Teo Degas' Books & Decks

The Sculptor tells the story of David Smith, a young sculptor struggling in his personal life and in his professional life as an artist as he is short of money, has no family and, despite its undeniable talent, his work is not being shown or showcased by any important art gallery and this despite his best friend Olly being part of the Art Gallery network.. He is at breaking point when his deceased uncle Harry visits him  and offers him a solution to solve his struggle with Art, and the lovely cheery young actress Meg crosses paths with him.

The book is drawn in a beautiful evocative duotone in indigo blue hues that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also the perfect tone to create the mood that this story needs, a mix of blues song with an underlining and sometimes upfront sadness and personal stress, and also the magic of this indigo child, indigo child understood here as a gifted guy with supernatural abilities and enhanced ways of perception.

McCloud artwork is really that of a Master regarding use of colour, composition, framing and style.

McCloud depiction of New York urban area is absolutely glorious and masterful. He looks at the city as both as an insider and an outsider, because some of the images are really those that anybody visiting the Big Apple for the first time would take with them, the overwhelming but thrilling presence of concrete, steel and skyscrapers. On the other hand, MCloud knows the city and is also able to depict its more rural or parkland areas with freshness and a great bucolic feeling, which is used as an emotional counterpoint to the urban settings, where most of the story happens.

As an insider McCloud shows the New York of the New Yorkers, the ambience of the city, but also the city of the people. Every secondary or tertiary figure and passer-by character depicted in the streets is fully there, even those in the background. Their body language, clothing and attitude tell a story of who they are and we can look at them as individuals that happen to cross the vignette, not as mere accessories to the main character or the image. This is one of the reasons I love reading comics on digital format as the zooming allows us to do that easily, and fully be there within the image, and notice the tiniest scratch or detail.

There are a few surreal  images depicted in the book, many of them truly impacting and beautifully drawn. There is a strong presence of oneiric elements as well. I one of my previous reviews, I mentioned the fact that Magic Realism can be easily mixed up with fantasy and surrealism to describe Latin-American novels as deniable part of the genre. Here we have the contrary case, this is, to me, an undeniable Magic Realism work, even if North-American, and not many people are focusing on that. So, which elements are part of the Magic Realism genre in The Sculptor?
> Fantastical elements (levitation, premonitory dreams, etc.), TICK
> Real-word setting, TICK
> The story is told as is nothing extraordinary was taking place, magical events are accepted in the same plane as those that aren't, TICK
> Use of multiple planes of reality, in this case the oneiric and the awakened state, TICK
> Metafiction, that is, the narrator intentionally exposes themselves as the author of the story, TICK
> Heightened awareness of mystery, TICK
> Social critique, In this case about how the art market works, TICK

On  the other hand, there are important literary connections the reader will make at the beginning, or at least I did, that of the Faustian-like plot being the most important.

I thought that the narrative and characterisation of The Sculptor did not match the finesse of the artwork. Although I liked the overall plot and ending, some characters are a bit clichéd, like Olly and Finn.The character of Meg seemed me a bit non-believable, a good-Samaritan Lolita, but it turns out that the character hides some surprises and is based on MCloud's wife and on their own love story. Ouch! However David and Harry's characters are roundly profiled and created.

The beginning of the book was exhilarating, witty and interesting, then turned into a boring immature love story to gain momentum again and end brilliantly.  The book mixes dialogues that deal with what Art is and is not, how Art is produced, how Art is sold and marketed and what makes a successful artist. On the other hand we see how life and Art mix in intricate ways, how the artist's life and the artist' art feed each other, and how most talented artists would not make it.

The ending was genuine and the one that I wanted to see. Some rules can't be broken ever, some thing simple are that way, as the character personifying Death would say. And changing the end to please readers would have been an artistic betrayal to the author's own vision and the inner logic of the story.

+ Some final consonants are mute but those or when this occurred is not mentioned. 

+ The pronunciation of some letters is inaccurate or incomplete.
+ This is a bait to get you to their online paid program to learn Korean.

You can find better stuff for free online,  for example

http://seemile.com

http://www.korean-course.com/index.en.php?page=alphabet01

I MISSED
I would have loved hearing the pronunciation of the words in Korean  by natives. Which would be really easy to do if the Kindle book had a link that got you online to a place where these words are pronounced or to a downloadable file. Other similar books on Korean have this feature.

