The Girl With The Midas Touch

I recently finished reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Swedish author Stieg Larsson, (2005, first translated into English in 2008).  It's the first book of the best-selling Millenium Trilogy, but the series was originally planned as a series of 10 books featuring the financial journalist Mikhael Blomkvist and his unlikely aide Lisbeth Salander, the be-inked character that gives the book its title.  The novel has been everywhere recently and the Hollywood adaptation has just been released.  So it's fair to say this novel has been on my radar for a while.



I'm pleased to say that The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo completely lives up to the hype.  On paper, it  shouldn't work: a thriller about a disgraced journalist on a sabbatical who attempts to solve a 30-year old family mystery sounds dull and dreary.  But Larsson is a master of drawing the reader into the story and it doesn't take long to get hooked.  In Lisbeth Salander, Larsson has created an instantly classic character.  Surprisingly, Salander doesn't play a huge part in this first book (although I think it's safe to guess that she steps into centre-stage later on, as the next two books are also named after her).

Another reason I've finally gotten around to reading this one is that Vertigo comics have just announced their adaptation of the book coming out in November.  If you can't wait that long, then a special preview is going to be published in time for Free Comic Book Day 2012 (May 5th this year, put in your diary now, fellow nerds!).  Vertigo have had mixed success recently with their line of stand-alone crime graphic novels, so it should be interesting to see how this one works out.  It's a major coup for them to get the rights to the novel.  Denise Mina is an interesting choice for a writer (a successful crime novellist, but a less-than-successful comics writer) but I'm more excited about Leonardo Manco's artwork.  Manco's pairing with Mike Carey on Hellblazer is probably one of my favourite comicbooks of all time.

Leonardo Manco's John Constantine, Hellblazer

Here's the cover to Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, coming this Winter:

And - quelle surprise! - they've gone for the sex angle.  In fact if you view the covers of the novels, you can almost see the progression from the original Swedish covers to the slightly sex-ed up but still demure British ones - culminating in the above monstrosity.  Lee Bermejo is one of my favourite cover artists and the above image is great: I just don't feel like it's right for this book.  The original title of the book roughly translates as "Men who hate women" and the book deals unflinchingly with sexual violence.  So, to me at least, it's wrong to play on the sex-angle too much to attract attention to the books.  Interestingly enough, the movie promo images are quite subdued - I expected the American screens to turn Salander into a blonde bomb-shell.  Salander is portrayed by Larsson as a severely damaged individual: not conventionally attractive and it appears the film has stayed true to the character.



The more eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that I've been making an effort to update this here blog more regularly.  I'm doing my best at the moment and I'm never short of stuff to ramble on about so, if you're still reading, thank you.  I'm doing my best to redesign this site too (with precious little proper techie knowledge) and make it a bit more attractive and accessible.  To this end, I've also listed this page with Technorati, the techno blog. As part of this, I'm obliged to published the following token code to register this blog: Y27T625J3PQ8.  There we go, all done.

I've also realised that this is a bit of a one-way conversation at the moment, so I thought I'd ask what are you reading right now?  I've altered my blog settings so that anyone can add comments and you no longer have to sign up for a Google or a Blogger profile, so feel free to leave a message.  I might have to revise that when the Viagra adverts start rolling in...

Oh and I nearly forgot to mention:  happy birthday Charles!  You'd have to have been living under a rock for the past year not to have noticed that this year is a special one for Charles Dickens: he was born 200 years ago today.  The BBC have been making sure no-one forgets, with their Dickens series of programmes and today Google have jumped on board.

Rapid-fire round-up

Isn't the internet great? Just when I've got a couple of new posts up and running, Blogger.com decides it will remove all the recent posts as a crucial part in some pressing "maintenance". When they finally reinstate said pieces of writing, all comments, as well as any half-drafted new entries have vanished into the cyber-ether, or wherever it is that still-born pieces of writing go to quietly die.

That'll teach me not to back up my work.

Oh well, on with the reviews. I've still got 16 or so books to write up until I get to what I'm reading currently. At this rate, I'm not going to be able to remember enough about them to do them any justice, so here's my rapid-fire round-up of a few of them:

Fables Volume 4: The Mean Seasons, Bill Willingham and various artists


Ah, Fables. I haven't read nearly enough of this warm-hearted fairytale series. This is quintessential Vertigo comics, with well-known character in not so familiar settings. (Come to think of it, there's a certain thematic resonance with Angela Carter here). The central conceit behind Fables is endearingly simple - (which roughly translates as: wish I'd thought of it first!)... All the fairytale characters and magical creatures have been driven from their Homelands by an unknown Adversary, hell-bent on enslaving all those Red Riding Hoods and happy families of bears. Luckily, they managed to open a portal and escape into our world, the world of the Mundanes, and now live happily in central Manhattan. I've read a couple of books of Fables and it never disappoints. At times it's a thriller, at times a love story but Bill Willingham always writes a witty and engaging story.

