Tuesday, May 31

DC Comics' Big Announcement

Well, even as I was putting together the last post, I was watching stuff appear on my blogroll at right about the Big Announcement DC Comics just made. I've just skimmed through DC's own blog postings:

as well as the first of my linked blogs' reactions – which just about sums up my own reaction.

http://dangermart.blogspot.com/2011/05/new-dc-explosion.html

I don't have a whole lot to add to what Martin Gray over in Edinburgh has to say, except that I have great trepidation. I happen to like a lot about the current DC Universe, even things I was initially skeptical of in concept (Dick Grayson as The Batman? Multiple Batmen?).  I'm trying to take a “wait and see” attitude toward all this, but I keep remembering what one of the podcasters I listen to repeatedly cautions – every jumping-on point is also, and it seems even more likely, a jumping-off point (John Mayo, Comic Book Page).  That's something the industry just can't stand.  I have a colleague who just a couple of months ago finally succumbed to years of influence by me and started getting his own comics (rather than just reading mine) - if there's too radical a change he might be lost altogether.  Indeed, it remains to be seen how much my own comics “pull list” as listed above will change in a short time.

More thoughts to come, I'm sure.

Not feeling so cheery right now....

Girasol Pulp Doubles #2(a): The Spider – Death's Crimson Juggernaut (2007)

By Grant Stockbridge (Norvell Page), originally published in The Spider #14 (November 1934)

I “discovered” The Spider a few months ago when I suddenly got hot and heavy into the old pulp heroes, and pretty quickly whizzed through the first five adventures in order because they are available as free downloads through Munsey's via the Stanza eBook app. (I put “discovered” in quotes because I've always been aware of the character but knew little more than that he existed.) The Spider has the reputation of being the bloodiest and most violent of the hero pulps, and that reputation is not undeserved as far as I can tell. From the beginning, which drops you right into the first adventure when Richard Wentworth has already for some time been a vigilante crime fighter in New York City, wearing a simple black cloak, mask, and fedora, under the guise of The Spider, who leaves his crimson spider mark on the foreheads of his criminous victoms, the violence doesn't let up. It just gets more and more epic. At first he's fighting more or less simple gangsters. By the third novel it's a plot to hold the city ransom by unleashing pigeons carrying bubonic plague. In the fifth there is a conspiracy to hold the entire nation ransom or whole cities' populations will die screaming, eaten alive by some kind of acidic green gas (some do, including part of Washington DC). I think part of the draw of the series had to have been just coming back next month to see how much more outrageous the story could get. Whatever, it worked for more about a decade and almost 120 issues.

Since the 1960s pulp revival there have been a number of reprints of Spider stories in a variety of formats. Currently, since 2007 I believe, Girasol Collectibles is issuing them in two different formats. First there is the facsimile series, basically reprinting the old pulp magazines complete and in order on much better paper and at a price considerably more than the original ten cents apiece ($35); second, there's the more affordable Pulp Doubles series, throwing two adventures together for about $15 per volume, retypeset but preserving the original illustrations and magazine format (but again on much better paper so it's essentially a large trade paperback). The Pulp Doubles come out quarterly and are up to about #19; I'm not sure about the facsimiles. My main quibble with the Pulp Doubles is that they are not being published in any discernable order. (I have the same complaint about the Doc Savage and Shadow reprint series from Sanctum Books.) I've started getting The Spider Doubles at about #18 but have availed myself of a couple of sales through Radio Archives to pick up earlier numbers, such as this #2 – which reprints the original #14, Death's Crimson Juggernaut, alongside #64, Claws of the Golden Dragon.

Generally, The Spider stories follow a set formula – throw our hero against seemingly insurmountable odds against ruthless criminals willing to kill large numbers of innocents (and they do), but let The Spider go to town on them in turn, guns ablazing. Throughout he is playing a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with his good friend the NYPD Commissioner Stanley Kirkpatrick who knows on some level that Dick Wentworth is The Spider and who is sworn to bring him to justice if ever he can prove it. Wentworth is supported by his lover Nita Van Sloan, her dog Apollo, Wentworth's valet the Sikh Ram Singh, and so forth. Many times in each story some or all of these will seem to face certain death, but so far they all emerge un- (or little-) harmed. So far in my little reading there have been several instances of the criminal world putting forward their own false Spider in an attempt to bring the real Spider into disrepute. And I've gotten pretty good with the last one with predicting who the master villain will turn out to be – just look at the most unlikely candidate outside the main cast.

