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Belated items of cottageania:
A bird hopping with its wings spread out just ahead of me as I walked to the compost heap. Don't you know you're supposed to drag one wing, not just hold them out for no reason? The true art of misdirection is dying out in this country.
Purple beans from my mother's garden; they turned green when cooked, and the cooking water was a brilliant, almost fluorescent green. Mysteriously, though, they still left a little purple residue on our plates after dinner.
Queen & Country vols. 1-2, Greg Rucka et al, Oni:
I picked these up because I had a) heard of them elsewhere and b) I flipped through volume 2 and discovered that Carla Speed McNeil of Finder did the art for "Stormfront". It's pretty good, but 2 volumes of hard-boiled secret police procedural is enough for me. More accurately they're secret soldiers, without even the ethos of police, and their government knows better than to let them operate at home, most of the time, and frequently has to remind their boss who he works for.
I don't know what interaction the artists had with the writer, who appears to be adapting the premise and some of the characters of his Tara Chase novels for comics. Given the variations in the stories (assassination, counter-intelligence and counter-counter-intelligence, terrorism, blackmail, kidnapping, political infighting, and good old-fashioned espionage) I shouldn't draw any conclusions about the contributions of the artists to the effect, but I have nothing better to do. Steve Rolston's version of Tara Chase seems rather melancholy, Brian Hurtt's art seems more light-hearted even while it's less cartoony, Leandro Fernandez presents it as something more like a superhero comic, Jason Shawn Alexander's style is sort of noir, Carla Speed McNeil is perhaps the grittiest, if only because she's illustrating a story where a major character and his successor die, and Mike Hawthorne's art is a lighter superhero take on the characters.
Fruits Basket vols. 17-18, Natsuki Takada, Tokyopop:
Tohru delivers a video love letter only to be vouchsafed not one but two dark secrets one after another. Hanajima sees fit to intervene, showing a fine sense of the dramatic. After an interlude with paper flowers, Shigure goes to a restaurant with his editor, who catches sight of Akito, the "god" of the zodiac, and the reader gets a further look at the tensions within the Sohma family. Volume 18 opens with Yuki paying a visit to fellow student Machi, whose life turns out to be pretty messed up. After that, it gets into the relationship between Hatsuhara and Isuzu, and how it figures in the snarl of nastiness around Akito and his mother Ren.
Aldebaran: The Catastrophe, Leo, Cinebook:
As usual with European comics with mature subject matter, what mostly sticks with me is its Europeanness. Hitch-hiking from town to town, having all your stuff stolen by another traveller, having your first sexual experience with a stranger, it's all there. The living ocean stomping all over a coastal village, wacky alien wildlife, goofy reliance on alien wildlife given a plainly very advanced technology (horseless carriages with no visible engine are harder to make than the artist appears to appreciate), and so on make me irritable, but I guess you have to make up for not having interstellar travel - it stopped working for no apparent reason after the colony was established.
Anyway, after some exposure to the neo-puritan society (they've banned music, among other things) and chasing one woman after another, Mark Sorenson winds up on his way to the big city in the brig of a flying warship of some sort, in the company of the bratty younger sister of the girl next door he'd been lusting after back home. Some mysterious people have been investigating the ocean, which has the government very annoyed for some reason. This is a 5-volume series scheduled to appear through 2010, so it may be a while before any of this is explained, at least in English.
The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, Thomas M. Disch, Simon & Schuster:
This starts out pretty entertainingly by clarifying what the "fiction" in science fiction is all about, namely what would be classified in most other realms of discourse as lies. The next chapter argues for Edgar Allen Poe as the first science fiction author, which seems reasonable enough. Other chapters get into the impact of science fiction on popular culture, which went from marginal to central over the 20th century - hence the subtitle "How Science Fiction Conquered the World". In the process they illustrate where science fiction has new and relevant things to say about the world and where it just screws it all up. Judging by the example Disch makes of Mission of Gravity, there are particularly exciting things to say about condensed matter physics. And you know? There really are.
