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 read the first 16 issues of Y The Last Man in white-heat mode one 2004 night. After that, every couple of months, there would be an influx of fresh issues that I would consume as soon as I could. I said this then, and I will say it again now - I had no clue of where the story was going or how it would end, Brian K Vaughan's plots devilish enough to batter my mind into enfeebled submission at the end of every issue. I generally pride myself on figuring out the inner workings of a story, having subscribed to and mapped Campbellian ideas of myths and storytelling from the time I figured out who Campbell was and where I could get ahold of Hero Of A Thousand Faces. ( Damn, I sound like a sanctimonious bastard, don't I? Nothing new about that, eh? ) But BKV stumped me at every turn of the plot, his characters becoming more than heroes and villains and bad guys and good guys and....uh...I meant bad girls and good girls, sorry about that.

And then I decided, at the end of issue 39, that enough was enough. I couldn't stand it any longer. None of that waiting business for me, Mr Cliffhanger-Loather. So I gave up reading Y. Let it finish, I said to myself, and then I'll finish it, in a single session of orgasm-inducing eye-humpery. The series was scheduled to last 60 issues, and that was just another two years or so away.

So issue 60 of Y The Last Man came out this week, and after getting my hands on it today, I sat down and did what I had promised myself I would, and read all 60 issues at one go.

I love you, Mr Vaughan.

What a ride! BKV tells his story as if he has all the time in the world, negotiating a huge supporting cast and a multitude of subplots with the skill of a Chess Grand Master. Needless to say, this series ranks up there with Vertigo's finest - Moore's run on Swamp Thing, Gaiman's Sandman, Ennis's Hitman and Preacher - the last one having been cited by Mr Vaughan as one of his inspirations for his approach to the series. It shows in the narration of the origin sequences of the characters, as we are given layers of their motivations and lives peeled away little by little towards the beginning, and the denouement that begins about halfway into the series, as small things fall into place. Red herrings and MacGuffins abound throughout, because this series is in part a mystery, or rather, a series of mysterious events unfolding one after the other. When I read issue 1 again today, I was struck by how much of groundwork Vaughan lays down in the very first issue, something Ennis did not do in Preacher until the end of the first arc.

As the series draws to a close, there are single issues devoted to tying up loose ends to EVERY SINGLE subplot and character that was introduced, I kid you not. The most important MacGuffin is revealed, quickly followed by one of the saddest moments in recent comics. The ending to issue 58 - mother of God, Vaughan, how could you??

There was something I had been agonizing over the last couple of months - what if the payoff, the ending to this great series is something that completely pissed all over the reader? The cover to issue 60 really freaked me out, because it can be interpreted in a very very nasty fashion. But you know what? The last issue was Perfect. The last panel actually had me gaping at the page for quite some time and just trying hard not to tear up. I am really really glad that I didn't read anything at all about where the series was going and avoided all the buzz until today - it helped. A lot.

And oh, let me not give Brian K Vaughan all the credit - it was in equal parts the contribution of the co-creator and penciller Pia Guerra and inker Jose Marzan Jr, supported by occasional guest artists Goran Sudzuka and Paul Chadwick. One of the coolest things about the book is how the art looked remarkably consistent throughout, even with the guest artists around. I suspect Jose Marzan Jr has to be given credit for that, for it was his inking that was the constant all throughout these sixty issues. Major brownie points also to the cover artists who designed such memorable paintings - starting from JG Jones on the initial 20-odd issues, Aaron Wiesenfeld on some of the middle ones and then series regular Massimo Carnivale.

I know you guys are busy and shit with your life and work and your families and about how precious your time is and how you cannot be spending too much money on buying graphic novels, but you know what? Give up a day of your life and read this series. You will be glad you did.

I read Crooked Little Vein on Friday. It's a short, nasty quest novel, filled with twenty-first century urban legends ( Warren Ellis claims most of what he wrote is based on things that really happened ) and a menagerie of over-the-top Ellis-ian characters. To an extent, (ok, putting on the critic hat here ), Ellis's characters here are stock reproductions of his template cast - the hard-talking evil-hearted bossman character ( Think Dirk Anger, Spider J, Henry Bendix), the tough-as-nails, tech-friendly female lead ( Aleph, Channon/Yelena), the cokehead Presidential wannabe, the down-on-his-luck protagonist, right down to the resilient rat in Mike McGill's office, the one that begins the proceedings by peeing in his coffee - it's familiar territory for Ellis readers. But the good thing here is, the man does his job well ( as if there was a doubt ). The throwaway nuggets of information Ellis scatters in his narrative leave you gasping with laughter - provided you laugh at things like tantric sex with ostriches and godzilla bukkake and saline injections in one's private parts. It interrupts the narrative only once, I thought, at the point where Michael meets another detective on a flight, who thinks it fit to describe his career experiences in vivid detail to our protagonist. Or maybe I just could not figure out what it is that Ellis was trying to do here - mock the Hammett/Chandler genre, or update it for the new century?

