meltdown??? meltdown's the second or third best comic store i've ever seen. behind comic relief in berkeley... i'm not sure where i'd put it in re: beguiling, but in that category. its the best store in los angeles, and los angeles has, like, five-six comic stores, so... and i was underwhelmed by, say, seattle or new york, the stores i saw there (midtown in new york was like a joke)...s

o just being a major city isn't really a big deal, but meltdown's just a really, really good store, i think.

and he didn't say indecipherable, he just suggested that other people in the store had been confused how to read it or something like that... i was being glib...

i'm a bit underwhelmed by it. i like the art ... and some of its interesting, but...how odd is it that we're essentially just reading this guy's religious beliefs? that dc's publishing them? dc doesn't publish christian people's religious beliefs, you know? isn't that odd?

i mean, granted, alan moore's religious beliefs are a thousand times more interesting than most folks, but ... they're still religious beliefs. so when he talks about science being insufficient for this and that, well-- some part of me can't help but snicker at him the way i snicker at any religious person telling me that science is insufficient. they say that shit all the time, and i laugh at 'em ALL the time. that one issue of sandman where neal gaiman put a belief in god to finding a broken watch on a beach or...? i thought that was retarded and i laughed at him. i mean, i just don't really get into that kind of thing because i'm, i don't know, a materialist rationalist, i think is the term morrison used once that i always liked.

(like morrison can do it in a way i don't get worked up over cause with morrison its more like ... its not the same)...

(and poor Heisenberg, who.. people really run with that heisenberg uncertainty principle)... but you know, if... isn't it just kind of odd?

david mack did something like this once. and it wasn't his finest moment either. i'm just not really so into this sort of thing... i mean, he earned it, but ... i felt like he'd been saying this all along, so i'm not sure what new he added.

but the bits that excited me, were where he actually tried to reduce all that stuff to the actual experience of reading the comic. i wish it'd been more like that, more the work kind of breaking down the experience of reading itself. it had that in a few moments and those few moments blew me away, but...

the way he changed the right-left reading flow was kinda fascinating too... i get the idea, to break the flow to recreate a different kind of mentality when reading it, but...

and its interesting that the final issue of the comic, with time disintegrating, doesn't really have any panels in it...

but... all the tlak about snakes or mushrooms or whatever...

its not the first issue of invisibles volume 3 for me, which was just ... so much more. its nice. its a nice idea and some of its quite nice, and some of its terribly exciting, but... i'm just not stoned right now, so...
-abhay