The Higher Nagging sinks to new lows.

I am, most likely, the only person on earth currently taking a break from the serious work of reading and writing about comics by reading a novel whose cover declares that it "only [could] have been devised by a literary team fielding the Marquis de Sade, Arthur Edward Waite, Sir James Frazer, Gurdjieff, Madame Blavatsky, C.G.Jung, Aleister Crowley, Franz Kafka."  But because academics are not allowed to take vacations, the world reminds them of what they should be doing at all times—the idea being that if you can make words, you must be making them count. 

I thought that this Higher Nagging would absent itself from my current project, but clearly I was wrong.  There I was yesterday, next to a stack of unread comics, and because I had the temerity to be reading a thick late-modernist novel ...

"I found myself in France a little more than six weeks after I enlisted.  I had no aptitude with the rifle.  I could not even bayonet an effigy of Kaiser Bill convincingly.  But I was considered 'sharp' and they also discovered that I could run quite fast.  So I was selected as company runner, which meant I was also a kind of servant, I forget the word ..."

"Batman!"

"That is it." (123)

Which is precisely what I was thinking (albeit with a bit more bluster) as I hurled the book across the room. 

Comments

[Thomas]

On the subject of comics, "it wasn't anything like the book," is a constant complaint when novels are made into movies. Then Watchmen came out and one reviewer complained that it was exactly like reading the book.

Can we fucking win, no.

[Luther Blissett]

There must be some happy medium between comics and tedious John Fowles novels. But I'm a snob. I find that both comics and Fowles run the gamut from stupid to pretentious, without much in between.

[SEK]

Then Watchmen came out and one reviewer complained that it was exactly like reading the book.

That reviewer was wrong for the simple fact that there's no such this as "exactly like the book," what with the sound, movement, etc. There's mimicry, no doubt, but it's been interpreted.

But I'm a snob. I find that both comics and Fowles run the gamut from stupid to pretentious, without much in between.

One, I'm not going to let you tar all comics as stupid, because that, in itself, would be stupid; two, I'm not going to let you tar all John Fowles novels as tedious, as I've only read half of this one and have given up in order to read this instead.

[James T]

Thomas: There are states inbetween "pointless use of a comic's name or characters in a production with no other connction to the source", and "artlessly replicating a work in a medium for which it was not written, and then chopping off the parts that don't fit (while inflating the fight scenes tenfold anyway, because DUDE BADASSES ARE BADASS). I disagree with that reviewer; watching the film was not like reading the comic, it was like having an idiot describe to you this totally awesome comic he read.