Nightschool: The Weirn Books, volume 3, or chapters 13-18 (plus bonus story!)

Mr Roi rocks.

Daemon is cool.

They are both called teachers, but they are very different.

There's a night university? Eron says he goes to university & it looks hard for him to hide his night-thing-ness. Interesting that someone like Mr Roi is at a high school.

That phrase gets used a lot in v. 3: "Night things." What the hunters call the various monsters & such. Which gets us "Nightest night thing that ever nighted" as a description of Mr Roi.

I suspect that the Sohrem-chosen & those who remember the taken are the same but I suppose I could be wrong.

The Sohrem is probably lying when it says that killing the other one will help.

I'm really not writing well when I sit down to the computer, sorry. This post feels thin to me.

The plot twists come fast & furious--no really, there's a lot of plot twist in this volume, & we leave things in even more dire shape, with at least one new unresolved problem. When does it get resolved? I don't know.

The action gets very brutal by the end of volume 2. It may be triggering, what with one character undergoing a very sudden personality shift.

But Izumo is still sexy.

I suspect the Jagara really are too keen to put outsiders in positions of authority.

Not for nothing is it called, "Sword of the Devil." Don't get too attached to these characters.

I want to gush about something, but I don't have the ability right now to do the post that does justice to this.

Svetlana Chmakova's Nightschool blows so many other fantasy-outside-your-window series away. Is it what superhero comix used to be to me? Or better than they ever were?

The cast is huge. Like seriously huge, a lot to keep track of. There are many concepts floating around in the series, & each has depths, which are unexplained but which the writer seems to know. I wonder if at some point the mystery & the inventiveness will run out & I'll be bored. But for now, it's still unfolding & interesting.

And what characters! Among others: The little Russian-American (OK, Russo-Canadian) seer who was used to play the stock market by a gang of werewolves & just wants to go home; the Hunters who protect her, & the mysterious teacher who trains them. The spell scientist who teaches young witches at the school (& is always breaking holes in the classrooms) has left various large "seals" around in the past--how old is this guy anyway?--& has a sentient library who smiles with glee when he leaves it (her?) new scrolls. The comical night principal who may have swiped the percolator from the teachers' lounge; the pointy-eared "demon" teacher training young weirns (witches) in use of their "astrals" (sort of sentient assistant extensions of oneself)--who throws a snotty new pupil (previously home-schooled) straight into the final...and that pupil, about whom a mystery is brewing.

I get the impression that Chmakova at least has some idea what it all means, that this isn't JJ Abrams-style mysteries-without-solutions-yet-thought-of. I hope that the characters that are lying near death will come back so we can see more of them. I care about these strange characters.

The cast has actual ethnic diversity too. Not only are there weirns (a sort of witch), "demons" (with pointy ears), Hunters (that feels like it should be capitalized here), vamps, a mermaid, blah blah blah; but each group incorporates characters of different color, language background, etc. In the black-&-white art, character colors seem to come mostly in white & toned, but they have different face shapes & hairstyles--so if you're keeping track you can tell them apart.

I guess Chmakova has spent time around young children, maybe teaching even; the "astral training" class has that wonderful sense of understanding pedagogy. In so many ways, this reflects what people are actually like, in their wild imperfection & messiness. Not something an antisocial self-isolating nerd could manage to put in his raging power fantasy--which is why it walks all over what we get from too many "fantasy comics."

The other night I finally watched ST:TNG: "Justice" to the end. The blond sex maniac Eloi Edo--still creepy. But there was some neat stuff in the ep that I had never seen: their god, & curly wig woman's reaction to same; & the sad but dutiful "mediators".

Still, there are giant problems with this ep.

Why was Wesley even on the away team? Granted, this is after "Where No One Has Gone Before," so Picard is taking an active interest in the boy. But how does taking an active interest turn to, "send to planet of simple-minded satyrs"?

And the Edo themselves: Good lord, what's with the dumb pleasure-seeking blond stereotype?

And the final resolution, with, ""there can be no justice so long as laws are absolute," "life itself is an exercise in exceptions," &, "When has justice ever been as simple as a rulebook?" was a bit simplistic.

