Well, I'm out of here. In case you didn't figure that out already, after six-odd months of LJ silence. I might have posted again, but the sight of an 81-year old LK Advani with prime ministerly aspirations on the side-bar pissed me off big-time. Yes, you read that right - LK put me off LJ. As did the animated gifs that promised slimming tips and tyres that save 33 gallons in fuel over their lifetime.

The LJ stands as a nice record of the my life between 2002-2008 - most of it blathersome pap to the casual observer, but each post has a memory of its own for me. It will stay here, undeleted, as long as the company does not overhaul its database, or change its terms of service and wipe out all non-updated journals. There's an official back-up of the archives if that happens - beatzo.wordpress.com, which I prefer because of the lack of annoying animated ads.

A slightly modified version of this ..umm...blog will continue here. Yup, own domain, wordpress installation, cheesy Japanese theme, OpenID support. Even a plugin that allows threaded comments. Upcoming 2009 Highlights : Watch me finally complete the complete study of the complete Lone Wolf and Cub Project. Marvel at the sincere reply to PR's comment about the futility of watching onscreen violence. Dollops of verbose tub-thumping, animated monologues on the perils of being a collector, occasional reposts of my articles that have appeared in print here and there, acquisition-ahoy posts that warms the cockles of my shallow, materialistic heart and sentences that refuse to end.

And you folks on the f-list, the ones who still make me smile with your updates, the ones I look forward to seeing every other morning, I'll be stalking reading you still.

I have a feeling that Beatzo is about to die. About time, too.

The Apatow-a-thon continues. Watched 17 episodes of Undeclared on Saturday. This series is a spiritual sequel of sorts to Freaks and Geeks; while the latter was about high school, this is about a bunch of freshmen in college. The "undeclared" term refers to the status of an undergrad student who has not decided on a choice of major subject. Ran on Fox in 2001 and, like all Fox series that I've come to love, was cancelled after the first season. Not because anything was wrong with the show; apparently, Fox telecast episodes in the wrong order, confusing viewers and bringing down ratings. Worst part is, even the DVD set has the episodes in wrong order; halfway through episode 10, we figured something goofy is going on, checked Wikipedia, and proceeded to rewatch the episodes in proper order. One of the high points of watching this was the number of surprise guest appearances by quite a few of the F&G cast as grown-up versions. Apatow-regular Seth Rogen is one of the leads ( and also writes some of the episodes), and Jason Segel has a recurring role. Both of them are a treat to watch, my only gripe being that Segel seems to have been typecast as the dumped boyfriend in almost all his major roles. Case in point: the Apatow movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which I also watched over the weekend.

Wish-list updates: The third ( and final) volume of Osamu Tezuka's Dororo is out. As is the first volume of his seminal Blackjack, sixteen more to go. Amazon, ahoy!

And I see a solicitation for the second Omnibus edition of The Walking Dead, out 27th November. Ooh, yeah! Not buying the first volume of this omnibus is one of the greatest Comicbook mistakes I've made. Still trying to find a decent copy.

I just finished reading The Complete Zot, going as slow as I could. Each of the stories is followed by a commentary page by Scott McCloud, in which he would explain some of his motivations, give a bit of historical perspective to his work ( being very modest about his genius and all) and that would make me go reread the issue again just to take in the story from a fresh perspective. I never thought I would enjoy the series the way I did - in my mind, I had filed the book as 'out-of-print curiousity' rather than a work to be enjoyed. But once you get beyond the awkward figure-drawing and somewhat clunky dialogues, McCloud's stories and characters radiate an old-wordly charm that is hard to explain. It is a beautiful mixture of fun superheroics and a melancholy coming-of-age story. The early issues are almost all set in Zot's world, and the emphasis is more towards tweaking familiar superhero idioms - alas, if I had a rupee for every post-80's series that tries to do this, I would own a Frank Miller Daredevil page by now. There are flashes of brilliance in these stories - the De-Evolutionary "Revert!" vaudevillian romp had me in stitches; it is hard to believe that a character like Arthur Dekko (and his completely-twisted worldview) could exist in a pre-Morrison Doom Patrol world; and the chilling 9Jack9 moment, where the character does the unexpected, leading to one of the most downbeat superhero endings I've ever read. But it is with the Earth stories, the ones in which Zot is stranded on Jenny's (i.e our) world is where McCloud really cuts loose. It's no longer a superhero story from then on, as individual issues are told from points of views of different characters, with Zot himself becoming little more than a presence in most of the stories. Every one of the earth stories deal with real-world themes - about adulthood, sex, same-sex relationships, responsibilities, to name a few. The book ends on a very open-ended note, possibly the best possible conclusion a series like this can have.

Oddly enough, similar themes as Zot can be seen in the TV series Freaks and Geeks. Saw all 18 episodes last weekend, based on recommendations from my friend Pablo. It was only when the credits ran at the beginning of the first episode that I realised this was a Judd Apatow production. And it had Apatow familiars Jason Segel and Seth Rogen in it. Set in a Michigan high school in 1980, and dealing primarily with the tribulations of the Weir siblings - Lindsay and Sam, the series is as much about their social universe as it is a delightfully retro look at life in the eighties. While primarily a comedy, F&G has just the right moments of drama to balance out the goofiness from time to time. The casting is note-perfect.The soundtrack is a delight, featuring bands like Joan Jett ( the title song 'Bad Reputation' is by her), Billy Joel, Gloria Gaynor, The Grateful Dead, Deep Purple, Van Halen, Cream, The Who - well, nearly every notable band of the time period.

Right now, I am blazing through The Big Bang Theory, and enjoying it tremendously.

A not-so-funny parody of Scott McCloud's Google Chrome comic.

A neat feature comparison chart of the major music players on Windows - Winamp, iTunes, Windows Media Player and the somewhat lesser-known Media Monkey, which pips the others. Not too surprising for me, I've been using MM for nearly a year and a half now, after an eight-year relationship with Winamp, and I can vouch for its solid featureset and overall user-friendliness.

The Lagaan Box set has had its price reduced to Rs 999. Half of its initial cost. Well, what are you waiting for?

Slightly old news: Virgin Comics closes shop. Sort of. They claim there are plans to relocate to Los Angeles to be "closer to Hollywood". Personally I think it was the mediocrity and the hype that did them in. Most of the comics I read were a confused mess. I doubt the writers involved even knew who their intended audience was. On one hand, they insisted on the strong authentic Indian experience, hyped up the reliance on Indian mythology, and came up with lumps of derivative storytelling that had more in common with fantasy cliches. Have you tried reading Ramayan 3392 AD or Devi? One was a puerile fantasy story that made the characters we know "edgy". The other was a Witchblade rip-off, with Indian police inspectors wearing trenchcoats and skyscraper-ridden towns called Sitapur. The Sadhu, another series is described by some unknown user on Wikipedia as "comparable to Neil Gaiman's Sandman", which made me laugh out aloud. At the end of the day, Virgin comics was basically packaging superhero stories coated with a thin Indianised veneer and decked up with a lot of Photoshop filters. The irony is that the unavailability of the releases in non-metros in India. I have yet to see issues in any major bookstores in Hyderabad. ( MR had some second-hand copies, last I checked.)

