A recent comment from a casual reader showed that "Classic" literature and comicbooks are mutually-exclusive. You see, I posted some links in my previous entries on Dostoevsky to the Spider-Man Podcast interviews with J.M. DeMatteis. Said commentator (?!?) thought that the links must've been faulty since they link to some Spider-Man fansite! After all, he was expecting maybe some links to the University of Toronto's famous Dostoevsky Studies section or something. Not some cheapo, "kitsch-y" Spidey fansite. Speaking of the Toronto Dostoevsky Studies site, I did download a dozen of so essays from them yesterday. The usual academia shit that makes a big deal "analysing" the novels of the Russian bloke. Lots of pretty pretentious garbage with one or two gems, as is usual among academia. Here at Jeremiah's, we learn our Lit. from comics and our comics from Lit. Sometimes we confuse the two. But that's ok, right?
It's interesting that Pltypus actually joined a comics club [see previous entry]. One of my fondest memory is of him and I standing around in Kino, Singapore. Then this lady came along who wanted to buy some X-Men TPBs for her brother. She must've thought that we looked like geeks or something because she actually asked for our opinions on what to get! Pltypus and I proceeded to give her an on-the-spot crash-course on X-continuity from "Giant Sized X-Men #1" to Grant Morrison's "New X-Men". Thankfully, we did not crash her hard-disk although she looked like someone who was trapped in the Negative Zone after that experience. She picked up a couple of the TPBs we recommended and thanked us for our efforts! Glad to be of help.
Ironically, both Pltypus and I can never really *fit-in* among the masses of general fandom (although Brian Michael Bendis did add me as a "friend" on Facebook!) I think it's got to do with the fact that we generally cannot stand the standard "geek-speak". I was in Kino KLCC some weeks back and there was this bloke who was trying to get his girlfriend into the DCU. He kept explaining how Hal Jordan's history *really* began with the *classic* Sinestro Corps War by Geoff Johns (in 2007). I smiled. Then he went on and on about the glorious Sinestro Corps War. My mind was resisting the urge to grab one of the DC Green Lantern Archives and slap him with it. No. No. NO! It began with Martin Nodell's "Alan Scott" and it went on to the Schwartz-Broome-Fox reboot with the "Hal Jordan" version. I wanted to show him the differences between the elegant art of Gil Kane and the flashiness of today's hack-artists. But I thought to myself: "Ah, why bother?" Most of the time, I had to struggle to stay on as a comic-reader by ignoring the endless chatter (sound-bites?) of the masses. Put in another way, I'm continuing as a comic-reader in spite of its most vocal followers rather than because of them! Kinda like church when you think about it. Haha!
Anyway, it's my birthday today. I'm 32 years young. I'm broke: so no presents. Another long 14-hours workday. Thankfully, Moon Knight is here with me in the office. Besides, I've got another 100+ issues of "Thunderbolts" that I downloaded. Only finished the first 12 issues from 1997-98. Lots more to go.
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