Stuff We Like This Week: August 7 Edition

Stuff We Like This Week: August 7 Edition

Aug 07

In an effort to combat our occasional…okay, okay, near-constant negativity, we give you a regular feature full of nothing but love — Stuff We Like This Week. Appearing every Friday, SWLTW will recap the things that have set our little nerdly hearts aflame within the past seven days.

Sarah: I seriously have the best luck ever when it comes to purchasing things at Excalibur, Portland’s fine comics emporium. I go there once a year on my annual Oregon pilgrimage and usually walk out with a new favorite of some sort. (I think I also dig this store because the salespeople always compliment me on my good taste — stroke my ego, earn my undying love!)

Anyway. This year, one of the new favorites is Renee Lott’s graphic novel Festering Romance, a sweet, funny tale of a girl who lives with a ghost. The basics: Janet is a college student and natural shut-in, in that special “I would rather play five thousand hours of this game than go to a gathering of more than three people” sort of way so many of us can identify with. Paul is her ghostly best friend and roomie. When one of Janet’s friends tries to set her up with a living, breathing, non-reclusive guy, things get complicated in ways you don’t quite expect. Ultimately, I think that’s one of the key things that makes this story so strong: it doesn’t unfold in a by-the-numbers way, but spills out in tangents and conversations and uncomfortable interactions — just like life. There are romantical-type things and friendship-type things and “I’m just realizing what my life is” type things and it’s all just very good. I also heavily dig Lott’s emotive, manga-influenced pencils, which veer from cute to heartbreaking. How gorgeous is that cover?

Maybe I should try to make my Excalibur trips occur more than just once a year.

Matt: Crime and criminals factor into the stuff I like this week:

We’re on season four of The Wire, and I love the more somber, dark turn it’s taking, as it dives deep into the educational system in Baltimore to illustrate just what inner-city poor kids have to deal with on a daily basis to even have half a hope of learning anything at all. This has always been a pessimistic series but now it’s like the show is being infected with this vague sense of hopelessness and dread; there’s subplots where kids imagine drug kingpins as zombie masters, and the muscle who kill those who cross drug lord Marlo find themselves slaughtered in a vacant house, covered in a ghostly cloud of limestone and nailed inside forever. The buildings themselves are coffins.

Darwyn Cooke’s Parker: The Hunter sits more square in the tradition of classic crime fiction that glorifies the criminal even as it demonstrates the cost of living the life. Parker is an animal of a character, carnal and driven, and Cooke literally puts us behind his eyes for the first portion of his graphic novel before following him on a solitary trail of revenge against those who stole from him money he himself helped steal. A brilliant adaptation that others have already reviewed far better than I ever could.