Knock it off

Somehow I never tire of these articles about counterfeit Chinese Harry Potter books.

These include “Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince,” a creation whose name in Chinese closely resembles the title of the genuine sixth book by Ms. Rowling, as well as pure inventions that include “Harry Potter and the Hiking Dragon,” “Harry Potter and the Chinese Empire,” “Harry Potter and the Young Heroes,” “Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon,” and “Harry Potter and the Big Funnel.”

Some borrow little more than the names of Ms. Rowling’s characters, lifting plots from other well-known authors, like J. R. R. Tolkien, or placing the famously British protagonist in plots lifted from well-known kung-fu epics and introducing new characters from Chinese literary classics like “Journey to the West.”

This reminds me of the way Darger had his Vivian Girls meet characters from The Wizard of Oz and other books. I'm also reminded of this bit in Dizzyhead Douglas's excellent Reading Comics, re the early success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:

Within months, comics stores' shelves were flooded with knockoffs and parodies and parodies of knockoffs—Adolescent Radioactive Black-Belt Hamsters, Aristocratic Xtraterrestrial Time-Traveling Thieves, Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos (I swear I'm not making this up)...

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In other news: Woah, the reading tonight has been written up at this cool blog called NYTimes.com!

And—New York mag likes the New-York Ghost, calling it "a wonder of both style and substance"!

Reading Comics, Thinking about Harry

Dizzyhead Douglas's new book, Reading Comics, is a must for anyone (Chrita? Singer?) who takes the medium seriously—for example, now I'm going to be hyperconscious that I use "medium" instead of "genre" when talking about comics!

I dig the premise (or one of the premises): That the Golden Age of comics is...right now.

Largehearted Boy has his soundtrack and many useful links up. And here's a great interview our own Chrita conducted with him a while back.

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I talked to Scott Timberg of the L.A. Times about what makes the Harry Potter books so appealing to adults. (I'm wedged between Lee Siegel and Laura Miller.)

So, Park, continued, we have the kind of fantasy people typically harbor: "I am special, I come from great, even legendary forebears, everyone is concerned with my well-being / life, and perhaps even secretly worships me."

Just for fun, here are my previous musings on the Potteriad—film reviews (from the PTSNBN) of the Chamber and Goblet adaptations.