Girl Detective

The swank new appearance is a benefit of the upgrade to WordPress 1.5, also used by the much-more-famous-than-I Warren Ellis, whose site I won’t link to because the last time I did I saw something I wish I could erase from my memory. My tech-spouse G. Grod has been muttering for some time (weeks? months? they all run together) about making the change to 1.5. He was spurred into action this weekend after the site got blasted by blackgammon spam. I again have a blurb, as I did at the old Girl Detective. I’m not sure I like the electric blue, but the new typeface is much better and easier to read. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one annoyed that “cl” looked like “d”.

I’m wavering about keeping the comments. There have been some fun discussions, as on messiahs and favorite fictional characters, but reader use is sporadic, and they do make me a target for the evil spammers.

As for the tagline, “needs more penguins,” it was something that G. Grod threw onto the template to see if it worked, which it didn’t until the upgrade. Now it does, but it’s pretty random, and perhaps only funny to G. Grod, me and friends who may have been with us (?) at its inception.

Feel free to email or comment any thoughts, on comments or on penguin taglines. Heck, feel free to make up an origin story for the tagline, as long as it’s not (too) naughty. This is a family weblog, after all.

I followed a Bookslut entry link today about teen chicklit. This seems strangely familiar, I thought, even before getting to the damning quote by Sarah Mlynowski about wanting to be in the same company as Christopher Pike and the Sweet Valley books.

Oh, yeah, I have read this before, and linked to it in this entry on crossover books, but the Houston Chronicle no longer has the earlier article available. The original link came from Bookslut, here.

The Star Tribune piece notes that there is a growing market for teen chicklit. What it fails to note is that while it’s popular and selling well, it’s complete crap, following a formula that teen-fiction expert Michael Cart nailed about ten years ago in his excellent critical analysis From Romance to Realism: 50 years of Growth and Change in Young Adult Literature, 1996, which also happens to be book #18 in my 50 Book Challenge for the year.

Take one teenage protagonist (fifteen or younger–usually younger); give her/him a story to tell in her/his first-person voice. Keep the number of other characters to a bare minimum and develop their identities sketchily (no room for complexity, you know). Limit the story’s time span to a year or less. Fold in an undistinguished setting in a sentence or two and don’t refer to it thereafter. Add a lot of pop culture references and brand names. Stir briskly–no time for reflection or introspection–using lots of dialogue and a simple, unadorned, straightforward, colloquial style. Keep it short–no more than 200 pages; kids have short attention spans, you know. Hang the plot on a problem that can–after lots of hints of impending doom–be resolved satisfactorily by the protagonist without adult interference. The experience will change the protagonist forever–and for the better, please. Because downbeat endings are definitely not welcome. Cook until half-baked. (p. 243-4).

If you’re interested in teen fiction, ignore those books cited in the Star Tribune article and instead pick up any of Michael Cart’s anthologies, three of which I wrote about here. They contain well-written, provocative works that eschew the above formula.

Yesterday my nineteen-month-old son Drake and I welcomed five other toddlers and moms into the house. The gathering was one of mediated chaos. As the morning waned and things ostensibly wound down, the little ones discovered the front porch, with its mini-slide. Wild delight ensued as they went up, down, and around. Drake introduced two of his compatriots to another feature of the front porch, the mail slot. The three of them stood shoulder to shoulder, gazing out with rapt attention, as Drake held up the flap. Light from outside played across their faces.

Seconds passed. Another mom laughed. “What a picture that is.”

I looked over at her and smiled. “I was just trying to remember where I left the camera.”

Then the boy on the end shoved the one in the middle, who screamed, causing Drake to pull away.

The moment was gone. We made our separate ways into the afternoon.

Please, God, for the last time. Jane Austen and the Brontes were not the godmothers of chick lit. They were the godmothers of good writing. Pride and Prejudice is not the “original chick lit masterpiece,” no matter what Jennifer Crusie says. It is, however, a good book. Jane Eyre is a good book. Babyville is an offensively awful book that took Jane Green probably all of a week to write. I understand that chick lit writers would like to legitimize themselves by claiming Jane Austen as one of their own, but she is not their ancestor. Their ancestor is Mills & Boone. Jane Austen gave birth to Arundhati Roy, Kazuo Ishiguro, and, you know, literature. So stop it, seriously. You’re only hurting yourselves.

