So, my reading time's kind of been curtailed by the holiday acquisition of a Mac-compatible external Blu-Ray drive with which to watch all my Region B import discs. OTOH, I did discover that a number of apps with which I can read comics are reasonably compatible-ish with my BlackBerry PlayBook, so I've been catching up on those.
Kind of apropos to the recent announcement of another Harper Lee novel, first GN I finished on the PlayBook was
Capote in Kansas by
Ande Parks &
Chris Samee, a fictionalized true-life account of Truman Capote's writing of his classic true crime account,
In Cold Blood.
It turns out that Capote was a close personal friend of the
To Kill A Mockingbird author, and she shows up at certain points in the narrative, having helped him smooth his way among the locals so that they would actually talk to him after he'd initially alienated them with his high-falutin' New Yorker ways, and they talk about
life, the universe, and everything human nature and the writing of her book and his.
For storytelling reasons which the creators explain in the afterword, her part isn't nearly as large as it was IRL, and they also have a lot of nifty notes and script excerpts about how the GN came to be and their research efforts and various decisions in making it.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The actual story was quite good, done in black-and-white
ligne claire-ish style, focusing on Capote and the town and the various ways in which they do and don't manage to intersect until finally, things start to work out and he can actually begin to write his book.
It's a very personal kind of story that focuses on the core of the characters underlying the "characters" that society assigns them, delving beneath Capote's semi-flamboyant façade, and the seemingly hardened exterior of one of the killers, and the grieving reserved stoicism of the victims' surviving family.
As mentioned, this came with a lot of nifty behind-the-scenes extras which help flesh out the story behind the story.
Highly recommended if you're interested not just in true crime accounts, but the process of researching and writing them at both 1st and 2nd-hand removes. This was part of my Humble Bundle Oni Press purchase and well worth the top-tier $15 price I paid for it (and got a bunch of other comics to read, too). I'm starting to wish that I'd auto-bought a number of other Humble Bundle comic book bundles, as in retrospect a lot of them had rather promising-looking things in them, and given my reading habits, as long as there was at least one title in there that I enjoyed, enough that its paper or other digital purchase cost would have come near the top-tier price I usually pay to get all the stuff in an HB, it would have worked out for me.
I'm starting to think that skipping on comic book/ebook HBs just on the grounds that they don't have "enough" stuff that looks like it'll grab me at first (as opposed to the themed ones where I'm just flat-out not interested because I don't read/watch the franchise/genre, like the Doctor Who & My Little Pony & Star Wars & Halloween horror ones, which would have been an unwise allocation of my money), are actually false economy on my part, and I'm going to go by an "as long as there's at least two things where the story looks interesting and the sample reads well or there's a title I own in paper that I wouldn't mind having a DRM-free digital copy of as well as some extra stuff thrown in, I'll get it" rule from now on.