Overall, a very cute useful book, that does what it promises, get you to recognise the hangeul alphabet and to read basic words. There are basic courses online, for free, with videos, done by Koreans, so that is always better. However, I found the association technique really helpful and that is the main virtue of this booklet.

"I wanted to write about life, Jorge, and look at me now... All I write about is death.
Ahh, but you know all too welll that death is a part of life my friend.
You're right.. death is a part of life.
Yes
and so is family. " (p. 22-23)

Daytripper offers an harmonious symbiosis of graphic art, an interesting narrative and engaging story with enough surprises and elements of reflection to make it a winner. Two Brazilian artists are the creators of this beauty, twin brothers Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba.

Daytripper is set in Brazil and tells the story of Brás de Oliva Domingos' life. He is a Brazilian journalist, working in the Obituaries section of a newspaper, an aspiring writer, son of the famous writer, and a man who wants to live life to the fullest. The novel presents his life in shuffled chapters that are not always chronological and some of them also have flashbacks to his past.. The chapters and ages are important events and life-changing experiences in Bras' life:

There is a sort of tendency among reviewers to call Magic Realism to anything produced in Latin-America where the narrative is not straightforward, with oneiric and surreal elements are present. I won't lecture anybody on what Magic Realism is. You can easily get that by reading a classic novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude and learn it in the best way possible. However, even the entry in Wikipedia gives a good overview about the genre and summarises the differences between Magic Realism and other genres like surrealism, fantasy and imaginary realism among others I think it is great to keep it in mind to approach and better to understand this novel. I mention all of this because this Magic Realism is used in many reviews to explain why Bras dies in each chapter. In reality, if you re-read the book or just pay attention to the details the first time you read it things are not what they look like.  

1/ Once you finish the book, look at the text boxes' shape and lettering. Which text boxes in the book match those at the very end?
2/ Who do you think wrote the obituaries?
3/ Who is writing the book and seating in front of a typewriter?
4/ After reading the chapter The Dream, and learning what is happening to  Bras, ask yourself what in the book is similar to that chapter?

3/ At the end of each chapter ask yourself, if the death of Bras wasn't real, which events or circumstances  would make Bras, or any other person, "die"?

If you are lazy, my answers are at the bottom of this review.
**** end of spoilers****

***

The short introduction by Craig Thompson, the author of Blankets, is very cute and cool!

Although I enjoyed the novel enormously, I found that the gap between Bras' 40s and 70s is a bit too wide and empty of content that the novel is a bit unbalanced. I would have loved seeing Bras and his family getting progressively older, and reshuffling the chapters a bit more to add a few more layers and produce a rounder  story. Also, we are presented with bourgeois characters, with predictable lives, who might not thrill all readers.

 ***

 ****get spoiled :)****
Here are my answers
Bras says nearly the end of the book: "My name is Bras de Oliva Domingos. This is the story of my life." The typography used and the text boxes used in these pages are the same as those we see at the end of each chapter when Bras dies, so it is not just Brass writing the whole book of his life, he is the one writing the obituaries of those supposed deaths. In the chapter The Dream we are told .that he has been diagnosed with brain tumours, which are affecting the way his awakened and oniric life work, they seem to mix past and present, and overlapping things. If you see the book as a whole this is just the structure of the book, an overlapping of moments in Bras' life in which things that seem magic or fantastic are just a creation of his sick mind but most of them aren't so. I don't think Bras dies in each chapter at all. He dies or is killed inside, or rather, a part of him dies, which part?:  

Descender vol. 2, like the first instalment of this galactic saga, is a graphic novel with amazing visuals and an entertaining story. It is like one of those comfort-foods that you want to eat over and over again because, although it is not gourmet, original or new it tastes good, warms your belly and makes you feel good.

I'm always mesmerised by Nguyen watercolour and drawing mastery and artistry. I love his use of colour and the way he creates lights an shadows using positive/background space. I love how good he is a creating landscapes and characters that can be painted with great detail or just sketched and deconstructed but, visually, still fully there. That is the case of his long distance images and background crowd images; the more you look at them the more they look like blotches of colour, but they are masterly shaped to create the illusion of a full image. Like in Descender 1, Descender 2 has a cohesive colour palette, with colours and hues that are consistently used, some of them are there to depict the environment where the action is happening, but there is a preference for different hues of white, blue, pink and dark greys, with other bright colours popping up secondarily, like red and orange. I don't know if it is a coincidence, but a dark hue of pink is always in the image when Tim-21 experiences special moments in the story. Descender 2  story has more action than  Descender 1 so Nguyen plays more with the composition and layout of the vignettes to create dynamism and tension. Like in the previous volume, memories from the past are drawn in sepia tones with a superposition of scenes or developed scenes that have no vignettes; that is the way the mind and memory work -- as an amalgamation of images, words and feelings that are never square or structured. If you are into the Arts you will linger on each page, slowly sipping the watercolour work and Nguyen's artwork.

