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Terrible twos: Happy B-day Retro-b-lore

Renee — Tue, 25 May 2010 23:02:20 +0000

And for your very special day I gift unto thee an update after an almost six month hiatus.

Prison for Bitches – a Lady Gaga fanzine.

Prison for Bitches is a collaborative piece by the dudes from Haus von Electric Ant and a bunch of awesome artists such as Hellen Jo, Johhny Ryan, and Lisa Hanawalt. The content is great my only complaint is that I wish it were less of an art zine and more of a comics [meaning more strips] and text-based zine. The Fruits-like scene report on Lady Gaga Cosplay in Kobe is a great section too that I wish would have been expanded. The artwork is excellent – really nothing disappoints.

My favorite piece is the single page by Michael Kupperman. On it, Gaga’s disembodied head floats above two primates while her heavily shadowed eyes stare out at the viewer – her mouth is open slightly, her hair is tousled around her head in a way that calls to mind Beethoven or Mark Twain’s signature locks. She does not look like a pop star, instead she resembles some sort of ominous ape deity. I’m into it. And something about it makes me think of Lawnmower Man…wild hair, apes, god-like presence…

Check out a preview of Prison for Bitches HERE!

My year in review – a month or so late.

Renee — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:51:31 +0000

In the year 2009 I…

1.) Hosted many Interlibrary Lushes, then…didn’t.
One of the biggest changes was the passing of the Interlibrary Lush torch. I began Interlibrary Lush, the monthly meetup for librarians and information professionals, in September 2008, and one year later I decided to move on to have time for other projects, and let someone else take over. So that is done. Besides the occasional, ‘How do I start a librarian happy hour in my town?’, I have little part in the group but the new organizers continue to host meetups each month. For more information on ILL check out the MySpace page, as well as the Facebook group.

2.) Learned to accept that I work in an archive, not a library
Having worked in libraries since 2001, this was difficult for me. For a long while I wanted to return to the library environment, the one I felt most comfortable in, and found it frustrating to live in a city with such a competitive job market – particularly for librarians. Two years ago, I found work in a departmental archive, and did not like it. I felt like I was settling, but over time this changed. It took a lot of work but now the archive is something of my own creation. I have a ’system’ in place – it is efficient and it works, and I am pretty happy about that.

3.) Completed many Rad Ref related projects
Which I have mentioned here and here and here.

4.) Wrote a fanzine about Margot Ruth Kidder
The fanzine is called Margot Ruth Kidder: Queen of the Margotnauts and is about all things related to Ms. Kidder. For those of you not familiar with her work…well, guess what? You actually ARE familiar with her work! Maybe from Sisters or Amityville Horror but most likely from the Superman movies where she played Lois Lane. Issue #2 is in the works but its completion date, at this point, is unknown.

5.) According to the timestamp on the first entry…I launched boldlygone[dot]net
Um…just so you know, some of the images in these zines have GRAPHIC depictions of interspecies love so NSFW, okay?

6.) Read one million comics books
Yes, one million comics books, which need to be reviewed, so I will, here, and soon!

Retrobacklore Reads

Renee — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 06:21:54 +0000

It’s true!

Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O’Malley – It has been awhile since I have been able to relate to a comic book character and their story so much. Granted, I have never dated anyone that required I battle all their exes Mega Man-style in order to continue dating them but then who hasn’t been involved with someone whose past relationships keep infiltrating their own? On occasion the the story seems a bit disjointed – I passed on SP to a friend and he agreed, “Is the beginning of book two actually the beginning of book two?” – but not to a bothersome degree. The look of SP is a manga-western comics hybrid that I love and am seeing more and more. For example with…

…Aqua Leung by Mark Andrew Smith and Paul Maybury – The story of a young prince on a quest to take back the throne and unite kingdoms – UNDER THE SEA. Good heavens, this comic is sweet, sweet eye candy.

Kamandi: At Earth’s End – Originally created in the 1970s by Jack Kirby, we see it resurrected in 1993 by some clueless jackasses at DC. They’ve managed to make him both crass and a mama’s boy. Kamandi has always been ridiculous, which is one of the reasons I love it but this reincarnation is just unacceptable. Bad story telling, boring characters, and Kamandi looks like some haggard Edgar Winter/WWF mutant . Although I admit I was happy to see Kamandi in the post-post apocalyptic Library of Congress. Of course, in At Earth’s End he’s not much for reading but his chaps-wearing gal pal, Saphira, sure is!