There was, however, some change, perceptible just in my own jump from the fifth to the fourteenth original novel. In the beginning, as mentioned above, Wentworth wore a simple mask, cloak, and hat … by “now” he's also sporting sallow makeup, a lank-haired wig, a hunched back, a prominent hooked nose, and a set of false fangs to make his visage even more frightening to the criminal world.

There's no way to properly summarize a Spider adventure - there's just too much happening on every page … here's the back cover blurb for Death's Crimson Juggernaut to give you a taste: Horror stalks the city as helpless victims are found brutally murdered … by crucifixion! Whole buildings are burned to the ground to further a mad scheme, and no crime is too terrible for the Torture Killers. Richard Wentworth joins the fray as the Spider, and finds himself blinded! Can a sightless Spider hope to win against these odds? Of course he can, but I lost track of the body count early on.

Is it great literature? Heck no, it's pulp! But like most pulp writers Norvell Page (who wrote most of The Spider stories) wrote with a driving purple prose that made it almost impossible to put down. And there's always the question – How will he top this?
* * *
Besides the Girasol Collectibles site linked above, you can find out more about The Spider at Chris Kalb's site, The Spider Returns.


And if you too want to dive into the world of the pulps, Radio Archives (also linked above), generally runs a "Treasure Chest" sale every Tuesday in which you can get a pulp reprint (of their choice, usually The Shadow or Doc Savage) for 99 cents thrown in with a $35 purchase.

Cheers!

Friday, May 27

Planetary, vol. 3: Leaving the Twentieth Century

By Warren Ellis and John Cassaday, collecting the series #13-18 (2001-2004)

Again, since I started this blog while I was in the process of reading through this 27-issue series collected in four paperback volumes, I'm going to play a little catch-up here. I'm not going to try to analyze the series as a whole. For one thing, I'm not but three-quarters of the way through it. And I don't pretend to have “gotten” all the subtleties, references, and themes in this deep series. Oddly enough, as far as I've found, it has not been annotated fully. There have been a couple of abortive attempts that don't seem to have gotten very far:
The basic overview “blurb” is this, from the back of both the first and second volumes:

This is Planetary: Three people who walk the world for strangeness and wonder, uncovering things others wish were left uncovered. They are the mystery archaeologists, explorers of the planet's secret history, charting the unseen borders of a fantastic world.

Of course, a conflict has emerged. In the first and second volumes great mystery surrounds exactly who the character Elijah Snow is and who the “Fourth Man” behind Planetary is. But there also develops an ongoing struggle between Planetary and a group called The Four that ratchets up in the third volume. Along the way a number of other characters and events appear from the last century or so, basically the twentieth (Planetary launched as a series in 1999; Elijah Snow is a very well-preserved 99 years old, having been born on 1 January 1900). Particularly those other characters (and even The Four) have analogues in various fictional genres and works of that same century … characters from before the twentieth century actually appear under their own names. I imagine much of that had to do with copyright issues.

Anyway, what I'm going to do here is break down the first three volumes by original issue and focus on the main character references:


Vol. 1 – All Over the World and Other Stories

#1: “All Over the World.” First we meet our main characters, put forward here as a three-person field team working for a mysterious “Fourth Man”: Elijah Snow, Jakita Wagner, and “the Drummer.” All three have some kind of super-power: Snow can manipulate and lower temperatures; Wagner is super-strong, -fast, and -tough; the Drummer is some kind of electronic savant who can communicate directly with computers and electronic systems. Then the balance of the issue reveals the existence of a band of super-humans in the 1930s and 1940s who are analogues mainly of old pulp heroes (and villains): The only one who is discovered still alive is Doc Brass [Doc Savage], but there was also one Hark [Fu Manchu], Jimmy [Operator No. 5], an Aviator [G-8], Edison [Tom Swift], Lord Blackstock [Tarzan], and a black-cloaked figure whose name is not given, I believe [The Shadow or The Spider]. All had vanished in 1945, it now turns out defeating an attack on our world by another universe's analogues of the Justice League, individually unnamed but clearly Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, and Aquaman. The issue ends with an exchange that becomes one of the catch-phrases of the series: “It's a strange world.” “Let's keep it that way.”

