Obdormio.com

By now, you should already know that the second issue of Cheshire Crossing is out. If you did not know this, you are probably not signed up for the e-mail alerts, something you should rectify at once.

Now about the new issue, let me just say: wow. I thought the first issue was good, but this just blows me out of the water. There is more action, more drama, and lots and lots of fantastic dialogue. Weir has really stepped up his game here, and it’s very hard to feel sad that Casey and Andy is on hiatus when it results in this.

Go read it. Then read it again. Then read issue one, before you read issue two again. If you feel up for it afterwards, I’m commenting with spoilers behind the cut.

(more…)

I realize that this is no longer topical, and that I should have written this back in September when I first thought about it, but I’m still going to write a short review of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion.

The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion is, obviously, the companion piece to The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. The Companion collects all the B- and C-chapters that Don Rosa has written since finishing The Life and Times, and also includes a couple of other stories which contain glimpses of Scrooge’s life before Duckburg.

The stories themselves are by and large as good as I remember them. The Cowboy Captain of the Cutty Sark and The Dream of a Lifetime are high points in humor, The Vigilante of Pizen Bluff brings the action, and The Prisoner of White Agony Creek and Hearts of the Yukon the drama. I am especially pleased to finally have my hands on Hearts of the Yukon, it has been missing from my collection for far too long. The Sharpie of the Culebra Cut and Of Ducks, Dimes and Destinies are amusing reads there and then, but otherwise unremarkable. I was a bit miffed to find that Last Sled to Dawson was not included in its entirety, only the flashback to Scrooge’s youth was printed. While I understand this decision, as the bulk of that story has nothing at all to do with Scrooge’s youthful adventures but deal with the consequences of them instead, it was still a bit disappointing to suddenly have the middle of the story thrust upon my on the new page, without any form of introduction. I thought it might be an error at first, but further examination of the index page revealed that it was only intended to be an excerpt.

As with the collection of the original twelve chapters, each story is accompanied by commentaries by Don Rosa, where he explains some of the background for the story, what inspired them, and what sort of research he did while working on them. They also include guides to find the hidden D.U.C.K-dedications. These pages are as interesting a read as they were in the original, and frequently add to the appreciation of the story, retroactively like.

The design of the book is obviously made to fit in with the original collection. It uses the same colors, the same fonts, and the same layout, and to my untrained eye it seems to use the same kind of paper. I appreciate consistency, so I mark that as a plus. I very much like the front cover, even if it is an amalgam of two previously made posters. Scrooge in front of the falling coins bearing his likeness from various stages of his life is a nice parallel to the cover of the original collection, with Scrooge in front of pictures in a photo album.

All in all, this book is well worth a read, and a definite must for anybody who owns the original collection.

As I have mentioned before, the comic Count Your Sheep is cute, funny and sad. Extremely cute, very funny and sad to the point of heart-break.

Adrian Ramos somehow manages to juggle these, so that even when it’s nauseatingly sweet, there’s something to laugh at, and when it’s gut-wrenchingly funny, there’s still a melancholy and sad feel to it. All these things in the same comic, which is actually pretty rare in my list, where strips are often one, sometimes two, but very rarely all three.

In a way, I feel that today’s strip really embodies the whole series. To have constantly present undertones of sad and cute in funny is one thing, but today’s strip doesn’t need undertones. It is funny. I laugh at the punch line. It is cute. I find naive little Katie adorable. It is sad. As I laugh and adore, it hits me that they’re a poor family living in a leaky, old house, and I cry inside.

I have neither biscuits nor beer, but in my book, Ramos deserves both.

This is why Count Your Sheep is Highly Recommended.

There are currently two comics on the web I follow fanatically, eagerly awaiting every new update, and wishing that there’d be more than one strip per day. One of these is Narbonic. The other is Get Medieval.

Now, I pretty much expected this for Narbonic. The story there is currently in its climax. Everything so far has more or less been building up to this, the grand finale before the comic ends. I’m on the edge of my seat to see what happens next, and based on the rest of the comic’s run, I fully expected to be.

Get Medieval, on the other hand, that took me a bit by surprise. Thinking about it, though, I’m not sure why. Get Medieval is a very good comic, well drawn, very well written, never misses an update, has good and consistent characters, is frequently accurate and always funny. In short, it is a solid comic, that ought, by rights, to make it’s creator tons and tons of money.

Well, as much money as you can make from comics, anyway.

But I never really though of it as a pins-and-needles kind of strip, until I suddenly realized how much I ached to see what happens next.

Form here on, there will be some spoilers, but everything that follows can be summed up as “read Get Medieval“, so if you haven’t yet, why don’t you just go do that instead of continuing.

(more…)

Loki’s timing is a bit off here, as I actually set aside time today to write here. Unless of course he used “currently” to mean “at this precise moment, 1:11 AM, September 16th” or a similarly narrow definition. Knowing him, he probably did.

Anyways, over a month has passed since the post where I said I was leaving for Bergen. Wow, where on earth did all the time go?

Actually, I have a good idea where all that time went. A good portion of it went to Babylon 5, which I’m fortunately almost finished with now. Very good show, that.

Another sizable chunk went to schoolwork. The intensive class Academic Writing has consumed many a night lately. When you cram a ten point subject into five weeks, it figures that it’ll take a lot of time. (For comparison, the other two subjects I’m taking this year, each also worth ten points, last at least fifteen weeks each.) Academic Writing, too, is almost over now.

And I’m not dead! I’m living and breathing and learning in Bergen, the city of rain, the Seattle of Europe. (Actually, I’m fairly sure Bergen was there first, so it should be that Seattle is the Bergen of America.) The city from whence the Black Death spread across Norway and killed off half the population. A city that, like Trondheim, is a much better choice for capital than Oslo. A city I could easily see myself living in, if not for the terrible lack of diverse products in grocery stores.

