Introducing the Critical Fan

Greetings, and welcome to The Critical Fan.

Some blogs are an outlet for day to day observations and impressions, but that's not what I want to do here. This is where I review, critique, and analyze "genre" works that have struck me as being exemplary or worthy of note. So it won't be updated as often, but I still hope that I have something worth saying.

And these works I'm going to write about? Allow me to run down my tastes and my nerd cred:

For all my life I've been an avid SF novel reader, and from there branched out into film and comics. Dark Horse's early Star Wars titles brought me roundabout into the world of indie comics, like Hellboy. (Mike Mignola of Hellboy also did the artwork for White Wolf's excellent rerelases of Fritz Lieber's delightful, post-Conan Lankhmar low fantasy novels.) Dark Horse also was the leading English-language manga publisher. This crosscuts my introduction to serious anime in college, but that's a story unto itself. For now, you have an idea of the kind of material I'm going to discuss here.

I've taken the name Kurotawa for this exercise, but some of you may know me by different names. Like the character in Miyazaki's epic manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds, I am along for the ride, yet not quite sure what everyone else is getting so excited about. Guess what? It's still me, Pete Takeshi. Guess we really can't get away from what we are. See above for the latest. (–PT, 6/30/07)

That's it for now. I just saw Steamboy last night, and was floored by both its beauty and its subtle irony. I'll write about it soon enough.