#2: “Island.” Basically a riff of the old Japanese monster movies, centered around Monster Island and its creatures such as Godzilla, Rodan, and so forth.

#3: “Dead Gunfighters.” An homage to Chinese action movies, in which our heroes meet a ghost cop in Hong Kong.

#4: “Strange Harbours.” Introduces a character named James Wilder (is it a coincidence that this is one of the names postulated by Philip Jose Farmer as the “real” name of Doc Savage in Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life? I doubt it, but I don't know the connection) who is transformed by some kind of interdimensional ship into some kind of science-fiction techno-art-deco Captain Marvel (the real one, i.e. “Shazam!”).

#5: “The Good Doctor.” Juxtaposes a sedate comic-illustrated conversation between Elijah Snow and Doc Brass with prose pages recounting the latter's career in pulp-magazine form. The cover is an homage to the 1960s paperback reprints of Doc Savage, complete with a faux James Bama cover. This issue also brings in a character named Jenny Sparks from the Wildstorm series The Authority (which I've not read – shock – horror!), about the anti-hero Justice League of the Wildstorm universe.

#6: “4.” Introduces the main “villains” - or at least opponents of Planetary (I'm not sure that things are entirely as they seem, and won't be until I've finished the series as a whole. I'm not reading ahead in any of the resources). They are analogues of Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four – Randall Dowling (Reed Richards), Kim Suskind (Susan Storm), William Leather (Johnny Storm), and Jacob Greene (Benjamin Grimm). These are The Four – and at least through the third volume they are portrayed as really bad news. They have powers much like those of their prototypes, the most different being Dowling who can “expand his mind,” i.e. read and influence others' minds as well as being super-intelligent (but with no morals to go with it).

The volume ends with the “Planetary Preview” which was actually published first, as an insert or backup to other Wildstorm titles: “Nuclear Spring.” Basically tells another version of the story of Marvel Comics' The Hulk. As always, it's given its own twist in this setting. My main quibble is the placement – right back to back with another Marvel Comics riff. Obviously it couldn't go first without diluting the introduction of Elijah Snow in issue #1, but if I were editing this collection I would have put it in immediately after, between #1 and #2. Oh well.


Vol 2 – The Fourth Man

#7: “To Be in England, in the Summertime.” Other than its cover's resemblance to the style of Wildstorm's sister imprint published by DC Comics, Vertigo, I can't make any real connections here beyond the name of a character introduced here, Jack Carter. That was the name of the character played by Michael Caine in Get Carter, a 1971 British crime-revenge film.

#8: “The Day the Earth Turned Slower.” As is obvious from the title, it's a riff on 1950s science-fiction films. The issue cover's great – fifty-foot woman, giant ants, Martians attacking – all at once.

#9: “Planet Fiction.” Tells the story of an earlier Planetary mission in which a previous field team member (whom Snow replaced – well that's the implication) Ambrose Chase was killed. (He also was super-powered, able to disrupt reality.)

#10: “Magic and Loss.” Members of The Four wipe out analogues of Superman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern before they can emerge on the Earth, appropriating their technologies for themselves. (This sounds very much like the plot for Planetary/JLA: Terra Occulta, which I already increasingly want to forget I ever read.  [Note:  I did read it a few days ago and had a blog entry for it, but frankly don't consider rewritng it worth the trouble.])

#11: “Cold World.” John Stone, Agent of S.T.O.R.M., is obviously Marvel's Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. - complete with a Steranko-esque cover. In this story, however, Elijah Snow announces, “I know who the Fourth Man is.

#12: “Memory Cloud.” Elijah Snow reveals that he himself is the Fourth Man. He was rendered amnesiac by The Four, sacrificing himself to save his team, but was found by them. He is now recovered and ready to take on The Four. The issue (and volume) ends with him projecting a huge icy “4” spanning Central Park in New York City – symbolically the opposite of the traditional flaming “4” left as a trail in the sky by the Human Torch.


Vol. 3 – Leaving the Twentieth Century

#13: “Century.” Retrospective of Elijah Snow's early adventures including his becoming an apprentice of Sherlock Holmes and kicking Count Dracula in the nuts. Really.