But hey, deep down, Crooked Little Vein is actually a mushy love story, so there.

I also reread the first volume of Powers yesterday. The deal with my copies of Powers is this - I bought ( at an insanely low price ) issues 7-37 of volume one some years ago. Read the lot then, but had to read the first six issues off scans. Then I bought volume one again, because Brady was offering all of the 37 issues at 50 cents each. Who can refuse such temptation? So I read the lot again yesterday, and it was so much fun. Because it's a creator-owned series, Bendis and Oeming are not bound by any conventions of the superhero/detective genre - and the tale goes places. Trust me on that. Especially the Forever arc, which is an origin story of the superheroes in the series, which completely took me by surprise. Can't wait to read vol 2, which I have not read before.

I installed an old favourite, Unreal Tournament on my machine. My ex-flatmate had downloaded quite a few maps and mods ( quite a few? More like ALL the mods available at that time on the internet) and it's kind of a zone thing - firing up a practice session on Unreal tournament, with the bot-level set at 'masterful' ( associated skill level comment: "I hope you like to respawn." ) Unreal Tournament used to be my favourite mode of release, right from the days I played it in demo mode in a window, because my celeron 333 MHz 32 MB machine just couldn't run it. There were only two arenas available in the demo, and I loved playing them all day. The background music was kick-ass, the bots splattered with pretty realistic screams, and most importantly, the flak cannon was among the most satisfying weapons I've ever used in a deathmatch, producing the kind of squelshy virtual gore that's made up for years of therapy.

I am in the middle of watching Ratatouille. Watching it in controlled doses, every day at dinner. I had completely lost it with Pixar after cars, but Brad Bird is someone I will never doubt again, I swear. What a beautiful movie! I missed out on seeing it in the theater because a bomb exploded in Hyderabad the day I had booked tickets and grrrrrrrgh, we didn't go.

I refer to the first four volumes of LW&C as the Meifumado arc, which consists of a series of adventures that do not follow a timeline per se, jumping about the place in terms of timeline and after-effects of one episode following the other. There is an internal continuity to some of the stories, in particular those that deal with the beginning of Ogami Itto and Daigoro's journey. The origin story, so to speak.

Meifumado is the Buddhist term for hell, a place inhabited by demons of Japanese myth. (This is the definition given by Koike in the book, and I am not sufficiently well-versed in Buddhist Theology to determine the deeper meaning of the term.) It is the path chosen by Ogami Itto following a tragic event in his life. Once a man with twenty-seven years of dedicated service to the Shogun behind him, it was a culmination of circumstances - part of which was instigated by political rivals, that forced Itto to abandon the way of Bushido and travel the path of hell, the life of an assassin. At first glance, there isn't much difference between Itto's previous incarnation and this - both involved bloodshed, corpses and a hardened heart. But while the post of the shogun's executioner required a blind allegiance to duty, the road to Meifumado was akin to that of an outlaw, free of society's rules and moires, with the lives taken paid for with the sum of five hundred ryos.

How do Koike and Kojima inject life into a series that, at surface value, is the life of an assassin? It's surprising to see the storytelling techniques at display here. The assumption the reader needs to make, while beginning a story in the early Lone Wolf and Cub stories is the invulnerability of the duo. There are more than 7000 pages to go before the journey concludes, and its fairly obvious that no major harm would come to the eponymous protagonists in the initial stories.

It would also be right to emphasise that these stories are not necessarily about Lone Wolf and Cub, they sometimes involve these characters as a plot resolution of some form. Some of them are a study in the twisted nature of vengeance - like the fourteenth story - Winter Flower ( volume 2). The story begins as a police procedural in an unnamed town, where the inspector of the province investigates the double-murder of a couple and a prostitute's suicide, both seemingly unrelated, but as the story goes by, we see the connections unfold through the eyes of the investigating officer. How the presence of a mysterious ronin accompanied by a baby in the vicinity tie in to the deaths are explained at the very end, when the officer looks at a winter flower given to him by the ronin - the same flower that was found at the murder-site, and understands for himself as the strands of the story come together. Some stories involve the accidental involvement of Ogami Itto and his son, the story The Virgin and the Whore being a particular example. A young girl, sold into prostitution, tries to escape her fate by killing the man about to escort her to the brothel. While running away from the yakuza gang which has bought her, she takes shelter in an inn, incidentally inside the same room that was occupied by Ogami Itto and his son. When the gang-leader, a shrewd lady, humbly requests the ronin for the girl he is sheltering, an interesting chain of events occur. Was it just coincidence that the assassin was at the inn or was all of it an elaborate ruse to carry through a hit. Don't worry, the ending comes as a surprise, regardless of what you might assume at this point.

