When Anita Blake Says "Arise and Serve Me," It Could Mean Any Number of Things

[quizzicalsphinx.livejournal.com]

Lock up your sons! Chris from the ISB is back with another issue of "Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter: The Laughing Corpse: Executioner", a title that never fails to amaze me with its sheer number of colons.

Let's talk editing here. Chris points it out, and I agree: this comic has been going on for thirty-one issues now, and there are still massive dialogue panels explaining what, exactly, Anita is doing--made even more insulting to the reader by the fact that Anita also tends to explain things we've just seen to the other characters, who I can only assume are meant to be readers-by-proxy. Overall, it has a feeling of speaking down to the audience, as if LKH assumes that her readers are so dumb or her prose so lofty that she must have frequent "YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE?" moments to let us catch up.

Likewise LKH does not seem to realise that comics have, um, pictures. That, or she is overly thrilled by her own deathless prose and seems to feel that no reader can understand the true flavour of the original novel if the comic does not incorporate vast chunks of narration. By now, one would think that LKH would understand this medium, considering how deeply she has involved herself with the editorial process of this thing.

In other AB:VH:tLC:E news, Linkara, comic reviewer at That Guy With the Glasses, promised viewers an Atop The Fourth Wall review of the Anita Blake comic a while back. It's going to be interesting to see how many of his criticisms run parallel with Sims'.