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The latest Hellboy spin-off will center on the cult-background of The Black Flame

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Hellboy in Hell marked the return of creator Mike Mignola‘s interior art to the Hellboy Universe. The character has been in Hell since 2012, but the mini-series concludes with issue #10 four years later. EW has reported that Mignola doesn’t have an immediate follow-up to the present day version of the character. Mignola previously revealed […]

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In an interview with Vulture, Mike Mignola reveals that his much-lauded Hellboy in Hell series will end with issue #10 which comes out early next year. And while he’ll remain busy with overseeing BPRD and other Hellboy-verse projects—and his Frankenstein Underground gn with art by Ben Stenbeck and Dave Stewart just dropped, he has no […]

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  Mike Mignola‘s Hellboy has been a cornerstone of comics since his debut in 1993 (he’s as old as I am!).  The character has survived the tumultuously shifting tides of the industry and a series of creative changes during his tenure at Dark Horse.  Now a few more changes are coming. Today, EW revealed the […]

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England is gone, replaced by a new World Tree, promising to end this world and replace it with something new. Hellboy speaks with a spirit that may be his friend Alice, but who also appears to be something more. She delivers a prophecy of doom and beauty to Hellboy, who awakens, and finds himself in Hell once more. And then things start to get weird.

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Comics fans have really taken to ComiXology over the past couple of years, but they have been extremely contentious with one comics publisher who has refused to take their wares over to the digital comics storefront: Dark Horse. Now the company has ceremoniously decided to take their acclaimed licenses and series over to the digital platform. The publisher broke the news in a press release sent this morning which CBR wrote up. UNFORTUNATELY, Dark Horse single issues are only accessible via their main application — Dark Horse Digital. This means that the Dark Horse trades and graphic novel collections will be available from ComiXology — a good solution for trade readers — but bad for the digital Wednesday warriors.

Dark Horse even went through the trouble of delivering a countdown clock with a Mike Mignola styled teaser image hinting at the announcement of Dark Horse comics available. Expect Buffy, Mass Effect, Fear Agent, Hellboy and more on the digital store as well as a beautiful assortment of sales of the various titles in the Dark Horse Debut celebration.

“We are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement which brings the Dark Horse catalog found in the Kindle Store to the comiXology platform,” said ComiXology Publisher and President Mike Richardson in the press release. “For the first time, hundreds of Dark Horse graphic novels will be available to comiXology’s devoted readers. The technology is stellar and we are pleased that our books will be showcased flawlessly.”

So…that’s upwards of 800 comics, start reading now!

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Fabian Rangel Jr. and Ryan Cody debuted Doc Unknown # 1  two years ago, and the project was financed entirely by Fabian out of pocket. They launched a Kickstarter project to fund BOSS SNAKE: Cold Blood, Cold Streets. The duo raised $7,540 to fund the project based on a character from the introductory issue, but the fruitful Kickstarter ventures put the creators on the map and helped with further projects with IDW and Dark Horse. Fabian and Cody raised $12,250 to publish DOC UNKNOWN: Winter of the Damned & other. The second Doc Unknown kickstarter project offered a number of enticing rewards that made publishing the comic with a cover by The Goon’s Eric Powell that much sweeter.

Third time’s the charm? The ambitious creators are attempting to fund their final installment of the series:

DOC UNKNOWN: THE WAR FOR GATE CITY is a 104 page graphic novel collecting the final four issues of supernatural pulp series DOC UNKNOWN. The third and final volume will be 94 pages of new story, featuring an introduction from ED BRISSON (SHELTERED, CLUSTER, MURDERBOOK) an afterword by me (Fabian Rangel Jr) and will include a pin-up gallery featuring MATT SMITH (BARBARIAN LORD), ALEXIS ZIRITT (SPACE RIDERS) LOGAN FAERBER (OH, KILLSTRIKE), DAVID RUBIN (THE RISE OF AURORA WEST), and MIKE MIGNOLA (HELLBOY)!

