Tagged: Elayne Riggs

The Great Divide, by Elayne Riggs

The Great Divide, by Elayne Riggs

As I’ve made clear in previous columns, I like reading. I have Bloglines subscriptions to almost 700 blogs, of which I probably read 400-500 pretty regularly. I tend to group my blog subscriptions into two major categories, culture and politics – what I call "news and views" – although lately I’ve been supplementing those with blogs speaking to other interests of mine, like food and grammar and LOLcats. And I’ve noticed the same problem with these blogs, particularly the political ones, which I came across in just about every hobby of mine through the years. By and large, the writers seem to believe their subject matter is the only one worth pontificating about, and any blogger who has "outside" interests is not worthy to be in their circle.

We live in an era of divide and conquer, where each faction is encouraged into its own little category, where the idea of a well-rounded individual is anathema to getting ahead, where specialization is the order of the day. Because of deadline pressures, many artists who make their living doing comic books have to choose between penciling and inking. My husband is fond of noting that in England, where he lived for the first 36 years of his life, there was no such artificial division of labour when he learnt his craft. Imagine his frustration when we were going over the rudiments of baseball and he found out about all the different subdivisions of pitchers and fielders! He still can’t understand how a professional ballplayer can’t field at just about any position, and why most pitchers can’t complete an entire game. To tell you the truth, the part of me that’s been a baseball fanatic since girlhood, and remembers lots of complete games, readily agrees.

But everything these days is compartmentalized to within an inch of its life. "General interest" and "Renaissance person" have become almost freakish notions these days. Why this is so in the days of "multitasking" is beyond me. We’re expected to juggle umpteen tasks simultaneously at work but we can’t choose more than one passion in our downtime?

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Food, Glorious Food, by Elayne Riggs

Food, Glorious Food, by Elayne Riggs

For the last week of job searches and interviews, I’ve not been very immersed in pop culture, unless one counts giggling at some Craigslist classifieds. I’ve kept up my blog reading, I’ve played computer games, I’ve suffered the first couple of plothole-ridden episodes of the Terminator TV series for a few minutes each, I’m up to Oz book #16, I’m through most of my DCU comics from November/December, the usual consumption. And it occurred to me — consumption. There’s a huge foodie contingent out there, which more and more resembles other pop culture fandom, so why not pontificate about food this week? After all, everybody eats. Even Stephen Colbert has been known to down the grits and lo mein on his show, and who can forget the immortal Eddie Izzard "Cake or Death" routine?

As a woman of some girth and experience, I have a love-hate relationship with food. I unapologetically love food itself, the pleasure it gives me to eat a satisfying and delicious meal, even to prepare one. But I hate the way corporations and people (most of whom don’t even know me) take it upon themselves to lecture me about my food intake, particularly when I’ve never sought their advice, based solely on my outward appearance. I despise our current Culture of Deprivation, which in reality consists of mixed messages since we’re also encouraged to decadently indulge at the same time. I despair that "moderation" seems to be such a dirty word in our world of extremes.

I grew up with the relatively moderate Four Food Groups chart (grains, fruits & vegs, meat and dairy). This predated the modern Food Pyramid, which presumes to advise people not only on how to vary their diets but on the proportions the USDA deems appropriate. Of course I implicitly trust a government agency among whose tasks it is to inspect meat and yet there’s all this e-coli and mad cow and goodness knows what else. And hey, the current acting Secretary of Agriculture is the ex-president of the Corn Refiners Association, so I guess we’ll all be hearing scads about how bad high-fructose corn syrup is for us, being probably the highest contributing factor in the decline of culinary health in this country. So you can see where I maintain a healthy skepticism toward changing food standards (like changing weight standards, beauty standards, etc.). People aren’t charts, and what works well for one doesn’t necessarily succeed for another.

