tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19168661520793479322024-03-05T05:37:16.975+01:00SembtextComics, books, and the occasional political post.Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.comBlogger359125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-19041825785120056932017-03-25T16:18:00.000+01:002017-03-25T16:18:32.052+01:00Kära bloggbesökare, det är tillfälligt – förhoppningsvis – uppehåll i seriebloggandet på grund av seriepoddande. Seriepodden, med mig och den eminente Christer Larsson, återfinns på flera ställen:<br />
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https://www.facebook.com/Seriepodden-1640538982942051/<br />
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https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu6xPLNuU2ltFp-izO51RAg<br />
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http://seriepodden.blogspot.se<br />
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(Språket är svenska.)Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-29790339097793091172016-08-05T02:30:00.003+02:002016-08-05T02:30:28.514+02:00Seriepodden del 2: Paul Dinis "Dark Night"Det blir litet blandad kompott om Batman i Seriepoddens andra avsnitt, kära läsare/tittare. Huvudsakligen pratas "Dark Night – A True Batman Story" av Paul Dini och Eduardo Risso, men för att fylla ut ett helt avsnitt kommer vi även in på lite annat Batman-prat.<br />
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Hoppas att ni har nöje av avsnittet!Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-87796225924691839192016-07-27T07:13:00.001+02:002016-07-27T07:13:21.588+02:00Seriepodden del 1: "Batman: Antologi"Det har begåtts YouTube-inspelning. Det är helt enkelt två medelålders, skalliga män som pratar serier i en timme, så möjligen är det inte riktigt vad du betraktar som "andlöst spännande underhållning", käre läsare, men vi hade i alla fall trevligt när vi spelade in.<br />
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Ämnet för första avsnittet är alltså den nyutkomna samlingen "Batman: Antologi" med ett urval från sådär sju decennier Batman-serier, men vi halkar också in på typ all things Batman. Så här blev det:<br />
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<br />Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-66052198148530110482016-06-11T15:20:00.001+02:002016-06-11T15:26:25.079+02:00Harvey Kurtzman: Hey Look!<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="6g7p3" data-offset-key="15t2d-0-0" style="color: #1d2129; white-space: pre-wrap;">
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14px;">Serielegendaren Harvey K</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14px;">urtzman,, skapare av bland annat MAD, fick i början av sin karriär en hjälplig försörjning av Stan Lee genom att göra utfyllnads-humorsidor åt dennes olika Timely-tidningar under rubriken "Hey Look!". Jag har hört/läst hel del om hur bra Kurtzmans "Hey Look!" var med sin anarkistiska, absurda humor med starka meta-inslag. (Förordet till den här Kitchen Sink-samlingen inleds till och med "Harvey Kurtzman is probably the greatest creator who ever appeared in comic books.") Stämmer hajpen?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14px;">Nja. De första ca 55 sidorna (av drygt 150) är kvalitetsmässigt rätt beskedliga vad gäller både bild och manus. Sedan börjar Kurtzmans mogna stil sakta att träda fram, och skämten blir också bättre och bättre framförda; halvvägs igenom (i och med den 77:e sidan, närmare bestämt) kan man sedan säga att det är <i>Kurtzman</i>. Är det då bra, i och med det?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14px;">Det får man nog säga. Inte riktigt allt håller ens från och med då, men nog är det läsvärt -- och i och med vad det pekar fram mot till och med något av ett måste för den seriöse serieläsaren.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14px;">Volymen avslutas med ett par serier som Kurtzman gjorde åt Elliot Caplin, då redaktör på Toby Press: "Pot-Shot Pete" och "Genius", samt "Egg-Head Doodle", en utfyllnadsserie åt Lee. De båda senare är ensides skämtserier, men i "Pot-Shot Pete", en satir över västerngenrens legendariska sherifftyper, fick Kurtzman breda ut sig över ända upp till fem sidor. Den känns också, så här i backspegeln, som en rejäl förövning till den sorts historier Kurtzman skulle producera för MAD.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif; font-size: 14px;">Läsvärd, för vad Kurtzman visade upp när han blivit varm i kläderna, och för den seriehistoriska aspekten.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">77:e seriesidan, när Kurtzman blivit Kurtzman. </span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lägg märke till växlingarna mellan svart och vitt, </span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">som ger dynamik åt serien.</span></td></tr>
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Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-1650699667428004582016-04-10T19:40:00.003+02:002016-04-10T19:40:38.985+02:00Seminarium om liberalernas "Startjobb"-förslag<div style="color: #141823; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
Okej, så jag tog mig iväg till Liberalernas seminarium om s k ”startjobb” med lägre lön, låg inkomstskatt och avskaffade arbetsgivaravgifter i veckan som var. Eftersom jag ofta tyckt att partiet borde vara bättre på att föra ut sin politik, inte minst till medlemmarna, gör jag här på eget, privat initiativ ett försök att hjälpa till med detta:</div>
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Bakgrunden till den föreslagna reformen är att vi i Sverige har mycket höga ingångslöner och liten lönespridning samt hög skatt på arbete. Förmodligen bidrar detta till att vi har låg andel enkla (och därmed lågavlönade) jobb. Vi har också det största sysselsättningsgapet mellan inrikes och utrikes födda i EU (delvis även beroende på en hög andel av den infödda arbetskraften i arbete).<br />Den nya anställningsformen startjobb ska vara tillgänglig för personer upp till 23 år samt nyanlända och ha ett lönespann på 14 000 – 16 000 kronor i månaden. Tillsammans med bl a slopade arbetsgivaravgifter leder detta till en halverad kostnad för startjobben jämfört med motsvarande anställning på den reguljära arbetsmarknaden. Nettolönen för den enskilde skulle bli ca 11 500:- i månaden.<br />(Jag är ansvarig för nedanstående text, inte någon av dem jag hänvisar till i den, men jag måste reservera mig för att jag kan ha missat eller missuppfattat detaljer i deras framställningar; föreläsnings-/seminarieanteckningar är nu tyvärr inte en helt exakt vetenskap.)</div>
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Det är bakgrunden och en kort beskrivning av förslaget. På seminariet gjordes förutom Erik Ullenhags inledning/presentation av förslaget inlägg av professor John Hassler, ordförande i Finanspolitiska rådet; Susanne Spector, arbetsmarknadsekonom på Svenskt Näringsliv, samt Daniel Wiberg, chefsekonom på Företagarna.</div>
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<b>Hassler</b> inledde med en genomgång av situationen och forskningsläget. Han verkar genuint och starkt orolig över den (bestående) låga sysselsättningsgraden hos nyanlända, och tycker det sker sorgligt lite konstruktiv diskussion om hur integrationen ska förbättras. Sverige har nu högkonjunktur och därmed vad som borde vara ett gott läge för detta, men mycket tyder på att vi kommer att missa chansen att få fler av de nyanlända i arbete. Särskilt gruppen med låg utbildning tar lång tid innan de kommer i arbete. I korthet sade han vidare:<br />- Subventionerade anställningar har hittills inte varit tillräckligt effektiva. Förenkla systemen, och komplettera med lägre löner för personer utan utbildning eller erfarenhet.<br />- Detta är inte en mirakelmedicin men behövs bland andra åtgärder.<br />- Det behöver inte leda till lägre löner eller mindre trygghet för flertalet bland dem som redan har jobb. Särskilt inte i dagens konjunktur, med god arbetsmarknad för de redan etablerade.<br />- Det finns inget starkt forskningsstöd för sämre förutsättningar för breda grupper av lågavlönade i Sverige idag.<br />- Det är centralt att få med arbetsmarknadens parter, inklusive LO. Inget avsteg från ”lika lön för lika arbete”. Men något måste verkligen göras.<br />- Det finns inget allmänt behov av sänkta ingångslöner i Sverige, kanske snarare en höjning bland vissa grupper.</div>
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<b>Spector</b> pratade mer allmänt om lönenivåer och lönespridning och varför höga ingångslöner och låg lönespridning enligt hennes mening leder till en sämre fungerande arbetsmarknad.</div>
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Det mest relevanta var för henne inte absoluta nivåer utan ingångslönernas relation till lönerna i övrigt. Låg skillnad leder till minskade incitament till utbildning. Man tar i avtalslönerna löneutrymme från dem som jobbat länge och ger till de nyanställda. Särskilt inom Handeln har man svårt att premiera duktiga, erfarna medarbetare som inte kan jobba lika tuffa tider som oerfarna studenter, som tack vare fler timmar och OB tjänar lika mycket som den som verkligen kan jobbet.</div>
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I länder med mycket stora inkomstskillnader är det lättare för företagen att lämpa över delar av lägstalönehöjningen på kunderna, vilket är svårare i en ekonomi med låg lönespridning som i Sverige.</div>
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Många lågutbildade jobbar i hög- eller mellankvalificerade jobb. Om man väl kommer in på arbetsmarknaden har man ganska goda möjligheter att klättra vidare i karriären.</div>
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Det är för gruppen låganlända lågkvalificerade som ingångslönen har störst betydelse. I Danmark har parterna lyckats komma överens om ingångslöner för nyanlända.</div>
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Löner är inte särskilt elastiska nedåt, så sänkt ingångslön skulle inte ha så stor påverkan på dem som redan har jobb.</div>
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Slutligen menade <b>Wiberg</b> att det var viktigt att sänka kostnaderna för att anställa – inklusive handledning. En stor del av dagens subventioner bygger på ett arbetsplatsförlagt lärande som småföretag inte har utrymme för att stå för. Instegsjobb etc komplicerade och administrativt betungande för företagaren. Det finns redan yrkesprogram som tillgodoser företagens behov av att ta in folks om ska lära sig jobbet – och deras kapacitet att utbilda dessa.</div>
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Enligt enkät är <i>Brist på lämplig arbetskraft</i> ett hinder för 21% av småföretag som vill växa. Något färre uppgav <i>Tuff konkurrens</i> och <i>Höga arbetskraftskostnader</i>.</div>
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Wiberg presenterade några punkter i vad han menade var en framkomlig väg för bättre integration på arbetsmarknaden för individer långt från arbetsmarknaden:<br />- Ersättning i ungefärlig nivå med studiemedel<br />- Utbildningsinnehållet ska vara CSN-berättigande och ske mera inom det offentliga utb-systemet (SFI, Komvux, yrkeshögskolor etc) än på företagen<br />- Inget krav på kollektivavtal för anställande företag<br />- Jobben ska vara tidsbegränsade till t ex max 24 månader<br />- Man bör också se över befintliga ”arbetssubventioner”</div>
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Det jag kanske mest tar med mig från seminariet var nog John Hasslers uppenbara oro för den situation vi har skapat, och hur viktigt han tycker det är med snabba, kraftfulla reformer för att göra något åt den svenska arbetsmarknadens skarpa tudelning.</div>
Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-80130711401724067592016-02-08T04:51:00.001+01:002016-02-08T04:53:26.377+01:00Carl-Göran Ekerwald: Nietzsche – liv och tänkesättWell, I've started reading some books again after last year being a bit hectic at times. First out to be reviewed here is Carl-Göran Ekerwald's <i>Nietzsche – liv och tänkesätt</i> ("Nietzsche – life and thinking"), which admittedly wasn't the best start possible.<br />
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IMHO, the problem isn't that Ekerwald doesn't know enough about his subject, it's that he can't adapt his style of writing to to writing a biography that's reader-friendly. Instead, he puts way too many interpretations and supposedly clever turns of phrase into his text in a manner that makes this more of a (very much) overlong article for the (somewhat snooty) culture pages of a newspaper. When you write a biography, you should (IMO) concentrate your stylistic skills on getting the facts about the person's life and work readable and understandable the reader, not pushing your own opinions or stylistic quirks onto said reader. Ekerwald doesn't really succeed in creating a compelling, coherent narrative about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche">Nietzsche's life</a> and thoughts that holds together because he constantly interrupts it with small excursions of his own opinions and comments.<br />
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So is this a waste of time? Well, no. You do learn quite a bit about Nietzsche, only not as smoothly told as I'd like. Me, I basically a) pity Nietzsche for the painful life he had to endure, both in terms of illnesses and personal (and interpersonal) failures and disappointments; and b) don't think he's entirely blameless for becoming the "Nazi philosopher" even though he wasn't a Nazi philosopher and was more or less co-opted into the movement by his sister skewing his work in that direction after his death.<br />
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Why not entirely blameless? Well, I think – and this is an opinion that has evolved while I've been reading and thinking about Nietzsche – that anybody putting forth an opinion, world-view or somesuch has a responsibility for what they're saying. If what they're saying is hateful, racist, anti-democratic etc, well, obviously they're responsible for their hateful opinions and writings. If they're not really writing hateful stuff, but formulating it so obscurely that it can well be interpreted that way, they're responsible for that as well – obviously far less culpable than in the former case, but still responsible for their texts. If confronted with that interpretation of their text and responding "no, that's definitely not what I meant", then that's that, and you can't smear them with that interpretation, but you can still express your wish that they'd written their text more clearly.<br />
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(Unless of course you're some abject idiot projecting his or her own fear and anger onto the text to make it out to be something hateful; heaven knows there's plenty of that going around in this polarized political environment.)<br />
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Anyway, there are many who write philosophical or political texts that are unnecessarily obscure; whether because they're just not very good at writing or because they think it makes their texts "better" probably varies. The result, however, is the same: the text is left open to interpretation, and different readers can project their own opinions onto it. (As can various critics, literary and political journalists etc, making for great debate fodder – debates that are basically a waste of time that could have been avoided had the author bothered to write more clearly to begin with.)<br />
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(Note: I'm <i>trying</i> to be clear with my opinions on this blog, so if I'm being unclear, it's due to bad thinking and/or bad English and writing skills. Just so's you know.)<br />
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But to get back to Nietzsche: He loses his father at an early age, grows up a serious little kid, comes to excel at school (except for math) and university, becomes an up-and-coming philologist, a very young professor, befriends Wagner and has a brilliant career ahead of him. But he becomes bored with the details-oriented academic work and becomes a more speculative philosopher instead – when he's not incapacitated by migraines and violent indigestion, of course. Eventually basically retiring from academia due to his health issues and living off a pension, his philosophy meets with limited success. I won't try to describe it here, as I don't consider myself competent enough – and because it's so unsystematic and goes off in so many directions that it would take a lot more time and space than this simple blog post can offer. Instead, I recommend <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Friedrich_Nietzsche">this Wikipedia article</a> as a good starting point or summary.<br />
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So, I can't really recommend this book. And I can't really recommend Nietzsche's philosophy, either – as with so many other historical philosophers, if you want to learn more about the subject(s) they're speculating about, read what modern research on the issues says instead. It won't leave you quite as erudite as studying the philosophers would, but it's a heck of a lot more efficient if you mainly want to learn how the world actually works.Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-9534421558917544022016-01-05T17:58:00.001+01:002016-01-05T17:58:38.052+01:00On storytelling, movies, and trite plotlines<div style="color: #141823; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 6px;">
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">(Svensk version följer nedan.)</span></div>
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I happened upon "The Flintstones" while channel surfing. Fred was on his way to the office to start a new, management, job. I happen to know enough about the movie to know that Halle Berry would be his secretary, so I stayed on long enough to see her (yeah, I'm weak. So sue me). After Halle, I couldn't stand it anymore, because it was so obvious: Fred would become seduced by all the trappings of power and affluence and lose touch with his old friends and his working-class roots, while the guys in power would actually set him up to be the fall guy for a nefarious scheme, but in the end he would realize the error of his ways (probably with the help of a friend) and do the right thing. The (happy) end.</div>
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Now, I realize there aren't really all that many basic plots out there to use (unfortunately, I can't find Theodore Sturgeon's – IIRC – three pasic plotlines despite having a computer with internet access; <b>fail</b>), but when a movie plot is that transparent, you <b>really</b> need to put more effort into other aspects of it – like better jokes, clever dialogue, great acting etc. Halle Berry being incredibly beautiful just isn't enough. (Maybe that's what lay behind postmodernism; people got fed up with trying to do the old stories well – which <i>is</i> hard work – and thought it would be easier just to put in some ironic winks at the reader/viewer?)</div>
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The same sort of problems made me unable to watch the recent Planet of the Apes prequel remake – it was competently made, sure, but so incredibly predictable that I gave up on it after half an hour – and got incredibly bored by Alan Moore's venture into "serious/literary" comics with A Small Killing – I'd seen basically the same story in other media often enough to know what was coming. On the other hand, I've loved what he's done in superhero comics, because there, he's been incredibly inventive and unpredictable.</div>
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A similar problem has surfaced with superhero movies. The recent <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant-Man_(film)">Ant-Man movie</a> only got worth watching towards the end; the rest of it was following the "Superhero move 101" basics so closely that it was almost embarrassing. The jokes about him learning his powers weren't particularly great, and nor was the dialogue. Contrast that with the first Avengers movie, which was packed with clever and funny dialogue, keeping my interest up all through the movie. (Even the kinda dull, unoriginal scene with the Black Widow being held prisoner at the beginning of it turned out to have importance for the later part of the movie.)</div>
