Reading up on it this morning I now know that he’s not writing it or doing the adaptation of the novel. Instead he’s going to be writing something called “back matter,” which is the commentary and fan interaction at the back. Apparently the text of the comic itself just comes straight from the book, suggesting that this is in more ways an artistic endeavor than a literary one. I think this is a good thing. Why? Because much as I love a lot of what Warren Ellis has written, and much as I will always treasure Global Frequency for containing the most sincerely sweet storyline ever penned about a bunch of people in one neighborhood in NYC who are made to weep tears of blood, become bisexual and speak an alien language, he is just shite at finishing things. I confess that I have come to have something of a love-hate relationship with his work and seeing his name on a title for the last couple of years. Here’s why:

• The Authority was, when he was writing it, amazing. So ridiculously good, and I’ll be the first to say that The Midnighter was a total hottie. Ellis wrote a couple of funny, affectionate drama queens really well.
• Global Frequency was a really neat idea, really fun stories and perfect for my short attention span. That the TV series never got made really disappointed me because Ellis so heartily endorsed the pilot. Ah, well.
• Transmetropolitan, when it wasn’t just filled to brimming with how much it liked itself too much, was a really fascinating setting with some very original elements.
• Planetary was, almost entirely, amazing. The last issue that showed up in my bag – #24, I guess? Something like that? – anyway, the last issue I read left me with the distinct impression of having gotten closure and that was refreshing. Now apparently there’s another one coming out? Another three issues or something? Fuck. Given it took ten years for them to crank out 24 issues then I have no idea when or if it will ever finish. I’ll buy it, though, because The Drummer is so mad hot and because whatever bizarre gems of classic comics and/or sci-fi lore Ellis unearths to drive the story will be worth consuming.
• Nextwave is a fascinating idea that has thus far suffered from a trainwreck of a publishing schedule. Is it coming out? Is what’s coming out a one-shot? When whatever may or may not come out does hit the streets will I remember a thing about the last issue? Will I still care? Let’s find out!
• Desolation Jones is/was, to be honest, revolting. I have no problem with comics that tend towards the gritty, the over-the-top, the “adult,” the scandalous or even the disturbing. This one was too much for me, though. I would sit there reading it and wonder whether another issue of Planetary had been delayed so he could produce this, the 24 of exploitation porn. No thanks.
• Fell, which is fantastic and makes me wonder just what was going on behind the scenes to disrupt the schedules of good books and push one bad one to market for so long: too many projects? Too little time? Rent due? YouTube addiction?

Maybe I’m being too critical. I dunno. When I first, mistakenly thought that Ellis was adapting Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I said to The Boyf, “Well, I’ll add it to the bag, but I’ve got to be honest and warn you that if it promises 24 issues in two years we’re going to be lucky to get fifteen in five.” If all he’s doing is the back matter, OK, I’ll give it a chance.

That said, this further illustrates (no pun intended) what an interesting publisher BOOM! has become. Fall of Cthulhu is, honestly, pretty dreadful. Cthulhu Tales, on the other hand, has been wonderful. Farscape‘s first three issues left me completely cold but I have no choice except to believe that a title like Muppet Robin Hood must surely be fantastic. The original titles they’ve produced seem to be hit or miss, as are their adaptations, but when they hit they are truly something special. I don’t really have any love left for remakes, adaptations or otherwise resoled properties – the film industry has used up all my tolerance for them – but if one is likely to catch my attention, at this point, it’s probably going to come from BOOM! so I am, in all sincerity, pretty stoked about this PKD adaptation.

(Now if only BOOM! would pick up Spellgame from the defunct Speakeasy Comics portfolio…)

It turns out that they’re by Richard Stevenson (actually Richard Lipez), who has reviewed mystery and crime novels in the Washington Post for years. The novels are about a gay private eye named Donald Strachey and his non-detective boyfriend, Timmy. In the movie, they’re a couple of cutie-pie lifestyle queens, with Timmy being played by Sebastian Spence, aka “Narcho” from Battlestar Galactica, and Strachey being played by the ever-hot Chad Allen. They are portrayed as having an almost Cleaverian homelife, so picturesque it nearly grates. There’s a lot of plush set dressing and a cute dog and they get style points for giving Strachey a beater car and a classic, sunlight-through-dust-clouds hardboiled office.

