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Reflections
I woke up this morning with an interesting experience of mind/body duality. I had had many vivid dreams, so my mind felt fresh and clean and ready for a full day of thinking. On the other hand, my *brain* is still aching from the cold that came on yesterday. I sure hope this doesn't turn out to be the bronchitis or similar that's been making the rounds.
On a similarly dualistic note, I've been re-reading a comic book run from the early 90's called Shade the Changing Man. It was in my "maybe purge this after a reread" pile. I remembered it as being mostly full of gratuitous weirdness (a la Doom Patrol of the same period), only not as good, and there's only so much room for gratuitous weirdness in my library. And on a *plot* level, that's still true -- weird shit happens, and I don't much care. But it turns out that the *characterization* is really great, and is gripping me solidly. I don't care about the events themselves, but I care strongly about how the characters *react* to (and are changed by) those events. Which suggests that I really should look up what else the author (Peter Milligan) has done in the decade since I last read his work regularly. Stuff that I passed over because the 1-paragraph plot summary sounded dull may in fact turn out to be well worth a look...
On a similarly dualistic note, I've been re-reading a comic book run from the early 90's called Shade the Changing Man. It was in my "maybe purge this after a reread" pile. I remembered it as being mostly full of gratuitous weirdness (a la Doom Patrol of the same period), only not as good, and there's only so much room for gratuitous weirdness in my library. And on a *plot* level, that's still true -- weird shit happens, and I don't much care. But it turns out that the *characterization* is really great, and is gripping me solidly. I don't care about the events themselves, but I care strongly about how the characters *react* to (and are changed by) those events. Which suggests that I really should look up what else the author (Peter Milligan) has done in the decade since I last read his work regularly. Stuff that I passed over because the 1-paragraph plot summary sounded dull may in fact turn out to be well worth a look...
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On the Milligan front: main thing I associate him with right now is Human Target, which is perhaps the perfect book for him. It's an ongoing series of meditations on Identity, with a main character who is *seriously* messed-up, but is slowly coming to realize that everyone around him is as well.
IMO, it's the best thing Milligan has done: less weird and self-indulgent than most of his previous work, but still grimly strange. Note, BTW, that it is perhaps the *darkest* thing he's ever done -- Christopher Chance is at best an anti-hero, and at that he's almost the only person in the story with any moral compass at all.
I strongly recommend starting the story from the beginning, which is the only way to truly appreciate how screwed-up the scenario is...
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