There’s no polite way to say it. The star of Roberto Bolaño’s long-awaited novel, The Third Reich, is a geek — a gamer geek, to be precise. And it’s the real-world implications of his all-consuming pastime that underlie the book’s action, even as he relaxes on the beach with his beautiful girlfriend and parties into the night with new friends. The immense role gaming plays in Bolaño’s atmospheric, slow-burning novel, written before The Savage Detectives and 2666 and serialized by The Paris Review in advance of its publication last month, got us thinking about the many memorable geeks contemporary literature has given us. A selection of our favorites is after the jump; add yours in the comments. Read More »
Comic book characters tend to embody the most petrifying of fashion nightmares, from wearing underwear as outerwear to donning full-body, technicolor spandex suits in broad daylight. Since life within the panels of a comic book tends to be only slightly less sartorially inspiring than being stuck in an ’80s workout video, we think residents of Gotham and Radiant City deserve an extra-hard pat on the back when they bust out runway-worthy looks. Browse our look book of the graphic world’s trendiest style icons after the jump.
Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic hits shelves this week, and being huge fans of Spiegelman (and particularly Maus) we couldn’t be more excited. First published twenty-five years ago, Maus has become a modern classic, though it is at times a difficult and disturbing novel. MetaMaus delves into the history of the book with hundreds of pages of answered questions and supporting information and is sure to satiate any fan — at least for a while. If you’re anything like us, you’ll need something to keep your graphic novel kick going when you come up for air, so we’ve put together a list of some of our favorite disturbingly brilliant graphic novels, including the famous Maus. Click through to see our picks, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments.
If we had a nickel for every superhero comic tattoo we saw, we’d be set for life. So, while DC and Marvel are great and all, it’s always much more exciting to spot an arm adorned with images inspired by an indie or web comic artist we love. After the jump, we’ve rounded up ten of our favorites, from Daniel Clowes and Adrian Tomine to Frank Miller and R. Crumb.
1. Justin Bieber was the big winner at last night’s American Music Awards, taking home four awards, including Artist of the Year. Insert snarky comment about tween girls owning the music industry here. [via MTV]
2. Author Norris Church Mailer, the last of Norman Mailer’s six wives, died yesterday of gastrointestinal cancer. She was 61 years old. [via Jacket Copy]
3. Pitchfork has bestowed upon Kanye West an extremely rare (especially for a new album) 10.0 rating. They probably owed him as much after he showed up at their #Offline festival last month.
4. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 1 had an unsurprisingly huge debut: the film earned $125.1 million, more than any other movie in the series has raked in on its first few days, with the sixth-highest grossing opening weekend of all time. [via WSJ]
5. Good news, indie comic geeks: Daniel Clowes’s Wilson is heading to the big screen, in a film that may be directed by Alexander Payne, of Sideways fame. [via Digital Spy]
Forget all this talk about the death of print media for a moment. Tomorrow a newspaper is born in San Francisco. Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly will be a one-time-only, old-fashioned broadsheet — the San Francisco Panorama. Its pages will measure 22 by 15 inches. Here’s what this beautiful beast will cover: “It’ll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more.”
Exciting and ambitious for an 11-year-old literary journal, right? That’s why we sat down with Oscar Villalon, McSweeney’s publisher, to get the back story on the project.
