What I’ve Been Reading: January 8, 2008

Ellis and Ennis this week, Ennis and Ellis. Only three books, and I’m not going to divide them out as nicely as I did last week. Chin up, pal, it’s a brave new world where you have to read an interconnected series of overly complicated sentences and notice that I will use italics to indicate the title so you can check and make sure my opinion matches your own.

Hands up if that’s not the primary reason why you read other people’s reviews in blogs.

That’s what I thought. That’s fine; I do it, too, particularly when it’s Spurgeon, because we are so similar and so different and it’s a fun little autopsy process, looking at our foibles and fetishes. There’s also the slow drive by and gawk things that I’d not read in a hundred years but still enjoy watching others kick around, like Caleb’s 30,000 word Weekly Haul posts. If someone could tell me how he puts together so many words yet remains so readable for my addled brain, I’d really appreciate it. Maybe it’s the small words.

Anyway. It’s the third issue of Ellis’s No Hero and while there’s eight pages devoted to double-paged spreads and Carrick actually points out that he’s using a cellphone at one point, bits like the Very Bad Thing that happens and the point of the double-page spreads is a pretty good one. I wanted to type a a bit about Ellis’s pacing on this, but honestly, it’s the end of the first act, and it feels just about right for a 9-issue series, but I’m still fretting a bit. Ellis, as much as I love a lot of the man’s writing, seems to have a consistent problems with his third acts - there’s a reversal missing and the protagonists just go and do what they wanted to do without any complications. For every Black Summer, where things happen on a fairly linear path but you had the benefit of a decimated cast list so that you were playing mental Survivor, there’s an Orbiter where they solve the mystery and go into space. (For the record, it was a very neat mystery, but I wanted more.)

Mind you, I’m beginning to think that Doktor Sleepless may turn out to be his magnum opus as it’s evolving into something a lot more than the Transmetropolitan Redux that it looked like at first blush, so my opinions when it comes to Ellis and his writing may be suspect, especially as I was about to type out a comparison to the first season of The Wire, a show I’m just now getting into. Mind you, a bit of editing and tightening up things on Doktor Sleepless so the individual dose feels stronger would not hurt at all, he said presumptuously about a writer who could have him gutted by Japanese suicide waitresses at any given time.

Oh, and if you were wondering when I’d get to Ennis: The Boys continues to make me fiercely happy, despite the mitigating factor of a replacement artist on the book this month; a sequence in which a Professor X analog went on and on about the importance of brunch as a respite against a world that hates and fears them has a good deal to do with my overall enjoyment. John Higgins tries (and fails) to draw The Boys, succeeding in some things and then going way off-model with others, particularly when it comes to drawing one character’s breasts. I feel like a lech for even noticing, but when a woman of modest proportions suddenly looks like she’s been cast from the Rock Of Love: Gonorrhea Fuckbus rejects, it’s more distracting than it should be.

Next week, I’ll be more coherent, I promise.

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