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scott pilgrim. [graphic content.]

By • On • In books, graphic content, nerd candy, scott • 2 min read

If you know me at all, you are probably aware that I love the English language enough that I never, ever use instant message speak. No ‘ty,’ ‘rotf,’ or ‘ttyl.’ You’ll never get even the occasional ‘lol’ or ‘brb.’ That is why what is about to happen is a big deal. And it is all because of Scott Pilgrim.

The in-game nerdspeak, the ‘pwned’ sort, just comes bubbling up at the sheer awesomeness Bryan Lee O’Malley has unleashed on the world.

Let’s pretend you can ask me what I’ve thought of the Scott Pilgrim series so far.

“Hey, Scott. How’s Scott Pilgrim so far?”

[*Head glowing from awesomeness*] OMGWTFBBQLASERS!!!

Scott Pilgrim is amazing! No, seriously. Listen. Well, read. IT. IS. AMAZING.

Epic!

The word ‘original’ has been around for a long time. As have the words ‘awesome, ‘hilarious,’ and ‘magicawonderfulnerdtastic.’ Okay, so I made the last word up, but if it was a word, it would apply to what I am saying. We have been using those words all this time without realizing that they were invented just so that someday there would be the proper adjectives to describe the Scott Pilgrim books.

They are so fucking good. My whole life has simply been biding time, waiting until the day when I finally read about the adventures of Mr. Pilgrim.

I know what you are thinking. “Hey Scott, c’mon. You use hyperbole all the time. They can’t really be that good.”

To that I can only respond with: Shut the hell up, dude. If you ever open your stupid, blasphemous face and talk about Scott Pilgrim that way again, I will come to your house and crack an egg of knowledge all over you.

Seriously. It’s like O’Malley took all the awesome, lame, wonderful parts of the average nerd’s brain, influenced by the fact that we are the first generation to grow up completely immersed in video games, and he created a world out of it. A world where things actually happen the way I pretend they happen in my mind.

If you ever wanted to Level Up for doing the right thing, or have a weapon that offers +2 against Vegans, or get EXP points for going to work, then this is the series of indie comics for you.

These books are absurd in the best way possible, surreal and delightful. There isn’t really a way to describe how different they are from any other graphic novel or comic book I’ve ever read. Sooo good.

I already couldn’t wait for the movie to come out this August. Now I think I might have to get a doctor to place me in a controlled coma to get me from now to Inception, and then from that until Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

I’m already mentally preparing for a trip to Toronto to make a (please forgive the pun) pilgrimage.

That glowing review, and so far I’ve only even read Vol. 1-4. I had no freaking idea that Volume 6: Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour wasn’t out  as a graphic novel yet. It doesn’t come out until JULY?!?!?!?!? Terrible. My heart aches for it. What was that I was saying about a coma? I need to check with my local hospital about that.

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wolverine: old man logan. [graphic content.]

By • On • In books, graphic content, nerd candy, scott • 1 min read

I love it when people take a well-known, fictional universe, and then imagine a dream or nightmare scenario that turns the whole thing on its head. When this sort of thing is done poorly, it rightfully draws the scorn of those who love said fictional universe. However, when it is done well it can be loads of fun.

This sort of thing happens most often in the wonderful world of comic books. The long-term, serial nature of comics makes them the best medium for asking, “Hey, what do you think would happen if [insert insane hypothetical situation]?” I have my own idea for a just such a situation, a whole story arc that imagines what Bruce Wayne would be like if his parents had lived. What would the ‘world’s greatest detective’ look like without all that misplaced rage, guilt and insane drive to repair what can’t be fixed. Yet, that is for another post.

One of the masters of the sort of imaginings mentioned above is Mr. Mark Millar. He brought us Superman: Red Son, wondering what the Man of Steel, and the world, would be like if Kal-El had landed in the U.S.S.R., instead of the United States. He brought us Civil War, in which the US government passes a law forcing all superheroes to present themselves for registration. Heroes take sides on the pro-reg and anti-reg sides, and all hell breaks loose.

