Alan Moore talks about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier.

It was released this weekend, by the way, bringing a two-year wait to an end for most people. For me, the wait should last another couple of weeks, at best. Months, at worst.). And book three, Centuries will be released by Top Shelf next year, if Kevin O'Neill is done with the illustrations. brokentooth, adgy et al, please let me know if/when you buy it.

I don't really like watching TV shows on TV. Frequent ad-breaks take away my concentration from the proceedings onscreen and the fact that I have to adjust my schedules according to a fixed time interval on a weekly, or daily basis does not appeal to my lifestyle. Which is why I would rather watch TV shows by buying the DVDs of a complete season, or by downloading them. Not only do I get to watch them according to my own timings, its pretty obvious that DVDs give me a more lasting product, added extras like commentary tracks. No ads, hallelujah!

However, if I apply the same principle to comicbooks, I have always preferred owning - and reading - the original single-issue comics as opposed to trades. Based on the analogy used, I would be more inclined to purchase trade paperbacks - collected versions of the individual comics. One of the primary reasons why I would prefer individual comics to trades is that when I was a kid, single issues were easily available and priced very cheap. The trades that would be available would sell at dollar price ( anything from 200 Rs upwards to around 900 for the ones that were priced at 35$), while the individual issue would come for anything between 10 Rs to 25 Rs. Collectibility was a MAJOR reason why I preferred single issues - it would be a mental triumph to own something that has had a limited print run and won't be reprinted AND might be worth a lot of money in the future. Plus, I loved letter columns. The kind of knowledge you get from letter columns used to be amazing, especially in the pre-Internet days. Not only would it clear away doubts about plot points, it would also give one a new insight into a particular aspect of the story, or something about the art. Probably my favourite letters EVER would be the ones in Sandman and Swamp Thing. Miller's replies to the letter column in his Dark Horse books, Sin City, 300 etc was enough to give put a whole new spin to the term "diatribe".

Even when I started buying stuff off eBay, I would concentrate on single-issue runs rather than the TPB collections, though the former cost a little, in some cases, a lot more. There were exceptions, like when I bought the collected From Hell ( one of my earliest eBay purchases) instead of paying close to 60$ for the individual issues. Painstakingly brought together runs of Sin City, Lone Wolf and Cub ( the 45-issue run from First Comics), , Swamp Thing, Transmetropolitan and Preacher. Now let me make it clear that I am not one of these fanatical people who insist on examining every corner and crease in a comicbook and talk about CGC grade and shit like that. Not at all. I took good care of the comics I owned, bagging most of them. I still refuse to lend them out to people and take a bit of care while reading them ( if you want to read my comics after you've just had your dinner, I will go ask you to wash your hands. With Dettol soap, and then you must dry them to room temperature). I would just insist that the comics I buy had their covers intact, didn't have any kind of obvious defacement ( no writing names or stamping or stapling my comics, thank you) and weren't yellowing. Because I was interested primarily in modern-age comics, all these criteria were met by sellers. I was a happy man. In fact I remember arguing with both oooky and gotjanx about the merits of the single issue, when the former was buying trades of Fables and Y The Last Man and the latter, well, everything he bought was trades. I was a purist, and even managed to brainwash convince tandavdancer how cool it was to own the ORIGINALS, not reprinted stuff. There were the occasional mild bouts of weakness when I would lust after a hardcover first print of Sandman: Season of Mists, for instance, but in all, I was pretty much a single-comic guy.

Another vote for single-issue comics comes from the fact that they are "historical" in some way. Printed only once, and not available in the market once they are sold out, and only accessible through back-issue bins in Comic Book Shops in the US. The fact is, most collectors keep all their comics bagged and boarded and pretty well-preserved. Will they become rare someday? I doubt it, because of the fact I just mentioned. More important about why I ought to buy single issues is that without adequate sales of the monthly comics in question, the trade versions wouldn't even be released. And there is a good chance that a decent series itself might get cancelled if there are not enough people buying it monthly. Case in point: American Virgin by Steven T Seagle and Becky Cloonan, that just got cancelled recently. It was supposed to be a long-running series but had to face cancellation because of poor sales.

This urge to own the original comics persisted until the middle of last year, when I was buying out a large collection from a friend of an LJ-acquaintance, someone who had advertised on one of those comic communities. The prices were rather good, and I started out by buying whatever single issues the guy was selling. But then, he lowered the prices of the trades he was selling, and all of a sudden, I decided to lower my buying-conditions and plonked down cash for all the stuff he was selling. Yes, everything. He had good taste in his books and I was pretty sure whatever titles I didn't know about I would not be worse than the Image shit I used to read as a kid. Thanks to that decision, I got to read some excellent stuff, like the crime series Hawaiian Dick and Paul Grist's Kane and Jack Staff. Lots of Marvel Essential Editions and collections. And like a crack-user who discovers the merits of heroin, I found out just how brilliant it was to read a trade paperback.

For one, when you read aTPB, you are reading a self-contained story. It's of course sturdier - there isn't that itch at the back of your mind, that battle between the collector who insists that you should not recline backwards and risk the chance of creasing the cover and the reader, who just wants to READ the goddamned thing and probably also have icecream at the same time. You have additional material, forewords, afterwords, design sketches, unpublished material - of course, not all trades have them, but most of the good ones do. And they're easier to handle. Retrieval time is cut down by a huge degree because I do not have to search through piles of material, the spine tells me what I am looking at. Looking at my trades of Blade of the Immortal, just to give an example, or Invincible, I am happier about the fact that I am able to read these comics and give them to friends without worrying too much about cover damage and spine bending.