Currently reading Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991 by Scott McCloud. Zot was a comic book published in the 80's, written and drawn by McCloud before he took on the task of writing his trilogy of comic-book treatises. In a way, it's a brave venture, bringing the series back in print after you've preached to the choir about various aspects of sequential storytelling - in the introduction, McCloud says the same thing, about his nervousness at laying bare the follies of youth before readers who are accustomed to seeing him as a comics guru. I have just begun the book, and it does not disappoint. There are glitches, obviously, but the overall package is a sturdy little relic. McCloud is vocal about the manga influence on this early work, and it shows in the pacing, the panel layouts and the action sequences. The storyline deals with a superhero from a comicbook universe arriving on "our" world, the work playing against the innocent Silver Age sensibilities of the character against mundane, real-world elements of the latter.

Two-morrows publishing, the folks who bring out really cool books and magazines on comics and comic creators, are having a sale on their site. Magazines like Rough Cut, Write Now and Comic Book Artist are on sale for 2$ each ( a 71% discount!), while the book section has upto 50% discountson them. Good stuff, wish the shipping charges to India wouldn't be so high...

On a similar note, Top Shelf Comix have their annual $3 sale, where a number of bestselling graphic novels are offered at that price and quite a few others have discounts on them as well.

If, for any particular reason, you want to stop reading Fables, issue 75 would be a good place to hop off. Because this issue is what it was all leading to. All that build-up, all the peripheral characters, the sidetracked storylines, everything comes together in 'War and Pieces', the three-issue storyline that concludes in #75. This is how Bill Willingham would have ended the series had Fables not become the bestselling, spinoff-producing behemoth that it has become . The story will continue, but will it be the same? I really, really hope so. On top of it, James Jean, cover artist extraordinaire - the man responsible for establishing the classical, definitive look of the Fables comic - is bowing out to pursue a career in fine arts. Issue 82 is his last.

The short-term consequence of this is the abandonment of all hope I had of owning an original Jean Fables cover. In the long run, I foresee the end of the five-year Eisner award winning streak that the series has had for Best Cover Artist. Unless they get someone worthy enough to fill Jean's shoes. The problem is that regular cover artists like Adam Hughes and Brian Bolland, both of whom I adore completely, lack that otherworldly painted style that Jean brought to Fables. Tara McPherson, for instance, who painted that Frau Totenkinder story in 1001 Nights of Snowfall has that special spark. So does Sam Weber, who's done some amazing work for Vertigo's House of Mystery, with Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturges. Ah, well, we shall see who editor Shelley Bond goes with, the official announcement should be out soon.

And in more news, All Star Batman and Robin #10 was recalled from retailers by DC. Here's why.

I have stopped buying CDs. They clutter up the house and I end up listening to the ripped mp3s anyway while the actual discs gather dust in the living room. To assuage a bit of the illegal-downloading guilt, I got myself an eMusic account. 11.99$ per month for 30 tracks, and they have a huge selection of electronic music AND almost all new Indian bands put up their music there. This month, I downloaded Shaa'ir and Func's album Light Tribe, S&F being the most hyped Indian band EVER ( except maybe Raghu Dixit, whose album I didn't enjoy at all ). These guys are mentioned in some way or the other in every Rolling Stone India issue, and one of their tracks featured in a free CD that came with the magazine two months ago. They even ended up making an appearance in 'Rock On'. Shaa'ir is Randolph Correia, the lead guitarist for Pentagram and Func is Monica Dogra, and together they make for an amazing package, Func's vocals and Correia's grooves meshing perfectly in the electronica-fuelled tracks.

Smoke a.k.a Dhruv/Ashutosh's Smoke Signals was the second legit download album of the month. I loved the few songs I heard for movies like Bombay Boys and Snip!, as well as random RSJ albums, and recently, there was this animated video on one of the music channels that featured a song called 'Summertime Rocks' from this new album, with guest vocals by Kailash Kher. The rest of 'Smoke Signals', as I found out, was not bad at all! The overall mood of the album is really Indian, but with a very eclectic soundscape. 'Yaad Tumhari', a thumri by Shubha Joshi, is a pure classical number at first, but then a subtle rock guitar riff plays in the background, along with a very very soft percussion track that never overpowers the tabla. But that's followed by 'On and On', a funkily mixed rendition of Mahalaxmi Iyer's vocals chanting a shloka - the vocals are heavily processed, and the carnatic violin sounds like a mad combination of an electric guitar and a phat synthline as the song progresses. The rest of the songs are similarly unpredictable. Rags Khote singing Bangla in a French accent in 'You're So Beautiful'. The African-sounding 'The Final Frontier'. The very unlullabylike 'Lullaby'.

Both the albums, incidentally, have been released by Blue Frog records based out of Mumbai. The company grew out of a live club, and now has its own sound labs, a music production house, and A&R services. I believe Dhruv & Ashutosh run it, or are at least major stakeholders in it. The site looks well-designed, and so far, in addition to S&F and Smoke, the label has brought out albums by John McLaughlin, Sanjay Divecha and Vivek Rajagopalan. They do sell CDs online, as well as mp3 tracks and also have a licenseable audio library for use by corporates.

Of course, the No-CDs policy does not apply to Rahman albums, hoo-ah!

Part of the aftermath of every quiz I conduct is the proliferation of questions-that-should-have-been. I kid you not, it's almost like Nature unburdens herself with a deluge of quiz-worthy information just to spit in your eye and rub it in about how much your quiz sucked and how better it would have been had you just read this bit of news one week ago, or if only you thought of that particular theme topic, or...

Ah well, the trick is to ignore all of the self-loathing and move on in life. As far as I am concerned, I just finished a quiz, and it went well, according to the organisers and quite a few of the participants. It was the Entertainment quiz for Nihilanth 2008, organised by IIT Bombay. Nihilanth, for those who came in late, is an inter-IIT-IIM quiz festival that has been around since 2002. In theory an annual event, it suffers from frequent lapses in its agenda; not without reason - the selection of venue and time of the year in which to conduct the fest is a humongously complicated process that involves blood sacrifices under the full moon, tactical maneuvers fought with eldritch weapons and followed by much lamentation of women. Uh, complicated process, don't bother. But doing a Nihilanth quiz has always been fun. The first one was my first ever professional outing as a QM, one that brought me into contact with quite a few interesting people, set in motion a frenzied quiz-outings across institutes throughout the country and also ensured a steady supply of Sino-Japanese-Korean content into my hard drive. This one had zero effect on hard drive, but was fun all the same.

What surprised me the most this time when I entered the hall was the number of familiar faces in attendance. Quizzing folks I remembered meeting from quite-a-few-years-ago and who I was pretty sure would be off the college circuit by now. Then I realised the bulk of them were ex-IITians who were now IIMians. The Prelims went by without a hiccup, and because there was a lunch break before the finals, I got some time to polish up the slides for the Finals, sat back and read Warren Ellis's Thunderbolts until the quiz began at 2. Apart from a bit of confusion in the middle of the finals where some of the videos did not show up on the projection screen - I had to exit the presentation, which in turn crashed Powerpoint and forced me to reboot the laptop - the finals went pretty much on time and in synch with whatever expectations I had. A long visual connect in the middle caused an incredible upset in the rankings because the IIM Kozhikode team ( which included LVC veteran Shamanth ) cracked it early on. IIM Indore maintained their lead throughout the quiz. Quite a few teams from IIMA were in the finals, and I believe one of them came third. Because there was a bit of time left and also because IITM weren't anywhere around, I snuck in my second long visual connect as well. I had put it on hold the day before because udupendra told me there was something similar asked in this year's Saarang, the kind of information that forces hasty rearrangement of slides and much heart-burn.

