Monthly Archive: August 2007

I was never very interested in reading the Harry Potter books. I found the movies enjoyable but that interest never made me want to read the books. The cries of outrage I heard from hardcore fans after seeing the movies didn’t help matters much.

If reading these books made them enjoy the movies less, why should I bother? I kept this up for quite a bit until July 15th, six days before the release of book seven, when I decided I was going to get through the first six before Amazon delivered my mother’s copy on the 21st.

The time constraint this imposed was a daunting one. 3,341 pages in a little over six days was, I thought, an impossible task. What I didn’t know was that these books read like drinking water. There is nothing to make these a hard read as long as you are quick on learning the lingo of the series, the non-made-up words are all simple, and these are children’s books after all. I went through the first three books in just under two days and actually had to take breaks in the latter half of the week so I wouldn’t finish too soon. In one of these breaks I went to see the new Harry potter film in 3-D; I would like to recommend that wholeheartedly, the 3-D effect looks great, it’s a different experience entirely. I finished Half-Blood Prince late Friday night and went to bed eagerly awaiting the mail the next day.

I’ll only cover the last book briefly, as it seems that everyone everywhere is discussing it always. The last book arrived at 11 in the morning and I was finished 14 hours later. Anyone who complains that that ending was ruined for them has clearly never read any other book as that was about the only way this series can end and still be remotely satisfying. Rowling is a very good writer when she’s on but I doubt even she would have the chutzpah to let evil triumph over good. I also feel like she sells out Snape, by far her most interesting character, to give him this overwhelmingly noble motive. Love after all is the most powerful thing in the Harry Potter mythos. It removes any trace of ambiguity in his action.

Reading the books in short order let me get into the books in a consistent headspace. I didn’t grow with Harry; Harry lived the entire interesting part of his life in a matter of days. J.K. Rowling, too, for that matter. You can see her rise from unknown to richest woman in England as her books progress from the first, when she is quite clearly cramped by space constraints to Order of the Phoenix which is a bloated mess of decompressed narrative.

And you thought that could only be used to describe Brian Michael Bendis.

DC Comics caused a bit of a ruckus late last year when they announced their new Minx line of comics. Minx was avowedly an attempt to drag the large audience – mostly young, mostly female – for translated Japanese [[[manga]]] back to American creators by giving them books in formats and styles similar to manga. Some feminists took an instant loathing to the name, and to the fact that most of the announced creators were male, but everyone seemed to think that the idea was a good one. (Though I’m still surprised that no one has done the obvious thing: spend the money to start up an American equivalent of Shojo Beat. The manga system works so well partly because the periodicals act as try-out books and party because popular series can be sold twice, as periodicals and books. Trying to create a manga-like market with only collections is like trying to ride a bicycle on one wheel – you can do it, if you’re Curious George, but it’s difficult and slow.)

I’ve recently read two of the four Minx launch titles, and thought it would be interesting to look at them together. (The other two, which I haven’t seen, were Good as Lily by Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm and [[[The P.L.A.I.N. Janes]]] by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg. And more books have already been announced to follow.) I’ll admit that I’m not the target audience for Minx’s books – I’m about twenty years too old, and sport the wrong variety of wedding tackle – but I am definitely the audience for a new book by the creative team behind My Faith in Frankie, and for a new book written by Andi Watson. And I’m certainly part of the audience for interesting, new American comics done well, no matter who they’re supposedly aimed at.

Let’s start with Re-Gifters, which is both more essentially conventional in its story and more successful in the end. It is a reunion of the crew behind [[[My Faith in Frankie]]], down to the publisher and editor – and the story has certain parallels to Frankie, as well. Our main character is a dark-haired young woman (Jen Dik Seong, aka Dixie), with a blonde best friend (Avril, who starts to narrate the story but is stopped quickly). Dixie thinks she’s crazy about a blonde boy (Adam), who turns out to be not quite as all that as our heroine at first thought. The narration, in Dixie’s voice, is also a bit reminiscent of Frankie’s. But that’s about the end of the parallels: Dixie’s story is completely down-to-earth, without any gods or other supernatural elements. (It’s also aimed at a younger audience than Frankie’s, so there’s no sex, either, and Dixie is a couple of years younger than Frankie was.)

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Steven Okazaki’s documentary feature White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will arrive August 6 over the HBO premium-cable network, marking the 62nd anniversary of the arrival of thermonuclear warfare. The film’s harrowing impact has been a matter of record since its in-competition run during last January’s Sundance Film Festival in Utah.

Though hardly the first of its kind, White Light/Black Rain proves a timely and emphatic reminder. It possesses a sharp consistency with the pioneering Barefoot Gen manga-turned-anime tales of Keiji Nakazawa, and with Masuji Ibuse’s novel Black Rain, as filmed in 1989 by Shohei Imamura. Okazaki’s film brings full-circle, East-meets-West, a persistent question raised by one history-in-the-making Hollywood epic of 1947, The Beginning or the End, which traces the Manhattan Project to a climax at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (In its very title, The Beginning or the End had declared thermonuclear weaponry a topic of perpetual relevance. Further outcroppings since then have included 1982’s The Atomic Café, a pageant of A-bomb boosterism propaganda; and 1995’s The Plutonium Circus, concerning the Texas town most thoroughly identified with nuclear “preparedness” as a tax base.)

White Light/Black Rain finds its more persuasive voice in interviews with survivors of the bombings, illuminated by a gauntlet of harrowing archival footage. Its appreciation requires context, lest White Light/Black Rain be mistaken for an unprecedented re-examination. Its nearer origins lie in the graphic novels of Nakazawa, whose first-hand account of Hiroshima – he professes to have noticed the approach, followed by “a million flashbulbs going off at once” – yielded two Barefoot Gen animated movies of the 1980s. Nakazawa has aligned himself with Steven Okazaki since the 2005 documentary The Mushroom Club, a short-film stage-setter for White Light/Black Rain.

The bombings have amounted to fodder, both imaginative and factual, for the American motion-picture industry since well before that turning-point of World War II. In a time of reciprocal hostilities, the U.S. entertainment industry felt a duty to commit propaganda as a function of advocating an any-means-necessary end to the war.

WWII, of course, no more ended with the bombings than it can be said to have begun at any absolute moment. One war bleeds into another, like the ocean ignoring its explorers’ charted boundaries, over the greater sweep of history. It is a simpler matter to cinch the moment at which Hollywood – itself an occupied territory at the time, given the influential presence of the armed forces’ motion-picture production bureaucracy at studios large and small – began anticipating a bombing run over Japan as a matter of meeting the Axis powers’ aggression in decisive terms.

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At last, the first of the new Futurama productions is about to be released… and just in time for Christmas cheer!

On November 27th, a D2DVD entitled Bender’s Big Score will precede Futurama’s return to Adult Swim. The plot is simple: our heroes have to save Earth from nudist alien Internet hustlers. In order to do this, they must solve the secret of time travel – a mission that requires close inspection of Fry’s, ah, butt.

So, of course, Al Gore joins the Futurama cast in the made-for-video movie, along with Sarah Silverman and Coolio.

The D2DVD boasts the usual assortment of bells and whistles, including a new episode of the series complete with futuristic commercials.