Recently, thanks to the Seattle Public Library, I got my hands on a copy of the fairly recent, Wolverine: Old Man Logan. In this, we move two generations into the future. That is, two generations after the bad guys finally realized there are, like, 20 villains to every one superhero, joined together, and took over the world. We find Logan as a simple farmer and family man in California, or, what used to be California. He does nothing at all to set things right. Why? Well, you’ll just have to read the book to find out.

I can’t go into much more detail than that without ruining some enjoyable twists and plot developments. Suffice it to say, it’s a really fun read, albeit, a noticeably darker and more violent one than is often the case, provided by one of the best writers working today, tackling one of the best heroes comics has ever had to offer.

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astonishing x-men. [graphic content.]

By • On • In books, graphic content, nerd candy, scott • 3 min read

An open letter to Joss Whedon:

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Dear Mr. Whedon,

Hey, it’s me, Scott.

First off, I need to apologize. I’ve been an absentee fan.

We both remember how addicted I was to Buffy the Vampire Slayer back in my younger days. That was when I would have given anything to be a hilarious smart-ass like your characters were, especially Oz and Xander. Although, if I’m being honest, I would still give anything to be a hilarious smart-ass like your characters.

Those days my devotion to the fledgling Whedonverse was unswerving.

Spike was the first instance I can recall where a villain was my favorite character in a show or movie. Angel was the first spin-off show I actually watched. And damn was I glad when Cordelia went from the vapid bitch to the clueless heroine so that I didn’t have to feel bad for thinking she was so damned hot. Although, I was still in love with Willow, even after she came out of the closet and made it clear I didn’t have a chance.

I loved every minute of it all.

But then, something happened. Somehow, we drifted apart, and we both know it was all my fault.

I missed Firefly and Serenity until 2009… 2009, Joss!! What’s wrong with me? I can’t really explain my actions because I don’t understand them myself. I’m ashamed, really.

I still haven’t seen Dollhouse. I know, not having cable is no excuse, neither is my mild aversion to the acting of Eliza Dushku. There is really nothing I can do to make it up to you.

Yet, that’s not why I am writing to you, but we will get to that in a moment.

First, I need to apologize for one more thing. Remember back in 2004, when you relaunched Astonishing X-Men for Marvel? That brilliant story arc where you resurrect Colossus, kill one X-Man (whose name I shouldn’t mention so I won’t spoil it for anyone else), and shoot another off into space with little hope of return? Well, I actually got to that party late too, and by late to the party, I mean I just read them last week.

Take some solace in the fact that no one has suffered from my neglect more than myself. I lived for six wasted, useless, futile years without reading your take on the X-Men… I was an idiot.

Yet now, oh Joss, now I have seen the light. It is so glorious! How is it possible to make the X-Men even better than they were before? By making them talk like fucking Joss Whedon characters, that’s how! Even with a fairly small cast of characters, you really turned out a shiny X-Men yarn. You let Wolvie be Wolvie, you offered the very best possible incarnation of Beast, you introduced some great new characters, and you never let us get comfortable, mostly by proving you were willing to kill off innocent kids and such.

Every last bit of it is solid gold!

However, I think your greatest achievement was what you did with Cyclops. How did you do it?

You turned the biggest pussy in the history of comic books into an honest to goodness super-hero. Most of the time, Cyclops is just a flat, boring, vanilla lump who works as a contrast to keep reminding everyone just how badass and unpredictable Wolverine is. And sure, that is how he started out with you, but by the end, Gorram. Joss, by the end he was a real character. He had depth, he was flesh and blood. I ached with him, I felt what it was like to wonder if you’re just a punch-line, to assume Xavier put you in charge of the X-Men because he felt sorry for you.

I believed it when it turned out none of that was true, when it was clear the Cyclops is exactly the sort of man who should be leading by order and example.

