That Was The Year That Was. Part One.

It's that time of year again -- the existential suspense redolent in the air over whether your uncle will get blindly drunk at Christmas again, whether the country will survive until January 20th, whether you'll get lucky on New Year's Eve. The usual swirl of late December concerns. And in that swirl are the year-end "ten best" lists as well, compiled by movie, music, book and other critics. The erudite Mr. Klaw and Mark London Williams thought it might behoove them to compile a similar top-tenny sort of rundown for graphic novels and comics and split it into two parts. Here are numbers 10–6 of the list.

That Was The Year That Was. Part One.

Our final five selections will be announced in the January 1 column.

The Suddenness of Things

My Nexus Graphica co-conspirator Mark London Williams penned this moving, heartfelt appreciation of the late comic book shop pioneer Rory Root and his impact on Mark's life and art.

And then came Comic Relief, Rory's store, opening up near the top of University Avenue. It was crammed with mainstream, underground, foreign and "adult" releases, and was one of the first retailing spaces to get behind those collected, bound "graphic novel" thingies that are so au courant right now.

The irony was, I had already moved down the I-5 here to the Pueblo of Angels (where, NorCal ex-pat that I am, I remain while my sons do their own growing -- though I'm not convinced the water will hold out, down here, but again, another column entirely). But I return to the Bay Area's auld sod often, and I'd pop in to Comic Relief whenever I could.

Rory was kind enough, in the early days of my Danger Boy books, to sponsor a signing for me at the San Diego Comic-Con, since the original Tricycle Press editions of the first two books featured covers by the Promethea art team of J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray, and Jeromy Cox.

I can't say we were overwhelmed by long lines of fans, in those earliest days of the book's release, but I always appreciated Rory's willingness to help another Berkeley brother out, even if he was writing prose with no interior pictures.

Continued...

Forthcoming books

At last night's meeting (and shame on you for not being there), we determined our books for August and September.

Our schedule for the next three months:

• July 9 Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff Vandermeer
• August 13 Ancient Fire: Danger Boy Episode #1: by Mark London Williams (The author will be in attendance.)
• September 10 Elric: The Stealer of Souls by Michael Moorcock

As always, we meet at 7 PM at the Flightpath. Visit the Dark Forces home page for more details.

Mark London Williams interview

Long time Dark Forces friend Mark London Williams discusses his popular YA series Danger Boy and parenthood in this brief feature over at Monsters & Critics.

Monsters: Do you feel parents are reading less to their children in lieu of pacifying them with video distractions?

Everyone is too distracted, too busy. And we're starting to have a generation of parents that don't read much -- at least, not for pleasure -- themselves. Everything now is relegated to one "screen" or another, including the one you're reading these words on. And while I freely admit I've made much of my own livelihood on this same screen, we all need to step away from it once in awhile.

Continued...

Le Guin on literature

This came to me via my buddy and Danger Boy creator Mark London Williams and I thought I'd share with the class. It's an article centering around Le Guin's belief that literature is just another brand of genre fiction... a subject often discussed at our meetings.

Rick