In Real Life: IRL

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In Real Life

Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang

I just finished reading In Real Life by Cory Docotorow.  It's a graphic novel adaptation of a short story he wrote around 10 years ago, adapted and illustrated by Jen Wang.  In it, a young girl named Anda starts playing a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Play Game) like World of Warcraft, named Coarsegold Online. Anda creates the warrior avatar KaliDestroyer and begins exploring her new world.  She makes guild friends with some other players and through one of her new friend gets hired to wipe out Chinese gold farmers in game.  One time, while she's attacking some gold farmers, she actually chats with one of them and she makes friends with a boy from China, Raymond.  The comic explores her conflicting feelings about wanting to maintaining friends in guild and standing up for her new friend Raymond.  She even helps him organize a strike for better health benefits, with disastrous consequences. As she learns to stand up for bullies in-game and beyond, Anda’s self-confidence at her new school grows by leaps and bounds.   Doctorow’s story is sure to resonate with dorky kids who have to juggle real-life friends, in-game friends, and parents who just don’t understand.
                                                                                        
The story is beautifully illustrated by Wang, whose amazing color palates help keep distinct what’s in game from what’s outside the game.  Not quite in anime style, but definitely different from your typical super-hero style, Wang’s artwork vividly brings to life Doctorow’s words.  As Anda becomes more sure of herself, she starts to look more like her avatar KaliDestoryer, a simple but effective visual touch. 

The story is relatively straightforward, but introduces kids to the exploitative working conditions that hire a whole generation of young men who would rather game for 16 hours a day than work in a factory making zippers.  While not a full polemic on the injustices of our digital economies, Doctorow has a small essay introduction that asks his readers to think about the effects of how they spend their time, and what they expect to get out of their hard work, in-game or in real life.  He invites readers to think about the effects of the way technology has allowed us new ways to make friends and organize, ways that were unheard of before the advent of the internet.  I really enjoyed it and I know other gamers might, too.  It has a girl protagonist, but it's not an especially girly book, so perhaps readers of both genders might be drawn to the idea of a hero who is a nerdy outsider, who likes video games, and who is willing to stand up for what's right.

Peter Panzerfaust: The Great Escape

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Peter Panzerfaust: Volume 1: The Great Escape.

Kurtis J. Wiebe and Tyler Jenkins

I have really enjoyed Wiebe and Jenkins re-imagining of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. In this beautiful graphic novel, the titular Peter Panzerfaust is an American teen who rescues the lost boys from an orphanage in Calais during the French Occupation in World War II.  The framing device of the narrative is that a present-day John Parsons is interviewing Tootles, one member of the lost boys, who then recounts their adventures following Peter.  Wildly charismatic, Peter leads the boys on the search for a ship to take them to England.   When that plan goes awry, Peter encourages them to go on the march for Paris.  Along the way, the Lost Boys cross paths with Kapitan Haken, the SS officer that will soon become Peter’s nemesis.  Peter courageously crosses blades with Haken, leaving him one hand short and setting the stage for him to become the hook-handed villain he was fated to become.  The boys then rescue Wendy Darling and her two brothers, British ex-pats who were heading home when their plane was shot down.  Ultimately, the lost boys find themselves in the path of the invading German army, an exchange that weighs heavily of Peter and the surviving boys.  Most remarkable is how well the story re-imagines elements of the original fantastical Peter Pan story within the semi-realistic context of a World War II boys’ adventure.  While there is some bloodshed, it’s relatively tame, with just enough of an element of gritty realism to keep the story grounded in semi-plausible events.

Eschewing the fantasy of flying fairies, mermaids, and pirates, Weibe’s version makes wry references to the source material in inventive and clever ways.  For example, there is an escape where Peter jumps from one building to another, encouraging the boys to fly to freedom.  In another scene, Peter survives an escapade that leaves his silhouette in a riddle of bullets, reminding readers of the Peter’s shadow.  And while she is not fully revealed in this story, we are introduced obliquely to Belle as the reason for why Peter, an American, was in France in the first place.  The story is chock-full of neat literary allusions to the source material, little gems for the reader to discover.

Jenkins’ art style is clean, simple, and generally pleasing, and Wiebe trusts in the power of illustration to show us the action sequences with little narrative redundancy.  The only quibble I have is that there is very little effort made to differentiate the lost boys visually, and so it is sometimes confusing as to who is doing what.  It appears that Jenkins spent time with the character sketches for Peter and Wendy, but his passel of boys are generally unremarkable from one another, a hairdo or hat about the only distinguishing feature between them.  That’s a minor quibble for what is an otherwise wonderful comic book re-imagining of the Peter Pan story.  The TLA Maverick committee had every right to laud this book in its most recent 2014 awards.  I’m looking forward to more Panzerfaust stories.

