National Comic Book Day: "The only fat super hero ..."

I bought a comic book today, got one free (That's what National Comic Book Day is all about; it happens the first Saturday in May every year in case you missed it, though readers in western time zones can still get their free books), and, as a bonus, I got my old comics shop back.

Most of the free books for adults had been scarfed up by the time I arrived, but I bought Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns because it's a classic and because I could not resist the idea of Superman as the tool of a fascist government.

The store itself was the real treat, though. It had vanished without a trace a few months before, as if sucked into a parallel universe. Last night, looking for shops taking part in today's festivities, I found that the parallel universe was two blocks away; the store had moved, and the old location's evil landlord had taken down the signs that directed customers to the new address, the clerk ("Comics Guy") said.

It's good to have a comics shop in the neighborhood again, because where else could I have heard Comics Guy tell a colleague that "I'm going as Bouncing Boy from the Legion of Super Heroes because he's the only fat super hero who's not, you know, embarrassing."?

 © Peter Rozovsky 2012

More Chandler and two fine openings from John Lawton

I can't get away from this Chandler thing. I've started Frank Miller's Sin City, an early landmark in the current golden age of crime comics, and both the first volume's title and its occasional wisecracks are obvious Chandler tributes. That title? The Hard Goodbye.

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Back in the non-graphic world, John Lawton's A Lily of the Field promises another aborbing and touchingly human look at civilian life during wartime. Here's the beginning of the prologue (and no one writes better prologues than Lawton: "It had not been the hardest winter."

And here's the opening of Chapter One:

"The war began as a whisper—a creeping sussurus that she came to hear in every corner of her childhood—by the time it finally banged on the door and rattled the windows it had come to seem like nature itself."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010