The series has raised (not taking account the Kickstarter and Amazon fees) $19,790. So, it’s safe to say they know what their doing when it comes to launching a successful Kickstarter, following through a quality product and rewards. I had a conversation with my Southern Arizona dive bar drinkin’ buddy and AMCE director, Ryan, about the success of the series, what to expect from DOC UNKNOWN: THE WAR FOR GATE CITY, and offers advice to Kickstarter comic creators.

Henry Barajas: Let’s cut to the chase. You and Fabian have raised $19,790 for this series. You’re already over 50% of goal. What’s your fuckin’ secret?!

Ryan Cody: Our backers are comic and pulp adventure fans who appreciate the world we’ve built. I think we really built on a successful first volume and good reviews and word of mouth. Doc Unknown Vol.1 was totally financed by Fabian on his own, then we did a small Kickstarter for a spin-off one-shot featuring Boss Snake and the enthusiasm was overwhelming. We noticed that there could be a market for more of these characters and Volume 2 of Doc was funded via Kickstarter within two days and did incredibly well. By delivering on time a high quality product, we eliminate any fear backers may have, and they in turn feel confident in telling their friends about it. It’s very grass roots and organic.

 

Barajas: Without giving anything away, what can backers expect in the last Doc Unknown adventure?

Cody: Everything. It will reward long time readers and include practically every character we’ve seen before. All of our villains are banding together to take out Doc. It’s also welcoming to new readers as the book is designed to be very accessible. There are alternate universes, magic, science, fish monsters, motorcycles, explosions, ghosts, lasers and plenty of punching. What else could you possibly want in a comic book?

Barajas: I noticed some big names are doing some pin ups of the character. How does it feel to see your character reimagined by someone like Hellboy creator Mike Mignola?

I was floored when Fabian told me. These guys are really busy with their own work, so the fact that they will take time out of their schedules to draw a character Fabian and I created is pretty amazing. Volume Two had Scott Godlewski and James Harren pin-ups in it, two of my personal favorite artists, and now to have someone like Mignola drawing a character I designed is absolutely nuts. It’s really cool and it’s fair to say he’s one my biggest influences. I think it just shows how timeless and fun our book is, it has a bit of everything we all loved growing up in it.

Barajas: What are some things you’ve noticed with unsuccessful kickstarter comic book projects?

Cody: I think there are two major factors in why kickstarters can fail. #1 is poor production and art. If your comic does not look like it could stand up with other books on the shelf, it’s probably not ready and the art and story is probably not up to par. Poor design, coloring and lettering can make even a good artist look like an amateur. The other reason I see is people asking for way too much money. The theory on these Doc Unknown books is to ask for the absolute minimum and then hope it makes considerably more than that to actually cover all the expenses. I think Fabian has really done well planning them out that way.

Click here to learn more or support the project.

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Look who's on the buses in #PDX – my old boss at Dark Horse Comics!

A photo posted by Anina Bennett (@bigredhair) on Feb 4, 2015 at 5:01pm PST

It’s true! As Instagrammed by Portland resident and Boilerplate co-author Anina Bennett, Dark Horse’s founder and owner Mike Richardson is part of an ad campaign for New Relic, a software development company that counts Dark Horse as a client.

Smart choice, as it allow great use of the Hellboy imagery as well.

 

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Mike Mignola chats with Douglas Wolk at Playboy about Hellboy and reveals a fundamental truth about artists—they write what they like to draw.

There’s a fairly radical change in style for Hellboy in Hell.
Well, there’s two things there. I hadn’t been drawing the book for a long time, and I changed the location radically. So I don’t know that I specifically changed the way I drew, but I changed everything else. My decision to go back to the book was attached to my decision to kill him off. I wanted to move him someplace that was made entirely of stuff I wanted to draw. When I draw the real world, there’s always something that’s gotta look right. I stylize stuff, but I’ve always felt I had my hands a little bit tied by having to obey the laws of gravity. But Hellboy in Hell is just this fluid dream world. Everything bends and stretches, so there’s a much more organic and intuitive way to draw everything. Perspective goes completely out the window. It’s just a matter of trusting your gut to make shapes. There’s a liberation to a lot of the artwork.

