Stuff

I spent a lot of Saturday afternoon and evening finishing a review of American Splendor: Another Day and getting most of the way through a review of Jack Kirby's Silver Star, only to find they were NOT autosaved by Blogger and are apparently lost. I do have the first draft of the Silver Star, which takes me up to the second or third issue, but lost the work on issues 3-5. For whatever reason, I've put a lot of work into this review of one of Kirby's lesser works. So I guess I'll go back to that when I get my energy back for it.

I've been pretty lax on reading comics and have been reading more novels, nonfiction, and watching dvds. I did read Osamu Tezuka's Apollo's Song this week and really loved it. I've been buying the Tezuka stuff from Vertical for a while now but haven't read any in over a year. This one is really great. I'll most likely review it soon.

Other stuff I've read are Crecy by Warren Ellis and Dead Children Playing by Stanley Donwood and Dr. Tchock. You probably know the Ellis one-shot--it's very good, and DCP is a small art book by the designers of most of Radiohead's cds. That's all that's in here, so if you've liked that work, you'll like this, plus you find out what Donwood was going for with each piece. Oh, and I read a lot of the first Jack Kirby Collector TPB this morning. Some great stuff in there, but I think it's kind of a shame they didn't reformat the material from the issues for the trades.

I bought a used copy of the Elvis Presley Complete '50s Masters box set for about half list price. I'd wanted it for years but contented myself with a couple Best Ofs and a used cd of the '68 Comeback special. This is an excellent set, really essential for rock and roll fans. I like pretty much all of it unironically. The Peter Guralnick liner notes help, too; I didn't know that after Elvis went from Sun Records to RCA he really started taking control of his recording sessions. I always had a picture of him as being controlled by others, but there seems to be much more to that story.