Over the Top: Paging through "Punk Rock Jesus"

So.

In the future, there’s this all-around gifted scientist.  She’s already won the Nobel Prize, and there is some research she’s working on that will create plants that use many times more the CO2 than regular plants.

Somehow, the only person who will fund her research is a meglomanical super-rich guy who wants to clone Jesus and show him growing up as part of a reality show.

There’s also the young woman who was chosen to carry the Jesus clone who is in over her head, and there’s an ex-IRA assassin who has promised to never kill again.

The Jesus character grows up isolated, and rebels, and gets really into punk rock, and tries to start a revolution.

It’s all over the top, and it feel like it’s trying too hard.  The art’s good, but the storytelling is lacking. I say this as someone who randomly found the title on a shelf who loves punk rock and mocking the Christian savoir. 

The premise goes too far, and that’s assuming that there is a historical Jesus (something dealt with, but may be a spoiler situation.)  Murphy still has some good work in him, so I look forward to what he may do next, but not this.

And I’ll digress, my biggest complaint here, as with some other sci-fi influenced stuff is that if you are creating a world that is based off of the current one that we live in, the reader has to be able to recognize the world as a logical historical extension of the current world.  The one in Punk Rock Jesus just doesn’t work for me, though others may like it.  It is a very subjective thing, but one that I have no answer for.

Masturbation Joke didn't trip the Amazon auto-censor.

Sometimes, as a guy, there are times when you only need to moisturize one hand. When that need arises, you need a lotion that can do the job. It can’t absorb into your skin too fast, nor can it be to oily.

By those criteria, this lotion works well for moisturizing your dominate hand. Where it falls short is in scent. I don’t know what toiletry companies think guys want to smell like, but this has the scent of that generic fresh scent that is plugged into so many toiletries; a scent that has no obvious analogue in nature. It smells like locker rooms

The problem is also in the name. Sometimes you don’t want everyone to know that you were moisturizing your dominate hand while your significant other ran to the drugstore. That’s why the idea of a lotion with “Light” scent is so enticing. It should create a moist hand with just the subtle hint of scent.

This lotion fails – the Light scent fills the room, and everyone knows you have a moist hand. In this context, the lotion is a failure. Move on and buy something else.


From: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2SI7ULBD3OWYK/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

All war books are anti-war books: Reading Tardi and Verney's "Goddamn This War!"

My library had this on the new release shelf, and my interest in picture books and the great war together made me pick this up.

It tells the story of an unnamed soldier from the start to the end of the war.  Like most of narratives I've read of soldiers at the time, it suffers from the inertia that was a by-product of the war's greater narrative.  Once dug-in, there wasn't much movement.  I think of it as a continent-wide siege.

The art is successful.  The authors use the palate to really set the mood - dropping color off in the trenches to show the gray drabness of that reality.    It looks good too, without being overly gruesome.  There is one particularly haunting picture that makes the cover and is even 'better' in context, the soldier with the medal pinned to his pillow.

Finally, what is particularly important in the book is that the story of the one soldier is generalized, there is a Europe-centric history of the war for the last 30 pages or so.  This year-by-year chronology of the larger events gives more context to the singular experience that the art section of the book conveys.  I enjoyed reading the history almost as much as I did reading the individualized story in the drawn section.