Production note: This many years later, I'm amazed at the flimsiness of the Edo costumes: Certainly another era. How did they stay in them? I guess this was to make the regulars feel better about their first season Lycra costumes.

Orange, by Benjamin (a.k.a. Benjamin Zhang Bin, Bin Zhang)

Took me a while to get around to reading this. It's very downbeat, & I wonder to what degree there is any edification to be had from it. But it feels honest to me, a longtime depressive.

What separates this from the angry "adolescent" work typical of Britcomix/Vertigo?

The Vertigo style is about externalized rage, trying to crap on everything else. All beauty is actively & passionately denied.

Benjamin's destructive impulses are internal, & the story is about self-destruction as a kind of sacrifice. The apparent futility is still laden with meaning & sense that there is beauty in the world, anyway.

Anyway, look at it for the art. Benjamin has a bunch of illos in the back he did for other things. Pretty. Pity the man himself seems so despondent.

Metamorpho was a whimsical DC comic book in the 1960's. I only know it by reputation, but I'm given to understand that it was merry.

For some reason--or, worryingly, for no reason at all--DC for the last 20 years has insisted on portraying the characters from that series as deeply broken & morose.

I have a hypothesis that most "general DC fans" & most DC editors are unfamiliar with characters' own books & base their impressions of characters other than the Bat- & Super- casts on the various characters' appearances in books like JLA, & their guest appearances in Bat- & Super- books.

I wonder if Metamorpho's morosity is somehow traceable to the infamous The Brave and the Bold #123 (when it was a Batman team-up book). This is the issue which excited a minor controversy ten years later in the letters pages of Mike W. Barr's The Outsiders. Mike W. Barr condemned The Brave and the Bold #123 as a throwaway non-continuity Batman/Metamorpho/Plastic Man team-up in which Rex (Metamorpho) was out-of-character, being uncharacteristically downbeat. And MWB made a point of writing Rex as a happy guy.

But then The Outsiders was canceled, & Rex turned evil & died in a very strange final arc. Metamorpho was resurrected in Invasion! & got stuck in Justice League Europe, where he became mopey, because his wife had moved on while he was dead & evil. Then he was killed off again, & is now back in some strange form in a new version of the Outsiders.

~ ~ ~

I like Shakespeare, I do. Underrated comedian, who is perhaps not well served by his worshipers. Look, Hamlet, stripped to plot, is a morbid sack of vomit, much like Titus Andronicus--it has survived because the soliloquy is that good. Romeo & Juliet seems like a romp gone strangely off to me. I liked Macbeth as a kid, but am afraid that on seeing it or reading it again, I'll now hate it. But yeah, good comedian, & decent work on his "histories." Some few of the sonnets are brilliant. Too bad English teachers mistake "tragedy" for "serious" & thus for "good."

But in no way did Shakespeare invent the human or something. English culture would have muddled through much the same without him, thank you very much. And I say this as a matter-of-fact Stratfordian; Shakespeare's output, much of it adapted from previous material, isn't that incredible in a world where J. S. Bach existed.

~ ~ ~

All of which is to say I read The Sandman: Dream Country yesterday.

As a longtime comix fan, I naturally started with, "the one where Gaiman kills off Element Girl." They actually gave Bob Haney & Ramona Fradon credit on the title page for creating her, but I don't think it's the sort of thing Fradon would approve of, exactly. Gaiman's odd little pro-suicide piece might have gone down better if it weren't done as the canon fate of a goofy whimsical trademark.

Also, I don't think you're doing Colleen Doran's art a lot of favors with that inker (M. Jones III?).

Then I went to, "the one with the Charles Vess art." I have never in fact seen or read Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Perhaps this hot mess would have made more sense if I had. Can someone familiar with both tell me if the references work? There was some mildly cute characterization, but not a lot of, y'know, story there. It seemed like he was trying to ride on reference to a more well-known work with which his audience would be familiar, which is something I consider poor writing.

I read the introduction, & on reflection, no, I don't think the man's father was telling him the truth.

Then I figured I'd read the Kelley Jones ones.

I'll give Gaiman points for actually freeing Calliope from bondage in the first one.

