Wonton Soup, Vol 1 & 2

Writer: James Stokoe, Artist: James Stokoe
Published by Oni Press

Johnny Boyo was the top student a the Plaxos Cooking Academy, but he felt the institution was turning him into something he didn’t want to be. He was loosing his edge. So, he did what any self-respecting culinary genius would do. He quit and became a space trucker.

In the first volume we meet Johnny and his trucking partner, the libidinous Deacon Vans. A run in with space ninjas brings Johnny back to Plaxos and his past. In the second volume an extended drug binge finds the two stranded on a backwards planet, in search of a means of refueling their ship. While the first volume’s narrative is pretty straight forward, the second’s sets up a variety of stories - hallucinatory, microscopic, and otherwise. This serves Stokoe’s storytelling skills well - he excels at taking offbeat ideas and working them into the whole - but the best of those ideas seems to take a back seat. In volume one Johnny was a master chef who hauled space freight. In volume two he’s a space trucker who cooks. Food’s there, but it isn’t as important to the overall story. And that’s too bad.

Artistically, the first thing you notice about Stokoe is the similarity of his work and King City’s Brandon Graham. I am not the first to notice this and I am sure Stokoe must be getting tired of hearing how much his work reminds people of someone else’s. The two did share a studio at one point, as members of the YOSH collective (I’ve no idea what YOSH means). It’s a loose, fun style that serves it material well. If you’re looking for something different, imaginative, and fun, you don’t need to look any further than Wonton Soup.

Heavy Liquid

Writer: Paul Pope; Art: Paul Pope
Published by DC/Vertigo 2008

Heavy Liquid is an exotic substance that, if handled one way is a powerful explosive, if handled another, an equally powerful narcotic. S and his friends have a quantity and dangerous people want it. The Collector has even more and wants S to find a certain sculptor, so he can hire her to create a masterpiece out of the substance. That she is also an ex-love of S and never wants to see him again is only the beginning of his problems.

I have to admit it took me a couple of chapters to get into this story. A lot of ground work is laid, but the first two chapters are mostly cool people meeting, talking, and sometimes fleeing. Once S takes the job, however, things ratchet up pretty quickly, culminating in a great ending - a revelation that puts everything that comes before it into a new light. Artistically Pope always delivers. Hogarth and Kirby may have laid the foundations for kinetic comics art, but Pope stands at the top in my book. You’d be hard pressed to name someone more innovative.

This is a 2008 reprinting of a 1999 DC/Vertigo release. They reprinted 100% in 2005 and First Second announced a new edition of THB for 2009. This has been put off until Pope is ready to release his new book, Battling Boy. Hopefully soon.

Swine flu: Eight Myths That Could Endanger Your Life

Britain’s New Scientist magazine has done a great job of debunking a lot of the nonsense people keep hearing about H1N1. When it first made the news I was extremely skeptical. I am not in panic now, but I have modified my position. Now I think it will be something like Y2K. You’ll remember Y2K as the catastrophe that never happened. What most people forget is that 300 billion US dollars were spent to ensure nothing happened. Those of us who did little or nothing - and I am one of those people - got away scott free because others did the work for us. Major systems were made compliant by industry leaders and government fiat. Its not a perfect analogy, I know, but even if you do nothing, the fact that everyone else is working hard to prevent a problem will not only lessen the chance of it happening, it will lessen the chance of it happening to you. But that doesn’t mean you should be content to do nothing. Check out the articles.

1. The symptoms are like regular flu. You've got it if you've got a fever.

"Ten per cent of our patients had no fever when admitted," says intensive care specialist Anand Kumar of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. Worryingly, this message has not got through to all doctors, health agencies or those creating online diagnostic aids. In many cases, the official line remains: if you don't have fever, you don't have flu.