Comicbook companies are getting smarter too - Omnibus editions, Showcase Editions, Complete Collectors' editions, Absolute versions, Masterworks, Essentials. It's paradise for someone who wants to read sequential literature , er, sequentially without the collectibility part of it interfering with one's reading pleasure. All of a sudden, it's more tempting to own a gigantic single volume compendium than a bunch of flimsy 32-page pamphlets. It does not harm my newfound opinion when these 32 page comics have 10 pages of ads and no letter columns and the single volumes have much, much higher production quality. All of a sudden, my steadfast resolution of holding out until I buy the complete Sandman comics in single issues seems to be weakening. Have you seen the colour transfers on the first Absolute Sandman volume? Dang! And all these releases also mean that one can read Silver Age comics without resorting to scans or endangering old collections. Also, with trades of manga titles, like Mai the Psychic Girl or Kamui, for example, it seems the latter-day versions are more uncensored, if you know what I mean.

The Biggest Reason that tilts the argument in favour of my giving up hankering for single issues and opting for trades - White Drongo. I am sorry, but I cannot resist a hardcover edition of Spider-man Loves Mary Jane if it's available at a competitive price ( read: with a major discount). I am NOT willing to forego the chance to buy The Amazing Adventures of The Escapist, especially if it comes with a beautiful Chris Ware cover. I AM going to resist buying all the Starman trades, though, because they don't reprint all the original episodes of the eighty-issue run of the title.

Hmm, so what does this have in store for my collecting habits? I will NOT be porting my single issue comics to TPBs anytime soon, sorry Ganja. In all likelihood, my Sandman collection is going to be Absolute-ized. Stuff that I have in trades ( Invincible, Punisher Max), or a combination of trades and single issues ( 100 Bullets ), I shall continue to buy in whatever format I find them in. I will of course buy all of the Omnibus, Showcase, Masterworks versions that come out. Tripe like Absolute Hush? Never.

- Watched the complete Firefly, followed it up with Serenity, the comic book and followed that up with Serenity, the movie.

-All of that instilled in a newfound zeal for watching TV series, so I watched half of Berserk and two seasons of Spaced. Started watching The Adventures of Brisco County Jr now.

- Five copies of this are available at MR Book stall, right opposite my office, at 250 Rs each. I have no idea how and why the book is there in the first place. Filed under "Rude-shock-of-the-month". ( Rude because I have no money to spend. )

- I did have Walden gift coupons to spend though, thanks to a Special Hard-working Person who agreed to let me use 1000 Rs worth. I bought Ramesh Menon's Devi Bhagavatam ( swear the guy's writing Indin mythology books faster than I am reading them ) ( and good ones at that ) and Mihir Bose's History of Bollywood. Reading the latter right now, periodically wincing at the lack of editorial supervision that pervades the writing. Subhash Ghia? Anupam Kher was an up-and-coming star of the nineties? Sheesh. At least the facts seem to be in order so far.

- More lustworthy releases include the two disc edition of 300. 699 Rs and way beyond my budget at the moment.

- Also drooled a bit over the new Koji Suzuki collection that seems to be available at Walden. I already have, and have read Ring, Spiral and Dark Water. Loop was there, too, but I'm holding out for the hardcover, so didn't buy it.

- There was also the Mammoth Book of War Comics, which had, among other things, two stories by Darko Macan and Edwin Biukovic, Will Eisner's Last Day in Vietnam, a Commando issuem, an early version of Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen and some Sam Glanzman Blazing Combat stories. 704 Rs, pass.

Just finished 41 issues of The Walking Dead. Best described by the author himself as "a zombie movie that never ends", TWD is Robert Kirkman's other genre-bending work ( Invincible being the first, a fresh superhero story for our times ). With the help of artists Tony Moore, Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn, Kirkman has crafted a story that made my jaw drop in virtually every issue and plough through the books breathlessly. Let me put it this way - if there was a law against speed-reading in the digital world, I would be arrested by now.

( More. )

Three years ago, I made a post about DVD pricing in India and how it was extremely brain-dead to charge big money for DVDs of movies which come with no special features and bad film transfers. I ended the post with a fingers-crossed comment about Lagaan not having come out on DVD yet and about how I trust Aamir Khan to "rock my socks off".

I can uncross my fingers now.

Lagaan has just been released on DVD for the first time ever. And not just that, the documentary The Making of Lagaan ( which has two alternate titles - the Indian version is called Chale Chalo and the international version Madness in the Desert) by Satyajit Bhatkal has also been released. I saw the DVD, which has been called the 'Anniversary Edition', at Music World last Friday, and I bought it yesterday. Putting my money where my mouth is. I promised myself I would buy it THE MOMENT it was released. Late by three days, but yeah, I paid up. The single DVD set comes with deleted scenes, which I had already seen before, thanks to a pirated DVD I bought off National market. It also includes the song 'Rey Bhaiyya Chhootey Lagaan' , previously released as 'Zin Kinak Zin' in a double-cassette collection called The Spirit of Lagaan that had background scores, dialogues and the songs from the movie. ( Including the Sadhna Sargam version of 'O Paalanhaare', which I think is way, WAY better than the Lata version we are familiar with) Also picked up the documentary, though only the VCD seems to be available right now. Odyssey was offering a copy of the book The Spirit of Lagaan free with the DVD, and so I picked that up too, though I already have a copy.

Watched the movie again last night, with someone who hadn't seen it before. Both of us LOVED it - c'mon, who wouldn't? It's Lagaan, after all. The transfer was perfect, the sound slightly schizophrenic - kept going high and low everytime the music stopped or crescendoed. I have a feeling it might be because we were watching it on stereo speakers. Rachel Shelley looks as beautiful as ever - wonder what she's up to nowadays?

(breathless) ( gasping for air) (SQUEEEEEEE)

Just did a Google search for her, and...and...Rachel Shelley's appearing on the third season of The L-Word. And in an episode of Coupling as well. What? WHAT?

It somewhat pains me to think that when I talk to kids today about Rachel Shelley, they will remember her as Helena Peabody from L-Word rather than Elizabeth from Lagaan. *sigh*

Ok, fanboy hat off. This is good news. I can now revel in more Rachel Shelley goodness with ease. Though I thought the first season of LW was pretty boring, hot lesbian women can only take up so much of my attention.