Once again the typography used in the book is very dynamic with different fonts being used to differentiate noise and ambience sounds, machine speech, robot speech, human speech, static signing, informative narration text and so on. This enhances the reading and makes the text more engaging and enjoyable.

As I mentioned for Descender 1, I love Lemire but I don't think Descender is his best work. Descender 2's narrative, character's depiction and dialogues  are still science-fiction déjà vu and cliches. Some characters are crowding the pages without contributing to anything and wasting a time and space that could be devoted to a more in-depth depiction and analysis of the main characters. Descender 2 is better at doing so than Descender 1, though, as there is a bit of more digging into who the characters are, albeit superficial and not deep enough to create round unique characters that don't remind you of anything you haven't seen or read before. Some of the characters that were a bit annoying, distracting and unnecessary in volume 1 are toned down and almost gone in volume 2, like Driller the Killer. However, we see others occupy that same annoying spot, like the funny-ugly predictable Blugger in volume 2.  Is he necessary to the story? Does he contribute to the story? To me, he doesn't, at least so far. The same happens with some of the dialogues, which are uninspired and a bit blah, and heard gazillion times in any other comic on planet earth. I found a bit ridiculous calling Effie the Queen in Between, jeez, I would have expected a bit of more creativity, a one word name that means just that...  

On the sunny side of things, the story seems to follow places that, a priori, we are lead to think that it would not happen. Like Andy popping up. We, or at least I, feared that Tim-21 quest would be met with disappointment, but Andy pops up in this volume and there is a great joy and intrigue. Andy is perhaps the most developed character in the story so far and I am intrigued about his motives. We get to meet some of the leading robots known as the harvesters, enter their mechanic moon, and get to know who they are, what they want and what they believe in. I enjoyed the mix of Huxley meets New Age beliefs that the leading robots have; there is a bit of gold buried there and I hope we dig it out in the next volume.  Although there aren't oneiric images in this volume, some of them are oneiric-like, especially those related to the fall into Planet Phages, and very lovely.  Finally, the story touches many interesting important themes: self-identity, individuality, race, alterity, ethical behaviour, what life is, what being human means, and what makes us connect. The more I read Descender, the more I see it as a quest for the ideal brotherly love and for connection, whatever form this might take and whomever is the being one connects with. The worlds in the Descender galaxy are multifaceted and interesting despite the flaws of the story.

The ending of this volume, although not a cliffhanger, gets me interested, and, once again, I will be buying the next volume hoping that the story follows unexpected paths, that we get some u-turns and surprises and that some characters have more depth, and being sure that Nguyen's artwork will keep me going no matter what.   

I read this book it on Comixology and the digital copy is fantastic. It makes you appreciate all the details of the artwork, and even the ruggedness and pores of the paper used for the paintings. One gets the impression of having the original in front of the eyes. I love that touchability of the images.

Fascinating, entertaining, funny and intriguing, "Them" is a companion to the doco series The Secret Rulers of the World, which revolves around the the Bilderberg Group's nature, aims, members, activities and secret meetings. "Them" is also a portrait of extremists of all sorts and conspiracy-theory believers done by getting to know these people directly and personally via Ronson. "Them" is, above all, an exposé of how nonsensical beliefs morph and adjust in the mind of people and groups whose values and belief systems are, a priori, totally contrary, and on how delusion can create a sort of matrix that feels very real to those people who plug into it. Finally, this book is, at a more personal level, an exploration of the meaning of being a Jew, of who the Jews, the Jewish and the Zionists are according to people who are not Jews done by Ronson, a lapse Jew.