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By Matthew Jent

Hellboy and the BPRD #1

Writers: Mike Mignola & John Arcudi

Artist: Alex Maleev

Colorist: Dave Stewart

Cover Artist: Alex Maleev

Genre: Horror, Fantasy, Action/Adventure

Publisher: Dark Horse Comics

 

“You’re taking Hellboy with you.”

In the mid-1990s I was in high school and looking for rebellion. Something to get pretentious about. It was a search for some kind of pre-hipster deep knowledge. Oh, you like superhero comics? Meh. I’m more of a Vertigo fan.

Then I found the comic book rebellion I was looking for. A group of comics creators, writers and artists of some renown, banded together and abandoned the Big Two publishers in order to make creator-owned work, following their passion and making the comics they wanted to make, unrestricted by corporate mandates, editorial oversight, and comics code authorities.

No, not the one you might be thinking of. I’m talking about Dark Horse’s Legend imprint. Founded by John Byrne and Frank Miller, it encompassed their extant Next Men and Sin City books, Paul Chadwick’s Concrete, and new series from creators like Art Adams, Geoff Darrow, and others. I was fifteen and looking for a bandwagon to jump on. So I decided Legend was going to be that bandwagon. Every creator, every book, the complete imprint: I was going to read them all.

Which leads us to Hellboy: Seed of Destruction. Growing up with superheroes, I wasn’t a big Mike Mignola fan. I knew him from covers and annuals and the occasional mini-series, and his art had always been too blocky, too weird, to squiggly for my tastes. But Hellboy, whatever that meant, was a Legend book, and more than that, it was tied in, however lightly, to the “Torch of Liberty” backup that was going to run with Byrne’s Danger Unlimited miniseries, so I was willing to buy it, skim it, and board it.

That was 20 years ago. If you’re reading this Hellboy review and wondering what a Torch of Liberty or a Danger Unlimited is, or even — yikes! — whatever happened to Concrete, that’s partly a testament to Mike Mignola and Hellboy, one of the few enduring comic book creations of the modern era. Inspired by mythology, pulp fiction, weird horror, and action-adventure stories, Hellboy was the book Mignola was made for, and it’s been published pretty continuously ever since that first issue of Seed of Destruction. There have been toys, cartoons, and a couple major motion pictures, but there’s never been a reboot or a relaunch. The universe has expanded to include solo series or one-shots for Abe Sapien, Lobster Johnson, and the whole Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. They’re not always written and drawn by Mignola anymore, but hey — the guy created a world around the idea that the (possible) Anti-Christ is a superhero/paranormal investigator. That’s fertile ground for a shared universe.

This December sees the release of Hellboy and the BPRD. In the year that Hellboy turns 20 for real, this series flashes back to 1952 to tell the tale of Hellboy’s first mission with the Bureau. This issue — like most Hellboy comics — is dripping with dread and foreboding. Professor Bruttenholm, the Director of the BPRD and Hellboy’s Earthly father figure, sends a team of soldiers and investigators to Brazil to look into a series of murders supposedly committed by a “superhuman creature,” the descriptions of which vary. They have a small plane, a contact in a Brazilian village, and orders to bring along the untested Hellboy, who is otherwise sitting on his bed, tossing playing cards, chilling with a pet dog. There are some visions of the future and worries (spoken and unspoken) as to whether Hellboy will be a force for good or evil, but any longtime fan of the character knows that the red guy has a heart o’ gold.

