It's a good life, if you don't weaken

Brian K Vaughan is the writer of a lot of very good American comics. Runaways, about a group of teenagers who discover their parents are secretly supervillains, Y: The Last Man, about the aftermath of an unexplained event that killed every male animal on Earth, except for one man and his pet monkey, and Ex Machina, about a former superhero who becomes mayor of New York. Apart from writing his own brilliantly different comics, he's a big fan of sequential art in general, and thinks people should read more of it. Specifically, that they should stop reading superhero comics exclusively and check out some other less-known genres.

So he set up a competition on his website, recommending ten graphic novels, and asking everyone to pick one. The ten lucky winners drawn out of the hat would get one for free, out of BKV's own pocket. As if that wasn't generous enough, a comic shop got in touch with him and offered him a good deal on his bulk purchase, so Brian decided to buy a graphic novel for every one of the 122 people who entered the competition in the first place!

Which is how I come to have a copy of "It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken", by Seth, an autobiographical story chronicling his attempts to track down an obscure cartoonist of the 40s and 50s called Kalo. This being before the internet was full of this kind of trivia, it involved a lot of going round and digging up old magazines, looking up names on electoral registers and phone books, and so on. We also get to see Seth's relationships with his friends, family, cats and the various people he meets along the way.

I do actually read quite a bit of non-superhero comic stuff already - aside from the Beano and Dandy (although the latter's not really worth reading nowadays), I'll buy anything by James Kochalka or Alan Moore, and dabble in other writers from time to time. But even so, "It's A Good Life..." didn't really click for me, somehow. One-panel cartoons are Seth's primary obsession in life, but they've never really been my thing, and somehow he doesn't manage to sell me on why he finds them so fascinating. And his self-pitying narration gets on my nerves a bit, as does his habit of saying something trite and obviously thinking he's being profound.

Even so, this is the kind of thing I should like. Every criticism I can think of, whether it be the content, the writing, the art, anything about it, could also apply to Kochalka's stuff, which I adore, so I'm not really sure what my problem is. It might be an acquired taste - I'll read it a couple more times, check out some more of his work and see if I change my mind.

Incidentally, Seth was called Gregory Gallant before he decided to change to the one-syllable name he currently uses. The biography at the back says "Looking back, this may have been a youthful error ... however, little can be done about it now." If I was called something as cool as Gregory Gallant, I'd never even consider changing my name!

The weather's a bit miserable - there was a partial eclipse of the sun up there beyond the clouds this morning, but nobody around here had any chance of seeing it.

I had a really weird dream last night, involving a new variant of the game othello. Weird because I can clearly remember all the details of this game - the settings and people involved in the dream changed from one moment to the next, but throughout it someone was demonstrating this new game to me and I was pointing out its many obvious flaws. The rules stayed consistent, though - it was played on a board with 14 rows and 8 columns, with the starting position in the fifth and sixth rows, and the central two columns.

You could play a disc on the left-hand column at any time, and add a line of discs of your colour horizontally or diagonally back to a disc of your colour anywhere else on the board. And on your next turn you could move that disc (the one that the line of discs from the edge pointed back to) somewhere else on the board in a straight line, provided there were no other discs in the way, rather than placing a new one.

I don't think it would work as a real game if you tried to play it, but I'm just impressed that I dreamed up a whole new game like that. It was called Othello Camouflage, I think. Othello Something-completely-incongruous-beginning-with-C, anyway.

I've just been practising memory stuff - hour cards, which is always the one I can get into the easiest. I think it's something about the tactile aspect of picking up the pack of cards and flicking through it, as opposed to just looking at numbers on a piece of paper, but I can do the cards much more easily without getting distracted. I'm still not as fast as I was before the 2004 world championships - I could do 30 packs in an hour then and just about look through each one four times. I was only trying 24 today and didn't quite finish in time. Still, that's the kind of thing that comes back to me with practice. I might have a go at an hour numbers tonight, if I can find the time. Probably won't, though.