 

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Ho Ho Ho, It’s Magic, by Elayne Riggs

Ho Ho Ho, It’s Magic, by Elayne Riggs

In a comment to Mike Gold’s column on Monday regarding Marvel’s "One More Day" storyline, Michael H. Price noted, "It comes down to the question of ‘What is Sacred Screed, and what is negotiable?’ How far can the re-invention, or the seemingly likely evolution, of an established character go before the Powers That Do Be dictate a market-pandering reversal?" He even quoted the line that fanboy favorite Alan Moore borrowed for "Whatever Happened to the Man of Steel?" — the famous "This is an Imaginary Story … aren’t they all?"

Now, I must confess off the bat that I haven’t yet read the "One More Day" saga. I think I may have read the first issue, but I’m still waiting for delivery of most of my non-DC comics from December. It’s something I’ve learned to live with, this being one or more months behind the "early adopter" new-comics-every-Wednesday crowd of which I was once a part, ever since my former job moved out of Manhattan, rendering impractical my weekly visits to the local comics store. It makes responding to the fan outrage du jour a little trickier, as I can’t cite specific examples of one thing or another, so I’m left with responding to the response, as it were.

I like to think it’s a tribute to writers and artists of the past that the characters and situations they had a hand in creating have taken on such illusory "lives" of their own that inspire such passion in readers that they seem to argue endlessly over something that doesn’t exist. If only that energy could be harnessed for good!

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Everything Old is New (Year) Again, by Elayne Riggs

It’s the first business day of 2008 and, as I noted a few weeks ago, time for many pop-culture mavens to present their Best of 2007 lists. Alas, I will not be one of those. I can’t remember most of what I read in 2007, a blur of a year for me at the best of times due to the losses I suffered. But this isn’t new for me; I can barely remember the fiction I read or watch more than a half hour or so afterwards. It’s just the way my mind works. The only time I was able to do yearly wrap-ups and "Best Of"s was when I was regularly reviewing about a dozen comics every week, because I could refer to my previous work, but even then it was tough because I didn’t grade the stuff, I just talked about it.

My low retention rate is one reason why re-reading cherished books I’ve had for years is so fulfilling to me. It contains both the comfort of revisiting something vaguely familiar to me and the excitement of seeing it all anew. I was very happy to have received so many comments on my last column (thanks so much, all!). Obviously children’s books are beloved by a lot of adult pop culture geeks besides me. That’s really wonderful, and I think it proves the point that all-ages stuff really does mean stuff written for the young and the young-at-heart, rather than exclusively for the young. (It probably doesn’t hurt that we’re all comics people too, and have all experienced the knee-jerk reactions of many non-comics readers that we’re too old for our hobby, with its accompanying implicit assumption that all-ages literature ought not be enjoyed by, well, all ages.)

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‘Zat You, Santy Claus?, by Elayne Riggs

"Childhood is the time of man’s greatest content," said Ak, following the youth’s thoughts. "’Tis during these years of innocent pleasure that the little ones are most free from care."

One of the promises I made to myself during my temporary unemployment period was to finally read and reread all of the Oz books that I own. It’s a pleasurable if somewhat daunting goal, as L. Frank Baum wrote 14 volumes in all, then Ruth Plumly Thompson carried on with 19 more, and although I had my period of fanatic Oz collecting and I did make it through all of Baum’s volumes I believe I stopped somewhere after the third or fourth Thompson book.

[As you might be able to discern from the photo above, my last four Thompson volumes aren’t even out of shrink-wrapping yet (hence the glare from the flash), and that out of many, many other "official" Oz books I also own tomes by Eric Shanower (Giant Garden, Salt Sorcerer and all his Oz graphic novels which are shelved elsewhere), Eloise and Lynn McGraw (Rundlestone), Edward Einhorn (Paradox) and Rachel Cosgrove Payes (Wicked Witch). Of those I’ve only read Eric’s comics, so I have a lot of great reading still to come!]

But I digress; for now I’m still working my way through Baum, and I’ve just started his seventh book. Despite the fact that he was hardly what you’d call ahead of his time (he advocated the extermination of American Indians, his work contains a fair amount of assumptions about gender roles), I’m finding his Oz books a real comfort, not only because he wrote of a time and place with which I have absolutely no first- or even second-hand experience (my grandparents were all immigrants and I’ve never lived in the middle of the country), but because he understood what it meant to write for children.