"Them" surprises, like many other Ronson's books, because presents the extremists from a very human point of view, with detachment and compassion at the same time. They are normal people after all, with families, beliefs, and a heart, people who live very normal lives, even though part of their normality is also extremism. They believe that we all, the others, are the real extremists and not them, and they are not happy to be called or considered extremists. As Ronson states, "I thought that perhaps an interesting way to look at our world would be to move into theirs and stand alongside them while they glared back at us."

Who are these persons? They are neo-nazis, anti-Jews, anti-Catholics, anti-blacks, anti-Christians. All these people share the conviction that power elites, the Bielderberg Group, orchestrated the 11/9 attacks, those in the World Trade Centre were part of the New World Order, "an internationalist Western conspiracy conducted by a tiny, secretive elite, whose ultimate aim is to destroy all opposition, implement a planetary takeover, and establish themselves as a World Government."

The people profiled in the book are:
1/ Omar Bakri Mohammed, the so-called Osama Bin Laden's man in the UK, a Muslim extremist who lived in UK from welfare, profited from free speech to preach Holy War on Britain, and was part of an active movement to support Islamic Extremism and Sharia Law anywhere, the UK included.

2/ Rachel Weaver's parents (Randy and Vicky), left the world and retired to an isolated cabin in a mountain area in Montana, because they believed that the world was being secretly ruled by a group of Zionist international bankers, "global elitists who wanted to establish a genocidal New World Order and implant microchips bearing the mark of Satan into everyone’s forehead."

3/ Jack McLamb lives and the small Christian community called Doves of the Valley. He is an ex-policeman, drummed out of the force after he created an organization called Police Against The New World Order.

4/ Big Jim Tucker works for an underground paper called the Spotlight, which supports neo-nazi  views and is obsessed with the activities of the Bilderberg group.

5/ David Icke, an ex-footballer turned sports commentator turned spiritual guru, who believes that the World Rulers are in fact body snatches of the Annunaki Lizards from the lower fourth dimension, whose aim is to dominate the world.

6/ Thom Robb, the Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, lives with his family and an informal army of white supremacists in the Ozark Mountains, wants to create an independent state oblivious to the moral decadence of the USA. He believes that Hollywood is a crucial part of a global Zionist conspiracy and moral decadence.

7/ The movie director Tony Kaye halfway through the  editing of his début film, American History X. 

8/ Jeff Berry, the Imperial Wizard of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, one of Thom Robb’s chief rivals, a man famed for saying ‘nigger’ freely on television.

9/ The Ku Klux Klan historian Richard Bondira, who sells Klan merchandise on the Internet and advertises himself as the keeper of a Klan museum.

10/ The Aryan Nations group in Idaho.

11/ Dr Ian Paisley, the Northern Irish Protestant nationalist and independent evangelical pastor, obsessed anti-Catholic and anti-Papist. 

12/ Mary Moore, a local anti-Bohemian Grove activist.


Ronson does a great job at creating a profile of what the Bilderberg Group is according to the extremists, to then go directly to the very members of the group, one of the founders included, and provide their version of the group's reality.

So, who are the Bilderberg group according to the extremists?
> They rule the world from a secret room.
> Every year, in May or June, this global elite go to a secret summer camp north of San Francisco called Bohemian Grove, where they get together and do all types of debauchery, sexual perversion and the same people who belong to the Bilderberg Group belong to it. They’re witches and warlocks.
> They start the wars, and cause famines and chaos.
> They control the governments, the presidents, the candidates of the major parties and are setting up the one world order.
> We haven't heard of them because they own and control the Media.
> They have been ruling the world in secret since 1954, when Joseph Retinger, a Polish immigrant, created the BG, which was called this way because their first meeting took place in the Bilderberg Hotel in Holland.
> They are Zionist Jews or just Jews.
> They are Machiavellian Papists according to others.
> They meet annually in Bohemian Grove, in the logging town of Occidental, where they perform  ceremony called the owl-burning ceremony or cremation of care, with depraved satanic pagan  ceremonies.

Who are the BG according to the BG Members?
Ronson contacted dozens of Bilderberg members, who ignored him between 1999 ad 2000 when Denis Healey one of the founder members of the BG contacted Ronson. Thanks to this conversations we know how the BG operates, as described at length in chapter 12 How Things are Done. It is important to remark that 
> they rotundly deny that they  secretly rule the world, but Ronson's interviewees admit that International politics and affairs had been influenced by these sessions now and then.
> They are against Islamic Fundamentalism and other extremisms because they go against democracy.
> They don't consider themselves a secret group but a private group as they speak freely of anything and don't want journalists middling in and attacking something they don't know anything about.

