This post will not be a full retrospective---I have a tendency to do that nearer the start of the next year as part of the usual statistics information on writing.
Very many things have gone in and out of my head, as well as my heart. Losses are aplenty, but gains are not too few either. Overall, it is hard to say if there is an overall gain or an overall loss.
But does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? Do I really need to keep a solid accounting of the so-called gains and losses on my own? I don't think so.
I think we'll leave the retrospective till when it is supposed to be out, and just switch gears to things that are less depressing.
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I have started on the Modesty Blaise comic series. I was introduced to this from a throwaway line from ashens, a long time Youtuber whose claim to fame is the sardonic humour displayed from reviewing various things on his infamous brown couch. The art style is on the realistic side, and follows the 3-panel format for each week. Naturally, the series had completed by now, but the serialised strips have been gathered into their own stories, and so the reading was relatively rapid.
It averages about
I like Modesty Blaise. It reminded me of the old adventure type comics like Tarzan, instead of the more common ``a gag a week'' type comics that are out there. The stories are old school, the art work is great given that it was monochrome, and it definitely entertains. I think there were a couple of movies made, but they were flops---I don't think that I am going to watch them though. Something about how the comic format does not quite translate well into the ``standard'' format of a 100-minute film; to pull it off successfully will either require a long enough caper (which definitely involves new writing), or some kind of better way of stringing a few story arcs together, which is hard because they often had one or two months of time interspersed among them implicitly, which could probably affect the pacing of the film.
All in all, still a cool comic, and I hope that I can finish it all before 2020 comes to an end. It is probably one of the few good things that came out of this dumpster fire of a year.
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I have recently read David Copperfield in the original as written by Charles Dickens, and I must say that it was definitely more impactful than the heavily abridged version that I had read some twenty plus summers ago. That abridged version was part of a series of classics that had a small squarish shape in it. It had the rough story line for sure, but what was missing was a lot of the atmosphere and inner dialogue in the original that made it the masterpiece it was.
There were times in the book where it had made me weep. I am unsure if it is because of the circumstance [of this year in general], or that the writing was just that good---I will leave it to the reader of this blog post to decide for themselves.
Bildungsroman---it seems like I cannot escape this genre. I don't feel bad about it, but am just merely making an observation.
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Not so recently, I had finally read two comics from a series that I had been looking for for years ever since I read the first one---it was a cross-over comic of Doraemon and Sun Wukong. The title of the first was 机器猫小叮当西游记（上）：《大战红孩儿》, and it was later on that I learnt that the second title was 机器猫小叮当西游记（下）：《女儿国之游》. It was by sheer happenstance that I came across these two titles---a friend was doing his spring cleaning and talking about his Doraemon comic collection when I was lamenting about not knowing how the story went after reading the first title of this 2-part series, when he promptly snapped a picture of both books and asked me if these were what I was looking for. Amazed, I replied in the affirmative and borrowed them both from him.
The stories of the first book was still as I had remembered them (that's good---it shows that I didn't hallucinate it), but I was a little disappointed with the stories of the second book. First of all, it ended on a cliff-hanger, since there was no resolution in anyway---there was no indication that the group successfully picked up the Tripitaka scriptures, nor was there any indication that 大雄 (Noby in official media, but I'm used to calling him by the Chinese name) nor Doraemon ever quit their journey to the west and head back to their own timeline/world. Secondly, when I was trying to find the provenance of the story to update my read list, I kept running into problems---none of the official lists and compendia were listing any of these two titles. It was infuriating.
I was starting to suspect that while the books are real (I can slam my head into them and give myself a concussion), they could have been some form of bootlegged fan fiction piece, which would explain the two things that I was pointing out. The third thing was that the entire crew of doraemon was not present in the story---only the three boys were there, despite having 宜靜 (靜香, Shizuka, or Sue) on the cover.
Anyway, I liked the cross-over a lot, but felt a little disappointed at the cliff-hanger. I cannot even say that it was tainted by nostalgia, but more like being affected by expectations.
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I suppose that's all I have to today's entry. And with that, I end at around 1000 words. Till the next one.
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