(urth) Women read Wolfe too (& seriously weird comic recs!)
Hmpf MacSlow
hmpf1998 at gmx.net
Fri May 16 13:40:44 PDT 2008
>
>Have any other women posted?
>Patty
Yes. Me, among others. Although I only post very rarely, and never,
so far, anything particularly insightful. I've only read TBotNS once,
in 2003, and feel it needs several readings before I can start
talking about it in an intelligent manner; haven't had time to
re-read it with the attention it deserves since then, alas. Will
definitely do so after I've finished university, which will be
sometime in 2009.
Sort of OT, but... if anyone around here is also interested in
comics, I'm writing my M.A. thesis about some comics who I feel share
some of the depth and strangeness of Wolfe's creation, although
they're very different on a philosophical/ideological level. And one
of them actually uses the word 'Ascian' for a nomadic people it describes!
So, since we've just seem to have passed through another round of
recommending authors and books, let me recommend some seriously deep,
seriously weird comics:
Carla Speed McNeil: Finder
Website/samples: http://www.lightspeedpress.com/
A few reviews, because I'm too busy right now to give my own:
http://www.paulgravett.com/articles/032_finder/032_finder.htm
http://archive.salon.com/books/review/2005/08/05/mcneil/index1.html
Possibly my very favourite review (you have to scroll down a bit, to
the part titled 'Finding Carla'):
http://www.vogelein.com/JanerBlog/2005/10/
Okay, that was actually only the moderately weird comic. Now for the
seriously weird:
Donna Barr: everything she's done, i.e. The Desert Peach, Stinz,
Hader and the Colonel, Bosom Enemies, Afterdead
I haven't found any really comprehensive review yet, so I have to do
this myself:
Donna Barr's been producing comics for decades now, and they're all
just *barely* this side of totally insane - and fascinating, in a way
that's often disconcerting. In many cases I still don't entirely know
what I actually think about them. Which is a definite parallel with
Gene Wolfe's work, for me! Donna Barr's world is filled with
fictitious gay brothers of famous Wehrmacht generals, people who
unexpectedly turn into horses, centaurs who fight in some close
analogue of the First World War, rabbits who want to turn human and
befriend harpies... not to mention that her latest work, the webcomic
Afterdead, unites all these unusual characters in a world that is
even more bizarre, namely some sort of far-future/life-after-death
version of the Third Reich.
All of which sounds as if it's carefully designed to offend just
about everyone. And really, it's incredibly hard to recommend these
comics without going 'no, no, no, it's *not* like you think!' all the
time. Especially if you haven't figured out what you think yourself, yet.
They're... *challenging* comics, on a number of levels, which come
from a deeply personal, deeply idiosyncratic place. And, really:
they're not like you think. I swear. ;-)
Donna Barr's website (which includes links to free downloads of her -
possibly - least weird comic, The Desert Peach, in the 'store' section):
http://www.donnabarr.com/
Hmpf (really a woman, despite the gender-neutral nick *g*)
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