Reflections

[alexxkay]

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...

Comments

[baron-saturday.livejournal.com]

I really liked Milligan's Shade. Even at the very end when it got *seriously* weird. I second jducoeur on Human Target. I believe that Milligan also did an X-Men title. Although not X-Men, but rather one of the eleventy-billion X.* titles.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

My Shade re-read is getting towards the end of the run, and I'm liking it much less. I like a certain amount of gratuitous *weirdness*, but the story seems to be getting more and more gratuitously *cruel*. Sympathetic (or at least interesting) characters getting killed and/or seriously fucked-up for no reason. But I've gone far enough that I'll probably finish it up. I expect I'll keep the front 2/3 or so in my collection, and purge the last bits.

I suppose now that Joss Whedon has managed to get me to break a decade of X-Men abstinence, I could give some of the other books a look. But no way am I even *attempting* to keep up with the continuity in general any more. That way, madness lies.