Then there's "A Dream of a Thousand Cats." Maybe it's because I read that one last, but this one affected me. It really got to me. Not enough for me to let slide that apparently the colorist doesn't know what a blue point Siamese is (or Gaiman assumes that at least some cat owners who care about this can't tell blue from chocolate). Ahem. But no, it got to me.

Then I thought about it. Dream's just a big fat liar, isn't he?

Anti-Scottish prejudice in In the Loop? I'm not sure. Apparently the two Scottish characters are from the TV show The Thick of It. So maybe it's anti-
Scottish prejudice in that.

Seriously, I don't usually scream this much about evil Jock gits unless I'm reminded of the existence of Mark Millar. (So, yeah, that's pretty often actually.)

Anyway, the scenes of the junior violent Scotch bastard terrorizing the timid English staff made me want to paste him. This business of using physical violence to force the government to commit fraud so one can commit larger violence with the banner of UN approval merits violent response. I'd push the jerk through a window. But then, that's why I wouldn't have been hired in that office; they want someone who will respond with timid capitulation to over-the-top threats of physical violence.

The parallel asshole in the US government was of a kind more familiar to me, thus more "realistic" in my experience. Will have his way with utter calm propriety, but still a warmongering hateful ass.

I do recommend this movie if you like hearing colorful cussing & lots of it, & want to feel deeply angry about Anglo-American politics. I was at the time I began watching it under the misapprehension that it was based on true events leading up to the Iraq invasion, which makes it more powerful, I think. But it isn't really representing that specific bit of lies & self-delusion so much as the imagined process of lies, self-delusion, & inappropriate careerism in government. "Inspired by," let's say.

Last night I finally saw In Her Shoes. I had a fair bit of affection for Toni Collette & Cameron Diaz already. I'm not really familiar with Shirley MacLaine, but she was good in this.

I really like this movie. I like the divergent lines plot structure, the focus on the internal development of the characters, & the ironic sense of protecting someone who's done you wrong from others' anger.

In one of the bonus features, the director (or one of the producers, I forget) was saying how this is the kind of movie that used to be common but now is rare, in how it's about modern realistic people, to whom the audience will react with a, "that's me!" I felt that way about both Rose (Toni Collette) & Maggie (Cameron Diaz) at different points in the course of the movie.

Rose is the "responsible" one, Maggie is the "irresponsible" one. And over the course of the movie, we see them each go through personal progress & reshape their relationship to each other (boy that's vague). It's quite a ride. Not one to watch with your very conservative parents, I would say, but a neat flick.

One strange thing: Why cast Toni Collette in a role that was written for a "fat" woman? I took it as "fatter than her sister"/"self-critical" but she's supposedly a woman with a noticeable weight problem (or former weight problem) in the script. She said she gained 25 pounds for the part, but she comes off as a svelte woman in baggy clothes.

Yesterday I watched two movies with very different takes on politics:

The Yankee satire Swing Vote (2008) paints US politics as the domain of somewhat silly but well-meaning people. Sure, they're frauds & flip-floppers, creatures of desperation; but they bend over backwards to make sure the swing voter will like them.

The Mexican suspense film Conejo en la luna (2004) shows us a Mexico where one political party is dominant, totally mobbed up, & murderous. A British national flees to her nation's embassy for protection, & is snatched up just outside the gate & hauled off to confinement by mobsters. The embassy staff don't even notice. A Mexican observes that (I paraphrase) "politics is the same beneath the surface everywhere; in Britain the dirty deeds happen under a cover of gentlemanliness."

Both pretty good movies, if not perfect.

I was amused by the GOP President in Swing Vote quoting T. Roosevelt--in a deleted scene. As if any Bull Moose progressives were nominated by the GOP these days. I wonder if that kind of little scene has any positive influence, puts any chink in the hardline conservatism of the party. I doubt it; the most I expect is that some voters will do what I used to do & mistake the modern "Grand Old Party" for the party of TR & Lincoln. Anyway, I liked Kelsey Grammar as the Prez. Also, disappointingly little Nana Visitor.

The end of Conejo en la luna--well, it's suspense, so maybe I won't spoil it, but I was surprised by one line in the last scene that seemed at odds with everything we'd seen. Brave face?