Splicer posted:

It has given me some insight into the people not feeling the rest of the comic since a soon as we hit a literary reference I didn't know it started reading like gibberish monkey cheese.

3D Megadoodoo posted:

wät

Such Fun posted:

Abbeycourt Mannor is Camp, capital C: the characters are larger than life stereotypes who never experience any development. They start at 110%, and that’s how they stay throughout the story. It’s why the copy-paste art works so well. Their stereotypes are broadly recognized; it’s that girl who backstabs her sisters, it’s that father figure who sees his daughters as a burden, it’s that redhead who thinks she decide for herself, it’s that puppeteer.
But to then go and base plot points and important jokes on rather specific literary knowledge that falls way outside of the broadly recognize stereotypes: meh.

Jose Valasquez posted:

Reading is for nerds, it's just a funny comic

londonarbuckle posted:

Post-Family Guy media criticism has thoroughly broken people's brains into thinking any joke or reference they don't get is "bad writing." Or, uh, "monkeycheese"

londonarbuckle posted:

Post-Family Guy media criticism has thoroughly broken people's brains into thinking any joke or reference they don't get is "bad writing." Or, uh, "monkeycheese"

Fantastic Foreskin posted:

Goonness knows

ultrafilter posted:

Twitch posted:

As someone who's tried to get through the Count of Monte Cristo a couple times (it's good but very long) I'm psyched as hell

Fantastic Foreskin posted:

It's a pastiche of jane austin from the word go, some literary knowledge is inherent to the concept.

Fantastic Foreskin posted:

Man, you want "assumes you're knowledgeable in then-recent french history", try reading Les Miserables. The footnotes would be twice as long as the book. I didn't make it through that one though. If Monte Cristo is the literary equivalent of candy, it's whatever the opposite is.

Fantastic Foreskin posted:

Man, you want "assumes you're knowledgeable in then-recent french history", try reading Les Miserables. The footnotes would be twice as long as the book. I didn't make it through that one though. If Monte Cristo is the literary equivalent of candy, it's whatever the opposite is.

Zil posted:

Have they ever done books of their comics? Would buy Abbeycourt Manor.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

I've read it a couple times, being freakishly at home with long books. Is funny reading it considering at the time it would have been published per chapter in newspapers, and has a nearly episodic structure as a result, it's easy to picture people getting hype as hell over it back in the day.

It did take me a bit to understand the whole setup, since Monte Cristo does rely on historical context that would have been very vividly in living memory at the time, but not so much to English language readers 150 years later. The edition I have has some very extensive footnotes, at least. The whole point being basically Dantes is caught up in historical events that his co-worker and his fiance's jealous cousin use as an excuse to get him locked up by a paranoid state, with a government prosecutor making sure Dantes goes away for life just because he might get blackmailed over it.


With a good heaping of Dickens, whose naming conventions and characterisation is frankly really not that far off. Structure's more of a Wilde esque farce, though.

Although I'm looking forward to the particularly Dickensenian poor bloke probably being entertainingly terrible at elaborate revenge.

3D Megadoodoo posted:

I finished Balzac's Le Cousin Pons the other night and started reading La Cousine Bette. The former came with myriad end notes while the latter has, so far at page 120, had one footnote by the translator, and reads much better. If I need to know who d'Löökokkimoolöökokkiimoo-Ööparaplyykikkeriikokkeroo is, I'll look them up in the encyclopedia.

e: The edition of Monte Cristo I've read had no notes:

Fantastic Foreskin posted:

I grew up on Duck comics and I don't think that one made it to the states, I am very jealous.

Zulily Zoetrope posted:

Yeah, Europe has its whole own Disney canon that I think rarely makes it across the Atlantic. I've never read a lot of Marvel or DC Comics but I grew up on the Duck Avenger, which was an Italian series starring Donald Duck as the titular Avenger:



I haven't read their version of The Count of Monte Cristo, but Donald Duck comics was my first encounter with Les Miserables.

Fantastic Foreskin posted:

I grew up on Duck comics and I don't think that one made it to the states, I am very jealous.

Monte Cristo I don't feel needs them, a passing knowledge of who Napoleon was and how paranoid governments work is enough. Les Miserables had me googling things every other chaper or so since an intimate knowledge of French history and society are both assumed and integral to the plot.

The blow-by-blow of Waterloo was excessive, to say the lease.

Fantastic Foreskin posted:

It's a pastiche of jane austin from the word go, some literary knowledge is inherent to the concept.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

I've read it a couple times, being freakishly at home with long books. Is funny reading it considering at the time it would have been published per chapter in newspapers, and has a nearly episodic structure as a result, it's easy to picture people getting hype as hell over it back in the day.

Twitch posted:

I just bought whatever Amazon ebook version came up first and looked unabridged.

Splicer posted:

Yup, I've been loving the Jane Austen stuff because I Get It, but Napoleon showing up and thingy meeting an old guy in jail were funny but I was clearly missing something, and if there's people who have been feeling like that about all the Jane Austin bits I can see why they weren't as enthused as the rest of us.

e: Which is not a "problem" with the comic, familiarity of the source material is kind of required to get everything out of a pastiche

Leon Sumbitches posted:

Aren't there a ton of loose ends? The vampire, the juggler, and so on?