Jessa Crispin at Blog of a Bookslut makes an impassioned plea to end the sloppy referential blurbing, although she previously linked to this piece on Charlotte Bronte in The Guardian with this:

Enough of the Bronte industry’s veneration of coffins, bonnets and tuberculosis. It is time to exhume the real Charlotte - filthy bitch, grandmother of chick-lit, and friend.

Attempting to economize, I have been delving into the large stash of beauty swag accumulated over the years from cosmetic gift-with-purchases (GWPs). I’ve not given up on the idea of putting some of it up on Ebay, but for now it seems a reasonable thing to use what I can. This has again confirmed for me how rare are the products about which I can exclaim, “I can see a difference!” It has also got me thinking of how to encode this in a beauty rating system.

F: Ugh. Wouldn’t use it if it were free.
D: Eh. It’s fine. Doesn’t bother me too much.
C: Decent. I like something about it–the scent, texture, packaging–but I don’t notice a difference.
B: Good. I like the product, and I can see some difference.
A: Great. I like it, and I can see a big difference.

Pluses and minuses for other considerations, like bang for the buck.

Body Lotions

Caudalie Vinotherapie Nourishing Treatment for the Body. A GWP from a Neiman Marcus (NM) beauty event. A strong scent that I did not find offensive, but can’t quite call pleasant, either. Did a reasonable job of moisturizing. I would not pay for this product, but was fine with using it having received it for free. $35 for 8.8 oz. Grade: D.

Kiss My Face Honey Calendula Moisturizer. A thick texture and a light, pleasant, sweet scent. Does not absorb easily. I’ve bought it a few times because it was on sale, but would probably not pay full price for it. $10 for 16 oz. Grade: C.

Natura Bisse Diamond Body Cream. A NM GWP. A good-sized sample. Thick texture, easily absorbed, mild scent. Supposedly firming, but I’m not sure how I’m supposed to tell a difference with only the few applications from the sample. Again, I would not pay for this product but was fine having received it for free. Cannot imagine paying the full retail price for this product, which is $210 for 9.5 oz. Grade: C.

Kiehl’s Baby Body Lotion. For the most part, babies and toddlers do not need lotion, in spite of what Johnson & Johnson have cleverly raised us to think. My toddler Drake, though, tended to get red, chapped cheeks during cold weather, and this helped. It is a light lotion with a light, natural scent. $19.95 for 8 oz. See Paula Begoun for other ratings of other baby products. Grade: B.

Fresh Lemon Body Lotion. This smells like lemonade, sweet but not cloying. I found it a good stand-in for perfume. The lotion is fine but unremarkable in texture and moisturization. $32 for 10 oz. Grade: C.

Weleda Calendula Baby Lotion. I bought this for Drake but ended up using it myself. It didn’t do much for his chapped cheeks. A medium-strong scent. Unremarkable. $12 for 6.68 oz. Grade: D.

Eye Makeup Removers

Clinique Naturally Gentle Eye Makeup Remover. I did like that it was a tube rather than a liquid, thus easier to travel with. This is supposed to be non-irritating, with the same Ph as tears. I found it very irritating to my eyes. $14.50 for 2.5 oz. Grade: F.

Neutrogena Oil-Free Eye Makeup Remover. “Effective and gentle.” I also found this irritating to my eyes, which are sensitive and I wear contact lenses nearly every day. Less expensive than the Clinique, but no less irritating. About $5.5 for 5.5 oz. Grade: F.

Face Treatments

Neutrogena Visibly Firm Lift Serum. A medium perfume and a strange Neutrogena-brand periwinkle blue color, but I noticed a difference when I began using this serum in addition to my morning and evening moisturizers. My skin looked firmer and better hydrated. About $18.49 for 1 oz. Grade: B.

Neutrogena Visibly Firm Night Cream. Again with the perfume and the light blue, but I also noticed a difference when I began using this–firmer and better hydrated, as above. About $18.49 for 1.7 oz. Grade: B.

Creme de la Mer Moisturizer. I received this from a very kind person in my life. I had previously used it in a sample and had not seen results, but had not received the instructions to warm it before applying it, and to pat it, rather than rub it, on. I am now easily able to see a positive difference in the appearance and texture of my skin. It looks and feels less wrinkled and more healthy. A thick, comforting texture with a clean, classic scent. A great product, though expensive. Grade: A-.

More reviews from my self-imposed 50-Movie Challenge.

10. Bad Santa. 2003. Directed by Terry Zwigoff. So dark that it often goes beyond the reach of humor. Weird, uncomfortable, sometimes quite funny. Sad for John Ritter that this was the last thing he worked on, because the unfunny scenes with him and Bernie Mac were reportedly tacked on in order to extend to movie’s running time.

11. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. 2002. Directed by George Clooney. Sam Rockwell plays Chuck Barris, creator of cultural icons like The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and The Gong Show, who claimed in his autobiography that he moonlighted as a hitman for the CIA. Barris later recanted, and Clooney’s movie does an excellent job with this amibiguity. The casting of megastar Julia Roberts as a spy, along with interviews with former Barris associates, contribute to the “is it real?” vibe. The film also slyly reminds us that reality TV is not a recent phenomenon.

12. Mean Girls. 2004. Directed by Mark Waters. Had some good commentary on how girls undermine other girls. Avoided many cliches, and had some laugh-out-loud moments.

13. Destry Rides Again. 1939. Directed by George Marshall. Jimmy Stewart is charming. Marlene Dietrich is funny. Great catfight. Tons of fun.

14. Second Sight. 1999. Directed by Charles Beeson. Not a film, but rather a Mystery miniseries starring my boyfriend Clive Owen as a detective who is going blind, but trying to hide the fact to protect his job. It veers occasionally into the realm of cheese, but is overall a good story, well acted.

15. Sin City. 2005. Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller. Dark with a capital D. A stunning visual adaptation of Miller’s graphic novels, but one that replicates their flaws: simplistic, violent, misogynist, and hyper-fetishized. Rosario Dawson is the only performer who falters. The others are able to bring some dimension to their reductive characters, all the more impressive since the movie was filmed almost entirely in front of a green screen. My boyfriend Clive Owen’s accent is flattened, but not obliterated.

I wrote previously here on why I blog. Simply put, blogging has enabled me to adopt a consistent writing practice. A tougher question, though, and one I didn’t become conscious of for a long time is this: why do I blog about those things about which I blog?

For the long time my topics were whatever leapt out of my head and onto my keyboard. Often, this was a hyper stream of consiousness, or worse, a daily list or diary without commentary or insight. Provoked by something I read at Mental Multivitamin, though, I took a long look at what I’d been writing about. Why was I making private things public? I reaped a benefit from blogging of writing practice, but what potential benefit to readers was some mundane snippet from my life?

I wrote at length here on my decision not to chronicle any further gripes about motherhood. Since then, I have become increasingly aware of mothers who use their kids as grist for their writing. Meg Wolitzer, who has a new book out, wrote on this at Salon here.

The notion of parents mortifying their children is nothing new… But the children of writers are given a mortification all their own. It reaches beyond the hokeypokey and deep into regions unfamiliar to the children of management consultants and travel agents.

In its most common form, the embarrassment occurs when a writer is simply doing his or her job: describing the world in an unflinching, candid manner, and casually borrowing recognizable bits and pieces from real life. Occasionally, a writer borrows much more than that. This was the case with A.A. Milne, who used his son Christopher Robin as a character without asking. The child grew up and was left to languish in bitterness, loathing the father who left him frozen in a kind of twisted, eternal moppethood. It seems clear that writers who use their children to advance their own work are guilty of some kind of unsavory pimping, and that those children — those trapped-in-amber, beloved figures from picture books and novels — have a right to feel furious.

While this quote has not scared me enough to stop writing about Drake at all, it did confirm that I can keep the grumbly bits, both his and mine, to myself. No need to immortalize those in ether. So writing in detail about my kid was no good. What, then, of my measly life was worth putting out there for public inspection? At this point, I was reminded of a story.

I was a junior in college, and begged my parents to let me have a car at school. They relented, perhaps based on the “it’s for my job” part of the argument, which was actually true. I drove that car hither and yon. After a while, its performance waned. I took it to a service station and received a call soon after.

Knowing how inadequate my answer was, I doubt I kept the upspeak out of my 20-year-old voice. “Uh, no one ever told me I had to do that?”

The spirit of that story is why I blog what I blog. I can’t know something till I learn about it. In the spirit of my girl-detective forebears, I like to follow clues and links. I blog about things that I find informative or interesting, in the hope that someone else will, too. I’m hardly an early adopter, so most of what I write here won’t be ground-breaking or trend-setting. Perhaps it will simply be one more small voice that helps you make a decision about what movie to watch, what book to read, or what have you. There is a danger, though, that I might state the obvious, which I’ll illustrate with another story.

