You are sleep deprived, so you're not going to be particularly productive today other than what you did to earn cash today and finally posting an update to your blog ( you should update your Deviant Art account too ). You did manage to get copies of Droid Soldiers #1 consigned at Austin Books & Comics today ( your brain is so muddled, you forgot the name of the customer-friendly woman in charge of consignment there, and you kind of feel bad about that, especially since she's also going to have a table at Staple! - not good form, but as stated, you are lacking sleep, which you will remedy shortly ). Unfortunately, you were unable to get copies of DS #1 into Dragon's Lair as they are currently doing a mass inventory count in preparation for Tax-Day. You wonder about their business model, as Austin Books doesn't seem to do anything like that, but the upside is that during this time of year Dragon's Lair starts have massive discounts on select inventory. So today, with a 70% discount, you paid $18+ for graphic novels totalling $70 retail. Included in this booty is Artesia Afield: The Second Book of Dooms ( Hardcover ); NYC Mech Volume 2: Beta Love, and The Mice Templar: Destiny Part Two ( Hardcover ). All excellent finds at 70% off.
While you had previously acquired the first volumes of both Artesia and NYC Mech, you don't have any of the previous volumes of Mice Templar, but it was worth it to get none-the-less. The production quality on that book is some of the nicest you've come accross, complete with a red ribbon bookmark. It also has a nice prologue to get you up to speed on the setting and where the story is at Indeed, it's a beautiful book throughout and you expect it to take a least a couple weeks for you to get through it all, especially with the Afterward and text-heavy extras at the end. You do have some nitpicking criticisms in the digital lettering being a bit cold to your eyes - maybe it's just that you prefer the irreplaceable organic feel of hand-lettering in your comics - but it doesn't really work for you. The art style, while cool and very well executed, also leaves you desiring something, the way Mike Mignola does in his Hellboy comics, which uses similar hard and thick-lined approach to the inking. It's very minimilistic, which would translate very well to animation, but doesn't exactly gel with your tastes. But again, this one is definitely a treasure and you plan on keeping it your library and collecting the other hardcovers in due time.
Artesia is one of the most brilliant series in the graphic novel medium. It deserves every award it gets. The detailed world and mythology, believable story and characters, simple lines, accurate forms, and the deliciously warm water colors. However, in it's successful efforts at realism in character responses and military culture, it lacks an element of fun. Like a healthy and hardy meal with only hints of paprika to add flavor only at key points. This can be either good or bad depending on one's mood or taste. These days you're more often looking for tasty fun with your hardy meal, but you none-the-less enjoy and respect it for, as well as inspired by, it's craftsmanship.
NYC Mech is a series you have always found intriguing, being into robots, but lost interest in when it was first serialized. The writing and art are all great and the stories were equally clever. But the problem you had with it was that, far from being a story about robots, it felt like a story about humans who were drawn to look like robots. One of things you think you find fascinating about robots is the contrast between the condition of being human and the condition of being an autonomous robot. If a community of autonomous robots emerged, you're pretty certain that their culture would have some marked differences from that of humans. But these are essentially just stories about life on the street, except every being is made out of metal and circuitry. You had your suspicions as to what the real angle was, but in that first story arc, there was not a hint of explaination as to how New York, and the rest of the world, became populated by robotic equivalents of every living thing on earth. This botherd you enough to not buy past the first issue. In spite of this, you bought the first volume in collected form, along with 24/7 ( a robot anthology edited by the author of NYC Mech ) to study the art, also to give it all a second chance, and you're glad you did, especially after reading this second volume, as it finally gave you the hint that you wanted it to have to make the fact that it was all robots interesting to you again.
It's time to go to bed. You should try to write about the Bunny Incident next time.
J.
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