#14: “Zero Point.” Another retrospective, in which the Mighty Thor's hammer Mjolnir leads Snow into the confrontation with The Four that left him amnesiac.

#15: “Creation.” Plays off Australian aboriginal myth, centering around Ayres Rock and the concept of the Dreamtime.

#16: “Hark.” Amanda Hark, the daughter of Doc Brass's 1940s ally Hark, enters into an uneasy alliance with Snow.

#17: “Opak-Re.” Equals the lost city of Opar – this is a tale of a younger Elijah Snow encountering Lord Blackstock in a mysterious lost city in Africa – which hosts a super-scientific but reclusive people. We find out that Jakita Wagner is actually Blackstock's daughter by a woman of Opak-Re, rescued by Snow.

#18: “The Gun Club.” Tells the real fate of the crew shot into space in Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon. Their capsule was lost in a 150-year orbit that eventually came back to its point of origin – and brought it to the attention of The Four, which gives Planetary the chance to capture one of their number, William Leather.

And so the third volume ends.


But I can't let this blog entry end without praising the art of John Cassaday.  He is one of the most technically perfect draftsmen working in comics today, and he can tell a story too.  To illustrate this, I've chosen two images:  One of the main characters, basically the cover of issue #1, and one big montage that is also available as a wallpaper:




Cheers!

(And with that, thank God, I've reconstructed more or less what this blog looked like before I carelessly deleted everything.  Luckily, for this last entry I had it saved, html and all, as a separate file.)

The Abduction of Amy Roberts (2003) (The Bronze Saga #4)


By Mark and Karen Eidemiller

After the somewhat more sedate offering with #3, The Bronze Avengers, the action ratchets back up to 11. Set in the days after 9-11, The Abduction of Amy Roberts finds the adoptive, but no less electronically gifted, daughter of Long Tom Roberts kidnapped by an African terrorist to construct the final intricate mechanism to implement a plot which will, to paraphrase Doc (called “Clark” in this series), “make 9-11 look like a cakewalk.” Clark and his new band of brothers launch a rescue mission that takes them to “The Land of Long Juju” (one of the original Doc Savage pulp novels that I don't believe I've actually read) in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Along the way they find an ally in one Hugo Danner (Philip Wylie's The Gladiator), who has survived as tough and strong as ever (think the original 1938 Superman) and who has also become a Christian. It's a rousing tale of high-tech neopulp adventure, with the Eidemillers' own unique take. I've already mentioned in a previous entry the one drawback to this series of “Christian Adventures of Doc Savage”; no need to belabor it here, other than to assure the reader that it doesn't detract from the overall story one bit.

But since this is the first of the Bronze Saga stories that I've given a full entry to, and it's taking up midstream so to speak, I do want to give at least a blurb about the previous stories to bring us up to speed. The first of the novels was:


Bronze Refined as Silver – establishes the basic premise of this series, telling how the 1930s-40s adventurer and crime-fighter Doc Savage woke from fifty years of suspended animation into a world that was not his own. He was found and “saved” by a street preacher named Perry Liston. They set out to find those members of his previous band of adventurers who are still living – Monk, Long Tom, Johnny, and Renny – as well as their various descendants, putting together (as I put it above) a latter-day band of brothers. They also encounter Doc's beautiful cousin Pat Savage – who has unfortunately “turned to the dark side.” Conflict with Pat, who blames Doc for everything bad that happened to her after he disappeared, helps set up the second story:


More Precious Than Gold – takes us back to the Valley of the Vanished in Hidalgo, where we even meet again, albeit all to briefly, Princess (now Queen) Monja. (Notice how I'm trying not to give away too many spoilers? These stories are well worth reading for yourself.)


Bronze Avengers – I referred to it above as more “sedate.” Well, that's if you can call a major earthquake and its aftermath “sedate”! In the course of this story Doc's new circle of supporters grows larger, and he even discovers that his legacy from the 1930s and 1940s, seemingly sullied by the discovery of what he had been doing at the “Crime College” in upstate New York shortly after he disappeared (his brain surgeries on criminals to transform them into productive and peaceful members of society was considered a gross violation of their civil and human rights), has nonetheless survived in an unexpected way.

Which brings us to The Abduction of Amy Roberts.