Political intrigues of the period take precedence in most of the assassination plots that involve Ogami Itto. In the story Close Quarters ( Volume 3) a clan requires him to dispose of dissidents who oppose the cutting down of a forest - the clan leaders want to reduce their trade debt to merchants by supplying Edo with wood at lower rates, while the rebels claim that destroying the forest would cause their towns to be flooded during rainfall. Itto is contracted to kill the dissedents without the forest being destroyed, because the dissidents have lodged themselves at strategic points, threatening to burn the trees before letting their leaders chop them down in the name of commerce. There is the peculiar request of the father in The Bell Warden, an official entrusted with the task of maintaining the official Town Bells in Edo, who wants his three sons to duel with the Lone Wolf in a bid to select the worthiest of them to carry on the family occupation. The Coming of the Cold makes Ogami Itto impersonate a law official to infiltrate a clan castle and assassinate the clan elder - the catch being that the contract is placed by the faithful retainers of the clan who feel the leader's actions would cause them to lose face.

"To Lose Face" - something that is one of the most important aspects of feudal Japanese society, where honour and personal loyalty were considered greater than one's life, if one were a samurai. Lone Wolf and Cub plays on this theme a lot, revelling in this singular Japanese trait and at the same time showing it for the vainglorious relic it was. In all the examples mentioned above, "face" plays a major role in determining the course of action of the people concerned, even among those not from samurai society. One of the principles we twenty-first century beings might find outdated ( not to mention bizarre) is the concept of regaining one's honour through killing oneself, but it was a way of life then, and Lone Wolf and Cub also becomes an examination of bushido, from that standpoint. It's interesting to see how the themes of honour and vengeance are interlocked in most of the stories, with most of the contract killings being related to a clan's honour or an individual's loss of face.

Not to say that the early volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub are lacking in the ingredients that typified the genre it was published under - action and sex. One of the early adventures involves Ogami Itto on a sea voyage, boarding the same ship as three fearsome brothers - the Bentenrai, each of whom are well-versed in a weapon of choice. Which means a proliferation of scenes like these:



As it turns out, the three brothers are enroute to protect the same client as Ogami Itto has been contracted to kill, and it ends in a face-off between the ronin and the three mercenaries. The icing on the cake is the death-speech of the brother who has the ill-luck to die by a diagonal throat-cut at Itto's hands - the resulting arterial spray causes a keening sound referred to as The Flute of the Fallen Tiger ( the same name as the story ). A Death-speech ( my term, I forget what the precise Japanese term is ) is the practise of having an ill-fated person, slashed at the hands of his enemy muttering a near-poetic sentence just before he dies, a good example would be O-Ren Ishii's "That really was a Hanzo sword" line at the end of Kill Bill Vol 1.

Throughout the journey, Ogami Itto and Daigoro encounter other ronin who walked the land at that time. Japanese history tells us that during the Edo period, the rigid feudal structure of society had led to a proliferance of samurai who lost their masters in court intrigues or the machinations of the centralized shogunate. Most samurai found themselves assimilated as paid retainers of their lords or forced to the streets bereft of land. "Half Mat, One Mat, A Fistful of Rice" ( volume 2) figures one such ronin, who makes his living holding streetshows in which he dares people to hit his head, sticking up through a hole in a mat, with a weapon of their choice. If they can go ahead and hit him before he dodges, they are free to scavenge his dead body with all the money they can fight. On meeting Ogami Itto and his son, the ronin suggests that Itto take to a better life to ensure that his son has a better future, to which Itto refuses, leading to a showdown between the two. Again, what is interesting here is not the actual fight itself, but the phiosophical argument between the two samurai, one who has no faith in the current society urging the other to reform himself and become a part of the social order once again. Another story "Parting Frost" ( Volume 4) is about Daigoro, as he searches for his father through the countryside - Kojima excels in drawing the silent montage of pages where the child walks, mute and uncomplaining, through the pouring rain. When he takes shelter in a temple, a wandering ronin sees him. Intrigued by the child's shishogan, the eyes that show no fear or emotion, perfectly balanced in life and death, the swordsman follows the child from a distance, watching him get trapped in a forest fire without trying to help him. His curiousity is rewarded - Daigoro lives through the fire by sheer force of will - but in this child, the swordsman sees someone he can never be, and he lunges to kill him. Like I said, the line of reasoning followed by most individuals in the series is at odds with what we ourselves might consider logical or fairly obvious.