By the end of your arc there wasn’t anyone else I wanted leading the X-Men. I would follow your Cyclops into battle any day. Joss, that is nothing short of a miracle.

So, that is why I am writing you this letter. Please, please, please write some more X-Men titles. I promise, this time I wouldn’t be late to the party.

Of course, I am damned sure looking forward to the Shepherd Book comics, whenever they finally come out. But Joss, if you write some more X-Men titles, hell, any comic title for that matter, I will be in on it from day one. I don’t care if it is a fucking Wonder Man comic, I will be in a rutting tent outside Zanadu, here in Seattle, waiting to get my hands on a copy.

I know, there is no way I should be asking you for something, not after how I have failed you as a fan. Yet, I would be remiss if I didn’t try.

Please Joss, do it for the kids, so that they might grow up in a world filled with astonishing Whedon X-men goodness.

Thank you for your time.

With equal parts remorse and pleading,

Scott


 

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y: the last man. [graphic content.]

By • On • In books, graphic content, nerd candy, scott • 3 min read

As a brief intro, this is first post in the ‘graphic content’ series. We’ll also post these with the book posts which still don’t have a title, as well as in the nerd candy category. ‘Graphic Content’ posts will all be about graphic novels/comic books.

In case you haven’t figured this out by now, I’m a huge nerd, and, like many other nerds, I love graphic novels and comic books. Feel free to judge me accordingly if you like, I’m used to it.

Anyway, on to the post.

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The Y chromosome has self-destructed. Every male mammal on the planet has dropped dead in horrible fashion, killed by what appears to be a mysterious virus. Every male embryo is dead, sperm banks are filled with lifeless sperm, there seems to be no present or future for men. Yet, every female on the planet who has survived the crashing planes and such has been left untouched. In some sort of macabre gender-rapture, mankind has become extinct. Extinct, that is, except for the last man on earth, Yorick Brown, and his male Capuchin monkey, Ampersand.

That is where the story begins in Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra. What follows in the graphic novels are the adventures of a lone man and his monkey in a world full of women. No, it’s not porn. It’s a post-apocalyptic rumination on what the world might look like in the wake of the death of men.

Yorick travels across the country and around the globe in search of his girlfriend Beth, some answers as to why all the men died while he and Ampersand survived, and hopefully a cure. His travel companions, aside from Ampersand of course, are Agent 355 of the Culper Ring, assigned to keep Yorick safe, and Dr. Allison Mann, a genius who specializes in genetics and hopes to find a way to save humanity.

I can’t go into much detail beyond that without ruining the story for those who decide to read it for themselves.

For the most part, the characters are flawed and likable individuals wrestling with the aforementioned catastrophe. Vaughn does a great job offering one imaginative possibility of what would happen if all the men died in a world which still slants heavily toward patriarchy. Again, I don’t want to go into much detail.

The story Vaughn and Guerra tell is engaging, and it continues to gain momentum throughout the ten volumes. The tenth and final volume is strong, unexpected and fitting, it also pissed me right the fuck off. Vaughn sticks with a semblance of realism, which sucks when you want the characters you have grown to love to have a happy ending. Instead, the ending is a mixed bag, like life. There are moments in the final volume that genuinely moved me, even though I did kind of want to punch Vaughn in his big fat face.

So, you have been warned, if you decide to read these and you want a nice, clean, Hollywood ending, stop reading after Vol. 9 and make up your own ending.

If you don’t read graphic novels often (or ever), try to get through the first four volumes before you make up your mind about the series. It can take time to adjust to the style of graphic novels in general, and this particular story takes some time to get up to full speed.

Y is a good introduction for those who want to dip their toes in the comic book medium outside of capes and tights. This is a fun post-apocalyptic story, and the fact that it is told with more than just words, but also with artwork, shouldn’t count against it.

As with any sci-fi/post-apocalypse lit, we get to play with several questions, so you might especially like Y: The Last Man if you feel you would enjoy story/conversation/dialogue around such questions as:

What if there was only one man alive, and that man were both an an amateur escape artist and a smart-ass, pop-culture quoting fanboy?

