Jarrett House North

Free as in beer, Wind as in air

A few comics related links this morning. First, it will be of interests to comics historians, fantasy fans, and my sister that the full archive of Elfquest is going on line for free to mark the comic’s thirtieth anniversary; the archive will fill up over the coming year. That’s a whole lotta Pini, folks. If you thought catching up with the Sluggy Freelance archives took a long time, just wait.

The other freebie is an archive of the original art for the first issue of Elektra: Assassin, written by Frank Miller and lovingly painted by Bill Sienkiewicz. If you think Miller’s later work was weird, intense, and violent, just wait until you feast your mind on this one. (Greg Burgas wrote an excellent review of the series that might lend some context to the art.)

Print on demand from the Internet Archive

Browsing a Wired.com photo feature on the Internet Archive’s book scanning operation, I was struck by this image, showing a self-contained book press. PDF goes in, paperback bound book comes out.

I would pay for a copy of Cabell’s Early History of the University of Virginia, for sure, and maybe even the five-volume centennial History of the University of Virginia by Bruce, which has provided so much material for my Wikipedia articles. I hope they get this capability on line soon.

The library problem

Interesting link from Slashdot regarding one individual’s effort to solve the library problem—also known as, how do you work with 3500 books? I like how they addressed not just the physical issues but also the cataloging questions.

Something to think about when I address my 550+ books...

Ass-kicking Bible verses

Cracked.com is kind enough to provide a listing of the Nine Most Badass Bible Verses, an idea that sounds really silly unless you know your Old Testament. Yep: Samson and Elisha, Original Gangstas. And I have to admit that the verse about David is pretty darned good, too.

I can’t help but think that some of my seminarian friends would be able to flesh this list out considerably. Ideas?

Prologue to Beowulf

And no, not that Beowulf, though I confess the release of the movie got me off my duff to start this project. And not even the Seamus Heaney translation. No, I’m talking about the real thing—the original Old English poem, as it was meant to be experienced—read aloud, in this case, by the great Old English scholar Kemp Malone.

I found a four-record set of Malone reading the whole bloody poem about seven years ago, in a now-vanished record shop in Central Square in Cambridge. The recording, on the once great Caedmon label (now an audiobook label for Harper Collins, with no sign of its back catalog reappearing anytime soon), was made in 1967 and, if the first side is anything to go by, probably drove every undergrad who listened to it completely nuts. Malone’s delivery is even-keeled, and he doesn’t attempt to sell the text, so little moments like the description of Scyld Scefing as a “good king” for his giving of gifts don’t get the reinforcement that the rhythm of the text would seem to indicate. But it’s still a great window onto the roots of the language.

I have a little bonus for this post: a clip from the recording, constituting the Prologue of Beowulf as read by Malone. I digitized the clip from my copy of the record; to date, I’ve only digitized one side of one LP, owing to the time required to do it properly (unlike CDs, vinyl has to be ripped in real time!) Hopefully it’s interesting to at least one person out there.

Prologue to Beowulf, read by Kemp Malone (Caedmon) - Download 2.6MB MP3

Comics roundup: Sikoryak, xkcd, ARBBH

Item: BoingBoing pointed to an R Sikoryak adaptation of Crime and Punishment a la a Dick Sprang Batman comic book. In turn, the Again with the Comics blog post that reprinted the adaption linked to the Masterpiece Comics on R Sikoryak’s site, including a tiny reproduction of my favorite comics adaptation of a literary masterpiece: “Good Ol’ Gregor Brown.” One morning Charlie Brown awoke to find himself transformed into an enormous insect... I actually own that issue of Raw and shared the strip with my English professor in a class on modernity where we were reading the original “Metamorphosis.” Good stuff.

Item: Wired’s profile of xkcd creator Randall Munroe contains exactly one item about Munroe that hasn’t already been linked on BoingBoing: that he used to be a roboticist for NASA.

Item: So Penny and Aggie has been hawking free downloadable reprints in PDF form for a while now. I checked them out, and I was pretty impressed—Wowio’s a nice service and the quality is good, even if it limits you to three downloads per day. But it got me thinking: how much money is in the business model? And who else is on the service? So I started poking around, and all these indie comic books that I remember from when I was in middle school are in there. Like, stuff that was trying to cash in on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, before TMNT was a movie or even a TV show. Like Dragon (terrible, and terribly I owned the first few issues of it!). And, of course, like Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters. And there’s better stuff too: Steve Canyon, Flash Gordon, the Star Trek Key Comics from the late 1960s; and more. Of course they also do ebooks; I just added Civil Disobedience to my queue.

