Merely Secondary Interests

I love this — this is what I’ve always been thinking, but said better: What’s important is what’s on the page (the prose with novels, the art and prose with comics), and the rest of the stuff is merely secondary.

Which is why I find 97.4% of reviews so frustrating — they talk almost exclusively about plot, characters, psychological insight and form, but not actually about the reading experience itself.

I do think that this lines up with what a lot of people are interested in — I sometimes get the feeling that people like reading recaps more than actually reading a book/comic or watching a movie.

A. S. Byatt: Scandinavian North Knower or What? An Investigation

I was reading an old short story by Byatt yesterday, and I came across this — which is totally correct. It’s not that the people in the “Scandinavian North” (i.e., the north of Norway) are better at English per se — far from it — but the prosody of the dialects matches up with English much better than the sing-song dialects of the Scandinavian South.

(And we’re not even going to mention the general unintelligibility problems that Danes have even when speaking their own language.)

So I thought: “Finally, a woman of culture!” And also “Gee, the educational system in the UK is pretty good”.

But then!

It’s established that he’s from Tromsø, which is about 350 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle… so… er… that’s an odd thing to say.

And then later, he talks about taking the train south, and there definitely aren’t any trains anywhere near Tromsø.

But! It’s also established that he’s a liar!

So my in-depth investigation into whether A. S. Byatt is a Scandinavian North Knower is inconclusive. Did she put that stuff in to let observant people into the secret beforehand? Or did she just not have access to the Internet in… let’s see… 1998?

I guess it’ll have to remain a mystery.

You’re welcome, I’m sure.

Last Week’s Comics Tonight

Here’s some comics I’ve read over the past week.

This is the second biiig collection of Michel Fiffe’s Copra — this one is over 400 pages long.

And this one has a lot of issues I can’t remember reading — distribution of the original self-published Copra was always pretty spotty, so I think I’ve got about half of them?

So it was great finally reading these issues, and also seeing how it ties together with the ones I have read.

I just love Fiffe’s artwork, and his storytelling is incredible — often on the verge of incomprehensibility, but always understandable anyway. He really makes you invest in the reading, and it’s always worth it. So entertaining.

Please please please don’t take years for the next volume, because I’ll have forgotten everything again by then.

I saw people being really excited about this R. Crumb collection (edited by Dan Nadel) on the intertubes, but I never got around to reading it until last week. And it’s certainly an attractive package physically — thick, matte paper and well-printed (for the most part).

And… I have to say that I’m disappointed. I mean, I really like R. Crumb’s comics, and I’ve read everything in this volume before — all the pieces here are solid pieces.

But it’s almost like Nadel is going for “see? Crumb can be respectable? see? see!? Comics aren’t just for kids any more! Biff! Bang! Pow!” or however those magazine articles pleading for comics respectability used to go…

So the collection is full of biographies of blues musicians, the Krafft-Ebing adaptation, autobio, and all of that literary stuff, and very little of the whimsical or nonsensical stuff Crumb does so well. And it’s presented chronologically, which means that you get even less variety.

As a counter example — Carload O’Comics is an old collection of Crumb’s less famous material, and it’s a great read because it’s sequenced so well.

Even the sex fantasy here is one where Crumb moans a lot.

So, I dunno. It’s just not a very good read, which is absurd, considering how great the material in here is.

Charley Patton With Bertha Lee-Oh! Death

But it did make me listen to O Death by Charley Patton and Bertha Lee, so it’s not all bad. Man, that’s a great song…

I got caught up with the weekly Spirou shipments again…

… but it’s not a particularly exciting pair of comics. The above was pretty funny…

… and this one is classic, but other than that, I think Spirou is in the doldrums at the moment.

I don’t think I’ve read anything by Savard before — I found this in a used book shop.

But this is exactly my kind of thing — a ligne claire mystery with magnificently drawn interiors and exteriors.

And scenery.

And wildlife! The only thing Savard doesn’t draw well is people.

Quite entertaining, anyway.

I’m not familiar with Roger Brunel either: “Five parts pastiche, one part porn”. I like that they’re saying “porn” and not “erotic comics” or something as wishy-washy as that.

I picked this one up used, too, and it’s really really been read to bits — all the pages have come loose.

This is a collection of one to three page porny parodies of famous French(ey) comics, it’s amazing how well Brunel manages to ape all these different artists.

The porn part isn’t extremely explicit — much of the humour above, for instance, comes from Blake & Mortimer existing in a world without women, which is Trenchant Critique.

I found it to be very funny, although my French just isn’t up to decoding all the single entendres, the double entendres and possibly the triple entendres — most everything is written in a wink wink tone, where things refer to sexual slang all of the time. Which is something Duolingo just hasn’t covered in depth, so I’m er out of my depth here. Google Translate isn’t very helpful with this stuff, either.

So I think I got about one joke in ten, but I still found it to be funny. Tee hee. I should probably read it again when I’m older and see how many jokes I get then… Very advanced humour I’m sure: “Syphiline and Gonophylle”. (Sibylline and Chlorophylle.)

Two new issues of the long-running Swedish Galago comics anthology.

It’s very varied, but this one by Johan Wanloo was very funny — I’ve gotta be on the lookout for more comics from him.

But there’s a lot of good stuff in here.

And not just Swedish stuff — at least I don’t think that Teddy Goldenberg is Swedish?

Lots of good stuff.

Finally, the latest Carl Barks collection from Fantagraphics.

This is from 1963ish. That’s not prime Barks years, but that’s got a positive side, too — it has stories that haven’t been reprinted to death over the years. For instance, I couldn’t remember the above story at all.

But there’s also some extremely familiar ones.

Classics, really — and this edition is good-looking. A very entertaining way to spend some time.

And it’s fun seeing Barks getting all hip and stuff.

And that’s that.

I have another theory

No, wait!

I’ve been using the Emacs LLM-backed spellcheck mode to go through my old comics blogs like the one about Epic Comics. Most blog posts are pretty ephemeral so I don’t really care that much, but those comics blogs are sorta kinda meant to be actually readable, so getting rid of obvious spelling mistakes is nice. (Several people have told me they’ve read an entire comics blog of mine! My god! The humanity!)

Going over all those articles has been an experience. It’s just so embarrassing! I know, I said in that first article that I try to be less neurotic about these things, but every time the LLM points out that I’ve incorrectly used “there’s” instead of “there are” I feel mortified. Slightly. Slightly mortified. That’s the ticket.

So here’s My Theory: People use LLMs to generate their texts because that absolves them of responsibility for their texts.

No responsibility, no embarrassment.

I.e., it’s less embarrassing to post an abhorrent text like this than to post something you’ve written yourself. When people point out that it’s unreadable dreck, you don’t have to take it personally.

If you’ve misspelled “embarasing” and somebody points it out, that obviously means that you’re a bad person and a moron and should be ashamed (etc., depending on your level of nerdly neuroticism). But if Claude wrote it, it’s not a reflection on yourself at all.

I mean, this theory only applies to nerds who care about this kind of stuff. Most people obviously don’t, and there are other mechanisms in play for them, but I kinda feel there’s something here.