Boxers & Saints

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Boxers & Saints

Gene Luen Yang

I finally got my hands on Gene Yang's Boxers & Saints. It's a remarkable story told from two different perspectives. Yang brings his magical realism to the story of China's Boxer Rebellion in this funny, sad, and touching graphic novel. Both sides show the heartbreaking repercussions of giving of your self for a greater purpose, be it nationalism or faith. One story leads to massacre and one story leads towards martyrdom, but both sides are told from the perspective of very believable characters, with no clear winners, no good guys or bad guys.

I really loved the stories of Little Bao and Four-Girl. I  appreciated the interwoven nature of the two parallel tales. I read Saints first, but want to read both again a couple more times. I'm sure both narratives will benefit from repeat reads. The books embrace the myths of Joan of Arc and Ch'in Shih-huang as avatars of different faith systems, and both become symbols of the forces driving Bao and Four-Girl to take action. I cannot recommend these books more highly!

Batman: The Court of Owls

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Batman: Vol. 1: The Court of Owls

Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo

In order to pick up some more mainstream comics, I've tried reading some of the more recent Batman (the ones from DC's The New 52), but so far I'm not overly impressed. I think I'm just not a superhero comic book reader, as much as I may want to give that stuff a chance. For example, the Batman story line for The Court of Owls involves a cabal who has controlled Gotham for centuries. The writer, Scott Snyder, tries to make it sound like there have always been rumors of this group, the Court of Owls, and one of the ways he does so is to make Gordon and Bruce both reference a nursery rhyme about the court. But to me, it seems like such a cheap way to pretend that this is something we should have known, making up a nursery rhyme. I mean, Batman's been going strong for 75 years and this is the first time it's referenced. We're supposed to suspend disbelief that somehow we have not heard of these guys ever before; Bruce, Dick, Gordon and everyone else has, but they haven't mentioned it till now, yet this mysterious group has been in the shadows pulling the strings all along.

This is the type of crap I don't like about mainstream superhero comics. They can't just introduce a new supervillain. They have to retroactively rewrite history so that he's not really new.  He's been there before, you just didn't know it. Oh, and by the way, the original Robin, Dick Grayson, was really being groomed to be the next Talon of the Owls as a kid, and if Bruce hadn't adopted him after his parent were killed in the circus, Dick would have ended up working for the Court of Owls. Crappy retconning, clumsily done. This constant rewriting of history with recon after retcon is what I don't like about superhero comics in general. Sometimes it's handled better than other times, but in general, I think it's the Achille's heel of long-format serial superhero comics. I think it stems from each writer's desire to leave their stamp on a given character.

I'm giving the series a little longer (I've got vol. 2 and 3 on order through ILL), but so far it's not doing it for me. I much more enjoyed reading Batman: Hush by Jeph Loeb, though it, too, introduced one of Bruce's childhood friends who (surprise) we've never met before this story and who plays a pivotal role in Batman's current mysterious new villain. Maybe I'm just too snobby in my comic book tastes.

Who's this Hob guy?

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"So who is this Hob guy and why did you name your blog after him?" you may ask.  Hob Gadling is one of the characters in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.  He was first introduced in an issue titled Men of Good Fortune, which is itself part of the longer story, The Doll's House. Hob makes the absolutely ludicrous boast in a pub one night that he refuses to play the same game as everyone around him: he refuses to die.  Dream and Death overhear him, and Death decides to let him live for as long as he's game to keep on living.  Morpheus (that's one of the many names for Dream) tells Hob that if he's still willing, he'll meet him at the same pub 100 years hence.  And so begins a series of meetings between a now-immortal man and the incarnation of Dream. Hob's fortunes swing like a pendulum: some centuries he's living life large and others he's barely scraping by. But regardless, he's never ready to throw in the towel. Even when life sends him a rotten fate, it's better than death.

Originally played primarily for comedic value, Hob Gadling is ultimately a catalyst for Morpheus to accept friendship and the relationships that ensue.  Hob helps Morpheus realize that even he needs friends, needs human contact, needs to find a way to connect to others. In many ways, it's Morpheus' relationship to Hob that eventually paves the way for him to accept the death of one aspect of himself and the birth of a newer, more humane and forgiving aspect of himself, born of a human child, Daniel. In this regard, Hob is a great symbol of the indomitable will of mankind to struggle ever onward, making friendships and loves despite the pains that sometimes accompany life.

In this blog, I'll be discussing some of the books and comics I read. As the reference to Gaiman's character shows, I like some of the more offbeat comics out there.  But I'll be sharing my thoughts on the books I read, both traditional novels and graphic novels.