Rag & Bone class of 1992-1993

Thinking about John reminded me to look up some of my other authors from the first three issues.

Mohit Bhasin, whom I served badly with a poor choice of anatomical clip art next to his poem in the first issue, appears to have kept up his dual pursuit of literature and medicine.
Laura MacCleery is at Public Citizens Congress Watch.
Kevin Corrie, our poetry editor, appears to have landed at Planting Seeds Records (if Google is to be believed).
Jennifer Scappettone is on the faculty at the University of Chicago (though she apparently almost didn’t get into poetry thanks to the environment at UVa). She also apparently contributes to the group blog A Tonalist Notes, though I’m still looking for her posts—it’s a large team.
Paul Bibeau’s book Sundays with Vlad: From Pennsylvania to Transylvania, One Man’s Quest to Live in the World of the Undead was published last month. He’s freelanced for a variety of publications and is now the only person I know to have been both an advice columnist at Mademoiselle and an editor at Maxim. I plan to check out the podcast of his speech to the Jefferson Society at my earliest opportunity.
April Thompson is a freelance writer and editor.
Rebecca Dunham is on the faculty at the University of Northern Iowa; her collection The Miniature Room was a T.S. Eliot Prize Winner in 2006.
Carol Golemboski is on the faculty at the Visual Arts Department at UC Denver.
Lailee Mendelson works at Emory and had an article published in Salon a while back.
Tyler Magill is still writing.
Poulson Reed is the sub-dean at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral in Denver, Colorado.
Jamie Gaughran-Perez is the editor of a zine called RockHeals, among other activities.
Kim Seelinger has been practicing immigration law and teaching.
David Sherwin is an art director, photographer, and musician in Seattle.
Stacy Wray blogs, writes poetry, and is one half of the acoustic band Tumble.

Harry Potter: all over but the movies

I started, and finished, Deathly Hallows last night. Don’t worry: no spoilers from me. Just a note to mark the end of that particular journey.

But one thought: how the hell are they going to make that a movie? Jo hardly managed to fit it all into just one book.

RIP, Kurt Vonnegut

Thanks to Zalm for starting me out right this morning by pointing to Kurt Vonnegut’s obituary. So it goes, indeed.

Yes, I know...

...quite a few meme posts recently. Forgive me: after a long downtime, I still have my blog training wheels back on, and any writing is better than no writing.

So I was tagged by Isis with this book meme:

Find the nearest book.
Name the book & the author.
Turn to page 123.
Go to the fifth sentence on the page. Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
Tag three more folks.

And boy, you’re going to regret asking me this, because I’m at work and the nearest book is ... well, it could have been worse:

Book: The Tipping Point (Back Bay Books, 2002)
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

p. 123, 5th sentence and ff.:

“Something that stuck in my mind was when Kermit would hold his finger to the screen and draw an animated letter, you’d see kids holding their fingers up and drawing a letter along with him. Or occasionally, when a Sesame Street character would ask a question, you’d hear kids answer out loud. But Sesame Street just somehow never took that idea and ran with it.”

Now in my defense: this is a serious book about what makes innovations and products “sticky” – keeping customers interested in the product offering. But still a kind of random connection...

Tagging: Chris, Zalm, Tin Man.

RIP, William Styron

New York Times: William Styron, Novelist, Dies at 81. While others will remember him for Sophie’s Choice, Lie Down in Darkness, or The Confessions of Nat Turner, I will of necessity remember this writer from my hometown of Newport News for Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, which he wrote in 1990 about his struggles with depression and which proved (aside from a short story collection) to be his last published work.

When I read Darkness Visible in the early 90s, there were few writers who had addressed the sufferings of depression in a public, accessible, direct way—and virtually no successful ones. Styron’s writing gave me pause as I reflected on its parallels with my own experiences. In retrospect, it has given me hope that depression need not always marginalize the sufferer.

Other encomia to Styron via Technorati.

Chris Baldwin hits the Big(ger) Times

Bruno artist Chris Baldwin reported on Friday (sorry no permalink) that his should-be-in-every-newspaper comic strip, Little Dee, will be available through Comics.com, United Features Syndicate’s online comics portal, where it can be read alongside Peanuts, Doonesbury, and other greats. It’s not syndication but it’s a huge step. Wired picked up the news yesterday, so I think Chris has more friends in places of greatness than he realizes. Stop by Chris’s page and buy his book to show your support.

Tomorrow's Children

It’s been one of those serendipitious days. A link on Boing Boing about a secret “cornfield” where misbehaving players inside the MMPORG Second Life get banished sent me on a search for the original story. The game makers credit the Twilight Zone, but I remembered reading a short story with the same premise as a kid in elementary school. “It’s a Good Life,” by Jerome Bixby, always scared the hell out of me, but it’s the sort of story that sticks with me to the present day.

