NEW BOOK EXPLORES A FASCINATING ASPECT OF CONTEMPORARY COMICS

Thanks to a recommendation from the ever-awesome comics legend Stephen Bissette, yours truly has been made aware of a new book exploring one of the more salutary developments in contemporary comicdom: the explosion, and ongoing influence, of ground-breaking, formula-exploding, taboo-shattering writers from the British Isles.

The book has a rather unwieldy title - The British Invasion: Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and the Invention of the Modern Comic Book Writer - but don't let that deter you. As Bissette declared in a recent Facebook post: "it's a pretty brilliant book and spot-on. ... I can honestly say Greg's not only done his homework, he's synthesized it all into a concise, involving, flowing read that's so true to the experience of those years ... that I'm getting sensory flashbacks at times ... RECOMMENDED!"

I've gone ahead and ordered a copy for myself, and I'd love it if some of you did the same, so we could do some kind of book club type thing together and discuss it in a forum I'll create for us on Facebook.

If you're in the USA, kindly order your copy from this link, which will result in a few shekels being dropped into yer old pal Jerky's beggin' cup. Meanwhile, if you currently reside in the howling wilds of Canada, then kindly use this link, as I have recently fixed it so that my affiliate program works there now, too! I went through a bit of a hassle to arrange for this, so PLEASE, if you're gonna order this book, order it through my affiliate links!

JERKY'S BOOKSHELF: "JUNKY" BY WILLIAM BURROUGHS

For a dude who made a career out of being the world's most famous heroin junkie, William S. Burroughs sure does seem to get a hell of a lot wrong in Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk". For instance, he claims it takes a few months of serious, daily heroin use to become a full-blown junkie. That's just bullocks. Although it's true the nannies out there who try to tell you you'll be hopelessly addicted after your first fix are equally erroneous, the truth is actually far closer to the alarmists' stance than Old William Lee's. Best to just stay away from that shit.

One notable element of this particular version - there have been many over the years since the first, essentially disposable Ace paperback edition came out in 1953 - is the inclusion of a barely literate introduction by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, as well as a junkie's "hep lingo" lexicon at the back of the book. If you ever wanted to find out how a "lush roller" makes a living, then this appendix is the place to find out.

By the way, if you buy this book - or any book, as long as you access Amazon through this link - I will get a few pennies in my cup! Do it for yer old pal Jerky! Either that, or fucking donate, why don'tcha?! I've got three blogs on the go here, and only 60 dollars worth of ad revenue over the last three years to show for it!

JERKY'S BOOKSHELF: THE PARADISE MOTEL, BY ERIC McCORMACK

Eric McCormack's The Paradise Motel.

"Postmodern" is a word that gets tossed around like... well, like stuff that gets tossed around a lot! See? Even that little "joke" of mine could be considered postmodern, or PoMo as its most fervent and hip adherents tend to call it. Filled with the kind of gruesome grotesques that literary critic and philosopher Julia Kristeva termed "the carnivalesque", Canadian author Eric McCormack's four-part
parade of nightmare imagery is episodic and disjointed.

And yet, there still remains a compelling and occasionally thrilling multi-layered narrative involving one man's quest to find out whether or not his grandfather's tall tales about the gruesome fate of the MacKenzie family, with whom old granddad had grown up back in rural Scotland, are true.

If you like your fiction steeped in violent, gruesome physicality, with a surrealistic twang that occasionally reminded this reader of Yann Martel's Life of Pi by way of the Russians (I'm warning you... it's grim!), then perhaps you might want to give The Paradise Motel a try. Don't let the non sequitur title throw you. This isn't a John Irving pastiche.

As with every book appearing on JERKY'S BOOKSHELF, if you decide to purchase it via Amazon, please go through MY LINKS. The few extra pennies a month this nets me goes a long way towards compelling me to continue producing this blog.

JERKY'S BOOKSHELF: "BATTLING BOY" BY PAUL POPE

Paul Pope's "Battling Boy" is the kind of work that paradoxically fills yours truly with the urge to create comics of my own, but also with angst at the realization that I will never create anything that comes close to the quality on display in this incredibly beautiful book. The narrative, the graphics, the characterizations, the world-building... "Battling Boy" scores in the top rank on every count. Two-hundred-and-two pages of pure, unadulterated comic book bliss. When it comes to youth-friendly, off-brand superheroics, it just doesn't get any better than this.

PS - If you buy this book at Amazon through my site VIA THIS LINK, 

I get a few shekels tossed into my cup on the back-end!