Kazuo Umeza – Cat Eyed Boy

Renee — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 03:13:06 +0000

Created in the late 60s by Kazuo Umeza, Cat Eyed Boy [shouldn't there be a hyphen in there somewhere?] is a horror/comedy manga about a half-[cat]demon, half-child that has been cast out of the demon world for looking too human. Shunned by humans as well, he wonders from village to village, living in attics, and getting into various kinds of mischief. Misfortune may or may not follow him although he does claim at the beginning of each issue that “awful things follow me wherever I go,” then threatens to appear in your attic next. I am a fan of manga from this period, and knowing Umeza’s reputation as horror manga creator extraordinaire, I had high expectations. Maybe a little too high. To be fair, the illustrations are unique and demonstrate Umeza’s fine artistic talents. The monsters and demons are so grotesque I winced at their appearance more than once. The Cat Eyed Boy resembles a strange cross-breeding of school boy, cat, Hamburgler, and Ed Grimley, which oddly enough equals ADORABLE. Like I said, Umeza is a talented man. My main complaint, however, is with the the shoddy translation work. Umeza’s stories may be as interesting and horrific as the characters that populate them but this is not evident in the English versions. The translations are just too literal. Example – Do you not tremble before the fearsome Water-Gulping Goblin? No, you don’t. Because he just gulps water. Other poorly named creatures include ‘Large Hand Bodyless’ and ‘The Meatball Monster.’

MEATBALL ATTACKS!

The Cat Eyed Boy stories have been compiled into two volumes, roughly 500 pages each. All the tails [har har har] are moralistic, and Cat Eyed Boy believes it is his duty to expose the avarice, cruelty, greed, selfishness in both humans and demons, and to punish them by allowing demons to harm and disfigure them [making them as unattractive on the outside as they are inside]. So for the most part Umeza portrays Cat Eyed Boy as a do-gooder, albeit a snotty, na-na-na-na-told-you-you-were-evil one. Oh, and does he really need to piss on everything? I admit the random urination scenes made me laugh but they don’t help enough for me to actually recommend these volumes to anyone. I will say that the final stories in volume two seem to translate better than the others. But again, unless, you are a huge Umeza fan, I would pick these books up at your local library rather than spending $25 for each.

Booktalk: Will There Really Be A Morning?

Renee — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:24:02 +0000

One of my favorite library classes was Adult Popular Literature. We discussed the importance of the trashy romance novel, played around on NoveList, created mock book clubs and gave mock booktalks. My booktalk was on Frances Farmer’s disturbing autobiography, Will There Really Be a Morning? [named after the Emily Dickinson poem], which told the tale of her rise to fame in Hollywood in the 1930s and later her tragic fall into alcoholism, mental illness, and abuse endured as a mental patient. Since it was an online course we had to submit our talks as audio files then post them to message boards for classmates’ commentary. I can only remember my professor’s comments. She thanked me for reminding her this book existed and said I sounded sleepy. I recorded the booktalk in the wee hours of the night in 2005, so the reason I sounded sleepy was because I was.

Ms. Farmer – Hollywood and then not.

It’s sort of ridiculous to hear me giving a book report as a fake librarian. My voice is a bit hoarse and at times I stumble over my words, but I like it just the same. “I hope this talk has been an illuminating one, and I look forward to discussing this and more books with you in the future.” Well, it’s the truth. Without further ado…

Farmer, Frances Elena. Will there really be a morning? : an autobiography. New York : Putnam, c1972.

Booktalk by Renee C. Bartley, July 7th, 2005. [4:08]

Bookhunter by Jason Shiga: Librarians will dig it.

Renee — Sun, 18 May 2008 00:36:26 +0000

While at the Stumptown Comics Fest I picked up graphic novel, Bookhunter by Jason Shiga. As a former Special Collections bibliographer I didn’t see how I could resist. Set in 1972, the book begins with Special Agent Bay and his Library Police/SWAT team on a undercover mission to find the culprit behind several missing copies of The China Lobby in America. It is not before long that we find the extremes Agent Bay is willing to go to recover a stolen book and it is clear he believes book thieves should be punished – severely. In the next case, Bay is assigned the task of finding an 1838 English Bible that belonged to John Quincy Adams and returning it to the Oakland Public Library. As the story continues we learn Agent Bay does not take his job lightly and is willing to risk even his own life to return a book to its rightful owner. The book is a sepia-toned gem, written with librarians in mind. Shiga drops Dewey digits and cutters with a wink and a nod to cataloguers and his use of terms like incanabula, bone folder, hinge strips, and Caxton [eeek!] will make Special Collections librarians and book binders giddy with joy.

The book has some creative action scenes, including high-speed book cart chases and battle sequences involving card catalogues and books as weapons [which brought to mind the manga, Read or Die, and its superhuman library agent, Yomiko Readman's ability to control and shape paper into weapons and other objects.].

I will say some librarians may cringe at the investigative tactics of the Agent Bay and the library staff that so willingly complies to his request to search all library patrons’ records and check-out history. But of course this library is only loosely based on a true story [see Shiga's page] and is set in simpler, pre-PATRIOT Act times. I want to avoid being too critical so you will check out the book for yourself. Shiga has made it available in its entirety here. So read it, then get it on your library shelves for others to check out.