Remembering the title of another story in the anthology, “Gonna Roll Them Bones,” I found a pointer to the anthology. Tomorrow’s Children, edited by Isaac Asimov, was full of extraordinarily creepy stories and hit me, as I was busy reading my way through the entire elementary school library, like a ton of bricks. From that point on I was hooked on science fiction, and remember being disappointed that Asimov’s own works didn’t have anywhere near the eerie resonance that these stories did. Based on the reviews in Amazon, it would appear that I’m not the only one who was warped for life by the book—and based on the prices for it on Alibris, it will be a good long time before I can get my hands on it again.

Review: Little Lulu Vol. 6, Letters to Santa

There was an odd comics book adthat stuck in my head as a young comics geek in the 1970s. I still remember three things about the ad: it was a sweepstakes sponsored bythe Clark candy company; it had a big picture of a bunch of Marvelsuperheroes in the middle; and it promised the chance to meet anyMarvel or DC superhero... or “even Little Lulu.” As a comics reader in the 1970s, I had no idea what Little Lulu was, but I knew it didn’t sound as cool as Spider-Man, so I ignored it. What a pity: had I done a little exploring, I might have been exposed to a piece of graphic brilliance.

Little Lulu stands alongside the Carl Barks Donald Duckstories for sheer comic genius told through simple formulas. Where Barks’s drawings were highly detailed and every episode featured a different, highly imagined setting for his cast to explore, Little Lulu,in the hands of writer/layout artist John Stanley and finish artist Irving Tripp, had simple, clean drawings, and only about four storylines: Lulu would get revenge on the boys for something; her friend Tubby would investigate a “crime,” usually perpetrated by Lulu’s dad; Lulu would tell the little neighborhood brat Alvin a story in which a girl would triumph over all odds; and “wild card” stories whereLulu might get into some unspecified trouble with her friends. Within those limits, the comic was brilliant. Lulu serenely sailed above all troubles, got the best of all the boys, and gleefully dealt vengeance on the neighborhood boys. And the art, simple though it is, is a touchstone alongside 50s era Peanuts and Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy for clean, stylized grace.

Now, thanks to Dark Horse, the original Little Lulu comics are being reprinted in chronological order. (Again, Little Lulu seems like the odd man out in a line-up for me, since Dark Horse is known primarily for gritty indie titles like Concrete, Sin City, and Hellboy, as well as for licensed comics like the massively popular Alien vs. Predator and the Star Warstitles.) The Little Lulu series is now up to Volume 6, and all the elements are in place. All the classic story tropes are in evidence here, with Lulu ad Tubby creating chaos for a truant officer, a ghost, a customer at the butcher shop, and of course Lulu’s long suffering parents.

But the best and probably most poignant story in the collection is the title story (which bears no title in the collection itself), featuring Lulu asking for a new doll so she can give her beloved old doll to the poor girl down the street. It’s an old story, but effectively told here, and a nice counterpoint to the commercialism ofthe season.

One minor quibble: as with Dark Horse’s other Little Lulu compilations, all the art is black and white, which detracts a little from the charm of the drawings; otherwise the collection is impeccably done, and will be enjoyed by fans of classic comics and young newreaders alike.

This post originally appeared on Blogcritics.

Splendid Sundays in Slumberland

New York Times: Restoring Slumberland. There’s an eerie synchronicity about reading this article at the same time as Cory Doctorow’s Themepunks serial in Salon. Peter Maresca’s painstaking restoration of Winsor McCay’s century old comic strips, which still stretch the limits of the form in both imagination and quality, and his subsequent decision to self-publish the results seems as brilliantly quixotic as the creation of garden gnomes with face-recognition for providing context-sensitive household memos.

What’s best about the new book is that it’s about a passion for something that was itself insanely passionate. No hack working in syndicated comics today could pull off anything like the imagination and brilliance of a page from this book. Unfortunately, what’s worst about the book is the infrastructure: the book’s website, sundaypressbooks.com, is was pretty much unreachable (it’s back now).

Update: Nice post at BoingBoing citing Glenn Fleishman on the copyright issues involved: “100 years later, the public that granted the limited exclusivity of copyright gets to reap in the greater benefit of cultural heritage being shared more widely.” The ironies abound in this case. Prior to the Dover reprints that surfaced a few years ago, I’m unaware of any collections that appeared while the work was still in copyright. It’s only now that the right audience has appeared to create a work that might spark new interest in McCay’s work.