Also, today's XKCD is this:
Featuring the alternate text of "Except for anything by Lewis Carroll or Tolkien, you get five made-up words per story. I'm looking at you, Anathem."
Alice in popular culture sighting no. 66: I picked up the deluxe edition of City of Heroes the other day. It came with various additions, including the first three expansions for the game. The first of these is entitled "Through the Looking Glass"
Alice in popular culture sighting no. 56: At Rockabaret last night, they were showing various cartoons on a screen over the stage. Some were old cartoons, such as Felix the cat and a Betty Boop cartoon entitled "Betty in Blunderland".
Alice in popular culture sighting no. 53: Page 196 of "The Portable Door" by Tom Holt features the lines "Sophie raised her head and stared at him. She still looked as though she'd followed a large white rabbit with a pocket watch down a hole in the ground, but some colour was starting to return to her cheeks."
Alice in popular culture sighting no. 54: Danielle Horvat (the actress who plays Taylah Jordan in Neighbours) has a picture on her MySpace of her in an Alice costume. It appears to be the same costume as worn by Pyretta Blaze.
Alice in popular culture sighting no. 55: The Screaming Trees album, "Buzz Factory", contains a song entitled "The looking glass cracked". While the lyrics don't refer to Alice specifically, they revolve around themes of altered reality and "going beyond". In looking them up, I also found that there's a Babyshambles song called "Through the looking glass". No doubt it's horrible.
Exactly why it's called this is unknown to me. Also, I am unsure whether the little character to the left of the name is meant to be the Jabberwocky...
Upstairs I found the rest of the set as well as a plain "black & white" (or red and white) version.
Notice that the label calls it an "Alice in Wonderland" set, but the box just refers to it as "The Alice Chess Set". This is probably as it incorporates characters from Through the Looking-Glass (Queen Alice, the white king, the white knight, Tweedledum and Tweedledee) and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (white rabbit and the mad hatter). The box also features queen Alice and the queen of hearts.
Interestingly, there's a full list of pieces for both sides at the beginning of Through the Looking-Glass, but this doesn't include Alice. Likely the decision was made to have the set feature more well-known characters, such as the ones used in the Disney version (though the white knight is anomalous to that idea).
Alice in popular culture sighting no. 35: In a performance at TED back in 2007, Jill Sobule and Julia Sweeney performed a song about "imperfect heroes" that mentioned Lewis Carroll and Alice.
Alice in popular culture sighting no. 33: I recently bought the first two volumes of "Fables" by Bill Willingham. There's multiple Alice references in both books, though Alice is conspicuously absent from the entire series. In vol. 1, "Legends in Exile", Snow White is carrying a sword, which she notes "is the vorpal blade of Jabberwocky fame. Kills in one cut, snicker-snack and all that? Does all the fighting for you?"
Then in vol 2, "Animal Farm", some of the residents of "The Farm" are shown to be the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit (not to be confused with Br'er rabbit, who is depicted as white and wearing a waistcoat, the actual White Rabbit is dressed in his herald's uniform), and various playing cards. Also, a quote from Wizard on the back of the book states that the book "Tosses traditional fairy tales down the rabbit hole."
Last night I attended a talk at Leicester central lending library by Bryan Talbot. I initially attended simply to have him sign my copy of Alice in Sunderland but it turned out to be a very interesting talk.
He talked about various things to do with being a writer and artist of numerous comics/graphic novels. Most interesting was his talk about the subliminal side of comic book artwork. He pointed out how a lot of various elements affect the way you read a comic without you realising it. Things such as how the pages are laid out (including things like panel grids, etc) and things like colour choice (even that of the background of a page). He also talked about his work on "The Tale of One Bad Rat" and how he tried to make it accessible to a non-comic reading audience. A lot of what he said got me thinking about my Digital cultures sessions and things such as signs and signifiers and "readerly" and "writerly" approaches to reading a work. If only we could've had a session where we discussed graphic novels!
Of course, I did get a chance to have him sign my copy of Alice in Sunderland and it's now part of my collection of signed graphic novels, which includes Alan Moore's V for Vendetta and Karl Kopinski and Gordon Rennie's first Kal Jerico collection.
Doktor Sleepless is a new ongoing series by Warren Ellis. While this is of course something interesting in itself (especially as Warren has compared it to Transmetropolitan), what makes it especially interesting is that it also has its own wiki (along with certain other sites). This isn't just a place that summarises what happens in the comic, this is the entire virtual world of the comics. They affect each other and grow out of each other.
