jducoeur

During the holiday break, I'm catching up on some of the graphic novels I have in electronic form. In particular, I'm working on some of the stuff I got in the enormous pile of queer comics I got from Humble Bundle a while back. (One of those "donate $30, get 50 graphic novels" deals.)

Not everything in the pile is great (for no obvious reason, it seems to include almost every Archie Comic that includes Kevin Keller, of whom I approve in principle but I just don't like Archie that much), but most is quite good.

An honorable mention goes to The Backstagers, which is fun and silly -- an exploration of the weird magical world behind the high school curtains, full of corridors and strange lands, where the actors never go but the backstage crew must explore and know in order to produce just the right shade of paint on demand.

(Not a full review because the bundle only included v1, and Boom Studios' website is currently down for maintenance, so I have to wait before getting the other three books.)

But two books so far are both complete and worth a clear recommendation, so a couple of short reviews...

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First up is Girl Haven, by Lilah Sturges, Meaghan Carter, and Joamette Gil.

Ash is a lonely kid, whose mother disappeared three years ago, still desperately trying to hold on to the hope that she might return someday. Having just made a few new friends, Ash shows them her writing and art studio, largely untouched since that day, and they accidentally discover that the imaginary world that she was always describing in her work is all too real.

Koretris is a land of magic, full of talking animals and a fight between light and darkness. It is also only open to girls -- so how exactly was a boy like Ash allowed in?

This is very much a story about gender identity, as Ash wrestles with the hope that maybe this world is confirming something, but it isn't quite that simple -- instead of saying what to believe, it is more forcing Ash to make a choice.

It's well-written, and I'd say well-suited to younger teens: there is some darkness to the tale, but it's generally a positive story about growth and self-discovery, very strongly advocating the notion that you should decide your identity for yourself. Recommended -- in particular, parents should give it a look.

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On the flip side is the rather darker and much funnier Camp Spirit, by Axelle Lenoir.

I first encountered Lenoir with her fabulously weird quasi-autobiography Secret Passages earlier this year. That is the tale of her younger childhood, starting to come to terms with the idea that she might be a little different from other people, her parent were aliens, and that she has an interdimensional doppelganger -- you know, little-kid stuff like that.

Camp Spirit is a somewhat more straightforward novel, but still has much of the same flavor. Elodie is 17, and absolutely despising the fact that her mother has ordered her to earn some money for college by spending six weeks as a camp counselor.

Much of the story is a fairly classic coming-of-age yarn, with scenes that would be all too familiar to many of us who were shy kids at summer camp (from the horror of camp toilets to the unbearable embarrassment of communal showers), livened with humor that grows as the story goes along. Elodie is given the problem cabin: a collection of absolutely uncontrollable red-haired girls -- watching her gradually learn how to harness and weaponize them is nastily fun. And she spends a good deal of time trying to navigate her own feelings about "little miss perfect", her friend Catherine.

But there's also a weirder level: the awkward-to-the-point-of-creepy Camp Chief; the camp songs (which are all Satanic heavy metal tunes); the legend of the local woods (which tells the tale of the good and wicked spirits that inhabit them); and of course that mysterious blue glow in the forest every night.

Suffice it to say, this is not a horror story, but it's often a fairly eerie one with some fantastical elements, as Elodie gets more and more determined to figure out what is up with this place.

Over the span of this six weeks, Elodie grows up a lot, going from sullen teenager at the beginning to significantly more self-possessed young woman by the end. That progression is well-rendered and reasonably believable; moreover, the story is an excellent ride.

Highly recommended -- it's a good book, a bit offbeat, and suitable for older teens as well as adults.

There -- I've just finished a major milestone in the monumental "sort the comics and figure out which ones to get rid of" project. I've finished with Cerebus.

Cerebus is the single largest title in my collection. It's bad enough that it's so long -- it's kinda-sorta a "miniseries", in that the overall length was planned from early on, but it ran for 300 issues. (Yes, really -- monthly for 25 years.) I got hooked on it somewhere around issue 60, and stuck through it through the end.