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(Unfortunately, the Marvel gang seemed to lose their focus on making the best movie possible for the follow-up; the action scenes at the start of it, with quick-and-dirty intros of the characters, didn't really add much to the movie, and they left the really interesting part of the story, Ultron's philosophy, which could have made the movie quite fascinating, by the wayside in their hunt for neat action scenes – thus making the movie less original and rewatchable than it could have been.)</div>
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Anyway, this is part of why I find comics to be such a brilliant medium – you can read them quickly, so you don't have to waste two hours on a movie that to 80% consists of fluff, anyway; you can to a large extent control the pace of storytelling yourself, so where the creators are too slow, you can speed up your reading, and where you need to understand or enjoy something more fully, you can slow down your reading pace and even re-read those passages, if you like. I'd rather spend ten minutes on a good 22-page Batman short story in comics format than almost two freaking hours on a Hollywood production that doesn't understand the character, and has huge logical flaws.</div>
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But that's just me. You're free to like the Nolan Batman movies if you want to; myself, I'd rather re-read some of Peter Milligan's stories… Or Neal Adams… Or Alan Grant… Or Frank Miller… Or…</div>
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Kom in på "Flintstones" på Trean. Fred var på väg till kontoret för sin nya tjänst, så jag stannade kvar tillräckligt länge för att få se Halle Berry. Sedan härdade jag inte ut längre, eftersom intrigen var så uppenbar: Fred lockas av maktens alla perks, tappar kontakten med sin klass och sina gamla vänner, luras av maktens män, skärper sig i slutet, happy end.</div>
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Det är i och för sig sant att det inte finns så många olika intriger att använda, men när de är så där oerhört genomskinliga får man faktiskt lägga _lite_ mera krut på att göra själva berättandet mer njutbart, med lustigheter, fint skådespeleri och samspel, med mera. (Kanske är det det som ligger bakom postmodernismen, att man inte längre klarade av att berätta sina gamla historier med elegans och finess utan blev tvungen att lägga till en extra dimension, den ironiska blinkningen till läsaren/åskådaren, för att undvika tristessen?)</div>
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Det är samma problematik som gjorde att jag inte iddes se klart Planet of the Apes-remaken – kompetent men fullkomligt outhärdligt förutsägbart – och leddes vid Alan Moores stereotypa A Small Killing samtidigt som jag älskat hans originella perspektiv på vad många betraktar som en närmast "död" genre, superhjältar.</div>
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Vi kan se något liknande vad gäller superhjältar på bio. Första halvan av Ant-Man-filmen var t ex rätt ointressant, eftersom man numera har sett så många superhjältar kämpa med sin nya roll. Skämten om krafterna var tämligen förutsägbara, och den förutsägbarheten kompenserades inte av någon större snärt i vare sig replikerna eller skådespeleriet. Den första Avengers-filmen, däremot, var full av smarta och roliga replikskiften, som gjorde att mitt intresse hölls uppe filmen igenom. (Även den i mitt tycke litet småtradiga Black Widow-scenen i början visade sig ha en djupare betydelse för filmen som helhet.) </div>
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Den andra Avengers-filmen kändes betydligt segare – actionscenen som inledde den gav inte så mycket mer än just action och en snabb-och-ytlig presentation av hjältarna, och alla filosofiska spörsmål som väcktes av den tänkande roboten Ultron och hans världsåskådning kändes som att de huvudsakligen fuskades bort. Senare uppgifter i media (på internet) tyder på att det kan ha haft samband med att Marvel velat pressa in för mycket innehåll som pushar/lägger grund för deras andra filmfranchiser, vilket bara understryker vikten av att i första hand koncentrera sig på att berätta en bra historia, och först i andra eller tredje hand ägna sig åt sådant som inte har med själva berättelsen att göra.</div>
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Serier är därför ett smått idealiskt medium att konsumera historier genom – det går snabbt att läsa, man kan själv kontrollera berättartempot och snabbläsa sådant som inte är så intressant och sakta in och koncentrera sig på sådant som känns viktigare, det är lätt att gå tillbaka och läsa om sådant som man inte riktigt förstod, och det är snabbt gjort att läsa om hela serien om den var så bra att den förtjänar det eller så komplicerad/djup att man känner att det skulle ge mera. Jag lägger hellre tio minuter på en juste Batman-novell i serieform än nära två timmar på en Hollywood-produktion med elefantiasis och dubiös logisk stringens.</div>
Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-1515731909452190072015-08-10T22:54:00.001+02:002015-08-10T22:54:26.411+02:00Scott Mills: TrenchesWell, I was a bit skeptical when I opened <i>Trenches</i>. The art was a bit sketchier than I like, and I've read enough about WWI, and seen enough war movies and stories to be a bit blasé on the subject. Most war movies and comics leave me underwhelmed these days; sometimes perhaps undeservedly so. (But not in the case of, for example, <i>Fury</i> or <i>Inglorious Basterds</i>. Man, those movies sucked.)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCICBLQGlAvUh6n2ZZZXekIUiZqnWC58sXXBtogEjFQjDupbV6SA_WmR7VP0K7o8HccJQARTqPynSTu0nwIsv_AXCm48_Ib4jHvueLswBaZ2sSare4_Tqk67vXYl5DLkTGzR3JpisGX21L/s1600/trenches_lg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCICBLQGlAvUh6n2ZZZXekIUiZqnWC58sXXBtogEjFQjDupbV6SA_WmR7VP0K7o8HccJQARTqPynSTu0nwIsv_AXCm48_Ib4jHvueLswBaZ2sSare4_Tqk67vXYl5DLkTGzR3JpisGX21L/s320/trenches_lg.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>Trenches</i> by <a href="http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/resources/interviews/2246/">Scott Mills</a> is about two brothers going to war. One, Davey, is a tough, hard-drinking womanizer. The other, Lloyd, more of a meek pencil-neck kind of guy – who was always put down by his brute of a father <i>and</i> his brother when he was a kid. Their commanding officer, Hemmingway starts the war with a firmer belief in discipline than the lads – especially Davey – but as each man evolves and learns more about himself and the others, a mutual respect and camaraderie evolves between the men – even, gradually, between the two, previously estranged brothers.<br />
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The story is told both in vignettes from the life in the trenches, with occasional bouts of war-fighting violence, and in flashbacks to the brothers' history together, mostly with not all that much harmony and brotherly love between them.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-0Z55yH2d21nFsoivfKZqzK3ZFAGDSWNFTOK4zlWOYohg7DJyJoJ_HzCfqp1xpiYwd4SECYaJcXurhbUdEtVpRfwARYESwrpnbGBsMBJeuJomYNQMrQOo_9ST51qOvfNAKsSYX3PoaE9v/s1600/trenches2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="293" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-0Z55yH2d21nFsoivfKZqzK3ZFAGDSWNFTOK4zlWOYohg7DJyJoJ_HzCfqp1xpiYwd4SECYaJcXurhbUdEtVpRfwARYESwrpnbGBsMBJeuJomYNQMrQOo_9ST51qOvfNAKsSYX3PoaE9v/s320/trenches2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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I had a problem with the art style for a while, but then I got used to it – and the important part of the story is really the evolving relationships between the three main characters, anyway, so realistic and detailed depictions of what the war <i>really</i> looked like isn't all that important, anyway. The art works, if you'll let it – but you might not be able to; I've read one review where the reviewer thought the art was <a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-891830-28-0">too whimsical for the brutality of war</a>. Now, I disagree, but I can see where the reviewer is coming from.<br />
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Anyway, by concentrating on the relationships, Mills avoids the trap so many war movies fall into: patching some sentimentality onto an action movie with lots of explosions. Mills doesn't have to do that, because he has a strong if not <i>entirely</i> original story using the war as a background and catalyst to push his characters together and forcing them to get to know each other better and learn to relate to each other. He does it well, which makes <i>Trenches</i> a recommended read.Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-27838221148605585572015-03-15T20:19:00.003+01:002015-03-15T21:34:25.235+01:00Nancy Peña: Tea PartyIn Victorian London, novaeu riche upstart Clifford Barnes is looking for recognition. Though he's drinking the finest whiskey at the finest clubs, he's still looked down upon old money/nobility types. In a rage, he challenges Lord Mac Dale to a tea party competition – the man who serves the finest tea wins, with Travellers Club doing the judging.<br />
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Lord Mac Dale enlists cookery counsellor (apparently an existing profession at the time) Victor Neville to get him the finest tea of the British Empire for the competition. Victor is undoubtedly skilled at his job, but unfortunately he suffers from narcolepsy and concomitant hallucinations about weird birds making unpleasant statements about his health.<br />
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Victor befriends Mr. Barnes' daughter, Alice, to learn which tea the upstart is planning to serve at the tea party, but it seems her helpfulness conceals some ulterior motives. Also, a kimono she loves to wear turns out to conceal some magical properties – more precisely, magical cats which serve as their mistress's spies and, when the need arises, thieves.<br />
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Anyway, miss Barnes gives Victor the name of the tea her father is planning to serve, as well as the place where he aims to get it – but that place doesn't exist. Victor embarks on a detective quest to find out where the tea is supposed to come from, but further complications ensue – like the police grabbing him for apparently trying to burglarize Mr. Barnes' house, having to fulfill the wishes of a rich and powerful Chinese "godfather", dealing with his capricious employer, having Miss Barnes double-crossing him to steal his tea, enlisting the help of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, and his narcoleptic attacks and hallucinations …<br />
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This is a rich story with several subplots – or rather, fragments of subplots, adding color and depth to the story without slowing it down – involving not just Victor but also young Alice, who has her own agenda mainly involving her magical kimono and its origins. The story is told with an ever-present hint of irony, which makes it amusing, but never becomes too much so that it becomes mocking towards the story's protagonists. Not being used to Peña's style, I wasn't sure what to expect, and she kept me wondering what would happen all the way to the end of the story – which is a good thing.<br />
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This is good, charming stuff, well worth your time. It's not the first story Nancy Peña's told about the Barnes family and the magical kimono. There are apparently four graphic novels about them, and this is the second, but you can read it without having read the first one and still enjoy it – after all, I did.<br />
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Well recommended.Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-80782027434502568032015-03-01T12:04:00.004+01:002015-03-09T19:41:51.290+01:00Det lästes lite böcker i januari<div style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
<b>Sara Gunnerud: Ordens makt i politiken</b><br />
I hög grad en anklagelseskrift mot (i huvudsak) moderaterna för att trixa med språket för att vinna väljare. Tyvärr trixar Gunnerud själv så mycket med språket -- felöversättningar, selektiv citatteknik -- att boken inte blir mödan värd för den som vill ha en politisk debatt som är mer än upprörda anklagelser.<br />
Rekommenderas inte.</div>
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<b>Andrew Palmer: The New Pirates</b><br />
Piratverksamheten vid i huvudsak Afrikas Horn analyseras.<br />
Problem 1: Befolkningen tyr sig hellre till sina klaner än en kleptokratisk regering; härav följer att Somalia för merparten av dem inte är en failed state i nuläget.<br />
Problem 2: Världssamfundet vill _så_ gärna ha en stat på plats att det är berett att överse med dess många och stora brister.<br />
Problem 3: Det är väldigt svårt att skydda sjöfarten med militära fartyg eftersom det är så stort område som måste täckas och piraterna anpassar sig efter den nya situationen.<br />
Ger vissa grundläggande förslag om hur fartyg ska kunna skydda sig, främst genom spaning och ett skyddat utrymme från vilket man kan kontrollera fartyget och som kan hålla piraterna ute till hjälp hinner anlända.<br />
Rekommenderas; dock litet seg i vissa delar av den grundliga framställningen.</div>
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<b>Axel Odelberg: Äventyr på riktigt. Berättelsen om upptäckaren Sven Hedin</b><br />
Hedin var äventyrare på den tiden när hjälp _inte_ var bara ett telefonsamtal och en helikopterresa bort, och förtjänar respekt för det. Tyvärr brände han bort den respekten genom sitt enögda försvar för tyskarna under första världskriget. Sedan lämnade han lyckligtvis politiken därhän och genomförde en fantastisk vetenskaplig expedition i (någorlunda) samarbete med Kina.<br />
Därefter brände han bort det förtroendet också genom sin idiotiska Hitler- och Tysklandsbeundran under WWII. Klantskalle.<br />
Rekommenderas.</div>
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<b>Henrik Malm Lindberg: Drömmen om jämlikhet. Socialdemokratins radikalisering och den svenska modellens fall</b><br />
Socialdemokraterna och LO märkte att den tillväxtvänliga politik de slog in på efter WWII inte gav den utdelning de hoppats på i jämlikhet, och att de kom att angripas från vänster för detta. Lösningen blev att a) satsa på minskade löneskillnader, b) ökade transfereringar, och ett därtill hörande starkt ökat skattetryck.<br />
Rekommenderas; en rejäl genomgång av hur samhällsdebatten på vänstra planhalvan såg ut under efterkrigstiden oavsett vad man drar för slutsatser av den.</div>
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<b>Per Svensson: Därför hatar alla liberaler. Och därför har alla fel</b><br />
Utmärkt genomgång av varför den utopiska vänstern har så otroligt fel i sin kritik av liberalismen och liberalismen så rätt om vad som ger ett fritt, välmående samhälle. Tappar farten rejält när Svensson försöker hitta ett liberalt sätt att möta det problem som terrorism och stater som förtrycker och mördar det egna folket utgör för världssamfundet.<br />
Rekommenderas, speciellt första halvan.</div>
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<b>Bo Sandelin: Adam Smith. Pocketbiblioteken nr 46</b><br />
Kortfattad biografi och skildring av Smiths viktigaste tankar (av vilka den s k osynliga handen bara är en del). Att kalla honom "laissez-faire" känns inte som att göra hans tankar rättvisa, oavsett om man gör det för att angripa eller kooptera honom. Matnyttigt i det lilla formatet.<br />
Rekommenderas.</div>
Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-52862936873781112692015-01-22T05:31:00.000+01:002015-01-22T05:35:56.892+01:00Mikael Wiehe står upp till försvar för antidemokrater. So what else is new?<a href="http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article20192842.ab">Mikael Wiehe</a> försvarar nu Hitlerpriset – förlåt, Leninpriset – mot den kritik det fått i dagarna. Tyvärr slår hans hyckleri igenom så tydligt i den grumliga argumentationen att det rimligen inte bör höja vare sig prisets eller hans egen status.<br />
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Han jämför till exempel Charlie Hebdo-tecknarna med den svenske satirtecknaren Lars Hillersberg och kritiken mot dennes antisemitiska teckningar till försvar för en <a href="http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Islam">antisemitisk propagandist</a>:<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="yui_3_15_0_2_1421898833025_1176" style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px; text-indent: 15px;">Och i Sverige,</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px; text-indent: 15px;"> där vi nu alla är Charlie och lyfter våra pennor till försvar för yttrandefriheten, var det inte länge sedan man förföljde, hånade och antisemitstämplade </span><span id="yui_3_15_0_2_1421898833025_1322" style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px; text-indent: 15px;">Lars</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px; text-indent: 15px;"> </span><span id="yui_3_15_0_2_1421898833025_1349" style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px; text-indent: 15px;">Hillersberg</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px; text-indent: 15px;">, en konstnär som verkade i exakt samma tradition som Charlie Hebdo, som vi nu hyllar.</span></span></blockquote>
Wiehe glider här på ett svekfullt sätt över viktiga skillnader. Till exempel var det ingen som mejade ner Hillersberg med automatkarbin; i stället riktades kritik mot att han gjorde antisemitiska teckningar till försvar för en antisemitisk propagandist -- något som rimligen borde falla inom ramen för yttrandefriheten i minst lika hög grad som Hillersbergs antisemitiska teckningar.<br />
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Lika svekfullt och manipulativt är Wiehes försvar för att uppkalla priset efter massmördaren och antidemokraten Lenin:<br />
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Att Lars Diding, som står för fiolerna har gett det stora priset namn efter Lenin och det mindre namn efter Robespierre är naturligtvis en provokation! Och just provokationen är ju, som vi lärt oss av den senaste tidens fruktansvärda händelser i Frankrike, en omistlig del av demokratin och det öppna samhället.</blockquote>
Man gör bristen på egna argument väldigt tydlig när man inte har mer att komma med än falska analogier. Liberala -- och andra demokratiska -- debattörer har stått upp för Charlie Hebdos rätt att provocera utan att bli mördade för det. De har inte därmed försökt förbjuda någon att kritisera tidningen. Charlie-redaktionens satir är inte heller på den nivå som Didings pris befinner sig; att en antidemokrat provocerar genom att hylla en annan antidemokrat (och massmördare) genom att instifta ett pris uppkallat efter denne är faktiskt inte riktigt samma sak som att provocera genom satir. En antidemokrat som hyllar en antidemokrat ligger liksom på en annan nivå än när satiriker kritiserar sin samtid.<br />
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Däremot är det naturligtvis inte ett dugg konstigt att en antidemokrats antidemokrat-hyllande pris går till en tredje antidemokrat; det ligger litegrann i sakens natur, liksom att den sålunda belönade antidemokraten står upp till försvar för detta. Kaka söker som bekant maka.Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-49736298945395544012015-01-17T22:44:00.001+01:002015-02-19T02:17:56.956+01:00On writing "action", part 1So I've got some opinions on how to, and how <i>not</i> to, write action – both in movies and TV, and comics. Since I'm a fan of good characterization, a lot of this series will deal with that; but I want to emphasize that I'm not claiming that I'm particularly good at writing this stuff myself; I'll mainly point to good and bad examples and discuss how one could go about it to do it better.<br />