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More of My Favorite Things, by Elayne Riggs

More of My Favorite Things, by Elayne Riggs

The combination of my temporary unemployment and inclement weather has enabled me to catch up on my DC comp box reading, so I can finally pick up where I left off a few weeks back. Mind you, I was looking at October books at the time and since then the November box came in. Still, a couple of the same caveats apply as last time — I haven’t seen the comics from the last few weeks, which gives me a bit of a headache when Robin gets his Suicide Squad advance comps and the issue in question (#4, in stores now) cross-references an important plot point in a Checkmate issue I’ve yet to see. So a lot of these observations will be about the issue prior to the one most comic fans have already seen, but in most cases the artists are the same.

Also, as before, I won’t cover every artist who did a good or serviceable job, just the ones I considered my very favorites of this most recent batch. Any omissions are not to be taken as an assumption that I didn’t like other stuff. And yes, I’m still talking more about how the art affected me viscerally than using technical vocabulary, which makes these more overviews than reviews per se. I miss full-on reviewing, but I just don’t seem to have the time any more.

While I stopped at the letter "F" last time, I wanted to mention a couple books which hadn’t come out at the time. Onward, then:

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Things to come,  by Elayne Riggs

Things to come, by Elayne Riggs

This is the time of year when people usually start to compile "best of" lists and recaps. But as 2007 has been more "the worst of times" for me than "the best of times," I prefer to look forward. After all, as Criswell once "predicted" in a hardly-memorable Ed Wood film, "We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives!"

Crystal ball gazing also helps if you have the retention level of a hyperactive gnat, which I’m afraid is the case for me. I don’t tend to get worked up over details in comic books or TV shows or movies because most entertainment is ephemeral to me; I just don’t feel I need to keep all the minutiae in my head. It carries the added advantage of making rereading the same book a lot more fun to me, a constant surprise as I encounter things again that I didn’t remember from the last time I read them.

In the land of graphic literature, at least in this country, Diamond’s magazine Previews is the only consumer choice in terms of moving from baseless speculation about what may or may not happen in monthly story installments months down the line (that’s more the realm of comics "news" sites, which often busy themselves in breathlessly extolling events yet to happen to the detriment of examining current comics) to actually planning out and ordering one’s reading of choice for the foreseeable future (say, two months down the line). Time was, order forms were the sole purview of retailers. Of course, time was when Previews wasn’t the only game in town. Not that the disappearance of competitors like Capital City and Heroes World constitutes anything like a monopoly for Diamond! At least not according to the antitrust investigation, which didn’t consider comics as separate from other literature. In any case, with all the major companies sewn up with exclusives and treated as Premier customers (some pigs being more equal than other pigs), Previews is the only choice now for readers who wish to support their local retailers, as well as for publishers who want to reach audiences they can’t afford to grow on their own (even in this age of online ordering). Unfortunately, Diamond doesn’t accept every comic published into the hallowed pages of Previews, so now more than ever it pays to see what’s out there in the virtual world, but online content distribution is another column entirely.

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Burning the candle, by Elayne Riggs

Burning the candle, by Elayne Riggs

This column is finally up to installment #42. As you well know, that’s said to be the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything. And now that I’m 50 years old, I’m supposed to be ever much smarter than I used to be, and ever so much closer to achieving the enlightenment that’s supposed to help me understand the questions to that answer.

Don’t you believe it. It’s a good thing life is a constant learning experience, although it’s a bit disheartening that the more I live the more there remains for me to learn. I can’t be the only one who constantly feels like I’m treading water, or running in place just to keep up.

Last night many Jews began the annual commemoration of Chanukah (or Hanukkah or Channukah or Throat-Warbler Mangrove), the Festival of Lights, not to be confused with Diwali, the Festival of Light marking the victory of good over evil, and uplifting of spiritual darkness, which seems to predate it by a good many centuries. Chanukah marks the rededication of the Second Temple (after it was desecrated by Antiochus IV Epiphanes at the time of the Maccabee rebellion, a couple hundred years before that Jesus guy came along) and the miracle that one day’s worth of consecrated olive oil wound up burning for eight (the length of time it took to process a new batch). So instead of celebrating something cool like the uplifting of spiritual darkness, in the hands of the Jews the festival became the glorification of frugality, of making a little go a long way.