The trip was pretty hectic because I wanted to be back early on Sunday, and the only other quiz I managed to attend was Shamanth's Lone Wolf quiz. That officially makes him the first quizmaster+participant in Nihilanth history. Scheduled to begin at 7 PM, it began at around 11 PM, not for any fault of the organisers, apparently there was a clash of venues with another event. This brought back good memories of late-night ( or early-morning, depending on how you look at it) quizzes of yore, but my biological clock just could not handle the sleep-cycle shift and I crashed at around 2:30 AM.

Hold on a second, you ask. Wasn't I supposed to be off quizzing? Well, yes I was. I guess this stint officially ends my sabbatical. Oh yes, world, I am back. ( You can be Mozart, if you want.)

News of the day: Batman: Arkham Asylum, currently under development for the PC, X-Box 360 and the PS3. The screenshots look nifty, the gameplay details are encouraging, but what increases the chances of this being really good is the fact that Paul Dini is scripting it. Dini, along with Messrs Bruce Timm, Alan Burnett and Eric Radomski, is responsible the single-greatest screen adaptation of the character - the nineties' show Batman: The Animated Series, and he's also a fairly competent comicbook writer, having tackled Batman in the ongoing Detective Comics , and also on standalone books like Batman: War on Crime.( But wait, Dini wrote Countdown too, right? Goddamn, the game is going to suck.)

Grant Morrison is the current writer on the ongoing Batman title, and a couple of nights ago, I caught up with the latest issues. So far, Morrison has brought startling developments to the character - his first four-issue arc 'Batman and Son' gave us ninja man-bats, a new love interest ( called Jezebel Jett) and a son. Old-timers will remember a graphic novel called 'Son of the Demon', which was published in the late 80's, drawn by Jerry Bingham and written by Mike W Barr. It had Batman teaming up with Ra's Al Ghul, overcoming his hesitation in courting Ra's daughter Talia, who always held a candle for him, and well...doing it with her. I read this story in 'The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told', a compendium that was one of my life-altering relics, because it introduced me to the Joker, the Monk, Calendar Man, Neal Adams, Dick Sprang, Alan Brennert, Earth-2, Man-Bat and taught me the Spanish word for Batman ( "El Hombre Murcielago", hooo-ah!). The page where Batman and Talia go for it is indelibly etched in my brain, the way things-you-see-at-age-eleven ought to be. Too bad somebody at the library, where I read this book in the first place, tore off the page after a couple of months. And no, it wasn't me. ( I just flicked the book, much later)

So anyway, 'Son of the Demon' was apparently a more well-written story than 'The Killing Joke' - does not really matter now, does it? - but what came out of it, after the fight scene with the bad guy Qayin and Batman's stony-faced farewell from Ra's and Talia, is Bat-baby, the child that Talia had claimed she miscarried. At the end, the child is adopted by an anonymous couple, Batman goes on with his life, and Dennis O'Neil, the Bat-editor-in-chief declared the story out of continuity. That is, it never happened, it was a hoax, a grand trick played on thirteen-year-old minds by evil DC writers, an imaginary story, as they all are.

Morrison chose to bring the story back into it-was-all-true-dom, with minor modifications. Damian Wayne is the newest addition to the stable of Bat-children that infest Bruce Wayne and his dual identity, and the boy has not quite a chip as much as a gigantic wooden plank on his shoulder - not so strange as he has been brought up by the League of Assassins. On his first night at Wayne manor, the boy beheads a (albeit minor) Gotham rogue called the Spook, and subjects Alfred and Robin to humiliating bouts of child abuse. The four-issue arc sets into motion a number of sub-plots, including one decidedly odd plot-line about Three Batman Ghosts, which is tackled by Morrisson one by one, in the issues to come.

Issues 659-662 were fill-in issues by the team of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake, and while I have been a fan of these creators in my younger days ( loved the Shazam miniseries they did, and their Spectre run hit a lot of highs, too), I safely skipped over these issues, which featured a storyline called Grotesk. When one has had a dose of the Morrison Mojo, it's hard to settle for anything less, meh.

Batman 663 is the famous ( or notorious, depending on which fan you ask) all-prose issue, where Morrison merges hallucinatory stream-of-consciousness writing with John Van Fleet's experimental panels. The story "The Clown At Midnight" is one of the Joker and his minions, and is narrated in a florid, demented style that rips your brains apart. Van Fleet's art usually works for me, but here, they look like video-game screenshots.

Issues 664-666 continues the Three Ghosts of Batman subplot that was laid down in the first storyline. Hubba hubba, things seem to be getting better in Morrison's Bat-verse. Bruce's dalliance with Jezebel Jett continues, and at the same time, there is trouble in Gotham, with a Bane-like character preying on hookers. And we learn of the Black Casebook, a diary that recounts all the unexplained phenomona Batman has encountered so far in his career. Flying saucers, ghosts, vampires and the like. It was while I took this in that I got an inkling of what Morrison is trying to do with his run. If I am not wrong, he is trying to bring EVERY single non-Elseworlds Batman story ever told under the "It-actually-happened-here's-the-explanation" umbrella. That means the Black Casebook refers to the silly period in Batman's career in the 50's and 60's when writers were experimenting with making him a sci-fi hero, pitting him against aliens and robots. One of the earliest Batman stories, that of the Monk( this featured in the "Greatest Batman Stories" collection), was about vampires and werewolves. I cannot imagine you would understand the kind of chill I get when I see Joe Chill ( sorry, couldn't help that) making a reappearance in the pages of Batman, or in seeing Bat-mite pop up in a cameo that's furthest one can get from camp.

The run concludes in the future. Say what? Morrison does a time-hop with the storyline, jumping an undisclosed number of years in the future. Issue 666 has heavy Biblical undertones, and in the future as laid down in this issue, Damian Wayne is now the Batman, having renounced the assassin's doctrine and adopting his father's crusade in a world that seems to be spiralling towards Armageddon. There's tragedy underwrit throughout this single issue, as we get hints of what really happened to Batman and his legacy, and the end-game is the showdown between Damian and the Third Ghost of Batman, in which we meet the Dark Knight's greatest ally. Amazing, amazing story!

With Batman 667-669, Morrison teams up with artist extraordinaire JH Williams 3. Minor digression: JHW3 might just be the greatest artist working in comics today. Don't take my word for it, go check out this series called Promethea. Only this guy could have rendered Alan Moore's treatise on magic in the nuanced, hypnotic meld of storytelling and eye-popping beauty. He brings a design-sense to his work that borders on maniacal, with panel transitions and page layouts that leave you gasping for breath. In this storyline, 'The Island of Doctor Mayhew', Batman and Robin fly to a Carribean island and rub shoulders with a campy bunch of heroes from around the world, who call themselves the "Batmen of All Nations". This is where my theory gains further ground, because you see, the Batmen of All Nations appeared in a 1950's story, and Morrison used some of the characters ( the British heroes Knight and Squire) in his JLA and JLA: Classified run. The story becomes a murder mystery involving an organisation called 'The Black Glove', as one by one, the characters are murdered, and Batman has to find out the killer before it's too late. This run is my favourite of Morrison's chapter so far, and while I thought it was a throwaway arc, subsequent issues reveal it as being far from that.

