The plot is both ridiculous and inconsequential: a demon and an angel had a child, which was as powerful as God. God then took off, the kid escaped his confines and fled to Earth, where he merged with the proud but decent Southern ex-Preacher Jesse Custer, granting him the Voice of God, allowing him to control anyone with the sound of his voice. The angels have sent an unstoppable murdering cowboy called the Saint of Killers after Jesse, and Jesse has set off across the country in search of the derelict God, with his ex-girlfriend and possible hit woman, Tulip, and a recently befriended Irish vampire named Cassidy. Like I said, ridiculous, but it doesn’t matter a jot. The writing is snappy, often hilarious. The characters are actually very well realized and fleshed out. And yeah, it will probably sate your need to for adolescent titillation and gross-out.

This is one of the few comics works that feels like it was made by a master of the medium. The writing is fairly awful at times (possibly only in translation), but graphic elements, both the illustrations and narrative flow of the layouts, are genuinely wonderful and often novel (well, to this Western inexperienced reader). Here are some examples I noted

(p. 17 & p.26 cartoony abstraction)
Early on in the book Tezuka uses even more cartoony abstraction in moments of heightened motion and emotion (think Loony Toons). I haven’t noticed this convention much before. Perhaps it’s just a manga convention I’ve missed? I found the effect a bit jarring, sort of kicks you out of the story for a panel or two.

(p. 43p3)
Another interesting convention was using hatched shading in place of solid black to indicated asides. One would think thought bubbles would have been the convention, which Tezuka used rarely.

(p. 625p1 great cartoon of shocked guilt)

(p. 650, p. 654) poor people depicted with much more realism. Is this intentionally done to distance them from the reason? Or the opposite?

One final though I had while reading was on translating works like this. There is a line on p. 528 that goes, “I’m sorry but I have zero interest in you as a woman.” This was either awful in the original Japanese, or the translator did Tezuka a serious disservice. This is an especially bad example, but overall the text was awkward and simplistic. I was wondering, though, if the text was equally abysmal in the original Japanese, what should a translator do? Replicate the quality of the prose, or write better passages so English readers won’t overlook a great work of comics due to infantile text?

Done
Another good’un, but possibly not quite up to snuff with the preceding books in this mini-trilogy. Not quite sure why I felt that way, just passages that didn’t quite do it for me. Or maybe it was the intrusion of such modern trappings as telegraphy.

Quotes

After Jack delivers a long-winded explanation of how an accurate timepiece can reveal a ships longitude at sea, Stephen replies (in Chapter 9, p. 278),

‘Heavans, Jack, what things you tell me. And I dare say this would answer for let us say Dublin and Galway?’

‘I should not care to affirm anything abou Ireland, where people have the stragest notion of time; but at sea, I do assure you, it answers very well. That is why I should like to borrow your watch.’

In Chapter 10, p. 312,

… on Jack’s first visit to the men it was represented to him that this here French bread, full of holes, could not nourish a man: if a man ate holes he must necessarily blow himself out with air like a bladder, it stood to reason.

Words

accoucher (v): p. 41
“cry peccavi” (v): p. 77
drabblers (n): p. 78
garefowl (n): another name for the extinct http://www.pageofguh.org/books/701 Lent to me by a friend and fellow iSchooler, and in fact, something I’ve been meaning to read for some time. I think I even bought a copy for my sister last Christmas. So far pretty good, dreamy, almost droning. Neil Gaiman is clearly a fan: the many Sandman stories involving cities have very roots in this book.

Done
Well, I finished this a while ago, and school has erased any interesting thoughts I had about it. I recall it was good, humorous, but I found it difficult to forget the author is a half-black British academic writing about an African American experience. I found all the University faculty and students and their various escapades and entanglements believable, both because I have lived in that world and based on what I knew about the author, but when the book delved into issues of being black in America rather than being black in academia, it felt a bit clunky. But then again, I’m not black, so knows, maybe it was dead on.

Good read. Worth checking out. Apologies for lack of cogent commentary.

Done

Another wonderful book, very similar to Cloud Atlas. Debate between fate and chance runs throughout, with the Biblical Serpect spelling it out, “Why do things happen the way they do?” Like Cloud Atlas, certain things recur almost irrelevantly, with even less structure than CA, like the presence of camphor trees, coffee spilling out of an over-filtered perc, mentions of comets and the phrase “New Earth.” It’s weird that DM not only reused some of these symbols in Cloud Atlas (the comet, for example), but he even reuses whole characters, like Tim Cavendish and Louisa Rey. Within a book these echos generate an impression of interwoven connection that is almost supernatural, an arcane logic behind the novel’s microcosm, but I’m not sure what effect it has or is supposed to have between books. Given that Ghostwritten is so similar to Cloud Atlas, should they be considered as a pair? As warm-up and performance? As performance and encore? Hard to say.

It is easy to say that reading Mitchell is a joy, filling you with sensation, facts, admiration, maybe even inadequacy. I obsessed, laughed, thought, disagreed, even shed a tear or two. I can’t recommend his books enough.

Oh, and here’s an interesting essay he wrote on how living in Japan influenced his writing.

Words

febrile (adj.) feverish