In the novels, I’ve found, their relationship has a lot more texture to it. The novels have proven to be a lot racier and seedier than the movies, but in a good way. The natural comparison is with Nick & Nora Charles of The Thin Man and this extends to the grungier side of their adventures. Nick & Nora were not well-behaved or well-mannered, and for their time they were pretty free-wheeling while still perfectly in tune with one another. So, too, with the Donald and Timmy of the books, who engage in banter that makes the reader think they’d be fun to know and who back one another up with a vengeance but at the same time have enough points of disagreement and enough bad behavior between the two of them to keep them both distinct and interesting.

The banter is really worth a special comment. I was chatting about this on a MOO the other day with Jos and Deadblob and I was saying that I think one of the symptoms of the progressive cynicism our society has taken on in the last fifty years* is that we have let our standards sink woefully low in the banter department. These days we watch The Hero and The Villain trade insults and we call it “banter,” but as Deadblob put it, they’re basically having a “yo mama” fight. If you go back far enough in pop culture, you find exchanges that can be both sharp-edged, perhaps even barbed, but still somehow more inviting, more open, more give and take than what we get today. I love me a good Whedon-penned dialogue as much as the next nerd but Buffy just ain’t got a thing on The Big Sleep or Charade or The Thin Man. Stevenson’s novels have that same classic banter – “shuttlecock,” Deadblob called it – in which characters are always more clever than real life, clever in a way that gives as good as it gets, clever the way we wish we and everyone else were clever all the time except when it would get too tiring.

Happily, they also enjoy some genuinely bothersome villains, disturbing brutes and scheming parties whose machinations are genuinely grotesque. I’m reading basically one a week on my lunch breaks and finding them very satisfying. They can be a little hard to find, but well worth it, and easily picked up out-of-order., which is good, since the ones most easily found are not the first or most recent books in the series; they’re the ones that have been (heavily) adapted to the screen.

Frankenstein is also a genuinely great film – a narrative that wastes not a single second, lavish sets, a genuine sense of glimpsing another time – and watching it I was struck how not just some scenes were iconic but every scene was something I’d seen copied in later work. Gods, what a great movie.

That said – and I say this as one of the Retrofantasma people – can the Retrofantasma people who come to the headline movie on the Friday of NEVERMORE just shut the fuck up already? For fuck’s sake, people, I did not buy a 10-pass so I could listen to you run your fucking mouths. Do not fucking MST3K the movie outside your own home.

Saturday I went to see The Disappeared which was really, really good. In fact, it was so effective that I had to get up and go out into the hall and just take a break from it in the middle. The movie features supernatural elements but they’re not the real story. In fact, I’d argue that the supposed main narrative – the main mystery driving the plot – is handled fairly ham-fistedly. I didn’t care, though, because that wasn’t what interested me. The movie is a ghost story, yes, but it’s not about that. It’s about what it’s like to be powerless in the face of grief and what we do to cope with that. It’s about what it’s like to be disadvantaged and surrounded by personal relationships taut with the tension between poisonous suspicion and a desperate need to trust someone. Very touching. So touching, in fact, that I barely even noticed the twist ending happening because the emotions of the story were much more interesting than the events.

Finally, I caught the comedy shorts. The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon was every bit as good the second time around. Things that were new to me included the gleefully sadistic and extremely funny Treevenge and the genuinely surprisingly well-done and extremely fun and funny The Auburn Hills Breakdown, about which I can only say – without spoiling it – that the concept was sufficiently simple that it could either be done really badly or really well and the makers definitely land on the really well end of things. If you have the chance to catch any of these in person, do so.