2. This is just mild flu. The death rates are even lower than for normal flu.

These numbers should not be compared directly. The 36,000 figure comes from epidemiological studies… Such studies reveal a bulge in deaths during and just after the flu season every year, mainly among the elderly. Many are clearly due to flu and other lung infections that can follow it, but more than half are not obviously connected, because flu often kills in indirect ways, by triggering heart attacks or strokes, for instance.
By contrast, the deaths attributed to swine flu are those directly caused by respiratory infection with the pandemic virus. Indirect deaths - the majority of the 36,000 figure for regular flu - are not being counted. The full death toll for 2009 H1N1 flu will not be known for a while, if ever.

3. You're safe as long as you're healthy. Only sick, weak people get really ill.

Most of the children who have died of swine flu were perfectly healthy beforehand, and many of the adult victims also had no underlying conditions.
Up to six times as many people as normal - a third or more of the population - are expected to get 2009 flu, because few people have any effective antibody protection against the virus… So if you have the right genes and you have had seasonal H1N1, you are less likely to get the severe form of flu. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to tell.

4. I'll be OK if I just eat organic food, take vitamins, wear a mask, wash my hands a lot and drink plenty of fluids.

Keeping healthy may make a mild case of flu even milder. And stopping smoking, losing excess weight and avoiding binge drinking will reduce your chances of getting the severe form of pandemic flu. But beyond this, little of the advice proliferating on the internet is backed by any evidence.

5. It's OK now because we have a vaccine. In fact, we have several.

The pandemic vaccine should make you and your family safe from this virus, but you may not get it for months, if you can get it at all. Some countries, including the US and the UK, have ordered enough to vaccinate everyone and immunisation began this month. But batches will arrive slowly, over several months, because the vaccine virus grew slowly and because we have few vaccine factories.

6. The vaccine isn't safe. Why take the risk to prevent mild flu?

The 1976 vaccine caused around 10 cases per million vaccinated. Even ordinary flu vaccines, however, are thought to cause one extra case of Guillain-Barré per million, in addition to the 10 to 20 per million who get Guillain-Barré some other way every year.
Does this mean it is safer not getting vaccinated? Absolutely not. First, there is the risk of swine flu killing you. Second, what few people know is that flu itself is far more likely to cause Guillain-Barré than any flu vaccine

7. This virus won't get deadlier - that isn't in a germ's interests.

We can also say that once most people have been infected by swine flu and become immune, a variant that can beat that immunity will replace the current strain. Will that variant be milder or nastier? An ordinary flu virus that suddenly became globally dominant in 2004 was more virulent than the strain it evolved from - though it isn't clear whether being nastier is what gave it the edge, says Jeffery Taubenberger of the US National Institutes of Health.

8. Once this pandemic is over we'll be safe for another few decades.

The next pandemic could be in 2059 - or next year. There is no obvious pattern to flu pandemics: the ones we know about were in 1580, 1729, 1781, 1830, 1847, 1889, 1918, 1957, 1968 and 2009. But the way this one emerged tells us we may be in for more soon.

The Terrorists Are Winning!

Glenn Greenwald on the Republican response to America's decision to finally try some of its Guantanamo captives.

Water On The Moon

NASA's LCROSS mission found the water it was looking for and in much greater quantities than expected.

Two For You

It's already the tenth and where have I been? I am still not reviewing for PBR, but I think I am working my way back to it. Here are a couple of reviews I posted in forums. Expect more.