The next couple of issues veers into editorial-mandate territory, as we find ourselves in the middle of a storyline called 'The Resurrection of Ra's Al Ghul'. Yes, Ra's had died in a book called 'Batman: Death and the Maidens', and apparently, editors found it necessary for him to come back from the dead. The story arc is one of those Bat-title crossovers that piss me off a great deal, and they usually feature a lot of Bat-proteges running around trying to save each other from certain death. ( Ha, 'certain death!' is a nice name for a band) This one's not much different. A lot of things happen, everybody lands up at Nanda Parbat, which is a favourite Bat-hangout, and Zombie Ra's appears. I was too pissed off to take all of it in, partly because I had read it a couple of months ago and didn't like it then, and I didn't think I would like it now. And I was right, I didn't.

Once Resurrection ends, the main storyline kicks in, called 'Batman RIP'. It's still going on, and I imagine it's going to be really freaking good, from the two issues I read. All of Morrison's stories so far have set up the Batman RIP storyline and apparently it will have grave ramifications in the hero's life. I am looking forward to reading this series at one go, so I gave up after those two issues. And believe it or not, the central conceit of RIP is that its events are based around a 60's single-issue story called 'Robin Dies At Dawn', also featured in "The Greatest Batman Stories". Zur En Arrh! Commisioner Vane! Simon Hurt! Possibly you would enjoy RIP without knowing about all these references, but face it, it's time to brush up on DC lore, if you want to enjoy Morrison's Batman in the months to come. I am a happy man, because I had given up on reading a good Batman comic in the last couple of years and now Morrison is imbuing him with a fresh perspective and motivations. Neil Gaiman apparently will write a 2-issue Batman story after RIP, called 'Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader". Bring it on, DC! Earn my respect and money, goddamnit.

I am just done with the first draft of this gigantic article on electronic music, and I had this burning desire to listen to the Boom Boom Satellites loud. Really really loud. Instead, I stumbled across this singer/songwriter called Pop Levi who sounds like he's going to be on my playlist for the next few days. Delicious, unapologetic pop music!

There's a new bookshop in town called Books and Beyond. Apparently a part of Spencers' Retail, it's opened at Ashoka Metropolitan Mall in Banjara Hills, the same place that has the Apple Store. I met a friend on Saturday who raved about the stunning collection they have, and how he picked up the complete Basilisk volumes from the graphic novel section there. Intrigued, I made my way there Sunday evening. No manga volumes to be found, but I did pick up the latest Artemis Fowl ( AF and the Time Paradox, and it's the pressure of writing the huge-ass article that has prevented me from doing a marathon read-session. That shall be remedied today). AND, I found this little hardcover edition of Lyra's Oxford by Philip Pullman, the companion book to the His Dark Materials trilogy. It was pointed out to me, just as I picked it up, that the book had a "Signed by the author" sticker attached to it, and yes indeed, when I opened it up, it was autographed. Phew! Made my week. Buoyed with optimism, I proceeded to spend the next hour looking for more books tagged with the same "signed by" label, found a generic young adult book or two that I wasn't really interested in, so just bought the two.

But Books and Beyond has a pretty cool selection. Other than the mandatory shelf-warmers, there was a complete set of the Flashman novels, a couple of books from the Dresden series by Jim Butcher, and Koushun Takami's Battle Royale as well, though incorrectly filed under "classics". I look forward to see whether they maintain the catalogue, or if it goes the Crossword way and degenerates into greeting-card world.

One of the good things about having a Music World right next door to my office is that after a particularly satisfying lunch, I can enter the store and browse through cheesy new DVD releases while the album du jour plays in the background. Most of the time, there's nothing too imaginative playing - the most popular tracks from the latest Hindi/Telugu album releases, but it does me good to hear a track here and there that I wouldn't have come across normally. I heard Pokiri's 'Dola Dola' the first time this way, and recently, the 'Lambi Judai' song from Jannat. Today was a pleasant surprise, because the minute I laid foot inside, a female chorus singing "Joy on sunshine, Joy on blue skies" started on the speakers. It's been ages since I heard Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and AR Rahman's 'Gurus of Peace', and I am almost embarassed to say I got goosepimples when the alaap began.

AR Rahman's Vande Mataram was released on August 15 1997, on India's fiftieth year of independence. The promos that ran through July and August on Doordarshan tantalized mercilessly - they mostly consisted of famous Indian personalities ( I remember MS Subbalakshmi and Pandit Jasraj being two of them) talking about freedom and what it means to them with a distinctive drum-beat in the background, and then the drum would get louder while the tricolour would unfurl slowly across the screen. The spots used to run in the middle of the Hindi Samachar, if I remember correctly, and whenever I heard the drum-beat, I would run to the TV room, dropping whatever it is I was doing at the moment. The only authentic bit of pre-release news about the album was based on short snippets in some other programme ( was The World This Week still running at that time? Or was it Vinod Dua's show that followed it?). It was supposed to have a Rahman/Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan duet, with the former having travelled to Pakistan to record with the maestro, who was ill at the time. Sting was supposed to guest-star, nevermind I did not really know then who Sting was. Sivamani had great things to say about it. Hype, in those innocent, pre-internet days

The night of August 14th, I was praying fervently to all the gods I knew - please don't let there be a powercut! AR Rahman was going to perform a live show ( this was obviously before all the World Tours began) at India Gate! Vande Mataram was finally out! The Man came onstage in blue jeans and a white shirt, and Sivamani, along with a HUGE contingnent of drummers went into an introductory performance that slowly led into THAT beat, the one we had been hearing on the promos. I had this small tape recorder positioned near the TV speaker, of course. (and the dang thing recorded it all pretty well, let me tell you.) Then Rahman sang The Song. And it was good. Then he sang a song that began "Aye Mere Vatan Ke Log", that I did not like too much. The later part of it is a little hazy in my mind, I don't remember what else he sang that night.

August 15th came and went. The ULFA had declared Independence Day as an Assam bandh - they still do, by the way, with most people staying at home that day and the state on high alert the week leading to it - and there was no chance a music shop would be open. I must have heard that tinny recording god-knows how many times. I remember playing it over the phone to friends who did not watch the programme on TV. The day could not go slower! The next day in college, I played the recording before class ( yes, I was an obsessed little bastard even then) and then moment second period was over, I ran to Bharali Brothers nearby, a place I normally loathed because the old man behind the counter treated us students badly, and enquired if the album was in. It was. Sixty rupees was pushing my pocket money for the month, but I paid up. I bunked the rest of the classes and headed home. In the bus, took my own sweet time to read the liner notes. Ok, so Dominic Miller was the guitarist who had played with Sting, and was playing on the album. The liner pictures were superb, the painting on the cover was by Thotha Tharrani, a name I remembered as the person who had designed the sets for Mani Ratnam films like Bombay. "Aye Mere Vatan Ke Log" wasn't even there on the album. Eight years later, I found out that the song was "Masoom" and it was released on the US version of the album, with another song called "Musafir", which was a reworked version of 'Ottagatha Kathikko', one of Rahman's earlier songs from the film Gentleman. (Yes, I have the US version of the album too).

I got home and switched on the music deck ( after remembering to clean the tape-head, hoo ah!), and put it on, feeling slightly light-headed. What The Frag?? 'Maa Tujhe Salaam' did not begin with the drum-beat. Well, whatever. 'Vande Mataram', the actual Bankim Chandra song played next. Blissful beginning, and a kick-ass guitar riff, though I did get a little cheesed off at the saxophone solo at the end. And then it started - 'Gurus of Peace'. Angelic female voices. A chorus in English! Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. And AR Rahman singing along. If on earth there was a time of bliss, it was this etc. August 16th, 1997 was a truly memorable day for me.

