really in the same genre as Batman or The Avengers but it is indelibly tied to it. The story comes down to a moral quandary. What if the key to curing every known disease on Earth lay in the DNA of superheroes? If superheroes are here to help, isn't this the ultimate sacrifice and way for them to help? Down on his luck with an ailing wife, Brainiac Ray Willis finds himself caught up in the mess of harvesting (or trying to at least) superhero blood with his scummy brother Denny. Black Market manages to traverse between the well known tropes of the superhero comic genre right side up and completely flipped on their head. It's the exact right mix of science and superhero, fantasy and grim reality. A brilliant little series so far.

But don't just take my word for it: Comic Vine review

Chances are, even if you've never touched a comic in your life, you've heard about ODY-C (Matt Fraction and Christian Ward). It's the ambitious and incredibly creative gender-swapped, futuristic sci-fi adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey. I don't even know what to write here because, come on, if gender-swapped outer space Odyssey doesn't sell it to you nothing will. No one could ever accuse Matt Fraction of coasting. Whether he's writing for Marvel or tackling epic poems, you know he's going to push the envelope. I don't think you need to have read The Odyssey to truly enjoy this comic, but like any adaptation a great deal of the enjoyment (for me anyway) is knowing how the new writer tackles the original story's themes, characters and style. The art is also something else. That cover above doesn't even begin to do justice to the epicness of the art within. It really plays with traditional comic panels and forms, so I'm not sure if that would make it harder or easier to read for a comic newbie. But read it regardless.

But don't just take my word for it: IGN review

Grant Morrison's Multiversity is an interesting addition to this post. Technically there is more than one issue out, but they're all technically first issues. Multiversity is, essentially, a series of one shots (single issues) that take place within the 52 alternative universes set up in the mid-2000s series 52. These may only be one-shots now, but it has been pretty heavily signposted that they may be expanded into full-run series. It's an interesting and eclectic mix of storytelling. Each issue, while interrelated, presents a world very different to the issue before it, told in a very different way. I'd imagine people will definitely gravitate towards particular one-shots and away from others - depending on the characters, genre and style. It's also one of the few comic series that doesn't include a single straight, white male protagonist. Full warning though, Grant Morrison is weird. I love his writing and his comics are some of my favourites, but I often feel like things are flying way over my head when I read him. But I personally kind of like that. I like that feeling that I could revisit a comic of his in 10 years and the Kayleigh then will respond to it very differently to the Kayleigh now. But it's also something that will turn some people off completely. So tread carefully with this one if you haven't read Morrison before, maybe keep an eye out for Comixology sales or borrow a copy from a friend.

But don't just take my word for it: Pop Matter's Pax Americana Multiversity review

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Read my previous Pages to Panels posts: 

Pages to Panels: A Bookish Guide (1)

Pages to Panels: Superheroes (2)