s is for...

well don't you think you have things all sussed out don't cha? anyway, left hand rob did a post a couple of days ago that was related to another one of his friend's posts about a meme they were working on. and basically, while i was writing this post the other day, rob assigned me the letter "s"

basically it's like this.

you get assigned a letter by the author if you comment, and you pick 5 characters whose names begin with said letter. the bastard is a benevolent despot so if you comment, i won't give you something stupid like the letter "q" or "x".

i'm going with comic characters since, that's what i've been reading of late and because i'm fucking illiterate. but if you want to pull out from the ensemble characters of the "good earth" or finnegan's way", then do it up.

first off, i'm going to go with the sandman. neil gaiman's sandman. yeah, it's an obvious one because gaiman's sandman has been the fucking gateway drug for adult comic readers everywhere. it was for me. i spent most of my childhood reading marvel comics, mostly x-men and when i got older i out these things away. and they found their way to the chairman's house and then they all died in a bizarre flood out in setauket. shit happens. anyway, i was in a discount bookstore on long island when i purchased a copy of brief lives and the wake.

read them both out of order and i put them down again.

it was poignant and i was completely into the notion of an idea made sentient and gaiman's nature of what do old gods do when no one believes in them anymore. i picked it up again when i started having marital problems and it was a compelling story. and a tragic one.

because the bastard likes to cheat at ALL games, secondly, i'm going with abe sapien from the hellboy/bprd franchise. abe, was a victorian businessman who was part of a cult and he woke up in the 20th century in a tank as a merman with no memory of his past life. this apparently happened on the day that lincoln was assassinated so he was thus named abe. when i first started reading hellboy, he struck me as a sidekick sort but, as the series wore on, abe, was much more. a tragic figure who's haunted by his past. a reluctant leader later on in the bprd series.

he comes across more as a quirky sidekick in the film franchise but, in print, abe sapien is a very strong, very tragic guy who tries to get the job done. also, i enjoyed him best when mike mignolia drew him but, he's a busy man these days so, it's all good.

thirdly, mr. shepherd from 100 bullets is the pick. 100 bullets is quite possibly the most involved series i'm reading right now. it started out for me as a weird book about a man named graves and his gift of a suitcase with a pistol and 100 bullets of untraceable ammunition which he gave to folks that were wronged so that they can make it right. shepherd was his former partner in a group of suited killers called the minutemen, who worked for an much larger organization called the trust that was made up of 13 families from old europe that wanted to run the new world as their own, behind the scenes and all they had to do to show the old monarchs that they meant business was to kill every last person on the island of roanoke 400 years ago.

shepherd was a member of the minutemen, then he was their warlord. and then it all went downhill. shepard was an excellent part of this very twisty, turny series that i'm still trying to wrap my head around. reads it now, jerk.

fourth? what's one sandman without another. before there was a neil gaiman sandman, there was a golden age sandman and and a silver age sandman but, after gaiman's had run it's course, the fine folks at vertigo decided to bring this golden age character back with lots of depression era pulpy goodness.

clad in his gasmask and fedora, wesley dodds, manhattan socialite purges the demons in his dreams by putting the big sleep on the criminals who haunt him in his dreams. the re-tooled vertigo series gives a really pulpy look into the ills of depression era new york city. it's a fantastic series and they've recently put out a trade (the bastard doesn't really know how recently as i don't follow the trades as much) with a new take during the war on terror. i haven't read it yet as i have a pile of morrison's doom patrol to go through and the latest volume of hellblazer i picked up.


in the saving the best for last column, is the spider. not THAT spider. spider jerusalem. quite possibly one of my favorite character in comics. spider is pissed. spider is a bastard. spider is trying to open your fucking eyes up. and take out the administration. and shoot you with his bowel disruptor set on prolapse. spider is from warren ellis' fantastic series, transmetropolitan, which i cannot recommend enough to you shiteyed freaks. it's the story of an angry journalist in the future who comes down the mountain out of retirement to fulfill his contract to a publisher and he goes back to the mountain destroying the presidency. did i give away too much? go to hell. just read. thank me later. or don't.

—the bastard

honorable mention goes to elijah snow from another ellis series called planetary. the premise is this. snow is the "third man" in an organization that dubs it self "archaeologists of the impossible", that are tracking down the earth's "secret history". snow who was born on new years day in the year 1900 is shrouded mostly in mystery and is re-learning his own past as he moves forward discovering these long lost mysteries as well as the people who are covering it up. i haven't read it in so long but, that's only because they haven't put out the fucking trade of the end of the series so the bastard has NO IDEA how it ended yet. get on the fucking schtick DC and give me my conclusion. the bastard needs to know things and he needs to know them now!

oh yeah, and elijah snow ages really slowly and can manipulate the cold and he wears white suits. read it but wait for the fucking ending jerks!