Back to Lagaan. Just when I was being very happy about my acquisition from yesterday, there came a bombshell, when I went to the www.lagaandvd.com website. You know, just to check out the press release and shit.

Turns out, there's a 3-DVD Collectors' set . That comes in a wooden box. With lots of additional goodies. Priced at a fairly decent 2000 Rs. GODDAMNIT, I knew I should have waited.




So far, I have - two pirated copies of the Lagaan DVD ( one with the deleted scenes that stops midway into the film, and the other with a bad transfer and audio, but works), the official single disc edition. I NEED the three disc edition, and I think I am going to have it. Soon.

I leave the US of A on Monday night.

In the last one and a half months, I have -

• been part of a team that's delivered a feature-complete product a day ahead of deadline.


• seen my first Monet, Titian, Manet, El Greco and Gainsborough. And these were names I remembered off the top of my head.


• visited my first comicbook shops.


• bought out full runs of comics and manga and exceeded my weight limit by 20 kilos.


• been to my first Comic book convention. Woo Hoo!


• indulged in Major Comic art acquisitions, 32 in all.


• managed to buy Perfect Gifts.


• visited 5-level used record/CD/DVD outlets, each of which made me want to sit in a corner and whimper to myself.


• held original first printings of the first three Dark Tower books in my hands, caressed them for about twenty minutes, put them back gently in their display cases and cried on the way out.


• eaten The Crappiest Biryani Evah, and priced at 8.99$ to boot.



• had surprise packages mailed to me from Spain.
  
  
• become part-time Web Elf for the coolest Electronic Dance Music site ever.
  
  
• not had the time to write about all these. Mostly because of point (1), but that will soon be remedied.

F**K YEAH!

And the comic shop owner quoted too much on that Hitman cover. Higher than my initial estimate. Goddamnit. I will try to bargain him down, but...erm....I don't think it's happening. Sucks.

But I picked up a complete run of Michael Zulli's Puma Blues ( 23 issues) and a complete run on Ted McKeever's Metropol ( 2 volumes, 15 issues), both for a cumulative price of 20$. And two old Heavy Metal issues for 2$ each. Cheaper than in Best Book Stall, and in better condition at that.

I have earmarked quite a bunch of stuff for the upcoming sale. Most likely I will be cleaning up their stock of complete runs. There are sets of Sam and Twitch, The Human Target ( the Vertigo series by Peter Milligan), a complete run of Longshot, and all the issues look like they are signed by Art Adams ( I am greedy, so I didn't buy that off immediately because they were 15$ for 6 issues, but 50% discount next week - yum! ). Quite a bit of other stuff too, I don't remember for sure. And seems like there's more full runs coming in.

So I am in Palo Alto, California right now.

Right opposite my hotel, there is an Indian Chaat place, where you get thaalis and panipuris. I am not interested in either. ( "Panipuris? You are not interested in panipuris??" "Well, not when they are $3.95 for six pieces. It's un-Indian that way.") But. But. There's a comicbook store right next to that eatery. Unfortunately for me, the time it closes is much before the time I get back from work, except on weekends.

Luckily enough, yesterday I came back from work just about half an hour before closing time.

And went inside My Very First Comic Book Store.

It was a cool experience. The salesman really knew his stuff, and pointed out the stacks of Asterix and Tintin they had right next to the door, because of the Indian population who inquired about them frequently. Because I did not have too much time, I decided to ask him about the art collection they had advertised outside, and he came back with two huge folders. Yum. Got to looking at the pages. Saw some nice Buscema/Severin Weirdworld pages, a couple of excellent Thor splashes, a Son of Satan splash by Ed Hannigan and Sonny Trinidad that set my heart a-flutter, especially when I saw the low price marked onto the pages. ( The salesman explained that those were the prices the owner had paid for them when he bought the pages himself. Damn.) And then, just at the end of the second folder, I saw...

A Hitman cover.

There was a Hitman cover for sale at the store.

Ok, let me set this straight. There are 60 John McCrea Hitman covers in existence right now, 61 if you count issue 10 Million. I own one of them, I have reserved three more, there's one on sale right now on Comic Art fans, Romitaman.com has the cover to #34 marked at an exorbitant price because it won an Eisner award, and I have accounted for about six or seven more of the covers.

That leaves us with about 40. And I just found one opposite my hotel room.

I would probably preen a little, but let me figure out how much the owner quotes. Fingers crossed.

And did I tell you about the sale that begins May 20th, which involves a 50% discount on all back issues and 25% on statues?

Heh, now that the Spider-man 3 movie featuring Venom is out , there is a flurry of eBayers who are selling their Hot Copies of Amazing Spider-man 300 at very Hot ( read: expanded) prices. Now if only someone would tell them that Venom made his first (though admittedly brief) appearance in Amazing Spider-man 298. 298 also happens to be the first issue in which Todd McFarlane elbowed his way into Spider-man history. I think I shall go take out my autographed copy of ASM 298 and gaze at it fondly for a minute or two today.

Bought Absolute Watchmen off White Drongo the day it landed. Whoo hoo. What is Absolute Watchmen, you ask? It's the remastered version of Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, newly coloured, oversized with a couple of pages of extras in which Dave Gibbons shows off his thumbnails, Alan Moore shows off how he can write a page describing a single panel, and DC figures out a new way to get you to buy an old favourite. You ought to be happy with the trade paperback, really, leave the Absolute versions to the maniac Completist Bastards. Either ways, I am happy I got it at a discount and proceeded to reread it again. As always, Moore's characters are too talky, and all of them, including Rorschach are quite erudite when it comes to explaining their motives and writing in their journals. The book is magnificent, the story is a landmark effort, but I still think Miracleman is better, and From Hell knocks both of them out of the park with its glory.

And then Vasu sent me Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman's second collection of short stories which was released last year and made it to India just last month. I love you, Vasu.

( Sidetrack: Ennio Morricone on my playlist after a long, long time. )

52, DC's 52-issue-long series which was released weekly over a period of one year, has just gotten over. eBay, here I come!

