Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Although the actual subject of this review is the 2024 TV series production of Shogun, I will be mostly talking about the novel it is based upon. Before we get onto my ramblings about Japan and fiction, I’ll give a summary appraisal of the series (I’ve watched up to episode 8 of 10). The show is fantastic! Repeating my claims to its excellence would get boring real fast, so I suggest taking my word that this recent production is a faithful representation of the book and damn good television even to those unfamiliar with the plot. Not knowing anything about Japan might even be a very fun way to experience this stranger in a strange land story.

The long and short of the storyline is in 1600 an Englishman reaches Japan in an effort to open trade, with the profits aimed at funding the Protestant side of the holy war between Protestants and Catholics. The Catholics had already made inroads (duplicitously) into the political leadership. The hermit-like four island nation Japan has had decades of unstable national leadership around the time the Englishman shows up with modern guns and cannons to shake things up a little. From there, you get a bunch of opportunities for political intrigue (so much), cultural exchange, decapitations, and sailors addressing each other with pure profane panache.

I came upon this book by way of my father. This title was among the handful he would give as his answer to, ‘what is your favorite book’. From what I can remember, what he...

If you have been reading the blog posts here, especially the last few dozen, you could see a common theme among the books being read and critiqued here. This has already been addressed (probably around the review of the DARPA book by Annie Jacobsen a month or so ago) and it will be addressed again. My reading tastes are unchanged since the dawn of my reading habit. It could be summarized as ‘boys with toys’. The toys in today’s case are super fast or super hard to detect airplanes.

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed by Ben Rich and Leo Jano is a straight up awesome oral biography of the creation of the coolest looking airplanes of my childhood. Let me qualify that last accolade, I was not a young pilot in the slightest. I was just some kid ogling pictures of jet fighters that I found in picture books. I put the F-16 on the same pedestal as Hakeem Ollajuwan. I myself did not see myself being a star center of the Houston Rockets that brought the team to the 1994 NBA finals, nor the avionics engineer of the F-117, but I could respect the delivery of both.

Sports memoirs are often boring to me. How many ways can you retell a story about some athlete training for a physical accomplishment and the outcome of the accomplishment? Especially in book form. I do not enjoy reading long passages describing physical actions, events, and outcomes. I feel that sort of subject is better addressed visually. So a critique on some sports biography...

Although the two books being reviewed today are the direct subject, the comic book landscape in the early 90s will be the larger target. Within that already esoteric field, we are going to be talking about one particular design tendency among comic books in the early 90s; guns! Back then, it was all the rage to give characters guns. Big ones. Real looking one: contemporary pistols and sub-machine guns drawn with clean illustrations. Or cartoonishly large futuristic weapons that look best served by a crew of several operators but are handily carried in one hand by a single superhero.

Prior to the 90s the realm of comics contained brightly colored figures that normally use fists or fictional powers to cheerfully stop crime. In the 80s comics took a turn toward the grim, the dark, the grimdark. The heroes became anti-heroes that stopped playing nice. Villains became appealing enough to have their own monthly title, or became abject paragons of ultra-violence. It would only get exaggerated in the next decade.

Guns were introduced into this world by introducing military trained agents or by adding firearms to existing costumed characters. For a while The Incredible Hulk, a character known for feats of strength worthy of ancient myth, was holding a huge caliber rifle in his early 90s adventures. Spawn, a brand new hero in 1991, wields the powers of a biblical supernatural Hellscape and is very often seen holding the most outrageous pieces of science fiction...