Saga, GoT and spoilers

We started onto the second season in our Game of Thrones rewatch, but only got one episode in. I suppose it's to be expected, coming back after the inter-season break, that there'd be a lot of setup and refresh in the first episode, but when you only finished the first episode yesterday it's a little plodding. Thank goodness it's so brilliantly-written, shot and acted.

I also re-read all of Saga so far in preparation for the new issue tomorrow. That's my third time reading it end-to-end; I always forget how short individual chapters are when reading the first trade volume, but things just fly past when I'm reading the digital copies.

With the new season of GoT starting soon, it's getting tougher to avoid everything about it; I really want everything to be new while I'm watching it. I'm excited to see where it goes, and much like Saga I'm well aware by this point that nothing is sacred. The big difference, of course, is that there are no potential Saga spoilers to avoid - I've read everything there is to read.

So yeah, I've seen all of the Game of Thrones TV show so far, but it seems nearly impossible for a discussion about the show to completely avoid comparisons to the books - which invariably leads to some very suggestive phrasings that, while not outright spoilers, can have heavy hints about where things are going.

Which is why I'm avoiding everything about it.

Digital dilemma

Posting a new entry every day is easy. It's writing them that's the hard part. I need to get better a making notes for things that I can get a post out of; if I have a starting point I can usually throw something together (although whether it's worth reading is another thing entirely), even if I end up on a tangent and write about something totally different.

I finally cracked and bought (the digital versions of) the Saga issues between the end of the first TPB and the current issue. This leaves me with a dilemma, though - I've broken that barrier now and it's going to be difficult to resist the whole rest of the series as issues, even if I intend to buy the second and subsequent TPBs as well.

But my bank has a £1.50 charge on international payments, so buying from Comixology that would nearly double the price of each issue. That wasn't as big a deal buying 7-10 together (although it's still a pain), but month to month it's not going to fly.

I could get a physical subscription from Forbidden Planet that wouldn't hit that additional charge, but for some reason I like the idea of buying digitally from month-to-month and then getting the TPB as a physical "archive" copy. To save on space, if nothing else.

Is there a UK-based digital comics store that sells Saga? I'd really like to support it month to month, but I can't justify the price if I've also got to pay extra to send money to the US.

Not much to say

Alpha Protocol is taking over my spare time. Played a lot of it over the weekend, and spent most of this evening working my way through the Rome missions - I've now moved onto Taipei. I've finally levelled up enough to unlock the ridiculously overpowered criticial-hit-from-cover pistol skill, but I'm still happy to switch to the assault rifle rather than reloading when things get less stealthy.

I'm trying to make decisions differently this time through - killing bosses where I'd previously spared them, that sort of thing - and have managed to get a couple of achievements out of this second playthrough so far, which is a pleasant surprise. I was only really expecting to get the Recruit completion one. Not that my gamerscore is particuarly important in the grand scheme, but it's nice to feel like your accomplishments are being recognised, if only by a meaningless number.

I did manage to re-read the first trade paperback of The Sixth Gun tonight as well, as I threatened on Twitter yesterday. I really want to like it, quite badly - the concept and the dialogue and the art are all great - but the pacing just doesn't let up. Considering how many of the great Westerns are slow-burners, the choice to have an all-out gun battle (and the occasional giant monster) in every issue seems rather odd. I think it's especially obvious coming off the back of Saga, which is beautifully paced throughout, although I remember thinking The Sixth Gun was a bit rushed even the first time I read it.

300

Shortly before Zack Snyder's adaptation of 300 came out in cinemas, I was having a conversation with someone about the film and, more broadly, the battle of Thermopylae. During the course of the discussion, I mentioned that the battle ends with most of the Spartans dying, which the other party got rather annoyed about. He seemed to think that I'd ruined the ending; I'm still of the opinion that - 2,500 years after the event - the statute of limitations had long since expired on that particular spoiler.

I mean, the whole point of the story - and the reason the battle is still talked about - is the nobility of sacrifice, doing what's right at the cost of your own life. I couldn't understand why someone would be interested in a film based (however loosely) on the real event but not have even a passing familiarity with it. They obviously hadn't read the comic either.

TCM are showing 300 at the moment, but I've had enough of it. The film bugs me in a dozen different ways, although most of those boil down the way Spartan society is presented - mostly the injection (by Miller, I assume) of some pretty aggressive misogyny - and the explanation by Leonidas of the phalanx, which his soldiers effectively abandon two minutes after the battle starts. I mean, if you're going to discount someone from fighting because they can't use a technique that you're not particularly bothered about anyway, I can see why Ephialtes takes the hump¹.

