DoomBook

Having liked R.A. Salvatore’s last entry in this almost-series, namely The Highwayman, I thought I would pick up it’s chronological follow up, The Ancient.

Most of the story takes place in the northern reaches with the Church of Blessed Abelle, an institution founded on good intentions that it frequently only pays lip-service and the “Old God” worshiping cult of the Samhaists again playing a prominent role.

Coming on the heels of the events chronicled in Highwayman Bransen has set out to find out more about his mystic training and the book left for him by his father. Unsure on weather the training offered by the mystics responsible for his martial arts prowess and ability to harness power from Abellican stones he begins by diverting from his intended path, where our story begins to pick up.

While it’s not as gripping as the previous novel, Ancient does have some merits that make it worth a read. The characters and their surroundings are interesting and well thought out. The intrigue and interactions between church factions both within and without the politically gaining Abellican order remain a strong focal point for the story and the orders rise creates a interesting center-point for this chapter of Corona’s history.

If you like Salvatore’s other work or you’re looking for a solid swashbuckling read give The Ancient a look. Anyone unfamiliar with his work might want to check out The Highwayman first, as it gives this story a bit of context and otherwise lacking understanding of Bransen’s character.

Never log onto your space from a HOPE convention and think “I really need to change the password on this right now at roughly 3 o’clock in the morning after a bit of drinking. You won’t remember it. I finally recovered the password, but it took long enough (as evidenced by the paucity of posts).

In any case, Ben Templesmith has been up to some hijinks, having come out with a now decent length series of graphic novels (and one would assume comic format releases) by the title of WormWood. A necrotic worm living in used corpses hedging a resistence against the Earth being destroyed.

Interesting stuff.

You’ll remember Mr Templesmith from the largely non-publishing series “Fell” (“Where did Warren Ellis’s Fell Go?“). This time he’s in full color, mostly single color washed out panels with his rough, smudgy-yet-detailed art style that seems to bring some life out of the object, especially objects as grotesque as this.

And the subject matter is fairly grotesque. Quite a bit of raunch to go around with a zombie inducing worm that drinks and hangs out at a strip club above a trans-dimensional gate. That’s run by immortal gate-keeping strippers. Frankly, if you think that’s funny the comic might be for you. You can check out some snippits of his art over at templesmith.com if you’ve yet to sample the work.

So, world saving zombies, drag queen leprechauns, and a sidekick made out of beer cans with no. Err. Nuts. What’s not to like?

We had to actually look up what “revenant” meant. Normally I would’ve had that one.. but unfortunately D&D references always skew my memory. It means, literally, ghost. Or more exactly disquited spirit (thank you Wikipedia) from Eastern European folklore.

Not having finished the novel I can’t comment on if it ends well, but at the halfway point it’s proved to be up to Donaldson’s usual standard. Characters filled with emotion and human foibles thread through the story along with the empowered embodiments of ideas and extremes. While there aren’t a huge cast of central characters each one is thoroughly, almost exhaustively, plumbed for depth in typical Covenant novel fashion.

Even taking the detail of Fatal Revenant into account (normally something that turns me off to a novel) I like the book. For some reason it clicks quite a bit better than other novels that expound at length on detail. Thinking on it, that’s probably due to the exposition being used on the characters, rather than merely their surroundings. Thomas Covenant novels evoke a visceral reaction that most books can’t, and this latest book is no exception.

So it’s been a while since the Fell trade paperback was published right? Mid last-year or so.

And then it just stopped being published. Which is kinda irritating.

My best guess is that they’re not paying Ellis and Templesmith enough to make it worth a constant release.. despite the comic being one of the hardest to find blockbuster sellers I’ve ever seen.

Granted, it does have a hard format to write. But while it’s very dense it’s also very short, which in theory balances out. For a good example of why, see many of the webcomics (or heck, even Phil Phoglio’s stuff, he’s been doing the format for ages). So the “it’s incredibly hard to do” statement doesn’t really wash for me.

So what with Ellis being hot property as a writer and all, he’s probably making more doing other projects at the moment and DarkHorse has to take what they can get. Just speculation.

Still, Fell is a great series and I’m patiently waiting for more releases. Even if I do have to make runs out to comic book shops that still have issues in stock (re: in New York) whenever they decide to release one.

It occurred to me that I haven’t put a series specific write up for anime lately, or anything on what I’ve been reading and listening too. Here’s a brief post to remedy that, possibly with some specific write-ups later.

