Ain't allergies a @*# pain?
Anyway, on to the issues of the day. Apparently the Reform Party has had a forcible clue injection in the form of Ventura's segment of the party, which has popped open a big can of whup-ass on Perot's segment of the party.
Egads. You know what this means, don't you? With a Venturist candidate at the head of the Reform Party, they might actually be a viable third party. Viable in the sense that they're more than a Perot ego vehicle, that is. Could the two-party Republic finally change into a true Democracy once more? Will the proletariat get their bread? Will we see more professional wrestlers in public office? All these questions and more will be answered, etc, etc.
I hope the Reform Party can get a candidate elected on a giant wave of proletarian surl. Can't you just see it now? A true President of the people at last. A crusader on a white horse come to kick ass and take names. Someone who's not afraid of being seen wearing a feather boa. Why, the comedy potential alone could keep Americans snickering well into the next millenium.
I mean, really, in a race between the Smiler and the Beast, it's good to see there's a third option. I mean, heck, if the only options are Smilin' Jr Bush and Al "Wood-boy" Gore, I'd vote for pretty much anyone the Reform Party chose to put forwards. They could dig up George Washington's corpse and put him on the ballot, and I'd vote their way.
But then, I'm pretty surly.
It's things like this that make me think that, hey, maybe the system *can* be saved. Maybe there's still hope after all. Maybe. Although if you want to ensure your place in the ruling aristocracy after the revolution, there are still plenty of positions open in my Legions of Terror! If it turns out we don't need a revolution to steer America back on the path of sanity, then we'll just get together and have a big kegger instead. After all, evil should be *fun*.
Where was I?
Errr... how about some book reviews? Ah, yes. Mmm. Graphic novels. I finally got around to reading A Distant Soil volume one, which I got at Otakon this year. I can see why Colleen Doran was marketing to the Con crowd, since she does use a few things one typically thinks of as being "anime" styles, even though the art is definitely the western style. Namely, the anime isms of a whopping great cast, plus those ever-present bishonen (pretty boys). Although she does riff this a bit by having one of the characters with astoundingly long hair get it stepped on at one point (all that hair has *gotta* be inconvenient, eh?). Of course, for all I know, those might not be intentional animeisms after all, but hey, the similarity would certainly make it marketable to the anime crowd, and that's a good thing. Sales are your *friends*.
Also, more recently purchased were the first two volumes of the Nausicaa in the Valley of the Wind manga. Come, now, surely even a non-fanboy must know of the anime movie of the same title. I mean, it was directed by Hayao "Totoro" Miyazaki. But anyway, the movie compared to the manga in the same way that, say, the Starship Troopers movie compared to the original novel. The movie combined tons of characters to make things more compact, and removed a lot of the motivations and all that for the non-central characters. Some things remain consistent in both versions, but really... In the movie, you've got an independant principality (the Valley of Wind) being invaded by people for no particular reason, and ending up as sort of helpless bystanders to a great war between two nations. In the manga, the Valley of the Wind is actually a vassal of the people who invade them in the movie, and the "invasion sequence" is quickly solved by pointing this out, at which point the same villains who trample and invade the place in the movie pause, blink at each other, and leave to go whomp on some actual enemies instead of pointlessly clobbering their own allies. The enemy leader actually has a reason to be surly in the manga (as opposed to the anime, where she's just sort of really surly for reasons which are never adequately explored), and is enough of a sympathetic character that Our Heroine is able to ally with without too much of a moral conflict.
The only down side is that the whole book is reversed (because the Japanese write everything out to be read in the opposite direction from us) which can cause finely-tuned brains to throw a gear when they look at, say, the map page, which titles things as being in the west that are clearly in the east due to the map being flipped. Did nobody proof this book? Where are your standards, you goofballs? Hrmf.
This is Surly-Manga-Reviewer Lad, signing off.
Rant 'o the day contains no additives, preservatives or small woodland creatures of any kind. Use only as directed. Do not expose to direct sunlight. Do not fold, spindle, multilate or remove identifying tags. Handle with care. Contains less than 3% milk fat by weight, not by volume. Squeeze the lemon.
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