This past month has held a LOT of reading for me – and it’s been GREAT. Comicbooks and prose, fiction and non-fiction, classic and modern – it’s been a real grab-bag!
Non-fiction: HELL’S ANGELS by Hunter Thompson was dang interesting. I’d always heard about Thompson, but never read any of his stuff before. This was a neat deep-dive into the most famous outlaw motorcycle gang of the 1960s – the HELL’S ANGELS. Thompson wrote real interesting book, and did his part to separate fact from fiction in the Angels’ “mythology”. Good book, enough said.
Biography:MARK TWAIN, from Reader’s Digest. I don’t remember where I came across this, but know I saw it, and thought, yeah, I wanna know more about that guy. Samuel Clemens lived one heck of an interesting life, loved telling a good story…and had to live to see two of his three daughters die before him. He had a more tragic life than would have imagined.
EDGAR G. MUELLER was “the” photographer of Mayville (and Horicon and Dodge County). When I was growing up, if there was an event in Mayville, Edgar was probably there photographing it. Someone gave me this short bit of an autobiography from, and it’s lovely in its simplicity. It’s basically a zine – typed out, xeroxed, stapled together, and given away. It’s a neat picture of early 20th-century life in rural, southeastern Wisconsin.
WHO SPARKED THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT? is a comic book that was given out at this year’s Free ComicBook Day. It’s a based-in-history comic about ROSA PARKS. Reading it, it really drove home to me and horrible modernity of American racism. How RECENT and NEAR it is to our culture. Keeping another race oppressed because of the color of their skin is now “middle ages” ignorance…it’s 20th century ignorance, it’s NOW ignorance. Oof…
CLASSIC (but a comic): THE THREE MUSKETEERS by Alexandre Dumas. As a kid, I really enjoy Classics Illustrated, and it made me feel so “worldly” to have read all sorts of classic pieces of literature, as a kid…not realizing how very much simplified those adaptations were, but still. They gave me a taste of the classics, and that was valuable. Recently I came across a couple modern Classics Illustrated, and decided to give them a go. All I can say for THREE MUSKETEERS is that is impressive how much you had to understand about French politics in the Middle Ages to understand what was going on! Still, kinda fun in a “foreign movie” way…
Comics, just comics, and a reminder: WOLVERINE, THE GODDAMNED, and PRIDE AND JOY were all made by favorite creators of mine. WOLVERINE was written by Larry Hama and penciled by Marc Silvestri; this collection featured some of Marc’s most popular issues. THE GODDAMNED is a Mad Max-ish Bible story of Cain (of “and Abel”) and is by Jason Aaron and r.m. Guera (who together did the modern classic SCALPED). PRIDE AND JOY is a crime drama by Garth Ennis and John Higgins (who have worked together on HELLBLAZER in the past, and Ennis is one of my fave writers), and explores some of Ennis’ common themes of “what is masculinity?”, karma/history doesn’t forget/we can’t outrun our mistakes.
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Posted by troyfreund 
The Day-to-Day Haiku Project 