In this volume, the Fables community are recovering from the aftermath of an attack and Snow White's baby is finally born.

Psttt: You can read issue 1 online here

Love and Rockets: Ghost of Hoppers, by Jaime Hernandez (2005)

Maggie's back in this recent Love and Rockets compilation. My first foray into the world created by the Hernandez brothers, this graphic album looks like a French Bande Dessinée collection in its similar presentation as an annual. The black and white artwork is beautiful, but Maggie's world has been around for 20 or so years now, which means this wasn't the best book to start with. Don't get me wrong: Superman, Batman et all have been around for 70 years or so, and I can still read those. Ghost of Hoppers is a story based heavily on nostalgia for the lead character's past; Maggie mourns for her fiery youth and reflects on how she's grown up. Unfortunately a lot of this was lost on me since I haven't read any earlier volumes of this long-running series.

I originally found this in the library as part of a Q Week display and planned to do a special post about LGBT characters in graphic fiction. As you can see, that didn't quite happen but is definitely a post for another time. See also: Stuck Rubber Baby, which I'll be reading and reviewing very soon. (As an aside though, American mainstream comics are still limited in their portrayal of gay/bisexual characters - this isn't a slur on representation of sexuality in comics though, Mexican/Jewish/Hispanic/Asian characters are heavily under-represented too. But isn't it interesting that mainstream comics contain a handful of lesbian characters, whereas virtually no gay males? Who'd have thought it, eh? What with the typical portrayal of women in superhero comics, that the audience would find lesbian characters more palatable. To be fair, I should mention that there was a bit of a furore when Kate Kane was first published as a lesbian superhero...)

JSA: Black Adam and Isis, Geoff Johns

This is the last volume of Geoff Johns's run on the JSA title. Once again, not the best place to dive in at: in the wake of a big storyline the Justice Society reassembles and welcomes some new members. Meanwhile, Black Adam (last seen instigating World War 3 in the pages of the year-long epic 52) attacks the Marvel family and resurrects his goddess girlfriend, Isis. I didn't expect to enjoy this book as much as I did, but it helps that I'd already read a bit of JSA and was vaguely familiar with some of the characters (there are LOTS). As such this is really not one I'd recommend to newcomers to the title or comics in general because there's so much back-story to absorb. You really need to have some knowledge of the DC Universe and its roster of characters to get something out of this one. If the last couple of sentences made your eyes glaze over, this isn't you.

Having said that, the covers are fantastic. Alex Ross does a great job throughout the series - just check out the above image of Black Adam, looking more evil and smug than Piers Morgan and Donald Trump combined. Now that's a villain!

Vimanarama!

After finishing one novel a week for the first few weeks of 2011 (reviews up soon), I've taken a break from reading novels this past week or so. For the first time in a while, I've taken time out to just read graphic novels and comics.

Now to those who know me, that may not sound like such a break from my usual schedule. But I've usually got a novel (or two) on the go whilst I read other stuff. This is the first time I've really just plunged into graphic novels for a little while. And in the past week, I've read 3 very different books.

And not a cape or a spandex outfit in sight...

First up is Vimanarama, by Grant Morrison with art from Philip Bond. This title, easier to type than to pronounce, collects a 3-issue mini-series published by Vertigo comics. The story

centres on Ali, a young man from Bradford fretting over his upcoming arranged marriage and the tribulations of running his father's grocery shop. This is Grant Morrison's script though, and it doesn't take long for Ali to discover a bizarre underworld beneath the shop and re-awaken 5,000 year old Indian demons that threaten to destroy the world as we know it. Worst still, they've completely disrupted business at the grocery store. Ali's only chance to save everything he loves is to call upon a strange team of Indian superheroes, the Ultra-Hadeen.

Vimanarama is a strange mix of everyday, human drama and off-the-wall mythology. I'm not very knowledgeable about Indian folklore, so it's hard for me to comment on how well Morrison transforms the legends of the Ultra-Hadeen, the Ramas and the vimanas. To be honest, I couldn't tell you how much he's made up himself and what was already extant.

The artwork by Philip Bond is fantastically clear: he's at ease depicting Ali on his bicycle as much as drawing the race of evil demons. The writing is very sharp and witty, but ultimately I found this book a bit dissatisfying. Morrison's work is notoriously hard to follow, and I spent a lot of my time scratching my head and wondering why things were happening. Perhaps it would've worked better if it had been expanded into another issue. In the end, Vimanarama is a bit dissatisfying, but not without its charm.