W O R D S 1

Outsiders trade paperback by Judd Winnick.
It was pretty good. Not stupendous. It was not as instantly likeable as Exiles when I first started reading that. I like the concept behind the robot from the future (though I don't especially like how she was visually interpreted by the artist). I also like Metamorpho II's origin. Pretty clever. All in all, I don't think I'll be getting another trade. It just wasn't THAT good.

Warren Ellis' Strange Killings. Not bad. Seemed a bit rushed at times. Definitely didn't get any interior views of the characters, which was a shame. I didn't come away understanding the main character's motivations. It seemed like Ellis was somewhat resting on the laurels of the infrerred "subjective morality" that he usually uses for his characters. Like, it was just understood that he was morally justified in his actions. Or whatever.

But I also read Dark Blue (also by Ellis), which was really good. Sometimes his premise is good, but his delivery is lacking, or vice versa. This one is choice on both. It, too, was slightly rushed, but maybe he just works faster and I should just get used to it? I mean, I often feel like he's moving too fast, but maybe that's just his style. Anyway, it was about this CIA agent who undergoes drug treatments of this drug which creates a shared narcotic reality. In the reality, a guy dies, but haunts it and sort of controls it. Sort of a Matrix meets Seven for the Narcotic world, or "narcospace."

I also finished A Brief History of Everything, by Ken Wilber, over the weekend. It seems that with every book by him I read, I not only understand his integral view better, but also feel like I can convey it better, as well. Hmmm, what really stuck out for me in this one? Let me think about it...

Brian posted at 2:14 PM.

I just read an Alan Moore run on WildC.A.T.s called Homecoming. It featured the team going back to Khera and finding out that the war (on which most of the conflict in the whole Wildstorm universe is based, mind you) has been over for 200 years, but no one ever told the folks who went to earth. I'm not sure what effect this had on the Wildstorm universe, if any, but it seemed like a pretty crazy premise to bring about.

One of the things Moore did for his story-telling was to portion out the stories by character and sort of focus an issue on a specific character. There was very little fighting or action for the whole thing.

At the same time this was going on, Savant, back on earth, was forming a second team to take up where the first (now thought dead) left off.

Brian posted at 2:29 PM.

I am currently reading Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code and Ken Wilber's A Brief History of Everything, both of which are vaguely religious in content. I commented a bit about the coincidence of the topic of the divine feminine in the Hipster Book Blog, so I won't mention it again.

Brian posted at 2:20 PM.