And that night, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan died.

In retrospect, perhaps I enjoyed the album, especially 'Gurus of Peace' a lot because I hadn't still heard a song called 'Poralae', from a 1994 Tamil movie Karuthamma, music by AR Rahman, from which the composer had liberally reused the melody for his duet with Nusrat. Karuthamma being one of those rare Tamil albums that did not make it to music stores in Assam. When I bought the Karuthamma album (Mount Road, Chennai, January 2003) and heard it that night in an IIT hostel room while swatting mosquitoes away, it took Herculean resolve to not jump up and run screaming down the corridor (out of...I dunno...excitement? Familiarity? Surprise?) on hearing a familiar tune was coated with a different aural layer.

Later, much later, in 2001 to be precise, I am on an auto from Hanamkonda to my college in Kazipet. My friend, recently relocated to Hyderabad and visiting Warangal to pick up some certificates, and I are talking music. He asks me, "Which Rahman album is your favourite?". It takes me about thirty seconds to say "Vande Mataram". And of course, on my next birthday, I get a CD of the same album from him, as a gift. This was the time when CD prices had not normalized yet, and it made me feel really giddy, owning my first Rahman CD.

Darwyn Cooke, whose work on DC's The New Frontier is a high point of retro-superheroics in the last couple of years, is working on four graphic novels adapting Richard Stark's Parker novels. I have talked about the Parker novels before, and it's exciting to look out for how Cooke's hardboiled-yet-cartoony style will interpret the character. Of course, the man has already proved he can take on noir, he's the one with the balls to take on Eisner's Spirit series. Can't bloody wait.

Holy Terror, Batman!, the Batman-meets-Osama ( and does unspeakably hideous things to him) yarn that Mr Frank Miller has been working on for the past couple of years will apparently no longer feature Batman. I can't imagine why! Actually, I think I can. Miller has consistently pushed the boundaries of Batman the character. All the Batman stories he has done till date, with the exception of Year One has featured a vaguely (and in some cases outrightly) psychotic version of Batman, a crusty, loud, sweaty, muscular alpha-male who is not afraid to render a world of hurt to criminal scum. The Batman of the Millerverse, nowadays more commonly referred to as "The Goddamn Batman" is hardly as noble as the public impression of the character makes him out to be. Combine that with Miller's slightly-misguided world-view, and it's not very surprising why the status-quo-loving DC would be nervous about the final product - after all, this was the company that censored multiple comics under its umbrella when 9/11 happened, because they featured exploding buildings and mass deaths. Anyways, Miller apparently has a character of his own in the book - "an idea for a new series", he says. I hope it does not take too much time to go over every panel and redraw Batman.

Speaking of Miller, I reread The Dark Knight Returns recently, after the second viewing of the movie. It's amazing how much information the man crams into this book. The cut-scenes, the TV-show footage that provides a commentary on the proceedings, the abundance of multiple first-person narrations - there's an insane rhythm to the writing and the dialogues that is Core Miller, and one that has been diluted ( and a wee bit corrupted) over the years. Has anyone found it difficult to take in all of that information while reading the book the first time? I had a friend complain about the excess panels per page, the information overload, I think I need to buy Absolute Dark Knight and see how that makes a difference.

A Thousand Good Things About Comics. God, I love lists like these.

After a very, very long time, I made my way to a second-hand bookshop this Saturday. There was an open quiz held that afternoon at the Hari Hara Kala Bhavan, commemorating the first anniversary of the Hyderabad Quiz Club, and Arul and I, after having sat through the preliminaries, thought about hitting the bookshop nearest the auditorium. Which was the relatively-new place adjacent to Sangeet Theatre. On the way, I remembered that the theatre was no more ( it is being renovated into a multiplex), would the bookstore still be there? Unfounded fears, because the place was open. And pretty dark, because of the scheduled power-cuts in the area in the evening. Nevertheless, we valiantly scoured through the piles. And I discovered a Cornelia Funke book I had been looking for ( The Thief Lord, 50 Rs) and a rock-and-roll novel I had heard of - Powder, by Kevin Sampson. Saw a three-volume Michael Moorcock collection that had Behold The Man and two other novels ( Breakfast in the Ruins and The Final Programme). Didn't pick it up because I already had the first book, and right now I am supposed to be on a book-buying sabbatical. No, really.

The Find of the Day came when we approached the billing counter. There is was - Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi, a 970-page behemoth commonly called "the Gone with the Wind of Japan". It's the story of swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, and I had been eyeing it on Amazon for quite sometime, trying to prioritize it with the other items on The Wish-list. This is the book on which the Samurai trilogy by Hiroshi Inagaki is based, as is the manga series Vagabond. I am glad I didn't spend 23$ on it - 100 Rs is a better sum any given day. Finding the book even made up for the fact that we missed the finals of the quiz by one star ( 27 and 8 stars made it, while we got 27 and 7 stars.)

Have you seen the brilliant packaging of the Taare Zameen Par DVD? Three discs, one DVD with the feature accompanied by the director's commentary, the other with deleted scenes and a panel discussion about disabled children, and the third a CD of the background score. The package contains two colour prints of artist Samir Mondal's paintings for the movie, the two that form part of the film's climax. Also comes with a flip-book ( featuring Ishaan Avasthi's famous hand-waving sad kid drawings), a pen, and a notebook. This is the kind of dedicated DVD release that makes me want to plunk down maximum retail price and wipe tears of joy at the lavish care the film-maker has showered on something of his creation. The price for this chunk of awesomeness is 499 Rs, believe it or not.

Much of my time is being taken over by the first season of Arrested Development. There is also the first sixteen-but-one Berserk manga volumes ( which was a gift from someone spacial) that I am reading from time to time. Lots of BT and DJ Shadow on the headphones. Half-way through two fantasy books, Cornelia Funke's Inkheart and Diana Wynne-Jones's Chrestomanci Chronicles volume 2. The Chronicles of Chrestomanci is this fantastic multiple-book cycle dealing with parallel worlds, magic and cats. I finished volume 1 - which has Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant, the first two books - in a single sitting.Christopher Chant was written later but is the prequel to Charmed Life, and Ms Wynne-Jones makes it full of delicious revelations and foreshadowings which made me grin like a maniac all day. Taking it slow on volume 2, I have a bunch of other unread Wynne-Jones which will be up next. I am on the lookout for The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, a send-off on fantasy clichés written by her in the form of a travel guide, I think I need to increase my second-hand-bookstore-visiting frequency.

Spider-man 3 is possibly the worst movie ( never mind the adjective) I've seen in recent times. A movie that I caught for the first time on HBO last night, and I was glad about two things - one, the fact that I did not spend any money on theater tickets or DVDs to watch this unredeemable pile of schlock, and two, there were ads littering the screentime. The ads helped lessen the effect, heck, they might have actually deadened the pain enough for me. Sure, there is eye-candy and dollops of webswinging and skyscraper-crunching action. I swear I wanted to kick Tobey Maguire in the face everytime he took off his mask and started off on one of his wide-eyed "acting" fits. By the time he metamorphoses into aggressive Peter Darker who walks and moves like a caffeine-infused, ADD-version of John Travolta, I would have gladly stopped the kicking and picked up a power-drill or a chainsaw. Or am I getting this all wrong and the morons behind this enterprise filmmakers were trying to say that if you are a nerd in school, cool superpowers, a hot girlfriend and an alien symbiote pumping testosterone into your body will never make you cool - you will become a Super-Nerd. Speaking of nerds, a message to the CGI animators: basic high school science says sand plus water no equal mud.

