Why You Should Read Rival Angels

Shameless self-promotion time, loyal reader*. Monday morning on the Rival Angels web comic site, a little baby of mine will egg tooth the hell out of it's enclosure and breathe free among the internets for the first time.

What's Rival Angels? It's the web's number one wrestling comic. Created, written and drawn by my fellow Workshed Studio keyboard monkey, Alan Evans. I've helped out with storyboarding, editing, and some dialogue in the past (and will in the future), but this time the content is all-original, all-Justin. I promise, I will not let the awesome falter.

For those who follow Rival Angels, the long-awaited origin of Sun "Li'l Dragon" Wong will finally be told. For those who don't follow Rival Angels, give it a look anyway. What's the worst that could happen?

A postulation in steps:

1) You read Rival Angels at work.

2) Your boss finds you reading it.*2

3) He/she flips his/her lid and starts screaming "Porn Violation!"

4) You hurriedly try to explain that women wrestling doesn't always mean porn and lurch up from your desk only to knock over your coffee, scalding both of your groins in a feat of physic improbability.*3

5) While nursing your damp, toasted parts you are spied by a coworker who has long suspected panky of the hanky type between you and aforementioned boss and now has the proof, what with all the screaming and genital rubbing.

6) Your boss panics and wraps his/her lanyard around the throat of the ill-informed office gossip, ending their ill-informed life both easily and tragicomically.

7) You and your boss are now both on the hook for at least manslaughter.*4

8) While disposing of your 'prison ticket', you have ample time between grunts and daydreams of the Weekend At Bernie's variety to explain to your boss just what Rival Angels is all about.*5

9) Your boss is intrigued and reads Sun Wong's origin for him/herself.

10) A brief conversation ensues in which you tell your boss how to subscribe to the Rival Angels web comic.

11) A longer conversation ensues in which you explain to your boss just how to set up a Google or Yahoo homepage in order to receive no fewer than thrice-weekly updates from Rival Angels.com via a blog aggregator.

12) Days pass, then weeks; you both realize that the office is a better place for the loss of that silly gossip your boss strangled.*6

13) Still enjoying Rival Angels, you come to form a close bond with your co-conspirator. You've gained a friend.

14) Years later, a man comes to you demanding hush money. He threatens to expose your murderous ways. Your boss rightfully lets you deal with it. After all, he/she has already killed someone for your benefit.

15) Upon delivery of the hush money, you take some initiative for once and follow him back to his den of thievery and find a flourishing white slavery operation.

16) Remembering some of the awesome wrestling maneuvers from Rival Angels, you clean house, setting free the grateful slaves and feeling real good about yourself in the bargain.

17) The police refuse to listen to the blackmailer; because really, who's going to take the word of a blackmailing white slaver as gospel?

18) In fact, the gossip who your boss 'instantaneously laid off' was wrapped up in the white slavery operation too.*7

19) You write me an email outlining the events of your life since reading Rival Angels and I fictionalize them in a blog post to solicit others to read Rival Angels.

20) Some other person begins back at step 1.*8

If that's the worst that happens as a result of reading Rival Angels (particularly starting Monday, April 27th), you've got no reason not to.



* Shame filled self-promotion is just too hard to fake.

*2 Say it with me; "Alt-T to switch between tabs".

*3 Why were your groins so close?

*4 Manslaughter could be parsed to read "man's laughter", but there's nothing funny about the word without that apostrophe and that space. English, huh?

*5 Rookie wrestlers living together; laughing, loving, learning, piledriving.

*6 The replacement is nowhere near as gossipy, buys you a drink occasionally, and does not smell of citronella. Maybe they're hot, but let's not get greedy.

*7 That was fortunate.

*8 Spoooooky.

A Better Angel - Chris Adrian

Let’s face facts, people. I, your humble typist, am not even close to being cool*. I’m not on top of the latest music, the hippest fashion, or the coolest drugs*2. The only arena (save for comics) that I can pretend to know about is books. As a bookseller in various capacities for the last 7+ years I’ve seen thousands of titles pass my way. I’ve even read some of them*3. However, even when it comes to books, I still fall a bit short of ‘guy you want at your ‘altbook goth poetry slam and appletini mixer’*4.