One of the major art pieces that went on eBay sometime back was a page by Neal Adams that features the first appearance of Ra's Al Ghul. Quite possibly, The Neal Adams Batman page. The price was stuck at 10000$ for about a week, and at the last minute, finished at 27000$. I am surprised. Everybody is, actually. The page doesn't even feature Batman per se, and Neal Adams Batman covers go for less than the final price. And it's tax season, forchrissakes.

Dave McKean's cover to Sandman 18, Dream of a Thousand Cats is up on eBay right now. One of the last McKean Sandman covers that the man still had, and it's going to go for quite a sum, I can assure you. At 17000$ right now. The work is a combination of acrylic, ink, and a collage of wood, framing, resin crow skull ( used to be an original crow skull which fell apart), transfer type, cardboard and gold acrylic paint.

I finished all my Paul Grist books last week. What. An. Experience. Just when I thought the likes of Bendis, Azzarello, Chaykin and Miller had done whatever could be done for crime fiction in graphic literature, Grist has gone and set a new standard with his Kane books. Set in the fictional city of New Eden, the series follows the eponymous hero, Detective Kane and his cohorts at the local Precinct. The story starts with Kane being reissued his badge following an unfortunate incident involving his ex-partner. The thing with Grist's work is - in the space of a couple of pages, he switches timelines, plotlines and characters, and with a flair that leaves the unwitting reader gasping for breath. Equally stunning is Jack Staff, one of his superhero works which, like most of the modern-day classic comics - by which I mean comics that go beyond the monthly schedule and try to use the superhero cliches in ways that mess with your mind - pays tribute to familiar characters. And introduces its own.( Betsy Braddock, vampire reporter has a ring to it, don't you think? ) An amazing mixture of twists, humour and good storytelling.

As it turns out, there are two Jack Staff books and two Kane books that I don't have yet. Soon be remedied, nyahahahahah.

It's end of the month, and I am broke. In fact, I am beyond broke - uber-bankruptcy would be the right word.

Hence, not a good time to enter Landmark Book Store, Nungambakkam, Chennai.

But the flesh is weak. I sauntered up to the manga section which, strangely, is located somewhere in the middle of the children's section while the rest of the graphic novels are just next to the entrance. Quite a few of the usual Del Rey suspects - Negima, Azumanga Daioh, xxxHolic and all - but the first one my eyeballs locked onto was vol 1 of Crying Freeman. The next moment, I was a crying Freeman myself, having observed the 594 INR price tag at the back of the book. Glanced wistfully at the pages - Ryuichi Ikegami's artwork embellishing Kazuo 'Lone Wolf' Koike's story about an assassin is something right up there in my Wish List, but no, goddamnit. I wasn't spending any money today. No freaking way. Returned the book to its place. Went to the normal graphic novel section and winced harder at the sight of the hardbound edition of Jessica Abel's La Perdida. The art was terrific, but again, flipped through the pages and kept it back.

Found out that Landmark has also begun stocking Los Bros Hernandez's Love and Rockets books, at a stunningly low 295 Rs each. Amazing! How can Fantagraphics books afford to be so cheap, inspite of a cover price of 14.95$?? My friend opined that it was probably a mistake - and promptly picked up volume 1. I tried asking around to see if they had Palomar and Locas, the complete Love and Rockets collections from the two brothers. They didn't. Oh well. I read the first volume of Oldboy - the manga in the store, which left me marvelling at the apt storytelling choices Park Chan-wook opted for while making a movie out of it.

And then I made my way to the sci-fi/fantasy section, and promptly regretted the decision.

Day Watch was out - the English version of the second book in Sergei Lukyanenko trilogy. Priced at 698, by the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth! And Ramesh Menon's Bhagavat Purana, which has got to be the thickest standalone book I've ever seen. Should be about 1300 pages. 995 Rs. After I was done with the soft-sobbing-while-being-curled-into-foetal-position in the corner of the section, I called retail therapy. In other words, Krishna of Bookworm - who cheered up a so-far-dreary day by not only having both books in stock, but also using the magic words "twenty five percent discount" in the same context.

Update: Chandru was in Chennai yesterday, and he bought Crying Freeman for me. What can I say - the flesh is weak. Oh right, I already said that.

Update 2: Chandru also bought La Perdida. *Sigh*

Update 3: There is an eBay seller who's put up five Crying Freeman volumes and nine of Wounded Man, another of Koike-Ikegami's collaborations. And he's shipping internationally too. Hrmmm.



It's official. If Samit Basu is channelling Neil Gaiman in his user-friendly, accessible-fantasy-writer-prone-to-bouts-of-mythology in his work, Sarnath Bannerjee is channelling Grant Morrison in his cheery outlook to writing. The guy most remembered for the mess that was Corridor, has come up with Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers, his second work, and this is what he says about himself - "I am always at the fringe. I am the fringe of literature. I am at the fringe of art- its a very comforting space." and about his work - "It’s a dark mysterious story which lot of it is me. It’s reality slipped into magic and magic slipping into reality with ease. Despite all the movement in space and time, the narrative is much more linear and much more rounded off." How very novel. If you haven't been reading Morrison's semi-coherent interviews for the last couple of years, that is.

Junji Ito is messing with my head.

Junji Ito who? A horror creator from Japan. Known primarily for a series called Uzumaki (Spiral in English, also made into a not-so-good movie) and for Tomie. Tomie. I read scans of this series a couple of years back. Fairly gruesome story about a drop-dead beautiful girl (heh heh heh) named Tomie, who has the power to make people obsess over her, and ultimately, kill her.

Except, Tomie does not stay dead easily. She regenerates, inspite of having been hacked and slashed and dismembered and, in one mega-sicko sequence, being ground to a paste and mixed with Sake. She regenerates, and sometimes, most of the time, actually, she comes back in ways that are extremely distressing to an unsuspecting manga fan who is having his dinner. Take my word for it.