The art from Alex Maleev and Dave Stewart is a great fit for Mignola & Arcudi’s story, and for the world of Hellboy. The shadows are dark (though not as oppressive as in Mignola’s own art), and the architecture is appropriately doom-laden. There are very few examples of characters free-floating in space — when that does happen, there’s always evidence elsewhere on the page of where these characters are. Objects, walls, backgrounds — ceilings! — painting a full picture of the space these characters inhabit. It might seem like a small thing, but with very little action in the first issue, Maleev and Stewart do a great job of establishing tone and tension through their use of setting and space.

As for the story? There’s always a push and pull to serialized storytelling. Do you write for the trade? For the periodical? Do you just tell the story you want to tell, and let page counts fall where they will? Hellboy and the BPRD #1 falls into the same category as a lot of modern first issues, meaning there’s a lot of setup without any denouement. That setup is thorough, and the tension and weirdness grows with an appropriate balance of pacing and characterization — two of the four BPRD agents are interchangeable, but Archie and Xiang are interesting enough to allow for a few potential redshirts on the team — but there’s no release of that tension. It’s an issue-long intake of breath, with no exhale. If you consider this as a single issue in a 20-years-and-growing tale, that’s not a bad thing. But as the first issue of a new series, I was looking for one more 4-6 page scene or cutaway that gave a clearer sense of what this story would be about. The first issue of a Hellboy series doesn’t need to provide a clear shot of the villain or an assessment of the threat at hand, but when I get to page 22 of any comic and I find myself genuinely wondering if the ending has been cut off (and this was a review copy, so it’s possible), I consider that a storytelling misstep.

Single issues like this are hard to review out of context. The short version is, If everything comes together, this is a very good beginning. The longer version is, well, everything else you’ve read to this point.

That said, I don’t need a more complicated pitch to continue reading than “Mike Mignola tells the story of Hellboy’s first field assignment.” Hellboy and the BPRD is building on a 20-year bank of weird horror, existential dread, and tales well told. This isn’t a great jumping-on point for new readers, but it’s a promising start to an untold tale in a decades-long serialized story.

Hellboy and the BPRD #1 will be released on December 3rd, 2014.

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It seems we’re not the only ones obsessed with Halloween—Mike Mignola and Dark Hose have been running a 13 Days of Hellboy festival, celebrating all kinds of artwork and story reveals in the Hellboy.

And we’re officially crossing over with this exclusive reveal of Mignola’s cover for the trade paperback Witchfinder: The Mysteries Of Unland. This is the latest book in a Hellboy spin-off series that centers on Sir Edward Grey, a Victorian detective of the occult who figures in the past of the Hellboy timeline.

This mini-series features art by Tyler Crook and colorist Dave Stewart and a script by acclaimed horror writer Kim Newman, best known for ANNO DRACULA, a take on the historic bloodsucker much admired by authors including Neil Gaiman; and British Fantasy Award nominee Maura McHugh (Jennifer Wilde). 

The story involves Grey investigating a swamp called the Unlands which happens to be full of  giant eels—and let’s face it, nothing says Halloween like a swamp full of giant eels.

 

Here’s all the 13 days of Hellboy announcements thus far:

Wednesday, October 1 – New Frankenstein Underground mini series

Thursday October 2 – Baltimore: The Wolf and the Apostle #1 preview

Friday October 3 – HELLBOY & THE BPRD  preview

Saturday October 4 – BPRD 1946-1948 new cover by Laurence Campbell

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March 22, 1994 was the debut of Hellboy: Seed of Destruction #1, the first appearance of Mike Mignola’s now-iconic character. There have been special things going on all over as detailed by Dark Horse Comics, today there are giveaways and brimstone and kittens and stuff. Find participating retailers in the link above.

I have to say as much as I love Hellboy is is these chocolates that most excited me. Dark Horse really knows how to run a merchandise line!

