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Why is there no mention of J M DeMatteis and Kent Williams Blood:A Tale anywhere?

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

20:45 / 05.05.04

Can we talk about it please? I love it, it's one of my fave novels I ever bought, and has been in storage for ages, so I haven't read it in about 2-3 years...

I'm sure loads of you lot have read it...Pretentious wank or unfettered genius? Some of the artwork, particularly the endplates (ish 1, when Blood emerges from the river of, er, blood, fully Vampired up and hair akimbo, the snaking ouroborous Blood on the breast of Woman, the freaky little floating dude in the space suit...Shit, I have to get to the storage unit and retrieve my comics, man)

I was only wee when I got hold of it, and read it cover to cover until about 4 am, finished with a huge sigh and felt...strange. What The Fuck Was That All About, I thought, as it worked its creepy way into every layer of my fragile little mind, and worked strange workings...

Please, comic people, talk about Blood.

21:30 / 05.05.04

OK, time to dig. I think it's sitting next to Moonshadow. Yay! I have comics to read!

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

00:13 / 06.05.04

Ooh, yes, I've got to dig that motherfucker out again... and Moonshadow, while I'm at it.

I absolutely adored Blood when I was about 15... I hope it's as good as I remember.

11:55 / 06.05.04

can we talk about moonshadow on here as well then or is it threadrot?

cos i loved it, i was what, 15 or something and somehow it struck a weird chord, all about adolescence i guess, not fitting in, a retreat to literature, and it got me reading all sorts of strange books which is a good thing, i wonder how it will stand up to scrutiny now? will look see too. have blood too somewhere but seem to remember not liking it as much, not whimsical enough maybe?

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STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

12:05 / 06.05.04

That's why I'm thinking I might prefer Blood this time round- when I read Moonshadow I loved it, but Blood wasn't quite as "nice"... now I think I'll probably find Moonshadow a little twee. My project for next week- dig out both books and put it to the test.

13:02 / 06.05.04

Personal opinion not shared by anyone Ive loaned it to:
J M DeMatteis= Pretentious hippy wank,
Kent Williams = unfettered genius.

14:11 / 06.05.04

I do remember when I firts read the two of them, I loved Moonshadow and thought Blood was a bit crap. Now I reckon Moonshadow is a bit crap, so I might like Blood.

16:58 / 06.05.04

yeah this was one of my favorites as well. that style of art mixed with a story that made you feel like evil lives amonst us but cant be pointed out and everythings tilted just a bit sideways.
made me go on a kent williams binge for a second.
couldn't tell you what the fuck it was about though. . .spose i'll have to read it again

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

20:50 / 06.05.04

Dunno, I found it really kind of Buddhist/Daoist, but with vampires and a freaky littly anti=gravity dwarf in a space=suit.

Heavy, heavy symbolism, and maybe a bit weighed down in its own importance and...I dunno...a bit try=hard?...I haven't re-read it for years, I was also a teen when i first dug it, but it definitely got me in that shift=the=assembly=point way, at the time.

The artwork, though, is just pure beauty...so many gorgeous images, really beautifully rendered in watercolour...amazing.

I'd like to re=read it before contributing anything more, but it'll cost me £40 just to get to the box in the lock=up..:-(

The Old Man says...Don't Worry.

Blood : 'What are you doing?'
Old Man : 'Caring for them'
Blood : 'Why?'
Old Man : 'What else is there to do?'

And all the fucked up shit in between chapters about the King and his Daughter and the Doves/Lovers, and the weird out mid=life crisis in the Real World after climbing the ladder in the abandoned WWIII bomber fuselage, and cancer and shit...Man, that comic is a fucking TRIP.

I'm gonna have to get it back.

Someone help me out here. Discuss!

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

20:52 / 06.05.04

Also, the Egon Schiele translation in the preface...Fucking.Wicked.

(Apologies for the = and - confusion, my son dropped the comp. keyboard and all the buttons pinged off...I managed to get most of them back in the right order, but not hese two, apparently.)

00:48 / 07.05.04

Calling DeMatteis pretentious might be a compliment. Hippy Wank works just fine methinx.

I tried to read Moonshadow more than once a few years ago. Couldn't get past page 2.

10:49 / 07.05.04

Jesus. Read it in about 20 minutes last night. Utter shite. Were it not for the beautiful art, I'd be selling it straight away.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

11:19 / 07.05.04

Say it isn't so! Is it that bad?

Must must must dig it back out.

The art really is great though...

12:13 / 07.05.04

I mostly find DeMatteis to be irritatingly new agey and pretentious, however, his Seekers into Mystery series was awesome. If you haven't read it, it involves a former Hollywood screenwriter trying to come to terms with his past and figure out if his glimpses into the supernatural are real.

14:41 / 07.05.04

Ugh the pacing is awful, the layouts don't work. I'm not going to say it doesn't make sense, because that would give it an aura of mystery it does't deserve. It's wilfully obscure in that "aha! but do you see!" way that teenage poets rely on so much. Dialogue sucks. Eugh. Just imagine Promethea written by Chuck Austen. With vampires.

14:44 / 07.05.04

Quite like the accelerated life bit, though. and what's with all those slashes/strokes/options in every bubble/thought/balloon/narrative?

15:19 / 07.05.04

maybe he's possessed by/channelling the Phoenix/Jean Grey

15:28 / 07.05.04

In defence of DeMatteis, I really enjoyed his semi-autobio "some lies about my life" book Brooklyn Dreams. I found it mostly very entertaining with just a bit of "new age garbage, Shirly Maclaine horseshit"at the end. Wonderfull cartooning from Glenn Barr who gave up comics to sell his babes & hot rods paintings cause he couldnt make enough money in comics.
It was collected last year at a bargain $13us for 384 pages. This recommendation comes to you from someone who thought seekers stank steaming fetid piles of hippy shit.

Horatio Hellpop

23:34 / 07.05.04

whimsy often doesn't stand up to repeated readings. much of dematteis' better stuff is sometimes groan-inducing because of his frequently-irritatingly-know-it-all-omniscient-narrative-voice-that-makes-you-want-to-hit-him even when the substance of his narrative is cool and perfectly appreciable as kind of stream-of-consciousness connection of images and ideas that don't always work but are fun/cool/and or have some kind of sincere energy that makes you forgive their flaws. he's had the good fortune to be associated with many very good artists who greatly raise the standard of his work (see similar ideas expressed without paint in seekers for the mystery, the beauty of the moments therefore often had a kind-of "this is real beauty, i'm telling you" feeling instead of being actually beautiful (and let's not start about . brooklyn dreams definitely feels the most cohesive of everything i've encountered by him and the artwork is just...perfectly suited to the story and in that neat small little package! it avoids the rambling of moonshadow and the incoherence of blood (which i love despite its flaws) and the boringly obvious moralizing of seekers (i kept the muth issues because i love his inkwork, everything else...goodbye!). a couple of cents worth.

22:14 / 08.05.04

I love the art. Kent Williams has a really strong drawing style that always manages to push its way through all those layers of paint. On the Moonshadow comparisons, Muth always seems to me like he’s far more dependent on using photo refs, while Williams clearly does a heck of a lot of drawing from a model. Is what I reckon. I remember that weird Wolverine/Havok thing the pair of them ‘collaborated’ on, with Kent Williams doing a crazy-looking, solid, gangly Wolverine, and John Muth turning in delicate watercolours renderings of James Dean. With Havok’s dialogue coming out of his mouth. Very odd.

Best thing Kent Williams has ever done: Uncanny X-Men 252, inking over pencils by Rick Leonardi. With a toothpick dipped in tar, it looks like. Bloody cool.