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Don't Call Us Angels vol. 2, Kasane Katsumoto, Tokyopop:
So, the shy and possibly crazy Yari from vol. 1 turns out to have telekinesis, I guess it is, and a thoroughly amoral attitude towards using it, mostly for entertainment. I suppose you could consider Udou's use of his power of persuasion to be similar. Kiba confronts him about this, which leads to some involved mind game that falls apart when they discover that Yari has kidnapped Haruhi, possibly at the behest of some as-yet unidentified shadowy instigator in a car.
I spent way longer than made sense trying to get through this. I was plagued by a curious disconnect, in my mind anyway, between the events of the story and the development of the characters. The former propelled the latter in more or the less the direction one would expect, but the reactions of the characters didn't seem to feed back into the story particularly. In the end, this is just another case of me being too stubborn to quit and wasting a great deal of time in the process.
Chiggers, Hope Larson, Simon and Schuster:
For those who care, I list the publisher for these blitherings by going to the drab little section with the publication information and stopping when I get to a name that isn't a division or imprint of something else.
I got this because it's by Hope Larson and it's not as thematically indecipherable as Gray Horses, and it worked out pretty much as I expected.
It's mostly a story about summer camp, from the viewpoint of one Abby, who wanders from one tentative association to another until the appearance of replacement bunkmate Shasta, who is, uh, the sort of person I imagine writes "Mary Sue" fan fiction. The extroverted but anti-social Shasta connects with Abby pretty well, much to other campers' annoyance. Miscellaneous loopiness aside, there does seem to be something genuinely odd going on with Shasta and lightning, which leads to the climax of the story out at the power cut (previously only known to me as a "hydro corridor") nearby camp.
Top Shelf 2008 Seasonal Sampler, Various, Top Shelf Productions:
This is a freebie, but I read pretty much all of it, and can report that I was intrigued by Nate Powell's Swallow Me Whole, Liz Prince's Delayed Replays, Eddie Campbell's forthcoming Alec (this bit of which I was surprised to have read before somewhere, probably in Negative Burn) but not Bacchus; the excerpt here made it seem like Scud: The Disposable Assassin, which is ridiculous, but it's pointless to lie.
CMX Summer Preview, Various, DC Comics:
I mostly skimmed through this one, according to whether the synopses seemed promising, and Yu Yagami's lunatic execution of the cowgirl concept of Go West got my attention, and the cover.
Pet Shop of Horrors: Tokyo vol. 2, Matsuri Akino, Tokyopop:
When I flipped through this at the store it seemed to have moved away from the rigorously formulaic mode of the original series, but it still doesn't matter very much that I missed the first volume of this one. The first story is yet another lather-rinse-repeat job where someone buys a mysteriously human-seeming "pet", and is eventually undone by their own overwhelming desires, not always for the pet in question. For example, this time it's Yuriko, who is vicariously obsessed with one of the hosts at a host bar (Like a hostess bar, except for women.) Count D. eventually talks her into purchasing fabulously handsome dark-eyed Hiroshi who swiftly gets a job at the bar and indirectly engineers the ascendancy of Yuriko's idol, Ren. Soon enough, the whole thing blows up in Ren's face, but the final punchline is saved for Yuriko.
After that unpromising start, the book breaks away decisively, bringing in the owner of the Chinese shopping concourse and local mob boss Woo-Fei, who is very concerned that this suave foreign pervert may be running some kind of slavery operation under the guise of a pet shop specializing in rare animals. Whether he has anything in particular against slavery or merely against it going on without the mob taking a cut is unclear. His insistence on seeing the details of D.'s operation gets him dragged off on a magic carpet ride as the Count leaps into a quest for the Kappa, a typically wacky Japanese legend, and we see what supernatural creatures he hangs out with away from the store.
The other two stories, "Da Capo", and "Dignity", about D.'s father, are likewise similar in that the protagonists are not swallowed up by Doom. The Kappa story is about as close as D. himself comes to being the protagonist; most of the time he's just a facilitator. In "Da Capo", he helps out the unfortunate Mie by means so indirect it's not entirely clear he did anything at all, but then he's more concerned with his main job as a supernatural fixer for another set of clients, and Woo-Fei tags along as the baffled observer again.
