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Showing posts from August, 2006

James O'Barr's The Crow, Wagner & Mireault's Grendel: The Devil Inside

The Crow , recently back in print, is at once great and terrible. It is the comicbook equivalent of a John Cartpenter movie if Carpenter were a goth art-school grad from Detroit. It reeks of the '80s and silly, but serious goth-drama. It has a scene where the lead character cuts his arms in mock suicide, bandages them up like a martial artist, and then performs a page or two of dance (in front of his cat), presumably all out of sadness. It is gleefully violent. It doesn't really bother explaining itself, but tosses in poems and acute musical references at whim. It finishes up with a 'coda' from someone uninvolved in the making of the book, which stands as one of the silliest pieces of pan-religious paganism I've ever read. To top it off, the author seems oblivious to the campiness of his work. If Wikipedia can be trusted, he has said of it, "There is pure anger on each page." Regardless of that quote's authenticity or context, The Crow seems unaware...

And now, the keyboard breaks.

After a week of training a useless middle aged woman with no experience in coffee, customer service, casheiring, or food prep; after 10 days of work, including a 60 hour workweek; after dropping $75 to get my own computer back up on the net, I find my keyboard is broken, and I need a new one. The relacement must be a USB board, and must have a USB hub unless I want to buy one of those, too. So there goes a fair amount of that money I made doing loathesome amounts of work. I don't see the point.