Odds and Sods: What's On My Mind

A collection of (at least tenuously) comics-related thoughts on my mind today:

- Gene Ha, in addition to being a very talented artist, is a genuinely nice and patient guy. I met up with him and a whole group of other comics fans last night to discuss Top 10, and he answered all our questions on the project, and even brought along some original art and mind-bogglingly dense and detailed scripts for a couple of issues. (Seriously, the script for page one of issue one was five single-spaced type-written pages long). If you happen to read this, thanks for showing up, Gene.

- Quote of the week, possibly the month, maybe the year. From Gillen's short essay at the back of Phonogram # 5: "[T]he second you create a person who perfectly embodies a philosophy, they cease to be human - they become a cipher. . . . [W]hen dealing with human beings, turning someone into an embodiment of a philosophy. . . well, you might as well be Ayn fucking Rand. It's propping up straw men and bashing the living shit out of them." Just one of the many reasons why people who love Ayn Rand's books are annoying - they think they are intellectual conservatives, but really they just have extremely poor taste.

- I'm currently reading Chuck Klosterman's essay collection, Eating the Dinosaur. The first essay makes a point that, while you might expect famous people to be more guarded or intentionally uninteresting in interviews, the opposite is often true, because the interview session provides one of the only interactions a truly famous person gets to have that approximates the type of every-day personal interactions normal people have all the time. Other interactions tend to place the famous person on an unequal playing field. I'd never thought of this, but it makes some sense - its impossible for Brad Pitt or Bono to really have a normal conversation with a random person at a bar or something. Which is why I think the best kind of famous to be would be something like comic book famous. You'd be recognized, admired (or possibly reviled) by a certain small sub-culture, but you'd still retain a level of anonymity and normalcy with respect to the world at large. I mean, the paparazzi isn't exactly following around even the most "famous" of comic writers or artists.

- You know you are a comic book nerd when the mere mention of the Pixies automatically makes you think of Transmetropolitan. In fact, I first found out about the Pixies through Transmetropolitan, as I hadn't really gotten into the independent or alternative or whatever the heck it was called back then music scene at the time the Pixies were popular. So when Transmet would name its issues/arcs after Pixies songs, I decided to check out the source material (on Napster! Ah, the late '90s) and soon discovered it was awesome.