No, the real problem is that I got sufficiently into it that I have at least two, and often three *versions* of each issue. Between the originals, the Swords of Cerebus reprints that came out early on, the Cerebus bi-weekly series that reprinted through around issue 75 (with new material in the backmatter), and "the phone books" (trade paperbacks, reprinting 10-30 issues each), I went a *wee* bit overboard. So I literally have two copies of every issue except, annoyingly, issue 86, which I apparently only have in the phone-book form. (I think I'm going to have to seek that one as a back issue.)

So I've just gone through all of it and culled, to get to the point where I have one coherent set. In the end, I'm keeping the single issues, since some of the backup material is actually pretty good, and getting rid of the phone books and Swords. I'm likely to keep the whole run permanently (even the interminable and incoherent "Chasing Yhwh" exegesis near the end), but I get some satisfaction of getting rid of nearly an entire longbox of the stuff...

As a lot of you know, I am the possessor of a lot of Stuff. Among that Stuff is the most idiotically large comic-book collection of anybody I know, which I've been accumulating since 1977. Not collecting -- just buying, reading, and putting in boxes. I don't know if anyone reading this aside from Kate has actually seen all of it. Yes, you're thinking, "That enormous pile of longboxes in your old basement? I remember that!" No, that's only the stuff after 1991 -- there's another 37 boxes that have been in storage for a dozen or so years. All told, it's somewhere north of 30,000 issues.

Anyway, as of last week I have finally begun the project that I've been putting off for 25 years: merging all of the comics into a single run, then separating them into three piles: Keep, Discard, and Maybe. (Maybe == "think about it again in a later pass") The goal for this pass is 10% Keep, 50% Discard, and 40% Maybe. So far, a couple of boxes in, I'm at least within spitting distance of those targets.

I'm mildly amused that I can get most of the way there by applying the simplest and dumbest of all metrics: do I actually *remember* this story? If I don't remember it at all, then odds are it wasn't good enough to be worth keeping. A truly prodigious fraction of the Marvel and DC of the past 40 years fail that cut, which is why I've dropped DC entirely and am steadily trimming back the Marvels. I mean, sure, some of the comics were just *bad*, and those are easy to discard, but it's depressing to realize how many were such cotton candy that they left no impression whatsoever.

Anyway, the sorting proceeds apace, and next week I should hopefully be able to start the other half of the project, the part that has delayed this so long -- inventorying the whole mess so I can begin to sell the discards. I will, of course, be doing that in Querki: it's a delightful little stress-test of the system. (My usual offhand guide to the maximum size of a Querki Space is 50,000 Things, and I've always been clear that this is in order to be large enough to hold all my comics. It's arbitrary but makes sense to me, the same way the size of a CD was chosen to be large enough to hold Beethoven's 9th.) Then I just have to figure out the most practical way to sell it...

Putting a link here for once, instead of in Facebook, because I think more people are likely to be interested: check out the new comic Atomic Size Matters, which is pretty delightful. It was written by a PhD candidate who was trying to explain her work to her friends and family. So she went back to first principles, and explained the concept she was working on (quasicrystals) in comic-book form. This became a minor sensation, so she Kickstarted it, and is now selling the book online. It looks like fun, breezy science writing, and the sample online (from the very beginning) is nicely clear. I'm considering picking it up, and I suspect some others might find it useful and enjoyable. (And I hope she chooses to do some teaching, based on her evident skill at making things understandable...)

[This weird ramble is kind of about programming, but this time it's introductory-level and generally useful, instead of the wizard-level stuff I usually talk about. We are going to teach a few basic programming concepts using my comic book collection as a motivating real-world example.]

There -- that project's been underway for about three years, and at least it's in decent shape before things have to go into storage.

I occasionally refer to Steve, the proprietor of The Outer Limits in Waltham, as my Comic Book Pusher. Some people think I'm kidding, but it's more a matter than I decided many years ago that comics are a less dangerous (if not necessarily cheaper) addiction than cocaine.

But the thing is, I am very much *not* a comic book "collector". I don't buy for value, or even completeness -- I just like reading them. So I tear through huge numbers of comics, and then set them aside. And once in a while, it occurs to me to sort them as I put them into boxes and stick them in the basement, so that later I might be able to re-read the best ones.

The problem is, while sorting a *few* comics (say, a few hundred) is easy, sorting many thousands of them is not. Hence, the last time I did a full sort of the entire pile was rather a while ago. "A while ago" being defined, in this case, as 1990. This is a Problem.


