Available Light

[andrewducker]

Once a month Page 45 (the UKs best comics shop) sends me their list of recommendations for the month. The best things about Page 45 is that (a) they love comics and (b) they aren't superhero fanboys.

Here's a review of something a little bit different:
Available Light h/c (18-99) by Warren Ellis. So Warren went out with his nifty new Eye Module camera, linked to a Handspring Visor Platinum hand-held computer (and yeah, apparently this was Warren, not Spider Jerusalem in an issue of sci-fi TRANSMETROPOLITAN), and took some photographs 240 x 320 pixels large. Then he sat down and wrote some short stories, I mean, like, really short stories, and packaged the whole lot in a landscape hardcover. And on the cover? The most exquisite picture of a cobweb, mounted on white with a silver frame, the photograph taking up less than a ninth of the surface area. Perfect. Couldn't hit my personal aesthetic more accurately even if there'd have been rice paper used somewhere inside. Unfortunately when I first opened the book, with its grainy photographs to the left, the prose to the right, I didn't get it. It looked... cold and insubstantial, the images vague, bleak and repetitive. Fortunately I then sat back and soaked in the prose - the finest so far in Warren's career - and the images came alive. Ellis is currently bursting with ideas on a scale normally attributed only to Alan Moore, and each of these sketches picks up a new idea and manages to throw it around, or upside down, more than enough to make you think. Don't be taken in by the proliferation of first person singulars, either, because, with the exception of the introduction, these aren't autobiographical pieces, many of them set in a different time and country. Indeed, like starting each new chapter in Alan Moore's prose masterpiece VOICE OF THE FIRE, half the fun is in working out who he's supposed to be, when and where. 'Pond' is a black-humoured monologue (Joyce Grenfell does STRAY BULLETS), 'Teazel' reminisces about walking home from school down country lanes; there's a word from Sherwood Forest, and 'Wasp Girl' features what must be the most gruesome suicide in literary history, playing to what must be a nigh-ubiquitous phobia. There are more than twenty additional pieces on subjects ranging from protest marching to poverty in the 19th Century, from working in a bric-a-brac shop to the first ignition of a nuclear bomb on a parallel world. It's a bloody good book.

Comments

[asim.livejournal.com]

Interesting reviews; thanks for the head's-up on Page 45.

I want

[tisme.livejournal.com]

This is so the kind of thing that I want to do and would be good at. Unfortunately, its hard to sell unless you're already an 'established' authour, and people are interested in its cos its you. For goodness sake, even this guy had problems but perservered, because it was Warren Ellis.