Lascio dormire il racconto per un po’ e torno a Sopdet.
Anzi, no, a Esbat. Ho ricevuto una mail che mi ha fatto un piacere immenso e che parla di Hyoutsuki. E’ la mail di un lettore di sesso maschile, e la cosa non è secondaria: un signor lettore, anche se non dirò mai di chi si tratta.  Il piacere immenso deriva dal fatto che Hyoutsuki è il suo personaggio preferito (e nei lettori maschi è raro), e che ha visto in Esbat una sorta di educazione sentimentale di un personaggio non umano. Un percorso di crescita e di conoscenza, compiuto, mi ha detto, in assoluta coerenza.  E io sono felice: perchè era esattamente quello che volevo. Volevo, cioè, raccontare anche dal punto di vista psicologico una creatura non umana, possibilmente dandogli un linguaggio, oltre che un cammino da compiere. Perchè lo volevo? Perchè non sono molti i personaggi che, da lettrice, ho incontrato con queste caratteristiche. Randall Flagg è uno, e infatti l’ho adorato (salvo nell’ultimo libro, dove tutto accade troppo in fretta). Mirta/Luna è un’altra, e ho adorato anche lei, in tutti e tre i libri.
Quanto a Sopdet, sto lavorando molto e, spero, benino: lo spostamento dell’intermezzo a prologo mi sembra una buona mossa.
Poi, per tutto il resto, mi impongo di stare buona, tranquilla e di non aspettarmi mai, per nessun motivo, la luna.

Some Thoughts Before The Review: The Stand’s pace is really starting to get to me as a comic fan. While the writing and artwork is quite fantastic all around, it’s difficult to be completely satisfied with tiny chunks of a massive story. Maybe I’ll trade wait Soul Survivors, the next chapter of The Stand comic series.

The Story: Nick Andros visits two very different places in his dreams as he hopes to make it through the night. Larry Underwood awakes and makes a grisly discovery. Stu Redman meets up with Harold and Frannie, warning them that their destination is not a place they want to be.

What’s Good and What’s Not So Good: The worst thing I can say about the final issue of The Stand: American Nightmares? That it doesn’t feel at all like a conclusion to anything. Nothing terribly exciting happens, there’s no killer cliffhanger, and everything just sort of inches forward in a way that lays the groundwork for the next mini-series. Does that mean it’s a bad comic though? Not at all.

From the revealing dialogue to the almost folksy narration, The Stand: American Nightmares #5 is an effective read. As expected, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s scripting gives every character a realistic voice and a satisfying level of emotion. In addition, the slow storytelling style almost forces you to invest in the characters so that the lingering sense of dread feels all the more unsettling.

As for the artwork, it’s as good as I’ve come to expect from the team of Mike Perkins and Laura Martin. From horrific details to subtle emotion, Perkins and Martin truly bring Stephen King’s story to life. I honestly have no complaints.

Conclusion: The last part of American Nightmares is about as technically sound as a comic can get. That said, it’s a bit boring and lacks the sense of urgency that should leave readers dying for more.

Grade: C+

-Kyle Posluszny

Zombies are mindless animated corpses, operating strictly on the simple instinct to pursue and devour… no external force affects or influences their behavior… right?  Well what if something, or someONE, could?  What if some sinister figure had the ability to coordinate–to direct–the legions of the Undead?  How would that change the playing field?

So, I’d sketched up some ghoulies, dreamed up a hero and carved out a back-story for her–partially setting the stage for the overall story in a spontaneous fit of creative writing (don’t worry… that doesn’t happen often.)  So what next…? 

Well, I’m the kind of person who craves balance.  So once I’d defined the hero, it became important for me to come up with an Anti-Hero.  “Protagonist… meet Antagonist.  I’m sure you’ll hit it off famously.”