Some of the worst scenes that stick to my mind - (get it off, auuuuugh, get it off my brain!)

Venom and Sandman hooking up together like a blind-date-gone-awry - "hey, random-guy-in-green-t-shirt, you like Spiders?" "No, black-spiderlike-man, I hate them." "Great, I hate them too, let's team up." "Sure!".
Aunt May pimping off her engagement ring to her nephew. Just ask the cheapskate to buy a new one, already!
An escape convict is chased across a forest and lands in a gigantic bowl. A science experiment in progress. In the middle of nowhere. AT MIDNIGHT. "Hey doctor, the weight on the sand module is different." "Ah, don't worry, it's probably just a bird." Do you really want to hear a rant about the weight difference between a bird and a man?
An extended scene involving J Jonah Jameson, pills, Betty Brant and a buzzer that was Johnny Lever-meets-Kader Khan.

And I think there's this epic conspiracy among those who make superhero films, to get a bunch of kids acting in random scenes saying "whoa!", "cool!" and assorted saccharine-loaded noises. What kind of twisted mind thinks up situations like these?If it were India, I would think it were the star secretaries who were jostling each other to have their kids doing cute stuff.

And the lines, GOOD GOD, the Almighty Lines. "I like being bad", Eddie Brock-as-Venom intones, sliding along a wall. Oooooooo, malevolent evil! "I have nothing left", says the granite-faced Sandman, an obvious graduate of Hemant Birje's WAH! ( Woody and Ham, for those who came in late) school of acting. Ooooooo, emotions. "You ok?", Spider-man to Mary Jane, after she has been kidnapped by his evil twin and left hanging atop a skyscraper in a taxi. A taxi supported by webs generated from said twin's sticky bodily fluids, after she's been waiting for her perennially-late boyfriend to show up and rescue her, and is nearly crushed by concrete blocks before plummetting down aforementioned skyscraper while screaming at Bruce Dickinson levels. There's something to be said here about words failing me, but apparently they failed the screenplay writer ( Alvin Sargent, I believe) too. Aunt May mouthed some pithy lines about good and forgiveness, Mary Jane was as irritating a girlfriend could ever get and well, I am done talking about the movie.

The verdict?



I am sticking to torture porn from now on.

PR, a quick note to tell you that I think your comments ( on my previous post) totally rock, and I will reply to them in detail when I get some time to collect my thoughts. I need all my wits about me to address all your observations, and the maniacal level of work right now is completely coherent-post-unfriendly. Bear with me, huh?

Now, a post that does not require any form of wit or thought-collection whatsoever.

For the last eight months, I've stayed away from buying stuff off Secondspin, who have, out of desperation at my withdrawal from their clientele, inundated my inbox with news of special sales. Every week, I get a mail that pleads, yes, I kid you not, pleads for me to buy 2 CDs from their site, for which they will give me 20% off anything else I order and free international shipping and the promise that they will include signed copies of Absolute Sandman with my purchase. Yeah, ok, I kid about the last bit. I've maintained a dignified restraint to all such attempts - a swift mail-delete and a quiet sob being the only responses I've come up with. Secondspin, I am sorry to say, has lost their favourite Indian customer.

On the other hand, I've been buying Moser Baer DVDs like mad, Hindi movies that I had pooh-poohed as overpriced a couple of years ago. For 39 Rs, I am willing to buy any Hindi movie I've been remotely interested in, over the twenty-eight years of my existence. Sheshnaag was one of my first nostalgia-based buys, and I thought the pinnacle of this spree came last week, when I bought Toofan, which connoisseurs of eighties film will recognise as among India's finest superhero movies. Today, I found Oh Darling Yeh Hai India, and proceeded to buy it immediately just so I can listen to the songs again, the Ranjit-Barot scored soundtrack being out-of-print for a long time. Also picked up Padosan, which I've watched multiple times but have never finished. And of course, the reason why I was in the store in the first place, the newest Rahman release Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na. My first CD in a very, very long time.

Checked out the credits first, like I usually do with a new Rahman CD. It's a pleasant surprise to see Rashid Ali back in the Rahman stable. The last time I saw him was singing 'The Journey Home' on Rahman's first world tour, and he's on two songs on the album. Other familiar names - Tanvi, Naresh Iyer, Sayonara, Benny, Anupama, Aslam ( ASLAM?? What's he been doing all these years? ). There's a new singer named Runa, on a song named 'Jaane Tu Mera Kya Hai', the second version of which is sung by Sukhwinder Singh. Hmm, why does Rashid Ali sound like Akon on the first song? Track's pretty funky, though. Genelia plays the lead and if I am not mistaken, Sagarika Ghatge ( the lady who played Preeti Sabharwal in Chak De India ) is in the movie too, but I can't see her name on the credits. Before you ask, Vasu and Sasi, don't worry, the rips will be online by tomorrow, I promise.

Other music-happiness - discovered this electronica band called Plaid through their score for the anime Tekkon Kinkreet. Apparently, the collection of electronica I got back from the US last year( a.k.a Joel's Mega Stash ) had included two Plaid albums and I am listening to them in a loop right now. And downloading obscure Morricone soundtracks from old Italian movies and TV series. Then there's Ivy's 'I've Got You Memorized', that's haunting my non-working hours.

I watched Haute Tension last weekend. A stomach-churning assault on the senses, one of the top-notch examples of gore/extreme violence films I've seen in recent times. I claim to have a stronger stomach than most, but last year's Wolf Creek and Haute Tension both seemed to tear my reserves to shreds. Both these movies take pleasure in dispensing with the security blanket of the standard teen horror movie where, in the first half an hour, it is established who ( the "safe girl", eight times out of ten, and the "unlikely boy" the rest) will survive the bloodbath that's due. After finishing HT, I made this mental promise to myself to lay off gore movies for a while, and then I went and checked my friends' page on Livejournal where adgy talked about another French flick called Inside, that made him squirm. There is a good reason most of my promises are mental.

The phrase 'Torture porn' gets bandied about quite a bit nowadays (along with the synonym I detest - 'gorno'). And the phrase mostly came into being because of the work of these bunch of directors, collectively called The Splat Pack, are reviled by many and worshipped by quite a lot of fans for the horror renaissance they've brought back into mainstream Hollywood. Out of them, Eli Roth is over-rated ( I dug Hostel a LOT, mostly for the concept, but the execution was more over-the-top than horrifying, and the sequel was overhyped and sucked) and of all the directors in this collective, he's the only one to whose work the aforementioned term can be truly associated. I haven't watched any of the Saw movies to pass judgement on Darren Bousman. Rob Zombie is TRULY a genius, and I am looking forward to the works of Neil Marshall and Greg McLean, and post Haute-Tension, I am interested in checking out the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, which I had dismissed as one of those teen slasher movies in the vein of Slumber Party Massacre and What I did Last Summer.

