I’m not really interested in giving people a quick introduction; I tend to mix my personal life, humour, sarcasm and knowledge into my book reviews and blog posts. However I do want to kick off talking about the book that turned me into a reader. It wasn’t until 2009 that I discovered the joys of books and reading and something inside me clicked and I wanted to consume every book I saw. This life changing event was all because of one book, an Australian non-fiction title called Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone! by Craig Schuftan.
At the time I listened to a lot of music and would have cited AFI, My Chemical Romance, Weezer, and so on as some of my favourite bands. In face I was right into the music that was been played on Triple J. Craig Schuftan was a radio producer at Triple J at the time and there was a short show he made for the station called The Culture Club. In this show he would talk about the connection rock and roll has to art and literary worlds. Friedrich Nietzsche was claiming, “I am no man, I am dynamite” well before AC/DC’s song TNT.
That was a real revelation for me and I picked up Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone! (subtitled; The Romantic Movement, Rock and Roll, and the End of Civilisation as We Know It) and began reading it. However it didn’t stop there; this book connected the so called ‘emo’ movement with The Romantic Movement, I never thought these bands would have anything in common with the greats like Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley or John Keats but I had to find out.
Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone! by Craig Schuftan ended up taking half a year to complete; not because I was a slow reader but I wanted to know more,and I read poetry by Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, and researched online. I picked up books like Frankenstein (an obsession of mine), Dracula and Wuthering Heights just because they were mentioned. This was a weird turn in my life but my growing thirst for knowledge became an obsession with reading. I have now set a life goal to read everything on the 1001 Books you must read before you die list.
It is weird to think one book can have such a huge impact on my life but I credit Craig Schuftan (and my wife) for such a positive improvement in my life. I will eventually read Craig Schuftan’s books The Culture Club: Modern Art, Rock and Roll and other stuff your parents warned you about and Entertain Us!: The Rise and Fall of Alternative Rock in the Nineties but I’ve put them off because I suspect the same amount of research will be involved.
Has a book had such a positive impact in your life? I would love to know in the comments. Also are there any other books that explore the connections between art and literature with pop-culture?
One of the great comics from the Plane of Limbo, The Fabulous Killjoys is finally coming out this June, with a Free Comic Book Day preview. You may recall this collaboration between My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way, writer Shaun Simon and artist Becky Cloonan is the print component of MCR’s 2010 SF concept album, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. Video’s for the album told the story of a bunch of heroic outlaws battling an evil Grant Morrison. Long delayed by Way’s hectic schedule, the book is finally coming out!
UPDATE: Comics Alliance has an interview with Way and editor Scott Allie about Killjoys and the next outing of the Umbrella Academy saga, Hotel Oblivion (Above)
GW: Yeah, that’s the greatest benefit of the break, which another thing about that break is important to point out is that we were recording an album. So it was weird because I guess the extracurricular activities I would do or the other stuff I was doing meant it really wasn’t a break at all. So that was difficult.
SA: And originally Killjoys was just a comic and then it was an album and a comic, but the album had to get done first. And now the comic is a completely different comic than it was going to be. The reason is that the Killjoys that he originally conceived is so different from the Killjoys that’s about to come out, because the album did a certain amount of what the original intent was. So there’s different characters and a whole different arc. The hiatus made it better, but it also transformed it into a whole different thing.
PR from publisher Dark Horse:
In 2009, when Dark Horse first announced a new project from Grammy-nominated frontman turned Eisner-winning comics writer Gerard Way (The Umbrella Academy), the response from music and comics fans alike was overwhelming. Now, Dark Horse is thrilled to announce that Gerard Way, Shaun Simon, and Becky Cloonan’s highly anticipated sci-fi epic will finally see publication in 2013!
Welcome to Battery City, where the disease is the cure!
In My Chemical Romance’s critically acclaimed album Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, the Killjoys fought against the tyrannical megacorporation Better Living Industries. It cost them their lives, save for one—the mysterious Girl. Today, the followers of the original Killjoys languish in the desert while BLI systematically strips citizens of their individuality. As the fight for freedom fades, it’s left to the Girl to take up the mantle and bring down the fearsome BLI or else join the mindless ranks of Bat City!
“The original idea for the comic informed the record,” said Gerard Way. “The record helped refine the idea, and then Becky had done a drawing of the Girl for the single ‘The Only Hope for Me Is You’ and I saw it and thought, this is the comic. It’s basically the last video, it’s the last part of the Killjoys story, while at the same time being totally its own thing.”
“I think we have created a broad range of characters here,” said cowriter Shaun Simon. “A lonely teenage girl hiding from her past in the desert. A couple of android call girls wanting nothing more than to be together. An aging assassin with a secret that could destroy his life . . . Even though these characters are living in a bizarre sci-fi world, their struggles are the same we face in our own.”
“The world of the Killjoys is full of visual opposites—from sprawling deserts to urban junkyards—and a cast of characters to match,” said artist Becky Cloonan. “It’s been a challenge to encompass all of this in my art, but woven into the world building is a human spark that lights this story on fire and gives me so much to draw from.”
As announced at New York Comic Con, an early look into this world will be published as part of Free Comic Book Day 2013, with the first issue hitting stands the following month on June 6!
This month’s Rock Sound
magazine has a big poster of My Chemical Romance drawn by
Becky Cloonan. You may recall the the new MCR album is very very SF, and Cloonan is supposed to be drawing a comic written by frontman Gerard Way that ties in with the adventures of Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. Nice, but where’s
Grant Morrison?[Via The Ephemerist
]
Dang… I forgot Cloonan was doing the art. Saw her at a con not that long ago and did not think to ask her about it. As if yhe comic didn’t sound great already.