On the Paper Trail: Halo Uprising (Graphic Novel)

Welcome back everyone we are on the Paper Trail once again as I take a brief turn of the plotted course to bring you this book. First off a story: I tend to stop by and check out libraries when I am in the close area of one on my travels. Today marks the 50th anniversary at the library and they had many events taking place. From a videogame truck, a full mini golf course in the building, a book sale, cupcakes, Elmo was even there at the bowling alley they made. There was fun to be had all around and more libraries should use this as some ideas on how to make their building a community center.

Naturally while looking on the shelves I came across their graphic novel section, sure it was not the greatest selection I have seen but it was WELL more then I have seen at many libraries in the area. I picked up this book, sat down in a chair and read it in full. This book took all of the positive vibes out of a festive atmosphere and just made me pissed off.

Oh where do I begin...

First although you see Master Chief on the cover on the book and is the first person you do see in the book, the book IS NOT ABOUT HIM. I can some up his cameos in a simple phrase "Michael Baysplosions can't take down Mr. Invincible." Now I often am harsh on story that just stick to the characters of the cannon and do nothing outside of the construct of the story, so you would think I would praise this direction.

However a good story this is not.

Our "hero" is a hotel attendant who in circumstance gets caught up in a firefight between the Marines and the Coven. An alien woman asks him where she can get a gun since she wants to fight with the Marines, and sure enough a solider dies and they pick up his weapons and fight along side them. Now during the course of this the hero does nothing more then help run away while the woman simply kills any threat they come across, there is a scene were she questions killing the aliens only to be swept away for a forced romance.

As you can imagine in comic book fashion they get caught soon after and ask to be taken to a key that no one knows about, except our hero and his brother. The brother is about to be killed and was tortured before giving away information that only his brother knows about and tells them to not destroy his last location of Cleveland. Yes, the key of Cleveland is not Lebron James' jump shot but a tie they used while playing Tolkien when they were younger.

Now I know I mentioned that Master Chief is not in the story as I am taking, but we see a lot of him kicking ass in between scenes for no other reason as to remind us that we want to see Master Chief and not an art major and an alien trying to fight the incoming threat. Sadly most of the "action" sequences take place here leaving all the characters in the real story standing around or running away.

Since I don't care about spoilers here we go. The hero finally does tell a Marine about the key and he is taken to a base in the sewers and tells us the story again. Well after a lengthy exposition he decides to use himself as bait to get to the mother ship by claiming he is the key. Before that however we have another forced romance scene where our alien woman tells us that he saved her life.

BULL SHIT!

The prior 30 pages just had him driving away from aliens while YOU WERE SHOOTING THEM! He did not save your life you saved his several times over, and outside of being a guy you chose at random to find guns at the beginning has no real value to you except owning a drivers license and having sight to find a vehicle.

Well then as you can guess the hero does get taken, tell them to kiss his ass, as a weapons destroys the ship, while Master Chief is looking on giving the proverbial thumbs up at his choice. We end however with the brother that explained that they wasted all this time trying to figure out something he made up and lost great causalities due to this as proof that Man will always survive and they will win the day. He then dies off panel.

This novel is just horrible. The main person you are selling to us has a cameo just to prove he is a bad ass, the main story is told with little to no character development, our female lead depends on a man when clearly she can go and take care of herself, the reach of events to take place to prove a point, and the end result to go and sympathize with our hero who simply plays a pawn at his brother's bluff is insulting at best.

Who the hell would think this is a good idea to get people interested in Halo?

Editor in Chief: Joe Quesada

This must be what Linkara and the Last Angry Geek feel like after they do a review, I need to take a break, see you back on the trail with a better book (I hope).

The Literary Loon's Library: American Gods

As with most noir heroes, we meet Shadow, the protagonist of Neil Gaiman's hard-boiled fantasia, "American Gods," after he's lost everything. Fresh from doing three years in prison for a stupid crime, he learns that his beloved wife, Laura, is dead, killed in a car accident with his best friend, the guy who'd promised him a job when he got out. To make matters worse, he has a series of unsettling encounters with a persistent older gentleman in a pale suit. Each meeting seems to be the result of extravagantly improbable chance, and the gentleman, who offers Shadow a job as his bodyguard, just won't take no for an answer. "Who are you?" Shadow asks, and the older man replies, "Let's see. Well, seeing that today certainly is my day -- why don't you call me Wednesday?"

