December 30, 2009

     Dave's Unspoilt Capsules and Awards
     The Week's Picks and Pans, plus Awards of Dubious Merit

Standard Disclaimers: Please set appropriate followups.  Recommendation does
not factor in price.  Not all books will have arrived in your area this week.
An archive can be found on my homepage, http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/Rants 
   The set of all comicbook reviews is not itself a review.  Or is it?

     Items of Note (strongly recommended or otherwise worthy): Logicomix

"Other Media" Capsules:

     Things that are comics-related but not necessarily comics (i.e.
comics-based movies like Iron Man or Hulk), or that aren't going to be
available via comic shops (like comic pack-ins with DVDs) will go in this
section when I have any to mention.  They may not be as timely as comic
reviews, especially if I decide to review novels that take me a week or two
(or ten) to get around to.

     Brody's Ghost Part 1 (of 4): MySpace Dark Horse Presents - The latest
project from Mark Crilley is getting launched as part of Dark Horse's online
arm, thus falling under the not-in-comic-shops part of the section
descriptor.  This first "issue" will be serialized over four months of MSDHP,
eight pages at a time, which is apparently the longest run of any single
piece on MSDHP.  Brody's Ghost is a rather grittier story than Crilley's
previous works, set in what appears to be a dark urban near future (cyberpunk
tone, but no evidence of cyberpunk tech), although we don't really see enough
in eight pages to draw many conclusions about the world as a whole.  It's
clearly meant to take place in one of the nastier parts of the city, but it
seems like there aren't any really nice parts.  Brody himself isn't the main
character of this installment, rather we mainly see him by his effects on a
young woman who ends up in a rough situation (she gets enough
characterization that she could well come back in a role other than victim,
but Crilley's always been good at fleshing out even the bit players, so this
might be the last we see of her).  The very last page explains the title and
veers the tone off into urban fantasy...it's not the ghost of a departed
Brody to which the title refers, it is the ghost(s) that haunt Brody.  The
tone also shifts from a pretty dark and depressing one to the possibility of
humor.  Well, dark humor, but what do you expect from the dead?
     Artistically, certain elements are retained from Miki Falls (notably in
the woman who gets mugged), but there's a deliberate shift from smooth and
mystical to rugged and decaying in the visual tone.  This is also notable as
being one of the few full color works from Crilley (leaving aside cover
art).  
     Unfortunately, while MSDHP was supposed to update on December 30, it
hadn't yet at the time of posting my review, so I had to go from the preview
pages shown on CBR.  These were the entire installment, but the page size was
pretty big and I get the feeling the art was intended for digest-sized pages.
So I can't really tell if the final presentation works until I can SEE the
final presentation.  [Later note: Pages are still kinda big on MSDHP, and
their system seems to assume I have a much taller monitor than my 17"
screen.  This is part of why I'm not a regular reader of the site, BTW.]
     With only 8 pages to go on, it's hard to really evaluate the story, but
it generally looks good so far.  The tone shift at the end isn't jarring in a
bad way, and while I can see all sorts of ways this could go badly, I trust
Crilley enough to expect it won't.  Recommended.  Free online at
http://myspace.com/darkhorsepresents?issuenu=30&storynum=1



Late Books:
     These are comics that were not listed as shipping during the week they
were reviewed.  Sometimes someone recommends a book to me that's already out,
and I grab it over the weekend.  Sometimes it's a trade paperback I ordered
online rather than trusting Diamond.  Sometimes the store screwed up or I was
inobservant and I missed something I meant to get.  USUALLY, though, it's
because Diamond didn't ship what it was supposed to ship and I had to
scrounge around or wait on a reorder.

