wheelah

Reading Gaiman always leaves me feeling kind of disconnected from the world, adrift a bit. Not in a bad way; more a transcending than a falling-from. Thanks to BitTorrent and a stern promise to myself that I will purchase his stuff with real money when I have some, I now have on my computer every single comic the man has ever written, and I fear I may be overdosing. I spent yesterday afternoon at the office flipping through the enormous collection (2 gigs worth) between calls, and as I left at 5 I not only had a defined internal monologue, but it was breaking itself up into panels for me.

I've started gaining the ability to think in comics, to look at my life and see how it would break down on a page, get a feel for the art style for this particular moment, see waiting for a light to change as a dozen little panels on a line--a frontal shot of my face, sunglasses on and visor down blocking the very top of the glaring sunlight, the same pose over and over again. I don't dream of suggesting that's an original device, but I'm finally developing the ability to see it from the outside.

I must have read several thousand pages of comics in the past two weeks, of both the breathtakingly-artsy and the gleefully pulpy schools, and many points between. The more I read, the more I get a feel for how the art form works and its voices. My voice when I write prose is still little more than an identifiable amalgamation of a few beloved authors, and I can only assume that the same will be true in comics.

So, now that I've waxed philosophical, let's get into what's basically 90% of this journal: Stuff I've Read and What I Think About It All.

( you can skip this if you like )