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I'm going to talk a bit about Anita Blake.
So I'm more than half-way through Bloody Bones and ... it's okay. Jean-Claude isn't annoying me as much as usual and while it does have that "ALL THINGS HAPPENING ALL THE TIME!!!" bullshit that they did in the last book only with a much larger cast of boring humans who'll probably be dead by the last page, at least Anita gets to do things in the book like SLEEP. I think by the end of The Lunatic Cafe she ended up fighting the villain with her crutches after one hour of sleep.
... What the hell happened with that fight, anyway? Didn't she kill the were-swan or something? I remember a lot of that book, why can't I remember the climax? Or the most crucial part of the climax? I remember a lot of it involved Edward and Anita and Richard in cages and Jason kept trying to eat/molest her ... Anyways ...
I'm really liking Larry Kirkland this time around, which amazes me because I didn't think much of him in Circus of the Damned. Of course, I didn't think that much of Circus of the Damned in general. (The Laughing Corpse remains my favorite. Whatever its faults, this series has the coolest zombies. I got kind of gleeful when the bitchy Amazon tags for the latest Anita Blake book were all "Bring Back the Zombies!") I'm really warming up to him, though. I like that he looks like a dweeb but has deep hidden power and that he's potentially BFF with Jason's bisexual werewolf self (in my mind, anyway). The mentor-student relationship with him and Anita is also pretty nice, even if it leads to a lot of "I'm So Hard" posturing on Anita's part. Okay, I'm hard to please, but I like Larry.
My one issue with Larry though is that my Watchmen obsession keeps leading me to want to mentally replace his image in my mind with Walter Kovacs, which in a way is appropriate since they both look like Howdy Doody but is inappropriate in that Larry is like the most un-Rorschach person ever.
Still, I do like the idea of Larry being kind of unattractive. Which gets me to the thing I actually wanted to talk about. See, since Laurell K. Hamilton has a need to describe everything (and I do mean EVERYTHING) I have pretty clear images of the characters. Or I THOUGHT I did, anyway. I've been semi-paying attention to Chris Sims' annotations of the comic adaptation. Which are interesting in the very least for their exploration of how what can semi-work in a novel doesn't really work in a comic (i.e. the constant head games/worldbuilding through dialogue). Sims is also pretty hard on the art. Which in the first couple of issues, really did have some serious anatomy problems. (All the characters having GIANT THIGHS being the biggest offense.) But I did like how I could see the art and be like, "Wow, they got that pretty much exactly right."
I'm not sure I see that as much in the later issues. First Dominga Salvador looks like Aunt May with a tan, which really floored me because I pictured her as this fat woman with dark hair and hard lines in her face. But I let that go because I realized hey, I didn't actually remember her description and I was probably tapping into racist images of voodoo medicine women in my mental portrait, anyway. But now I've learned that Irving looks like this and I'm just like, "Noooooooo!" I mean, seriously. "Balding reporter" and THAT'S what they come up with? Some cute guy with premature baldness showing through a thick Jew-fro? I was so sure he looked something like the tall Bob from Office Space, too. I don't know you guys. This is disappointing. I mean, is nobody allowed to be unattractive in the Anitaverse now? And aren't comic artists naturally allowed to draw ugly dudes? I mean, Manny doesn't look that great. What's going on here?
Or maybe I'm too sensitive. I don't know. It's not like my mental conceptions are canon.Doyle from Merry Gentry has African features, I have spoken! These designs just struck me as weird, I guess.
I don't know. Does anybody else read this series? What do you think of that art?
So I'm more than half-way through Bloody Bones and ... it's okay. Jean-Claude isn't annoying me as much as usual and while it does have that "ALL THINGS HAPPENING ALL THE TIME!!!" bullshit that they did in the last book only with a much larger cast of boring humans who'll probably be dead by the last page, at least Anita gets to do things in the book like SLEEP. I think by the end of The Lunatic Cafe she ended up fighting the villain with her crutches after one hour of sleep.
... What the hell happened with that fight, anyway? Didn't she kill the were-swan or something? I remember a lot of that book, why can't I remember the climax? Or the most crucial part of the climax? I remember a lot of it involved Edward and Anita and Richard in cages and Jason kept trying to eat/molest her ... Anyways ...
I'm really liking Larry Kirkland this time around, which amazes me because I didn't think much of him in Circus of the Damned. Of course, I didn't think that much of Circus of the Damned in general. (The Laughing Corpse remains my favorite. Whatever its faults, this series has the coolest zombies. I got kind of gleeful when the bitchy Amazon tags for the latest Anita Blake book were all "Bring Back the Zombies!") I'm really warming up to him, though. I like that he looks like a dweeb but has deep hidden power and that he's potentially BFF with Jason's bisexual werewolf self (in my mind, anyway). The mentor-student relationship with him and Anita is also pretty nice, even if it leads to a lot of "I'm So Hard" posturing on Anita's part. Okay, I'm hard to please, but I like Larry.
My one issue with Larry though is that my Watchmen obsession keeps leading me to want to mentally replace his image in my mind with Walter Kovacs, which in a way is appropriate since they both look like Howdy Doody but is inappropriate in that Larry is like the most un-Rorschach person ever.
Still, I do like the idea of Larry being kind of unattractive. Which gets me to the thing I actually wanted to talk about. See, since Laurell K. Hamilton has a need to describe everything (and I do mean EVERYTHING) I have pretty clear images of the characters. Or I THOUGHT I did, anyway. I've been semi-paying attention to Chris Sims' annotations of the comic adaptation. Which are interesting in the very least for their exploration of how what can semi-work in a novel doesn't really work in a comic (i.e. the constant head games/worldbuilding through dialogue). Sims is also pretty hard on the art. Which in the first couple of issues, really did have some serious anatomy problems. (All the characters having GIANT THIGHS being the biggest offense.) But I did like how I could see the art and be like, "Wow, they got that pretty much exactly right."
I'm not sure I see that as much in the later issues. First Dominga Salvador looks like Aunt May with a tan, which really floored me because I pictured her as this fat woman with dark hair and hard lines in her face. But I let that go because I realized hey, I didn't actually remember her description and I was probably tapping into racist images of voodoo medicine women in my mental portrait, anyway. But now I've learned that Irving looks like this and I'm just like, "Noooooooo!" I mean, seriously. "Balding reporter" and THAT'S what they come up with? Some cute guy with premature baldness showing through a thick Jew-fro? I was so sure he looked something like the tall Bob from Office Space, too. I don't know you guys. This is disappointing. I mean, is nobody allowed to be unattractive in the Anitaverse now? And aren't comic artists naturally allowed to draw ugly dudes? I mean, Manny doesn't look that great. What's going on here?
Or maybe I'm too sensitive. I don't know. It's not like my mental conceptions are canon.
I don't know. Does anybody else read this series? What do you think of that art?