It’s worth noting that a few seats away from us during the shorts collection was a woman who was having a really, really good time. I don’t know if she was just wicked high or what but she giggled endlessly, such that more than once the crowd was laughing at her as much as at the movies. I’m not complaining, though; she made the whole thing more fun. That’s the difference between someone who’s really into the movie and someone who’s trying to make the experience be about themselves: she was sharing and improving the experience with/for everyone around her. The blabbermouths on Friday were just pissing me off.

Afterwards, we dropped in on Chapel Hill Comics to check out the new store. The new store gets a huge thumbs-up and is highly recommended. I commented that a friend might be leaving some DVDs for me in my bag there as he and I had failed to meet up when he had the DVDs in his possession and then I said, “Which is, I guess, kind of like having a post office box at the comics store?” I was worried that the request would bug such kind people but instead Vanessa seemed pleased to see evidence of their clientele as a larger community. The store itself is very nice, much larger and much easier to move around in and browse the aisles, very colorful, very engaging. Insanely awesome, in fact.

After that we hit the grocery store and in the parking lot I was taken with the way an approaching storm loomed over the Kroger. I took some quick pictures and while we were standing in the dairy aisle the building shook from the first peal of thunder. Awesome.

That said, I do really, really like him as a character. I like him so much that I actively wish he were smarter. Chandler created Marlowe as something of a sad sack but a competent sad sack. I would like to see a little more day-to-day competence from Dresden. If he’s one of the best wizards of his generation then gods almighty but I’d love to play game of Trivial Pursuit with these people and have some money riding on the outcome.

All snark aside, I like the third book a lot more than the first two. I think the author needed to shake some bugs out of his writing and his story-world in the first two. I feel like he’s making progress with that by book three. Given that there are, what, nine? of these things, I’m figuring he’s got it mostly worked out by now.

I have also been mulling over the Harry Potter series, as I wrapped up Deathly Hallows a couple of weeks ago. I still am not quite sure what I think of it. Glad I read it? Yes. Satisfied with the outcome? Mostly. Do I like the fade-out-fade-in epilogue? Yes, actually. Do I still loathe Dumbledore? Yes and no. Do I like Harry? Yes but not like like. Do I like the whole series? Not sure. Do I hate Snape? Yes, terribly, and a part of me realizes that it’s because I had days when I was the greasy weasel of a kid that could have turned into that guy (though mostly I still identify with Lupin). Is it impossible, at 32, to identify at all with the kids? Sadly, yes.

It was a bit overwhelming to plow through that many thousands of pages in short order, just one right after the other, non-stop. I think that may have made it harder for me to process my reactions into lengthier statements for now.

• The teacher in me really hates Dumbledore. He wants to shout into D’s ear constantly that they are children for gods’ sakes, that if they get caught doing whatever they’re doing every time Dumbledore encourages them to break every rule and most laws while he looks the other way, they are screwed.
• The kid in me likes Dumbledore just fine.
• The kid in me is weaker than the teacher; as such, I am in direct opposition to most fans of the Harry Potter books by virtue of basically hating Dumbledore.
• At the beginning of HP5 I liked Harry and couldn’t stand Dumbledore. At the end of HP5 I hate Harry and I could almost-maybe like Dumbledore.
• In case an odd-numbered page and one’s goldfish-level memory might lead one to forget, a reminder: no one can Apparate or Disapparate to/from Hogwart’s! If one forgets while reading this sentence, don’t worry; shortly one will have an even-numbered page to read, on which Hermione will surely remind one.
• In case one finds one’s self too occupied forgetting and being reminded of the fact that no one can Apparate or Disapparate to/from Hogwart’s to remember this fact, fifth years have a lot of homework.
• I have posited to Deadblob that – note: there is a subtle reminder in the next fragment – given one cannot Apparate or Disapparate to/from Hogwart’s it is highly likely that one cannot Apparate or Disapparate to/from Hogwart’s because one has far too much homework to do.
• I’m actually really enjoying these books.
• The end of HP5 is just unforgivable. I want to reach into the novel and choke Harry with my own two hands.
• That I feel this way simply means JKR has very successfully made me care what happens.
• Everything about the 5th year Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher – more accurately, both of them – is absolutely brilliant.
• I really want a better understanding of how magic works. It seems like they point their wands and say their fake Latin wordsincantations and if they really want it then it just happens. Much as I like a lot of the plot points and story effects of magic in the books a part of me finds this a really dissatisfying technology of magic.
• Gods almighty, has any setting cried out more desperately for 0th-level detect magic? Jeez.
• If anything bad happens to Lupin in the long run I think I will probably cry my goddamned eyes out.

