Been replaying Batman Arkham Asylum for the last few days until I got derailed with a very tedious boss fight. (It’s the poison Ivy fight that in my opinion overstays its welcome.)
My displeasure, apparently, was heard all the way in Poland and CD Project Red decided to grace me with a patch for Cyberpunk 2077 that fixed most of a graphical problems on my aging, base-model Xbox One. So I’ve been trying to finish up any remaining quests on there that can now activate thanks to the Code Review Gods.
But there’s really not much left. Sure there’s things I can scrounge around and find – and I am – but it really feels like reaching into a finished bag of chips and grasping at crumbs. You can do it, but you might want to get a new bag.
Plowed through a large section of the book yesterday and will most likely pick it up again after this post. I’m currently in the “Doll’s House” storyline for anyone keeping track. The writing is as strong as I remember it, but the cleaned up art is really changing the story for me.
One of the things I love about comics is one of the things that everyone seems to forget about comics: you read the art just like you would the words. There have been simple little concepts delivered in the art alone that I missed on read throughs with the original printings.
It hasn’t drastically changed my interpretation of the text, but my eye can relax so much more and find what’s important in each panel.
I didn’t really read comics growing up, so I never got used to the traditional, chemical process of coloring that was used before the mid-nineties. I cut my teeth on digital inks. Now that they’ve used that process to retouch Sandman, I find the earlier issues much easier to read.
As for the actual content, there’s a section in “Doll’s House” where the character of Desire is introduced. That felt like coming home again. There was something about how they were presented – living in a giant artiface of themselves, the photo reprints in their main hall, and the fact that they were a gender fluid character in the 80’s – that had a profound impact on me. Something about all that seared itself into my brain, and I find myself thinking about that sequence every few months, and I’ve applied different concepts from it in my own work from time to time.
I knew it was coming yesterday and it still caught me off guard.
Not that the scene itself is that revolutionary. It’s your basic, villain in their lair, gloating about their new plan kind of thing. It’s only there to apply tension through dramatic irony for the following scenes that would fall flat without it. We’ve seen it a million times before. But all the concepts around it and the fact that this is finally expanding the mythology of the story simply by saying “things like this can happen with Endless,” make it into something more striking than it would seem at first blush.
Over the last year I’ve been doing a lot of comfort reading for obvious reasons. This has consisted of me rereading a lot of old Vertigo comics, and now I’m left with the one I’ve been putting off: The Sandman.
This is the comic that has made the rounds so much in critical circles that it’s just considered to be Objectively Good. If you have an issue with any part of this book, the error is with you and no blame can be held with the writer, editor, or artists.
That makes it sound like I’m setting up to say I don’t like it. It’s not true; I dearly love this series. However, I got into it in early college at the beginning of my love for comics. (Hence my battered collection of trades, which is NOT depicted above.) There’s really no separating my discovering this series from my having my world-view expanded with the influx of all these new stories.
But I haven’t flipped open a Sandman book in the better part of a decade. I’ve changed a lot in that time and I’m wondering if I’ll still find anything in these pages now.
I’m only two and a half issues in but so far so good; the mystery of the story is still gripping and Gaiman’s relaxed yet highly stylized form of dialogue still makes for enjoyable reading.
The art has also been cleaned up, which for me is a blessing. The first trade of Sandman was one of the first three American comics that I bought, but it took me almost a year to read it because I found the artwork so off putting. Concepts in the art are much less garbled in this reissue even if the pages are a still little more busy than I would like.
Probably will get into a deeper review of the series later. This was just a first impression of what I’m reading right now.
Getting around to head into the city to see humans. I know these humans so it’s okay. For me. I don’t know about the humans.
Never know about humans.
There’s a few more posts I want to make over the weekend, so we’ll see if I get to them. I’ve also found out that WordPress as a CLI which is very exiting to me as I can use it to script things. Scripting things brings me joy. Might get into that as well. Also, I want to do some more reading. Also also, I need to stand up a server to host all my code because GitHub has changed its login procedures in a way that makes uploading code to a remote repository a slight pain in the ass.
Busy weekend coming up, which means I’ll get to none of it. Shut up.
Didn’t check my phone for a few hours only to look at my notifications and see that there was a tornado warning in my area. My area being Massachusetts and has never had a tornado in the 10+ years I’ve lived here.
This has done nothing good for my phone addiction.
That’s how my day’s been going. Finished a few books last evening so that might be the direction this evening takes as well.
I’ve alluded to this in past post, but I think a new phase is starting and it is something darkly academic.
Github has changed how it’s passwords work and now I have to create tokens when I want to upload my code to a private repository. I know the real answer to this is to run a repository on my own servers and cut Github out of the loop entirety, but I just don’t feel like setting that up at the moment. For some damn fool reason, I want to work on my own projects and not my tooling.
But enough of that for now.
As I said a few posts back, I took a week off from reading and just now finished a book. Now I’m looking for something new. Probably should finish one of the seven or so books I’m currently in the middle of, but I’ll most likely start a new one and then nod off to bed.
Been puttering around the house for the last few hours, had the other half of a sandwich, and now I’m about ready to go for a walk. I’d like to clear my head before I sit down and take care of a few things.
While today is shaping up to be a very technical day, it has dawned on me that I haven’t read anything in almost a week. That’s something else I’m going to have to look into.
It was recently brought to my attention that there’s a new(ish) genera of aesthetic called Dark Academia, and that makes me very happy. The idea that there are people curating art that celebrities both intellectualism and dark weirdness gives me hope for the future.
The nuanced discussion of genera and concept of aesthetic play are things that could only come out of Tumblr’s constant content churn. Thank goodness that thing is saying relevant and justifying its continued existence. Somehow the bulk of that community has figured out how to center around the curation of pre-existing materials without sucomming to curations’ cudgel: gatekeeping.
Because they’ve been able to avoid this – on the whole – they’ve been able to use the act of curation to create new contexts with which see that which already exists.
I still operate a Tumblr account and it’s been one of the bright spots for me during the pandemic. I’ve been using it exclusively to collect inspiration for future stories. That has been stuck a little tightly to the cyberpunk and retro 80’s aesthetics, so I’ve been looking for ways to branch out.
I will be resetting my sensors to cast a much wider and darker net.
