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DeMatteis and Dostoevsky
Oct. 4th, 2010 08:30 pmFavorite comic-related read of the week: JM DeMatteis on Kraven's Last Hunt, the way stories take on lives of their own, the vital role Mary Jane plays in Spider-Man's life*, how it almost became a Batman story with Hugo Strange**, and the influence of Dostoevsky on Kraven himself.
An extra bonus was seeing just how openly JMD interacts with the people who comment on his blog. Every other comic writer I've seen online is very selective about what they respond to, and even then, they keep their responses very curt and limited. JMD is warm, effusive, and you get the sense that he just loves talking with his fans. Henchgirl said that it's how I'd interact with my fans, and I think she's right. Maybe when I finally write about JMD's Two-Face: Crime and Punishment for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
about_faces, I'll ask him a couple questions about the story and see what happens.
I got up the nerve to write to him, and soon we had a back and forth about Dostoevsky, our mutual loves of The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot***, and how I couldn't get past the first quarter of Crime and Punishment.
I've now been personally ordered by JM DeMatteis to finally finish reading Crime and Punishment and then let him know what I think.
Henchgirl thought my subsequent fan-giddiness and mincing Homer-Simpson-style effete excitement was adorable.
Welp. Looks like I'm gonna have to put off my plans to finally catch up with Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber to finally catch up with the other big Dostoevsky book I keep avoiding. Actually, before going back to Amber, I tried to read War and Peace--translated by the same people who made me fall in love with Dostoevsky--but I just can't bloody get into it.
So back to Roskolnikov it is, on the personal orders of he who might just be my all-time favorite comic writer! Not a bad incentive!
*After reading more and more Spider-Man from the 70's to the early 90's, I am convinced that Peter needs MJ as his life partner to make Peter-centric stories work. She's a wonderful character in her own right, and without her, Peter is just an annoying bucket of angst, guilt, and neuroses. I do enough of that in my own life, thank you very much.
**I was just thinking the other day about what it would take to write an ultimate Hugo story, but then I realized that the story I was coming up with was essentially just ripping off Kraven's Last Hunt, so I found that tidbit both amusing and frustrating that we didn't see such a story. But instead, we got Doug Moench's "Prey," which is one of the greatest Batman stories ever (and stupidly out of print! WTF?!), so that's not a bad trade-off.
***I fell so in love with The Idiot that I spent summer of 2002 writing my own stage adaptation, which I'd planned to submit for performance with the Rude Mechanicals. I wonder how well that script holds up. Would I want to modernize the dialogue? Stay true to the original text? Rework the ending? Did I do anything to actually justify it being adapted to stage in the first place? Because I loathe pointless, unjustified adaptations of works from one medium to another.
If you have nothing new to say with it, why do it at all? So I have to worry about what, if anything, the twenty-year-old me of 2002 had to say.
An extra bonus was seeing just how openly JMD interacts with the people who comment on his blog. Every other comic writer I've seen online is very selective about what they respond to, and even then, they keep their responses very curt and limited. JMD is warm, effusive, and you get the sense that he just loves talking with his fans. Henchgirl said that it's how I'd interact with my fans, and I think she's right. Maybe when I finally write about JMD's Two-Face: Crime and Punishment for
about_faces, I'll ask him a couple questions about the story and see what happens.I got up the nerve to write to him, and soon we had a back and forth about Dostoevsky, our mutual loves of The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot***, and how I couldn't get past the first quarter of Crime and Punishment.
I've now been personally ordered by JM DeMatteis to finally finish reading Crime and Punishment and then let him know what I think.
Henchgirl thought my subsequent fan-giddiness and mincing Homer-Simpson-style effete excitement was adorable.
Welp. Looks like I'm gonna have to put off my plans to finally catch up with Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber to finally catch up with the other big Dostoevsky book I keep avoiding. Actually, before going back to Amber, I tried to read War and Peace--translated by the same people who made me fall in love with Dostoevsky--but I just can't bloody get into it.
So back to Roskolnikov it is, on the personal orders of he who might just be my all-time favorite comic writer! Not a bad incentive!
*After reading more and more Spider-Man from the 70's to the early 90's, I am convinced that Peter needs MJ as his life partner to make Peter-centric stories work. She's a wonderful character in her own right, and without her, Peter is just an annoying bucket of angst, guilt, and neuroses. I do enough of that in my own life, thank you very much.
**I was just thinking the other day about what it would take to write an ultimate Hugo story, but then I realized that the story I was coming up with was essentially just ripping off Kraven's Last Hunt, so I found that tidbit both amusing and frustrating that we didn't see such a story. But instead, we got Doug Moench's "Prey," which is one of the greatest Batman stories ever (and stupidly out of print! WTF?!), so that's not a bad trade-off.
***I fell so in love with The Idiot that I spent summer of 2002 writing my own stage adaptation, which I'd planned to submit for performance with the Rude Mechanicals. I wonder how well that script holds up. Would I want to modernize the dialogue? Stay true to the original text? Rework the ending? Did I do anything to actually justify it being adapted to stage in the first place? Because I loathe pointless, unjustified adaptations of works from one medium to another.
If you have nothing new to say with it, why do it at all? So I have to worry about what, if anything, the twenty-year-old me of 2002 had to say.
