I caught a History Channel documentary/docudrama yesterday about Joaquin Murrieta. (And if you're curious why I was watching a documentary about him, I highly encourage you to go back and read my blog postings here, here, here, here and here.)

But what stood out to me in the documentary is that Joaquin is a particularly significant character out of Mexican and Mexican-American mythology, but I had never heard of him until I was specifically trying to track down a character like him. Now, certainly, I don't pretend to be a purveyor of all cultural knowledge and my ignorance of his existance is not, in and of itself, surprising. But what struck me is there is very little written about him online (at least in English). That suggests to me that English-speakers are largely unaware of his existence, and those that do know of him likely have some more direct cultural ties to him. Sun-Wukong seems to be a little more well-known in the U.S., but not by much.

Now, I've acknowledged for years that Americans have a tendency to be self-absorbed egotists who devalue cultures outside their own, but I still find it surprising. Mankind, as a whole, have a collective experience that is universally translatable through good literature. Really good stories can transcend cultural barriers and speak to people regardless of their upbringing and background. Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Sun-Tzu, Dostoevsky, Verne... many of the great authors throughout history have not shared the same language and their works still mean something to us (in some cases) centuries after their deaths! But America, as a whole, continues to seem unwilling to look upon any culture due south of their southern-most border as anything worthwhile. Here in the States, we have a few bastardizations of words from Mexico but not much more, and South America is ignored entirely.

So, in one sense, it reaffirms for me that America needs more projects like my "Propoganda of the Deed" idea. (Side Note: I'm still pretty jazzed about the idea and would love to have an artist-type contact me to help see it to fruition!) On a broader note, it says to me that we need more people like Gene Yang doing comics in America. Of course we're going to continue to piss off the rest of the world if we do our best to ignore their ideas. (Image courtesy of Micah Wright.)

Coming in just under the wire for Chris' Invincible Super-Blog Meme: The 2007 30-Second Recap. You can read the rules there, but the upshot is to summarize a storyline from 2006 as quickly as you can. Without further ado, The Thing (the entire series) in 30 seconds...

This week, I picked up my regular stash of comic books as I usually do. I read a few during my lunch break yesterday, and a few last night, and most of the rest today. This week was a little odd in that several of the books tied directly into Marvel's "Civil War."

Well, that wasn't so odd in and of itself since a lot of Marvel's books are tied to "Civil War" these days. But what was odd was that I found myself not really caring. At all.

For most of the "Civil War" storyline, I've been reading these stories and thinking to myself, "Well, this guy is acting way out of character! And so is this guy! And her! And..." It's been frustrating seeing characters that I do generally enjoy reading about acting in ways that strike me as widely out of line with their established character. Regardless of what you think of any of the individual characters and whether or not you agree with me, the biggest complaints I've heard about the series (next to shipping delays) have centered on character assasinations. But that kind of reaction, while generally negative, is indicative of emotional involvement. I disagree with the writer enough that it bothers me. It bothers me enough that I write about it.

But between this week's Amazing Spider-Man and Civil War and Civil War: Front Line, I just read the books and said, "Eh." Despite the double-cross and secret double-cross and double-secret double-secret-cross and whatever other stuff they threw into the mix this week, I don't really care. Despite that the story has reached the tipping point and the characters are literally seconds away from an all-out war with each other, I find myself unconcerned about the outcome. I don't care who wins or loses, who lives and who dies, who sides with whom... I just want this to be over.

I'm not quite sure when exactly I gave up caring -- it was certainly recent, though. It's possible the shipping delays gave me too much time to think about problems in the story. Maybe seeing Alan Davis' Fantastic Four: The End reminded me how far off my favorite characters are being written. (Side Note: There is some SERIOUS mis-characterizations going on when an older, out-their-prime, mostly retired, and not speaking to one another Fantastic Four feels more on target than what's being presented as the canonical team.) Maybe it was the realization here on my blog that I buy comics to enjoy, and what I've been enjoying most lately has not been related to "Civil War."

Since there's only one issue left, I likely will buy it. I do enjoy the puzzle aspect of sorting out how all the stories across multiple titles fit together. Not as much as I enjoy reading a good story and caring about what happens to the characters, but I enjoy the intellectual challenge of chronologizing the books at least enough to wait until the series concludes.