As Frank Miller put it in his introduction, this is a cruel, mad world that the characters inhabit.

It is in volume 3 that the origin story, part of which is narrated in Vol 1, the ninth chapter 'The Assassin's Road', is fully explained, and the reader is given more details about the insidious dealings of the Yagyu clan, which sets into motion the chain of events leading to the transformation of the shogun's executioner into an errant assassin. Koike's storytelling skills have never been in doubt, but it is worthy enough to mention here that he gives us the backstory to a backstory in this tale, titled "White Path Between to the Rivers". Masterfully told, as always.

However, the best story in this arc remains 'The Gateless Barrier' - the last story in volume 2, which deserves a post in itself. To be continued.

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.

What is Lone Wolf and Cub all about? Simply put, it is a revenge story set in the Edo period, when the Tokugawa shogunate ruled over Japan. It’s the story of a wronged samurai named Ogami Itto and his baby son Daigoro, and how father and son seek to avenge their family honour in the face of relentless , powerful opponents. Above all, it’s a study of samurai life, Japanese society and human morals set in a time that is drastically different from our own, in an arena where the rules are substantially different. It’s historical fiction and it’s a pulp adventure and it’s a morality play. And yes, it’s one of the most influential manga series ever written, inspiring characters from different genres and cultures.

Lone Wolf and Cub, like most good things we know and love, was a product of the seventies. It was written by Kazuo Koike, a man much influenced by the gekiga movement in manga espoused by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, a move to more realism and experimentation in storytelling style. Koike opted for historical fiction served with liberal doses of sex and violence- much like Sanpei Shirato’s Kamui (1965-67). He began Lone Wolf and Cub in 1970 with a series of short stories illustrated by Goseki Kojima, then an up-and-coming manga-artist, serialized in Manga Action magazine. As the series progressed, the storyline became more complex, with Koike incorporating Zen philosophical observations in his stories, introducing little-known aspects of Japanese society, and brought twisted moral motivations to his characters. Kojima’s exquisite black-and-white brushwork held it all together, featuring detailed images of the Japanese countryside and settlements, brutal renditions of fight scenes, and quiet, multiple-page-spanning moments of the baby Daigoro and his father. The final product was 28 volumes in all, culminating in an ending which can be called- using the greatest of all understatements I can use - epic.

It was not until 1988 that the first English translations of Lone Wolf were published, bringing the series into mass consciousness of the Occidental world. Even before that, the ( untranslated ) series gained a lot of prominence among comicbook artists and the Japan aficionados, one of them being Frank Miller -  who claimed, in the introduction to the first issue of the translated version of how 250 pages of back-to-back reading left him “babbling like an idiot”. It was First Comics that brought this series to America in the 1980s, just when manga and anime was seeping into the counter-culture consciousness. These 48-page comics were printed on high-quality paper, each of the issues bearing covers by noted artists like Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz and Matt Wagner. Early issues also had introductions by Miller, who revelled in his fan-boy love of the series by writing extremely florid descriptions of the series.

There were problems, though. The principal being that First Comics chose not to print the stories in their published order. Because of the assumption that the US market needed their stories more accessible (read: dumbed down), they chose to publish stories in chronological order. Which meant that the early First issues had the origin of Ogami Itto’s vendetta, instead of the actual storylines. Not a bad thing, but you know the problem about reading order – it’s like forcing someone to read The Magician’s Nephew before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe just because events in Magician's happen before the latter. Later issues had random storylines clubbed together from early Lone Wolf and Cub tales. All this is not necessarily bad, sometime or the other, First Comics would have been able to cover all the LW&C stories. That point was rendered moot by the fact that after publishing 45 issues of Lone Wolf and Cub, the company went bankrupt in the late 80s. As a result, only about 2000 pages of this epic tale were published in English, roughly a fourth of the complete story. And it has to be said – the story hadn’t even got to the good parts.

