"Such Pictures You Shall Weave! Such Tapestries!"

Hades Welcomes His Bride
A.E. Stallings

Come now, child, adjust your eyes, for sight
Is here a lesser sense. Here you must learn
Directions through your fingertips and feet
And map them in your mind. I think some shapes
Will gradually appear. The pale things twisting
Overhead are mostly roots, although some worms
Arrive here clinging to their dead. Turn here.
Ah. And in this hall will sit our thrones,
And here you shall be queen, my dear, the queen
Of all men ever to be born. No smile?
Well, some solemnity befits a queen.
These thrones I have commissioned to be made
Are unlike any you imagined; they glow
Of deep-black diamonds and lead, subtler
And in better taste than gold, as will suit
Your timid beauty and pale throat. Come now,
Down these winding stairs, the air more still
And dry and easier to breathe. Here is a room
For your diversions. Here I've set a loom
And silk unraveled from the finest shrouds
And dyed the richest, rarest shades of black.
Such pictures you shall weave! Such tapestries!
For you I chose those three thin shadows there,
And they shall be your friends and loyal maids,
And do not fear from them such gossiping
As servants usually are wont. They have
Not mouth nor eyes and cannot thus speak ill
Of you. Come, come. This is the greatest room;
I had it specially made after great thought
So you would feel at home. I had the ceiling
Painted to recall some evening sky--
But without the garish stars and lurid moon.
What? That stark shape crouching in the corner?
Sweet, that is to be our bed. Our bed.
Ah! Your hand is trembling! I fear
There is, as yet, too much pulse in it.

LINKS:
Alicia Stallings' website
"Recitations" by A.E. Stallings, illustrated by R. Kikuo Johnson (via Boing Boing)

White House press conference... VAMPIRES EXIST!!!

Urgent News Flash!!!

The White House announces to the press that VAMPIRES ARE REAL!
And... the President is meeting with top officials of a VAMPIRE rights group!

If you don't believe me... Watch it!



And...
Now that the word is out, Vampires are all over the place!

They are now openly dating... see LoveBitten.net!
Openly selling blood alternative beverages... see TruBeverage.com!
Have their own alternative news source... see BloodCopy.com!
And have their own Washington lobbyists... see AmericanVampireLeague.com!

Not that this movement for acceptance is without opposition...
The Fellowship of the Sun is trying to fight back by preserving "the strength and purity of the human race"... organizing an oposition movement and aiming to expose false claims on the part of vampire activists! (see FellowshipoftheSun.org)

I don't want to play politics...
but I think Vampires are AWESOME!

Interview With a Vampire... AWESOME!
Underworld... AWESOME!
Blade... AWESOME!
Night Watch... AWESOME!
And Joss Whedon even made Buffy the Vampire Slayer AWESOME!

In more esoteric fare I also loved... Nadja (produced by David Lynch), and Ultraviolet (the AWESOME British mini-series not the crappy Milla Jovovich movie)


So I'm totally in! Who's with me!



OK....
Confession time...
In case you haven't figured it out yet...
All that stuff at the beginning about Vampires being real...

All lies.

In truth, all the videos and websites noted up front are all just "viral advertising" for a new HBO series coming in the fall. And you may have come across other sly advertisements for these products and services cleverly run in magazines, on Myspace/Facebook/Twitter, or on TV. These ads all seem normal enough ... unless you're really paying attention.

The series called True Blood is based on a series of novels called Southern Vampire, by Charlaine Harris. HBO is also publishing a graphic novel to promote the show. You can find the official HBO website here, or a very helpful fansite at True-Blood.net!

I'm stoked!

In honor of Comic-Con... A book review!

So...
Comic-Con 2008 kicks off today down in San Diego...And while the culture of Comic-Con facinates me, I have no intention of going. And I also have no intention to make this a blog entry about Comic-Con. But I did think that it would be a great time to post a graphic novel book review!

SIDE NOTE:
For those of you who have been living in a pop-culture bubble, Comic-Con is short for Comic Book Convention, and this particular convention has become the MOTHER OF ALL COMICS CONVENTIONS drawing over 100,000 visitors! If you want to find out info about Comic-Con... I won't be talking about it... Instead you can go here - iFanboy ComicCon episode - or - ComicCon website

So here's my review of the "Abadazad" series:
Abadazad: The Road to Inconceivable (Book 1)
and Abadazad: The Dream Theif (Book 2)
written by J.M. DeMatteis and illustrated by Mike Ploog.


I must say that I was initially quite skeptical of this series. My wife purchased the first book after hearing an interview with the author on NPR almost 2 years ago. She read it quickly and recommended it to me, but "I don't read comics" and the whole thing seemed so young, so I never really paid much attention... A year and a half later, I have finally picked it up... and I could hardly set the books down! Not that they have the intense page-turning allure of a great thriller, but they have an enchanting fun quality that is utterly captivating.

The Abadazad series is a strange beast, very difficult to cleanly categorize, and therefore also very difficult to describe (not that it will keep me from trying).

The primary narrative is based around a contemporary character (14 year old Kate) in something of a fantasy/mystery/adventure story; and while the book is self-purported to be wholly the published diary entries of our heroine, the format in truth is a melding of styles. The traditional diary text flows into and out of more conventional graphic-novel/comic-book styles, and just to make things really interesting we are also introduced to pages "extracted" from a fictional 19th Century fantasy series also written about Abadazad. While all of this sounds incredibly complex (and it is), DeMatteis and Ploog make the labyrinthine interwoven narratives feel seamlessly united in an easy read.

Aside from the unique format of the storytelling itself, it is just as difficult to pin down the intended audience. The writing style is very simple and easy to read (as would be appropriate for the diary entries of a teenage girl) and the author so well captures the point of view of our protagonist, that it seems likely female readers of a similar age and temperament (angsty teen girls) would most strongly connect with her telling of this story. But by the same token, the book is so rich with cultural and literary references that I can't image such a young reader having the breadth of experience to pick up on all the allusions made by our culture savvy author (from Barney, Botox, and The Beatles; to C.S. Lewis, L. Frank Baum, and Tolkien; and from Disney movies to The Matrix; and more)! The result: a book likely targeted and marketed to a younger audience, but one that is no less enjoyable for adult readers.

Now for the bad news...
As of now the story is left unfinished... at least in the United States (more books have been published in the UK). The original story arc was planned for three books with the hope of many more stories to come, but only two books have been published in the US so far, and it is my understanding that no announcement has been made for a pending publication stateside. So... I have been left hanging... just as the adventure was really getting moving!

For the moment, I am trying to get my Abadazad fix through imports (books 3 and 4 have been published in the UK), but even that is proving difficult to find. I am hoping that as word spreads about this smart little series, we can encourage quicker action on the part of our American publishers!

p.s. - For any of you ComicCon nerds who are still hangin' on hoping for more about the convention... I still can't help you. But I will throw out this little nugget: both J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Ploog are in fact bonafide comics artists... DeMatteis has written for Captain America, Justice League, and several Spider-Man series; and Ploog has drawn for several Marvel comics. So there.