Tuesday Muffining
I like muffins.
Jane’s going to be taking a vacation for the next few weeks; a literal one, I’m frantically editing the middle chunk of Last War in Albion Volume 1 so she can work on it on the plane. So starting next week I’m going to gear into book promotion mode for Neoreaction a Basilisk, which will have a Kickstarter to fund it in May, and running excerpts from the book on Tuesdays. Super Nintendo Project is also coming back in a couple weeks. A nice spring regearing against the alt-right, I suppose. Fun times at Eruditorum Press.
The Last Tournament in Albion has a few hours to run, but the outcome seems pretty clear, so I figure I’ll offer some broad thoughts. First, the apparent winner, From Hell. Jed Blue and I were talking on Twitter about it; he had not been struck by the book when he read it, and wondered about its popularity. And I think that’s actually fair; it took me an age to get into it too. I’d actually already started writing Last War in Albion when I gave it what I consider its first proper read, and really felt like I got the book. But holy shit once I did. The comic basically invented psychochronography. I literally owe my entire literary and critical approach to it, even if that approach largely developed prior to my reading it as such. Which is utterly consistent with the critical approach it lays out, of course. Utterly brilliant. I didn’t know I was rooting for it going in, but I’m thrilled it (probably) won.
V for Vendetta‘s also a great one, of course, and a nice runner-up that I would not have been the slightest bit bothered by winning. It says something that we got an all-Moore final – something that’s probably true about the War as well. It’s a hell of a writer who pens these two works. Not for nothing is V for Vendetta getting two chapters, with another to come in Book Three; its weight in the War is comparable to few. That said, I am surprised that it was such an apparent blowout, especially given how dominant V for Vendetta was in what I had thought a fairly tough division. Phonogram was perhaps an easy quarterfinal opponent as such things go, propelled forward due to recentism, but it’s also a damn fine comic that was nice to see go on a run over genuinely good stuff like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Miracleman. This was, I think, a category hampered by obscurity in many cases, but quality-wise perhaps my favorite.
In proper bracket fashion, the semifinal that should have been a final was Watchmen vs From Hell. A couple people wondered what Watchmen was doing away from the superheroes while Sandman was in with them; the answer is just that the easiest way to define the superheroes division was “is it Marvel or DCU.” The result was a deliciously brutal division – I don’t think anything had as many heartbreaks as it did for me.…