Even in the metaphysical sense, if you don’t believe in anything higher on the cosmic food chain than ourselves, you should be able to get behind this. After all, couldn’t the transition from holy to mythology be considered death to even the idea of a deity? Or, at the very least, a demotion en route to getting canned, just the first stop on the road to extinction? Though he’s not the first to explore it, my first experience with this sort of thing was thanks to Neil Gaiman, in both Sandman and then American Gods. It’s pretty much been on my mind since.

I’ve also got Sir James Frazer on the brain this morning, hence the title of this post. While I haven’t been reading The Golden Bough, from which the quote is taken, I have been digging through Tim Taylor’s excellent The Buried Soul, which explores the invention of ‘death’, the idea, and the development of the human concept of the soul from an archaeological perspective as some research for the post-Awakening Volume Two book Alex and I are doing. On that same count, if anybody can recommend a definitive, unexpurgated version of The Golden Bough I’d be thrilled. It seems like there are a few too many to choose from for me to be comfortable hunting and pecking through.

In other writing news, I’m pretty excited to note that I finished the first draft on my first non-comic short story in more than five years yesterday. It’s just a baby, only 4,000 words in its current state, but I’m still excited. I’ve mentioned it in interviews, but part of what drove me to write comics when I first started giving it a whirl five or six years ago was my complete distaste with my own straight fiction narrative. A lot of it, all short fiction, read more like an outline for something larger with very cold and detached direction, not unlike a script. After years of studying (not formally, just reading anything and writing comics), I decided it was time to dive back in and see where it takes me. So far so good and I think more is on the way in the coming weeks and months. I’m planning on making 2010 the year of the short…

Some miscellany for you:

Just found this last night, copies of Awakening Volume One which Alex and I signed for Lone Star Comics are available on their website. May be a fun last-minute holiday gift for the noir or zombie fan whom you hold close to your heart. For those of you new to the site, be sure to check out the Awakening Comixography by following the link here, or check out the entire Comixography via the nav bar at the top of the page.

Tweeted by Templesmith, PR Newswire points out the Top 10 PR Blunders of 2009. Some amazing stuff. And when I say amazing, I mean horrifyingly stupid.

Just watched Drag Me to Hell last night, and it was everything I would expect from a fun Raimi horror flick. The last 20-minutes were disappointingly obvious, which led to a bit of a ‘hurry up and end’ face from me but overall I was pretty happy with it. My biggest gripe was the use of CG where traditional effects would’ve matched both the feel of the movie and the history of the filmmaker much better. The same could be said for a few flicks though, (::cough:: Crystal Skull ::cough::), and seems to just be indicative of the times.

I was more enthusiastic about Quantum of Solace. What an amazing movie. Buyer beware though: if you didn’t like Casino Royale, or if you don’t remember it, you may want to stay away or refresh yourself, depending on how you felt about it. This was a direct sequel which picked up shortly after the end of Casino and didn’t explain itself for the benefit of initiates in the audience. I liked that. You rarely see movies with the same type of continuity you get out of, say, sequential fiction, picking up the story with the next ‘issue’ so to speak. It was welcome to not have to sit through 20-minutes explaining who these people were and why I should care, and more welcome that it wasn’t avoided because it was a new story but because they’d already been through all that in the first go ’round. Last I heard this new series is planned as a trilogy or quadrilogy, and I hope it’s true. Looking forward to the next one immensely.

Website note the first, if you’d like to leave a comment you have to click on the title of the entry of choice on the front page. You’ll be brought into that entry and a comment field will be hanging out at the bottom of the page. As I stumble across other quirks, I’ll let you all know.

Off to begin another short while yesterday’s cools off a bit. Happy Friday, everyone.

- Nick