feedingbrett's reviews
190 reviews

It was in its repetition that the ‘telling’ revealed itself to me. It sparked a curiosity and fuelled an admiration of its effect as the pages were turned. However, it was in the eventual ‘slip’ into the rhythm of the chapters, the themes radiant in their intent, and its emotion prime in their impact, that its technicality began to submerge into the background, and there amongst the foreground of the reading experience was me and my vulnerabilities. At a critical point of the story, my eyes welled in tears, and the boy, once a third-degree character enduring it, has become an intimate attachment to myself; it was during then that the unspoken tether between the protagonist and reader came into full effect, a collective experience that is shared and empathised, bursting through the end of it as impacted and revelatory as the character has endured. Depths of metaphor and familiar attributes of living coney themselves in ways that have silently imprisoned humanity, and the honest fear of such a cycle repeating itself into the lives of our offspring make such all the more harrowing, not to mention suffering through it personally. How to Hold a Cockroach guides us to life’s now obscured senses, hoping to rip off the veil that we have unknowingly donned ourselves, and experience this precious life for all its worth.

While there are sporadic moments of informative exploration of themes, production, and historical context, its desire to hold its readers along in its scene-by-scene recreation feels more akin to the film with an audio commentary but translated into words for us to endure through. I am assuming the audience has seen the film, and so I felt that its methodology feels viscous and futile. In the end, I am glad this film had an edition within the series as it is clearly deserving of it, I simply think it could have replaced its scene-by-scene pacing with avenues of interpretation or greater exploration of historical influence.

My rating is a combination of both of my feelings towards the two stories that this set contains. My thoughts of them are found below:

The Dark Knight Returns:

Heroic titans representing two sides of the same American coin, The Dark Knight Returns finds Frank Miller exploring the means and grounds of a path towards a world with peace and justice. Yet, despite their differences in operation, it is evident of the failures rooted in their ideologies, conveying a world incapable of a harmonious middle ground, and yet witnessing both sides scrambling and fighting for a hopeful utopia. While the polarisation of both Clark and Bruce is merely a small fraction of the narrative, it is the centrepiece - not just in its function as a sensationalist climax, but as the root that determines the growth of the future that they are both pacing towards. Miller’s choice to hold the story’s eye on the caped crusader is simply the fact that it is the far more enduring and punishing road. 

The Dark Knight Strikes Again:

Returning to the world that Bruce Wayne had supposedly left behind, author-artist Frank Miller seemed to have his sight for an expansion, and that is exactly what he did. For better or worse, is up to the reader, but for me, it conveyed a large container with very little filling. Yes, Batman is back, but this is because the threat is larger; Superman remains a pawn to the government, but even that seems to have blurred from what was once established. By its end, I never felt I moved an inch closer to Batman, or for the world that he was trying to protect. Even under Frank Miller’s authorship, there was a sense of scatter of the story that is in contrast to what was produced by his predecessor, and the artwork then showed relevancy and depth that supplemented its story. It is as if Miller has extracted and materialised the interiority of the original and allowed it to shape and nudge its plot, which essentially gives little room in return if one chooses to re-explore the events that have unfolded here.

If one is familiar with the methodology of the comic-book format, one may find the compilation approach from The Folio Society slender, maybe even sparse in focus. While this criticism holds merit given the format’s breadth, one can also see the benefit that it brings to the uninitiated, to those seeking a celebratory act, and to those who recognise and crave the romantic allure of physical books. This, compiled by Roy Thomas, has given his readers an efficient snapshot of the character’s life on the page, as it simultaneously signifies the importance and relevance that the character has upheld over his lifetime - along with the writers and artists that have brought him to life.

It is a story of a young man coming into his own, not just in his wizardry, but of his true nature. It traces a path to complete self-awareness and how such understanding would lead and inform one to complete actualisation and inner peace. A Wizard of Earthsea never gets lost in the minutia of its world-building, recognising such insistence would be a distraction rather than beneficial. And yet, strikingly, it remains able to balance both the grand and the personal that would still satisfy the appetites of its readers. This was a delight.

What strikes me about <i>Brave New World</i> is in the way that its characters are used to communicate the specific ideas that Aldous Huxley wanted to address, in that they exist merely as tour guides of this alternative reality to spark our thoughts and feelings into an internal debate of these alternative systems and values against our current state of affairs. While the path that these characters tread does hold its own set of outcomes and consequences that shape the story, the emphasis is never present enough to establish personal identification. This internal debate is the engine that carries the reading experience and beyond, it is the ingredient that moulds the legacy it has today. However, the most striking aspect about it is the findings of that debate itself, which has led me to an obvious grey area that considers both sides of the coin, given what both have to offer and are capable of achieving. Perhaps these are preliminary thoughts that would eventually evolve, shaping a worldview that would differ from what I carry as I presently write this review.