This is where the computer science degree comes in. The most important thing you learn in programming classes isn't how to program -- that becomes obsolete rather quickly as systems and languages change -- but rather, how to analyze algorithms. And the very first thing you learn is how fast the various sort algorithms run.

Most people, when given a bunch of things to sort, use some kind of Insertion Sort -- that is, you just put things in order, sticking them into place as you get to them. This works great for sorting anywhere up to about 50 comics, but once you get past about a handspan in width it slows down dramatically, because it starts taking a long time to find the right place to put each one. And in fact, we are taught in school that an insertion sort is "n squared" -- the amount of time it takes is proportional to the number of things to sort, squared. When you're sorting tens of thousands of comic books, that is a very long time indeed. (Sorting ten thousand comics this way takes literally a million times as long as sorting ten.)

The canonical fastest sorting algorithm is known, quite reasonably, as the Quick Sort. Conceptually, it's pretty straightforward. You take your pile of things, and create two buckets around a midpoint: in our case, the buckets would be "comics from A-M" and "comics from N-Z". Then repeat this for each bucket, so you'd wind up with four buckets in order: A-F, G-M, N-S, T-Z. Keep repeating until each bucket has only one comic book and *poof* -- it's all sorted! This works *great* in the computer -- indeed, in some programming languages it's basically a one-liner -- and it is "n log n": the amount of time it takes to sort everything is proportional to the number of items times the logarithm of that number (which is relatively small). This is more or less as fast as you can theoretically go. It has only one problem: it requires n buckets, and I do not have tens of thousands of tiny comic book boxes.

So for real-world problems, we have the Merge Sort, which isn't *quite* as fast as Quick Sort, but is still basically "n log n". For a merge sort, you start out by doing an insertion sort (just putting things in order) for as many things as you can easily do (in our case, about a handspan's worth of comics). Set those aside, and do it again for the next batch; repeat until everything is in little piles. Now merge together a reasonable number of piles -- take around 3-6 piles of comics, and just go from front to back, putting them together, which is extremely quick and gets you a *bigger* pile. Do that for all the small piles, so you now have some big piles. Now do the same thing for the big piles, so you wind up with one really big, completely sorted pile.

(Of course, none of this is a deep dark secret -- good librarians know this technique just as well as good programmers. But it occurred to me that many folks probably don't have cause to sort thousands of items very often, and might not know the trick.)


So when I've read 3-6 months' of comics and put them away, I typically do about two passes of this, so that I wind up with 1-3 longboxes, sorted and merged in order. What I *haven't* done since 1990 is continuing the process: take these now rather large piles, and keep merging them.

But everything is going into storage shortly, which means that all hope of *ever* seeing the collection fully sorted is Doomed Doomed Doomed if I don't make progress. So a few months ago I kicked back into motion the project that I had started before Jane died, to fully merge the whole thing. Sadly, I didn't get it all the way complete, and I need to stop now and focus on packing. But I've gotten to the point where I now have three *humongous* piles of longboxes, labeled runs A, B and C, which represent all the comics since 1990. After the move is done, I can begin to pull those out of storage, along with the pre-1990 run, merge the whole thing, and craft a really serious Querki app to inventory and sell most of it. (My comics are going to be one of the acid tests for Querki, and will help drive several generally interesting features.)

And the final result? I have 68 longboxes in the post-1990 run, along with 30-40 in the pre-1990 one, already in storage. In total, I'd guess that that's about 30,000 comics, enough that the collection *must* be kept directly on the slab, lest it break the house. A fair addiction, indeed...

Thanks to unicornpearlz for forwarding me this crucial must-read spoiler about the upcoming new X-Men series...

Okay, here's one where I suspect that some of my friends have useful ideas.

Some of you know the_resa from her earlier career -- under the name Teri S. Wood, she was responsible for a bunch of great comics, particularly her long-running strip The Cartoonist in Amazing Heroes, and her epic science fiction story Wandering Star. Resa is dipping her toe back into the comics waters, starting with her biweekly webcomic Yet Untitled. (A humor strip about coping with life in Forks "Yes, really, we existed before Twilight came out", Washington.)