The detractors of torture porn draw attention to the fact most of the violence in recent horror ( well, let's not mull over definitions of "horror" here ) films are directed at women, and bring in an element of sadism and humiliation that appeals to a predominantly male audience. Critics like Roger Ebert and David Edelstein have gone on record saying such films are pointless and not art by any means. I don't agree with both points. When you equate all such horror films with "porn", you are effectively saying that the predominant element, the "point" of the whole exercise, is the violence, the same way there is not an iota of story in a porn film. A horror film, ANY horror film, and in particular the recent ones, have plots. They might be hackneyed or cliched, but they aren't the knock-knock-who's-there-the-plumber-oh-let's-fuck variety that you associate with porn. I look at the horror medium, again, I am talking ALL sub-genres of horror here, as a challenge by a film-maker or a writer to like-minded enthusiasts, a challenge that says, "Ok, you've seen it all, now see if you can take this", and creates something that pushes the cocoon of taste, tolerance and stability that the enthusiast has built up for himself. An author has a tougher job to do so, mostly because he has his words and the reader's mind to play around with, while a film-maker can use both sight and sound to help his cause.

Just an aside. Sometimes, I see people shutting their eyes tight during a crucial scene in a horror movie, to avoid the tension. I cannot. I just have to see for myself. Especially if the sound's on and there is a lot of screaming, in which case my mind conjures up worse things than what I see on screen.

But honestly, such cases are rare, because the challenge comes with a caveat - you have to allow the film-maker into a primal part of your brain, you have to agree to let yourself be scared. It's easy to cheat. Get a bunch of friends together and laugh at the scenes. Think of how the scene would be if a Bappi Lahiri tune is playing in the background. Imagine you are part of the crew of the film ( this one's my favourite cheat, guaranteed to work everytime), and think about what a pain it was to shoot the scene, about how the actors were giggling when they were shooting and what a bitch the makeup artist was. As soon as you dissociate yourself from the reality the film is trying to establish, you are no longer emotionally invested in it and probably you can sit through it without much inner turmoil.

But that's not much fun, is it? Sometimes you need to let the demons in. I did, with both Wolf Creek and Haute Tension ( I even did it with this film called Kaakha Kaakha, where, a pivotal scene was a remake of one in a Hollywood movie, and one done very tastefully. Which in my book means that there was very little blood onscreen, implied violence rather than in actuality). In all these cases, I had to stop the movies in the middle to get some fresh air and calm my stomach. All three movies that I mention have this atmosphere of despair about them until the very end, and I think that got to me more than the gore and the violence. The fact that nothing can be right in this world, the good guys don't always win, and there are no happy endings. And that I believe is what irks the critics more than the violence onscreen, that there isn't a happy ending, which they would interpret as "a point", to all that is happening onscreen. There is no cause-and-effect scenario either - most of the Splat Pack films do not go around explaining the whys and wherefores of the events in them, they are more concerned with getting the viewers to identify with the characters ( to what degree they succeed is moot), the precise tones of blood that would look realistic onscreen, the correct dirty texture of the sets, the perfect sound design. Most importantly, the antagonist in all these films is not a supernatural character or an over-the-top villain. It is someone who is everyone. The boogeyman of the twenty-first century is one of us, these films say, and by watching the events unfold onscreen, you are a part of the violence. In Wolf Creek, it is the jovial local who goes out of his way to help the charactersl; in the Hostel movies, it is someone who has money to spend on an experience of a lifetime. In Haute Tension...well, why don't I avoid the spoilers here, enh?

All of these so-called torture porn movies have one thing in common - they are genuinely trying to disturb you, they are trying to make you stop munching that popcorn and feel uncomfortable in your seat when you watch it. Whether it changes your life or not is immaterial, really.

I will tell you what kind of films really make me unable to watch them - it's the faux-snuff films. I tried watching some of the Guinea Pig films and shut down the player by the first five minutes or so, and deleted the files as well. The home-video feel to a movie is something I just cannot take, it is one element that makes my eyes water, and my mind becomes unable to indulge in any of the cheats I was talking about earlier. That's a reason why I never got around to watching The Blair Witch Project.

Hellboy is one those series that has always left me with mixed reactions. The concept is stellar – the possible future ruler of Hell – nicknamed Hellboy when he was transported to earth by a ritual gone awry – is unwilling to accept his destiny because of his sympathies with humankind. His decision triggers events throughout the planes, and also, because of his involvement with the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, he has made himself quite a lot of enemies in the netherworld. Writer/artist Mike Mignola draws inspiration from horror stories, folklore and local myths and legends from around to world to come up with a rich supporting cast for the series. The story of Hellboy is a series of quest-stories, each of which contributes to explaining a bit of back-story and also in building up the world the characters inhabit. Mignola obviously has a plan for his baby, and he is taking his time unfolding it to the readers.

But what gets my goat is that Hellboy, as a character, is ruefully underdeveloped. In spite of leading a life filled with supernatural elements, the character has little or no regard for the consequences of his actions. His standard modus operandi in dealing with anything at all is to punch and shoot, no questions asked. This adds a level of shallowness to the storylines that I’ve been unable to come to terms with. I mean, what’s the point of all this world building and plot development if your character is a one-trick pony?

That does not mean I do not read Hellboy. I follow the series very closely, even though it is tough to keep track of all the miniseries and spinoffs that are being churned out. Initially it was just Mignola doing all the writing and artwork, and my oh my, the man is a design god! Alan Moore summed it up perfectly when he said that Mignola’s work combines Kirby’s comicbook sensibilities with German expressionism. The work in Hellboy is the cumulative output of a man who has experimented with his craft for the better part of two decades and has developed a style that’s minimalist and unique. In short, when you see Hellboy for the first time and see Mignola’s chunky blacks adorning the panels, you feel like there is not other artist who can do the character justice.

But then, for the past couple of years, Mignola has been involved with other aspects of his character. He is, I believe, closely associated with the production of both the Hellboy movies, and the animated series, and the various merchandising aspects of his brainchild. It would be a wonderful world if an artist could just sit at his chair and draw and everything would fall into place, but let’s face it, page rates and royalties (and even original comic art sales) aren’t enough to make ends meet, especially if you’re striking out on your own. So one cannot begrudge Mr. Mignola his lack of output, he has a business to run after all. What makes it all good for the fan is that he is personally supervising the choice of artist for the ongoing stories –Hellboy, its companion BPRD, the limited series Lobster Johnson and Abe Sapien, and also co-writing most of them. There has been quite a gap between the last Hellboy series – ‘The Island”, and the latest “Darkness Calls”, and apparently that’s because the previous artist short-listed for the job did not quite make the cut, or the deadlines. Editor Scott Allie tells us in the letters page of Darkness Calls #1 that after the artist turned one issue in, he was replaced by British artist Duncan Fegredo.

Duncan Fegredo has had a checkered career. His work on Grant Morrison's Kid Eternity and Peter Milligan's Enigma, two miniseries published in the early nineties, brought him critical recognition, but not really the kind of fan following an artist of his caliber deserves. He then went on to do painted covers for a number of series, Shade the Changing Man, Lucifer, Star Wars, to name a few. But in terms of a career-defining assignment, Darkness Calls is definitely the first to come Fegredo’s way.  I was skeptical at the choice – like I had mentioned before, Mignola had always been the definitive Hellboy artist, and though there had been other artists doing short stints on the character ( as with the miniseries ‘Weird Tales’, a collection of short horror tales involving the character and written and illustrated by a gazillion different guys, including the likes of Alex Maleev, P Craig Russell, John Cassaday, Scott Morse and JG Jones) , Darkness Calls was core Hellboy, and it was difficult to envisage anyone else carrying off the mood and tone of the character.

When I flipped open the first page of Darkness Calls, I gasped.

