Thursday, 30 June 2005

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Fluffy Puppies, Kittens and Bunnies Armed to the Fucking Teeth, and Something About Breakfast Heads Where have I gone? Nowhere. But the intellectual substance of what I've been reading lately hasn't warranted much writing. At least, popular perception of what I've been reading hasn't. For example, I finished Grant Morrison's excellent comic series WE3. It follows the adventures of the three cuddly animals--cover pictured on the left--as they escape from the super-secret containment government facility and make their way home. Now, I think the book quite good in the same way that I thought Buffy the Vampire Slayer quite good: it plays pinballs with entirely distinct generic conventions. Over the course of this short, relatively dialogue-free graphic novel, Morrison creates a compellingly convincing account of the logic behind "war without casualties" initiatives without betraying the cloying narrative conventions of landmarks of Hollywood cinema like Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey. (Attentive readers will note the similarities between the cover of the Michael J. Fox and Sally Fields-voiced fare and Frank Quitely's. I don't think that's a coincidence, nor do I think it all that clever.) What's interesting about the book is how, for example, when the animal rights advocate who created the trio responds to their imminent departure from this world--"decommisioned" in the book's lingo, but euphemisms like "puppy heaven" and "put to sleep" also apply--by releasing them into the wild. Her concern, as that of all animal lovers would be, is with the destruction of the animals. She cares not a whit what the implications of releasing these cuddly killing machines into the wild are. The fact that they demolish raw most of what they encounter doesn't bother her. Moral conundrums ensue. What, after all, should we think about the poor owner of Tinker whose "hand-made" sign graces the cover of one of the unbound issues? Surely he or she misses Tinker, and surely Tinker would rather not have become a cat equipped with ground-to-air missiles. Surely? Surely. So, for those who wonder why I haven't been posting with regularity, now you know. Were I to post, I'd be writing about comic books and science fiction...but I wouldn't be writing all that intelligently about either. The most I can say about John Clute's exceptional and exceptionally dense Appleseed is that it defies xeno- and technological compulsions of hard sci-fi in refreshingly confusing ways. I could pull numerous examples from the book, but that'd bore you to tears and cause the ever-increasing knot in the small of my back to tangle more ferociously. So you'll have to settle for a singular example about an apparently multiple headed creature that's doing some that has something to do with maintaing a safe orbit: ...he allowed himself to forgive the teeth and their head (this once!) and let his brainless breakfast head sink its hollow jowls (starvation eat all liars!) into a trough of loyal wrigglies, which it wolfed down. He adjusted the twining of his tails within the cart, settled into command posture over the great lunch bucket, and--white it continued slowly to starve half to death awaiting...

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