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You may think that characterization isn't particularly important in action movies or comics; that the important thing is to have lots and lots of action – fist fights, shootouts and explosions. You'd be wrong. Characterization is what makes an audience care about the characters in the story, and willing to spend up to two hours in their company, rooting for them to succeed. There <i>is</i> a genre of films that mainly tries to appeal to fans of violence, of course. Sometimes, such a movie will be made by a regular Hollywood studio, in which case it'll have excellent production values, at least a couple of big-name actors (though a couple of them will likely have a career that hasn't exactly been booming lately), and well-crafted violence ballets. It will still suck, though, because it's still just a bad excuse for the viewer to enjoy people seeing being maimed and killed. Yes, I'm talking about crap like <i>John Wick</i> – and basically every Jason Statham movie ever made.<br />
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(Now, you<i> can</i> enjoy this kind of movie without being a psychopath. For example, if you're into martial arts, there's a lot of enjoyment to be had from watching the techniques used in say, an old Jackie Chan movie. But there has to be some pretty darn good martial arts techniques to justify the simplistic stories and rudimentary characterization levels of these movies.)<br />
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If you see one of these movies, it's usually written according to a very simple model:<br />
1. The hero is introduced. He (it's usually a he) does something nice, to show that he's a good guy, and possibly something not-so-nice, just to show that he's a tough or cool guy.<br />
2. The villain is introduced. He does something horrible, to show that he's a horrible person – or, frequently, there's a bunch of villains introduced and shown to be horrible persons, even though one of them is the leader and the rest are his henchmen. The reason for this is that it the more villains there are, the more the hero can kill and/or maim on his way to the top villain. Of course the villains are shown to be such horrible people to justify the hero's levels of violence against them. Generally, unless you have a pretty messed-up personality or view of society, you don't appreciate people being beaten to a pulp for pilfering an apple, for example. And with the levels of violence in modern action movies, the villains have to do some pretty disgusting things to justify them – sadistic torture, rape, mass murder etc.<br />
3. Somehow, the villain(s) and hero cross paths, and the hero gets a reason to fight the villain(s).<br />
4. Fight fight fight fight.<br />
5. The hero wins, and everything is well in the world. End.<br />
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There are a lot of crappy movies made according to this model, and some of the blame for this falls on people like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Snyder">Blake Snyder</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Truby">John Truby</a>.<br />
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"Who are <i>they</i>", you ask? Well, Snyder wrote <i>Save the Cat</i>, a scriptwriting manual outlining a simple (or, rather, simplistic) scriptwriting model that gave the reader detailed instruction on how to structure a story. Truby's <i>The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller</i> does the same thing. Both of them could have named their books <i>Scriptwriting for Dummies</i> instead – while they make a lot of good points for the novice writer, the resulting monoculture of mechanical movie writing can only be viewed as bad.<br />
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Basically, their approach to movie writing is that you tell most of your story through its structure. To shorten their structure-driven movie writing recipe somewhat: start with points 1-3 above, move to the hero having a huge setback and becoming depressed, hitting rock bottom and feeling that he's failed. Then have one of his friends set him straight, have him realize what his big moral weakness is and correct it, and through that change become capable of defeating the villain(s). Huge win, happy ending, blah blah blah.<br />
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When I was in my thirties, I had seen so many such movies, built on pretty much exactly the same structure, that I was rather sick and tired of Hollywood movies. I could count the beats of the story off as they occurred, and knew what to expect at pretty much every point of the story. "Well, things seem to be working pretty well. I guess it's time for some disaster to struck, so that… Aaand there it was. OK, how long will we have to wait while the hero's wallowing in his own misery until something happens that makes him pull himself together and finish this?" Basically, the only movies I could be bothered to go to see in a cinema were Disney movies (after the studio pulled itself together with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Mouse_Detective">The Great Mouse Detective</a>, they started churning out some quite beautiful animation, and while the stories were pretty predictable as well, the sheer storytelling skill, beautiful artwork, and humor compensated enough to make them worth watching) and the occasional comedy. See, when you use structure to tell the story in a manner to maximize impact on your audience, and that structure has to follow a certain template, your audience is going to learn the template eventually – and then your stories basically won't have any impact, because the audience already knows what is coming.<br />
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That's why I've been more fond of "revisionist" superhero writers since the 80s – or rather, the seventies, because <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Gerber">Steve Gerber</a> qualifies as a revisionist superhero writer even though he did his most seminal work in the seventies (and I read them in the eighties, anyway) – because these guys worked from a different structure, so I couldn't predict what would happen. Or, maybe I should rephrase that: I could be surprised by what happened. The standard structure always opens for a couple of different outcomes; for example, at the end of a drama, you can have the protagonist succeeding in his (or her) effort, or he could fail, and then kill himself for good measure to try to make a cheap emotional impact on the audience, but once you've seen a bunch of these movies you know what the possible outcomes are. With the revisionist writers, or with independent filmmakers, you'll get something far less predictable. And since a huge part of the reason I like to watch and read fiction is avoidance of boredom, less predictability is usually a good thing.<br />
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As long as there's a happy ending, of course. I read enough history and current affairs to have had my fill of unhappy endings. They depress me, and I don't need any more of that in today's world. (That's part of why I like Grant Morrison's writing so much. He'll take you on a wild, unpredictable roller coaster ride and somehow manage to end it all on a positive note anyway, no matter how disastrous and hopeless everything has seemed midway through. Unpredictable <i>and</i> predictably non-tragic. The best combination there is.)<br />
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There are other things that can make me un-bored with a story, of course, and I hinted at some of them with that Disney reference earlier on. If the ride is enjoyable, it's not really a big problem that that you know where it's going. Other storytelling elements can also be used. With comics, you can have beautiful images. You can also have beautiful language, or clever wordplay, which is also very enjoyable. There is also the characters; strong characters that I care about can do a lot to keep me interested in a comic even if it doesn't quite deliver in other areas. For example, Charles Schulz's <i>Peanuts</i><b style="font-style: italic;"> </b>had a bit of a slow period for a number of years when it wasn't as funny as it had used to be (though in fairness, it's <i>very</i> hard to be as funny as <i>Peanuts</i> was at its peak), but because I still cared for the characters, I still enjoyed reading about their lives and experiences.<br />
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So there's an example of something you can use as a writer to make your work more interesting: characterization. What passes for characterization in modern blockbuster movies and TV series is often rather pathetic, unfortunately. Too often, what we get is just stock characters with a couple of quirks thrown in. I'll give you an example: <i>Criminal Minds</i>, where the team has a computer specialist, the characterization of whom boils down to dressing in a flamboyant girly manner, talking flirtatiously to another member on the team when he's out trying to save lives and needs relevant information <i>fast</i>, and saying self-assured stuff like "Do I know where the killer lives? Does the pope wear a funny hat?" a lot – another case of chattering instead of giving out critically important information as fast as humanly possible.<br />
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This shallow kind of characterization goes hand in hand with another of my pet peeves, banter, but I hope to get into the problem with mind-bogglingly vapid banter in a later installment of this series, so I'll leave it for now. Just remember: quirks don't equal characterization.<br />
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To be fair, there is not a lot of space in an action story for introspection or long soliloquies – which, considering the writing skills of the average action movie writer, and the acting skills of the average action hero, probably isn't a bad thing. However, there are other methods of characterization than weird fashion statements and recurring phraseology. One method, especially appropriate in action stories, is <i>action</i>. That is, the way a person <i>behaves</i> shows us something about what kind of person he or she is. Take a look at the following clip from <i>Lethal Weapon</i>, and pay special attention to how Mel Gibson's character, Riggs, acts at the start of the clip and after the murder. (I suggest you watch the first 20 seconds or so, and then skip to the three minute point.)<br />
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First, notice how Riggs doesn't mix at the beginning of the clip. He doesn't approach the other people there; he doesn't want to mingle. He's a man apart, a loner. That's a pretty import part of his emotional makeup, and one that is well echoed in this scene.<br />
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Next, after Hunsaker is shot, what does Riggs do? He acts. Immediately. He starts running towards a position from where he can fire on the helicopter, and then starts blasting. So, obviously, he's a man of action (and violence, when necessary). And what does he do as the helicopter leaves? He runs after it – shooting. Now, that's pretty meaningless, because he's not likely to hit anything while running, but obviously he's too angry, to eager to get the bastards, to care. We see this also when he reloads and continues firing after the helicopter is well out of range. So not only is he a man of action, he is also a pretty emotional kind of guy. Also a nice piece of characterization, although a bit overvalued, especially in heroes. Me, I prefer heroes a bit more able to temper their emotions with more practicality – or perhaps "professionalism" is a better word. There are ways to emphasize professionalism more than emotionalism in this scene, but this is already a pretty long, wordy post, so perhaps I will get to that in a later post on this subject. The art of writing action stories will be revisited in the future.<br />
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To be continued...Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-2353642985887674982015-01-13T04:53:00.000+01:002015-01-13T05:05:03.885+01:00Sara Gunnerud: Ordens makt i politikenI sitt förord till <i>Ordens makt i politiken</i> menar Sara Gunnerud att det "används en hel del ful och manipulerande teknik i den svenska samhällsdebatten", och att det är en del av förklaringen till "varför högern har kunnat flytta fram sina positioner så mycket de senaste decennierna". I bokens första kapitel slår hon fast att "[a]tt manipulera med språk är ohederligt" och att det är "omoraliskt att manipulera människor i samhällsdebatten". Hon slår också fast följande sympatiska tes, som jag tycker att alla bör skriva under på:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Den som värnar demokratin måste försvara den, och inte själv bidra till att korrumpera den. Alltså har var och en ett ansvar för kvaliteten i det demokratiska samtalet.</blockquote>
Väl talat. Vi ska återkomma till de orden efter en kort sammanfattning av Gunneruds bok, dess budskap och syfte.<br />
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Gunnerud är språkvetare och socialdemokrat. Med sin bok vill hon ge vänstermänniskor (främst, så vitt jag kan förstå, socialdemokrater och fackligt verksamma) språkliga redskap för att dels föra fram sina budskap på ett så effektivt sätt som möjligt, dels analysera borgerliga budskap för att kunna vederlägga dem. Den som klarar av att styra debattens språkbruk kan med hjälp av de associationer orden skapar få övertaget redan från början, och Gunnerud ger en hel del exempel på vad man skulle kunna kalla "tjuvknep" som används i dylika syften.<br />
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Samtliga sådana dåliga exempel kommer från borgerliga eller näringslivsanknutna debattörer. <br />
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Boken är alltså rejält vinklad. Jag tycker inte att man kan klaga på det i sig; det rör sig trots allt om en socialdemokrat som har ett uttalat, öppet politiskt syfte med vad hon skriver. Problematiskt, rent av rejält problematiskt, blir det dock när Gunnerud själv använder sig av metoder som helt klart skulle platsa i den katalog av fula knep som hon räknar upp. Låt mig ge ett par exempel.<br />
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I kapitlet "Maktens undanglidande språk" kritiserar Gunnerud makthavares försök att glida undan ansvar genom ett vagt, otydligt och vilseledande språkbruk. Hon exemplifierar vagt språkbruk med Moderaternas landsbygdsprogram:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Vad gäller EU:s roll i svensk rovdjurspolitik har vi även här sett en utveckling som inte gynnar arbetet med att uppnå acceptans för den förda svenska rovdjurspolitiken</blockquote>
Gunnerud menar att formuleringen "är så vag och öppen att den kan tolkas på helt olika sätt", att det är omöjligt att förstå om det är "EU som ska förmås låta regeringen besluta om vargjakt, eller (…) att svenska medborgare som har starka åsikter om varg ska förmås acceptera vargens närvaro i skog och mark". Letar man litet högre upp i Moderaternas dokument <a href="http://www.moderat.se/sites/default/files/attachments/40_forslag_for_en_levande_landsbygd.pdf">"40 förslag för en levande landsbygd"</a> – som ju formuleringen "även här" antyder att man kan göra – hittar man följande:<br />
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Vi kan nu se allt mer frustration över vargstammens kraftiga ökning. Känslan av otrygghet bland boende måste tas på allvar. När rovdjuren angriper tamdjur måste åtgärder vidtas.<br />
För att få tillbaka människors förtroende för rovdjurspolitiken anser vi att "en" länsstyrelse bör få ansvar för skyddsjaktfrågor.</blockquote>
Den otydlighet som kan återfinnas i det av Gunnerud återgivna citatet beror alltså inte på att Moderaterna försöker vara vaga för att "inte stöta sig med någon", som Gunnerud påstår, utan helt enkelt på att hon själv skurit bort delar av vad som sagts. Om hon har gjort det avsiktligt för att kunna angripa Moderaterna eller om hon läst dokumentet med så ideologiskt färgade glasögon att hon helt enkelt oavsiktligt filtrerat bort informationen kan jag naturligtvis inte avgöra. En dålig grund för hennes angrepp är det likafullt, och underminerar hennes position. (Reservation för det fall att hon syftat på något annat, för mig okänt dokument – notapparaten nämner bara "Moderaternas landsbygdsprogram 2013", inget mera – men det verkar rätt osannolikt med tanke på att det var det enda dokument med den citerade formuleringen som dök upp vid en Google-sökning.)<br />
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Slarv eller misstag kan dock hända. Värre är det när man förvränger forskares resultat för att understödja den egna agendan. Den amerikanske lingvisten <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff">George Lakoff</a> har forskat om åsiktsskillnader mellan, med Wikipedias formulering, "liberals and conservatives", och kommit fram till att dessa följer "from the fact that they subscribe with different strength to two different central metaphors about the relationship of the state to its citizens". I sin bok <i>Thinking Points</i> pratar han i stället om "progressives" och "conservatives".<br />
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I Gunneruds tappning blir detta "progressiva" och "borgerliga".<br />
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Fundera på det en stund. Lakoff jämförde amerikanska högerrepublikaner med progressiva/liberaler. Gunnerud översätter rakt av amerikanska högerrepublikaner till svenska borgerliga, dvs spektrat FP-C-KD-M, och drar sedan slutsatser om <i>dessa</i> utifrån Lakoffs undersökningar. Den felöversättningen är djupt ohederlig. Mitt eget parti FP ligger klart närmare Demokraterna politiskt, och det djupt reaktionära och främlingsfientliga i dagens republikanska parti saknar i huvudsak klangbotten i svenska borgerliga partier (dock inte i det främlingsfientliga populistpartiet SD, men det är en något annan sak). Men eftersom det passar hennes syften tvekar Gunnerud inte att beskriva den "borgerliga" tankemodellen som att den menar att det är "omoraliskt och destruktivt att göra livet drägligare för den som är fattig, sjuk eller arbetslös" – vilket säkert skulle förvåna till exempel ett stort antal borgerliga socialliberala politiker som genom svensk historia arbetat hårt och i stora stycken framgångsrikt för att göra livet drägligare för just de grupperna.<br />
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Gunneruds ohederlighet när hon använder amerikanska högern som förklaringsmodell för svenska mittenpartiers politiska ställningstaganden – och ignorerar de skäl de själva anför för dessa – blir desto mer slående som den sker i en kontext där hon anklagar sina meningsmotståndare för att manipulera människor genom sitt språkbruk.<br />
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Det finns fler exempel, men jag tycker de här räcker för att illustrera vad boken egentligen handlar om: politisk ammunition. Saklig analys är vad inte Sara Gunnerud är ute efter, och det är inte heller vad hon levererar. I stället är det en partsinlaga med rejäl ideologisk slagsida och klent med intellektuell hederlighet. Jag var beredd att ta en del kängor mot borgerlig politik i allmänhet och Alliansens regeringspolitik i synnerhet för att få mig till livs en läsvärd analys, men <i>Ordens makt i politiken</i> är så mycket partsinlaga att den är ganska värdelös för den som inte avser att läsa den för att i första hand få sina redan existerande politiska åsikter och fördomar validerade. Rekommenderas inte – utom för vänstermänniskor som redan är övertygade om att de som befinner sig det minsta till höger om Socialdemokraterna är ondskefulla, förstås.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">(Föga förvånande kan man finna en mer uppskattande recension på <a href="http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/bokrecensioner/article19500731.ab">Aftonbladets kultursida.</a>)</span>Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-75163979284398818932015-01-02T22:31:00.001+01:002015-01-11T02:03:30.351+01:00Movie review: Man of Steel<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Zod off!!"</td></tr>
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Look, this isn't an awful film. But it isn't a particularly good one, either. Spoilers ahead.<br />