In my last post I said that Raptus was about to start. It is now over, leaving me with much less money than before, but also a nice little collection of comics containing stories by Carl Barks and Don Rosa. I also got hold of Rosa’s “Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion” yesterday, so I have plenty and plenty of reading material. Especially if you factor in “A Game of Thrones”, “Eye of the Labyrinth” and “Deadhouse Gates” as well.

Hm, I foresee much more time vanishing in the near future.

So, what else has happened the last month?

Andy Weir has put Casey and Andy on indefinite hiatus, in order to focus his efforts on Cheshire Crossing. While I’m sad that we have to wait for the grand finale of C&A, I’m also excited that this probably means less waiting for the next issue of Cheshire Crossing. Weir reports that he is sick of C&A, which is extremely sad, and that he might not finish the arc at all, which is nothing short of tragic. I certainly hope that he feels better about it when the CC-issue is finished, it would be a crying shame for a great comic like Casey and Andy to end in the middle of its final arc.

Sluggy Freelance has started a new Oasis-story. Pardon me while I squee. It even looks like we’ll get some actual, definite answers in this one, though I’m not taking anything for granted when it comes to Sluggy. I’ll hold my tongue until it is over, I think, though I have to say that I love the new supporting characters. The setup has all the markings of a truly great sitcom, and it’s a shame there isn’t one like it on TV already.

The Gods of Arr-Kelaan have lost Ronson! Eeek! Well, no, not really eeek, we all know he’ll be back, as we have seen him appear in stories set at after the current one, but this should still be a very interesting story.

No doubt a lot of other stuff has happened as well, but this is all I can think of at the moment. Any omissions will have to get separate posts later, an arrangement nobody should be angry about.

Now I have to go fill the fridge.

I need to write something here, preferably something long and summary-like, explaining why and what has happened recently, and to put some of my thoughts on other subjects down as well. Not now. Not this weekend, as Raptus, the comic convention, starts tomorrow.

Right now, I just want to say that this is the best Irwin tribute strip so far.

So, have a look at the latest Casey and Andy.

All right, there were hints. Weir has kindly provided us with a list of them. Some of them, even I picked up on.

We knew she was rich. We’ve seen her with jewels. Both of these I noticed. And I actually did wonder what on earth she was burying. But I never added it up to this.

I somehow completely missed the Interpol thing. I know I’ve read it, more than once even, but it’s just been pushed out of my mind, I guess.

I figured she just had a good job, like jeweler, or maybe she came from a rich family. She was supposed to be the normal one, you know, the poor girl that had all the weirdness thrown at her.

She became fairly weird herself, eventually, but that was to be expected really.

And then Weir hits us with this revelation. Well, those of us who haven’t bought the RPG.

This is why Casey and Andy is Highly Recommended.

I don’t like to use the word ‘review’ on anything I write here. It sounds too serious for my tastes. A review is supposed to be structured and give reasons for all its opinions, maybe analyze and dissect the subject, and be all serious. It is easy to do badly. I don’t think of myself as a proper critic. I much prefer to simply say, “I like this, you might too,” which is basically what I do with my comics links page. That’s hard to screw up.

Even so, in this post I am attempting a review. Bear with me please.

So, Count Your Sheep. Click that link for the definition of bittersweet.

Count Your Sheep is a strip I’ve been avoiding for some time, for no good reason at all. Seriously, I have no idea why I haven’t read it before. It’s not like I haven’t seen links, on Websnark if nothing else. And it’s not like those links weren’t really, really good. I had just, for some unfathomable reason, decided that I wouldn’t read it. I guess it just has to be chalked up to stupidity.

Count Your Sheep chronicles the adventures of young Katie and her widowed mother Laurie, and their imaginary friend, the sheep Ship, who often helps them fall asleep at night. Counting Ship appears to be far more effective than counting normal sheep.

Count Your Sheep is cute. Very, very cute. Cute and sweet. Seriously, it’ll give you diabetes if you look at it too long. Un-manly though it may be, I actually like cute, especially when it is the kind of cute Count Your Sheep delivers on a pretty much daily basis.

Katie is a pretty believable child, innocent and curious and full of energy, and capable of cause plenty of mayhem. She’s too sweet to actually be a fully believable child. I have two younger siblings, and they both had a screaming streak that Katie seems to lack. This is not a real drawback, as the sweet and innocent Katie is much more fun to read about and more suited to the comic world than a screaming, realistic Katie would have been.

Count Your Sheep is funny. It’s not necessarily spit-take, laugh-so-hard-your-belly-hurts-funny, though there are strips that do that. Mostly, it is a warm kind of funny, that makes you smile or chuckle a bit. Be it from the relationship between Katie and Laurie, from the interactions with their mutual imaginary friend, or from the young Laurie’s relationship with her future husband.

Count Your Sheep is sad. It is heartbreakingly, painfully sad. Even at its most cheerful, there is an underlying melancholy, reinforced by the blue colors, and the purples used for the little Laurie strips.

Laurie is a struggling single mom, who works two jobs trying to make ends meet. As seen in the strip linked earlier, they had to pawn their TV, breaking Katie’s heart.

As I said earlier, this strip is the definition of bittersweet. Adrian Ramos manages to deliver heartbreak and humor, often in the same strip, which is extremely hard to do. Of the top of my head, I can’t think of any other strip I read which manages to do both simultaneously, and certainly not as well as Count Your Sheep does it.

If I was to complain about something, it would have to be the many unrelated sketches you have to flip through in the early archives, but other than that, reading Count Your Sheep is a joy. A teary, heartbreaking, gut-splitting joy. Count Your Sheep is now Highly Recommended.

(Also, it really needs Oh No Robot.)