Throughout this series the spiritual life and transformation of the characters is a major theme – redemption. It's generally very well written. Sometimes the lack of professional editing does let the occasional grammatic or stylistic faux pas slip through, and I'm not sure a “real” publisher would allow the Eidemillers to so self-indulgently write themselves into the stories as much as they do. But these - as well as the sometimes overbearing evangelical tone - are ultimately minor things.  And the fact is that I find myself more in tune with the Eidemillers' world-view that they are trying to get across than not.  I understand where they're coming from.  And so I highly recommend these e-books as a rather offbeat but engaging series of Christian fiction. I'm finding myself tearing right through them. I started the first on Good Friday and have read through about one a week since then.

By the way, I have to say a couple of words about the covers that I have pictured above. The images are taken from the Eidemillers' website, which has a gallery of pictures to go with the Bronze Saga. They are photoshopped in the style of the old 1960s series of Bantam reprints of Doc Savage pulps which established for all time thereafter the iconic image of Doc Savage as illustrated by James Bama. Pretty clever work - although I didn't picture Kananga as Idi Amin!

Cheers!

You've gotta restart somewhere

"You've gotta start somewhere" was the title of my second post a week ago, before the incredibly stupid delete-all event of a little while ago. Basically I just listed out what I was currently reading. Well, here's where I am now.

I'm in the middle of reading three different series. I often have multiple reads going on at the same time – again, in addition to my scholarly reading that's not part of this blog. I also gravitate toward series fiction, long-form story-telling.  It's what I like about comics - the never-ending story.  This time I'm just going to list them by series, then give each of the most recently-read volumes of each its own separate blog entry.
  • Planetary, by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday. This was a comic book series published by DC under its Wildstorm imprint between 1998 and 2009. It's collected in four trade paperback volumes. I read the first two some years back, then stockpiled the third and the fourth as they came out. They sat on my shelf for a while until a couple weeks back when I undertook reading them all the way through.
  • Perry Rhodan. You can find more information, including my write-up of the latest issue that I've read by going to my other blog, which is listed over yonder → … Briefly, Perry Rhodan is a German pulp magazine series that has been published weekly since September 1961 and is almost up to issue #2600 in Germany. An English translation of about the first 150 issues were published in the 1970s, which is when I discovered it. In this blog I'm just going to give notice when I've finished reading the next issue in that 1970s English-language series and that a new entry to The Perry Rhodan Reading Project blog will be forthcoming.
  • The Bronze Saga, by Mark and Karen Eidemiller. I'm reading this on my iPod Touch using the Stanza e-reader app. This is a series of fan-fiction that is available free through the Eidemillers' website. It has a premise that at first sounds wacky, but they make it work. Basically, the pulp hero Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, fell victim to one of his arch-enemies after his last pulp-magazine adventure ca. 1950, was trapped in suspended animation for fifty years, then woke up to a world that had changed utterly. Dislocated in time, space, and spirit, he was found by an itinerant preacher, through whom he found Christ and became himself a traveling evangelist. The series is also called “The Christian Adventures of Doc Savage” – Huh?!, you say? That was my reaction too when I first heard of it via an episode of one of the podcasts that I listen to, Ric Croxton and Art Sippo's The Book Cave (the episode is here). But as I said above, they make it work. Mark Eidemiller has a thorough knowledge of the character and, more importantly, a real feel for him, and with few exceptions I, at least, feel that I'm really reading about Doc Savage. Sure, the series gets a bit overbearing with its evangelical tone at times, but everything else is so well-done that that does not detract from my enjoyment. Anyway, Doc being Doc, trouble has a way of finding him, and these stories (I'm currently reading #5, but I'm going to reconstruct my entry for #4 which also serves as an overview of the series thus far) are filled with much the same kind of adventure as the old 1930s pulps were.
Lest I leave the reader with the wrong impression, I feel the need to explain my reaction to the religious aspects of The Bronze Saga. Here's my own religious history, in brief: I was raised Southern Baptist, but had largely lost my faith by the time I was out of high school. Within just a few years, however, I had found it again, in the Roman Catholic Church in which I worship to this day. I'm pretty thoroughly a traditionalist Catholic. I don't wear it on my sleeve or anything, but I hope my faith shows through my life. Not wanting to be judgmental, I nevertheless must say that I find the overt in-your-face religiosity of many of the more evangelical Protestants who do seem to wear it on their sleeves to be quite sanctimonious. I am just not very comfortable around it. But despite the tone of the Christianity propounded in The Bronze Saga being somewhat "in-your-face," it is only one element of the stories and I must say again that they can be read as rousing adventure stories that do have a solid Christian moral foundation. And that aspect and viewpoint I am in perfect tune with, finding it indeed quite refreshing. I recommend them highly.

