American Elf/Paul Pope

Just a quick post before work, since I got up a bit earlier than usual this morning....

I've been tearing through American Elf, reading a handful of strips every chance I get. The weirdest thing about the book is the mindset it puts you in; once you fall into the rhythm of the strips, you find yourself breaking down your interactions with people into "panels", and trying to determine if things that just happened to you would make a good strip. It really makes you relate to the process behind the art more than almost any other book (or film, or album, for that matter).

I was going to say that it also gives you a great sense of Kochalka's personality, and I suppose it does, but it's also a very selective, distilled sense. Even though you can read what seems like years of his life, it's really only one or two events per day; the exchange of two or three sentences at best. While it certainly gives you a sense of his twisted humor, and his tendency towards crankiness on a somewhat regular basis, there's really not a whole lot more you can get out of four panels per day. Read enough of them and you start to get more of a complete picture, but even that only gives you a limited amount of information. Especially when a large portion of the panels consist of belching, farting, peeing, and teasing the cat.

Got a shipment from Mars Imports yesterday, containgin Paul Pope's P-City Parade and Buzz-Buzz Comics Magazine, and also a copy of Goodbye Chunky Rice, by Craig Thompson, that I already own. Oops. They were out of stock when I placed my order, so I went ahead and picked it up elsewhere....and of course, as soon as I did, they got it back in a Mars Imports and sent it to me. Oh well. I'll figure out something to do with the extra copy...

But with the other two books, I'm a lttle bit closer to my goal of Paul Pope completism...in fact, I should be getting a package from Mile High tonight with a copy of THB #2 in it, bringing me a little closer still. But the main thing I'm excited about is having a copy of the "Smoke Navigator" story, in Buzz-Buzz. This story started out life as a manga project during Pope's years with Kodansha in Japan, eventually became condensed into the version that appears in Buzz-Buzz, and then was expanded and altered in some form to become a portion of 100%. I've heard a lot of praise for this story, and I'm looking forward to reading it myself.

Ont he topic of Paul Pope, what is that fucker up to these days? He's had a couple things out recently (his issue of Solo and a story in Project: Superior are the only ones that leap to mind), and I heard a rumour he's working on some sort of Batman project, or maybe some new THB material, but I haven't heard anything official in ages. It doesn't help that his website hasn't been updated since 2003...If anyone knows, pass along the info.