In addition to a slew of exclusive giveaways, Dark Horse has produced an all-new sampler comic featuring two classic Mignola tales, “The Ghoul” and “Another Day at the Office,” as well as two new stories by Mignola, Fábio Moon, and R. Sikoryak!

Additionally, as part of this special promotion, participating retailers were entered to win an original piece of art from Mike Mignola. This special honor goes to Hot Comics and Collectibles in New Hope, Minnesota!

Look for the Hellboy: The First 20 Years hardcover collection, on sale in comic shops everywhere on March 19! This deluxe oversized hardcover presents Mignola’s favorite covers and illustrations in gallery style, from his first drawing of Hellboy through twenty years of publishing.

Dark Horse Digital has Hellboy Day offerings as well, with the Hellboy MegaBundle Sale and the Mike Mignola Sale!

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TweetLord Henry Baltimore, Vampire Hunter, is more strictly speaking the hunter of a specific vampire, as THE WIDOW AND THE TANK one-shot reminds us. For such a goal-oriented guy, he certainly leaves plenty of ash-piles along the way, not to mention the corpses of other creatures he may happen to encounter. Writers Mike Mignola and [...]

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TweetFriday is art day! Friday is also the harbinger of the weekend, but who cares about that? Instead, take a look at all the pretty pictures I gathered for you from the shady, cob-webby corners of the Internet you dare not venture… (I can’t say more) FF by Mike Allred (you HAVE to click on this to [...]

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This Friday, The Autumn Society invites you to the Hellboy 15th Anniversary show, only at Brave New Worlds! Because nothing says Happy Holidays like the beast of the Apocalypse!

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This is a little round-up post of things on my mind. Above is a sketch of Mike Mignola's Hellboy, one of my favorite comics of all time. I draw Hellboy all the time but this is the first drawing I've done that I like, probably because I did it in my own style rather than copying Mignola.

First, I wanted to share this BBC article with you. It's a Front Row radio episode about comic books and posits that we are now living in a golden age of comic books. Whatever you think it's a great article. The bit about comics starts about 13:13 into the show.

On my iPod is a new playlist called Chamber Pop. I'm obsessed with all these little musical subgenres that Wikipedia has articled to an almost academic point. Chamber Pop began in the 1960's as Baroque Pop with the release of the seminal pop album Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys which was a major showcase for the genius of Brian Wilson. The idea is a type of pop music that introduces atypical instruments ans arrangements more associated to classical music. This music has continued and found a renaissance in the 1990's with music from Neutral Milk Hotel, Apples In Stereo and now The Decemberists, although now it's referred to as Chamber Pop. If you like rich, layered pop this might be for you.

Something else worth mentioning is my new addiction to audiobooks. It appeals to both my love of multitasking and my boundless laziness. What really love about them, other then being able to "read" while drawing, is that I can finally read all those classics I've just never gotten around to like the Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon and Joyce's Ulysses. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

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Nothing much to report, just working away. I'm finishing up a new pencil drawing while planning another one. There's so much I want to do. Going to see Hellboy 2 tonight. Can't wait for that.

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Back from Brazil -- a bit under the weather, with a blogpost from 4.00am still unfinished -- so here, to celebrate the release of Hellboy 2 (http://www.hellboymovie.com/), are a few photos from my trips to Budapest that never got posted...


Selma Blair asleep by a rock.



Selma awake and pretending to be a book cover.




Guillermo Del Toro, probably over a hasty Hungarian lunch.

And finally, me, in need of a haircut, hanging out with an elf-prince and an elf-princess (Luke Goss and Anna Walton)...




Now, go and see the film... (there's a ticket-buying widget on the Hellboy site, but when I tried it, it seemed convinced that I could only see the film between 1:30 am and 9:30 am. Which actually corresponds to my waking hours right now, but isn't much good for seeing films round here.)

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It’s Thursday and everyone knows what that means! Git yer contest hats on. A bunch of fun stuff this week to get involved with. As always there’s a bunch of Twilight Contests - you Twilight fans are so active - plus, make your own FanLib Fortune Cookies. Cool Huh?

