hudsonhawk

"Beating a dead horse" Meaning: To continue an activity that is no longer useful or constructive From Salty Dog Talk: The Nautical Origins of Everyday Expressions by Bill Beavis and Richard G. McCloskey: This tradition may also be the origin of the term "Horse latitudes" to refer to the area of light winds and calms between 30 and 35 degrees north of the equator. Ships sailing from Europe would reach these waters about a month into the voyage.

This is a test I learned a few years ago to help identify passive voice. It isn't necessarily 100% accurate, but it's a good litmus test: If a sentence still makes sense when you add "by zombies," it's probably written in passive voice. Example: "The ring was given to the woman" is passive voice. "The ring was given to the woman by zombies" makes sense. "Someone gave the woman a ring" is active voice. "Someone gave the woman a ring by zombies" doesn't make sense. Over the past few years, the writers whose work I regularly edit have come to learn that a comment of "zombies!" means they need to rewrite the sentence in active voice. "Zombie Attack" and "Zombie Apocalypse" are reserved for whole paragraphs or chapters written in passive voice.

I'm not sure if it would be considered "lesser known," but High Fidelity (adapted from the Nick Hornby book) definitely wasn't a blockbuster. The book is about a record-store owner who experiences sort of a mid-life crises following a break-up and has to come to terms with his life, his relationships, and to some extent his obsession with pop-culture. He does this in part by tracking down the women at the other end of his most painful break-ups and trying to figure out what went wrong. The movie stars John Cusack, has a couple cameos by a thoroughly unlikable character played by Tim Robbins, and was one of Jack Blacks early major roles. It's kind of a chick flick for guys. The thing I loved about the movie is how it completely captures the book while completely changing the details. The book is set in London and is very British, but the movie is set in an American city (Chicago, I think). Largely by changing the pop culture "language" of the characters, the film makers made the movie very American. The result is that the book and the movie are somehow exactly the same and completely different at the same time.

James Bolivar Degris from Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series. He's the perfect mix of swashbuckler, mastermind, and scoundrel, has a wicked sense of humor, and in general perfectly embodies the "rogue with a heart of gold" archetype. I haven't read the entire series, but I always keep an eye out for books I haven't read when I visit used bookstores.

It's definitely a different kind of reading, and kind of an acquired taste. Unfortunately the "taste" for it can be difficult to acquire because there are far too many comics that don't properly take advantage of the medium. A lot of current writers in particular seem to miss the point that a comic should tell a story with words AND pictures. When the page is full of huge blocks exposition and dialog and the characters are mostly standing around until the action scene, it kind of misses the point. The writer is basically writing a novel and letting the artist handle the difficult-to-describe parts. Older comics tend to be much better at using the combination of words and pictures to their fullest, but the stories tend to be kind of simplistic and hokey. The best bang for the buck in my opinion is Frank Miller's work up until 300, probably because he's both an artist and a writer (and hadn't gone crazy yet). Miller's art has a kinetic energy and tone that allows him to tell the basic story completely in pictures, but he knows how to add just the right amount of text to supplement the story and make it more meaningful without relegating the art to a secondary element.

I definitely consider graphic novels worth reading, and I think more and more readers have started to realize that in the past 20 years or so. I personally didn't read many comics when I was a kid, but my sophomore year of college a friend forced me to read Watchmen and Batman: Year One and I was hooked for life. My favorite comic authors are Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, and Grant Morrison, though there are plenty of other people who I read. I think the main stumbling block a lot of people have with comics is that "mainstream" comics are the super-hero genre and the genres that people are familiar with from other types of fiction are generally considered to be "alternative" and, with the exception of a handful of fantasy and horror comics, are generally harder to find in (or completely missing from) most comic shops. If I'm trying to convince someone that something is worth reading, I usually try to see what genres the enjoy from other art forms and get them a comic that matches their tastes. So someone who likes Tim Powers novels will get something by Alan Moore, someone who reads urban fantasy will get Fables or Sandman, a fan of relationship dramas gets Strangers in Paradise, the Hunter S. Thompson fan gets Transmetropolitan, etc. That way they can get used to the art form with a genre they already like and branch out into the wider and weirder world of comics from there.