The scans I had read before were from this defunct company called Comicsone, and the translations weren't too good. Dark Horse comics has taken to reprinting all of Junji Ito's works in a series called Museum of Horror, and I recently bought volume 2. Excellent stuff, more so because in this volume Ito's art seems much more polished than the early Tomie stories. Now to find volumes 1 and 3.

You can read a complete Junji Ito horror story right here.

* * *

Gaurav got a bunch of my stuff back from the States. A Sergio Aragones Groo pin-up, a Harry Roland Vampirella painting, a Tony Harris Starman page, and a 2-page Kevin Maguire splash page from Gen-13/Fantastic Four( my first double-page splash! Woo Hoo!). The splash page had some of the most detailed inking I have ever seen, I spent a good half an hour just looking at the intricacies. Apart from the artwork, he got back the complete Hellboy collection, the first three volumes of Lady Snowblood, quite a bit of Ellis - all of which were part of Brady's collection that I had purchased this year, most of which is still at 2fargon's place in the States. I finished the Hellboy volumes sometimes yesterday - started them in the airport the day before. Yes, I was travelling.

* * *

How was the last year for me? Very trippy. Right from Jan 1st, 2006, half of which I spent in Bangalore airport, I seem to have been travelling like mad. I cannot remember more than one or two weekends in the first three months of this year when I was in Hyderabad. None of these trips were too restful, except for a Mumbai trip in April, where I spent three and a half days in invigorating company, and the last week of the year, which was my Back To Basics trip. I nearly ended up spending half of 31st December in an airport too, but I didn't mind it one bit, nosirreebob.

In case you haven't been following the LJ too obviously, last year was also the year of Original Art. ( 2004 was the year of The Comic Book, 2005 the year of The DVD ) Technically, I bought my first pieces on 25th December 2005, but in 2006, the acquisition of my first Quitely page broke the 200$-eBay-barrier. I slacked off sometime in the middle of the year, but then I had this life-altering conversation with a friend, sometime in September, about why he is going to collect original comicbook art, and only original art, after he graduates. There was a flash of light, in which I realised how right he was. And from then, there was no looking back.

It was also, in a slighter degree, the year of a near-complete comicbook collection. I bought out a collection from someone in the US, and effectively that has put an end to fervent searches and snipes on eBay. I am contented. For now.

A depressing year, as far as new music goes. Apart from the fact that my sister gifted me an iPod shuffle, there has not been any hallelujah-worthy moment in music for me, this year. (Yes, that's right, I have become a jaded old fucker. Rape me, my friends. Which reminds me that I waded through Nirvana's discography sometime back. Excellent rush of happy memories that was. ) No, hold on, let me remember some music-worthy moments from last year...

- The live Zero-7 video that Vasu showed me, that made me go and listen to all of Zero-7 for a couple of days.
- Listening to this band from Nepal called Nepathya, who do rock versions of traditional songs from around the Himalayas. Infectious!
- Rediscovering DJ Krush, who I had heard a little bit of in 2005.
- Siddharth singing 'Appudo Ippudo' from Bommarilu, Shreya Ghoshal on the songs of Anukakonda Oka Roju, and, most important of all, 'Dole Dole' from Pokiri.
- All the adgy mixes.
- Kailash Kher's Kailasa, the live DVD as well as the CD.

Hmm, seems like there might be a mixtape in the offing after all...

The first half of the year, I took this rather drastic measure of choosing to ignore ALL blockbuster movies that are released. It was meant to be a one-year abstinence from all things corporate-Hollywood-and-Bollywood-ish, but the idea got chucked somewhere along the way. I did not watch too many movies either ways - probably the fact that Sympathy For Lady Vengeance did not impress me as much early this year has something to do with it. The ones I saw were reruns of the ones I saw before. Repeat viewings rock, don't they?

About the rest of what went on in my life, well, all of you who know me already know about what's going on, so do I really need to write it all down? The rest of you will have to make do, I guess.

* * *

Right now, I have in front of me the following - Pride of Baghdad and Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall, both hardcover. Genshiken volume 3 - I had bought volumes 4 and 5 yesterday on the last day of the Odyssey sale. DVDs of Pitamaghan, Vettaiyadu Vilaiyadu, Anjali, and Jillanu Oru Kaadhal. A neat Hitman page, drawn by John McCrea and inked by Gary Leach, featuring the last appearance of Sixpack, that I picked up from the post office today morning. Ramesh Menon's Mahabharata is occupying my nightly hours.

Ain't life grand?

I am obsessed with comicartfans.com. As if you didn't know. While collection-hopping sometime last week, I landed up on a Spanish collector's gallery, where, to my surprise, I found an Alan Davis page for sale. Not just another Alan Davis page, it was a page from an issue of Batman and the Outsiders, published sometime in 1985. It happened to be the issue where I had seen Alan Davis's work for the very first time. And also, it was cheap, remarkably so. So, in my nostalgia-induced headiness, I sent a message to the collector saying that I wanted the page, and would he be all right with mailing it to India, and all that jazz.

He replied in a couple of hours, and quoted a price that was extremely reasonable, shipping included. Everything fine and hunky-dory. I would pay him on Monday, I told him. Cool.

So on Monday, just before I am about to pay, I notice that he's online in GTalk. Just engage in casual conversation for a while, talking about comic conventions and collecting addictions and how tough it is to pay for Uderzo pages. While we are talking, I tell him that I am ready to pay and go over to Paypal, type in my information and click on "send money". Just then, he asks me, "have you checked out the site that represents Alan Davis and sells his art for him?" "No", I said. I hadn't come across any site that sold Alan Davis artwork. He passed on a URL to me, and the moment I clicked on it, I knew I should have been more careful. There were Alan Davis pages GALORE, and truth be told, much better than the ones this guy had put up. It even had a page from The Nail, with all the JLA characters in it, and some pages from the X-23 debut in X-Men, including a kick-ass fight scene between X-23 and Wolverine.

