Looking Glass Hearts
March 24th, 2011
Being: an index to my recently completed series of posts on stories, mirrors and what happens when you mistake one for the other.
Since I botched the timing of these essays, I thought I’d link to them all in order, just in case anyone felt like humouring me and reading them all as part of the one big story:
- Short and to the Pointless #1: The Like Trap (a short post on reader identification in Phonogram and Eddie Campbel’s autobiographical comics)
- Short and to the Pointless #2: Josie Long and Dodgem Logic (about the deadly combination of bad comics and bad romantic advice)
- Looking Glass Hearts Forever (a long post on the Scott Pilgrim comics and movie)
- Short and to the Pointless #3: The Playwright (on the fact that you can no more write your way out of a story than you can jump your way out of freefall)
Come on, take a dive with me – you might not regret it!
All of that blather aside, I’m pretty happy with this little essay series. It’s properly modular, just like Seven Soldiers wasn’t, but I also think it pays to read the whole thing at once.
Agree/disagree/tl;dr?
Please feel free to let me know in the comments!
Looking Glass Hearts Forever
March 8th, 2011
Being: the long post about Scott Pilgrim that my last two posts were building up to!
So 2010 saw both the death and the rebirth of the comics internet’s favourite slacker hero, Scott Pilgrim. Time to celebrate?
Well, if you ask Brendan McCarthy we should probably just be happy that it’s all over and done with:
I find that ‘comics geek’ bedwetter subculture very inward-looking. It doesn’t interest me at all… Comics like Scott Pilgrim are not on my radar. I think that stuff has already had its day in the sun.
I was going to contest Mr McCarthy’s classification of Scott Pilgrim, but then I watched the movie again and realised that there are two jokes about characters weeing themselves, plus various other references to pee and peeing throughout the film, so maybe he was onto something after all!
Lapses in basic potty training notwithstanding, I still love the comic and the movie, to the extent that I’ve spent the past few weeks immersed in both of them (GEEK!), cataloguing the differences in style and pacing (GEEK!), comparing the three different endings on offer (GEEK!), and listening to commentary tracks (GEEK! GEEK! GEEK!), all in the hope of finding out quite why I bothered doing all of this in the first place. Circular logic? Trust me, you don’t know the half of it!
Sounds like a good reason to go all *SPOILER* crazy and Panel Madness one of the final images from the series in the hope of finding out why I can’t get this song out of my head, eh?
Well, this guy thinks he’s already been there and done that and built an inescapable black hole out of the image that we’ll be spending our time with…
But don’t worry about him – he’s just some guy from the story!
3 conversations with Kieron Gillen: Phonogram, music and comics
August 3rd, 2009
So this is an interview in three stages. If it was an album it would be a prog album. One of Rick Wakeman’s later efforts involving Arthurian legend and horses on ice skates. Or perhaps it would be a three hour gabba techno set by Lenny D. Or maybe it would be Sandanista, the Clash album that never knew when to stop…
I’d wanted to meet up with Kieron as I knew he was a local London boy and would most likely be amenable to a few shandies whilst discussing his cult comic series Phonogram as well as his recent forays into the Marvel Universe. And any other shit we could think of. To my pleasure Mr Gillen was up for it.
