Caketrain! Issue 11!

Thor: god of thunder review

Thor: God of Thunder /
The god butcher
Collects issues #1-5
Jason Aaron & Esad Ribic
$24.99 (Hardback)
124 pages

With the popularity of Marvel Comic's movie machine, Thor is certainly gaining some readers. For those interested in what propels this character, Jason Aaron's run of Thor: God of Thunder is a great place to start. The narrative twines three versions of Thor from different times in his life. We get to know the young Thor who cannot yet lift Mjolnir, the Avenger's Thor, and finally a older almost broken Thor (now one-eyed and ruling what's left of Asgard).

These stories are held together with a villain named, rather bluntly, Gorr, but who nonetheless is an intriguing character: during one scene in which he's bound our young Asgardian hero and is busy inflicting pain, Gorr is interrupted by Thor's followers and pleads with the berserkers to not fight as he is trying to free them, insisting, "Do not throw your lives away on something as useless as a god! He isn't worth your devotion!" Gorr thinks mortals' lives would be better without any gods and all and is busy ridding the universe of what he considers a dangerous pest. As the story progresses, Aaron deftly builds our sympathy while balancing the actual atrocity of this character's actions--intent and impact on a cosmic scale.

Supporting Aaron's writing is Esad Ribic's art (who some may recognize from Wolverine, Loki, and Uncanny X-Force). His work here is impressive--adeptly shifting perspectives and including enough detail to encourage looking again without drowning the composition. Colorists Dean White and Ive Svorcina need a shout here as well as coloring is gorgeous.

While the first trade-paperback is a pretty fast read, the series is in-depth and worth checking-out, and is a good addition to your library's (or your own) collection.

Review of Yolotl

Jenny Drai over at Stiched, Stapled, Bound has written a terrific review of Yolotl by Lourdes Figueroa that y'all should definitely check out! http://stitchedstapledbound.wordpress.com/

Hearts Desire Poetry reading this Friday at the Bay Area Public School!

Review of Battling Boy by Paul Pope

Battling Boy 
By Paul Pope
202 pages
First Second 2013
$24.99
Ages: 12 - 112   

Paul Pope is one of the rawk stars of the comic book world. One of his first works, THB, blended a manga pace with a continental flair, and since then he's definitely honed this aesthetic and narrative style. What really excites me about Battling Boy, besides being a complete Paul Pope vehicle published in quite a while, is the unabashed youthful quality of the book. While many of Pope's other titles deal with sometimes pretty adult themes (I'm thinking of you 100% and Heavy Liquid), Battling Boy immediately announces itself as a story for kids, but still enjoyable for readers who enjoy a loose expressive and fast-paced style twined with an adventure / coming -of-age narrative.  And for those of us a little older it's also a lot of fun to just look through the book and be reminded of all those awesome 70s record album-covers! 

Battling Boy is actually a young god, or perhaps a demigod, who on his thirteenth birthday is dropped off on an earth that is similar to ours yet beset by monsters. As Battling Boy's dad puts it, "...grim for now a plague of monstrosities pours down upon her [Arcopolis], battering her buttresses under abusive burden." (A lot of alliteration there, and perhaps a little over-wrought but I keenly recall noticing the differences in vernacular between adults in my life and myself. Plus his dad looks even more heavy-metal than Thor.) Like many current YA dystopian narratives,Battling Boy begins with the death of a hero, and while this early tragedy is perhaps a little easy, it does set the tone so that we understand that at least some of the monsters, despite looking a little silly, mean business. As well, it provides a plausible narrative for the next hero, Aurora Haggard. Anyway, our young hero is given several t-shirts each with a different beast upon it (an orangutan, t-rex, fox, etc.) which imparts a particular strength; yet when BB first encounters a large car-devouring monster he is tossed around like a doll and must surreptitiously call upon his father for help. From here, the narrative takes off and nicely sets up future volumes. There's a lot to discover in Battling Boy and it bears multiple reading.  It's a great book, and I highly recommend giving it a read or adding it to your collection.

Alice Notley reading in the Holloway Reading Series

Alice Notley / Holloway reading series / Cal Berkeley / Wheeler #315 / October 10th, 6:30 - 8. 
And if you can’t make it: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Notley.php

Banned Books Week 2013

September 22 began Banned Books Week--seven days when libraries and educators encourage everyone to consider the history and effects of censorship. Librarians are a varied group of people--they have different belief systems and different politics; yet, did you know that American librarians subscribe to an ethical code? Right?! Number two on that list reads, "We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources."  Yet the question still remains, "Why?" I mean shouldn't some materials be censored? Aren't some books* dangerous?

Well, yes; ideas are dangerous, just as they are vital, challenging, and absolutely necessary. Censorship is so offensive because at it's center it is dehumanizing. It makes that assumption that the reader does not have the intellectual capacity to disagree with an opinion, or to recognize the difference between written narratives and the realities of his or her life. Censorship is also dehumanizing to the censor as it limits one of humans' greatest strengths: communication. No longer can the censor have a conversation with another as that information has been removed from the dialogue entirely. Being human is to swim in a world of ideas and communicate those in order to learn more about the world.

Banned Books Week on Twitter

We must accept the responsibilities posed by education, by knowledge, and by wisdom. If we are lucky enough to have free access to information, then I think we must also take responsibility for our communities, and for making sure that freedom of information is played forward to others. Kurt Vonnegut once stated that, "Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." Wisdom is gained through experience and dialogue and sometimes, if we are lucky, through observation (either of real people and situations or those found in books and movies). (To take a look at some other literary greats' thoughts on censorship, take a look here.) So this is a good week to go visit your local library! Check out a banned book!

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*And let's not get started about comics! The Comic Code Authority came about mostly thanks to this guy, and we've felt the impact ever since. Comics are some of the least recognized, but most often challenged and banned books. Luckily we have the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund today and they are totally worth checking out.