For those of you who don't know what that is, basically for a a week and a half of every year, all of the locals out here put on Cowboy hats and pretend like we're in touch with our Wild Western Heritage. There's a medium-sized theme park we open up for just that window of time, right in the heart of downtown so it can clog the already jammed arteries of our poorly planned transit system.
We have rodeos, horse races, and even a nightly grandstand show with fireworks and a marching band! All of these are priced to inflict modest wounds upon your wallet, but if you still have some money left over after, there are all sorts of other seasonal tourist traps laid around town.
Yeah, it's pretty awesome.
Fabler-wise, last week's interview was Lar deSouza (of Looking for Group & Least I Could Do), this week it's James Turner (Nil: A Land Beyond Belief, Rex Libris, Warlord of Io), and next week is shaping up to be Doug Wheatley (Star Wars: Dark Times, Star Wars: Empire, Superman: Last Son of Earth). I was especially excited to talk to James Turner as I'm a big fan of Nil, and have been for some time - since my friend Arinn took it out from the Library she worked at back in 2005 because she thought I might like it.
We also had some mentions on Sequential, the Shuster Awards Blog, and the Least I Could Do media section. Thanks to the above, and to anyone else linking to the Fabler Blog - the more people that are reading the interviews, the more sustainable I think it could be as a longer-term project.
On the topic of the Shuster Awards, if you haven't seen this year's nominee list, check it out here. Lots of mighty fine Canadian talent competing for top honors this September.
It's struck me that I haven't done any comic reviews for some time, as I've just been sticking to weekly updates giving my thoughts on the monthlies/new releases I'm planning on buying. I'd like to try to get back into a routine where I have time to put up reviews; it just hasn't seemed feasible lately. I don't know how some others manage to pull it off - take Chuck's Comic of the Day, for example. Just as the title implies, he manages to churn out a brand new, multiple paragraph review every single darn day.
For now, here's my forecast for comics I'll be buying this week:
For starters, two titles put out by Canadian artists I've interviewed for the Fabler Blog -
The Nobody HC - Written and illustrated by Jeff Lemire, acclaimed creator of the Essex County Trilogy, I'm pretty excited to get my hands on this Vertigo offering. The Nobody is a modern retelling of H.G. Wells' Invisible Man, with a North American small town setting and a pronouncedly sombre tone. You can read the interview I did with Jeff about it here.
North 40 # 1 - Words by Aaron Williams, pictures by Fiona Staples. North 40 # 1 marks the beginning of a new Wildstorm ongoing series that promises to be chock full of monsters, Western imagery, and kick ass action sequences. Or so Fiona Staples informed me, at least, when we chatted about it for the Fabler.
My pull list is looking pretty tame this week, as there's only one other title I'm picking up:
Dark X-Men Beginning # 1 (of 3) - The reason that I'm buying this title is dependent on screwy logic. It's a tie-in to Dark Avengers/X-Men: Utopia, the first part of which I enjoyed immensely, thanks to Matt Fraction's spot-on ability to weave a good narrative. This book, however, is not written by Fraction, but instead by Paul Cornell. To be fair, the latter has done some solid work on Captain Britain, and I guess he's an established writer for Doctor Who - but the curious fact remains that I'm buying his writing because of the excellent writing of someone else. Huh.
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