The discussion about female characters is still going on with Elisabeth Moon responding to Rose Lemberg and Amal El-Mohtar responding to Elisabeth Moon.
Nick Mamatas talks about the perils of the wineglass shaped story. I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusions, but it is an interesting post.
The 2011 James Tiptree Award goes to Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston.
At The Guardian, Damien Walter is looking for indie-published weird fiction.
French comic creator Jean Giraud a.k.a. Moebius died of cancer aged 73. I discovered Jean Giraud’s works along with the rest of the Franco-Belgian-Dutch comic universe as a teenager. I was often in Rotterdam and Antwerp at the time, because my Dad worked there, and being a teenaged girl, I loved prowling the city. Naturally, I was attracted by the many French, Belgian and Dutch comic books that could be found at any bookstore or news stand with their gorgeous artwork, lots of strong female characters in the best sense of the term and subjects which went far beyond what was available in Germany or the US at the time. And best of all, since the comics were in Dutch, my parents could not even complain that reading comics would automatically destroy my reading and writing ability. So I found Franka and Yoko Tsuno and Blake and Mortimer and Suske en Wiske and Natasha and Bruce J. Hawker and Storm and Comanche and De Geuzen and The Red Knight and Aria and Michel Vaillant and Rik Ringers and Buck Danny and Corentin and Luc Orient and Valerian and Veronique and I also found Jean Giraud’s Lieutenant Blueberry. Blueberry was cool and wonderfully drawn – a spaghetti western in comic form. And even I who didn’t like westerns enjoyed Blueberry. So did my Dad, coincidentally. He usually didn’t look at my comics, but he did flip through Blueberry and remarked how wonderful the artwork was.
I don’t remember if I discovered his SF work created as Moebius at that time. I probably saw them on the shelf, but for some reason I never bought them. So I remember Jean Giraud, creator of of the improbably named Lieutenant Blueberry as well as a fabulous one-shot adventure comic set in South America, which I liked even better than Blueberry, rather than Moebius, creator of The Incal and The Airtight Garage and one-time artist on the Silver Surfer of all things.
But whichever name he used, he was one of the greats.
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