Three Somehow Related Topics

Maybe they're only related for me, inside my head. I've been thinking about these three things, together anyway for only a few weeks, but as I tried to develop blog posts about them, they seemed best served all being together, which made sense for two of the three. The third one, though, fit unorthodoxly because of the metaphor.

The first topic entered my brain before the freak accident. I had ridden over to the Dollar Bookstore to look around, but mainly to get out of the house. That was a place I would ride to spend some time, look for my authors, look for random other oddities (sometimes you could find them), and eventually leave. They do have a comic book section, and I would usually check out the titles. On this day, a cover caught my attention, and I was drawn to it.

At some point I'll be posting a long post about my relationship with comics, how it's evolved over the years, and bits about the artists I always liked and would follow independently of the company or title. That's a short list with names like Frank Miller, Tim Truman, Mike Mignola, Mike Allred, and possibly my favorite superhero artist, Joe Quesada. Quesada now runs Marvel Entertainment, and has been a force with their recent developments: dropping the Comic Code and pushing for high-end movie productions. He started out as an artist doing the pencilling of fringe comic books. For fans of his work, his style stands out, catches the eye anyway. I liken it to art experts who can look at two similar pieces and declare confidently oh, this one is so-and-so, and this other one, who cares.

Now, the comic above is an issue of Solar: Man of the Atom, #23 to be exact. It was published by Valiant Comics, a company that was a biggie when I was at the height of my collecting, and their logo looked like this one, before the dark time and it was changed. Just seeing the logo brought back memories. At the time I was collecting, Solar, not a character I cared for, was maybe a year past this issue, probably in the mid 30s. Solar was one of the elder Valiant statesmen, having been created in the '60s and, like Magnus: Robot Fighter, another '60s-era hero, were property bought by Valiant and relaunched in the early '90s to kick-ff their new company.

Okay. Off the rails for a second, but the history is the context. That above issue of Solar was a title I didn't read, and from a time that was before I was even getting into it, so it was a cover I'd never seen before. But, from across the tiny comic book section at this Dollar Bookstore, I could tell it had a Joe Quesada cover. I thought, Wha...? When did he do covers for Solar? I came over and found a few other ones, and later I went to look up some of his early gigs in the industry. To fans of Joey the Q, that cover is unmistakable. When I went to find that picture, the one above, the website had other covers, and there was another one I'd never seen before, but I could pick it out of even the smallest of icons. Here's that one, also obvious for longtime fans:

That whole day was weird at the Dollar Bookstore's comic section. There were a whole lot of titles that during the early '90s would have been worth between ten and fifty bucks, and very hard to come by. That was before the collapse, a topic I'll be covering in my piece on me and comics. But to see all these early Valiant and Image books, books so hard to get and coveted in my time, sitting here on the shelf for a buck cracked me up. And to think, I was only interested in the Joe Quesada covers.

Seeing them inspired me to find some of his earliest comic book non-cover work. It turns out I have most of it, save for two little known series for DC Comics, two little known series I'm currently in the process of obtaining. They look really nice, at least from the little I can see.

One of the "my authors", one of the guys I check out at all book stores, is Haruki Murakami. I'm a very big fan, was turned onto him by my dad, and have since turned both Corrie and Norm onto him. One of his books I've read is Dance Dance Dance. It's fun and exciting and out there, like so much of his work. I learned, though, that Dance Dance Dance is a sequel of sorts to another, earlier Murakami novel called A Wild Sheep Chase, a book I'm reading now on loan from Norm.

Sheep Chase is noticeably a young Murakami voice, but it's obviously him, and it's a blast.

Norm discovered that A Wild Sheep Chase is the last of a trilogy, known as the Rat trilogy (a character is called the Rat), and that the first two books of the trilogy were translated into English, but weren't ever sold stateside.

Wha...? How awesome. You're telling me that there are English versions of the earliest Murakami novels, that they represent two pieces of a trilogy that itself got an addition edition? Yes indeedy.

The first is called Hear the Wind Sing, and the second is called Pinball, 1973. Hear the Wind Sing was the first full manuscript Murakami wrote for a contest, which he won. Pinball, 1973, from what I've read, has one of the characters from the earlier story searching for a pinball machine, among the other usual Murakami adventures.

They were translated by Alfred Birnbaum, whom I believe is the main Murakami English translator.

I was able to find the books, both on Amazon and  Ebay, with various prices. Here's a picture used by a seller:

So far the theme looks to be old works by well known, or maybe "well known" artists. Blasts from the pasts. Anyway, a looking back, or a hearkening back to an older time seemed to connect the three things in my head, and the last thing here was the last part of the puzzle that I couldn't divorce from the Quesada/Murakami Connection.

I'm talking about the steeping of wormwood in high percentage alcohol; the creation of thujone. Oh yes, I'm talking about our old friend absinthe.

Nothing hearkens back like tales of the green fairy.

I watched a documentary on Absinthe, while most of it was in French, the history lesson was interesting. A lady nurse in Switzerland concocted a tincture that utilized some of the well-known or highly-popular curative herbs, mostly wormwood, and the common liquid used for tinctures, high-powered booze. The drink became popular among the tiny villages near the Swiss-French border, and it took the invasion of Algeria, and the practice of sending absinthe along with the French soldiers, to bring it back to Paris and turn it into a phenomena.

In the years after the Algerian campaign, absinthe in Paris became the most popular drink around. Everybody drank it everyday. That's barely an exaggeration. It was a serious phenomena. In a small village, a guy slashed and slaughtered his whole family, and he'd been drinking absinthe. The small anti-absinthe crowd used this incident as a rallying cry, and eventually got absinthe banned. It wasn't much discussed that the family killer had drank two bottles of wine and half a bottle of brandy along with his 3 ounces of absinthe.

So, after a few years, absinthe was banned throughout the western world, including even America, who barely knew anything about the drink. It was being brewed in New Orleans, but that was about the extent of the green fairy's reach.

In 2007, the US government lifted the ban on the drink, as other countries across Europe loosened their grip, and all the countries have decided to put certain limits on the thujone levels. America has some of the strictest guidelines, at about a 10mg concentration. Is that enough to feel to feel the thujone? Who knows.

In Europe, the guidelines are a little different. Some of the Swiss makes kept making it secretly, and once they lifted the ban, and once the guidelines were set, some of those makers just went back to regular production. That's because in Switzerland, the acceptable high level of thujone is a 35mg concentration.

When we in Europe seven years ago, once I learned that the absinthe over there was just a shell of it's former self, I was disappointed, and didn't really look to buy any of it to bring home. I was under the impression that the thujone levels had been neutered, making the drink just high-octane bitterness, instead of the high-octane stony bitterness that was famous back in the day.

I'm not sure when the laws changed, but a concentration of 35mg is pretty much exactly how strong the thujone content was back in the 1850s. Check out the last few lines of this data sheet:

Just look at the second column for the different brands or regions throughout history.

Go Swiss Absinthe! Here's a link to a catalog of sorts for strong absinthe. It looks pretty cool, and at some point I'll be adding some of the good stuff to my collection of  "good stuffs".

Rear-view mirror looks; artists and muses; newly revealed revelations...this is the thread of these three topics. That I couldn't separate them shows the strength my brain gave that thread.