Books of Many Varieties

[lunasariel]

 So things are moving right along in my little world. Glimpses has been ordered. Wildstorm has finally fallen to DC. School work is going alright, I guess. My forays into Great Literature continue. Life goes on.

So, starting at the top: Glimpses has been ordered. Yay! Now I just have to wait until it gets here, and somehow avoid all spoilers and reviews until it does. The only complaint I've heard about it so far is "too short," which is a very good sign. I'm still regretting not bringing my Nightrunner, though, and I've resolved to pick up the Tamír Triad when I get home. I've been noticing quite a few similarities between Lynn's work, especially the aforementioned Triad, and Tamora Pierce's work, especially Song of the Lioness. Small, quick-witted protagonist with gender identity issues? Check. Smartass, commoner BFF (later BF) that she can't admit her attraction to? Check. Conscientious royal buddy who's (usually) on the main character's side? Check? Pretty, elitist asshole who's mean to the main character and her friends? Check. Big, easy-going friend who ends up drinking too much? Check. Quiet nerd who turns out to be an absolute badass? Check. Tough-but-fair weapons master? Faithful retainer who used to serve the main character's father? Wily, likeable old courtier who knows which way the wind is blowing? Check. Pushy god(s) more or less forcing the main character into her Destiny? Check. Evil wizard hell-bent on ruling the world, or failing that, destroying it? Check. A crossover between the two 'verses would not go amiss, I think.

The funny thing is, there are more apparent similarities between the Tamír Triad and Song of the Lioness, but in my head, the crossover takes place between Nightrunner and later Tortall (think Protector of the Small or Trickster). I just think the characters would get on so well. I can just imagine some of the conversations...
Alanna: "Holy shit! You're the ruling monarch?"
Phoria: "Damn straight."
Alanna: "And people don't get on your case for being a woman or anything?"
Phoria: "Sometimes they do, yeah, but then I kick their ass and then everything's good."
And then Alanna, Kel, Buri, Thayet, Phoria, and Beka would all go out to beat the crap out of each other and bond.
Thero: "I like to blow stuff up and turn people into animals. Also, I'm pining for an unattainable woman."
Numair: "Do you? I like to blow stuff up and turn people into trees! Also, I was pining for an unattainable woman until it turned out that she was pining for me too. Now we're married and have children of extremely mixed biology."
Thero: "Hmm... " (thoughtful look) "You know, I've got this dragon bite that..."
And Numair would learn something new about Skalan wizards.
George: "Hi! I'm charming, sexy, and disreputable. This is my equally-sexy magic warrior wife, and this is her possibly-enchanted signature sword."
Seregil: "Heya. I'm also charming, sexy, and disreputable. This is my equally-sexy magic warrior talímenios, and this is his possibly-enchanted signature bow."
And then George and Seregil would stand around trying to be all spy-y on one another, while Alanna and Alec discussed the problems of being in love with a professional rogue, and also being all spy-y on one another, only not so blatently.

In other news, poor old Wildstorm has been absorbed into the DC Empire. I know, Wildstorm wasn't doing great, but I greatly fear for the fate of The Authority, Stormwatch, Gen 13, and Wild C.A.T.S. once they've been folded into the already-teeming multiverse. It has been noted elsewhere that DC doesn't like its writers rocking the boat any more than is strictly necessary to market themselves as mavericks, so Apollo and the Midnighter might end up even more bowdlerized than they already are. On the other hand, a confrontation between Superman/Batman and Apollo/Midnighter might be interesting. Hell, since Bendix's pet projects (Apollo, the Midnighter, Crow Jane, Amaze, Lamplighter, Impetus, and Stalker) are all expies of DC characters, it would be fascinating to see the first two meet their DC counterparts (Superman, Batman, Black Canary, Wonder Woman, the Green Lantern, the Flash, and the Martian Manhunter). This would be especially good for Apollo, who, it's hinted, still carries the guilt of A) having been put in charge of that little debacle, and B) basically falling apart at the seams when pretty much everybody else got killed.

So I'm going to go read the entire Authority in memoriam, and then probably come back here and bitch about how bad it got.

...

Time passes. It's a very different picture, reading the run in its entirety, so I'll be reviewing it by author/artist.

Original (Ellis/Hitch): MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE! See, originally The Authority was just supposed to fill in the gap that was left by Stormwatch. They were genuinely supposed to change the world for the better, but they also gave people a chance to change it for themselves. It wasn't until Certain Other People came along that they devolved into a bunch of bloodthirsty, psychotic fanatics.

Ideals aside, oh, Jenny Sparks, I missed you. I missed you taking charge and yelling at everyone. I missed you putting your cigarette out on Apollo's shoulder and calling Angie a cheeky moo. I missed your determination to kick, beat, and shout the world into acceptable shape. I missed you being tough and clever and old and you.

Actually, there's a lot that I missed about these early issues. Apollo's and the Midnighter's obvious love for each other without making a huge deal out of it, Jack's easygoingly caustic humor, Jeoren's deeply hidden backbone. And to top it all off, the art. My god, the art. This is what *my* Authority looks like, and always will look like.