I'm trying to help her understand how modern webcomic-publishing works; we spent a bunch of time today talking through RSS, how it works and why you want it for your webcomic. But it occurred to me that my knowledge of webcomics is fairly shallow, and others here might know more. So I'm throwing the question out: what should an aspiring webcomic author -- specifically one who knows traditional comics quite well, but is new to the webcomics world -- learn about? What are the opportunities and challenges that she may not have thought about yet? Who should she meet and talk to, to learn more? (And does anyone have a good guide to the nuts and bolts of getting started with RSS?)

Resa's a friend, and I'd like to see her succeed in this -- frankly, giving her a way to get back into comics would be great. So I'd appreciate any and all tips and pointers here, and please spread the word if you know others who might have useful information...

Those who have been around comics for a long time may remember Resa Challender (aka Teri S. Wood), for various fabulous comics -- in particular, her masterpiece Wandering Star. For those looking for some new stuff from her, note that she's starting an occasional webcomic, Yet Untitled. Not terribly deep and complex, just some observations of life in Forks (Land of Sparkly Vampires), WA. Promises to be fun...

It's Christmas Eve Eve, 2006; if you're lucky enough to have had an invitation foisted on you, Seth Bingo and The Silent Girl are running their dance club, Never on a Sunday. The club has three simple rules:

• No Boy Singers


• You Must Dance


• No Magic!

Because this is The Singles Club, the just-finished miniseries set in the Phonogram universe, and there is just a *bit* of magic in the world. Music is sort of magic-in-potential, albeit mostly the subtle magic of the mind and heart and soul -- a metaphor wrapped in the literal wrapped in a metaphor. Other than that, it is quite exactly our world.

The first Phonogram tale was Rue Brittania a few years back, and told the story of phonomancer David Kohl tracking down the killers of Brittania, the Goddess of Britpop. It was a good start, but with The Singles Club we get real magic on the printed page. Its seven issues tell seven separate but tightly interlocked stories, of a bunch of friends and their night at the club. Each issue tells the same story from a different viewpoint, not so much contradicting each other as filling in each others' gaps, so that the stories considered together are very different from individually. Each takes a different viewpoint character; for example:

• There is Emily Aster, the ultra-cool girl who got the way she was by casting her original messed-up identity and soul into Limbo. But just because Claire isn't around any more doesn't mean she can't mess with Emily.


• There's Lloyd, aka "Mr. Logos", who is certain that he can change the world -- if only someone will pay attention to his ideas.


• Laura Heaven is the nominal villainess of the piece -- and yet, is so easy to identify with, when you read it all from her viewpoint.


• And of course, there is Penny. She's the beautiful and sweet one, living white magic on the dance floor, and is having the worst evening of her life: as far as she can tell, all her friends have turned against her. Of course, that's not true: they're just all living their own stories.

In clumsier hands, the conceit would be precious and tritsy, but this is a wonder. Each story and character is achingly real, wrapped up in the magic of their lives as only a 20-year-old can be.

Kieron Gillen, the author, has a passion for his subject that borders on obsession. Each issue comes with a page or two of footnotes, detailing the musical references in the stories; between that and the structural intricacy, the result would make Alan Moore proud. (Why can't American authors write this well?) I'm keeping the series out as reference material for the next time I want to do an online musical trawl: I want to dig around and learn more about these characters by learning more about their musical tastes.

All of this is complemented by Jamie McKelvie's beautiful, elegant clean-line artwork. Imagine what John Byrne might look like if he had some visual imagination and the ability to draw more than one face. Actually, that's unfair -- on his best day, Byrne's art has never been this pristine. Even Matthew Wilson's coloring contributes crucially to the story, literally providing it with the subtle tones it needs.

The series has been running for a good while now, not even remotely monthly. With any luck, Image will be smart enough to come out with a collection promptly, and will include all of the backmatter that adds even more depth to the whole thing.

Recommended unreservedly: this may well be the best comics story of 2010, the sort of thing that snaps the chains of genre that so often wrap and limit comics. If you like music or magic or comics, this is worth a try; if you like all three, it's a must-have...

Okay, I've mostly been trying to keep my journal light and upbeat lately. But you have to have some darkness to contrast with the light, right? So for my darkness I'm going to say exactly what I think about DC's current Super-Epic-Mega-Stupid crossover, Final Crisis. The following is more a rant than a review.
( Massive spoilers, if for some mysterious reason you should care )