Taking a break as I reply to some e-mails. I'm in nocturnal mode again and I just finished having some lunch. At 2am!? I had a semi-productive half day so far, though. Got some groceries, unpacked my Chicago stuff and played some guitar. I bought 2 books yesterday and read bits of those as well. One was Becky Cloonan's East Coast Rising which I've been looking forward to for a while now and the other was Mark Rothko's The Artist's Reality. ECR has been great so far if not a bit light on story. I think that's been the general observation of Tokyopop books for me so far. The deconstruction of story makes the 200 or so pages kinda fly by and I'm left without much plot. Course, these are meant to be 3 issue works so I suppose I should just think of first issues as a first "act". Don't get me wrong, I'm still really impressed with the work and this isn't a complaint but, rather, just an observation. Anyway, I appreciated the amount of detail poured into the characters. Everything from their clothes, scars and tattoos were soaked with style. If these hipster pirates really existed, bars and clubs would look hella cooler I bet. I also appreciated the creative panel work on some of the spreads. I rarely do the spread thing so it was nice to see ships draped across 2 pages as it flies through the water. Really cool stuff. Rothko's book, I've only read the intro to where his son kinda talks about how the book came about. Will have a better review of it once I dive into it a bit more.

TAK