I suppose at the end of the day I can't hold too much of that against the film, though - if his Watchmen adaptation is anything to go by, I'm assuming 300 is an almost note-for-note retelling of the comic, which I haven't read and frankly don't have much compulsion to. I assume the only historical research done by Miller before writing the original was into the battle itself; I know that there are liberties taken with Spartan culture and can only wonder where the hell half the Persian stuff came from.

There are some tremendous lines in it though - even if the best ("then we shall fight in the shade") is apparently a genuine quote from one of the Spartans at the battle². But for every badass taunt and cool shot, there's just so much facepalming that I can't get past.

I remember reading up about Thermopylae a lot when the movie was first announced; maybe if I hadn't, the film wouldn't annoy me quite so much. I don't think it's even disappointment - I didn't know what to expect from the film - but it somehow feels disrespectful to the real thing to turn it into such a freak show. I'm sure the battle wasn't as honorable and glorious as the Greek historians of the time would have us believe, but it would have been pretty awesome without taking such massive liberties with the source material.

¹ I am so, so sorry. I couldn't resist, and then couldn't bring myself to edit it out.

² Probably my favourite line from the real thing didn't make it into the film; when Leonidas was leaving Sparta to fight, his wife - the unfortunately-named Queen Gordo - asked him what she should do if he didn't return. He replied, "marry a good man and bear good children". While it does seem to imply that her only purpose should be to produce more Spartans, I like the sense that he didn't feel like he had any ownership of her. I don't think he was giving her an order; he was telling her not to give up her own life just because he might lose his.

Saga

I don't read a lot of comics. In my heavy anime days I read a ton of (mostly shoujo) manga, but American (and, I suppose, British) comics never held much appeal for me. I did collect Wolverine for a while, when Marvel brought out a kind of best-of collection around 1999, but all that really did was emphasise the ridiculously complicated history and backstory that I had no hope of unravelling.

Really, the first comic I read and was a proper fan of was Watchmen, which means I undoubtedly missed - and continue to miss - a lot of the references and significance. It's as famous for its deconstruction of comics as a medium, the tropes and characters of the comics that came before it as it is for its own tone and storyline. Everything that's come since seems to have been massively influenced by the moral ambiguity and "dark gritty realism" of Watchmen to some extent, so it's probably difficult for me to appreciate the impact it had - even if I'm intellectually aware of it.

Long story short, I haven't been keeping up with comics and haven't had much interest in doing so. I've got the first four volumes of Y - The Last Man sitting on a shelf next to me, but the order I got them from Amazon¹ did as much to kill my enthusiasm and interest for the series as much as its heavy-handed plotting and awkward dialogue did.

The big hitter in comics these days seems to be The Walking Dead, but I couldn't get into the art, story or characters for one reason or another². I've got the first TPB of The Sixth Gun, but its pacing is all over the place and I can't see how they're going to stretch it out much longer so haven't bothered picking up any more yet. I've also read Scott Pilgrim, but it's a self-contained and relatively short (for comics) story.

Despite its shortcomings, I kind of liked Y - it's clumsy but at least it's a different take on the apocalypse. The ideas were interesting enough that when I was told about Saga and I saw Vaughn's name attached to it I added the first TPB to my Amazon wishlist. A few days and recommendations later my resolve broke - it was less than £7 delivered, so I figured it was worth the risk.

Short version: I really like it. The writing's much more natural than the clunky dialogue I'm used to in comics (even Watchmen is horribly exposition-heavy), the pacing's brilliant and Fiona Staples' art is astonishing. The characters are interesting, and the ease with which the universe is built up and explained really surprised me. The amount of sex and nudity probably isn't strictly necessary for the story, but it oddly doesn't feel like titillation.

It's one of those rare reading experiences for me where I can see the movement from panel to panel. It's not fair to say that I imagine it as a film, because I honestly don't think Saga would survive the transition with its brilliance intact - but it feels almost like I'm watching something that's really happening. This has occurred so rarely to me that I (obviously) can't really explain it.

It arrived today, and the aforementioned filth is the only reason I didn't finish it in a single sitting at work. I got through the second half of the volume when I got home, and have reread it twice since then. I honestly can't get enough of it, which is going to make the wait for volume 2 - due out in early July, for f--k sake - pretty unbearable.

¹ I ordered volumes 1-4 (the trade paperbacks), but volume 3 was out of stock and I only got 1, 2 and 4. Read the first two while waiting for the third to get delivered, but it took so long to come back into stock that I ended up cancelling it. I only got around to picking up #3 when I spotted it at London Expo the year before last.

² It maybe doesn't help that I saw the TV show first and preferred its slower, more deliberate pacing to the comic group's breakneck migration. Both pale in comparison to Telltale's episodic adventure game, though.

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