I've been Incepted

I finally got around to watching Inception which I really enjoyed. Reading other people's opinions it seems to be both a pretty divisive film with a lot of respectable people either loving it or hating it, and also a film that's perfectly suited for over-analyzing. It takes about 10 seconds to find over a dozen theories and allegorical models as to what really happened and what it all means.

Damn you, toy top. Once again you've shattered my delicate grasp on reality.

All this cinematic navel gazing reminded of the Pop Culture and Philosophy Series, books featuring 15 or so essays that each explore philosophical ideas in the guise of a certain movie, TV show, etc....

This list has 40 of these books, but there are a good 10 or so more than that. I have the one on baseball and really liked it, though it's been about 5 years since I read it so I cite anything specific that I liked. Probably wouldn't kill me to read it again.

Some I can buy more than others. The Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia seem far more fertile ground for philosophical introspection than say Family Guy or Harley-Davidson motorcycles. And judging by the review score people are far more accepting of waxing philosophical on Quentin Tarantino movies than Jimmy Buffet songs.

Not pictured: Immanuel Kant

I fully expect Inception to get one of these books in the next 6 months or so.

Hooray Books!

I have a special Amazon wishlist for books and such that are out of print and really hard to come by. And one that's about to come off that list is Donald Graham's landmark book Composing Pictures. Not because I bought it (not yet at least), but because it's back in print.
Donald Graham was a long-time art instructor at the Disney studio and was a driving force in their swift artistic improvement in the golden age.

It's good to see that out of print isn't forever, at least for good books.

And if any publishers are looking for books to reprint; Mort Drucker's Familiar Faces and that big, 2 volume Charles Dana Gibson collection would be perfect.

And thanks to On Animation for pointing this out for me.

Another addition to your extra-large bookshelf

I swear Disney puts out more books than anyone. There have to be about 8 books out every year about Disney in general on top of ones tied in to recent projects.

Here's a new one for this year. The animation studio is continuing its archive series with a new book focusing on design.

I already got the previous two on story and animation which are great books to look through. The books are big, square behemoths so you can get a good look at drawings which are of the scratchy, rough pencil variety rather than slick cleanup art, which makes them more useful to study and learn from.

Thinking way too much about e-books

I’ve been lukewarm about the whole e-book concept for a long time. On top of the hassles of a book in file form, there just a certain value in something being tangible.

Now I’m starting to realize that electronic publishing is the solution to the type of problem I assume kept Marshall McLuhan up at nights.

See... He's thinking about it.

It’s my personal belief that all media should be readily accessible. I don’t mean free per se, but capable of being acquired at a reasonable cost.

There’s an untold amount of books, movies and such that are either out of print, making them very difficult if not impossible to get, or were never released in your home country at all, making them even hard to acquire and likely not translated into a language you read.

For example one of my favorite anime franchises is Full Metal Panic. Along with three different TV series there are 2 different manga series and 3 of the original light novels released here in the west.

But at the same time, there are 7 light novels, 10 short story collections and about 20 volumes of manga that have never been released in North America; and unless they make another anime or restart the abandoned live action remake with Zac Efron probably never will.

You were my only hope.

That problem is the sort of thing e-books could fix. Without the financial and physical limitations of printed books publishers could better cater to niche audiences and release tons of previously inaccessible material.

At the same time it’s occurred to me that on top of lightening my shelves, electronic books would also kill off the used book market.

The reason I have so many books and DVDs and the like is because I buy almost everything used.

Re-selling an e-book isn’t allowed and even though $10 for an e-book is much cheaper than a new printed one, it’s still far more than the $4-5 I’ll spend at a used bookstore or Amazon marketplace.

So the difference is between greater access top media and less freedom to use it.

The only questions are where the balance is and whether the trade off is worth it.

Book hunt

It took me a month or two, but I finally finished The Education of a Comics Artist, an extensive collection of essays and interviews about the comics medium.

Despite being a real word-brick with very few pictures for being a book about a visual medium, it had some very interesting and enlightening ideas.

My personal favorite essay was by Craig Yoe. He talked rather tongue in cheek-ly about being a voracious accumulator cartoons and comic art to the point of saturation. That point where A&E or Oprah might document your extensive hoarding and give you an intervention.

Some artists he mentioned, like Heinrich Kley, only have so much available. Just the same two books that've been around for the last 50 years.

Even a prolific artist like Walt Kelly is hard to find books published in the last 20-30 years. Fantagraphics was supposed to start releasing books of Pogo strips like they have with Dick Tracy, Terry & the Pirates and the like, but nothing has ever come of the book since I preordered it on Amazon two and a half years ago. Yet every year instead of canceling it Amazon pushing it back and keeping my feeble hopes up.

Sorry, maybe next year

Despite all this I've been cramming my Amazon wishlists (yes, plural) full of cheap, used books on comics, cartoons and illustrations that'll take me years to buy off.

I'm not sure what happens after that. I think you just soak up comics awesomeness through you pores or something. Maybe I need to reread the essay.

More like a Book-va-snow-day

Suddenly, I can understand how people at political rallies and such can overestimate the crowd size by twenty-fold.

My boast of owning 1000-2000 thousand books fell a tad short once I actually counted them:

562

Now I haven't really counted them all, just the ones on my shelves. There are a few books laying about on desks and end tables, there's several in "The Box" which is where I keep books I've bought but haven't gotten around to reading yet. Plus I have a whole other 5'x3' bookcase the completely full in storage. (which is code for "In my parents' basement.")

All those will probably push my over the 1000 mark, but I was still way off. Lucky I didn't go with my original claim of having more books than the New York Public Library. I'd have felt pretty stupid.

Instructor Zim

If you're not already a regular visitor to the ASIFA-Hollywood blog, you should be. It's a treasure trove of animation and comic art as well as scan of entire books that've fallen out of print, like the original Preston Blair book or Nat Falk's How to Make Animated Cartoons.

One of their current features is high-res scans of Zim's Cartoons & Caricatures, or Making The World Laugh by turn of the (last) century cartoonist Eugene Zimmerman.



What I'm most impressed with is how lively his roughs can be while still being so specific. No vague stick figures or stiff layouts. Plus there's definitely a different style and sensibility to cartooning from 100+ years ago, before the influence of animation.

Apparently the pages are going to start being cycled off soon, so if you want to get the entire book you'd better head over there now. Besides that's the only place you can get it, and it's free.

Book-valanche

I'm embarking on a quest to answer one of the hardest questions in my life: "Just how many damn book do I own again?"

A couple years ago I took up the very nerdy task of cataloging all my DVDs on a spreadsheet so I could easily say how many I own, (about 500) many total discs there were (about 980) and how long it would take to sit down and watch the entire collection. (about 2½ months)

Now I'm setting off to do the same with my book, simply because I couldn't even hazard a guess as to how many there are. 1000? 2000? I have absolutely no idea.

I figure if I pace myself and do a shelf a day, I should be done in about 2 weeks.

We're getting a bigger kit

I'm not crazy about re-buying a book I already own, but I guess I can make an exception for the best animation book ever written.



I haven't heard what "expanded" means, not even how many pages more it'll be. But since I don't see myself dropping $1000 on the DVD set anytime soon, I guess I'll have to take it.