For now I’m taking a break. In part this is to “let” Deadblob catch up but truth is he’s already passed me. I needed to pull my head out of that world for a while after HP5. Right now I’m reading Boris Akunin‘s The Death of Achilles. Highly recommended; it’s Holmes meets Marlowe meets Bond in Moscow in 1882. The empire is just starting to look a little wilty around the edges and a Russian diplomat trained in martial arts and philosophy is solving murders with his Japanese manservant. It sounds terrible, I know, but it is not. It is quite good.

Now that the series is over I have come to realize that to some degree I am missing the boat on a massively experienced, shared cultural phenomenon.

Somewhere in our house, between us, The Boyf and I have several but not all of the books. I’ve watched the first movie and remember it fairly well though I don’t really recall the particulars of the climax. Do I have to reread it? Should I? Is it vital? I’m pretty sure we have the second book someplace around here and even if we don’t I can lay hands directly on Azkaban (or however it’s spelled) and start there if need be. Given that I have an idea of what happened in the second book – though largely from the Sluggy Freelance parody of it – do I need to read that one?

Basically, here’s the deal: friends and strangers, lovers of HP, is the first book skippable? Second? Or am I cutting myself off at the knees by skipping any one of them?

As you may or may not know, a couple of months ago I changed jobs.  This morning I got a call from the exchange used by my old employers and I answered it thinking my old work buddy was calling me – odd, given she doesn’t work on Fridays.  Instead it was a different ex-colleague.

“Dan?” he asked.  I said no, then recognized his voice.

“This is Michael,” I said, laughing.

“Oh, man, [my old boss] just IMed me this number and all he said was ‘Call him and ask if he knows.’  I’m sorry to bother you.”

Now, how many times have you fantasized about ditching a job and then getting a call later asking for help and telling them where to shove it?  Or perhaps introducing them to your shiny new consulting rate, top dollar per hour or any part thereof?  Fair enough, I’ve done it, too.  To be honest, though, I really liked my old boss and I really liked most of my old co-workers.  It was the company I hated.  Anyone further up the chain than my boss was a shark who smelled blood in the water.  Anyone whose face I’d see any given day was generally very decent.  I don’t mean “decent” in the sense of being merely acceptable, I mean it in the sense of being trustworthy and good.

I paused for a moment and then said to my old co-worker, who was the troubleshooting team lead when I left the position of change control team lead, “Listen, don’t worry about it.  What’s the question?”

He asked me The Question, which had to do with the obscure inner workings of an arcane process I used to manage and I answered it with a caveat that the answer was now two months out of date.

He was kind of surprised I’d helped, I think, because we’ve all had that same fantasy.  Truth told, I’m happy where I am.  I have no hard feelings against my old boss or most of my old co-workers.  I run into them at lunch, sometimes, and when they ask how I like the new gig I tell them I’m quite happy and they express jealousy and, well, that kind of gives me a bit of dark warmth on the inside.  At the same time, I am happy with the change.  I am enjoying my new job.  I don’t need to be a dick to a manager or a former co-worker I genuinely respected just to get my jollies.  So, I helped them.  It just took a second.  The answer was easy for me, but I’m not sure anyone else there could have come up with it.

In the middle of all that ‘look at me, I’m an adult’ self-congratulation, however, I had to recognize and acknowledge that knowing they did, in fact, really need me gave me one of those dark glows.

I had a fantastic rest of the day at my new gig.