Category: Reading

Review: Transformers Vs. G.I. Joe, Vol. 1-6 by Tom Scioli

Posted on by Sue
One line review: If Jack Kirby and David Lynch teamed up to make a 1980s afternoon cartoon, it would look a lot like this.   
 
Writer/artist Tom Scioli has been a darling of the underground comics scene for years. He’s won multiple awards and huzzahs from his peers, and was personally sought-out by pop star Gerard Way when Way launched his own line of comics with DC in 2016.
 
The reason for this is that Scioli’s comics have a very unique tone to them. There is a playful austerity to them, a po-faced silliness. He blends the dynamic art of 1960s Marvel superhero comics with an almost Cormac McCarthy approach to scripting. The mix is both heady and a headtrip. And kinda goofy.
 
With the comic book series, ‘Transformers vs. G.I. Joe’, Sciloi was given free reign to do whatever he wanted with two of Hasbro’s best-selling toy lines. He could change their backstories, rewrite their futures, and kill off as many characters as he saw fit. Nothing was off-limits. No one was worried about how it would effect toy sales. The result is one of the most imaginative and unpredictable comics I’ve ever read. At times, it feels like a ‘men on a mission’ movie. At other times it feels like Lovecraftian mythology. Then there are the times it just feels like you’re watching some scarily-smart kid smash their toys together on the floor of their bedroom.
 
Some stand-out moments include issue 0, a brief intro to many of the leads and a pretty good litmus test as to whether or not you’ve going to want to stick around, and the majorly meta issue 7, wherein the evil Doctor Mindbender makes Scarlett, “a crossbow-toting southern belle with a history in martial arts”, believe her entire existence is a lie and that she and everything else are actually — gasp! — toys.
 
I read this series 3 years ago, and imagery and ideas from it still pop into my head every week or so. That’s gotta be a good thing, right?
 
(reviewed by Josh)
 
All six volumes of this series are currently available to read — FOR FREE! — via the Hoopla app, if you’re a Falmouth Public Library, West Falmouth and Woods Hole cardholder! Click here.
 
For information on how to get a Hoopla account, click here! 

Are You a ‘Gateway Reader’?

Posted on by Sue
My high school’s D.A.R.E. program (a well-meaning, misguided, state-funded attempt to keep kids off drugs) used to use the term ‘gateway drug’ to describe any drug that appeared harmless (cigarettes, pot, leaning in too close to one’s magic markers), but inevitably led to other, more dangerous narcotics (crack, crystal meth, permanent markers). In recent years, I’ve begun to rework the ‘gateway’ moniker to fit the needs of my own vice of choice — books.

Gateway Books are books that are so darned good that they make you want to read any and all the other books name-dropped within.

One of the first gateway books I remember coming across was S.E. Hinton’s ‘The Outsiders’. Not only did I pick up some random Robert Frost in hopes of finding ‘Stay Silver’ and ‘Stay Bronze’ (his lesser works), I also rented the videotape of ‘Gone With The Wind’ (the book looked too long and too boring to my fourteen year old self — and still does!). A decade or so later while reading all of the Elmore Leonard novels, I had an ongoing ‘secondary syllabus’ made up of all the crime fiction paperbacks Leonard had his characters reading.

The ultimate Gateway Book for me, though, has been Mike Davis’ ‘City of Quartz’. Davis, a Los Angeles historian with a photographic memory and a gift for finding the threads that bind seemingly disparate subjects together, had me watching film noir classics like ‘Detour’ and ‘The Big Sleep’, gobbling up the South Central-centered pulp fiction of Chester Himes, the dark, satiric, science fiction of Aldous Huxley, and becoming a salivating fan boy at the altar of Joan Didion’s 1960s suicidal California travel lit. I’m not exaggerating — I literally spent an entire year exploring the books, movies and music mentioned in ‘City of Quartz’. If that ain’t the obsessive-compulsive behavior of an addict, I don’t know what is. [we have since ordered ‘City of Quartz’ for the library, and hope to have it soon!]

How about you? Do you have any ‘Gateway Books’ that sent you tumbling deeper and deeper down the reading rabbit hole? If so, please share them in the comments!
 
This blog written by Josh M.
 
Link to eBooks in Overdrive where available, here!
 
Elmore Leonard (some available in Overdrive, via CLAMS or other MA library networks!)
Robert Frost-bio, and links to some of his poems, here.
Aldous Huxley, ‘Brave New World’ ebooks here.