I’ve gotten weary over the years, especially of hype and marketing. It’s engendered in me no small amount of Bestseller Backlash*5. This extends to lesser-known authors in a ‘coolness mutation’ of the disease (which explains why I’m so McSweeney’s/New Directions/SoHo Press deficient). This mutation kept me from reading a book called The Children’s Hospital, written by Chris Adrian. It sounded good, I wanted to read it, and then at least four co-workers had to tell me just how good it was. This sort of thing has kept me from Murakami, Marias, Marquez*6 and other ‘M’ name authors.

Time went by, The Children’s Hospital stared at me accusingly each time I unpacked it from a Perseus Distribution box, and I got on with life. Then, as if by magic (or the weekly galley box sent to each Schwartz store from the home office), I saw a book by Chris Adrian with my name on it.

Did I dare? Well, yeah, or I wouldn’t be writing about it. I tore through Adrian’s collection of stories, A Better Angel, and soon after felt like the last guy to insist that the Earth was flat*7. From the first story on it’s evident that Adrian has an envious amount of creativity and an admirable grasp of his characters’ motivations and viewpoints.

Make no mistake; these aren’t quirky slices of life or faith-affirming meditations on mankind’s foibles. What’s in this book, in every story without exception, is sadness, nearly incommunicable rage, twisted pathos and the ever-present specter of death. Having never read Adrian before, I was surprised to say the least. There are elements of the fantastic and the supernatural in many cases, but they serve as a means to explore a reality that’s been turned upside down.

The central question in so many of the stories in A Better Angel is “How does a person deal with death?” The death of loved ones, the death of innocence, the death of spirit in the face of atrocity. The answers proffered won’t help you sleep better at night, but they will make you think hard about your own response to tragedy. This book is not a positive coping mechanism; quite the opposite, it is a rage-filled howl against the inadequacy of emotion and the way in which terrible events weigh down everyday lives.

A Better Angel is definitely not for the faint of heart; it is for the questioners and the seekers who are open to plumbing the depths of anguish and living in the chilly recesses of tortured minds for the space of a story now and then.

*I’m not fishing for compliments here. It’s a simple statement of fact. Let it be.

*2 No “meth-mouth” for me, thanks. Drugs are bad. You heard it here first.

*3 Not many classics, too much genre trash, and a fair amount worth recommending here and on The Inside Flap.

*4 Catch the next mixer at Recreational Sherpa’s; Milwaukee’s newest indoor rock climbing center and pub house! Located in the basement of the third crack house on Cambridge, just off the corner of Brady and Farwell. $5 cover, Tuesday night rails are only $2 until 10pm. Can’t relate to having a street with at least three crack houses in your city or town? Good for you.

*5 A particularly virulent book-borne form of elitism that causes sufferers to recoil from any book that comes highly recommended by any print or online publication (except The Inside Flap), or sells a lot of copies.

*6 “It’s Garcia Marquez, jerk!” I’m aware, but go into any bookstore and you’ll find him shelved in both ways. I don’t make the rules, I just bend them to make weak alphabet jokes.

*7 I know; I seem to start a fair amount of my book recommendations by saying that I held off on reading a book and found I was wrong to do so. What can I say? I spend a lot of time being stubborn and wrong. I could have just come out and said as much, but who am I; Georgia’s senior Senator, Saxby Chambliss*8?

“I don’t know what I’m doing here either. While I’ve got your attention; don’t vote for that Barack Hussein Obama feller. He’s a ‘risky’ choice. I hope you take my Southern Strategy meaning when I say ‘risky’.”

*8 I actually know next to nothing about Saxby Chambliss or his reading habits, save for that he’s a Republican and therefore alternates The Bible and Ann Coulter and is most likely evil. Plus, he’s got an ‘old money’, funny-sounding name worthy of mockery.