Reading List part 2

- Colby Buzzel - My War

With this relentlessly cynical volume, Buzzell converts his widely read 2004 blog into an episodic but captivating memoir about the year he spent serving as an army "trigger puller" in Iraq. Posted to Mosul in late 2003, Buzzell's platoon was ordered "to locate, capture and kill all non compliant forces." Accordingly, his entries describe experiences pursuing elusive guerrillas (aka "men in black"); enduring sniping, rocket and mortar attacks; and witnessing the occasional car bomb. Face-to-face fighting almost never occurs. No matter: though the combat scenes are exciting, this book is actually more engrossing as a portrait of the day-to-day life of a young American soldier who has "read, and re-read, countless times, every single one of [Bukowski's] books." Like Bukowski, Buzzell appears to be a sentimental misanthrope; he pours scorn on everyone from cooks to generals to President Bush. He also despises the media, the antiwar movement and everyone who thinks they understand what's happening in Iraq. That his superiors kept their hands off his blog for several months, however, shows they understood that;despite its foul language, griping, insults directed at higher officers and occasional exposure of dirty linen;Buzzell's work never really wavers in its portrayal of American forces as the good guys in a dirty war.

- Robert Rankin - The Antipope
'Outside the sun shines. Buses rumble towards Ealing Broadway and I'm expected to do battle with the powers of darkness. It all seems a little unfair...'
You could say it all started with the red-eyed tramp with the slimy fingers who put the wind up Neville, the part-time barman, something rotten. Or when Archroy's wife swapped his trusty Morris Minor for five magic beans while he was out at the rubber factory.

On the other hand, you could say it all started a lot earlier. Like 450 years ago, when Borgias walked the earth.

Pooley and Ornally, stars of the Brentford Labour Exchange and the Flying Swan, want nothing to do with it, especially if there's a Yankee and a pint of Large in the offing. Pope Alexander VI, last of the Borgias, has other ideas ...

- Kurt Vonnegut - Bagombo Snuff Box
Any new book by Vonnegut, especially since he has vowed to retire from literature, will be welcomed by his fans. But as the author himself says in his introduction, these 23 apprenticeship stories "were expected to be among the living about as long as individual lightning bugs," and they will be of most interest to completists and scholars. Vonnegut's best short stories from the '50s were collected in Welcome to the Monkey House. Those in this collection for the most part work humbly with formulas dear to mid-century middlebrow magazines like Colliers. Included are tales like "The No-Talent Kid" and "The Boy Who Hated Girls," both featuring a genial bandmaster named George Helmholtz, who has to deal with misfit high school boys while dreaming of owning a seven-foot-tall drum. In "Thanasphere," Vonnegut tries out a sci-fi themeAa man is sent into space in a rocket and discovers that space is full of the voices of the dead. In a short, ironic piece, "Der Arme Dolmetscher," a soldier who recites a line from Heine's "Die Lorelei" that he has learned by rote is assumed to "talk Kraut" by a bungling officer. Pressed into service as a translator, he acquires just enough of the language to help his detachment surrender in the Battle of the Bulge. The title story concerns a man who visits his ex-wife and feeds her a cock-and-bull story about being an adventurer. In "Runaways," two teenagers realize that love is not enough to get married on, gently deflating the myth of the then-incipient youth culture long before the Summer of Love. Vonnegut's afterword, "Coda to My Career as a Writer for Periodicals," comments in his trademark style about his midwestern origins and the vagaries of writing for magazines. BOMC featured alternate.


Colby Buzzels' My War is a great read. It gives an inside look in what US Soldiers are doing everyday in Iraq and how they themselves get through the day. It's pretty fascinating to read about a guy somewhat my age, who listens to the same kind of music as I (Social D, Black Flag), being stuck in Iraq. What I still don't get though is how any person who listens to the bands mentioned before can enlist and do well in an organisation as the army. If anyone has a clue please help me out on that one

comics:
-Douglas Rushkoff and Liam Sharp - Testament:Akedah
From the imagination of best-selling author Douglas Rushkoff, one of the most iconoclastic and acclaimed minds of our era, comes a graphic novel series that exposes the "real" Bible as it was actually written, and reveals how its mythic tales are repeated today.
Grad student Jake Stern leads an underground band of renegades that uses any means necessary to combat the frightening threats to freedom that permeate the world. They employ technology, alchemy, media hacking and mysticism to fight a modern threat that has its roots in ancient stories destined to recur in the modern age.