     Logicomix: Bloomsbury (US publisher) - Written by Apostolos Doxiadis
with technical assistance from Christos H. Papadimitriou, drawn by Alecos
Papdatos, colored by Annie Di Donna.  I got this as a Christmas present, and
since there's essentially nothing out this week, I figured I'd spend more
time reviewing it than I normally would.  I suppose I could warn of possible
spoilers, but as the plot is the life of a man who died about the time I was
born, I think the statute of spoilers has passed, eh?
     The core story of this graphic novel is the biography of Bertrand
Russell, a mathematician, philosopher and logician who once spent nearly four
hundred pages on a rigorous proof that 1+1=2 (don't laugh too hard,
rigorously proving things taken as obvious is a lot harder than it looks) and
who knocked a big hole in the quest to create a solid foundation for
mathematics while trying to make that selfsame foundation.  (As an aside, I
should note that my background in physics involves a lot of stuff that makes
pure mathematicians cry, like assuming a rod 10m long and 1cm thick is
infinitely long, or treating the infinitesimal "dx" as well-defined on its
own, so it's kinda hard NOT to chuckle at some of the things that nearly
drove Russell to madness.)  It's wrapped in a framing story that has Russell
relating his life story to an audience in the early 1940s, interspersed with
explanations of the concepts he had been wrestling with at various points in
his life.  And THAT'S wrapped in another framing story about the creators of
the comic discussing the outline with Papadimitriou and trying to figure out
how to go forward (it shifts from "here's what we have" to "what next?" at
page 199).  Just as Russell seemed to be finding that the world is supported
by turtles all the way down, this story is framed all the way out.  ;)
     I should probably make a (hopefully) brief aside on why what Russell did
was a big deal.  Consider computer programming languages: wouldn't it be
great to have one that would never run code that had errors in it?  Sure,
most languages are good at error-detection, but some always get through.
Well, what Russell wanted to do was make the same sort of error-proof code
for logic, so that rubbish statements like "I am lying to you right now"
would be impossible to fit into the format.  You wouldn't have to worry about
these statements, they'd just be "ungrammatical" and rejected without
evaluation.  Unfortunately, the more he poked at it, the less likely it
seemed.  Eventually, Kurt Godel would prove that for simpler systems you
could exclude "Captain Kirk Logic" entirely, but not for any logical system
powerful enough to underpin mathematics (that's the Godel Incompleteness
Theorem, by the way...any system complex enough to describe mathematics will
inevitably run with buggy code, allowing you to properly format statements
like "This statement cannot be proven" within the system).  Essentially, in
trying to solidify the foundations of mathematics, Bertrand Russell managed
to show that it was actually a mobile home.
     In reading this, I decided to read the back section first, which is a
short encylopedia of people and concepts important to the story, in order to
brush up on my rather spotty mathematical history knowledge (thanks to Van
Lente and Dunleavy, I'm a bit stronger on the philosophical history side).
One thing that struck me was how many logicians' biographies had a statement
like "In later years he became increasingly paranoid" near the end...and it
turns out that this was to be a theme of the book, possibly the main theme.
Heh.  Even if you're not interested in the logic part of it, the outer layer
story is a good tale of how biographies are more than just recounting the
facts of a life.  The original writer wants to focus on theme, character and
the like, while Papadimitrou would rather do more justice to the logic
itself, and treat the process that led to computers as the real protagonist.
One of the afterwords explains a few of the liberties taken with real history
in the name of a more interesting story (mostly taking interactions that had
been via letters or other indirect means and turning them into face-to-face
meetings for more dramatic results). 
     Artistically, it's very "European Comics" in style.  Granted, my
experience with European comics compares unfavorably with my background in
mathematical history, but I've seen enough to recognize a house style when I
see one, and this is such a case.
     All in all, a hefty but very worthwhile read.  Strongly recommended.
$22.95 cover price, $18.36 with free shipping at deepdiscount.com, currently
discounted to $13.97 and eligible for super-saver shipping at Amazon.


New Comics:
     Comics and comic collections that I got this week and were actually
supposed to be out this week, as far as I can tell.  These reviews will
generally be spoiler-free, but the occasional bit will slip in.

     Nada.  Not that there was much coming in the first place, but Diamond
decided not to bother shipping anything to my store.  I was thinking of
getting the Siege promo freebie, but I hadn't put it on my pull so it doesn't
really count as "Gone Missing".


Gone Missing:

     Stuff that came out some places this week and that I wanted to buy, but
couldn't find for whatever reason, so people don't have to email me asking
"Why didn't you review X?"  (If it's neither here nor in the section above,
though, feel free to ask, I might have forgotten about it!) 

     Current list as of 12/30/09: Official Handbook of the Gold Digger
Universe #22, Gold Digger v3 #105.


Awards:

"I Wonder If Every Failure Adds A Ghost?" Award to Brody's Ghost Part 1 (of 4)

"If Bertrand Russell Had Succeeded, Kirk Would Have Been Trapped On Mudd's
     World" Award to Logicomix

     Dave Van Domelen, "Without language or thought, how can you understand
ANYTHING?"  "Who knows.  Maybe by whistling?  -KHT.-  -PHT.-  It's too cold
for whistling, Russell." - Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Logicomix 

Drift on back to the December 2009 Page.