Reading:

• “Whitechapel Gods” by S.M. Peters
• “Undead” by Richard Lee Byers
• “Wrath of a Mad God” by Raymond Feist
• “Twilight Watch” by Sergei Lukyanenko

And watching:

• Welcome to the NHK!
• Karas
• Zombie Loan
• Night Magician
• Samurai Champloo
• Ouran High School Host Club
• Genshiken Season 2
• Rental Magika
• Denno Coil

And basically listening to the same run of audio. Nothing really exciting on that front. Groove Coverage, Tiesto, Ferry Corsten. Anjunabeats Worldwide off di.fm. A good run of Last.fm.

Even though it keeps insisting that I want to listen to bad 80’s New Wave and seriously clangy industrial, which I don’t.

And that’s it for now. Maybe I’ll have something up on the series or some single tracks that have caught my ear out of the noise.

Nochnoy dozor (Night Watch in English) was an excellent book by Sergei Lukyanenko. Night Watch the movie (in it’s original Russian, no need to watch a bad dub) is a mediocre movie that’s a horrible letdown from the novel it’s based off of.

Honestly, I’d say to give it a pass unless you want to see how badly a book can be translated into a movie.

The plot changes are drastic and largely unnecessary. One of the major ones is even listed as a “glitch” by Lukyanenko in his comments.. how on earth you glitch a major part of your adaptations plot is beyond me.

If you’d like to see the array of differences check the movie listing out over at Wikipedia.

Acting talent for the movie isn’t all that bad, casting is alright, with characters fitting in with their descriptions from the novel well enough. It all really comes back to the plot being a horrible adaptation that really chops the heart out of the story.

Read the stories (although I found Day Watch to be a bit odd and that it didn’t fit well with Night Watch/Twilight Watch) but give the movie a pass. Or catch it on broadcast TV.. this one’s not even worth a rent. I’ll post if Day Watch (the movie) is any better when I pick up a copy to check out.

Kio Shimoku’s slice of life manga on the happenings of a group of high-school Otaku is at an end. Genshiken: The Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture volume 9 wraps up the series and ends on a somewhat longer note than the original from Kodansha’s Afternoon (from which the series was reprinted).

The same dense art that originally had me pick up the series continues through the last book. Panel’s are filled out with expressive character action and the dialog tends toward wordplay and conversation rather than a trade of statements some manga writers over-use.

Almost all the characters that appear through the series are present for the finale. The only notable absence was the creepy former club president, who hasn’t shown up since the early issues of the series.

So all-in-all it’s a somewhat more satisfying ending than the original print release. It’s already gracing my bookshelf, go check it out.

Just read Outlaw Nation by Jamie Delano, Goran Sudzuka, and Goran Parlov. It’s essentially a classic meandering American tale written by a British writer to show what he saw in our country on his travels. It misses a lot of the veneer and really cuts to the heart of the States.

Also, the storyline proves to be a bit prophetic what with the clamp down on American civil liberties in the wake of 2001.

Outlaw Nation illustrates the death of the American Spirit in pursuit of the American Dream, to steal a line from the liner notes. That’s truly the best way to phrase it, and an interesting perspective you don’t often get in native tales.

The story follows Story Johnson, a zonked out ex-writer and member of the somewhat extraordinary Jones clan. The Johnsons are a particularly long lived specimen of American that started out from a brutal act in the Old West and carry on the raucous Western spirit. Even in the face of encroaching government intervention and the new world order.

Almost poetically, Americans aren’t portrayed as being good or bad, and are mostly (seen through the eyes of our character, a native son) our own worst enemies.

Even though the yarn raps up early the story romps at a good pace and satisfies. As the author states, in light of the events happening in the real world post-publishing, it comes off a lot cleaner than he had intended.

Grab a copy, it’s a good read.

Raymond Feist’s latest outing to Midkemia, part of his DarkWar saga, builds up the storyline in interesting ways. The usual suspects are all there rendered in vibrant colors.

As a follow up to Flight of the Nighthawks and a part of his larger canon of works in Midkemia Into a Dark Realm really worked for me. Characters don’t tend seem overly repetitive or static.

Into a Dark Realm being the middle book in the series I can’t say much about the content without spoiling it. If you liked the previous book in the series this entry should hit the same bar of quality.

Anyone new to Raymond E. Feist’s work might want to start off with Shadow of a Dark Queen or one of the earlier series just to get a feel for the continuity. Plus they’re excellent pieces of literature in their own right.

Finally the trade paperback of Warren Ellis’s Fell has been released. I picked it up to fill in the blank spots from the comics I couldn’t find to purchase (even after 8 reprints) and it’s good. See my previous post for a quick description of what it is. Here’s Wikipedia’s take on it.