To be honest, I never did come up with quite as clear of an idea about who the Antagonist was, or where he came from.  Maybe I was being lazy, but I decided that he would at least start out as a complete mystery… and I figured I could sort out the rest if it ever became important. And knowing that I was doing this as a creative exercise, and never really planned to actually MAKE a movie out of it… I figured that was good enough.

The Antagonist as far as I did define him was a man… probably incredibly old, but with no appearance of physical decline… grim, but not unattractive… absolutely fearless and intimidating beyond belief.  In fact, I modeled the basic idea off of my memory of Stephen King’s ultimate villain Randall Flagg, from one of my very favorite books ‘The Stand.’

 Like I mentioned previously… my main goals in this series of drawings were:

1)  move quickly – don’t spend too much time on details
2)  experiment with framing
3)  work on color schemes to convey mood

On that score, I think I did well with this one.  Although, I’m not exactly crazy about the face, or the figures in the background (truthfully, I’m not even sure what they were supposed to be… but I’m calling them Zombies now… weird, lumpy Zombies) I do like the framing, the colors and the overall sense I get when looking at this sketch, so… I’ll call it a keeper.

Stephen King – The Stand (New English Library, 1980)

Blurb from 8th impression, 1987

First come the day of the plague
Civilisation devastated by the death-dealing pestilence. Cities choked with rotting corpses. The air heavy with the ear-shattering silence.

Stunned survivors emerged, immune to the plague. A handful out of millions, they sought out others like themselves to slowly and painfully build a new world.

Then came the dreams.

Dark dreams that warned of the coming of the dark man. His worn-down boot heels walking the roads and his red eyes piercing the night. The apostate of evil, warlord of the charnel house, prince of torture and death.

In the far west his empire was growing. It is the time of the Apocalypse. The last titanic struggle between good and evil for the mastery of the world.

‘The author of Carrie and The Shining outdoes himself in this spine-chilling fantasy.’ – Publishers Weekly

Some Thoughts Before The Review: The slow pace of The Stand is starting to get to me as a monthly reader. I realize that the book is adapting a fairly large work and that Stephen King is an author that likes to take his time with telling a story, but I always go into a new issue of the comic adaptation accepting the fact that I may get less of the story than I’m ready for. The comic is damn fine-looking and extremely well-written, but the current pace is making me think about trade-waiting the next part of the story.

The Story: Larry Underwood and Rita Blakemoor make their way out of New York, encountering all sorts of grisly things along the way. The situation they find out turns out to be much worse than they had imagined…

What’s Good and What’s Not So Good: While limited in scope (as far as how many characters are in it) compared to earlier issues, American Nightmares #3 is one of the best chapters of The Stand yet. The story of Larry and Rita’s trip through (and out of) New York is thrilling, intense, brutal, and almost perfectly executed. If I have any complaint, it’s that the characters that the issue focuses on aren’t all that interesting or likable. Rita has some unique quirks and Larry’s attempt at personal redemption is well-written, but personally, I feel like I don’t have any real emotional investment in either character. It hurts the overall impact of the book, but only a small amount.

On a technical level, the latest issue of The Stand is quite brilliant. The occasional stomach-churning artwork by Mike Perkins and Laura Martin looks fantastic when on display, though the most effective scenes show almost nothing. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has to write his way through a number of panels that are completely black except for the dialogue and it works far better than you might expect. The scenes are surprisingly creepy as Larry deals with horrors that cannot be seen.

I could probably go on some more about what I like, but I really don’t want to ruin anything. So let me just say that my interest in the series has been renewed thanks to the impressive work by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Mike Perkins, and Laura Martin. I look forward to seeing more focused issues in the future.

Conclusion: American Nightmares #3 is probably my favorite issue of The Stand (so far). Be sure to check it out!

Grade: A-

-Kyle Posluszny

Geek alert!

A friend emailed me to let me know “Mother Abigail” is now Tweeting.

