Diana Laurence’s How to Catch and Keep a Vampire: A Step-By-Step Guide to Loving the Bad and the Beautiful
(Sellers Publishing, 10/23/09, $14.95 trade
paperback) is advertised as non-fiction and humor. It’s 160 pages, complete
with FAQs, myth busting, case studies, cutesiness with perhaps a nod to Sex and the City, references to the
latest vampire crazes (True Blood and
Twilight), and an underlying
cautionary tale (the danger of the serial-killer-turned-vamp-professor, Dr.
John Grey) of female stupidity, to-turn-or-not-to-turn angst between Diana and
her vamp paramour Connor, and redemption. It tries to be many things. 

I kept
wanting to like it. I love vamp lit. I’m published in the sub-genre several
times over and love to play in that playground. I’ve watched the suckers ever
since I was a little girl and first saw Bela Lugosi as The Count and said,
“Oooh! He’s cool! He wears capes and goes to the opera!” and lusted after
Frank Langella and loved Rice’s The
Vampire Lestat (and I’m an adult, so I despise Twilight – vampires don’t sparkle!) and can geeble with the best of
them over Vampire Bill and his delicious-but-inaccurate accent! So I get the
whole fascination-not-fear idea and how that can be played for amusement. We
are not amused.

Laurence’s vamps tend toward the True Blood variety, but with added bonuses. Yes, they drink real
blood and synthblood, but they can also eat and they have a drink called Light
Shade that enables them to walk in the sun plus an elixir that makes their pale
skin more normal looking. They aren’t damned, but are immortal (societal
prejudice smear campaign). Flying is merely hypnosis on their victims – they
don’t do it. They used to sleep in coffins out of superstition but don’t,
anymore. They don’t shape shift – more myth and hypnosis. The worst parts
about being a vamp seem to be that they can’t use mirrors and the alienation
they have from loved ones due to prejudice and the mere fact that the vamp will
live forever (barring staking) and other types of humans won’t (oh yeah,
they’re human…they have souls!). Oh, and if you drink a vamp’s blood but are
caught in time, you can be drained of all your now tainted blood, have it
replaced with synth blood ‘til they can get your proper blood type, and prevent
a turning before it’s acted upon all your blood cells and they’ve acted upon
the rest of the cells in your body. But it has to be done fast.

It’s all just a bit too neat and tidy and convenient
and…well…flat. It should be seductive, like its subject. It’s not. Dry. How
can you make talking about vampires, one of the most fun subjects in the world
(every culture has a type of vampire myth!), boring? This manages. Not quite
sure how. But it does. And that sucks. Excuse the bad pun. I just couldn’t
help myself.

Red Snow
By Susumu Katsumata
Drawn & Quarterly, October
2009, $24.95

From a Western perspective, it
would be understandable to assume “gekiga” meant “short, depressing Japanese comics
stories,” even if that’s not the most accurate definition. (Gekiga can also be long depressing Japanese comics stories, of course.) And, since
the current exemplar of gekiga for those of us in the English-speaking world is
Yoshihiro Tatsumi, there’s a sense that those short, depressing stories need to
be set in the modern world, that gekiga
is a literature of urban ennui and the
dislocations of modern capitalism.

But gekiga is wider than that; Katsumata is another one of its
masters, and his collection Red Snow is
filled entirely with stories of a rural, pre-war Japan – but one as filled with
bitter unhappiness and struggle as any badly-thrown-up Tokyo apartment building
of the ‘60s. His rural landscapes have nothing of nostalgia about them; these
are insular, stifling, dull little farming communities, full of equally dull
and small-minded people, out in the middle of nowhere.

A few of these stories have
supernatural elements, but the only creatures that appear are kappa – mischievous water spirits that fill the
role of leprechauns or pixies in Japanese folklore, and were thought of as
being equally as common and prosaic. The fantasy in Red Snow isn’t numinous or uplifting – it’s just yet
another annoyance in a small village full of them, just one more damn thing to
have to deal with. Kappa are no worse than the rich guy in town who thinks he
has the right to seduce any woman around – who’s also called “kappa.” (more…)

Beneath A Steel Sky: Remastered is a rerelease of the popular computer game from 1994 from British developer
Revolution Software. This month, Revolution brought it to the iPhone and iTouch, complete with new fully animated cut-scenes created by Watchmen and Martha Washington artist Dave Gibbons. Sales have already gone over 20,000, and the publisher expects to sell over 100,000 copies during the life of the game.

Which certainly gives more hope to that comics on iPhone idea…

First he appeared in Models, Inc. #1 last month, then he appeared on our own Crazy Sexy Geeks videocast, and now he’s appearing on The Late Late Show with Aquaman:

For that matter, later on in the show, host Craig Ferguson spent time talking with Sir Salman Rushdie talking about how he was approached to write a graphic novel, and then he veered into a discussion on kryptonite:

All right, so he got the details wrong. He has a Booker Prize and a knighthood, and you don’t.