There has not been much time for reading so far this summer, so I am only just now getting toward the end of the Pol Pot biography (Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, by Philip Short) that I picked up back in the spring.

It is quite good, as books about insane totalitarian utopia schemes go. With a subject like the Khmer Rouge, it is easy to throw up one’s hands and declare that these people are all just crazy. How else to explain the forced emptying of the cities, the enforcement of communal food preparation, the breaking up of families, and the systematic crushing of individuality?

Short, a British journalist, goes a long way towards providing answers to that question. While he clearly does not sympathize with what Pol and the Khmer Rouges were trying to do and explicitly condemns their actions and motivations, he does a good job of illustrating how and why things went so badly for Cambodia. Like many ideoloically driven revolutions, the people who began it may have had good intentions, but with their focus solely on the ideology rather than its practical effects, the situation went south quickly.

Where Short’s narrative falters, I think, is in his repeated assertions that the tragedy in Cambodia was rooted in Khmer psychology. Perhaps Khmers are, as Short asserts, inherently prone to black-and-white thinking and brutality. However, he provides little evidence to back up this claim, and makes it far too often.

That flaw aside, the book is definitely worth reading.

The last time I used that title for a post, it was to announce the news that Land of the Dead was coming out. This time, it is for something even more momentous.

What, you ask, could possibly be more momentous than the release of a new George Romero zombie film?

It’s a new Thomas Pynchon novel, and it is due to be released on December 6. There is no title yet.

Oh, the anticipation…

Aside from breaks for setting up the new laptop, getting Linux running on it, and my almost entirely Intarweb-free vacation, I have continued my new-found interest in reading comics.

Lately, I have been getting into 30 Days of Night, The Authority, and New Avengers. I finished DC’s Kingdom Come early last week (it was quite good), as well as Identity Crisis, which I found somewhat dissapointing, and have just started reading Planetary.

What have I learned from all this?

As with many other hobbies, there are a ton of comics out there—the volume is rather overwhelming at first. And if the sheer number of titles is not daunting enough, there is the additional problem that the two major publishers, DC and Marvel, have been putting out books about the same batched of characters for so long that the backstories are immensely convoluted.

While I think Marvel’s comics tend to be slightly more accessible than DC’s, both feature huge rosters of characters that have been running more or less constantly since the 1960′s and 70′s, have been killed and resurrected multiple times, and have existed in multiple iterrations in multiple universes. What’s more, many of the current storylines only make sense if the reader is familiar with a significant portion of this history.

Marvel has attempted to deal with this problem via its Ultimates line, which effectively retells the stories of most of its major characters (and many minor ones) from scratch. However, because they continue to publish books in the pre-existing timelines, all they have really done is to create yet another universe that must be somehow worked into the overall continuity.

DC, meanwhile, is on its second round of attempting to collapse all of its crazy universes. However, given that in their previous attempt (Crisis On Infinite Earths), readers needed an encyclopedic knowledge of nearly the entire DC history to understand what was going on and it still didn’t solve the problem, I don’t foresee this one doing it either.

All of which is to say, I wish the stories were better. In general, I have been more impressed with the smaller-name titles—books like Invincible, The Walking Dead, The Authority, etc. may still be from off-shoots of the big publishing houses, but they aren’t tied to the long-standing mythologies that burden DC and Marvel. In other words, they don’t have to resort to stuff like “What you didn’t know was that in Marvel Team-Ups #143, when Thor wasn’t in the room on page 12, he was actually off getting the magic amulet that he just used to get out of a jam…”

I mentioned a week or two ago that I had gotten sucked into reading comics. While that obsession has waned somewhat, there are still a couple of series occupying a fair amount of my time. At the top of the list is The Walking Dead.

Written by Robert Kirkman and illustrated by Tony Moore (and later Charlie Adlard), The Walking Dead starts with small-town cop Rick Grimes waking from a coma to find that the hospital (and in fact the whole town) have been overrun by zombies. As the series progresses, we find out the scope of the zombie epidemic, but the story is more about the interactions among the survivors.

Don’t misunderstand—there is plenty of good zombie mayhem, and more than a few white-knuckle moments (surprisingly so, for a comic). However, like any good zombie story, what makes this one worthwhile is how the characters react to what amounts to the end of the world.

The series is currently up to (I think) issue #26, and is available both via Bittorrent and in trade paperback. I highly recommend it.

After having managed to avoid it for my entire life, I find myself having gotten sucked into comics.

It all started with my dissatisfaction regarding the season finale of Smallville and the aforementioned research into the comic-book histories of Brainiac and Zod. Almost everything I found mentioned Crisis On Infinite Earths, a mid-Eighties series that attempted to reconcile and clean up DC’s multiple universes and convoluted storylines and character histories, so I checked a couple Bittorrent sites, and sure enough, it (along with lots of other comics) was available for download).

Crisis did not take long to read—we are, after all, talking about comic books here—but the problem is that figuring out what is going on involves knowing a lot of the backstories. That meant more research, which just sucked me in more.

Then, while downloading, I noticed that the Marvel Ultimates series was also available. Since a friend of mine had recently recommended it, I grabbed that as well.

Since then, I’ve gone on something of a binge: Sandman, Infinite Crisis, The Authority, Hellblazer, Hellboy, The Watchmen, and most recently, Invincible. I’ve read most of the Sandman series before, but always from friends’ borrowed copies, so it’s nice to be able to go through the stories at a more relaxed pace. The rest are just stuff I’ve heard about in passing over the years, or have read reasonably good and interesting reviews of recently.

Unsurprisingly, some are better than others. My biggest gripe is the not-uncommon occurence of silly or trite storylines and plot twists. However, these are comic books we’re talking about. The main aspect that has sucked me in is the visual presentation and the way that the same basic story (human gets superpowers) is handled over and over again in slightly different ways.

We’ll see how long this fascination lasts. At least it hasn’t cost me any money yet.