A fourth of the Marvel titles I currently get will be ending in the next month or so. Three more are mini-series that will all be over by summer. I'd be surprised if another three of what's left on my pull list will survive the year without being cancelled. By that point, it looks like I will, for the first time, be getting more independant comics than I will Marvel ones. Not sure if that's me perceiving a decline in Marvel's quality, or simply a change in my personal tastes and preferences, but it certainly seems noteworthy.

Okay, first off: why has it taken so long for someone to do a pirates vs. ninjas comic? I mean, c'mon! It's a brilliantly simple concept that requires no explanation beyond the title.

"Hey, Sean! Whatcha readin'?"

"Pirates vs. Ninjas."

"What's it about?"

"Um... pirates versus ninjas."

That said, it is in fact a dangerous concept to tackle. The pirate versus ninja debate has been going on since the mid-1960s, and it's a question that instantly gets your imagination racing. And precisely because your imagination is filled with tons of imagry and a host of different scenarios, almost any interpretation of that is going to fall short. (Rule of thumb: interpretations always fall short of your imagination.)

But in the case of Antarctic Press' Pirates vs. Ninjas, we're treated to every highlight of every pirate versus ninja debate since the idea was first introduced. We've got pirates brushing off throwing stars, ninja stealth gliders, pirates chopping off ninja heads, ninjas sneaking aboard a pirate ship, pirates being fired out of cannons... but, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The story (yes, we have an actual story on top of cool fight scenes!) revolves around an ancient map the pirates have to the treasure of the old gods. The scrawlings on the map are so obscure that only one navigator can interpret them, and the ninjas swoop in to try to capture the navigator and the map for themselves, in the hope of reviving Raiga, father of ninjutsu. The ninjas succeed and the issue ends with the navigator in the clutches of the ninja.

The prologue sets up most of the story for us in the first five pages. The ninjas reveal their plot on the last page. Just about everything in between is a rip-roaring fight between the pirates and the ninjas. It's just all-out fun across the board -- the pirates act exactly as you'd expect and the ninja act exactly as you'd expect. Every reason you've heard why a pirate or a ninja should or shouldn't win a fight is on display and, what's more, many of the qualities that some people cite as advantages are simultaneously used as disadvantages. Sure, the pirates are drunk, but that also means they don't feel the little pin pricks caused by the ninja's small blades. Sure, the ninjas are practiced and orderly, but that doesn't mean didly in the chaos that is a pirate ship.

Let me put this succinctly: Pirates vs. Ninjas is a fun book. It could easily have relied too heavily on the concept and let details like art and storytelling and dialogue fall to the wayside, but the book lives up to (and indeed exceeds) my expectations.

Like Marvel's promotions of "Civil War", Antarctic Press has used a "Whose Side Are You On?" campaign slogan to tout the book. Unlike Civil War, though, Pirates vs. Ninjas is well worth the price of admission!

For whatever bizarre reason(s), I find myself reflecting on Eugene Ionesco's children's books today. Children's books, naturally, are a not-too-distant cousin of comics and it's not uncommon these days for celebrities to write a children's book for whatever reasons. (I suspect it has something to do with not "needing" to form complex plots or extensive characterization.) But back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, playwright Eugene Ionesco penned a series of children's books titled simply Story Number 1, Story Number 2, Story Number 3, and Story Number 4.

Like many kids, I had any number of children's book as a child. Many classics like the works of Dr. Suess and various Little Golden books. My father was a fairly progressive parent at the time and also made a point of getting a number of books by Ezra Jack Keats and other other Caldecott and Newberry winners. But the Ionesco books stand out.

The basic premise of each book is that young Jaqueline is left in the care of an adult who tries to entertain her questions with extended on-the-spot stories. Each overly simplistic answer the child receives begs further questions which, to the storyteller, leads to increasingly bizarre twists and turns in an effort to keep the illusion of the original answer. For example, in one tale a housekeeper attempts to keep Jaqueline from disturbing her parents, who are sleeping off a hangover from the night before. But, rather than try to explain how and why the parents got drunk (and, for that matter, what "drunk" means) it evolves into an elaborate and complex story involving putting rainbows in your hair and climbing giant derby hats as if they were mountains. The stories have a stream-of-consciousness approach to them that wanders headlong into the surreal with each increasingly unlikely element of the story illustrated in exactly the way a child might imagine the situation.