This was not Mignola. This was like someone who had captures Mignola’s aesthetics, the spirit of Hellboy, so to speak, and made it his own. This was Mignola Reloaded. Ok, enough with the clichés already, yeah? Fegredo brought a manic intensity to the proceedings with his keen eye for detail. For instance, a forest scene that occurs in the first issue. While Mignola would probably have filled in blacks for the most part, and trust me, he can convey a LOT with minimal brushstrokes, Fegredo literally goes apeshit with his detailing. You can almost see the individual leaves crackling under Hellboy’s feet as he tromps through them, while in the background the bony branches of trees alternate as spider-webs of dark and light.  Fegredo got all the tricks of the trade right - the Mignolian leitmotif of an aspect panel transition to a close-up of a sculpture or some ancient gaping creature. His designs are fantastic – I don’t know how many of them were Mignola’s, but considering the kind of talent he has on display, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was given complete freedom to come up with his own panel layouts and character sketches. And trust me, the artwork just gets better, more confident and intricate as the series progresses. It is as if Fegredo, unsure of how people will react to his interpretation of this iconic character, had held himself back in the first issue and then feeding off the positive reactions, just cuts loose.

Ok, the story, which in case of Hellboy has always managed to disappoint me. Darkness Calls begins with some characters you wouldn’t know were relevant unless you have read the stories that came before – thankfully, there are editorial notes that explain which segment of Hellboy some piece of dialogue references. Then Hellboy enters the story and there you go, that same old pigheadedness about the character - he refuses an offer by a group of rather disgruntled women saying, “Leave me alone!” puffing on his cigar, not making an attempt to understand what they are asking of him. Then things begin to get interesting, when an old, old foe makes a bargain to have Hellboy transported to her world. It’s Baba Yaga, the old witch from Russian folk tales, who Hellboy had blinded once upon a time and who wants his life in return.

It’s interesting to note, at this point, that there are two American comic book series that uses Baba Yaga as a pivotal character – the other being Fables, another excellent series that you should be reading, and the characterization of the lady in both the series is dead-on – she’s evil, she’s powerful, she’s old and there are very few ways to keep her off-balance. In the Hellboy series, Baba Yaga is shown, much like her original Russian version, as traveling around in a pestle. Which gives me this insanely happy feeling in my tummy because this is the old witch I know.

So we have Hellboy stuck in Baba Yaga’s Russia, and it is but obligatory that we see other characters from Russian folklore popping up as well. Remember Koschei the Deathless, whose soul was hidden by Baba Yaga in a very, very secure location? Vasilisa the Beautiful, who was helped by a fairy godmother throughout her life and was one of the few girls who could actually escape Baba Yaga’s clutches? Don’t worry, I haven’t given out any spoilers, just that these two characters make their appearances. There are others, but you can find them out for yourself.

The story goes on towards a predictable climax – Hellboy punching with all his might. There is another revelation, but more importantly, while he’s exiled in folklore-Russia, things are afoot in his…our world, when something really really evil is being let loose. Darkness Calls, like ALL other Hellboy miniseries so far, ends on an incomplete note, with threads of stories to come. Like I said, this becomes frustrating for a casual reader who wants to read a story with a beginning and an end. Ah, well, so we wait for the next Hellboy series to come by, I guess. And read the BPRD stories that are coming out pretty regularly. *sigh*

More pieces added to my Comic Art gallery!

You know how much I love The Authority, right? The series was to comics what summer blockbusters are to Hollywood - filled with over-the-top action sequences, superheroes facing apocalyptic, planet-threatening problems and dealing with them the simplest way possible - maximum violence. You might argue that the premise of such a series has as much substance as a Michael Bay film, but therein lies the difference. The writers in the first 29-issue run of The Authority were Warren Ellis and Mark Millar, two writers who know how to use comicbook ( I nearly said 'cinematic' just now) violence to maximum effect, AND write a worthy cerebral story. The first twelve issues that Ellis wrote were illustrated by Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary. Millar took over on issue 13, after a major change in the status quo, and along with Frank Quitely, Gary Erskine, Chris Weston and Art Adams, set to make his run a worthy successor to Ellis's.

Enough with the blabber already. Those of you following my art collection avidly know that my Quitely Authority page kickstarted Mark two of my collecting phase, the phase where I spiralled downward towards complete art addiction. Recently I got my hands on a Bryan Hitch Authority page, from issue 11, a page that features the whole team. Love it! Then there is a Gary Erskine page from the last issue of the run, #29, which features Angie, the character we know as The Engineer brought back to take her rightful place in the team.

I picked up a page inked by Gary Erskine, over Chris Weston's pencils. The series is called The Filth, and it's one of Grant Morrison's most convoluted storylines. Chris Weston is a highly-underrated British artist whose eye for detail and realistic penmanship brings to mind the works of Brian Bolland. The page features the first appearance of Dimitri, who is a talking chimpanzee, and an assassin, and a staunch communist to boot. Dimitri, needless to say, is a character whose coolness levels will make you weep. There was also a splash page from the second volume of Invisibles, also by Grant Morrison and Chris Weston, that I added to my gallery. I love Weston's work more and more everytime I see his blog. He's currently doing a series called The Twelve, which I will pick up once it's complete.

There's also a Starman page by Gene Ha, one of those classic pages from a classic story that lands in your lap when you're least expecting it. It's a piece I had been eyeing for the better part of a year, and suddenly was put for sale at nearly half its original offer price. Needless to say, I jumped on it faster than you can say "bundolo!".

There's also a neat Warrior woman pinup by Ernie Chan, that I picked up last year at Super-con, and got around to scanning just a couple of weeks ago. Three sequential Daredevil pages by the wonderful Gene Colan, again picked up sometime back, but these took quite some time to wend their way to India.

Last, for now at least, is a cover from Boneyard, a horror-comedy series written and drawn by Richard Moore. It's a light-hearted comedy series, not too well-known, but featuring witty writing and engaging characters. This cover, incidentally, is that of the first issue of the series, which means that it features first appearances of all the characters.

Whaddya think?

Reading davenchit's comment about where the animated gif in one of my earlier posts was from made me rack my brains like crazy. Generally, if I surf the net and come across something interesting, it either gets saved to my del.icio.us account or, if the site in question is one that's regularly updated with consistently good content, adds itself to my Google Reader. Interesting images - which includes hilarious LJ icons, animated gifs, screen-caps, celebrity por...uh..., you know, stuff - get saved to a temporary folder, which I later consolidate into a single folder somewhere. That stays on disk forever. Well, until the next drive crash, in which case I just think of them as collateral damage and continue with my life.

But hey, if you point to a particular image and ask me where I got it from, I would say, like I told davenchit before, "some random forum". That's because the above schema does not allow me to remember the source.

Today however, I wanted to find out where the image originated from. Out of ideas about searching for forums - do I look at comic art stuff or at scans_daily or at torrent forums or comic blogs or...how HOW?? A little creative googling to the rescue. The gif was linked by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing a couple of years ago, and the creator happens to be a guy named Paul Robertson. Yes, he has a Livejournal. Yes, the journal has a ton of other gifs too. There is also an artblog run by him and a couple of other guys that's pretty swell. And Paul apparently has made animated movies featuring arcade-game-style fights, blood, gore, mayhem and complete bedlam. I got one of them here. There is another, available on torrents as well and you can get more details of it here. The movie I got was 12 minutes long, and though the style gets a tad repetitive, I wouldn't call it boring AT ALL.

Amazing stuff.