How would women organize the world without men?

What would hope look like after the apocalypse?

Also, Vaughn does a great job playing with the sexism and gender roles in our current culture through the story of what would happen if the world as we know it became purely past tense. Most obviously he does this with his primary characters.

Yorick is a sweet, sensitive, laid-back, non-violent type; Dr. Mann is an insensitive, fairly closed-off, outwardly angry person; and 355 is a strong, dangerous, well-trained killing machine, and also the story’s anchor of courage and goodness. None of the three fit the typical gender slots characters normally get slotted into.

I can’t really tell you anything else, otherwise I would spoil things for you, something I intend never to do. Suffice it to say, Y: The Last Man is worth a look. Check it out.


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world war z. [the as yet untitled book posts.]

By • On • In books, nerd candy, scott • 2 min read

I just finished World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. It was hugely entertaining! Written by Max Brooks, son of legends Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, the work is obviously modeled after Studs Terkel’s The Good War: An Oral History of World War II. The book is a series of “interviews” done by a UN researcher ten years after humanity’s victory in the Zombie War.

Clearly, there is a great risk that the book will be pure genre blood and gore with little or no compelling narrative, or it could become so tongue and cheek that it loses all meaning. Brooks manages to avoid both of those potential pitfalls, creating a really engaging read. It is in turns hilarious and moving and there is real humanity to be found within the gore.

Brooks did some amazing research, and thus his narrative is tight. WWZ works really well as an imaginative exercise in how actual global socioeconomic and political realities would shape a real zombie apocalypse. Brooks also does a great job keeping his zombies consistent. Often, a book like this can grow to have too many moving parts and the zombies would manifest whatever traits needed for the story at a given moment. This happens constantly in film, television and fiction. Brooks seemed to set a clear physiology of his zombies first, did loads of research about various nations, economies and governments of the world, and then imagined what would happen if Z-Day were to arrive.

Each of his interviewees, from scattered locales all over the world, told stories that felt like genuine fragments of the larger story he had created outside of our view. Brooks did the work so well that many reviewers have favorably compared it Orson Wells’ “War of the Worlds.” Much of what Brooks did worked as a skewering of bureaucracy, militarism and institutions, showing how each was practically organized to fail at any attempts to prevent letting the zombie outbreak turning into a worldwide apocalypse. The fact that he never left the ground level, always letting the characters truly tell their own stories, was what kept it from feeling like there was an agenda.

If I would make a critique it would be that there were times where characters seemed to lose an individual voice, instead sounding more like Brooks himself. This was especially true in that all of his true heroes shared his disregard for faith of any kind, something that would simply be impossible in the actual religious make-up of the world, thus it comes across as a short-sighted misunderstanding of the reality that not all people of faith are extremist Muslim terrorists and lunatic Pat Robertsons or Glenn Becks. Most likely, as it has been for every single calamity in world history, faith would be a part of the problem and a part of the solution in responding to WWZ. Yet, as I write that, understand that this is a tiny critique of a book which truly was a genuine pleasure to read.

The zombie genre can be quite a bit of fun, and this book would be a great introduction for those interested in entering the zombie milieu. It is a remarkably unique sub-genre in which we can explore our fears of the end of the world, can wrestle with the reality that when the world ends it will probably be humanity that pulls down our own curtain, and where we can engage in a hodgepodge of other fun little mental games. I could go on talking about how much I love the zombie genre for a while, so I will end that conversation here… for now.

This book is a fast, engaging read, and I recommend it to all you great folks out there in the internets.

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jonathan strange & mr. norrell.

By • On • In books, scott • 4 min read

So, one of our semi-regular posts here on Roused to Mediocrity will be centered on books we love. The posts will include books we’ve just read for the first time, or books that we read when we were twelve. The criteria is that they are the sort of book that we simply need to recommend to everyone who will listen.