That sentence may not make a whole lot of sense to you unless you’re read Stephen King’s “The Stand,” in which the survivors of a mysterious super flu nicknamed “Captain Trips” are drawn into a fight against good and evil. The good have dreams about a woman named Mother Abigail, who is 108 and lives in a Nebraska cornfield. The bad turn to Randall Flag, who draws them to (where else) Las Vegas.

Anyway, Mother Abigail is now Tweeting. I signed up to follow her and an hour later received a message:

Randall Flagg is now following you on Twitter!

Truly we live in interesting times. Whoever’s doing it has the speech patterns down pat!

The birdhouse installation I’d been planning has been pushed back a li’l while due to my lack of a stepladder, which I’m trying to get hold of now.

But stay calm, folks…

I wanted to make a relatively upbeat swine flu-themed streetart piece. I’ve seen other flu-related streetart and graf from other cities where people have made stencils of coughing pigs or Randall Flagg. But more is coming.

Perhaps one day this will make me famous, and people will know what it was really like to be a middle-class white homeowner living in a temperate climate in first-world nation with time on her hands in the middle of the day and an IKEA kitchen catalog on her kitchen table during the Swine Flu (Potential) Pandemic of Aught-Nine. And perhaps I will be vilified by history for my flip remarks and uncaring attitude towards the tragedy surrounding me, just like we vilify Samuel Pepys and his cruel, brutal remarks about the Great Plague and Great Fire of 17th Century London. There’s a special place in hell for people like us: level 4.5, where the Pretentious are punished with Oblivion (right between the Slothful and the Covetous) by watching the WordPress Webmasters delete their accounts over and over again.

Luckily for Samuel Pepys, he wrote on paper.

I feel like I can be flip right now, even on the front lines of the Swine Flu (Potential) Pandemic of Aught-Nine, because I have all this glorious infrastructure surrounding me. Every single person who has caught the flu in San Diego County has recovered completely. We have teams to spare for tracking the disease, training hospitals, and helping Mexico do the same. We’ve got plenty of masks and food on our shelves in the city right now (although our household doesn’t really have its own disaster stash), and I work from home for companies in northern climes far away from the front lines. My family is healthy, and it would be pretty easy for me to stop taking Fella to preschool if they close the schools, and I have six tomato plants, a serrano chile plant, and basil and oregano and cilantro growing on my patio–what with the onion sprouts I’ve got in the kitchen, I don’t foresee ever running out of salsa. It’s springtime, so even if we lose power we aren’t going to freeze at night, and I just don’t see a run on the grocery store happening. If worse comes to worse, we’re only a mile’s walk from the local drinking water reservoir. I could totally bring my empty milk cartons there to fill up. Heck, I live far enough away from the shipyards that I’m not even afraid of a suitcase nuke!

I absolutely understand why this disease is a problem in Mexico, especially Mexico City. I am very glad that everyone is tracking this disease, and following it so closely. It would be a terrible thing if it ran rampant through that city, but even there its mortality rate is very low for healthy people who catch it. (Healthy people is the catch.) The real problem that my uneducated, speculative self can see is that it’s such a dense population with a lot of people around to act as incubators. No one wants a mutation, and the more cases that crop up the more likely it becomes. I’ve seen Outbreak. I’ve read The Stand. I know what a mutation can do, even before the Randall Flaggs arrive on the scene.

But hopefully the population density of my town is low enough, and my reasons to go out few enough, that even if the worst happens we can avoid it. The unluckiest people will be caught in the first wave, but if we are spared that, we can ride it out, I bet. Without having to eat the housecats. We aren’t planning on going to Disneyland until Christmas, either, and I’m sure that this will sort itself out well before then.

Thus comforted to my own satisfaction, I’ll take the presence of a mouse in my garage last night as less of an ill-omen (that thing totally tapped into my instinctive primate hatred of rodents and the hanta virus) and more of an indication that a four-inch space below my broken garage door lets critters in, and go change my wet, cold socks that had water poured on them from the overfull watering container I used to water my food supply. Lieutenant Dan was always adamant about keeping your feet dry, and now I know exactly why. I’m going to get through this thing with all my toes!