I was visiting my sister Sydney some years ago. She had just gotten a kitten, sleek and black with bright green eyes. He zoomed about her house, provoking the dog and charming me by pouncing around my room and sneaking up into the box spring under my bed. I was impressed by how cute, spirited and clever he was. Later, I related his antics to friends of mine who have cats. They looked at me oddly. “Uh, Girl Detective? All kittens do that.”

Please forgive me, then, when I post something obvious. One person’s kitten is another person’s oil change.

I sit, frozen in front of the screen, careering around the internet, struggling to write a word. It has been some time since I blogged. I don’t know where I picked up the construction in the title, but it’s one of my favorites. I will state the obvious. Travelling can be difficult. But it is good to see family.

It is also good to be home.

I won’t be writing for the next several days. Thanks for visiting and reading, and I hope to see you back at the end of next week.

There is a new episode tonight of Veronica Mars on UPN at 9 p.m. Eastern, 8 p.m. Central.

The front page of Salon today had features on the show and its creator Rob Thomas, both of which I’ve written about previously.

If you didn’t believe me, believe Salon. Veronica Mars is good. Check it out.

This entry at litblog Collected Miscellany draws an interesting and, I think, quite valid distinction between book reviews, written for newspapers and amazon.com, and book criticism, written for academic or scholarly purposes. Describing the latter, he uses that quintessential grad school word “unpack”.

I’ve been reading Collected Miscellany for some time, and have been remiss in not adding it to my list of links yet. There are a handful of contributors, all of whom write on specific books and other book-related commentary. It’s quite well done.

I find Collected Miscellany a good companion to Conversational Reading, which has a good intro posted today. Conversational Reading is a single-author litblog, recommended to me by Blogenheimer.

And while I’m on the topic of litblogs, I will mention again how much I enjoy Blog of a Bookslut. The short, bantering entries are informative and fun to read.

More on my self-imposed 50-Movie Challenge. I’m not writing about books lately because I’m doing research for my novel.

9. Tully. 2002. Directed by Hilary Birmingham. A quiet little gem of a movie about a small-town loverboy who learns not to be such an ass. The beautiful scenery and the unconventional, red-haired beauty of Julianne Nicholson both reminded me of Malick’s Badlands, though that’s a heavy comparison for this little film. A little slow to start, it eventually got me completely engaged with its story and characters. I loved it.

A few days later, I started to watch All the Real Girls. 2003. Directed by David Gordon Green. I watched for thirty minutes, then gave up. It is also the story of a small-town loverboy. I did not, though, buy Paul Schneider as the lead. Yes, I know womanizers don’t have to be good looking or socially ept, but I find them more believable in fiction when they are. (Seriously, who are you going to buy as a womanizer? Him, or him?) I didn’t buy Natasha Leone as an ingenue. While Tully unfolded slowly and carefully, All the Real Girls jumped around in fits and starts, often dropping in on characters in mid-conversation. It felt too self-consciously clever on the part of the director. Both movies got great reviews, but I couldn’t work up the gumption to finish the latter.

Lots of folks were picking what I thought of as smarty-pants, hyperliterate stuff. I kinda shook my head. I mean, what’s the point of trying to write a short story based on a Dylan song? (I always thought Dylan songs were short stories, only better.) Anyway, for me, “Rio” came up right away. For one, I fucking love the song, it usually makes people smile, even if they’re shaking their heads in the process. I sort of think you can divide the world into people who appreciate Duran Duran, and people who don’t, and I’d rather vacation with the people who do. To me, Duran Duran in general, and “Rio” in particular, shimmer with the absolute brain-freeze purity of pop-rock’s trascendent ridiculousness, whatever that means. And I like the drums and guitar. And, good Lord, the lyrics, to “Rio” especially, are an L.A. sunset, a hot breath of everything and nothing all at once. I love shit like that.

Duff sent me a copy of Lit Riffs, a collection of short stories based on songs. This is exactly the kind of book you want to be lent; it’s got some great things, but it’s wildly uneven. The above quote is by Zev Borow. I think it encapsulates a lot of what’s wrong with most of the stories in the collection, but also with short stories in general, and perhaps even with pretentious people at large.