My assumption is that for my part, fiction will make up the bulk of my recommendations. That is because, as those who know me can attest, for my money there is nothing that beats stories. Stories are sacred and redemptive, they teach us about who we are. When we hold them up to the light we don’t just learn about the characters in the tale, or the author, we learn about ourselves, about what it means to be human. See, there I go rambling about story when this post is about something else entirely!

Thus far, we have yet to come up with a clever moniker for said posts, and we would love the help of you out there in internet land. What should we call these posts?

The first post fits right in with my prediction, but you didn’t really think that I was going to blog about something else after making a claim like the one above, did you? Anyway, on with the post!

Normally, on a day when I finish a book I am quickly on to another. That is never a reflection on the story, or how much I enjoyed said book. Most often I simply can’t wait to sink my teeth into page one of another tale. The most significant exception I can recall was quite recently, after finishing Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke.

After finishing the story’s final page I was so hesitant to leave behind the world of alternate history and characters Clarke had created that I actually spent two days deciding whether or not I would start a new book or simply relive the delightful pages with Strange and Norrell again.

Books simply don’t get better than this. It was wonderfully British, subtle and nuanced, consistently hilarious, in short, it was utterly brilliant. Filled with beauty and wonder, darkness and tragedy, and for all its false history it is filled with people who have the depth, faults and authentic frailty of each of us. I quite honestly wished that when I had finished the 850 pages that there were 1000 more at least.

Clarke’s tone of narration was perfect for making the idea utterly believable that, during the Napoleonic War, London saw the reintroduction of magic into everyday life. The alternate world of the story was just like our own, aside from the fact that everyone was well aware of the existence of magic and faeries (and as a side note, faeries in this story are not miniature girls with wings, they are tall, attractive, wildly dangerous and unpredictable creatures of both genders, for whom magic comes as easily as breathing). Clarke tells a tale which feels at every moment appropriately outlandish while at the same time entirely plausible and commonplace.

I loved all the characters. Each had a depth that wasn’t exaggerated, but felt quiet and real. When someone tells us a story in real life, they rarely go out of their way to point out the emotional complexity of the story’s subjects, that is simply present for those who desire to read between the lines. Such is the case for characters like Jonathan and Arabella Strange, Gilbert Norrell, Childermass, Stephen Black, Lord Wellington, the gentleman with thistle-down hair, and even the absent yet always central character of John Uskglass.

Each character wooed my affection, not in spite of their foibles and weaknesses, but because of them. It was in large part their weakness that made them feel so authentic. They held grudges to the point of absurdity, the two main protagonists were fueled by arrogance and fear as often (or more often) as courage and clarity. They were all terrible at communicating, to their own peril. However, it is never in the absurd Lost sort of bad communication that works as a shorthand (read: lazy) way of keeping the plot a mystery (Kate: Sayeed, what’s wrong?!? Sayeed: We are all going to die if you don’t stand on your head whistle the theme song to Hawaii 5-0. [Characters walk off into the jungle, and, end scene] Viewer: Ah, I see, that is the end of the conversation. Not, “Why, Sayeed?” or “What is going to kill us?” or “Why would that help?” or “Take 5 minutes and tell me the short version of what’s going on.” We’ll just leave it at, OK, that vague, mysterious and nonsensical answer works for me, away we go.)

In Clarke’s book the poor communication happened in the way that we are all often terrible at communicating in real life, when a simple uncomfortable conversation might clear everything up but we avoid the tension and vulnerability, where we are unwilling to face the necessary relinquishing of our pride. It is a world where we let misunderstanding hang in the air because we cannot bring ourselves to make the sacrifices necessary for a needed conversation to take place.

Since reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell I’ve also loved the hell out of Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu, which is a book of short stories, each taking place in the same alternate history as the novel.

I hope it isn’t long before Clarke unleashes her slightly dark and entirely brilliant imagination on the world with a new book.

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