The CDC Update on US Cases of Swine Flu A (H1N1):
April 25, 2009, 11:00 AM EDT
California: 6 people, all recovered
Texas: 2 people, both recovered

7:30 PM EDT
California: 7 people
Texas: 2 people
Kansas: 2 people

By Stephen King (Creative & Executive Director), Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (Script), Mike Perkins (Art), and Laura Martin (Colors)

Some Thoughts Before The Review: I’ve never read the novel it’s based on, so I can’t really comment on how effective the adaptation is. That said, I am definitely enjoying every bit of The Stand: Captain Trips. From the weighty, slow burn storytelling to the memorable visuals, everything about the series just feels right. It’s the perfect thing for when I feel like I’ve had my fill of superhero comics for the month.

The Story: Captain Trips continues to spread like wildfire as people drop like flies in a number of states. A storm approaches, both literally and figuratively, as the cast tries to cope and brace for the worst. Randall Flagg continues his travels as well.

What’s Good: Everything about the issue works for me. The artwork is absolutely perfect for the grim tone and impending doom present throughout the book. As for the script, it effectively increases the tension and builds the drama without ever resorting to something that feels like a blatant hook to grab readers. Long story short, Captain Trips continues to be a prime example of an adaptation that respects the source material and makes fantastic use of the comic medium.

What’s Not So Good: The only thing I can possibly say that might be regarded as a negative is that the series is not going to appeal to everyone. And the latest chapter isn’t going to change any minds. The series almost demands patience and I know some people will be turned off by that.

Conclusion: Marvel’s adaptation of The Stand continues to impress. If you liked the first three chapters, you will love the fourth. I highly recommend it.

Grade: A

-Kyle Posluszny

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” The Gunslinger  by Stephen King

This one sentence sends chills up my spine. I’m not sure exactly why. It is sparse and straightforward. Hemingway would be proud. There is a feel of invocation, as if it is calling readers to sit at a campfire and listen. Those of us familiar and fond of Beowulf  might consider it the moment of Hwat! It is clear that what we are embarking on is not just a tale to be told in one single night. It is epic.

Epic has large implications. It is a story that for some reason echoes everything there is to echo about a culture and people. Perhaps this is why my spine gets chilled. Epics are meant to cause us a moment of awe and connection. I have the same feeling sometimes when I hear Celtic music. There is that moment where I connect to the words and music, my ancestral culture, and this culminates in a powerful, almost mystical connection to what was, it, and will be concerning these things.

Stephen King’s Dark Tower series does this for me as well. I feel as if it connects to American culture, views, and fears in a way that can only be described as epic. I just started the series on Friday by reading The Gunslinger. I finished this book in a day. While I could just say that it simply a story of good versus evil, to do so would diminish the value of the story and of its epic nature. To be more precise, this is a story of the heroes journey and the anti-heroes journey. Perhaps, it reflects our culture’s search for moral boundaries and our own need for good and evil, even as we say that such things are not relevant.

Or maybe I’m just doing like any good English major would do and tearing the series apart for my own amusement.

Some of you may be asking how a good Christian girl like me can even consider that this work, which is considered by many horror, to be beautiful. It involves death, loss, evil of the worst kind, and questioning things that we are supposed to just take as fact. I would say that you’ve answered your own question.

Part of living is facing these things. While those things are not pleasant, and some people believe that we shouldn’t acknowledge them at all because we glorify them when we do (a silly idea, at best), by turning our heads and not facing them, we lead ourselves into greater darkness.

