Serious comics

I’ve written here before about my love of comics and while I had not read comics since around the beginning of the new millennium, I got back to comics about a year ago. At first, I was simply catching up with old stuff or simply finding old comics that I’d wanted to read but had not had the chance to before. But recently, I started reading the comics which are coming out at the moment – the fresh stuff and boy was I in for a surprise 🙂

Somewhere in between the time I stopped reading comics and started reading them again, they seem to have somehow gotten a lot more edgier and more realistic. The first of the new breed that I started reading was DC‘s "Identity Crisis". I suddenly saw old familiar characters portrayed in a new light – they weren’t just super-heroes with incredible powers but normal people like you and I, people with powers sure, but also people with their own vulnerabilities and foibles. Not perfect people by any stretch of imagination – simply people. I was enthralled by this new direction that the comics were taking and got a few more comics – read some more and was beginning to like the way things were going.

However, all the new comics I’d read had been from DC. My original allegiances in comic had been more Marvel than DC. Most of my favourites came from Marvel but they’d also been the reason for me giving up comics a few years back – they’d tried to make things more "realistic" by killing off some of the most beloved (at least beloved to me) characters around and I’d just not liked their experiments. Around this time, Marvel was doing another one of their radical changes – a major story arc which (brutally) changed one of the most established super-hero groups in the Marvel Universe. I was thinking of picking up this story arc and reading it when I heard that one of my most favourite characters dies in that arc and that was it, it felt just like when I’d stopped reading comics earlier and I decided to give Marvel a wide berth and concentrate on DC, who seemed to have better story-telling and better direction anyway.

The original Marvel story arc I was talking about (in case anybody is wondering, it’s "Avengers Disassmebled"), ended and they started a new comic, "New Avengers". I picked up a couple of issues of the comic out of curiosity but still didn’t read it since I still didn’t feel like following a story from the company that killed one of my most favourite heroes. Then Marvel came out with "Young Avengers" and since this was a totally new group of heroes and a totally new comic where I had nothing invested in emotionally (yes, I get worked up about comics :p) I decided to give it a shot and I was pleasantly surprised! It had humour, it had freshness and it was even better than the current stuff from DC – yes, others might disagree with me here but I’m talking about me, not others :p It turned out that the guy who wrote "Young Avengers" -Allan Heinberg – had also written for "Gilmore Girls", one of my favourite TV shows! (Incidentally, that could start a whole other thread of thought about how comics seem to be attracting well-known writers from other fields such as Kevin Smith and Joss Wheadon of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" fame – Laurie reminded me later of also Orson Scott Card who is writing "Ultimate Iron Man" … but perhaps another time)

What did happen was that I enjoyed the "Young Avengers" so much that I finally gave the "New Avengers" a try and actually liked how they were written and then went on to read a few more Marvel comics and what do you know, I’m hooked again 🙂 Marvel is doing good stuff with some of their characters and now DC’s got some good story lines going too and then DC announced "Countdown" :p Now, I’m not really sure about "Countdown" – if any comic book fans are reading this, you’d know about DC’s "Crisis on Infinite Earths" back in 1985 where they had a major 12-part series which redefined their universe. Now, 20 years later on their 70th anniversary, DC is doing it again with "Countdown". Heck, they are even calling it "Countdown to Infinite Crisis" :p

I had not read "Crisis on Infinite Earths" till now (though I’d been hearing about it for ages and I’d read both pre-crisis and post-crisis Superman) and I finally did. Now that I’ve read it, the first preludes to "Countdown" seem hauntingly familiar in certain senses – you have the Blue Beetle playing a major role, the villains uniting, the spectre taking a hand and so on – there is even a lot of emphasis on the character of Dr. Light! But will it play out the same? Will this be somebody at DC saying "this is our chance to correct Crisis on Infinite Earths" which was in its own right a correction/update to the DC universe? Or will this play out differently and will we be presented with a new, more mature DC universe? I don’t know … only time, and the unfolding of the story, will tell 🙂

The right time to write …

I’ve been meaning to write here again since my last entry … but never seem to find the time :p But then again, that seems to be a common complaint of mine recently. I’ve been thinking of getting to work on the novel that I started a while back thanks to Laurie but even that has been progressing in fits and starts. I’d never really thought of writing a novel before I met Laurie – all I really wanted to do were short stories because I didn’t think I could sustain the effort needed to produce a novel … mostly because I’m really impatient and want everything done now but also because my writing style changes from day to day and depending on what my mood is. But somewhere along the way (probably because I heard her talk about writing novels day in day out :p) I got started on a novel and suddenly I realized that by Jove, I could actually do it 🙂

Another incentive of course was the program that I’d started on for Laurie. She’d mentioned the need for a good writer’s text editor and I scoured the net for something which had all the features that both she and I needed and couldn’t find anything that had every feature we wanted. In fact, in most cases, we didn’t even come close. So I decided that I might as well go ahead and write my own :p So was born Amanuensis – which is still very much a work in progress – and I needed something to test Amanuensis with and since I tend to hate using junky test data, I actually decided to use the novel that I wanted to do as the test data 🙂

Anyway, the first rush of work (and testing on Amanuensis) got me up to around 20,000 words and I am pretty happy with that since I don’t think I’ve ever written that long a story before. But then I got stuck – as usual, I got sidetracked, Amanuensis was put aside and I went on to other things. Since then, I’ve come back to Amanuensis several times and made some major changes to the program for Laurie but I haven’t actually gotten back to writing on a daily (or even extended time period) basis. I do think about the story and add to the characters, dialog, events and so on but haven’t actually sat down to do any extensive writing. I feel that it’s time to do so … but have been finding that time is always the issue. Of course, if one wants to write, and I mean really write, I don’t think anything would stop you. So, I’m still probably making excuses for myself since I’m a lazy git :p But I’m closer to actually putting down words on paper again … so let’s see where it goes 🙂