![]() Given how comic book fans tend to obsess about continuity, it is ironic that so many of best (and most interesting) takes on iconic superhero characters tend to come from outside the rigid framework of the single interconnected shared universe. ![]() However, he also wrote a short two-issue story as part of DC’s digital-first The Adventures of Superman comic, scripting Superman’s first encounter with the Clown Prince of Crime. He drafted an eight-page origin for the Atomic Skull for the first annual of DC comics’ relaunched Action Comics run, and would get a change to craft his own origin story for Clark Kent in American Alien. In the years following his initial success, Landis has remained relatively connected with the Man of Steel. At once reveling in the absurdity of the massive nineties comic book crossover and interrogating its central character’s identity crisis, it was a potent piece of pop culture criticism. A year before the release of Chronicle, Landis put together a short film that served as an extended discussion of The Death and Return of Superman featuring a variety of top tier talent like Mandy Moore, Elijah Wood, Ron Howard and Simon Pegg. He directed a film, released in Australia and Germany, based on the novel.Nevertheless, Landis is a writer who does seem fascinated with the mechanics and underlying logic of superhero storytelling. (Mar.) FYI: Flanagan won the Australian Booksellers Book of the Year Award for The Sound of One Hand Clapping. Australian writer Flanagan (Death of a River Guide) brilliantly illuminates the lives of those who are ""forgotten by history, irrelevant to history, yet shaped entirely by it."" His characters here transform tragedy as they discover their individual worth. Only after confrontations, revelations and Bojan's symbolic and apocalyptic rebirth is the past redeemed and the pair reconciled. Though her father cannot articulate his suffering (one of the themes here is the inadequacy of words to express the totality of existence), she remains bound to him in deep understanding of his despair. ![]() Sonja's painful memories mix with those of her sober artie's (the affectionate Slovenian word for father) tenderness and his inspired woodworking (""his hands knew a restraint which lent him grace""). Bojan's poverty and his memories of his wife and of wartime atrocities made Sonja's childhood difficult his brief hopes for another marriage were dashed, and Bojan fell into drinking and beating his daughter. ![]() Bojan Buloh was just another ""reffo"" from a Slovenia ravaged by WWII, recruited ""to do the wog work of dam-building,"" when he found himself the lone parent of three-year-old Sonja. The mystery and heartache surrounding that event echo through Sonja's young life all the way to 1989-90, when the pregnant Sonja returns from mainland Australia, longing to see Tasmania and her estranged father. Sonja Buloh barely remembers the night 35 years ago when her mother, Maria, walked out the door of their crude hut in the dismal construction camp at remote Butlers Gorge, never to return. Tasmania-vast, mysterious, like ""the unknown country of the heart""-is the setting for this powerful tale of a father and daughter who struggle to rise above the forces of history and personal tragedy.
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