To The Devil His Due

Daredevil Volume 1 (Marvel Comics, 2012)

Collecting issues #1-6

Writer: Mark Waid

Penciler: Paolo Rivera, Marcos Martin

Inker: Joe Rivera

Letterer: VC’s Joe Caramagna

Daredevil’s been in a funk for several years now, with each new creative team that takes over the book putting Matt Murdock through ever bleaker adventures. These stories resulted in a grim and gritty outlook  for Daredevil.  This new series from writer Mark Waid comes as a breath of fresh air.  Daredevil has a light, breezy tone throughout as he bounces back from his lowest point.

Stylistically the book stands out too.  The stories here are bright, colourful and visually appealling.  Regular series artist Paolo Rivera uses a range of new short-hand techniques to show how the blind Murdock navigates his world and in particular his sense of “radar vision”.  Although this might sound superfluous to the spandex heroics, it’s really a central point of the book.  The character of Daredevil rests upon the concept that a blind man can have such mastery of his environment that he can become a superhero – make no mistake, a little of the old suspension of disbelief is needed here.  But the art on this book will make you see the world from Matt Murdock’s perspective.

Overall, this was a great start to a new series and a perfect jumping-on point for new readers.  I’m looking forward to seeing where else Waid’s run takes Daredevil.

(As a postscript, I've linked to the Amazon page above by force of habit but when I checked out AbeBooks, there's a cheaper copy available here.)

GoodReads

One of the fun things I've been doing this last years is tracking all my reading on a GoodReads profile site.  My profile's here if anyone's interested.  It's a great way to catalogue your reading, follow trends and keep a record (although it won't ever replace my trusty List) and for geeks like me you can make some pretty pictures to show off the books you've read.  This is especially good if you read a lot of books that you don't own, if you have an e-reader or if you get a lot of books from your local library*.

As soon as I've figured it out, I'll get a widget up on this page to show/shame what I read last year.

I just about hit my target of 60 books to read in 2012 (with a little bit of cheating - including speed-reading comic books to get through my quota as the end of December began to loom).  I've set myself a target of a modest 65 to read in 2013, with a personal promise (ha ha) to read more novels and comics.


*Which of course, would be a legal requirement in my future vision of book-centric dystopia. Benefits would then be deducted for people who didn't check out a pre-agreed number of items per annum and it would be a horrible, horrible place to live.  Judge Dredd would be on the scene to inform my ridiculous rules.  You have been warned so at least try to act surprised when they march you down to the self-checkout machines.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone!  This is my “oh-my-god-I can’t believe how long it’s been since I posted” post.  Which is a shame, because I’ve read lots of cool things that I really wanted to write about on here.  I worked out from my Master List (which I may share on here someday), that I read about 60 books last year.

And about 16 of them didn’t even have pictures in or anything, so there.

For the last 2 years I’ve read many many more graphic novels than, well, non-graphic novels.  So perhaps one of my reading resolutions this year should be to read more proper books?

My major news is that, as of Christmas 2012, I am now the proud (read “smug”) owner of a Kindle Fire.  I wasn’t aware of all the great stuff the Fire device could do, so for those not in the know it’s more-or-less an Android tablet computer as well as being an e-reader.  There’s enough distractions on it that I haven’t read a whole book on it yet, but suffice to say that it’s going to liven up my daily commute.  Plus everything is linked up to the Amazon store, so if you’re not on your guard it can be a dangerously short number of clicks to get you from “I wonder if China Mieville has any new books out since I last checked” to “well, now I have ALL his books available on this shiny little black monolith” and “wait, where did all my wages go again?  Oh yes, I spent them on that obscure fantasy writer that Neil Gaiman recommended on his blog”.  You have been warned.  I will try my best not to reach that stage.

Whilst I love those old-fashioned paper things we call books, reading on the Kindle is a completely different experience which will undoubtedly change what I consume as well as how.  I had a discussion this morning about which books would be the most/least inappropriate to enjoy digitally.  Apparently, if you download William Gibson’s cyperpunk standard Neuromancer, your head will explode.  Meanwhile I can’t even contemplate downloading Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury; I can only imagine him turning his grave at the very notion.  [Note: Bradbury did eventually embrace e-books and released his work in a digital format, but I can’t help but feel this would have been at least partly down to his publishers’ input].

I’m currently finishing off a library book before diving into my Kindle downloads: DC: Legacies by Len Wein.  As the title suggests, it’s a history of the DC universe spanning 10 issues and told from the perspective of Paul Lincoln, a long-term collector of superhero memorabilia.  So far, so good –there’s not so much a strong story as a general thread tracing the development of the fictional DC world.  It shows where the first masked avengers came from, leading through to their persecution and eventual disappearance in McCarthy-era America, then the apperance of a new group of brightly coloured superheroes and the cosmic crises, corruptions, deaths and (yes, of course) resurrections that the comics industry has entailled.  I’ve enjoyed it but I know very little about the history of comics before the 1980s.  If you’re a fully paid up member of the continuity police, I imagine this book will make your head spin; DC seems to revise its “official” history every year to the point that the company itself can’t hope to keep up with what the current accepted line is.  But to pick that apart too much would be to miss the point of a fun romp through 60 odd years of publishing history.

Enough about me though… what are YOU reading?