Enter Dark Horse comics, twelve years later. The manga boom had arrived in the USA by then, with companies like Viz and Tokyopop already bringing out popular titles that had found extended reader-bases, and Dark Horse following suit by reprinting some of the classic series – Masumone Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Domu and Akira. Based on a deal with Koike Shoin publishing, Japan, ( incidentally, owned by Kazuo Koike himself, in sharp contrast to publisher-owned manga properties, the writer had obtained the rights to all his series from the original publisher Fuso-sha) Dark Horse acquired the rights to bringing back into print Lone Wolf and Cub. Instead of choosing to go the normal 32-page or 48-page pamphlet form, the company opted to print the series the way it was originally collected in Japan, 28 4-inch by 6-inch volumes of 250-300 pages each. Not only was this format in sync with the new publishing model followed by manga companies, it also served to keep costs down, so that the volumes cost 9.95$ each when they came out, a perfectly fair price to bring in a healthy reader-base for this long series. Dana Lewis along with Studio Proteus, one of the pioneers in manga translations, undertook new translations for the series. The other concession made for the American market was that the manga was flipped – which means, the reading order of the original artwork, back-to-front, right-to-left was changed to the western left-to-right format. This was done by reversing the artwork, resulting in incongruities like almost characters in the series becoming left-handed. Covers were by American artists, with all of Miller's covers for the First comics being reused initially and newer covers designed by Mike Ploog, Matt Wagner, Vince Locke and Guy Davis.

The twenty-eighth volume of the Dark Horse reprint came out in December 2002. Dark Horse stuck to a release schedule of a volume per month, quite a foolhardy venture, considering that the editorial process had to be put into place for 300 or more pages per month!

I have read and reread the volumes a number of times since I got them, both in digital and actual formats. There have been more works by Koike/Kojima published by Dark Horse after that, the ten-volume Samurai Executioner and the currently ongoing Path of the Assassin. But it’s Lone Wolf and Cub that keeps calling me back every now and then. And the more I look around, it looks as if there isn’t anyone comprehensively writing about how good this series gets as it progresses. I know a lot of folks who start reading it, and lose interest by the 10^th volume, just because the story gets a little repetitive. Trust me, Koike and Kojima have crafted a story that demands your attention. It requires the reader to focus on a journey without worrying about how long it will take or where it will go. Because unlike stories about super-humans or larger-than-life franchises which have to go on, so that the creators and the publishers can milk all possible storytelling avenues dry, Lone Wolf and Cub has an ending. It becomes all too apparent to the reader by the time the storyline enters its second arc (I have mentally divided the series into a number of arcs, each arc representing a logical progression of Ogami Itto and Daigoro’s journey ) that the Koike and Kojima have no intention of running in circles.

So this is what I am about to do. Over the period of the next couple of days ( or weeks. You know my writing habits) I am going to write about each volume of Lone Wolf and Cub. There will not be spoilers, for the some of you who have not read the series yet and want to read it someday. Some will have read the series already. Most, I gather, don’t give a flying fart about what I write or am going to write, so this is your chance – give this idea-space a miss unless you want to know more about this amazing series.  Right now would be...uh...a good time to really figure out if you really need me on your f-lists.

Onward, then.

John Dolmayan's personal comic collection.

He has started a comic-shop called Torpedo comics.

Some non-googleable questions from Infinite Rampage - The comics quiz. You might have to click on the images to see them full-size.

( Here you go... )

Answers whenever I feel like 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.

I have been avoiding quizzes and quizzing for the last seven months, for a variety of reasons that I won't go into right now. But when there was talk of doing the next edition of Graphic Rampage, the comics quiz ( the first edition of which I conducted for the KQA two years ago and which got blasted into limbo last year), I just had to do it. I am referring to this version of the comics quiz - "Infinite Rampage", a fanboy touch that I cannot resist. And oh, the original name was supposed to be "Infinite Civil Secret Rampage", but there's only so much geek humour one can infuse into a name without the joke falling flat.

So Infinite Rampage it is, this Sunday October the 14th of 2007, in Daly Memorial Hall, Bangalore. Worlds will collide, pulses shall pound, the universe will never be the same again, as Hoary Hyperbolic Homonyms take over your quizzing moments.

Here is where you can take a look at the preliminary round of the previous Graphic Rampage. The quiz will be in the same vein, the only thing I have to take into account is that the Fanboy Quotient has definitely increased in the last two years - I mean, there are more people who have read Sandman and Watchmen and who know the differences between their Ennises and Ellises.

In other news, Hitman/JLA# 2 came out last week, and if it were not for my busted Internet connection, I would be SO reading this book right now.