First, about Lit Riffs. It opens with a “lost” story by Lester Bangs. We’re all less fortunate for its having been found. As with many collections, reading the more famous name authors isn’t the best strategy. I was disappointed by Jonathan Lethem’s piece, and didn’t even bother to finish Aimee Bender’s. I did, however, enjoy Neal Pollack’s “Death in the Alt Country,” which reminded me of Robbie Fulks’s “Roots Rock Weirdos”, Heidi Julavits’s “The Eternal Helen”, Judy Budnitz’s “The System, and Borow’s “Rio”. While I’d heard of all the artists whose songs were chosen as inspiration, and even own CDs by most of them, I found most of the chosen lyrics to be obscure, and the stories based on them to be even more tenuously connected. Borow’s was the refreshing exception to this.

I once had a friend who was a fierce champion of short stories. I could never echo his appetite for them. Too often, I felt short story authors were trying to out-creepify each other. Thom Jones’s “I Want to Live!” exemplified this for me, and I found some of this tendency in Julavits’s story, though it had a self-aware humor that transcended the creep factor.

This creepification implies that art should be separate from enjoyment. I attended a class with the film director Peter Greenaway once, and he made an interesting distinction between enjoyment and pleasure. Enjoyment, he said, was simple fun. Pleasure, though, was more complicated, even didactic. Too often, I think, short story writers and other people of so-called taste valorize works of art that are complex over those that are fun. But either extreme would be unhealthy. Too much enjoyment produces vapidity, yet too much complicated pleasure leads to pretension. A balance of both, however, allows for learning and humor. I think Borow’s story and endnote capture this perfectly.

As an example of a non-pretentious, highly enjoyable collection of pop music, I highly recommend Music from The O.C. Mix 1, especially track 9, “We Used to Be Friends” by the Dandy Warhols. Brain-freeze purity, indeed.

There are several geek-friendly movies coming out soon. Frank Miller’s Sin City on April 1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on April 29. Batman Begins on June 17.

Wait, isn’t there something else the geeks are excited about this year, coming out soon?

Oh, right.

I don’t want to go into nerdishly obsessive detail about this, but I think there are some cool things going on in Battlestar Galactica. The original series contained references to leading the tribes out of Egypt (the pilot helmets had Egyptian imagery) to the promised land of Earth, with stately Lorne Greene as the Moses figure.

In the present series, the creators have made some interesting twists, key to which is that the human race created the Cylons as slaves, who then rebelled. The Cylons are monotheists, while the humans believe in a pantheon of gods. There are many references to how the same stories happen over and over, throughout history. Are the Cylons now the analog for the persecuted Christians who rise up against their polytheistic oppressors? If so, why are we rooting for the humans? Further, who is the savior? Even further, will s/he be a lunkhead?

Or, in my case, green. I spent several years of my young life wishing for green eyes. The heroines in the trashy romances I read never had red hair and brown eyes, as I did. If they had red hair they always had green eyes, which were, of course, usually flashing. (Have you ever seen anyone with flashing green eyes? I haven’t.) Finally, though, in the mid-eighties came contact lenses that could change brown eyes to green. I was so excited to get them, only to be disappointed. They sat slightly askew on my iris, leaving a lopsided brown ring around my pupil. They were not the magical transformation for which I had hoped.

My experience with these contact lenses left me highly sensitized to other brown-eyed folk wearing them, like Naomi Judd, L’i'l Kim, Paris Hilton, and most recently Edward James Olmos in Battlestar Galactica. I found this last so curious that I didn’t hold out much hope of having it confirmed. Oh me of little faith. Olmos is wearing blue lenses so he has similar coloring to Jamie Bamber, the actor who plays his son, Lee. Bamber, in turn, is dyeing his normally blonde hair brown, as well as Americanizing his English accent. Interestingly, this is not the first time Olmos has worn blue lenses. He did so in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, to signify “the fusion of cultures and peoples”.

I am just busting out of a prolonged (nearly four weeks) writing block on my novel, which I have to present to my group next week, so blogging may get short shrift for a while. It is HARD not to spend time blogging, because it goes so much faster than work on the novel.

My 19-month-old son Drake is up to fascinating stuff. Earlier in the week he climbed to the slide in the jungle gym by walking up the steps holding onto the rail, rather than by crawling. At home, he stood up while going down our front steps holding the rail, rather than waiting for my help.

Drake has a little dance of excitement, in which he stays in one place and hops his feet up and down and laughs. It is very like a Snoopy dance.

And during our readings of Edward Gorey’s The Epiplectic Bicycle, my husband G. Grod and I read the story, and Drake is able to say the word bubbles, like “Ho!” and “Whee!” Last week my husband G. Grod and I did a tag team reading of Bread and Jam for Frances, in which G. read the story and I sang the songs (for all of which I’ve made up tunes.) The three of us enjoyed that reading very much.