And this guy, he takes my Paypal payment and returns it to me. I don't know if he got charged for it or not, but this is what he said after returning the money:

"Maybe this way I lost a sale but won a friend. :D"

You sure did, Pablo.

Since I've been flying around the country quite a bit (urm, planes, not newly developed wings), I have been able to find time to catch up on a bit of reading. And buying. Reread Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors on the Kanpur trip. Also started a Diana Wynne-Jones collection of short stories just after that got over. And graphic novels, loads of them.

Landmark, Mumbai was a revelation. I had been hearing raves about it from oceansandearth and suku. The former gave me a near-apoplexy by mentioning that not only did the place have Samurai Executioner volumes 8 and 9, which yours truly had been searching for high and low, it also had volumes 14 and 15 of Blade of the Immortal, of which I had read volumes 1-13 in white-heat some time ago. And indeed, when I landed up there, the collection sent a rush of blood to my head. It had all that, and much more. Is anyone looking for volumes of Akira? What about David Lloyd's latest original GN Kickback? Complete runs of Fables TPBs, Y The Last Man, Flash Gordon collections, Promethea - basically whatever mainstream comics has to offer. Even the first two volumes of the Koike/Kojima release Path of the Assassin, which is just being released by Dark Horse.

But hold on a second, no discounts. Wankers. Just went ahead and bought some bare necessities, Samurai Executioner and BotI included. Glared at the hardcover edition of The Complete Conan by Robert E Howard. Wankers. I will just have to pick up the softcover version the next time I am in Blossom. My patience has run out.

It pains me extremely to realise that nowhere in Hyderabad can I buy new books with a 20% discount, like I used to in Bangalore. It's partly a blessing, because most of my book-buying is now confined to second-hand books ONLY while in this city. And boy oh boy, Best-Frankfurt-MR do manage to throw up surprises every now and then, like the original Tideland novel by Mitch Cullin for just 50 Rs, and a beautiful fairy tale book called Wingless which I picked up the other day just because it has illustrations by Atanu Roy. I do frequent the bigger bookshops - Odyssey and Walden - every now and then, but that's just to check up on the latest releases. If I like anything, I buy them at 20% discount the next time I am at Bookworm or Blossom. Both Odyssey and Walden have these "Sales" twice every year, in which they sell all their stock at a grand 10% off. Phoeey! Walden does one better. It takes out the worst books of the lot, the marketting manuals that were out of anyone's radar eight years ago, Java 1.2 API guides, Windows 98 tutorials, and tags them with "special prices" - which we customers are supposed to drool over and buy immediately. They are selling unsold hardcover copies of Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince at 15% off - well after the paperback has been released. Morons.

Count your blessings, Bangalore-dwellers. For all the cribs I have against your city, there are certain things that make me gnash my teeth and wish I were still in that office on Museum Road. Ah, to be able to drop in at Blossom every day at lunchtime.

Did you know that Barefoot Gen, the seminal manga on the horrors of Hiroshima, and considered to be one of the inspirations behind Grave of the Fireflies is now available in an Indian edition? Yes, and quite well-priced at 250 Rs, also comes with an introduction by Anand Patwardhan.

Marjane Satrapi's Chicken and Plums is also available at most bookshops, though the cost price of 600 is somewhat off-putting. I will just wait for a Bangalore trip to pick it up.

Volumes 5-8 of Osamu Tezuka's Buddha are available quite freely in the market now. ( How freely? Even a backwaters bookshop like Odyssey, Hyderabad has them on display. The last time I asked them if they had Buddha, one of the salesmen pointed me to the "religion" section. Bah! ) Prices also seem to have come down quite a bit. 295 per book, and if you buy them from places that offer a discount, you get them for REALLY cheap. I ought to be peeved that I spent almost twice the money on the first four volumes, but this lowered price makes me quite glad because more people will pick up this superb series, which deserves hosannahs and praise and our eternal gratitude to Osamu Tezuka for creating it all. Highly recommended, folks. Storytelling does not get better than this.

I tried watching Nacho Libre the other night, but fell asleep midway. Is it just me, or is Jack Black trying too hard?

I am a big fan of soundtracks. Not just Indian soundtracks, all kinds. I am just awed by the fact that music can be used, in the hands of a skilled composer, to augment the impact of a scene in a film. I love the way music can be used as subtext in a barebones storyline. In fact, half the reason I end up hating a movie is when the accompanying soundtrack is crock. ( Perfect examples: the recent assembly-line productions of Ram Gopal Verma's The Factory, which rely on over-the-top moodscapes to ruin half-baked storylines) Right now, there are three composers who are my personal Gods, people whose music make my day ( or night) anytime I listen to them.

On top is AR Rahman. Part of the reason why I like him, truth be told, is that I've grown up with his music. He was the nineties, for me, every year indelibly marked in my memory by a couple of Rahman albums. There really have not been too many Rahman soundtracks I cannot listen to at any given point of time, and there are few Rahman tunes I cannot recognise in the first seven seconds of the song playing within earshot. But yeah, his background scores are no great shakes - they are essentially reworked versions of his songs in that particular movie, played on a different instrument or in a different style, or a slower/faster tempo than the song itself. Very few Rahman-scored films of recent times had memorable scores, to be honest - the songs might be awesome, but that's all you remember after you finish the film, the songs, and not the music. And I don't think I was hallucinating when I heard the same snatch of music at the end of Swades and at a point in Mangal Pandey: The Rising. Of course I am a Rahman fan, you idjit, but faith that refuses to face the facts is not faith at all, as Albert Schweitzer once said and all that.