If you have a basic knowledge of mythology (or, for that matter, etymology, or, really, if you just have a good dictionary) and a vague idea of what "American Gods" is about, you can figure out this fellow's real identity pretty easily. Shadow, however, hasn't yet realized that he's stumbled into a kind of underground, a loosely connected network of burned-out, down-on-their-luck deities, the remnants of every god, godling or other supernatural being that any person who ever set foot in America has ever believed in. Their circumstances are, to say the least, reduced: Wednesday, who used to be a contender, ekes out a living by running cons on inattentive clerks and bank customers, and later in his adventures Shadow will meet a Mr. Ibis and a Mr. Jacquel, who run a shabby-genteel mortuary for "the colored folk hereabouts" -- "hereabouts" being Cairo, Ill.

Wednesday, who finally succeeds in hiring Shadow, is traveling across the country, enlisting his peculiar colleagues -- who include Czernobog, the dark half of a dualistic pair of Slavic brother gods, and Mr. Nancy, the human embodiment of the West African spider-trickster god Anansi -- in a titanic battle. Their opponents are the "new" gods, gods that represent America's shift from the spiritual to the tangible and material: the Technical Boy, who says things like "[Wednesday] has been consigned to the dumpster of history while people like me ride our limos down the superhighway of tomorrow"; a bunch of men in black who call themselves "the Agency" but are referred to by everyone else as "the spookshow"; a "perfectly made-up, perfectly coiffed" newscaster goddess by the name of Media; and a never-seen contingent called the Intangibles, who join the conflict somewhat reluctantly because they are "pretty much in favor of letting market forces take care of it."

Shadow goes through some of the requisite hard-boiled experiences -- getting kidnapped and beat up by the bad guys, discovering that his employer hasn't been exactly honest with him and so on -- along with a few others that never crop up in Chandler and Hammett. A magical coin, given to him by a drunk claiming to be a leprechaun, a token that Shadow tosses into his wife's grave, has the unnerving result of reanimating her, and while she's unquestionably dead, she helps him out of a few scrapes. The characters in TV sitcoms (controlled by Media) drop their shtick and look out of the screen to address him directly, trying to talk him into joining the new gods. And then there are the weird dreams Shadow keeps having about a buffalo-headed figure who issues a series of cryptic pronouncements. But none of this is quite as creepy as Lakeside, the small Michigan town where he holes up for a while, a place that's just a little bit too good to be true.

With its mythological echoes, puns, in jokes and other decodable references, "American Gods" will delight the sort of reader who likes to hunt for such things. (Gaiman even jokes about this by including a bit about "hidden Indians," that is, the kind of visual puzzle in which disguised figures are worked into a drawing.) The novel also has a big theme about the nature of America, which, most of the characters insist, is "a bad land for gods," supposedly because we get tired of them and they dwindle from insufficient worship. This, it must be said, doesn't jibe with reality, and perhaps that's because Gaiman (who wrote the seminal graphic novel "The Sandman" and has authored several traditional novels, including the delightful "Neverwhere," which sets uncanny doings in the London Underground) is British. When Mr. Jacquel observes that "Jesus does pretty good over here," well, that's an understatement.

But the slightly off skew of its take on the U.S. doesn't really matter much, for "American Gods" is a crackerjack suspense yarn with an ending that both surprises and makes perfect sense, as well as many passages of heady, imagistic writing. And for all that he's missed in the American propensity for religious fanaticism, Gaiman has exactly nailed the way we talk; some of the most savory characters are the minor ones, the helpful middle-aged ladies and surly cons who regale Shadow for a moment or two before passing out of the story, like the fellow inmate who tells Shadow: "My last girlfriend was Greek ... The shit her family ate. You would not believe. Like rice wrapped in leaves. Shit like that."

Speaking of Greeks, their gods never make an appearance here, though their presence, you'd think, wouldn't be any less plausible than that of Anubis and Thoth. Even more mystifying is the absence of the guy Mr. Jacquel calls "one lucky son of a virgin." Somehow, the fact that we're twice told that Shadow is 32 at the very beginning of the novel -- as well as a few things that happen to him later on -- seems to be a reference to that conspicuous no-show, but now I'm pointing out hidden Indians. Whatever its loftier intentions, "American Gods" is a juicily original melding of archaic myth with the slangy, gritty, melancholy voice of one of America's great cultural inventions -- the hard-boiled detective; call it Wagnerian noir. The melting pot has produced stranger cocktails, but few that are as tasty.

WRA Episode 25- Galactic Patrol

Hey y'all! New episode is up, and its awesome! This is my favourite pulp science fiction novel, Galactic Patrol!