DOKTOR SLEEPLESS, Vol. 1: ENGINES OF DESIRE

Writer: Warren Ellis; Art: Ivan Rodriguez
Published by Avatar 2008

I remember when Ellis first began to promote this work. He made the point of comparing it to Transmetropolitan. Doktor Sleepless is a Spider Jerusalem for the 21st century (not a direct quote, but you get the idea). But it’s a comparison that does this troubled story no favours. Spider was a passionate gonzo journalist, obviously modeled on Hunter S. Thompson. He exposed fools and he sometimes played the fool. The tone of that comic was deeply set in the socio-political revolutions of the 1960s; the last time a large segment of the population believed that positive social change was both possible and inevitable. We may look back and cringe at their naivety - we may not - but their intentions were good. Sleepless is a meglomaniac who seems more concerned with the cyber-punk (or whatever the current nomenclature is) community than with the world in general. Not that he cares about the world. He wants to bring it all down. Maybe literally. There is an odd Lovecraftian turn at the end. What we get is a couple hundred pages of techno babble and a screed about how the world we have isn’t what we thought it would be when we were kids. Just a lot of whining about authenticity. It’s a concept that get bandied about a lot (the cynic in me wonders if its use here isn’t derived from rock music criticism) but it has little practical value. The world you live in is the real thing, however disappointed you are in it. Trust me. Driving jerk boyfriends to suicide and enabling the beating of a rent-a-cop take the place of political action. I like Ellis, and I wanted to say something positive, but there isn’t anything here.

Rodriguez’s art doesn’t add anything either. I was struck by how much alike his characters look. When a women with short blonde hair puts on a brunette wig, she is a dead ringer for another character. She isn’t meant to be. Like a lot of comic artist, Rodriguez relies on costumes and hair to tell the audience who is who, and there aren’t many costumes here.

Ellis seems to be moving away from comics and I would be very surprised if this series went even half the distance Transmetro did. Honestly, I don’t think that’s much of a loss.

GOTHAM BY GASLIGHT: A TALE OF THE BATMAN

Writer: Brian Augustyn; Pencils: Michael Mignola; Inks: P. Craig Russell; Colour: David Horning; Introduction by Robert Bloch
Published by DC 1989

Gotham By Gaslight puts Bruce Wayne and the origins of Batman a hundred years into the past (as of the time it was published) and sets him up against Jack the Ripper. Wayne has spent five years in Europe preparing himself under the tutelage of such men as Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud and now feels ready to take up his mission and save Gotham from its criminal element. We get a quick series of retellings, detailing the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne and introducing a familiar cast of Gothamites. It soon becomes apparent that Wayne isn’t the only one newly arrived from the Continent. Jack the Ripper is also in the city, and two - the Bat and the Ripper - quickly have the entire city up in arms.

It’s a good story and it’s well told. I can see why it has remained so popular for twenty years. However, there are a couple of obvious weak points. First, we know who the Ripper is right away. We are not supposed to, but the moment he appears on the page, your first thought will be, 'I bet that’s Jack the Ripper.' And you’ll be right. Second, Batman ignores the Ripper’s actions in Gotham, content to follow his own agenda, until circumstances make him act. I don’t care how many Elseworlds there are, Batman wouldn’t act like this on any of them. It’s a fundamental misreading (mis-writing?) of the character.

This book comes with some interesting contributors. Neither of the artists are associated with superhero comics and the intro is written by Robert Bloch. Bloch was an early Weird Tales contributor, and his career was mentored by his friend H.P. Lovecraft. Today Bloch is best known as the author of Psycho. He takes an original approach, writing the introduction as Jack the Ripper.

I picked up my 1989 edition of this at a recent convention, but DC put out a new trade addition in 2006, which includes a follow up story, also by Augustyn.

Still Here. Really.

Looking back it seems like May was the last month in which I really did any blogging at all. For the last couple of months I blogged exactly one time each. Not good. But I am still here and I will try to make an effort. I haven't been writing for Paperback Reader either or Christian Beta. Well, a little bit for the latter. Its getting to the point where I am actually starting to miss it. I did finish a short story I started last summer. I think if I had worked on that everyday it could have been done in a couple of months! I have given it to two or three friends to read, and told some family members they're welcome to look too. Once I get some feedback I will give the story a last going over.

I am adding Robot 6 to my list of Sites Worth Noting and I am leaving you with another of Paul Pope's brilliant Dune pages. This one isn't from his blog (it's from the Dharblog). As far as I can tell he is just doing these as the inspiration strikes. There doesn't seem to be any grand plan, and he certainly isn't working on an adaption. Which is almost too bad. I say almost because he is still working on Battling Boy and First Second isn't going to re-release THB until they're ready to release Battling Boy (I emailed them and asked). So once he's done that, maybe then he can start on Dune?