Member contests open for submissions:

These contests will end by next Thursday (which is my birthday) and need your votes.

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When I was at ALA, I scored a paperback copy of How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines by Thomas C. Foster. I've only read a bit of the book thus far, but I can tell you that thus far, the subtitle is not a lie. The chapters are short. They are written conversationally. And they are full of pithy advice and sentences, some of which are oversimplifications, but most of which are useful in any case.

On poetry
Foster's fourth chapter is entitled "If It's Square, It's a Sonnet". He goes on to explain that he doesn't bother teaching much of anything but sonnets (fie on Mr. Foster, fie!), because unless you're a poet or really into poetry, it's kind of pointless. (A thousand times fie! Which would, I suppose, be fie thousand. But I digress.) He notes that a sonnet contains 14 lines, and is usually in iambic pentameter (10 syllables per line), which means that it's roughly as high as it is wide on the page. And then he says this:

I think people who read poems for enjoyment should always read the poem first, without a formal or stylistic care in the world. They should not begin by counting lines, or looking at line endings to find the rhyme scheme, if any, just as I think people should read novels without peeking at the ending: just enjoy the experience. After you've had your first pleasure, though, one of the additional pleasures is seeing how the poet worked that magic on you. There are many ways a poem can charm the reader: choice of images, music of the language, idea content, cleverness or wordplay. And at least some part of the answer, if that magic came in a sonnet, is form.

Huzzah! for Mr. Foster after all. And his further explication of what a sonnet is and what it can accomplish is equally good. He closes his chapter by noting that "Sonnets are . . . short poems that take far more time [to write], because everything has to be perfect, than long ones. We owe it to poets, I think, to notice that they've gone to this trouble, as well as to ourselves, to understand the nature of the thing we're reading. When you start to read a poem, then, look at the shape."

On writing compelling biography or nonfiction

I recently read a 2003 New York Times interview with Laura Hillenbrand, the author of the acclaimed bestseller, Seabiscuit. Here are some bits from the interview. The first bit is her explanation as to how she made the book feel alive and contemporary.

I think the secret to bringing immediacy to any nonfiction story is to ferret out every detail that is there to be found, so that the reader feels like an eyewitness. To do this, I consulted a very broad range of sources, from record books to living witnesses, and everything in between. I studied every film and photograph that I could find, and acquired complete newspapers and magazines from the period and read them cover to cover so I could put myself in the mindset of the men and women of the era. I researched what things cost, what books and movies were popular, what the weather was on a particular day, anything that might help me stand in the shoes of an average American of the Depression era. I was very fortunate in that Seabiscuit was covered very heavily in the press and followed by millions of people, so there was a lot to be found.

Hillenbrand was asked whether any "artful nonfiction" had an influence on her method of storytelling, but her answer really goes to her philosophy of writing nonfiction, and to her use of novelistic devices.

My goal as an historian is to make nonfiction read as smoothly as fiction while adhering very strictly to fact. I read a lot of nonfiction, and have certainly been influenced by such superb historians as Bruce Catton and David McCullough, but the writers who have had the greatest impact on me have been novelists. Michael Shaara's masterpiece "The Killer Angels," an historic novel about Gettysburg, has had a tremendous influence on my writing. Tolstoy has also been a wonderful teacher, namely "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina." Other writers I read over and over again, and try to emulate, include Austen, Wharton, Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

On re-reading books (or, perhaps, on writing novels?)

When I find a book I really and truly love, I tend to be a re-reader. I believe that will be the subject of tomorrow's blog post, in fact. For today, I'll stick with quoting a bit from another, far more famous re-reader: Jane Austen, in a letter to her sister, Cassandra, dated Feb. 8-9, 1807, referring to a novel by Sarah Burney:

"We are reading Clarentine, & are surprised to find how foolish it is. I remember liking it much less on a 2d reading than at the 1st & it does not bear a 3d at all. It is full of unnatural conduct & forced difficulties, without striking merit of any kind."