Finished William Goldman's What Lie Did I Tell this weekend. Brilliant book on screenwriting and what makes movies tick, equally good as ( and better than in parts, I thought) Goldman's earlier Adventures in the Screen Trade. While Adventures was more of anecdotes about the star system and the Hollywood machine, Lie goes deeper into the mechanics of storytelling in films. There are bits of classic screenplay moments - the crop-duster scene from North by Northwest, the zipper scene from There's Something About Mary, the orgasm moment in When Harry Met Sally - each of these scenes are discussed and deconstructed in detail somewhere in the middle of the book. Elsewhere, Goldman also talks about "the Pitch", how to sell a story to bored executive producers and studio heads. He comes up with pitches for his own screenplays,using a minimal number of words to describe The Princess Bride, for instance and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He talks of the whys and hows of script doctoring, why a Studio would want the storyline of a movie script to be changed because it isn't "happening", and how an idea or two just leads to a completely different angle to the movie. ( The good part: he infuses his writing with good, solid examples throughout. The bad part: He tends to talk a little too much about himself.) All of this written in a witty and affable style that never bores you, or makes you think he's driving the point home too hard.

Some other high-points of the book - Remember those forwarded emails about "Top Ten Things that only happen in movies"? The kind that go - "You will find a parking space right opposite your building, without fail." and "In a movie, you can pay a taxi driver the exact fare without looking at your wallet.". Well, Goldman explains WHY these rules HAVE to exist. I used to be pissed about screenplay writers adapting novels and changing storylines at their own whims. Goldman explains why this is not only an important thing, but also necessary for a movie to work.

In short, a very, very engaging look at the business and the art of screenplay writing.

Thanks to my friend Pablo, I knew about this Belgian series called Spirou, which has been through multiple publishings and translations since its creation in 1938. In contrast to Tintin and Asterix ( which I mention because of the inherent familiarity folks have with them), Spirou has been written and drawn by multiple creators, from Jijé in its early years to Morvan and Munuera in 2004. I know only of the artist Pablo has been raving about - André Franquin, who developed the characters and the storylines and is considered the definitive Spirou artist.

And now, thanks to Eurobooks, which has already brought out the Agatha Christie and Biggles graphic novels and claim to be bringing out comic book versions of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, Spirou is available in India. And these are Franquin's stories being published as oversized albums (the same format as Tintin and Asterix ) and are priced at 199 Rs each. I saw about twelve of them at Walden today. A quick flip-through reveals slightly sub-standard translation and lettering, the translators seem to have used a terrible typeface and I could see Americanisms abound in the dialog - but beggars can't be choosers, I say. Am in cheapskate mode right now, otherwise would have bought the lot. Waiting for the next Bangalore trip where discounts will be negotiated and free book coupons put to good use.

I finished Tezuka's Apollo's Song today morning, while waiting for a missing-in-action mechanic. Brilliant work, and a pretty fast read. Considering that it was a two-hour wait, and the book was the only one I had around, I read it twice.

The prologue of the book, like I had mentioned before, is a trippy look at human reproduction.

( Scans of the prologue, to encourage you into buying the book. )

The story, on the surface, is that of a borderline psychotic named Shogo Chikaishi who, because of an abusive childhood, has a history of killing animals - especially one of a pair - because he cannot stand love. He is cursed by a mysterious goddess who appears to him in a dream that he would fall in love, for all eternity and for countless incarnations, with a woman who he would never be able to possess. Furthermore, in every incarnation, one of the lovers would die without either of them consummating their relationship. Thus begins a tale that goes from Nazi Germany to an island full of peaceful animals to a futuristic earth overrun by synthetic humans. The title, and the broad theme of the story is taken from the story of Apollo and the water nymph Daphne, but in Tezuka's hands, it comes alive as a poignant account of an eternal human experience - love. Is it something futile and meaningless, because all animals do is reproduce and leave behind a part of themselves? Or is it something timeless, something worth aspiring for? ( Don't look at me! )

I found the treatment superb. Tezuka's art does not shine as it did in Buddha, but he makes use of his economical style to convey a tremendous amount of emotion in his characters. What surprises me the most is the ease with which The Master goes from drawing a animals and natural outdoor landscapes to futuristic towers of 2030. The character of Shogo took me from being repulsed at his actions to actually sympathizing with him - which shows the kind of character development Tezuka is able to bring into 500 pages. The book does suffer from the occasional misogynistic brush-strokes - Shogo's mother is painted in villainous hues, her promiscuity apparently leading to his loss of faith in humanity. ( Though, to be fair, Tezuka later recants and shows us how a mother's love for her son remains steadfast.) There are digs at career-oriented women, a reflection of Tezuka's own post-War views, perhaps?

