[UA] Recommended fiction

[Ville Halonen]

SHALLOW GRAVE (movie)
I've seen it two times, pre-UA (didn't like) and after UA (did like). Of course there were a few years between the two times. It's a story of three roommates looking for a fourth, and when one is finally found, next morning he's dead with a lot of money on him. So what do they do?

Cut him in pieces and bury him, of course, and keep the money.

Two of them have fun, and the third, the accountant-guy who was the one slicing the corpse up, shows signs of way too many failed madness checks and starts living in the attic, paranoid and cautious. A wonderful model for any UA character who has no luck with his Mind rolls.

THE KILLING JOKE (comic)
Often noted as the best single Batman story ever, this little Alan Moore story is actually a Joker story, drawing a picture of how the man-that-was became The-Villain-That-Be and how one very-bad-day can ruin your whole life. Brian Bolland's graphic is terrific.

CANARDO(comic)
Benoit Sokal's comics depicting a duck private dick, Canardo, in a world inhabited by intelligent animals and humans, who don't get along that well. Nihilistic, tragic, ironic, and decadent, the adventures of the duck soon turn him into a sorry alcoholic. Quite low on anything paranormal, but there's enough booze, cigarettes, blood, desperate characters, and sex to satisfy any UA fan. Sokal's messy drawing style adds up to the atmosphere, although the two last ones suffer greatly from computer-enhanced coloring.

HELLBLAZER (comic)
Everyone knows this one, right? RIGHT? I've only read the very first nine stories (by Jamie Delano), but its highly imaginative and modern unnatural stuff make it ideal UA source material. Its mood and style was different from what I expected, and I had trouble adapting to it, but by the end of the first collection the amoral occult investigator John Constantine had taken me by the hand, wanting more. Give him a chance, if you already haven't – and never mind the awful coloring (which even gets better in time).

LIEUTENANT BLUEBERRY (comic)
Two French guys made (in the 70s) a Wild West comic. Jean Giraud (Moebius) is a wonderful drawer, but most of the albums suffer from lousy coloring: two of the nine I've read are wonderful graphically, the rest are between less than average and good because of the dull and unimaginative coloring. Nothing unnatural here, but the multi-album (at least six of 'em) plot beginning from Chihuahua Pearl is absolutely marvelous once it gets going. There's two major points (in addition to the artwork) that make this *very* recommendable:
1)Blueberry isn't the mighty omnipotent superhero; quite the opposite: although he's smart, the bad guys are often smarter and get him into a looooot of trouble in the aforementioned story.
2)Complicated, surprising, action-packed pageturner plots that every GM and writer should learn from. 
I didn't like the ones before Chihuahua Pearl too much, but it may be because I hadn't got used to the nature of the comic. Should read them again...

ENIGMA (comic)
Not everyone likes Duncan Fegredo's drawings, but believe me: you get used to it and might even come to love it. An eight-issue story of a boy's childhood comic book hero coming to life. The story has mystery, unnatural stuff, weird monsters, evolving characters, philosophy, an impressive bunch of layers and a meta-comic. Although not as dark, Enigma contains several very, *very* UAble elements. I don't want to spoil anything: *read it*!

-V
Wants desperately to see Hellraiser


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