And so it’s here, in all its glory, the first volume of the definitive edition, in English by Vertical, of the manga version of the old Mobile Suit Gundam. A gift for my fifty-second birthday. And I have already discussed how, at the tender age of fifty-two, it feels weird to be so excited by a comic based on a cartoon I watched when I was fourteen. But like in that old song, it’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to. Or I’ll enjoy Gundam.
I have just watched Seven Strike as One, the final episode of the third and last season of Into the Badlands, to me still the best fantasy series on the telly these last few years, and one I will miss a lot now that’s gone. The finale was fast but highly satisfactory, and ended with two colossal hooks for a possible sequel that, alas, seems unlikely.
Sherman Augustus as Moon, Eugenia Yuan as Kannin, Nick Frost as Bajie, Daniel Wu as Sunny, Emily Beecham as The Widow, Lewis Tan as Gaius, Ally Ioannides as Tilda – Into the Badlands _ Season 3, Episode 16 – Photo Credit: Aidan Monaghan/AMC
I admit I am a fan of the series – I love the characters, the setting, the fighting choreography, the small scale of the story that makes this more sword & sorcery than epic fantasy, the retro-futuristic elements. I will try and get the DVDs sooner or later. And there’s another reason why I want to re-watch the whole series – Into the Badlands is absolutely great at making the fight scenes part of the narrative.
(spoiler alert: I’ll be using clips from the first season of the show, so they should be pretty safe, but if you’d rather watch the episodes first, just don’t start the videos)
Notoriously, I am in the habit of re-reading one of two books, in alternating years. Usually in the spring, I either re-read Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, or I re-read Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. This year, following the death of Wolfe, I decided to change my pattern, and re-read something different (while I am also reading some of Wolfe’s stuff I had missed so far).
My only doubt was – what should I re-read? In the end, I had two candidates: the massive The Wizard Knight, and the three books in the Soldier series. Both are great books, both I have read too many years ago, both are here on my special shelf, and both are books (or book series) from which I could learn something new. And both are deep stories, multi-layered and full of secret passages, darkened nooks, false floors and hidden rooms. Something new and different is found with each new visit, each new exploration.
A post-apocalyptic cyberpunk western vampire movie? Why not? The world is currently obsessing about other movies and TV series, but I like the idea of finally watching movies and shows I missed when they first came out. Priest, from 2011, is one of these.
Today I found a hole in Wikipedia. Nothing major, but enough to derail my research work for the better part of this morning. I had to dig out old books and cross-reference information to determine not only what the hole was about, but also what should have been in place of the nothing the hole represented.
I’ve been commissioned a short historical article about two women that lived in Turin in the 17th and 19th century respectively. They belonged to the same family, and lived in the same building, but were extremely different for personality and personal history. So I was looking for historical detail to define their actual relationship and to build some kind of bridge between the two. I needed something that could fit two paragraphs and join the two personal histories.
After The Shadow fizzed at the box office, the hopes, for lovers of old time adventure and pulp-ish entertainment, rested on the Paramount production of The Phantom, based on the classic comic strip by Lee Falk, featuring a stellar cast: Billy Zane, Treat Williams, Kristy Swanson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, James Remar and Patrick McGoohan. What could ever go wrong?
And really, based on the trailer, one could dream…
This morning I was asked a short piece on the Italian Concession in Tientsin, to serve as a bridge between two history articles of mine that are being reprinted. It was a fun job, 700 words in one hour. Thanks to all the research I did for my books,The Ministry of Thunder and Cynical Little Angels, I have tons of material on the Italian presence in China between the wars.
But I did a little web search anyway, and unearthed some stuff I had never seen before, including a photograph.
These are Italian airmen, photographed in China in the early ’30s, at the time of the Breda Ba.27 debacle that is at the start of Felice Sabatini’s adventures in China. The photo is badly colorized, but you get the idea.
“And who’s Sabatini?” my brother asked me upon seeing the picture. Nice question. I have of course my own candidate for the role. But what do you guys say?
Karavansara 