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On Krypton, scientist Jor-El stands before the ruling council demanding that they allow him to rescue the Kryptonians' collective genetic code from the cataclysm about to destroy their planet. They don't listen. Suddenly, general Zod enters the chamber, accompanied by soldiers, announcing that he's taking over government to save Krypton from these ineffective talkers. Jor-El escapes, stealing the code and bringing it to his home in order to send it, with his newborn son Kal-El, into space, to Earth.<br />
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Then the film starts going downhill, unfortunately.<br />
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Jor-El's wife Lara doesn't want to send her son away, because what if he dies out there in space? That he's about to die on Krypton when it explodes doesn't seem to matter to her. Then, when she finally agrees to let Jor-El send the boy off – and keep in mind that Zod and his soldiers are on their way to take the Kryptonian genetic codes back, so time's a-wasting – she refuses to let him go, holding on to him as long as possible. Zod then arrives with his soldiers, who seem happy to let their leader walk into an enemy's lair in front of them, apparently unarmed. In fact, most of them stay outside and just two of them walk 5-10 meters behind him, carrying guns that they apparently don't know how to use because Jor-El can grab a gun and shoot them both before they can pull the triggers of <i>their</i> weapons.<br />
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Jor-El, the scientist, proceeds to beat the crap out of the soldier Zod, send his son and the Kryptonians' genetic code away into space, and get killed by Zod because nobody in this movie seems to care one bit about actually disarming and tying up violent enemies. Zod walks out to his waiting soldiers, who haven't done anything useful like shooting down the ship leaving their enemy's lair. Kryptonian armed forces thus arrive to capture them before they can stop the ship, and they get sentenced to the Phantom Zone for their crimes. After that, Krypton eventually explodes, killing Lara and everybody else on the planet.<br />
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So, what do we have so far? Standard Hollywood writing, where everything is about striding about and making pompous declarations and watching some marvelous imagery from the CGI people. There is nothing much to suggest imminent threat in the scenes, no need for anybody to rush anything because they'll always have time to do whatever is necessary to reach the various plot points outlined in John Truby's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Anatomy-Story-Becoming-Storyteller/dp/0865479933">The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller</a> or Blake Snyder's Save The Cat! <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Save-Last-Book-Screenwriting-Youll/dp/1932907009/">The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need</a>, two books that have done their fair share to ruin Hollywood films in general by insisting on stereotypical structuring of movie scripts. Instead, we get sentimental moments with Lara, put in there for no other reason than to hit the audience over the head with "it's tough for a mother to be separated from her child forever", as if the actress couldn't have shown that through actual acting. We also get Zod showing himself as evil, through his treasonous behavior and cowardly back-stabbing – again, entirely in line with the recipe from Truby, Snyder et al – and we don't confuse the audience with something that might take their attention away from this stuff, like people actually behaving and speaking somewhat realistically, or the top military man of Krypton acting like he knows anything about war and fighting at all.<br />
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Anyway, over to Kal-El's – or Clark Kent, the name given to him by his adoptive parents Jonathan and Martha Kent – life on Earth. He does good without revealing himself and his powers to humanity, moving from job to job as something happens that makes him have to show his powers. You know, just like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Hulk_(1978_TV_series)">David Banner</a>. Turns out, a) the US military has found a spaceship in the Canadian Arctic, b) the US military absolutely sucks at background checks, so Clark can sneak in and work as a handyman on the site. There, he discovers his Kryptonian heritage, Lois Lane discovers him, and his actions lead to Zod and his gang also discovering him, and coming over to join the party, take the Kryptonian genetic code and basically destroy the Earth and mankind to recreate Krypton and the Kryptonian race. Fierce fighting of various kinds ensues.<br />
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Henry Cavill actually isn't bad in the role as Superman, but the scripting doesn't give him the backing he should have. For example, Clark and Jonathan Kent fear that if humanity learns about Clark's powers, they'll fear and shun him, a theme that doesn't really work with the Superman mythos, which is really true-blue, mom and apple pie, honest Midwest, etc. The "humans will fear and hate him" theme really belongs with the X-Men, not a Superman movie – unless you do it a whole lot better, like for example <i>not</i> having Clark let his father die a meaningless death in a tornado, because <i>obviously</i> an old man is better equipped to run back in a storm to the family's car to save the dog trapped in it than the young, athletic son who also happens to have superpowers. You sit there watching, saying to yourself, or your friend next to you, "what are they, stupid?".<br />
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No, they're just victims of lazy scriptwriting. You want to kill off Jonathan Kent, fine – but do it in a manner that doesn't insult the characters' intelligences (or the audience's).<br />
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Final insult: gratuitously inserting Jor-El back into the story as a computer-stored consciousness, just because it's easier to have him drone on with exposition and repeating the basic conflict between him and Zod just in case the audience is too stupid to remember it, even after it was hammered into them at the start of the movie. What is it with moviemakers wanting to put Jor-El back into Clark's life? Come up with a way show the audience what they need to learn without using this exposition crutch, instead.<br />
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From there on, the movie is basically lots of super-powered fights between super-strong and nigh-invulnerable people punching each other with little other effect than making the other guy fly some 50-100 meters away and smashing through a lot of housing on the way, plus a standard (see, for example, Batman Begins) "a huuuuge disaster is looming, will the hero be able to stop it (yes of course he will, and everybody knows it)" finale.<br />
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What's good about the movie, then? Well, there is some decent acting in it, with Kevin Costner doing the best job as Jonathan Kent; Costner's so good in the role that it's just a damn shame that they kill him off so early, and in such a flimsy manner. Laurence Fishburne is his usual competent self as Perry White even though he doesn't have much of a script to work with, and Russel Crowe is similarly albeit more stereotypically competent as Jor-El. The women in the movie, Lois Lane included, are to a too-great extent sideline-watchers or in need of rescuing. How I miss <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margot_Kidder">Margot Kidder</a>, who almost managed to carry the first two Superman movies of the seventies into "good movie" instead of "watchable" territory. (Oh, Reeves was good in the title role, but Kidder put whatever spark there was in those movies – much like Teri Hatcher did with Lois & Clark.) And like I said, I think Cavill does a decent job, but like the others, he doesn't have much of a script to work with; I wonder if Crowe doesn't, in fact, get to do the most acting in the movie.<br />
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Also, the movie <i>looks</i> great; art direction, design and CGI is top-notch. But the actual superheroics are too sparse (and too angst-laden) at first, and are a bit too stacked on top of each other with too little cleverness about it in the second half.<br />
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So this is a watchable film, but not a necessary one – unless, of course, you love superheroes. If you do, you're pretty much obliged to see it, and to wish that the producers and writers had done a better job with it.<br />
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(Post scriptum: I checked to see who'd actually written it, and to <i>not</i> my surprise, it turned out to be David S. Goyer, who also helped write Christopher Nolan's not-very-well-done Batman trilogy. I'll save my gripes about that for a later post, though.)Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-41227329544895359512014-07-24T13:04:00.002+02:002014-07-24T13:04:18.794+02:00Yves Sente & André Juillard: Blake & Mortimer – The Oath of the Five Lords <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Are you familiar with those classic British detective series on TV – <i>Midsomer Murders</i>, <i>Poirot</i>, <i>Inspector Lynley</i> etc? Of course you are. (And if you aren't, that doesn't really matter; it was more of a rhetorical question.)</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj58y5RENUfaR4f6HcaiTrkZgvzcEpIksUkybpTzsCz3PZ-wh30kS9nOISSmzP2ZmdUnuQpWDq9rxw6NpgQtc6sAXZCjDZqRPEQweBwfwRhvC8nFriqlrWuAGGe10iPcT_xZBm4v3Dp1QoO/s1600/Blake+&+Mortimer+18.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj58y5RENUfaR4f6HcaiTrkZgvzcEpIksUkybpTzsCz3PZ-wh30kS9nOISSmzP2ZmdUnuQpWDq9rxw6NpgQtc6sAXZCjDZqRPEQweBwfwRhvC8nFriqlrWuAGGe10iPcT_xZBm4v3Dp1QoO/s1600/Blake+&+Mortimer+18.jpg" height="400" width="302" /></a></div>
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The standard plot for one of these whodunits starts out with introducing the main protagonists or the problem the detective has to solve – or a very old event that sets the stage for what is to follow. If the latter case, it is usually not entirely clear exactly how this will affect the present-day crime riddle, but solving that riddle is often dependent on the detective realizing how those old events are connected to it.</div>
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We then have a crime, usually a murder, which gets the detective(s) involved in the case. While trying to understand that case, and perhaps feeling that he/she/they is/are getting a grip on it, another murder is committed, which makes it obvious that that is not the case at all. Digging deeper, the detective(s) a) encounter some red herring(s), b) find a crucial bit of evidence that is frequently not understood properly. Suddenly, perhaps from a comment by his/her partner, the detective realizes exactly what has happened and why, and who the guilty party is, and rushes to – in the very nick of time – stop the murderer from killing another victim.</div>
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The end.</div>
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This is a rather stereotypical way of structuring your plot, and the reason it is so stereotypical is of course that it works. People – readers and viewers of criminal fiction – love it, and faithfully follow well constructed series in the genre. It offers tension, the challenge of oneself making sense of the various bits of information revealed during the investigation, some "aha!" moments, and the satisfaction of seeing justice enacted. Who could complain? As long as it's well done, of course. Stereotypical plots enacted badly are just terrible, whether in book or film/TV format.</div>
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(As you may already have guessed, the plot of <i>Blake & Mortimer – The Oath of the Five Lords</i> conforms to this basic structure.)</div>
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_%26_Mortimer">Blake & Mortimer</a> is a comics series created by writer-artist (and Hergé collaborator/assistant) <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Pierre_Jacobs">Edgar P. Jacobs</a>, combining elements from detective stories and science fiction. Several albums were published in Swedish when I was a kid – and I would dearly like to know where the hell the albums I bought then have gotten to, because I can't bloody well find them today. </div>
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From what I recall, though, the panels were usually a bit too text-heavy and the storytelling a bit too cumbersome for me to really appreciate it. Much later, however, something happened. First, in the nineties French publishing giant Dargaud decided to revive the series, with some top contemporary comics creators doing the honors as Jacobs passed away in 1987. Second, British <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinebook_Ltd">Cinebook</a> started translating all B&M albums, publishing them in English.</div>
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(Now, I <i>can</i> read French, but I do need to have a dictionary on hand, so it's easier for me to read the stories in English. Also, I can buy them cheaper and easier via my comics dealer. Thus, I'm thankful to Cinebook for making these and many other French/Belgian comics easily available as there are very little French-language comics published in Swedish these days. The notable exception, small-press publisher <a href="http://www.albumforlaget.se/">Albumförlaget</a>, can only publish so much.)</div>
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Anyway, this particular story starts out in 1919, depicting how some MI5 spook with a grudge against Lawrence of Arabia has a manuscript stolen from the war hero. We are then transferred to the fifties, when a masked figure burglarizes a museum to steal a violin. Coincidentally, scientist Philip Mortimer – half of Blake & Mortimer – has been invited to that very museum to hold a seminar on science and archaeology. Meanwhile, his old friend Francis Blake, head of the MI5, hurries off to the funeral of an old Oxford chum. Turns out the old friend was murdered… And some other old friends from that Oxford circle are then murdered, one by one…</div>
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From there on, it's basic traditional British whodunit; following leads, some of them red herrings, and gradually discovering how the two cases are connected – and how they are connected to the scene depicted in the prologue. Both Sente and Juillard are old hands, so they know their craft, and they do it well. I'm a bit annoyed at the way Captions are handled, as they sometimes give redundant information and are lettered in all caps while the speech balloons are in lower case, giving the impression of a narrator speaking in a RATHER LOUD VOICE. But the overall work is solid, with a complicated plot that is gradually revealed to the reader, skillfully weaving in some real-life connections and an interesting episode from Francis Blake's past, adding some dimension to the character and a reason for him to take a special interest in the case. </div>
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There are also some nice bits of characterization showing the reader what incredibly Britishly polite people Messieurs Blake and Mortimer are. As an example of that, please listen to the head of the MI5 asking the person at the front desk of a hospital to make a life-or-death phone call: "I don't want to impose on you, miss, but could you place another call for me?" </div>
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Overall, the positive aspects of the story compensates for the actual solution to the case being not all that special and somewhat predictable. (Only "somewhat", though, because if you're familiar with the genre, you're not particularly surprised by it, but Sente does keep his options for tying the whole thing together open for most of the album.)</div>
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Also, occasionally it becomes almost a bit <i>too</i> "let's do a really, <i>really</i> British whodunit", but overall, it's enjoyable like a good <i>Midsomer Murders </i>or <i>Lewis</i> episode. Worth your time.</div>
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<a href="http://hoopercomicart.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/cinebook-9th-art-blake-and-mortimer-18.html">Here's</a> an enthusiastic review with some art samples.</div>
Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-57669315661216812592014-07-14T16:46:00.001+02:002014-07-14T16:46:18.668+02:00Azzarello, Jones & Bermejo: Before Watchmen – Comedian, RorschachCount me among those who felt it was a bit silly of Alan Moore to have a hissy fit about other people doing Watchmen prequels when he's made a whole career out of taking characters created by others and remaking them.<br />
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However, even though I still feel that way, I also feel that Brian Azzarello botched his takes on Comedian and Rorschach; these stories do not add positive value to the Watchmen saga.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0VeDFs4GoC25lS7NjP4Usiw8Z17VPxvkbIIoeff5I8b18rghUa9ofGy3Pitk777e3y1ueL9_UImBGCvt7M7yd9YJ1oqE1urR6huc-jyIGH5mQoogB914mhyphenhyphenXLwdluRZ38M-O-m89T2zdJ/s1600/BW+Comedian-Rorschach.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0VeDFs4GoC25lS7NjP4Usiw8Z17VPxvkbIIoeff5I8b18rghUa9ofGy3Pitk777e3y1ueL9_UImBGCvt7M7yd9YJ1oqE1urR6huc-jyIGH5mQoogB914mhyphenhyphenXLwdluRZ38M-O-m89T2zdJ/s1600/BW+Comedian-Rorschach.jpg" height="320" width="211" /></a></div>
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The problem with the <i>Rorschach</i> story is that Moore's ruthless, efficient, crazy-but-cunning character here has been transformed into, basically, a sadistic but well-meaning klutz. He starts out torturing a drug dealer/user to learn where a drug gang's HQ is, goes there and is promptly defeated by the gang and beaten to death. No, wait – the drug lord has cooked up a grand scheme to catch and kill Rorschach, but doesn't bother with actually killing him. Instead, he's beaten to within an inch of his life and left for dead in the sewers. Right there, the gritty "realism" (actually "detailed, sadistic depictions of violence") of the story loses its believability.<br />
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Meanwhile, a serial killer called "The Bard" is mutilating and murdering women in the city. Also, a kind waitress befriends Rorschach's secret identity, the down-and-out loser Walter Kovacs, and tries to help him. (You just know, reading it, that it's not going to end well.)<br />
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Anyway, Rorschach searches out one of the gang members who nearly killed him, and tortures him (in graphic detail) for information – anybody recognize a pattern here? – and then barley escapes with is life as the rest of the gang turns up. Opting for an ironic twist to end the story, Azzarello then has bad things happen to the waitress in connection with the aforementioned serial killer, and has Rorschach murder "The Bard", who gets off on some unexplained technicality, three years later. The end.<br />
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This story reminded me of Tamburini and Liberatore's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RanXerox">RanXerox</a> – violent to the point of being sadistic, with excellent art and a not particularly good writing. Azzarello gets lost in his own violence-feast, and even Bermejo's brilliant art can't save him. Tamp down the sadism, and you'd have a story that would work with the ironic ending, but <i>not</i> with Rorschach. Moore's Rorschach simply doesn't work in this story – in fact, it's hard to understand how a Rorschach this bumbling would have survived long enough to even be a part of <i>Watchmen</i>.<br />