Blossom has copies of both Apollo's Song and Ode to Kirihito, two Osamu Tezuka classics being reprinted by Vertical books, with snazzy cover designs by Chip Kidd and a very very readable English translation. I had bought Kirihito when I was in the US, and was just about to order Apollo's Song, when a friend called up to inform me about its availability in Bangalore. He also went to the trouble of buying it for me and sending it through someone who was travelling to Hyderabad, and as a result - new Tezuka book for me to read. Yes! 541 pages of Tezuka goodness! Though I honestly hope that people aren't buying this book for their kids - its dipped in mature themes, I see loads of cartoon nudity as I flip through the book, and the opening sequence is bizarre look at human reproduction.

The next Tezuka offering by Vertical is another 600+ tome called MW, available for pre-order on Amazon. It's due for release in the US in November. Am I getting it? You betcha!

The other item on the pile is an Indo-Russian production which I bought because (a) I remember being totally floored by the movie when I saw it as a kid and (b) It was available for half-price at a Planet M sale. Bless you, Indian DVD companies, for understanding the necessity of price cuts in your offerings. I bought and watched Raghu Romeo on the same day and would have also bought Benegal's Junoon, but I got into an argument with the salesman. The MRP had been slashed from 350 Rs to 199 Rs, and then there was a 50% discount. The salesman had put the discount on the original price, not the revised MRP, and no amount of cajoling would make him budge. The hell with it, I will just buy Junoon some other time.

About Ali Baba Aur Chalis Chor - I remember very vividly the innovative design of the "Open sesame" cave, which showed a waterfall flowing in reverse and the cave opening in the cliff. When I watched the opening sequence again today morning, it was surprising how well the scene still holds up today in terms of SFX. Does not look cheesy. The other thing I noticed was the proliferation of Russian actors - and except for the well-known Indian artistes, everybody else seems to speaking in Russian, with the Hindi lines dubbed on. So it was a bilingual production! Most of the production crew was also two-fold, one Indian cameraman and a Russian one, two directors, two production designers - I am keeping an eye out for the other Indo-Russian fantasy film I know of - Ajooba, which I remember was a turkey the first time I saw it, but I don't mind seeing it again. The scene where Sonam ( playing an Arabian princess ) puts a miniaturized Rishi Kapoor in her blouse deserves an award in itself. Did I just type that? Yes, I just typed that.

Amazing. The complete movie is online on youtube.

Uploaded three new pages of art this month.

Two pieces by Leinil Francis Yu. One from X-Men 103, which features the cutest head-shot of Rogue I've ever seen. And another from New X-Men annual 2001, written by Grant Morrison, with the entire issue drawn in widescreen, horizontal format ( so you have to read the comic by turning it on its side. ) This page is special because it has the scene that's the genesis of Cyclops and Emma Frost's relationship, with Emma turning up in Cyclops's room at night with a champagne bottle in hand. And of course, she looks awesomely hawt!

The third piece is a Punisher splash page from the acclaimed Garth Ennis run. The story arc this page is from is called "Up is Down and Black is White", where one of the Punisher's enemies who got away this one time comes up with this brilliant idea of digging up the Punisher's family's remains from their graves, pissing on them on camera and sending the video to all major news channels. Needless to say, Frank Castle goes on a rampage. This page, for me, is a perfect Punisher page. Dark, brooding and beautiful...

August was graphic novel month. Rejoicing in the headiness of having all-but-20-pounds of my comics back in India, I spent all of last month reading, rereading, caressing, making sweet love to having fun with my books. And this is what I read.

Peter David: Hulk Visionaries volume 1: Reprinting the earliest Hulk books by writer Peter David, who was to go on and write more than 150 issues in the course of his career. One of the interesting points of the book was the introduction by David himself, in which he pointed out how the term "Visionary" made out his early storytelling attempts to be part of an organised approach while it was anything but. It was only later that David was to hit his stride, weaving subplots and revamping the Hulk into a renewed fan-favourite. These early stories were written firmly with the eighties audience in mind. Comic-book dialogue, mandatory fight sequences, narrative captions, a subplot in every issue to keep the storyline moving along. The artwork by Todd McFarlane is incredibly cheesy, apparently the young Todd could not draw anything but action sequences and splash pages - the images of the Hulk in action are truly awesome, but the ones in which there are characters talking, normal "quiet" moments are tacky beyond belief. I would have enjoyed reading them a LOT a couple of years ago, but now it was more of a nostalgia read than anything else.

Walt Simonson - Thor Visionaries volume 1 and 2: Another eighties run, one of the best storylines in the Thor comics featuring a character called Beta Ray Bill, an alien who turns out to be worthy of lifting and wielding Thor's hammer, Mjolnir. This storyline, despite being riddled with the same kind of creative flourishes that proliferated in eighties comics, holds up very well. Simonson's storytelling, in both the script and art departments, is truly mindblowing. He makes use of the stories and characters that Norse mythology has to offer and weaves them with the main Thor storyline. At the very outset, Simonson does away with the Donald Blake identity of Thor, introduces Beta Ray Bill, brings in Baldur's torment following his resurrection, talks about Loki's insidious plans against Asgard and ....well, a lot, lot more. I now have to go and hit volume 3.