Then the Christians came along and, within another few centuries, had converted massive populations and co-opted their festivals so that Midwinter (the winter solstice) practices became part of Christmas, which grew and grew into a general celebration of plenty and excess and cheer (except for those people who insist on missing the point by suggesting Santa is a "bad role model" because he’s fat and jolly; no no, can’t have any happy large people around during the months when it’s customary to fatten up to stave off cold and hunger!). And you know, given the choice between a whooping it up over how fortunate one is to have enough to eat and how dire one’s circumstances are that one has to burn the midnight oil for a week — well, let’s just say it’s easy to see how one can become so popular it’s no longer solely Christian or even pagan but practically secular, where the other is forever relegated in the public consciousness to second-place status and an excuse to teach lessons in multicultural inclusion.

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Comics, community and The 99

Comics, community and The 99

One of the things I mentioned in a previous column is how frustrating it is to many readers that reviewers have so many negative things to say about comics and so few positive ones — one of the reasons being, of course, that it’s simply easier (and, for many, more fun) to slag on someone else’s hard work than to praise it, to pick at the missteps rather than examining the story as a whole.  I still suspect this ties in with why so relatively few reviewers discuss the art in a comic book; as they’re writers, it’s easier to concentrate on just the writing, which one can then proceed to negatively nitpick to one’s own standard of personal amusement, rather than learning about how to talk about the main thing that separates comics from prose work, from movies, from just about any other form of entertainment.  But I digress.

I’ve had the first four issues of a comic book series in front of me for months, wanting to talk about them. This was before the series even debuted in the US, and now the first two issues have already appeared in stores. And with one thing and another in my crazy life, I haven’t had the time nor the wherewithall to actually sit down and review anything. And it’s become, as these things do, rather an albatross ’round my neck that I haven’t gotten to it. After all, a wonderfully talented, amazing woman who happens to edit the books sent them to me in good faith that I’d get to reviewing them sooner or later. And after all, wasn’t I the one who did over four years’ worth of weekly reviews on Usenet, covering at least a dozen comics during some of those weeks? What, besides life’s vicissitudes, was preventing me from sitting down and doing this review?

Sooner or later we all have to face our own procrastinating natures. For me, the approach of the year’s close and the feeling of community that means so much to me in this industry prompted me to finally get down to it. After three introductory paragraphs, naturally. Has the time finally come for me to say a few words about The 99 from Teshkeel Comics? Well, yes and no. I’m not going to do a structured, formal review per se, but discuss the series more in terms of its inspiration and ideas.

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The days of miracles and wonder, by Elayne Riggs

The days of miracles and wonder, by Elayne Riggs

I’ve taken a break from my promised sequel about comic book artists whose current work I like because (1) I still haven’t made it through the most recent DC comp box, (2) it’s not like there’s a huge clamor for it. and mostly (3) I’ve been in a sort of weird transition mode and needed to write about that because it’s never far from my mind, but is thrown into special relief during the upcoming holiday season.

In truth, I feel like this entire year has been a transitional one for me. Losing my best friend then my father in rapid succession threw me for such a loop it seems doubtful I’ll ever fully regain my equilibrium. Then there was The Job Thing. I’d been looking for a new position for awhile but the timing never worked out. Every time my job search gained momentum, my boss would return from Europe and I had to put everything on hold. Meanwhile, lots of little downturns became bigger ones and, to make a long story which I’ll be happy to tell you in a bar sometime short, on November 9 my employer of ten years and I officially came to a parting of the ways.

I have enough severance pay for awhile and am still interviewing for a new position back in Manhattan, so this isn’t a lamentation on my lack of current employment. It’s more a realization of how lucky I’ve been again this year. Even with deaths in the family and among my circle of friends, I have so very many blessings in my life. And with my half-century mark looming ever closer (a week from Sunday, in fact) I thought it would be a nice and perhaps inspirational idea to count those blessings.

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