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The <i>Comedian</i> story in this volume is somewhat better, in that it doesn't do too much damage to the character. However, it delves way too deeply into conspiracy theory territory for my tastes – having a cold-hearted Jackie Kennedy conspire with Eddie Blake (the Comedian) to murder Marilyn Monroe, FBI higher-ups conspire to keep Eddie from Dallas to save President Kennedy from being murdered, the army conspires to smuggle drugs to fund the nascent Vietnam War, and the CIA conspiring to assassinate Robert Kennedy. It gets somewhat tiresome.<br />
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Anyway, Eddie Blake comes off as a somewhat more fully-developed character here than in <i>Watchmen</i> (as well he should, of course, having a whole mini-series to himself). He's a close friend to the Kennedy family, and he takes President Kennedy's murder very hard. Lyndon B Johnson's administration then sends him off to the budding Vietnam war where he's supposed to be merely a PR figure, but instead he infuses a fighting spirit into the lackluster American soldiers he encounters. (Of course, the notion propagated in this comic that all you need to win battles is to be sufficiently bad-ass is something I sorely doubt; but perhaps things like fire, movement and cover aren't as visually exciting as standing upright in full view of the enemy dressed in a gaudy costume and going full rock'n'roll with your machine gun.)<br />
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The war and the politicking back in the US takes its toll on Blake, and he gets more and more unhinged and cruel, until nobody wants to have anything to with him anymore – including his old friend Bobby Kennedy who decides that enough is enough, and America needs a leader who'll say no to war crimes and massacres, and Eddie Blake needs to be held accountable for his crimes. Of course, Eddie Blake can't allow that… Exactly how he goes about to try and stop it, I won't reveal, as I try to stay away from spoilers as much as possible.<br />
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This is a better-written story than the Rorschach one, but like I said, I'm tired of Kennedy conspiracies. I also think that the Vietnam war has been somewhat overused as an excuse for craziness. If you feel your story needs somewhere where there's no rules and you can do anything, no matter how crazy, the Vietnam war is always there, waiting for you. But even if your story is a well-crafted one, I'm likely to have read or seen it before, just because it's so easy to put people into that environment and go "anything goes, and look how this drives ordinary men crazy".<br />
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So even though this is a better story than the Rorschach one, it still doesn't get me very emotionally involved, because I've already seen so much of it before. Had Azzarello concentrated more on Blake's relationship with the Kennedys, or on actual politics instead of conspiracy theories, or the actual Vietnam war instead of the readily-available stereotypes, I might have been more interested. OTOH, if you haven't already seen or read too many Vietnam movies, documentaries, stories or books, you might get more out of this story than I did.<br />
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Not recommended, even though J. G. Jones does a credible job on the art. Alan Moore made his career – heck, his superstardom – taking characters others created and doing something special with them, so it's perfectly reasonable that "his" characters should also be available to others. But do something <i>special</i> with them then, for crying out loud!Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-12602436497382069762014-07-12T00:59:00.001+02:002014-07-13T12:39:52.566+02:00Batgirl: The Greatest Stories Ever ToldWell, this is quite the mix of well-known – even classic – comics creators, starting with Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino (and inker Sid Greene) for the very first Batgirl story (from 1967). Barbara Gordon, prim librarian daughter of Commissioner James Gordon, creates a tight-fitting, bat-themed masquerade outfit that'll show everybody that she's more than just a brilliant brain, but on the way to the big party encounters a crime in progress and decides to break it up. With her brown belt judo skills, she accounts herself well, attracting the interest of Batman himself. Accidentally interfering in Batman and Robin's handling of a case, she nevertheless perseveres and proves herself to be a crime-fighting force to be reckoned with. (I will mention, however, my disappointment with scriptwriter Fox for his apparent belief that a laser beam works much like a jet engine.)<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB96IGbBam2uPuV5REPZef9xd3hyNlPRHVovHpkCJNscm3IQITOPeQtmWCwB4M1EP9QmJxbq6cWBtRE_9prujteTYHOlFa0-9Vqs1Kp4yiwfAZ0GMQrnEEixKq0Amm3HNDFZEQUb3GyxPQ/s1600/Batgirl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB96IGbBam2uPuV5REPZef9xd3hyNlPRHVovHpkCJNscm3IQITOPeQtmWCwB4M1EP9QmJxbq6cWBtRE_9prujteTYHOlFa0-9Vqs1Kp4yiwfAZ0GMQrnEEixKq0Amm3HNDFZEQUb3GyxPQ/s1600/Batgirl.jpg" height="320" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The excellent (of course) Alex Ross cover.</td></tr>
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Then follows a couple of stories penned by Frank Robbins; typically for his bat-stories, they're pretty decent detective yarns. The first Robbins story, from 1970, is drawn by Gil Kane with inks by Murphy Anderson. While I don't think Anderson is the best inker for Kane, he's competent enough and Kane's dramatic storytelling still comes through. Don Heck's the artist for the next couple of stories (from 1972), and I was unfortunately never much of a fan of his art. The scripts are weaker, as well, with Robbins trying to put some social significance into them by having Barbara go into politics to improve society.<br />
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That sad trend continues in an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_S!_Maggin">Elliot S! Maggin</a>-<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Grell">Mike Grell</a> overly patriotic and fantastic story from 1975 celebrating the US bicentennial, marred by Maggin's use of magic, the Devil (yes, sadly), and a syrupy sentimental speech before Congress by Rep. Barbara Gordon in his script. Grell's art is also weak; illustrating the story but adding neither elegance nor power to it. Next, an apparently intended-to-be-in-good-fun 1977 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Rozakis">Bob Rozakis</a> story about Two-Face's daughter pretending to be the daughters of the Penguin, the Riddler, the Scarecrow and the Joker which doesn't work either, partly because too much focus is on Robin instead of Batgirl, but mainly because it's just pointless. Instead of whimsy, we get dull. Old pro Irv Novick does the art but wasn't really suitable for something so light-weight – especially not with the inks of Vince Colletta.<br />
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These two stories shouldn't have been in this volume; they're just not good enough to deserve it – especially in a book called "The Greatest Stories Ever Told".<br />
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Then things start looking up again. In a post-Crisis story from 1997, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devin_Grayson">Devin Grayson</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Fegredo">Duncan Fegredo</a> depict Robin and Batgirl's new first meeting, two kids who're trying to learn the ropes of superheroing and who also have to learn how to work together as a team on the fly as they pursue a hostage-taking burglar. It's a cute story where Grayson's fun, lively script works well and establishes a pleasant but not rivalry-free relation between the two. Fegredo's elegant and dynamic art makes the story even better.<br />
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And speaking of elegant, the last story (from 1998) is inked by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Nowlan">Kevin Nowlan</a>, who has one of the most beautiful ink lines ever. (Script is by Kelley Puckett, and pencils by Terry Dodson.) "Folie A Deux" nicely tells of how Commissioner Gordon took care of Barbara after her biological parents died in a car crash, and how a newly minted Batgirl blackmails Batman into training her when he tries to stop her from risking her life fighting crime. It uses some advanced storytelling, but loses a bit when it tries too hard to be clever when depicting Gordon being saved by Batgirl after trying to stop a robbery – if you can't get your point over without making too-improbable jumps in logic, perhaps you should rethink how you intend to make it. But the inks <i>are</i> by Kevin Nowlan, and the Barbara-Gordon relationship is very well depicted, so this is still worth your while.<br />
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I'm rather disappointed with DC for including those two weak Maggin and Rozakis stories; they've both done better, and certainly there are better Batgirl stories around that could have used. In fact, there's a whole Batgirl Showcase volume chock-full of Batgirl stories, most of them better than that (<i>and</i> many of them drawn by Gil Kane). This collection is still worth reading for getting a sense of the character's history, some beautiful art and decent-to-good stories, but it's not a must-read.Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-12408676032188685662014-06-29T13:09:00.003+02:002014-07-12T10:33:21.648+02:00Sage Stossel: StarlingWell, I've been busy.<br />
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Work, other stuff, and I've been reading a bunch of comics that have been just filling out shelf space as I didn't quite have the time and energy to read them when I bought them. (There's a <i>lot</i> of those, I'm sorry to say.) And since I'm currently on "DC: B", ploughing through a big pile of pre-52 <i>Batman</i> TPB's, there hasn't been much that has been interesting enough to want to blog about -- DC killed a lot of the energy inherent in the Batman character when they a) made him way too one-dimensional, b) started having the plots run through all the various bat-titles; the synchronization necessary always seems to take a big toll on the creativity of the writers.<br />
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Oh, and c) replaced the "detective" part in "the world's greatest detective" with "will torture people to get information whenever the writer can't think of actually <i>interesting</i> and not disgusting ways to move the plot forward".<br />
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However.<br />
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Thanks to the kindness of the people at the excellent <a href="http://bookshop.se/">Uppsala English Bookshop</a>, I recently got a copy of Sage Stossel's <i>Starling</i>, which tells the story of Amy Sturgess, marketing person and superhero, and which is far more compelling than tired superhero stories trying to replace actual drama and quality storytelling with big "events" like earthquakes etc. So here's Starling:<br />
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Amy discovered her powers while a kid in school, and in her teens gets recruited into the government's superhero program. Whenever there's a crime for her to stop, she gets a text message, and has to make up some excuse to leave whatever she's doing to change into her superhero garb and fly to wherever she is needed. To explain her many and sudden disappearances, she has to pretend having an embarrassing medical condition, which does not help her already somewhat awkward social situation.<br />
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Anyway, Amy's already somewhat hectic and unpredictable life becomes even more hectic and unpredictable as a quick succession of events occur:<br />
- She gets responsibility for a big contract at the bureau where she works – actually, her boss was supposed to fire her for her unpredictability and absences, but he's completely exhausted from having a newborn baby at home, so he gives her one last chance – she gets to take over the contract <i>he</i> should have been doing;<br />
- Some creep at the company where she works is ripping off her work, and she's not assertive enough to put a stop to it;<br />
- She meets an old college sweetheart who wants to rekindle the romance, which she would like to do as well, but he's engaged to a very nice woman who, it turns out, is very helpful to Amy in her work;<br />
- Her ex-druggie brother turns up at her doorstep, in big trouble.<br />
<br />
Watching Amy/Starling juggle all these problems – along with her regular superhero/secret identity troubles and tribulations – is like reading a very well written and charming Spider-Man adventure. Stossel's art style is cartoony, but the writing is, well… I could call it "realistic-ish", I guess. Part of it is actually about "real" problems, like Amy's romantic and work problems, and some is a pretty good take on what problems actual super heroics would entail in the real world. Like I said, a good Spider-Man story, minus some of the melodrama.<br />
<br />
Finally, all threads converge. Amy has her big presentation at work (and since her focus group was sabotaged by the guy angling for her work, she's had to make do with asking guards, police officers etc. at various crime scenes what <i>they</i> would like in the finished product) but at the same time has to save her brother <i>and</i> make right a crime he committed without getting him implicated. She also gets shot with an assault rifle (and she is <i>not</i> invulnerable), and since she's running late, the presentation is taken over by the guy looking to steal the contract from her…<br />
<br />
This is a funny, intelligent and engaging superhero story, and I'll repeat the word that I think symbolizes it best: charming.<br />
<br />
In fact, utterly charming. Warmly recommended.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Here's an <a href="http://www.graphicnovelreporter.com/authors/sage-stossel/news/interview-112613">interview</a> with Stossel. And here is an <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2013/12/starling-a-xanax-popping-superhero/282570/">excerpt</a> (which I don't think does the story full justice, actually).</span>Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-42890166345596615662014-03-15T02:20:00.002+01:002019-12-29T16:39:46.259+01:00Aquaman: Death of a PrinceThere is a certain plot structure in superhero comics that can be taken as a pretty certain indicator that you're reading hack work. …All right, there are several, but the one I'm thinking of right now is this one: The hero has a confrontation with a villain, and loses. Basically having the hero at his mercy, the villain then retreats, shouting a threat – something like "you stopped me this time, but next time I'll finally succeed in killing you!". Subsequently, the hero searches out the villain and defeats him. The end.<br />
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There's plenty of that in <i>Aquaman: Death of a Prince</i>. To be honest, the whole collection sort of sucks.<br />
<br />
Plenty of creators worked on the stories in this collection – mainly Mike Grell, Jim Aparo and Don Newton & Dave Hunt on the art and Steve Skeates, Paul Levitz, Paul Kupperberg and David Micheliene on the writing. The Grell part seems to be very early in his career and the figure drawing and inking felt a bit awkward IMHO; the Don Newton chapters suffer from him not being really suited to action stories, he was far better at mood, and the Dave Hunt inking doesn't convey the elegance of Newton's shading that I've seen in some of his Batman stories; and the Jim Aparo chapters (the main part of the book) are gorgeous, and practically the one redeeming feature of this collection.<br />
<br />
The writing, as hinted at above, is pretty terrible. Apart from the villain-has-hero-at-his-mercy-and-flees scenario, there's also plenty of that perennial favorite, the-supposedly-inescapable-trap-that-the-villain-leaves-the-hero-in-and-leaves-because-he-has-"better"-things-to-do. Finally, the writers also kill off Aquaman's son in more or less a throwaway story arc, which ticks me off in more ways than one.<br />
<br />
First of all, I think it's a sign of lack of respect towards one's characters to casually throw enormous tragedies their way. They're not <i>real</i> people, I'm well aware of that, but just using them as playthings still rubs me the wrong way. If you don't have any respect for your characters, why should the reader? Second, if you <i>do</i> subject them to horrible tragedies, you owe it to the reader to explore the consequences of that. Here, Aquaman looks sad for a couple of panels, then goes back to fighting bad guys with just occasional thoughts about how sad it is to have lost his child and occasional stereotypically depicted outbursts of anger. The deep grief displayed on the (Jim Aparo) cover? Well, that's the sort of characterization writers like Michelinie or Kupperberg are really capable of; they're better at glib dialogue and stock plots. (Yeah, that's kinda harsh, but that <i>is</i> basically all they deliver here, as in most other stories I've read by them.)<br />
<br />
Oh, and I don't like the depiction of Mera, Aquaman's super-powered wife, either; she's way too much of the stereotypical, wide-eyed, near-helpless girl. (Until her son is killed and she starts hating Aquaman in a sort of crazy manner, of course, but that's not really an improvement.)<br />
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So is this a terrible book? No, not entirely, and that is all thanks to one man: Jim Aparo. His very clear, very strong and muscular (I almost typed "virile", which still wouldn't have been wrong) artwork saves this from being a total disaster. He can't save it from being bad, but he can actually make it worth your while to suffer through the bad writing, just to marvel at the power and clarity of his art. This is Aparo at the top of his game. Much like another old pro, Joe Kubert, he could make bad stories – well, not good, but let's call it aesthetically enjoyable. And plenty of today's comics artists could learn a thing or two from guys like Aparo on how to combine power, excitement <i>and</i> clarity of storytelling in one fine package.<br />
<br />
So, not recommended. This is not good comics. But if you want to enjoy some very good comics artwork, you can get this one just for Jim Bloody Amazing Aparo.<br />
<br />
(Second opinion: A far more positive review than mine can be found <a href="http://offthepanelcomicreview.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/review-aquaman-death-of-a-prince/">here.</a>)Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-70534338077735602812014-03-11T11:35:00.002+01:002014-03-13T11:29:30.314+01:00OK, so I created this comic, see…<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguUr2EDf1229uKhMIg8wVe_zQZKl4P83z6RVuXPFcw2Nj5Z3YRliCvq_cysd9Ez4YOp9TC2LhukSP0NY8UWfbcWLNBNWrfrLhunwLHsDALemgzdi0c9ZcltixBTAMi54YtvKPdMgAKpgqY/s1600/Mildh+&+Fromm+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguUr2EDf1229uKhMIg8wVe_zQZKl4P83z6RVuXPFcw2Nj5Z3YRliCvq_cysd9Ez4YOp9TC2LhukSP0NY8UWfbcWLNBNWrfrLhunwLHsDALemgzdi0c9ZcltixBTAMi54YtvKPdMgAKpgqY/s1600/Mildh+&+Fromm+2.jpg" height="320" width="232" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Art by the excellent Carlos Pedrazzini.<br />
Mildh & Fromm © Göran Semb, artwork © Carlos Pedrazzini.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
… and it took a while. I'm not exactly what you'd call a professional comics creator – I make roughly half my living from the comics business, but that's mainly as a translator – so I've never been pushed to produce comics on a regular basis. (Well, except for during a rather cash-depleted period around the year 2000, when I wrote one or two <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/91:an_(comic_strip)">91:an</a> stories per month because I absolutely had to. Fortunately, I got a job that eliminated that need just about when I ran out of ideas.)<br />
<br />
Anyway, several years ago, I had this idea for a comics character after a run-in with a bunch of, shall we say, somewhat intoxicated youths. It didn't turn violent, but it felt like it easily could have, so I – being something of a neurotic – started thinking of what I could have done had it actually <i>turned</i> violent.<br />