Beyond what I've just written, I don't really intend to go any further into my religious views, except where it's necessary and natural given whatever I might be blogging about in a particular instance. I do read a number of books on religious history or spirituality, and I will include those in this blog. I don't intend to record my daily spiritual reading, however ... unless something really strikes me.  Most importantly, however, I will not let this blog become a forum for religious debate and argument.  'Nuff said.

Anyway, that's where my reading stands pretty much right now. And you got a little more insight into who I am and where I'm coming from. For what it's worth.

Cheers!

Why another blog?

Well, first I've got to confess doing something incredibly stupid. I actually started this blog a week ago, then in attempting to delete my latest entry and just start over with it, I accidentally deleted all the entries. $#!%!

Okay, deep breath. Now... I can't reconstruct all that I had, but luckily I had a draft of the most recent entry saved elsewhere, and I can reconstruct some of the earlier ones fairly easily, so all is not lost. Completely. But when the computer asks you if you really want to do what you're telling it to do, don't think twice! Think three or four times!

Anyway, as to the question that is the title of this entry. That was the title of my very first entry a week ago. The short answer is that, ever since I started my Perry Rhodan Reading Project blog a few months ago, I have kept reading other stuff at the same time. And I have sometimes felt the urge to record my reading and reactions to those works as well, but didn't want to clutter that blog with irrelevancies. So here we are. I doubt this blog will be quite as in-depth as the Perry Rhodan blog, for which I feel, given that there is remarkably little information to be found on the web in English (it's mostly in German, the language the PR series was, and continues to be, first published in), with that blog I'm filling a real niche. Hopefully I'm making my own small contribution toward building up enough support for a renewed publishing effort for PR in English that we'll one day be able to read past about issue #150 (approximately how far the American publishing effort went in the 1970s) in English, perhaps one day all the way to the issue #2600 that is fast approaching in German. And maybe I'll live long enough to see at least the beginnings of that renewed English publication. So if push comes to shove, I'm giving that blog priority over this one.

Because with this blog I don't pretend to be filling any such niche. This is more an exercise in narcissism. Just giving me an opportunity to sound off about what I've been reading (and probably watching) and what my reactions are to it. Again, I'm not going to go try to do any kind of in depth analysis. Most of the time it will probably be more of a log than anything else. But any thoughts that come to me as I'm entering those entries will go down. Because a picture is worth a thousand words, I'll usually throw up some kind of cover shot as well. I hope anyone who comes across this blog enjoys reading it, maybe is introduced to something that they've never come across before and goes on to read and enjoy it themselves. In that way I can consider myself giving a little something back to those authors who give me enjoyment. I likely will be critical of some works. If I don't like something I'll say so. I may even say why, but I'm not going to feel any great need to justify my reaction. If I like it I like it, if not I don't, and that's just the way it is.

Who am I? Well, I am indeed a professor, of Early European History, at a small state university in Louisiana. And I am indeed “absent-minded.” Just ask my wife or anyone who knows me. “Absent-Minded Professor” has been my persona in several different internet venues for a number of years. Often I use a picture of Fred MacMurray from the movie of that name as my avatar.


What do I read? Besides my professional reading, which will not be recorded here – as I say up top, if you want to know about that, either track down one of my scholarly articles or take a class from me – I read a bit of the following, in no particular order other than this is the order they occur to me now:
  • pulp adventures (Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider, et al.)
  • comic books (mostly DC Comics, very little Marvel and some independents mostly in collected form)
  • science-fiction
  • historical fiction
  • fantasy (Tolkien)
  • urban fantasy (The Dresden Files)
  • mystery
  • crime fiction
  • the occasional popular thriller
  • and so forth
And too much television usually of the same genres. As I said I'll probably include some of that as well, but I doubt it will be as full a log of whatever I happen to watch.

Anyway, I hope the reader who comes across this new blog of mine enjoys it. If not, just move along.

Cheers!