Tom Strong 1-22 *sigh* Ok, let me try and talk about this without going into Fanboy Overdrive.

Alan Moore created and wrote this series, as part of his America's Best Comics publications, which also released the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Promethea and Top Ten, among others. Moore wrote the first 22 issues, and other writers chipped in until issue 35 ( including Michael Moorcock, Brian K Vaughan and Ed Brubaker ) - and for the most part, the Moore stories were illustrated by Chris Sprouse, the co-creator of Tom Strong. How do I describe this series? It's an incredibly retro look at super-heroes ( Aren't they all? ), it features homages to tonnes of pulp and comicbook characters ( Yeah, I know, even Planetary does ) and it exists in a world that takes in superheroes, magic, Nazis, parallel worlds, talking Gorillas, time-travelling counterparts, steam-driven robots, super-dynasties, and....well, if you got a cool concept, Tom Strong has it. Moore glories in introducing twists to familiar literary devices that make reading this series a jaw-dropping, orgasm-inducing experience. In the middle of the series, you have stories-within-stories that are "Untold tales", stories from Tom Strong's past, or from one of the multiple dimensions in which alternate versions of Tom Strong exist. Each such segment is drawn by different artists, like Art Adams, Gary Gianni, Dave Gibbons, Paul Chadwick and Kyle Baker. The final series that Moore wrote "How Tom Stone got started" is a conceit in itself, in which Moore reimagines his own characters with a completely different history, one that's perfectly plausible and well-fleshed out. In the space of three issues, he actually made me want to read about this otherseries. Incredible.

There is a heck of a lot of books I want to talk about, but this is all I have the patience for, I'm afraid.

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. )

I put up a couple of new pages on my Comic Art Fans gallery. Stuff that I bought or picked up in the USA following time payments.

A Dark Victory page by Tim Sale. It's in fact one of the last pages in the series - just before the final sequence. One of the best images of Two-face I have ever seen. If you think Tim Sale is a brilliant artist, you should hold a piece of his original art at close quarters and look at the details to appreciate HOW good he really is.

A Trinity page by Matt Wagner. The page has Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, and some of the coolest Matt Wagner inking you will ever see. I am a MW junkie, having discovered the guy's work in the Demon miniseries published by DC in the 1980s. His recent work includes the Dark Moon Rising miniseries starring Batman, which are modern reimaginings of Batman's earliest adventures. Batman and the Monster Men is the first Hugo Strange story, Batman and the Mad Monk tells the story of the vampirish Mad Monk, one of the earliest Bob Kane stories.

An Usagi Yojimbo pin-up by Stan Sakai. I don't really know if this is a published pin-up, but Sakai tends to use these kind of inked drawings as back cover images or inside the comics as bonus pinup material. Someday I need to get my paws on an Usagi Yojimbo cover.

A Loveless page by Marcelo Frusin. Marcelo Frusin is another artist from Argentina who makes perfect use of black and white in his work, much like Risso, his fellow countryman ( I believe he trained under Risso for some time). Loveless is an ongoing Western comicbook series written by Brian Azzarrello, and this page is from one of the earliest issues. It's also special because it's inked, most of Frusin's available art is pencils only.

A New X-Men page by Frank Quitely. Yes, I promised myself I will get more and more Frank Quitely art, and that's exactly what I am doing. This is one of my favourite pages from Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men.

Another Frank Quitely work, a sketch of Death. What can I say? I love the guy's work.

A Starman page by Tony Harris. Starman, frankly speaking, is one of the most respectful DC series you will ever read. It brings a rich sense of history to a character whose shelf-life has been very choppy in the DC Universe, with multiple people taking on the mantle of Starman, with different powers and origins. James Robinson, Tony Harris and all the others who chipped in as the 80 issue series progressed revisited the history of Starman and brought a cohesiveness to it that blows all such reimaginings out of the water. This page also features the Golden Age Sandman, Wesley Dodds, from one of the best storylines in the series, called Sand and Stars.

Well, like 'em?

In the meantime, feel free to go check out the Comic Rockstars Toilet Seat Museum. The brain-child of Brian Wood and proprietor of the Comic book Lounge Isotope, James Sime, the collection boggles the mind. It also makes me want to go shoot myself for not checking it out when I was in the Bay Area earlier this year.