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The answer I reached was, not a whole lot.<br />
<br />
But my imagination had been kick-started, so I started thinking of things you could do if you were, well, the sort of person who <i>could</i> do those things. And then, having grown up on a steady diet of adventure comics (and similar stories in the film and TV series formats), I let my imagination run with the concept. Turned out I felt I had a potential hero in the works, and it also turned out there were more situations I could imagine him in. However, only delivering his tough-guy lines to crooks and the occasional police contact started getting tiresome pretty quickly, so I teamed him up with an older, more experienced partner so's he'd have somebody to talk to – which would also help me with exposition. As it turned out, the older agent was a natural choice for those cynical lines, leaving the original hero as more of a straight man in their banter.<br />
<br />
Anyway, this changed the dynamic of the situations I imagined my by now two heroes in. One concerned gaining entry into an apartment when two armed bad guys tried to stop them – first by subterfuge and then, when that doesn't work, through violent means. (Fortunately, there wasn't a large window by my door, so the neighbors couldn't see me when I acted out the scene by myself to check that it actually worked.) The experienced agent immediately took the lead, leaving the "junior" partner somewhat shocked by his capacity for rather ruthless violence.<br />
<br />
So I now had one working action scene. What was missing was a story to put it in. I started thinking about reasons why the pair of heroes would need to gain immediate entry to the apartment, and picking from a wide range of stock situations from the world of action/thriller/adventure stories that exist in the world of fiction, I picked "kidnapping". From there, I had to work out who was kidnapped, why, by whom, how my team of heroes got involved and how they found the place where the kidnap victim was held, and how it all would end. Somewhere along the road, my original hero had a sex change.<br />
<br />
See, looking over the story, I suddenly realized that I had exactly one (1) woman in the story, and that was the kidnap victim. Now, I'm not a fan of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test">Bechdel rule</a>; I think a work of narrative art stands on its own merits regardless of the genders of the characters, but I'm also not a fan of too stereotypical story structure, so I made a few changes. I <i>could</i> have made the older, more experienced agent female, of course, but I felt it more likely that the more experienced agent would be male; after all, traditionally, women have not participated in actual fighting to the same extent as men – and as the adventures of my heroes, Monica Mildh and Erik Fromm, will involve quite a bit of, shall we say… probability-bending, I think it's important to base as much as possible of it in an at least seemingly-realistic world, not straining the reader's credulity except when you <i>really</i> have to. (And yes, Erik's name is indeed inspired by the late, great psychologist and philosopher <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Fromm">Erich Fromm</a>. It is also a pun, though: "mild" means <i>mild</i> in Swedish, just as in English, and "from" means <i>pious</i>.)<br />
<br />
Anyway, to cut to the chase, I solved the various problems that had to be solved to make the story work (which doesn't make it a great story, of course; it just means that it doesn't fall apart at first glance like a standard Hollywood action movie) and wrote a script, and set about finding an artist. That wasn't exactly easy, and in the end, I had to go outside of Sweden's borders to find the skillful and very professional <a href="http://www.carlospedrazzini.com.ar/">Carlos Pedrazzini</a>. I sent him the script, he sent me his pencilled preliminary pages, I put in the text so's he'd know how much space the speech balloons would need (and occasionally asked him to change something) and he produced inked and colored finished pages. Finally, I lettered the whole thing in Swedish and sent it over to the Swedish <i>Fantomen</i> (<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom">The Phantom</a></i>) comic book, where it is just now being published, in issue #6-7/2014.<br />
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Now, my hope is that <i>Mildh & Fromm</i> will be sufficiently favorably received by the readers that the editor will buy more of their adventures, as I have 6-10 more stories about them in various stages of readiness, from finished script to rough plot, but you never know. Nevertheless, it has been exciting to try and create my own comic, and I'm grateful to Carlos Pedrazzini for partnering with me to make it a reality.Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-37145943567964202352014-02-12T03:48:00.004+01:002014-02-12T03:48:49.618+01:00Aquaman: Time and Tide by Peter David, Kirk Jarvinen & Brad VancataI've always liked Peter David's stuff, ever since he burst on the Marvel scene with some brilliant Spider-Man stories way back when I was still buying single issues. He started out funny (extremely funny, in fact) and then went on to prove (in <i>The Death of Jean DeWolff</i>) that he could do the serious stuff as well, so I had high hopes for him. Time passed, and he turned into (for me) a reliable-but-not-quite-brilliant superhero scribe who didn't get the greatest characters and artists, but still turned out solid material – if not as brilliantly funny as those earliest efforts that, for example, placed Spidey in the high-rise-less suburbs for one memorable issue with beautiful inks by, IIRC, Bob McCleod.<br />
<br />
Anyway, apparently David has an affinity for the Aquaman character and did not only a massive history of it called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atlantis_Chronicles#Atlantis_Chronicles"><i>The Atlantis Chronicles</i></a>, but followed it up with a 1993 four-issue mini-series, <i>Aquaman: Time and Tide</i>, which details Aquaman's personal history. It is also the title of this collection of those four issues.<br />
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In the first chapter, we witness Aquaman's first encounter with surface-dwelling super-heroes (the Flash) and -criminals (the Trickster), eventually making him a hero with the surface world, as well as making him realize he doesn't like the surface world. Next chapter, David shows us how Aquaman grew up with a herd of dolphins (well, they're <i>really</i> called "pods", but I'm not going to pretend that I knew that without checking on Wikipedia), although they're initially reluctant to take him in. (Yes, there's a bit of a Tarzan vibe to this part of the origin.) Third chapter details his <i>first</i> solid, teenage encounter with the surface world, including a love story with a young Eskimo (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inupiat_people">Inupiat</a>) girl which ends badly because, well, Arthur is fundamentally bad luck for people getting close to him – a theme developed in earlier series with the death of his son, resultant insanity of his wife, and alienation of his young pal Aqualad, and now solidified by David.<br />
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The fourth chapter of the collection is a bit of a letdown as a finish to the series, actually, as it's mainly the Ocean Master turning up to do battle with him and being defeated, plus dark hinting about much worse things to come. Basically, it's a cliffhanger that doesn't really have you all that acutely worried; it's more depressing than actually tense or exciting. The Jarvinen-Vancata art team shares a bit of the blame with David for the lack of drama. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a 1993-94 comic, there is a strong hint of Image Comics in the art, mainly of the Erik Larsen - Rob Liefield variety – as in "cartoony but not elegantly cartoony", which doesn't lend itself easily to either exciting action or strong drama.<br />
<br />
There are a couple of strong points in the script, though. Many think that it defined the character, and I guess it probably did, but it doit in a way that really drew me into the story. Like <i>The Atlantis Chronicles</i>, it comes of a bit too much like a, well, "history" rather than "story". The best chapter is the second one, where we can observe how important "the Way" is to the various denizens of the ocean. If something is a good thing or not to do is very much decided by whether it's their "Way" or not. Different species have different Ways, and, as the young Arthur learns in this story of love and death, if you want others to respect your Way, you're going to have to respect their Way as well. It's a very solid, well-crafted story – and it would have been more poignant with more theme-relevant artwork IMO.<br />
<br />
Anyway, with only four chapters it's not a thick collection and it only costs ten dollars (or did when it was published in 1996), so it's worth a read even though I wouldn't call it a major work. Like I said above about much of Peter David's other work, it's certainly competently told and with some good bits, but never <i>really</i> exciting – at least not to me.<br />
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Sorta so-so recommended.Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-10417931735543101462013-12-31T03:54:00.001+01:002013-12-31T03:54:14.259+01:00What have I done?, 2013 editionWell, not as much as I wanted. I probably took on a bit too much work this year, but I <i>do</i> have a new house to pay for. Anyway, here's this year's book list, unfortunately only about two-thirds of what it should have been at a <i>minimum</i> – I hope to rectify that in 2014, but we'll see.<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Eva-Lis Bjurman: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Barnen på gatan</i> ("The children on the street") </span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Been a while since I read this one. Basically, IIRC, in the 1800s-early 1900s, </span>workers' kids<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> not getting sufficiently civilized by culture etc was seen as a problem by the finer strata of </span>society, and efforts were made to socialize them into a more proper, bourgeois model of how children should be, and the book depicts the debate and methods for this. (IIRC, that is.)<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Peter Olausson: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Tredje rikets myter</i> ("The myths of the </span>Third<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Reich")</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As you're probably well aware, the Nazis built quite the mythology to underpin their rule – </span>myths<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> about various sorts of "untermenschen", and a whole mythology about the so-called Aryans and their background and glorious future, etc. This book is about those sorts of myths, </span>including Holocaust denial. I remember it as worth the read; it was an easy-going, pretty fast read.<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sara Arrhenius: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>En riktig kvinna. Om biologism och könsskillnad</i> ("A real woman. About biologism and gender differences")</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A feminist who isn't happy with the theories of gender differences coming from evolutionary psychology and such, attacking theses about gender differences in our society being based on actual biological differences between </span>the<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> sexes.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Anne Banér: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Uppkäftiga ungar och oförargliga barn. Barn i svensk skämtpress 1894-1924</i> ("Sassy kids and well-behaved children. Children in Swedish humor magazines 1894-1924")</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A look at how children were depicted in Swedish humor magazines at the turn of the century. Worth the read, partly to get a look at the cartoons by some excellent artists, partly for the cultural history </span>aspect<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Bruce Grenvill et al: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Krazy! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art</i> </span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This is an exhibition catalog, and as such laboring under certain constraints. First, the pictures are going to have primacy, and not all of them deserve that primacy IMO. Second, the text isn't (usually) going to be allowed the space needed for real depth and breadth on the subject. IIRC, it's three examples of each art form along with </span>introductory<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> texts. I thought it was kind of interesting to see examples of stuff I don't usually get in contact with, and peer into what goes on in art forms I don't usually get into. Still, I prefer more traditional books on subjects I want to learn more about; for an exhibition I want works that'll keep my attention longer than the usual comics etc fare – </span>in other<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> words, while I certainly think comics, for example, deserve to be put on display in exhibits, like traditional art, they need to be pretty damn well-crafted to keep my attention, and most comics just aren't that well done, art-wise.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Matthew M. Hurley, Dnaiel C. Dennett & Reginald B. Adams, Jr.:<i> </i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Inside Jokes. Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Heavy on the philosophical and speculative side. A tough slough language-wise if you're not used to that sort of reading, not really offering enough insight to be worth the effort unless you're quite interested in the subject.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Niklas Zetterling & Anders Frankson: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Hitlers första nederlag. Anfallet mot Moskva</i> ("Hitler's first defeat. The attack on Moscow")</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">How the Nazi onslaught ground to a halt in without reaching Moscow (although they came way too close for comfort). Pretty (high-)standard military history, well done and well worth the read.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">John Steinberg: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Humanistiskt ledarskap lönar sig</i> ("Humanistic leadership pays") </span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Steinberg argues that if you treat the people working for and with you decently and care about what <i>they</i> want to get out of life and work, you'll have a better-functioning workplace, which'll not only be a better place to work in, bt ultimately a more efficient one as well. Pretty standard management (self-help-ish) handbook; not bad. Worth the read.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Patrick Lencioni: </span><i>The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: a Leadership Fable</i> ("<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Fem felfunktioner i en grupp och hur man skapar en fungerande arbetsgemenskap")</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">See Steinberg above, pretty much.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sulo Huovinen, red.: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Finland i det svenska riket</i> ("Finland in the Swedish state") </span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Finland basically wasn't a "part" of Sweden until we lost it to Russia through utterly stupid "</span>statesmanship" from a couple of kings (notably Gustav III and Gustav IV); Finland and Sweden were one nation. This book explores some of the historical ties between Finland and Sweden – I think; it's a collection of historical essays and a bit on the dry side, so it didn't leave a huge impression on my memory.<br />
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Goodin, Headey, Muffels & Dirven: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Compares the United States free-market liberalism-driven system, the German corporate and the Netherlands social democratic (sor social liberal) models by looking at statistics for the countries over a ten-year period of time. They compare reams of data to evaluate which welfare model is the best. For equality, that seems to be the social democratic model; for social integration, the corporatist regime seems to hold the upper hand. However, the social democratic model seems to be better at not just promoting equality but also at reducing poverty, and it does pretty much as well as the corporatist model at promoting stability and social integration, so it is declared the winner.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I have no truck with that; being a social liberal myself, that is pretty much the model I prefer myself – however, unlike people to the left of me, I think we need to adjust that model to avoid curbing </span>initiative<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> and work force participation, because without a sufficiently hard-working and enterprising population, the social democratic welfare state will </span>collapse<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> under costs it cannot afford in the long run. (Basically, that is at the core of the current Swedish political debate on these issues, even though that is frequently hidden underneath over-the-top rhetoric. Anyway and conveniently enough, </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">you can read the book for yourself </span><a href="http://www.academia.edu/1148797/The_Real_Worlds_of_Welfare_Capitalism" style="letter-spacing: 0px;">here.</a><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Peter Santesson: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Reformpolitikens strategier</i> ("Strategies of reform politics")</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">IIRC, this one would have been more honestly titled "Strategies for implementing neo-liberalist policies", but I'm a bit hazy on it. I remember it as having a clear ideological tendency, but nevertheless delivering a worthwhile overview of the tools available for effecting policy change – basically negotiation, </span>persuasion<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> and coercion, according to </span>one<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span>review.<br />