Go Go Heaven, Keiko Yamada, Tokyopop:
It seems that something Peresephonean is going on with Shirayuki, with the Earth frozen over and everyone in dire straits, except that it's Heaven that wants her and it was a side effect of her own escape from same that put her parents and humanity in general into a deep freeze. Six months have passed, and while Prince has been away, Hell has gone to itself in a handbasket, with demons upsetting the furniture, running in the halls, and stealing from the larder.
With just weeks to go before Hell, with souls evaporating from it furiously, shrinks into a naked singularity or something, they determine to go into the past and see if there isn't some way to turn Shirayuki from a witch back into a human. Shirayuki is pretty seriously disturbed by having accidentally refrigerated Earth, and if anything wants this more than Prince does. However, this is one of those universes where history cannot be changed, and not only do they end up precipitating Prince's eventual ensmittening with Shirayuki and the death of his father and mother, but they find out that his father fell in love with a witch, too.
I find Shirayuki's extreme angst in this volume a little curious, but I guess it just goes to show that smoking will ruin your health. Wait, I mean, drugs will mess you up. No, no, that's not it, something something... DANGER: CHEESE! That about says it.
The Perhapanauts #1-2, Todd Dezago and Craig Rousseau, Image:
Well, hey, what's not to like about this? A winsome outdoorsy sort of narrator who happens to be a ghost, a telepath, a moth-man, a dimension traveller, a sasquatch, and a chupacabra with a severe case of Short Myth Syndrome team up under the auspices of some shadowy (hence humble, hence heroic!) government organization, putting right what once went wrong... oh boy! And a cover by Art Adams, which... was not the cover I bought. Oh, those rascally publishers.
Not that I can really see any big difference in quality between Art Adams and Craig Rousseau. Maybe this just means I'm a leaden-pated philistine, but I prefer to think that it means that it looks pretty amazing. And lest the previous paragraph give you the wrong impression, it does acknowledge some of its sillier aspects. Along with the ghost Molly, Choopie is my favourite character, even if he's basically a furry green Strong Bad.
Nightmares and Fairy Tales #23, Serena Valentino and Camilla d'Errico, SLG:
Much of the story in the final issue of the series is told without words. Given the art, this is no problem at all. Lucas's comeuppance comes right up and ances him, good and hard, as the mermaid busts out, forces him to relive his past crimes, the carnival madame helps at the birth of the mermaid's second child, very much against his wishes, and the mermaid goes home to her family.. in Innsmouth, it looks like.
Gold Digger: Tiffany and Charlotte #1, Fred Perry and J.L. Anderson, Antarctic:
I got this because I like the cheesecake in Gold Digger but I'm kind of intimidated by the continuity, so a sort of reboot of the concept was pretty enticing. Except that I didn't need to read more than a few pages of Ninja High School to realize that it wasn't my thing, and this is more like NHS than it is like GD. Oh well.
Ubu Bubu #2, Jamie Smart, SLG:
No, I haven't read issue #1 of this yet. Like it matters? I can't really tell this apart from Bohda Te, but nominally instead of a demon kitty of Hell, it's a demon of Hell in a kitty. It takes place in the real world instead of the Nega-X Zone, but it's the same all-out, no-brakes, gross-out lunacy.
RASL #2, Jeff Smith, Cartoon Books:
I don't really cotton to the title character, or his life-style when he's not heisting art, or the sullying of Maxwell's equations to pretty up some theory of parallel universes, or the pulp-standard assassin who's chasing him, but it doesn't really matter, because Jeff Smith can draw a seedy lizard-faced guy in a hat on the cover and have it coloured in weird tones of dark blue and red, and I'll still buy it, because it still looks amazing.
Some time ago I came across... wait a minute, I keep these links in a time-stamped log, and so I know that I came across nickjsky's Mars:2020:Springtime on May 27 at 03:15 a.m., Pacific time. From there I went to fragomatik's Life on Mars and his few other videos. From there I went on to spend an entire night watching videos of nuclear weapons tests, and decided that surfing Youtube was a bad idea.
However, weeks later, shortly before I finished my taxes (sigh) I got to thinking about "Life on Mars" again, because the music was pretty amazing. The description lists the source of the music as Torley Wong, so I finally followed the darned link and discovered that he's working at Linden Labs now, and has given over composing techno music due to some auditory misfortune, but that it's still available on archive.org, so I noodled on over there and snarfled a copy of all three versions of "Neohippie". The one from the video is the "punk rockmix", and I recommend it.