I have never seen the documentaries, but the book stands alone well. "Them" is well-written, very well structured and "staged", and most of it has just a great cinematic feeling that makes the reading truly enjoyable. No wonder that the rights of the book were purchased to turn it into a movie. It feels like a movie but, sadly, all of what is mentioned in the book is real. Ronson does a great job at presenting the subject  in a very entertaining way, with very humorous real-life episodes, mixed with serious reflection and research (even adventure) journalism.

Like in other of his books, Ronson has the great virtue of keeping his English Phlegm burning even when people are talking badly about the Jews, and at keeping his Jewish origin as hidden as possible, or perhaps not openly displayed, and at getting the trust of people who, then, he exposes without any regret. Ronson wants to present to us who the extremists are and what they stand for. That is great. What I find somewhat unethical is his apparently willingness to make those same people believe that he is a sort of unbiased analyst, even a friend, when he is basically a journo writing a story.

I think the book can be easily used to study the concept of Alterity.

I found the chapter on Romania's Ceauceuscu very entertaining but way off subject despite the fact that Ronson says that "I had come to Romania because I imagined that an auction of Ceauescu’s belongings was a fitting microcosm of what I believed went on inside Bilderberg meetings." As a reader, I don't agree.

The story of Randy's Weaver is very sad and depressing, and I found great that Ronson delved into the deep trying to bring up to the public the version of the killing of the family in the family cabin.

The chapters Clearing of the Forest and The Secret Rulers of the World are utterly funny, in a weird sense, hilarious at times. Ronson describes himself, perhaps just for narrative purposes, as the naive Jon who gets into weird things by accident.Yet, he is able to make and answer important questions and to provide his honest personal view on different matters. I found that he is perhaps more honest with the reader than with the people he follows and interviews in this book, but this is just my impression.

 NOTES
> Shorter or Modified versions of some of the chapters appeared published elsewhere before publication in their final form in this book.
> The profiling and research on some of the extremists mentioned in the book began in 1995 and the book was first published in 2001,  and the first electronic edition in 2010. In that regard, many of the events mentioned in the book are no longer current and many of them have have had U-turns that aren't mentioned in the book. However, the book reads well and is still valid as an exploration of extremism and extremists. It would have been great adding an addenda mentioning some of those events, an update of what has happened to those characters since the book was written, something really easy to do in an electronic edition.

TYPOS
+ location 520 ‘Oh, give it tome!’
+ loc 2395 wasa mistake.
+ loc 2546 ‘who might want tomarry me?’
+  loc. 3486 to see a filmwhich may
+ All references to Ceauescu have the s replaced with the proper Romanian symbol, but they appear oversized and somewhat distorted in my phablet and a bit odd in my Kindle for PC.

A NOTE ON THE COVER
Ronson's book cover for the kindle edition is utterly cool, like most of his other Kindle editions. Great design and colouring and very humorous with Ronson's glasses and silhouette always un view. So 'catchy'! Kudos to the designer.

A great reading overall.

I love Dr Seuss' books. I think they are not only good for children, but also for adults. They all teach important lessons, values, ethical behaviour, they are lay and universal, and they always ground me. Dr Seuss' books are about what life should be. Life is crazy (his crazy texts, unusual stories, and outrageous colours are just that), but it not just about what you see, it is about how you relate to people, how you see and relate to the world, and how you feel. 

"And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" is a book about the beauty of the ordinary and of savouring the small things in life. It is also a book about the importance of imagination and how imagination works. The story also captures how fables and legends were born centuries ago, how small things were put together to be turned into a unreal fantasy.

This story has aged well with regards to some points but not others, but it is more relevant than ever for modern kids. Originally written in 1937, it is obvious in 2016 that most small children in developed countries don't walk alone to/back school, not even with pals, they are driven to/from school by their  parents or accompanied by caretakers in school buses. Of course, there are countries where children walk Kms to go to school, so perhaps for those the story is as fresh as it was when it was written. On the other hand, the role of imagination in the education of children isn't as prominent  as it was 30-50 years ago -- nowadays there is an ubiquity of visual imagined worlds presented to kids  already masticated in TV programs and movies, too many kids aren't told or read stories before bed,  and too many are parked in front of TVs, tablets and smartphones numbing their imagination when they should be using it the most.