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Francis Spufford: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Red Plenty. Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Excellent history of the failure of the Soviet economical model, written as a decades-spanning novel. Well written, captivating and highly recommended.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Kalle Holmqvist & Anders Roth (ed): </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Kuba på riktigt</i> ("Cuba for real")</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A (kinda thin) collection of essays and articles by Swedish leftists who've visited Cuba and </span>believe<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> themselves to have seen the "true" Cuba. Basically, they're all making various excuses for the Castro dictatorship, showing themselves to be dictator-huggers with little concern for oppressed people as long as the oppressor professes to be a socialist. Pretty disgusting.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Thomas Gustafsson: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Kuba</i> ("Cuba")</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The opposite of the above. A thick book giving a highly readable history and analysis of Cuba. Gustafsson is highly knowledgeable and doesn't believe that being a tourist in Cuba for not-quite a week makes one an expert; instead, hes spent a considerable part of his adult life reporting from and learning about the country, and it shows. Highly readable, with depth. He doesn't excuse the dictatorship, notes the comparatively high standard of social and medical services – for a long time paid for with extensive </span>economic<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> support from the Soviet Union – the inefficient economy, the lack of freedom, and the stupidity of the U.S. economic boycott. Highly recommended.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Robert Service: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Lenin. <i>A Biography</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Basically, there seems to have been something wrong with Lenin. Seriously. </span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This book goes deep into details, which makes it a bit less-than-readable. OTOH, it possibly helped the readability of the two other Lenin bios I read this summer that I'd already gotten so much biographical info about him from this one. Anyway, not the Lenin bio to start with, I'd have to say.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Andrew Taylor: </span><i>Books That Changed the World</i> ("<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Böcker som förändrade världen. De 50 viktigaste böckerna genom tiderna")</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Taylor lists the 50 most important books in history in his opinion – and you can make many such lists, of course. This one is well-argued and gives brief overviews of the books and their importance. Worth the read.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Tom DeFalco: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Comics Creators On Fantastic Four</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Tom DeFalco: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Comics Creators On Spider-Man</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I thought DeFalco was a terrible comics writer, doing shallow, formulaic stuff, and overall Marvel quality took a dive under his editorial hand. However, he turns out to be a really good interviewer, so this is well worth reading. However, I can't agree with the self-congratulatory tone of some of the people he interviews. (Like for example Ralph Macchio, who was very much a part of the declining editorial standards of Marvel in those days.) </span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Amusing observation: Stan Lee is among the people interviewed, and of course he wouldn't be Stan Lee if he didn't spend part of the interview doing the hard sell for a book he's newly written… Anyway, recommended.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Madeleine von Heland: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Gudar, makt och massmedia – en odyssé med Pinocchio till Superman</i> ("Gods, power and mass media – an odyssey with Pinocchio to Superman")</span><br />
Over-interprets certain movies (like <i>Pinocchio</i>) to make them fit a thesis. Not worth the read, really.<br />
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Johan Hakelius: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Döda vita män</i> ("Dead white men")</span><br />
Johan Hakelius is sort of the lazy neo-liberal; he gave up on trying to change Swedish politics and settled for making a comfortable living writing columns and books; for this book he seems to have gotten a stipend for writing some sort of analytical book, and instead read up on a bunch of British eccentrics and made a book out of a huge number of anecdotes about them.<br />
It works, but it's kind of light fare.<br />
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Dmitri Volkogonov: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Trotsky. The Eternal Revolutionary</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Volkogonov is the loyal official Red Army historian who got access to the archives, read what the Communist leaders and founders of the Soviet Union actually did, and became an anti-communist. That is, if you believe him; if you're a left-winger who wants to keep his faith in Lenin, Trotsky et al, you can always claim that he just adjusted his opinions to fit the new Russian leaders (like Boris Jeltsin). Me, I tend to not trust the judgement of people who actually think Lenin et al were on to something good, since the result of their efforts was a totalitarian, murderous and soul-crushing dictatorship, but what do I know?</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Anyway, recommended. Like Lenin, there seems to have been something wrong with Trotsky as well.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Louisiana Revy</i>, 49. årgång nr. 2, oktober 2008: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>MANGA! Japanske billeder</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Another exhibit catalog; not really worth your time. Read a couple of proper introductory handbooks instead; it'll take longer but ultimately be more rewarding.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Jessica Abel & Matt Madden: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Drawing Words and Writing Pictures. A Definitive Course from Concept to Comic in 15 Lessons</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">How to do comics. Not bad, though not quite the "definite" course, I'd say.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Tom Holland: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Millennium: the end of the world and the forging of Christendom</i> ("</span>Tusenårsstriden. Hur kristendomen segrade i Västeuropa")<br />
Well, Tom Holland knows his craft, which is to make old history readable to the modern reader. This period is a bit messy, but Holland makes an effort to create a readable narrative out of it. To quote from the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3561036/Review-Millennium-by-Tom-Holland.html">Telegraph review:</a> "<span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">Holland's broad sweep takes in all the major wars and political upheavals over a 200-year period, starting with the great shift of power from Carolingians to Saxon 'Ottonians' in the early 10th century, and ending with the Norman conquest of Sicily in the late 11th century and the astonishing capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099."</span><br />
One power struggle Holland concentrates on is that between the German-Roman emperor and the Pope, but ultimately, he bites off more than he can chew – or rather, make a functioning narrative of. The book is still interesting, because there's so much that is happening during this time and it's well worth your time to learn about it, but <i>Millennium</i> isn't quite the book it should have been to help the reader understand these events. I'll go with those reviewers who've recommended reading Holland's <i>Rubicon</i> instead.<br />
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Rickard Berghorn & Annika Johansson: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Mörkrets mästare. Skräcklitteraturen genom tiderna</i> ("Masters of darkness. Horror literature through the ages")</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Now </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">this</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> is how you write about so-called subculture. You start out by being very knowledgeable about the subject, give a historical overview highlighting </span>import ant developments, and finish it off by offering the reader a bunch biographical essays presenting important creators and their works in more detail. Excellent stuff, highly recommended.<br />
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Hélène Carrère d'Encausse: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Lenin</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">An excellent, highly readable biography of somebody who doesn't quite seem to have been </span>quite right in the head, but who nevertheless managed to impose his view of what society should be on a great nation, creating a great f***ing disaster.<br />
Recommended. My choice if you only have time to read one of the three Lenin bios I read this summer.<br />
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Tim Pilcher & Brad Brooks: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>The Essential Guide to World Comics</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you only have 300 or so pages to present all the world's comics, you're going to have to keep a pretty brisk tempo (especially if you waste some of that space on full-page illustrations that possibly, at least some of them, didn't quite warrant that kind of exposure). Still, you get a pretty decent overview of several countries and regions for the space the writers had to work with. A good interest-whetter; recommended.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Kristian Gerner: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Ryssland.</i> <i>En europeisk civilisationshistoria </i>("Russia. History of a European civilization")</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Gerner is a historian who knows Russia well, and feels that the Communist disaster din't have to happen to a great country and its people. Nevertheless, it did, and it had consequences. Worth reading; Gerner knows his stuff. </span>Recommended.<br />
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Scott Adams: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>God's Debris. A Thought Experiment</i> ("</span>Tankeexperimentet eller Den Gamle och De Stora Frågorna")<br />
Well, I like <i>Dilbert</i>. This seems to be a book written by Adams to get people thinking about various things, but it has too little in the way of an actual author's viewpoint to agree or disagree with to be worth it to me.<br />
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Amid Amidi: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Cartoon Modern. Style and Design in Fifties Animation</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">An excellent history of the stylized animation produced during, well, mainly the fifties – </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNsyQDmEopw" style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Gerald McBoing-Boing</a><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, or Jules Feiffer's absolutely brilliant </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNgiWU9LY7A" style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Munro</a><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, for example. Amidi is </span>unnecessarily<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> haughty towards the classical animation of Disney and others, but apart from that, this is very good stuff, giving the reader an overview of the animation studios producing the new-style films as well as important creators – animators, designers, directors. Highly recommended.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Susanne Pettersson & Göran Persson: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Dra åt samma håll! </i>("Pull in the same direction!")</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Another "humanistic </span>management" book; apart from the annoying format – it's supposedly told by an employee learning how to create a good, creative and productive working-place environment from his new boss, much like Lencioni's book – it contains decent advice.<br />
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Dmitri Volkogonov: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Stalin. Triumph and Tragedy</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Stalin's rise to power, and what he did with it. </span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Not. Right. In. The. Head.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Gus Martin: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Understanding Terrorism. Challenges, Perspectives, and Issues</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A basic </span>introductory<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> text for university courses, I'm guessing. A bit too basic for my tastes, but if you want an introduction, it can work. A bit too much "summarizing complex issues in 4-5 bullet points" for my tastes, though.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Dmitri Volkogonov: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Lenin. A New Biography</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Volkogonov seems to really despise Lenin, in the manner one </span>might<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> expect from someone who's trusted somebody and then been heavily betrayed by him, but it sometimes gets in the way of the narrative about Lenin's actual deeds. A lot of stuff from the archives about how Lenin actually ruled. Basically, Volkogonov's thesis is that while Stalin took the communist dictatorship to the next level, most of the levers of power and oppression he used had already been installed under Lenin. Recommended.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Richard Stoneman: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Legends of Alexander the Great</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">See, Alexander the Great met strange people in his travels. Some of them were kind of hippies, living in peace on a basic level, taking what </span>they<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> needed from </span>nature and not aspiring to wordily power over others<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, and they either a) taught him how useless it was to try and gain the world but lose one's soul, or b) showed by contrast how accomplished he was. Which lesson these legends were trying to impose on the listener/reader seems to have depended on who told them (and where Christianity was in its historical development; contemplative or, well, not-so-contemplative). Worth reading half of it; the legends get a bit repetitive and predictable after a while.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Lillian S. Robinson: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Wonder Women. Feminisms and Superheroes</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Cultural studies and feminism takes on superheroes. Superheroes lose, ideology wins. Plus inordinate amounts of commas and subclauses Robinson's sentences. Has some worthwhile observations, but isn't overall worth the effort.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett: </span><i>The Spirit Level</i> ("<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Jämlikhetsanden. Därför är mer jämlika samhällen nästan alltid bättre samhällen")</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Reading this, it seemed to me that Wilkinson and Pickett were sort of </span>cherry-picking<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> their statistics to enhance their thesis and to expand its applicability. Turns out that's a very common and strong criticism against the book. (I thought it was very odd that they only did bivariate analyses, for example, instead of trying to tease out what the really important factors in various issues are. Also, they seem to sometimes exclude or include certain countries from their analyses as it befits their thesis.)</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As could be predicted, various </span>leftists writing for Swedish newspapers' <span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">cultural pages </span>happily<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> latched on to the book's conclusion: that by eradicating inequality, society is basically going to solve most of its ills (that's in fact only a very small exaggeration on my part), instead of looking critically at how it reaches that conclusion</span> (well, <i>practically</i> that conclusion)<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If Wilkinson and Pickett had instead concentrated on showing the negative consequences of high levels of inequality instead of offering equality as the cure-all for society's ills, this would have been a book to recommend. As it is, it isn't.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Anu Mai Kõll (ed.): </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Kommunismens ansikten</i> ("The faces of communism")</span><br />
Some<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> very good history and analysis of the consequences of communism; it's academic rather than polemic, which makes it far </span>mrs<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> interesting than it would otherwise have been. Recommended.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Stefan Olsson: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Handbok i konservatism</i> ("Manual for conservatism")</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">An apologia for conservatism that isn't uninteresting, but which ultimately glosses over too many of its problems to be convincing.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Hanna Miodrag: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Comics and Language. Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Too combative against those views the author disagrees with; it gets a bit </span>repetitive<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> after a while and that becomes more problematic than it would have been in a book not so heavily-invested in big-words academic language – it's already not an easy read if you're not into that sort of writing, so you don't want to spend time rehashing basically the same attacks as you read in the last chapter. That said, Miodrag's own views, that comics can't be analyzed as an overall language, but instead you have to read each comic in its own context and interpret it from that viewpoint, is very much valid (and mirrors my own).</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Worth reading, could have been more worth reading.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ella Odstedt: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Varulven i svensk folktradition</i> ("The werewolf in Swedish folk tradition")</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Odstedt collected a lot of folklore in the first half of the 1900s. This is the standard book about Swedish werewolf folklore: how pregnant women's magical rituals for ensuring pain-free childbirth would entail the child becoming a werewolf, how magically-skilled Finns or Samis could turn themselves "regular" people into </span>werewolves<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> or </span>werebears – as evidenced by the dead bear having a belt with a knife in it under its fur when you skinned it – and how pregnant women needed to be escorted by a male, even a boy, when moving about outside the safe confines of the home to avoid being attacked by a werewolf who wanted to tear out the fetus from her womb and eat it in order to be cured from his werewolf affliction.<br />
Excellent stuff. Some modern essays commenting on the issues are also included, and they are not up to the quality of Odstedt's stuff. For example, a feminist writer jumps on the obvious interpretations of the above, telling us how it's obviously an attempt to constrain women that they needed to be accompanied by a male everywhere and how targeting their magical rituals for pain-free childbirth as creating a werewolf out of the child makes them nothing more than vehicles for child production. She doesn't make the effort to actually problematize the issue, looking at alternative interpretations – for example, a pregnant woman might need help and assistance in other ways than warding off werewolves, and obliging somebody to accompany her might also be seen as giving her support; also, the Church's attempts to eradicate old-fashioned folk magic (or: superstition) cannot IMO be so easily brushed off as simply trying to control women – after all, the Church certainly looked quite askance at "magic" used by males as well. In my view, you should put in commenting essays in a book like this to offer depth and complicate or explain things, not just to offer ideological boilerplate.<br />
