Another Winning Week
I may soon be a marked man at work.
Why? Because I've won another week in the office football pool in part because I picked the Green Bay Packers to lose - this time to the Pittsburgh Steelers.
I was actually surprised at this; I hadn't expected to even be in the running, since I knew I lost one of my high-point picks yesterday, but it turns out I did better than expected, and would win if the Packers lost. Now, I'm not really all that emotional or involved in football, but I did engage in a little trash-talking with a couple of the Packers fans (including the guy running the pool) at work. For a change, I didn't start talking as if I'd already won, but a couple of them did talk as if I'd already lost!
Needless to say, I feel this gives me some nice bragging rights tomorrow!
(To be fair, neither team really deserved to win tonight's game. The Packers utterly sucked in the first half, and the Steelers turned around and nearly choked in the fourth quarter, almost blowing a 27-3 lead. They hung on for dear life and won 27-20.)
Ah, sports. How else can I stir up all that testosterone flowing through my system?
Campbell has a very sketchy, busy style which I find hard to read. His sense of composition I also find a little dodgy, and I often find it hard to tell his people apart. But he does an okay job here, especially in his architectural renderings.
But the book is really about Alan Moore's interpretation of the Whitechapel Murders - otherwise known as the crimes of Jack the Ripper. The story is not presented as a mystery; rather, Moore quite plainly lays out his answer to the question of Jack's identity (Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski has his own theory), and presents his notion for the motivation behind the murders, and their tie to the Royal Family. I've only read the first two issues (I believe there are twelve), but presumably the remainder follow the whole thing through its development to whatever conclusion there could be.
Its biggest problem is that Moore gets bogged down in issue #2 with a lengthy and extraordinarily verbose (even by the standards of the author of Watchmen) exploration of Jack-to-be's motivations and philosophy. Moore is rumored to be an occultist, and to some extent this monologue may be an explication of some of Moore's occult thinking. I'm not sure. At any rate, it is fairly tedious - but does have some nice drawings of very old buildings.
But overall I'm intrigued enough to pick up the rest (if I can find 'em) and read them.
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