Second in the list, not because of quality - let me assure you that I am not comparing any of these three composers in any way, other than the fact that they make my earth move - is Ennio Morricone. I have been introduced really late to his music. Believe me, chances are - you haven't heard Ennio Morricone's music yet, true Morricone music, that is. Because, in the sixties and the seventies, when Morricone was composing kick-ass stuff, certain unscrupulous hacks in America, like Henry Mancini or Mantovani (that's right, I know I should not call them such derisive terms, but it's just their covers stunted my musical education. They have also done some good stuff in their days) did some lame-ass cover versions of his soundtracks, and just to show that people have lousy musical taste, these cover versions sold really well, and I suspect made their way up the Billboard Charts too. The cover versions didn't sound bad, just watered-down. Insipid music that did not have a tenth of the energy that the original Morricone versions did. What was so unique about Ennio Morricone's original compositions? I could rave about his quirky use of instruments, or the completely loony themes he came up with. A solitary twanging guitar, a wailing harmonica, the sound of a jew's harp, shrieking human voices - Morricone did not need the grandeur of a string orchestra to come up with the soundscapes needed for a brutal desert shoot-out or a blood-splattered night. Or for that matter, a tenderly-shot love scene.It's not like he never used string orchestras either,;he did, and very beautifully too, in later day classics ( Wolf, Once Upon a Time In America, Cinema Paradiso). This man made the most memorable oboe piece in cinematic history - 'Gabriel's Oboe', from The Mission. He's composed nearly six hundred soundtracks so far, and has managed to repeat himself in only two of them. Pure genius, I say.

Of late, I have stumbled upon ( not by chance, to be honest) Morricone's scores for Italian Giallo movies - Dario Argento's Cat O'Nine Tails, for example, and Mario Bava's Danger Diabolik. Awesome, goosepimply scores. I have much to thank Kill Bill for, and rediscovering Ennio Morricone is one of the reasons.

Third in the list is a lady whose music I heard people raving about so freaking much that I nearly went berserk trying to get hold of her stuff. Yoko Kanno is her name, and she's a Japanese composer who has done music for anime titles like Cowboy Bebop, Macross Plus, Earth Girl Arjuna, and Ghost in the Shell; Standalone Complex. There's one thing I need to make clear about Ms Kanno - you can never, EVER slot her into a genre, or even in two, or ten, or fifty seven. Absolutely no-no-No. Fine, so you listen to 'Tank', the theme music for Cowboy Bebop, and go "Ah, a Jazz-oriented composer, reminds me of brass bands of the forties.", and then you hear 'Live in Baghdad' off the same album, a song that can give Judas Priest a complex, it sounds so eighties hair metal.Right, so the next song happens to be 'Fantasie Sign', a song that begins like an Edith Piafish French ballad, leading to a 180 bpm Jungle beat that kicks your teeth out of shape if you have your speakers loud enough. Of course, there is 'Bindy', a faux-middle-eastern piece where an alto saxophone tries to sound really hard like a shehnai, and very nearly succeeds; followed by 'Forever Broke', which is a slide-guitar piece you might hear Johnny Winter playing on a really, really bluesy day.

Right. So maybe I went overboard trying to describe how hard Yoko Kanno's music cannnot really be described to anyone, you have to listen to it to figure out how much it rocks. And this is just one album, from out of a possible 7 albums accompanying Cowboy Bebop, with all its music as diverse as the genres from which this anime borrows its themes from. And then you have to listen to the rest of her work, each more audacious than the other. "Audacious without being pretentious" is the term I've heard someone use with regards to Yoko Kanno's body of work, and it strikes me as the perfect term to describe her.

To buy or not to buy?

I am seriously waiting for the music of Rang De Basanti to be released. Music by AR Rahman, of course. It's due sometime this week, and I really need to hear something more than the single line ( and that infectious banjo loop that plays along with it) on TV. The music of Water ( also by Rahman, and one that he called "the best work he has done so far" in an interview sometime back) has released on all the online radio stations, but I am not listening to it until the CD comes out.

Also tempted to buy Bluffmaster, even though I already have Trickbaby's album. Two Ranjit Barot albums have also come out - Pooja Bhatt's Holiday, the songs sound pretty decent, and another one called Brides Wanted that I saw last night in Planet M. But the 145-150 Rs tag on each of these CDs puts me off, I don't want to buy Hindi movie soundtracks just for a good track or two, and then two months later, find prices slashed to half.

Heard Susheela Raman's Music For Crocodiles playing at Habitat, and nearly ended up buying it. Saw the 445 Rs price tag and took the easy way out - ran home and listened to Love Trap(her previous album) for three days. That lady has a sexy voice, and she does some awesome music.

Also saw Trilok Gurtu's latest album Broken Rhythms, it has Huun Huur Tu and Gary Moore guest-starring on some tracks. Temptations, temptations....

What have I been doing?

I conducted a couple of quizzes over the last month. Two of them were for IIT Kanpur, for their cultural festival Antaragni '05. One (and a quarter) was were for IIM Indore's management festival IRIS. They went off quite well, or so I would like to think. Met a lot of familiar and new faces over the trips. Happily enough, even the lych-worthy theme rounds were happily received, and that warms the cockles of my heart. ( That was just a figure of speech, I really don't know what cockles are, and if they are associated with the heart, so whether they are warm or cool doesn't really matter, because I wouldn't know. Just saying...)

Though I am generally in varying levels of nervousness before a quiz I do ( the nerviness dissipates only when the quiz is halfway over, and as I reverse the direction of the questions, nobody faints or tries to lynch me.), there was one quiz in particular that made me shake in my shoes. It was the one I did for Class IV students, and it makes me sweat just to think of the fact that it required THREE tie-breaker rounds to figure out which teams got what prize. It is extremely unnerving for the quizmaster when he sees that someone who has answered his question (after standing up, and raising one's hand even as the question is being read out) also breaks into a war-dance that would put a Native American Indian to shame. And that's after every question, trust me. It also frightens me when students from Class III, when told that the round was going to be a flag round, start yelling "Eeeeeeeeeeeasy." and proceed to crack every answer. Note to self - tougher questions the next time.