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Johnny Ambrius: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Sällsamheter i Södra Sverige</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Well, I recently reviewed this one, so you can jolly well go back and read the review.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Christian Peters: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>100 mästare och deras bästa verk. 10 tio-i-top-listor i odödlig litteratur</i> ("100 masters and their best works. 10 top ten lists of immortal literature")</span><br />
The author comes of as somewhat officious, but basically, the works and authors he presents are well worth canonical status.<br />
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Albert O. Hirschman: </span><i>The Rhetoric of Reaction. Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy </i>("<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Den reaktionära retoriken. Konsten att argumentera mot alla samhällsförändringar")</span><br />
<br />
Hirschman looks at how all reforms have been met with the same kind of arguments from people defending the status quo: "It'll just have the opposite effect", It won't change anything", "It risks to hurt what we've already accomplished", regardless of their applicability on the actual situation.<br />
I've met the same kind of argumentation from (mainly) right-wing reactionaries, something that has gradually strengthened my conviction that you always have to demand that people offer more constructive criticism than this sort of – again – boilerplate. Recommended.<br />
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Bengt Nilsson: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Sveriges afrikanska krig</i> ("Sweden's African wars")</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Nilsson is (rightly, IMO) furious that Sweden's international aid to a way-too-large extent has been spent propping up </span>undemocratically<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> regimes. The book's title alludes to aid money often can either be used directly for war purposes, or to replace money for social welfare and actual infrastructure development in a country's budget, leaving the rulers free tu use all the more money to enrich themselves and to fight wars against other countries or parts of their own population instead.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<a href="http://sembtext.blogspot.se/2013/12/blake-w-mobley-terrorism-and.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: black;">Blake W. Mobley: <i>Terrorism and Counterintelligence: How Terrorist Groups Elude Detection</i></span></a><br />
Scroll up a bit to read the actual review of this one.<br />
<br />
Well, that's it. I was going to do a similar post about the comics I've read this year as well, but this was exhausting enough that I'll probably forego that. I'll try to use the energy saved to post more reviews next year instead.Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-6835643334309463632013-12-25T03:02:00.004+01:002013-12-25T03:11:50.006+01:00Blake W. Mobley: Terrorism and Counterintelligence: How Terrorist Groups Elude DetectionBlake Mobley is a former CIA analyst now working at RAND. <i>Terrorism and Counterintelligence: How Terrorist Groups Elude Detection</i> looks at how a number of terrorist organizations have approached the important task of counter-intelligence, and how different key factors shape the challenges and efficiency of their counter-intelligence work.<br />
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This is a book that really didn't need to be a whole book for the conclusions it draws, as they're pretty easily summarized in three sentences or less, but I still found it worth reading not just for the discussion of exactly <i>how</i> these factors shape the counter-intelligence work, but also for the general discussion of principles of counter-intelligence work, and the terrorist group histories – the case studies, so to speak – which illustrate Mobley's points. There are four chapters on the Provisional IRA, Fatah & Black September, Al Qaida, and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Gama%27a_al-Islamiyya">Egyptian Islamic Group</a>, respectively, as well as a chapter on a number of embryonic terrorist groups who failed to meet the counter-intelligence challenges their situations entailed, and who consequently were eliminated.<br />
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I won't rehash the histories of the various groups here; there's Wikipedia and Mobley's book (and others) for those sufficiently interested, and I'm a bit short on time. Instead, I'll present the major theoretical findings of the book – or, the three key factors that "shape how and how well a group identifies and mitigates (…) counterintelligence threats".<br />
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The job of counter-intelligence is to defend the organization against <i>human spies</i>, <i>technical collection of</i> various forms of <i>communication</i>, <i>direct observation</i> of the organization's activities in its area of operations and/or controlled territory, <i>passive observation</i> of the group's members moving in/through hostile territory, and <i>exposure in the media</i>.<br />
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<b>Organizational structure</b> – more specifically, whether the organizations is strongly controlled top-down or its control functions are decentralized, determines whether there'll be strong, standardized procedures in place to deny the enemy's attempts to penetrate the organization. Standard operating procedures will greatly improve counter-intelligence capabilities – but it also entails a risk: if the enemy knows what your organization is doing to prevent penetration, it can adapt to counter those specific standards and procedures. If, instead, the counter-intelligence methods used depend on who the local commander is, it becomes much harder for the enemy to predict.<br />
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<b>Popular support</b> makes it harder for the group's enemies to find informants, and to move among the group's supportive populations undetected and/or unreported. However, if you spend too much time and energy on gaining the population's support – for example, through frequent media appearances – you risk accidentally offering information that your enemies will use to get at you (Mobley offers Yassir Arafat's many media appearances as an example of this).<br />
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<b>Controlled territory</b> makes it a lot easier for a terrorist group to train and plan activities, and makes it a problem for its enemies to get close to observe and penetrate it. However, at the same time, it offers those enemies a clear and obvious target for their intelligence operations – and it can also make the terrorist organization overly confident, leading to laxer standards and thus increased opportunities for its enemies.<br />
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Anyway, recommended. A negative review on Amazon lists a number of details supposedly wrong with the PIRA chapter, but they're all just that; details that don't seem to affect the general narrative in any major way, nor the theoretical conclusions.<br />
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(Unfortunately, I've been unable to verify whether this is the same Blake Mobley who's apparently written a number of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dungeons_%26_Dragons_modules">Dungeons and Dragons</a> stuff.)Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-60247022751851815092013-12-23T02:25:00.004+01:002013-12-23T02:27:04.349+01:00Gray, Palmiotti & DeZuniga: Jonah Hex: No Way backYou know how in old movies, they have the bad guys do something really bad, like beat up or kill somebody, to show how bad they are? And how in old-but-not-<i>that</i>-old movies, say from the seventies-eighties, they have the bad guys do something really bad, like torture or kill somebody? And how in films from the nineties-onwards, they show how bad the bad guys are by having them do something really bad, like rape somebody or commit mass murder?<br />
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This evil-deeds inflation is something that bugs me; it seems the violence keeps getting nastier and gorier even in mainstream, big-studio movies, and it's real unpleasant to watch – and it also, IMO, shows a lack of respect for the characters in the story to so casually and cruelly use and abuse them just to paint the bad guys as sufficient monsters to justify all the vicious violence the hero will use against them. Yes, I know, those characters aren't really <i>real</i>, but it still bugs me, even apart from the aspect that I don't think it's a good thing to normalize really nasty acts of violence. It's just <i>lazy</i> – "we can't be bothered to spend time and energy to do actual characterization, because we'd rather use that time for explosions and overlong action/fight scenes". Bleah.<br />
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Anyway, let's leave the big-budget, well-crafted (if not necessarily good) movies and move to the done-more-on-the-cheap B and C movie fare that can be seen so frequently on television and in the dvd rental shops. Here, the same technique for establishing the bad guys' badness is used, but it's done even more slapdash, with even more clichéd situations and dialogue. They can't be bothered to use a writer who writes dialogue that actually sonds like something real people might conceivably say. Also, the same laziness and recourse to stereotypes can be seen in the way the setting for the film is established. You know how John Ford would use the landscape not just to establish the setting, but also to create a mood, in his movies? Well, nowadays, in the B fare, you'll see a couple of standard scenes to establish the setting and basic premise of the story, and then the moviemakers'll go straight to the trite fight scenes – which is, after all, what their audience is there to see.<br />
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This can be done very swiftly. For a western, you can have a stranger riding into a town dragging three dead bodies behind his horse. Scared women peak through their windows and then quickly draw the curtains. A rich fat cat observes from his office on the second floor above the saloon; then nods to his (ugly) henchman: "Check out who this guy is." A couple of prostitutes hanging out outside the saloon come on to the stranger with some lewd suggestions. Another, better-looking prostitute recognizes the stranger, greets him by name and is rewarded with a crooked grin and a promise to look her up later. Hard-looking men walking down the street pause, look at the stranger, then on the corpses he's dragging along, and spit at them. Finally, the stranger reins in his horse in front of the sheriff's office, and a frightened-looking, not particularly athletic or young sheriff comes out from his office and asks why the stranger had to come with the Holder boys to <i>his</i> town; he has enough problems as it is.<br />
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Now, I'd be the first to admit that the above isn't any great writing, but I'm betting you already know how that film would play out. That's because we've already seen basically the same story again and again – and sometimes the film is actually good, because it is well made, has some good dialogue, and good acting. Mostly, however, it's not very good; in fact, usually, it kind of sucks, because everything seems done by rote and nothing is original, not even – or rather, especially – the sadistic, sociopathic depredations of the bad guys. And it still "works", at some level, because even though very little care goes into crafting how the story unfolds, because we already know the story so well, we still know what's going on – leaving the moviemakers free to concentrate on the stock confrontational scenes that is the film's real <i>raison d'être</i>.<br />
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And that brings me to Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_DeZuniga">Tony DeZuniga's</a> <i>Jonah Hex: No Way Back</i>.<br />
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The previous, Swedish-language, review was basically a lament that <i>All-Star Western: Guns And Gotham</i> was basically Jonah jumping from situation to situation where he could shoot-shoot-shoot and punch-punch-punch more-more-more than anybody else; not winning his battles through any cleverness but just the incompetence of his multitudes of enemies, who can't seem to hit him even though they're two dozens and he's basically standing unprotected out in the open while he's gunning them down by the, well, dozens. So I wasn't happy with it.<br />
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Anyway, I figured I'd give them one more chance, as I'd already bought this book quite a while ago, and it had the art of good ol' Tony DeZuniga, the original Jonah artist, whom I've always appreciated.<br />
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Anyway, in <i>No Way Back</i> we are told the story of how Jonah was left by his mother in the uncaring hands of his vicious beast of a father, and how he many years later happens to find his mother, an alcoholic prostitute with tuberculosis, and learns from her – through basically torturing her by withholding booze from her until she tells him what he wants to know – that he has a half-brother. Then she dies. Jonah takes the coffin with his dead (and now rather smelly) mother to the peaceful town where the brother lives and works as a sheriff and preacher. Meanwhile, he also finds time to use a beautiful young woman who's turned on by this merciless killer for sex, and to casually kill a very large bunch of Mexican criminals who've murdered a bunch of innocent indians for the bounty the government has put on Apache scalps. As it happens, the leader of the gang they belong to very much wants to hurt and kill Jonah, so he follows in his tracks, casually torturing, murdering and raping the people Jonah's been in contact with.<br />
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I won't give away the final battle and its ending; instead I'll just note two things:<br />
a) How well the story conforms to the stereotyped generic story I outlined above; you've seen all these elements before, and you don't get much more than just the bare basics of characterization, because, well, you know, you already know all the elements of tis story anyway, don't you?<br />
b) It's not really the fact that the story is clichéd that annoys me, it's how it's done with so little flair. Jonah being abused by his father, his relationship with his mother, the contrast between himself and his goody-two-shoes brother – all this is stuff that could have made for really interesting reading if Gray and Palmiotti had bothered to delve a bit more deeply into it instead of concentrating on "boy, Jonah is one tough, bad hombre, delivering casually cruel and hard lines with inerrant reliability, doesn't he?" and "boy, Jonah sure guns down bad guys casually and brutally efficiently, without a scintilla of emotion, doesn't he?".<br />
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I doesn't help that DeZuniga's art isn't really up to his old standards; in fairness, he was an old man when he drew this, and perhaps already marked by illness, but it's still too sketchy, anatomically weak and stiff in the movements of the characters at times to be really enjoyable; at times it reminded me of sort of a Gene Colan who'd lost his elegance and was inked by some awkward, not-very good inker. At basically 4-to-6 panels per page, the individual pictures are so large that they really need an artist that's on his toes. Sadly DeZuniga wasn't here, despite his long history of excellent art, especially as an inker.<br />
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So this book suffers from a combination of unoriginal content and execution without flair. Not recommended. I recommend the first John Albano-written parts of <i>Showcase Presents: Jonah Hex Vol 1</i> instead – and if the second volume, coming out very soon, includes the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Fleisher">Michael Fleisher</a>-scripted, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Heath">Russ Heath</a>-drawn story about Jonah's ultimate death and taxidermy (yes, you read that one correctly), I'll recommend that as well. But <i>Jonah Hex: No Way Back</i> is just a B movie.Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1916866152079347932.post-18573640037858954742013-12-23T00:03:00.000+01:002013-12-23T00:04:37.032+01:00Jonny Ambrius: Sällsamheter i Södra Sverige ("Strange Occurrences in Southern Sweden")So, in Sweden, early every Christmas morning, there is service at the Church. This is called the <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julotta">julotta</a></i> (jul = Christmas, otta = early morning), and in the olden days, you had better be there. Nowadays, it's a nice tradition for many. However, it wasn't so nice for the woman in Vallby, a village in southern Sweden, who woke up early, misread the clock, and went to the church several hours too early.<br />
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When she approached the church, nothing seemed amiss. Lights were lit, and the sound of psalms being sung with great conviction carried far. So she went inside, but when the priest turned away from the altar to face the congregation, she recognized to her horror that it was a priest who'd been dead for several years. She looked out over the congregation, and realized that it consisted only of people who'd been dead for years.<br />
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One of the dead women, who'd been her godmother, rose from her seat to to tell her to leave quickly if she valued her life, because this was the <i>julotta</i> of the dead, and no living people were allowed to attend it. The woman hurried towards the exit, but other dead people, annoyed at her intrusion, rose as well and tried to grab her. She just barely made it out the church doors – one of the dead got ahold of her coat and almost managed to stop her. The next morning, pieces of cloth from her coat were found on several of the graves in the churchyard.<br />
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This is just one of the many <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scania">Scanian</a> legends presented by Jonny Ambrius in his book <i>Sällsamheter i Södra Sverige</i>, but it certainly is one of the better. A few are classical stories about trolls trying to stop the expansion of civilization and Christianity, by sabotaging the building of churches or throwing large rocks att already-built churches (the latter sort of legends are used to explain how large rocks came to rest where they happen to rest). Many are ghost stories, some of them tied to particular castles or manors, other to certain environments – like the drowned sailors trying to work their way up from the beach to the church and cemetery so that they may rest in hallowed ground. Unfortunately for them, they need the help of a living human to get over the high wall surrounding the cemetery, and their semi-decomposed state isn't likely to gain them any immediate friends and helpers. They're also going to have to contend with the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Grim">Church Grim</a>, the guardian of the burial grounds that is the spirit of an animal sacrificed when the church was built and buried beneath it to protect it against the Devil and/or to placate the site's spirit.<br />
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Anyway, it's always amusing to read this sort of stories, and I keep wondering why Swedish comics creators don't harvest these old legends much more for story ideas – a lot of them are ready-built for comics adaptation, and already adhere to the "ironic twist" story model that was the hallmark of the old EC comics as well as the <i>Eerie</i> and <i>Creepy</i> magazines and many, many others.<br />
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Worth the read; recommended.Göran Sembhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06535552290268020711noreply@blogger.com0