All this world is but a play, be thou the joyful player

[sovay]

It is not true that everyone I know came for eggnog (and mostly stayed for dinner), but the combined powers ofgaudior and rushthatspeaks and their two-month-old Fox, Gaudior's mother and stepfather, schreibergasse, sharhaun and his girlfriend who is almost certainly not on Livejournal, and David and C. made for a busy and lovely Christmas Day full of good conversation and friend groups I don't usually get to introduce to each other for extended periods of time and I held the small child and we got dinner on the table before everyone who needed to leave for work in the evening had to leave and there was further hanging-out afterward and after all the guests had gone home, I fell over sideways onto the couch under my jacket and slept for an hour and a half.

derspatchel got me two books I had not even suspected: Alan Cumming's You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams: My Life in Stories and Pictures (2016) and the out-of-print hardcover of Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot, Man of Mystery (2008) I had been coveting at Comicazi for more than a year. He seems to be liking the new biography of George Herriman I got him. We fed the cats their Christmas present—salmon—as soon we got home and hung the scratchboard drawing of a nautilus from my parents next to the glass-fronted cabinet. I still want snow, but I think I'm going to settle for watching some Frank Capra or Preston Sturges on TCM.

Merry Christmas, all.

Comments

[sovay]

Huh. Would not have guessed you were a Flaming Carrot fan.

I backtracked from Mystery Men (1999) and it hit my absurdism sweet spot.

One of my Xmas gifts was the Cerebus Cover Art Treasury, which features a Carrot guest appearance at one point

Sim writes the introduction for this collection. I never got into Cerebus, because I became aware of it well after the point where Sim had gone entirely off the rails about women and religion, but it's a perfectly cromulent introduction.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

In hindsight, the point at which the rails were leapt from is entirely clear. At the time, it was so jarring that most of his fans believed for years that it was a performance art stunt, and he couldn't really *mean* all that...

From approximately issues 20-150, Cerebus was brilliant and ground-breaking more often than not. The earlier stuff is rougher, but improves fast. The later stuff continues to have flashes of brilliance until the very end, though the brilliance is to be found more and more often in formal use of the medium than in plot or characterization the further on one gets.

Comics has no shortage of excellent artists. There are many fine writers and storytellers. But there has not yet been another letterer who even approaches the heights of Art that Dave Sim reached.

I'm sad that I'm unable to recommend it without serious reservations, but there is a lot of good there. If I've made you more curious, the first two volumes can be downloaded free from his website.

[sovay]

In hindsight, the point at which the rails were leapt from is entirely clear. At the time, it was so jarring that most of his fans believed for years that it was a performance art stunt, and he couldn't really *mean* all that...

That sounds painful, both for the people who gave up on him immediately and the people who kept trying in good faith to defend him.

I'm sad that I'm unable to recommend it without serious reservations, but there is a lot of good there. If I've made you more curious, the first two volumes can be downloaded free from his website.

Thank you. At least at the moment, I am unlikely to start a massive reading project knowing that it derails in a meltdown I will find personally unpleasant to read, because that's emotional investment I might never get back, but it's good to know that the early portions of the comic can be enjoyed independently; that it is not one of the situations where it was always necessary to read past the author's painful opinions and all that changed was the ratio of rail-jumping to brilliance.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Oh, and as a Flaming Carrot fan from fairly far back, let me just share my bafflement that a Flaming Carrot spinoff ever got a film adaptation made in the first place. This universe is often far more absurd than we credit :-)

[sovay]

Oh, and as a Flaming Carrot fan from fairly far back, let me just share my bafflement that a Flaming Carrot spinoff ever got a film adaptation made in the first place.

I was so happy when I found out.

This universe is often far more absurd than we credit

I credit the universe with a lot! It can get away with more than fiction.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Indeed it can. And the long-term fate of the fictions within it are so unpredictable. My bafflement at the existence of Mystery Men is similar to (part of) my reaction to Guardians of the Galaxy. If you had told me in the late 80s that there would some day be a big budget, successful movie with large roles for obscure Marvel C-listers like Star-Lord, Yondu, and Ronan, I would never have believed it.