Wednesday, May 19, 2004
The last couple of days, I are been mostly reading...
MMM Magazine. A guide book, a spell book, a comic... all about Helensburgh in Scotland. It's geography and history, showing you around a place through the experiences and memories of the people that have lived there, telling you the place's story through it's various locales.
It has a sea god that has seen Blade Runner, Vikings that got lost in Brazil and a bar that turned the Buddha away. It has the past and it has the future and everything that stands between the two. It's a mighty piece of work and you should appreciate the supreme effort it's going to take you to get a copy of this because it is truly worth it. And it's overseen by a Barbeloid who makes a damn sexy pirate. Oh yes.
...Orbiter. The main thing that put me off buying this up till now was the hardcover, I might have loved the man's Transmetropolitan but not enough to splurge on any of his other projects, so the almost year later paperback release was more likely to catch my eye for a moment of weakness panic buy.
It's Warren Ellis's love letter to space exploration, so many of his usual tics of someone who is harsh, rude and violent, much as Uncle Warren pretends to be in his epistles to the faithful are repressed if not absent here. Ten years after a mysterious disappearence that closed down manned space travel that missing last shuttle returns to earth, minus most of it's crew, covered in a strange material and with a catatonic and violent pilot. To solve the mystery of where it's been for ten years the team sent in to investigate have to open themselves up to possibilities that turn on their heads notions of how the universe works and our place in it.
I know nothing about space shuttles and I understand even less about physics, so consequently I don't know whether anything Ellis says makes any sense or whether he'd have a fine future ahead of him writing nonsensical technobabble for episodes of Star Trek. All I can say is it sounds convincing.
But it's mainly used to cover up the noticeable deficiencies in Warren's work, namely the difficulty he has writing idealists who aren't the bastard offspring of Hunter Thompson, see Spider Jerusalem, Jenny Sparks, Elijah Snow... This is basically an artifact story like Clarke's Rama books on a smaller scale. But the human interactions don't work, the pilot is psychotic when first met, but we get no explanation for that, nor does it come up again. Another character is seperating from her partner/husband, that gets one page for him to comment about how her first love was always space, to which he can't compare. And at the finale, the idea that two other characters have somehow managed to hit it off and are an item are absurd.
However, if this review seems overly negative it's because I don't want to spoil it for you by talking about the good part. Because the good part is the unfolding of the mystery of the shuttle and where it's been. This is where most of Ellis's work has gone into, and is as big a plus as his human scripting is a minus. Like I said, I have no way of knowing whether anything that Ellis writes is true, but it has an internal logical consistency within the story.
I don't think I've come across artist Colleen Doran's work before but in this I have to say "Meh". She starts off strongly with epic views of the abandoned Kennedy Space Centre which has become a huge hobo town, but as the story progresses and turns inward she is unable to keep up. As the story reaches it's climax points towards the end, with shots of the shuttle's engine, or the cockpit, either Ellis's directions in the script were poor or she was just unable to execute them. Extremely proficient at drawing things that are, when the script calls for a step into the unknown her artwork is unable to make it.
Definitely read before you buy. Or read before you buy MMM Magazine...
MMM Magazine. A guide book, a spell book, a comic... all about Helensburgh in Scotland. It's geography and history, showing you around a place through the experiences and memories of the people that have lived there, telling you the place's story through it's various locales.
It has a sea god that has seen Blade Runner, Vikings that got lost in Brazil and a bar that turned the Buddha away. It has the past and it has the future and everything that stands between the two. It's a mighty piece of work and you should appreciate the supreme effort it's going to take you to get a copy of this because it is truly worth it. And it's overseen by a Barbeloid who makes a damn sexy pirate. Oh yes.
...Orbiter. The main thing that put me off buying this up till now was the hardcover, I might have loved the man's Transmetropolitan but not enough to splurge on any of his other projects, so the almost year later paperback release was more likely to catch my eye for a moment of weakness panic buy.
It's Warren Ellis's love letter to space exploration, so many of his usual tics of someone who is harsh, rude and violent, much as Uncle Warren pretends to be in his epistles to the faithful are repressed if not absent here. Ten years after a mysterious disappearence that closed down manned space travel that missing last shuttle returns to earth, minus most of it's crew, covered in a strange material and with a catatonic and violent pilot. To solve the mystery of where it's been for ten years the team sent in to investigate have to open themselves up to possibilities that turn on their heads notions of how the universe works and our place in it.
I know nothing about space shuttles and I understand even less about physics, so consequently I don't know whether anything Ellis says makes any sense or whether he'd have a fine future ahead of him writing nonsensical technobabble for episodes of Star Trek. All I can say is it sounds convincing.
But it's mainly used to cover up the noticeable deficiencies in Warren's work, namely the difficulty he has writing idealists who aren't the bastard offspring of Hunter Thompson, see Spider Jerusalem, Jenny Sparks, Elijah Snow... This is basically an artifact story like Clarke's Rama books on a smaller scale. But the human interactions don't work, the pilot is psychotic when first met, but we get no explanation for that, nor does it come up again. Another character is seperating from her partner/husband, that gets one page for him to comment about how her first love was always space, to which he can't compare. And at the finale, the idea that two other characters have somehow managed to hit it off and are an item are absurd.
However, if this review seems overly negative it's because I don't want to spoil it for you by talking about the good part. Because the good part is the unfolding of the mystery of the shuttle and where it's been. This is where most of Ellis's work has gone into, and is as big a plus as his human scripting is a minus. Like I said, I have no way of knowing whether anything that Ellis writes is true, but it has an internal logical consistency within the story.
I don't think I've come across artist Colleen Doran's work before but in this I have to say "Meh". She starts off strongly with epic views of the abandoned Kennedy Space Centre which has become a huge hobo town, but as the story progresses and turns inward she is unable to keep up. As the story reaches it's climax points towards the end, with shots of the shuttle's engine, or the cockpit, either Ellis's directions in the script were poor or she was just unable to execute them. Extremely proficient at drawing things that are, when the script calls for a step into the unknown her artwork is unable to make it.
Definitely read before you buy. Or read before you buy MMM Magazine...