Millar/Quietly: Yurgh. Just yurgh. I come off this glorious Hitch high, and looking at Quietly's blocky, scribbly art is extremely disconcerting. Scenes that would otherwise be rather moving just turn out unpleasantly farcical. In particular, I'm thinking of a certain scene in The Nativity where Apollo and the Midnighter have an extremely important discussion that has literally been the topic of fan-debate for a decade. There are a lot of delicate emotions being dealt with in these few panels, so obviously a deft hand would be needed to portray in the characters' body language, as well as in the angle of the "camera" and a thousand other small artistic choices, thoughts and feelings that could never be put into words. Instead, we get freakin' Quietly, who gives us possibly the most unflattering shot of Apollo in recorded history, consisting mostly of his suddenly gargantuan forearms, squashed nose, and broad, flabby lips. I mean, we go from this:


to this: 
. This is exactly the panel I had in mind. Kinda shocking, isn't it? And it goes on and on like that more or less forever.

IMHO, these were the Authority's worst years. The writer used the characters as mouthpieces for his own political ideals, completely neglecting them as people with their own thoughts and motivations, and the aritst...well...*points up* Even Brave New World, which I otherwise would have enjoyed highly was ruined by a bunch of hairy, scribbly, violent gorillas running around in the Authority's costumes. Even the switching-out of Quietly for Adams in the last few issues of the aforementioned Brave New World was only a tiny step in the right direction, Adams being nearly as bad as Quetly. His lines are neater, yes, but again, hairy, squash-faced goons in bondage gear is *not* my Authority. But then again, the addition of Eskine in the very last issue was a much bigger turn for the better. Again, the lines were cleaner and tighter, but the character designs overall were much closer to Hitch's (and maybe Eliis'? I don't know how much he likes getting involved in artistic decisions) originals.

No, I'm not going to mention that weird little Peyer/Nguyen sub-series about the New Authority, because the fandom in general seems to want to pretend that those never happened.

That last issue of Brave New World, and consequently of volume one, was a good thing in a lot of ways. After that inexplicable period where The Authority were media superstars (WTF?), they finally got their rears back in gear, although it took them getting deposed and almost killed to realize it. But at the end, Apollo and the Midnighter are finally married and have finally adopted Jenny, Jack and Jackson have patched up that feud they had for one issue and then never mentioned again, and once again the team seemed genuinely focused on making the world a better place instead of finding new and tougher people to prove themselves more badass than.

After that came a series of more or less one-shots, which weren't bad as far as they went, but, they didn't advance the plot or the characters. I think the series was sort of in a holding pattern until The Powers That Be could find a decent team to take it over. At that point, they were making do with Morrison and a succession of artists (Turner, Huat, Turner again). The problem with that was the Morrison, who basically owned The Authority at that point, seemed to be mainly interested in portraying the team as outright villains, or near to. At least I could physically bear to look at the art here, which is an improvement on Quietly.

Godhead seems to be the one arc I liked here. Yes, it was hitting the whole "RELIGION IS BAD" line a little hard, but at least someone else was wearing the fanatic loony hat for once. Also, the bondage costumes from those anti-Authority propaganda pictures? Hilarious.

But then Morrison had to work with and around Revolution, Brubaker and Nguyen's brainchild, which was...interesting. I didn't particularly enjoy it, but I can see that it was well-written and that it was a logical direction for the series to go in. In fact, if that hadn't gone that way, I'm sure there would have been a fair amount of outcry to the effect that they should have taken that final step.

But enough about obscue comic books and even more obscure fantasy novels. Now, on to slightly more widely-applicable nerdiness.

I'm burning right through the assigned reading for my Introduction to the Novel Class. Moll Flanders took freakin' forever to read, and it wasn't exactly gripping at that. Our classroom discussions about it consist most of us bitching about how much we hate it. I can see how revolutionary this was for its time, and I applaud Mr. Defoe for being so forward-thinking, but ol' Moll and her nameless friends have not aged gracefully. In the end, Moll Flanders is interesting mostly from a historical and sociological point of view.

I've also finished Emma, which was a vast improvement. I find all of Jane Austen's works very comforting, in a slightly stifling sort of way. Nothing bad ever really happens, and all the main characters live happily ever after. That's kind of nice to come home to at the end of a long day of, say, London Fields, but it seems that reading only Jane Austen would be like a diet consisting solely of well-seasoned oatmeal: tasty and filling, but eventually you get tired of the sameness. I adore Austen's wordplay, though. In this age of lowest common denominators, people just don't use the kind of language that Regency folks whipped out on a regular basis. And some of it is truly beautiful language, too. I'm sorry to see it falling into disuse. Oh, well, that's what the intelligentsia are for.

At the moment, I'm on Gaudy Night, which is endearingly old-fashioned, like an old man in suspenders and a pork-pie hat, sitting around while smoking a pipe and reading the newspaper. Although if we're doing Gilded Age detective fiction, I wonder why the professor chose Dorothy Sayers and not the better-known (I can't comment on quality, not having read enough of either to warrant an opinion) Agatha Christie. Some of the characters seem like, well, caricatures to me, especially the students, but I'm not sure how much of that is simply the writing conventions of the time, and how much is the time difference between then and now. In particular, Pomfrey's dialog sounds like Donna from Doctor Who or one of the Pythons imitating a rich upper-class twit-about-town.

Finally, I have fulfilled my cultural obligation of seeing at least one Shakespeare play here. I've seen The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV, Part One. I'm slated to go see Part Two tomorrow. I'd rather not review them here, honestly, since I have to do so fairly exhaustively for class, and I'd rather not sit here and rehash the whole thing.