Don't forget that Masterpiece Theatre is airing Miss Austen Regrets at 9 p.m. on most PBS stations tonight. And try not to laugh (as I did) at the name of the lovely younger girl pictured here in the role of Fanny Austen Knight. (And no, Fanny isn't the name I found funny - it's her real name, Imogen Poots, that cracked me up. I am so very immature.)

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Coming to PBS this Sunday is a production entitled Miss Austen Regrets, starring Olivia Williams as Jane Austen. Those of you familiar with some of the earlier Austen productions will remember her as Jane Fairfax in the 1996 production of Emma made for television and starring Kate Beckinsale. Those of you unfamiliar with that production may recognize her as Bruce Willis's wife in The Sixth Sense; oh — and you can see the 1996 version of Emma on March 23, 2008.

I'm very interested to see what they do with this production, which primarily focuses on the end of Jane Austen's life. Jane died in 1817 at the age of 41, most likely from a condition known as Addison's disease, which is, if I understand it correctly, a form of tuberculosis that affects the kidneys. Jane had never married, although not because of a lack of suitors; she received at least one marriage proposal, which she accepted, only to rescind her acceptance the next day.

The film is largely derived from Jane's correspondence with her niece, Fanny, who was at that time entering the "marriage market", as well as other correspondence between Jane and her sister, Cassandra, as well as from biographical information and surmise. I'm keen on seeing what percentage of surmise there is before I decide whether I think this production is justified or not.

In the meantime, I'm off to work on my own Jane Project, which is, for those who might not know, essentially a biography of Jane Austen told in verse using period forms. I'm still wrestling with the last six lines of a particular sonnet that has now occupied me for about two weeks. But to quote Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy in the 1995 P&P (coming back to PBS in February for a three-week run): I shall conquer this. I shall!

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On what writing is

"I always thought writing was arraying words in beautiful patterns, but now I think it's more like walking blindfolded, listening with your whole heart, and then looking backward to see if you made any tracks worth keeping." Sara Lewis Holmes in her recent Poetry Friday post at Read Write Believe.

On why fiction/fantasy matter

Ten days ago, I put up a post entitled "Why We Need Fiction", about which I remain pleased. One of my rationales for why fiction is important reads as follows: "We need fiction because it allows us to create an artificial barrier, behind which we can examine Big Important Issues in a hypothetical setting, instead of beating people's brains out, possibly literally, by addressing those issues in the real world."

I've started reading my copy of The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy by Leonard S. Marcus, and it appears that Lloyd Alexander agreed with me in part:

"Q: Why do you write fantasy?
A: Because, paradoxically, fantasy is a good way to show the world as it is. Fantasy can show us the truth about human relationships and moral dilemmas because it works on our emotions on a deeper, symbolic level than realistic fiction. It has the same emotional power as a dream."

On poetry

Here, the first seven lines of a fourteen-line poem by James Kirkup called "The Poet":

Each instant of his life, a task, he never rests,
And works most when he appears to be doing nothing.
The least of it is putting down in words
What usually remains unwritten and unspoken,
And would so often be much better left
Unsaid, for it is really the unspeakable
That he must try to give an ordinary tongue to.

And from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, which airs tonight at 9 p.m. on most PBS stations, the novel of which I reviewed last July. Here is a portion of the text taken from a description of the developing friendship between Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe. This section is often referred to as Austen's "defence of the novel", and is found in Volume I, chapter 5 of the novel:

. . . and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; ——for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding ——joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens, -- there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. "I am no novel-reader ——I seldom look into novels ——Do not imagine that I often read novels ——It is really very well for a novel." ——Such is the common cant. —— "And what are you reading, Miss ——————?" "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ——"It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;" or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.

Seems the more things change, the more they remain the same. No?

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