Did a comics quiz for the KQA yesterday. Note to self: scratch off one of life's TODOs. Pretty good response, and really good answering by all the teams. Added to the already-generous official prize by adding a couple of comics DVDs/CDs as incentives. There, serioussam, that was me doing my bit for comics evangelism. Graphic Rampage ( for that was its name, precious) was followed by the Ganesh Nayak memorial quiz, conducted by tandavdancer, sonataindica, and their partner-in-criminally-good-quizzing Rajat. Blighters put paid to my no-excessive-geekery-in-the-comics-quiz rule by doing a seven question Sandman theme. One that I cracked at the fifth question, but refused to answer until Mother Teresa's Racist Doglovers did so first. The propah excuse to make is that they were tagging behind our team by 5 points, and I didn't want to upset the status quo. But the real reason was that other than Tori Amos, I could not figure out any way to connect the theme. How did I know it was Sandman? Because there is no way that Tori Amos can lead to anything ( or anyone) else in a quiz, other than Neil Gaiman. One of life's little secrets, and the reason why I stayed away from Ms Amos in the comics quiz. Mwahahahahaha.

The whole question-setting/DVD-burning exercise added much to my stress levels on Saturday, which is probably the reason I fell asleep at 11:30 PM last night. One Perfectly Healthy Sunday night wasted - oh, the inhumanity of it all!

Frightening Coincidences Department

Ok, so last Wednesday night, I decide to read Miller's Born Again arc off my hard disk. The reason why I hadn't read this so far was that my Miller-Daredevil download, way back when downloads were at home in Hyderabad, comprised only issues 158-191. Managed to transfer the remaining issues ( 219, which I had owned and read way back, 227-233) from Sam when I was in Delhi, and yeah, so I read them at one go. Life was good, and the next day I came and checked out eBay prices. Just in case, you know.

Thursday Evening. A cursory trip to Magazines, Brigade Road's gift to humankind along with Bookworm. (Blossom is exempted from the "gifts" category, and adds itself to the "necessary evil" part of the catalogue. ) Actually, I was on the way home from a trip to Bookworm, having bought a hardcover copy of Song of Susannah for a decent price, and Anthony Lane's Nobody is Perfect, a collection of movie reviews and miscellaneous writings by the New Yorker reviewer ( trivia: where does the book get its title from?) Dropped into Magazines on a sudden impulse, and the guy tugs me by the sleeve and leads me to a corner stacked with Mojo and Uncut magazines, complete with CDs and astoundingly-high price tags. While I am still gasping for breath, he tugs at the other sleeve and leads me to the other corner of the shop, with the magic words "New comics." And boy, oh boy, are they new or what! Get myself a stack of Supermans some two-three months old, a couple of JMS Spiderman issues, loads of Gotham Knights and Catwomans, when he brings out one more stack - which happen to be in packs of 5 each. I point out that because there's no discount on the combo packs, he might as well open them up and display them as single issues - we comic-buyers always like to see what we are buying, right? As always, my powers of persuasion have the desired effect, and he slices open all 37-odd packs. At this juncture, I was about to go bill the comics I had selected ( along with a couple of Heavy Metal back-issues) when some familiar images peek out from the lot he's diligently tagging. YES YES YESSSSSS! Issues 231, 232 and 233 of Daredevil, the ones I had read just the night before. More near-fainting spells ensue when I see the other comics in the lot - which include random issues of V For Vendetta, Elektra: Assassin, The 'Nam, and Micronauts. (Yes, I love Michael Golden.) Had to pay 35 Rs per comic, but was worth it, really.

At the end of it all, I had to pay an auto-driver ten rupees extra to get the whole bundle back home. 99 comics, 3 magazines ( I totally ignored the Mojo/Uncut lot that evening), and two thick books. Now that was a night to remember.

First Law, or the law of pricing: A book will always be priced higher than what one is willing to pay for it.
Corollary I : The feeling of euphoria induced on seeing a book is inversely proportional to amount on the price tag.

Second Law, or the Scouring Law: You always find a book when you least expect it.
OR
The less the effort you put into finding a book, the greater the chances are that you will find it.
Corollary to the Second Law: If you decide to stop buying books for a limited period of time, the quantity of book sales around you will increase dramatically.

Third Law, or the Law of Boundless Optimism: A book will always be available at a cheaper price at some other place some other time.
Corollary to the Third Law: You will always meet a guy who has bought a book at a rate cheaper than what you paid for it.

Fourth Law, or the Serious Law: If you wait to buy a book you think is slightly overpriced, you will always find it on the shelf, but not on the day you give up and go to buy it.

As if they weren't self-absorbed already.

I spend a lot of my free time in the office browsing through the sections in amazon.com ( otherwise we workssss, preciousss *hack, cough* ), you know, generally drooling over the books, the graphic novels, soundtrack cds, DVDs - all the kind of things you find in places other than where I am. And then I had the nice idea of creating this Wishlist. Sometime later, I ended up forgetting my amazon password, so I had to recreate the List from scratch. Just so that it doesn't happen again, I have put it on my Lj.

Criteria for making it into the Wishlist? Nothing too particular. There are a lot of Comic books, some books about comics, some books about the creators who make those comics. Some CDs - all soundtracks, some DVDs - all anime. One gadget. ( Something everybody on earth should own ) There are some things that should not be here, because I have found them already, and should have ticked them off the list, but who am I to interfere with my laziness? Only 74 items? That's because these are more like pointers for me. Most of them (at least the comics) are first-parters of epic sagas, and instead of buying the Trades, I would very much want to own the original 32-page amekomi-form they were published in. Reading them on a computer screen is fine for my immediate needs, but I foresee that with time, a major chunk of my monetary assets will be spent on tracking down these tomes. Nuff said.

Personal Comments added to every entry. I think I am going to enjoy reading them in the future, especially after I have managed to get the item in question.

Entries that have been coloured in are ones that I have already gotten. The ones in coloured this way are with me, either in mp3-cbr-divX format, and I am still waiting to "get" them, if you know what I mean. Yippee de do yay!

( My Amazon Wishlist.  )