This is the type of thing I grew up on.

A few years ago, my father tried cleaning out some of his old books and asked if there were any I wanted. Out of his entire library -- which is quite extensive for a personal collection -- I only asked for those four books and a hardcover Krazy Kat collection. Surreality to the n-th degree that represented my childhood.

To my knowledge, the Ionesco books have never been reprinted. Since they were written by a playwright who was by then very well-known for his absurdist performance pieces (what he called "anti-plays"), very little seems to have been written about these four short stories. Further, the titles themselves don't lend themselves to many productive Google searches!

So I'm curious how a man who did know how to think visually would develop a children's book to be illustrated by another person. How did he interpret and utilize the creative process in his illustrated works? How many notes did he give the artists? Certainly, he must have made SOME mention of the artwork -- otherwise the stories could easily be illustrated with, for example, a child sitting at the kitchen table listening.

I'll have to dig those books out again and see if I can divine anything from the art itself. I don't know that I've ever looked at it from a truely analytical point of view and it might be interesting to see what an objective (well... at least semi-objective) eye might see that the hungrier eyes of a child would've missed.

This article in Tuesday's Cincinnati Enquirer is about a local comic shop who's charity auction Monday raised money for breast cancer research. While the article doesn't cite how much was raised (I'm guessing not much since only 25 people showed up) it's still a great PR piece for the store. Kudos to shop owner Paul Mullins for a) helping fight for a worthy cause, b) raising general awareness of breast cancer research to folks who might not otherwise know anything about, and c) alerting the local media to draw positive attention to the comic industry in general and his store in particular.

The Wife and I hosted my folks over the weekend for a slightly belated Christmas and some New Year celebrations -- hence the lack of blogging for the past few days. But I'm back online now, running almost exclusively on caffeine and sugar, and ready to keep you entertained. Or at least, briefly occupied with trivialities when you should be getting some work done!

I think gift ideas are somewhat difficult for my relatives. They know me well enough to know my comic book (and other) interests, but I have, at this point, most everything that that I have an active interest in. There's no reason to get me, for example, a copy of Fantastic Four #1 because I already have it. So I try to make things a tad easier by coming up with a list of things that I don't have, and are perhaps a little farther down on my list of "wants" so that I haven't actually spent the money on them myself.

Among the gifts I received this year, for example, I was given...

Batman Illustrated by Neal Adams, volume 2. A hardcover collection of Neal Adams' Batman stories from the 1970s. (I already had volume 1.) Adams was the Batman artist as far as I was concerned back in the day, but I'm not a huge fan of Batman as a character. So it's nice to have a collection of Adams' work (including his covers) without having to wade through various back issue bins for his occassional issue of Detective Comics or Batman or what have you.

(By the way, that isn't a slight against Jim Aparo! For whatever reason(s), though, I didn't have any Aparo Batman comics as a kid.)

I also got the second Challangers of the Unknown Archives. (Again, I already have the first volume.) This is mostly a history lesson for me -- a way I can study what Jack Kirby was doing immediately prior to creating the Marvel Universe.

As you might gather, what I've found, especially in recent years, is that saving the more high-profile, hardcover collections for my wish list works a little better for me. I can focus my attentions (and money) on more obscure, hard-to-find and/or unlikely-to-be collected back issues -- like my relatively recent purchase of a run of Kirby's old 2001: A Space Odyssey -- while leaving the stuff that's easy to track down on Amazon or in some brick-and-mortar store for relatives. The DC stuff is even easier since they tend to do a much better job of stocking their warehouses. That way, even if Aunt Grace has no idea what to look for in her local Barnes and Noble, she can still hand the title to a clerk and they can order it fairly easily.

Of course, what I need to do now is create a wishlist that allows my relatives to check off what they have purchased so I can avoid duplicates! (Yes, I know about Amazon's wish list functionality, but not everything I want can be ordered through them!)