Before our son Drake was born, one of the things on my husband G. Grod’s and my long to-do list was to get a lawyer and set up wills. We got a recommendation from our financial guy, then met twice with the lawyer, once to discuss what types of wills we wanted to have, and to get paperwork to go over so that when we met the second time we’d finalize the wills.

A lot of the paperwork was about what each of us wanted to be done if we were incapacitated. I was surprised to learn how differently we felt from one another. One of us wanted to be kept alive if at all possible, the other wanted no extraordinary means. We’d talked about these things in generalities before, but filling out the detailed questionnaires made each of our views very clear to one another. When we met with the lawyer the second time, we put those wishes on paper, and got them signed. We also chose who would look after Drake, in person and financially, if something were to happen to us.

We had a zillion things to do in the days before Drake was born, but getting our wills was one of the best expenditures of time and money I can think of. Do you have a will? Does someone know for certain what your wishes are if something unexpected were to happen? It’s a little time, and a little money. But it’s nothing when you compare it to the wretched alternative unfolding in the news.

Over the past several years, I’ve scaled back, and scaled back again the number of comics that I read. Right now I’m reading about ten a month*. This usually means that there are one or two Wednesdays a month that my titles don’t come out. I like the ritual of going to the comic store every week, but it’s hard to justify when I know nothing new has come in.

I’m going to pick up Grant Morrison’s new project Seven Soldiers, though, and that will pretty much ensure at least one book a week for quite some time. Seven Soldiers started off with a #0, and then is followed by seven four-issue mini series, followed by a concluding issue. Morrison is working with a different artist on each of the seven titles. I haven’t liked a lot of what Grant Morrison has been doing in the past several years, but I did enjoy the whacked-out Sea Guy, and in this interview at Suicide Girls, Morrison references both Animal Man and Doom Patrol; I enjoyed the beginning of his run on both of those series.

For each week’s list of new releases, visit the New Comic Release List.

*Here are the ongoing titles I read: 100 Bullets, Daredevil, Ex Machina, Fables, Finder, Girl Genius, Gotham Central, Planetary, The Pulse, Queen & Country, and Y the Last Man. Not all of these titles are published monthly.

I wrote before about whether I wanted to make the shift from individual comic book issues to graphic novel collections. Lisa Schmeiser at the Rage Diaries recently noted her frustration at the ending of the series Rising Stars. Waiting for graphic novel collections is one way to avoid the heartbreak of investing time in a series that ends with a whimper, not a bang. Last week, I participated in an email volley with two friends who have strongly held views at opposite ends of the spectrum.

NPC is a proponent of the graphic novel option, for the following reasons:

the GNs don’t have ads, the physical product is of a noticably higher quality, and (most important) the GNs often contain additional material (for example, character sketches, retrospective introductions, and sample scripts) that is not included in the single issues…those factors would make me prefer GNs even if they cost more than the sum of the single issues. that they actually cost less is a bonus.

NPC does note that sometimes individual issues contain material that doesn’t get collected. He still thinks GN collections are the way to go.

Blogenheimer says that he’ll still buy individual issues for two reasons.

First, I enjoy the process of getting something new and interesting each week. No matter what’s going on in my life, I have something to look forward to on Wednesday. Second, comics are quicker to read than graphic novels. I can find time to read a comic on all but the busiest days. It is harder to find the time to read most graphic novels. While I’m mostly caught up on comics, graphic novels tend to pile up like my unread books.

Because of the ads and the cost I was leaning toward the GN option that NPC champions. But I think Blogenheimer’s two points are quite strong. I enjoy going into the comic shop on Wednesdays, and I’m disappointed on weeks when I don’t have any books to buy. Additionally, even individual issues are piling up, so graphic novels are literally gathering dust before I read them.

While Blogenheimer and NPC make good points for each side, I don’t think it has to be either/or. I think it was Kierkegaard who offered us the option of both/and, and Hegel who championed the synthesis of two seemingly opposing viewpoints. In an ideal world, I’d buy the individual issues as they came out, then the GN collection later to re-read the story line in its entirety. At that point I could re-sell the original issues to defray the cost of the collection, or keep them if they contain uncollected material that I like. Right now, buying both single issues and GNs isn’t fiscally responsible. Since I have to choose, I’m going to stick with individual issues. Yes, they have annoying ads, and I can get burned when a series heads south. But part of the joy I find in comics is both the serial nature of the narratives as well as the serial nature of comic store visits.