The beauty of The Gunslinger lies in the story’s ability to awaken our desire for quests. Today, we don’t have quests. We’re busy plodding along at our jobs and our lives. We often forget that the human soul needs to go on quests. These things can make us grow, just as Roland, the gunslinger of the story, grows as he moves through the desert, up the mountains, and to the beach where he faces the man in black. The Roland we meet at the beginning of the novel is not the Roland who sits with the man in black only to find that his journey has just begun.

An even greater beauty of this novel is that is makes the reader think. King does not serve his story up on a silver platter. He makes his reader get a donkey and follow Roland, suffer with Roland, and get frustrated at the end when there are more questions than answers.

I am going to work my way through the series over the next few months. As I do, I will be chronicling my journey on facebook and here, if I can. It’s the least I can do before the world moves on.

If this is your first encounter with this novel then you should visit http://www.stephenking.com/DarkTower/

Desde Octubre o Noviembre he esperado con ansias, cada semana, a que le den luz verde a The Mist de Frank Darabont. Claro, siendo la cuarta colaboración entre Stephen King y Frank Darabont, me tenía emocionado. Los antecedentes del trabajo unido de estos dos personajes es impecable. La adaptación de Shawshank Redemption es una maravilla y también lo es The Green Mile. Era sólo justo que pudiera ver la nueva adaptación de uno de los trabajos de King. Pero semana tras semana, abriendo el periódico o una de las páginas de Internet de alguno de los cines de Tijuana, el título siempre estaba programado para la semana entrante. Hasta que lo quitaron de su lista.

Volvió a aparecer en Enero, programando el estreno el 9 de Febrero. Pero ese día tampoco pasó nada. Lo mismo el 14 y el 21. Hasta que por fin, este viernes pasado la sacaron. Qué mal que no llegamos a tiempo a verla ese día. Afortunadamente, pude ir el día de hoy.

Sospecho que los retrasos no eran simples berrinches burocráticos. Después de ver la película, me queda claro porqué hubo tantas personas que se opusieron a la realización del filme. Desde que Frank Darabont escribió el final a la historia inconclusa de King, hubo quienes se opusieron e intentaron condicionar su filmación al cambio de final. Darabont, afortunadamente, nunca cedió.

Desde la escena inicial, con David Drayton pintando a un pistolero, con una gran torre negra en el fondo y una rosa etérea sobre el aire, la historia encuentra su lugar. Al contrario de Hearts in Atlantis, The Mist no esconde sus orígenes y da las suficientes pistas para explicar, a los seguidores de The Dark Tower, que la película es resultado de una puerta que se ha dejado abierta, entre esta dimensión y otro de los níveles de la torre.

Seguramente, esta imagen parecerá familiar a los que vieron la película:

Pertenece a la idealización de Marvel del Crimson King. Y muy probablemente, las criaturas eran soldados del Crimson King. Lo que no sabe él, es que muchas veces son más efectivas las tácticas del mismisimo Randall Flagg que las de CK. Flagg no suelta monstruos, ni mucho menos. Él trabaja a un nivel psicológico, mucho más sutil y efectivo. Explota la naturaleza humana.

Y a continuación alerto de SPOILERS

Por lo que muy probablemente, Mrs. Carmody era producto de Randall Flagg. De cualquier manera, la forma en que la humanidad decae, a una velocidad logarítmica, es uno de los grandes mensajes de esta película. No podemos llamar a ninguno de las dos posturas enteramente racional. Una de ellas había dejado de lado la razón para dejarse llevar por la fe solamente, mientras que el grupo encabezado por David, supuestamente liderado por la razón, sucumbe al miedo y resulta en uno de los finales más depresivos de todos los tiempos.

Irónicamente, debió haber sido feliz. Las fuerzas armadas triunfan. Pero nos dice mucho más que eso, nos habla del salvajismo innato del ser humano. Testamento dado por Golding en The Lord of the Flies o anteriormente reflexionado en Cell por el mismo Stephen King. Es mucho más triste porque había esperanza. Es mucho más revelador porque decidimos apagar las luces, cuando todavía había mucha luz.