-Brian Wood - DMZ: On the Ground
A near-future America is torn by war between the Free Armies, who control New Jersey and the inland, and the United States, ensconced in New York City's boroughs. In the war-torn DMZ of Manhattan, Matty Roth, hired as a phototech intern to a famous battlefield journalist, is stranded when the rest of his crew is killed. Overcoming initial panic, he decides to remain as the sole embedded journalist in the devastated, largely depopulated city. It's a career-making assignment--if it doesn't get him killed. Befriended by former med student Zee, who runs a clinic, Matty discovers a society struggling to survive amid skirmishes and snipers (appropriate soundtrack music: Talking Heads' "Life during Wartime"). Of the DMZ issues collected here, the first three establish its premise. In the succeeding two, Matty discovers the "Ghosts of Central Park"--paramilitaries who defend the now-deforested preserve and its zoo animals--and chases a robber who steals his press badge. Wood's writing does justice to the intriguing concept, and Burchielli's jagged artwork effectively conveys the characters' desperation.

-Paul Jenkins and Humberto Ramos - Revelations
Revelations is a 168 page trade paperback from Dark Horse comics that collects the complete, six issue mini-series. Revelations is decidedly Da Vinci Code inspsired with its conspiracies and Catholic hierarchy cover-ups although it ends up being decidedly darker in tone than Dan Brown's blockbuster.

As the story opens a Vatican Cardinal falls, or is thrown from a window and impaled on the gates below. Obviously dead, that doesn't stop a Latin-chanting assailant from still attempting to stab the Cardinal with an odd looking dagger. Cut to London and the apartment of Detective Charlie Northern who receives a late visitor one evening, an old friend Marcel LeClair, himself now a Cardinal at the Vatican. LeClair brings Northen to Vatican City to investigate the death of Cardinal Richleau who many considered the next in line to become Pope.

His investigation is hindered by the powerful Cardinal Toscianni who is covering up the events of Richleau's death and the mysterious, dagger-wielding assailant. The Italian police are little help and come off as rank amateur bumblers. The facts don't add up as various guards report hearing different things. Northern finds an ally in Lucille Pelliccia who heads up the accounting firm that handles the Vatican's finances. A mysterious coin leads Northen to a secret society called the Palladian Fathers and rumors of black masses and devil worshipping.

Soon, a coroner friend of Northern's who performed an autopsy on the Cardinal's body is found brutally murdered and someone tries to run down Charlie in the streets. Northern is getting close to something but the question is what? And who is the mysterious man feeding Northern tips about the investigation?

Revelations is a darkly painted mystery horror and surprisingly sinister. I was expecting Northern to be a typical downtrodden police detective but writer Paul Jenkins truly breathes life into the character. Northern is part John Constantine and part Sherlock Holmes, or perhaps Columbo might be the better comparison. Humberto Ramos' art isn't t he typed you'd expect to find in a book of this tone as it is quirky, and slightly cartoony, but ends up working quite well. The climax is starkly horrifying as Jenkins throws readers a big curveball.

-Brian Vaughan - Y:the last man/Volume 4:Safeword
Vaughan and Guerra have crafted a frequently funny, sometimes compelling, postapocalyptic American road story with a twist. A mysterious plague has wiped out every man around the globe, except for one: a sardonic 20-something romantic named Yorick. Poor Yorick, however, has to conceal his identity from man-hating Amazons, renegade separatists and all sorts of other female factions who want to use him for one thing or another. He's on the run with a government agent and a geneticist as they hope to figure out what caused the plague and how Yorick survived. This volume focuses on the character development of Yorick and geneticist Dr. Alison Mann. Vaughn spends three chapters on Yorick's past and present psychosexual traumas, as he encounters a very eccentric therapist; the next three chapters follow Dr. Mann down some dangerous roads. Vaughn is an excellent episodic writer, able to sustain a suspenseful arc of plot, themes and realistic characters from one moment to the next. Guerra's art is unremarkable but competently conveys all kinds of action. Most important, Vaughn makes readers care for his characters. In the tradition of much good sci-fi writing, his fantastic plague backdrop is a very clever way of isolating and expanding on simple human themes of love, loneliness, fear and, of course, gender relations.


Essentially all these comics are awesome. Testament stands out for its storyarc combining old Bible stories with a nearby cyberpunk future, DMZ might well be the best Vertigo title since 100 Bullets and Revelations is a welcome back for my favourite comic drawer Humberto Ramos to the world of Catholism which he already explored a bit in the Crimson series.