Although we’ve got season 1-6 of
Seinfeld on DVD, in the name of economy (relocating 12,000 miles is not cheap) I was all set to wait, showing signs of extreme virtue, until Wellington Public Library got this DVD box set into stock rather than pay $90.00. True, the fact that WPL have a great collection meant I didn’t think I would have had to wait too long, which was a factor – but my brother (unknown to me) came up with a better solution and bought me it for Christmas and we've gorged on it already. So much for my supposed restraint.
Before they started releasing these box sets I’d only seen a handful of
Seinfeld episodes, so I had no idea how consistently funny this show was until very recently – either they never showed it much on UK terrestrial TV, or I just missed it (the few episodes I had seen were on cable TV). Six seasons later I feel like
Seinfeld is a required part of my life – the unique comedic style, the endlessly repetitive yet endlessly inventive and (increasingly) amoral universe of Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine is like a second home, a deeply satisfying, and funny, parallel universe. TV shows seem to work best when they successfully turn only on their own invented logic, to the point of solipsistic madness, and
Seinfeld season 7 certainly does that, in the form of Soup Nazis and Wig Masters, Marble Rye theft and toxic glue to name just a few of these episodes’ plot devices. After six years of creating, embellishing, and pruning the basic template every episode shares, this season runs like a well-oiled machine, with hardly a trace of slack in the scripts and a truly impressive standard maintained – in short, these episodes are uniformly hilarious.
As I discovered in looking at the DVD extras, Larry David left the show at the end of Season 7 but it carried on, with Jerry Seinfeld taking sole charge, for another two seasons. I haven’t yet seen any of these episodes, so I don’t know how this worked out – and, especially after having seen
Curb Your Enthusiasm, it’s hard to imagine
Seinfeld without Larry David’s influence - but hopefully I won’t have to wait too long to find out though as these box-sets have been coming thick and fast so far. The only question is, do I wait for WPL library to acquire it, or...
I was too young to read the early stories in these two collections when they were first published in Love & Rockets (starting in 1981), but have read the Hernandez Brothers eagerly work wherever I could since about 1988. As well as reading Love and Rockets from issue 30 up until it stopped in 1996, chasing down the various off-shoots, and finally, more recently, buying the newly reconstituted Love & Rockets (vol 2), I have over the years bought a fair few partial collections (The Death of Speedy, House of Raging Women, etc.) and some reprinted early back issues – all in an attempt to make sense of the worlds' and characters' Jamie and Beto separately create.
For this reason, I wasn’t sure what the experience of reading these two enormous volumes – 700-odd pages apiece – would be like, as I thought I had read all the stories contained within them already. However, I needn’t have worried: encountering these stories bound together, uninterrupted, gave them all sorts of new resonances and provided a much fuller appreciation of the overall plot-arcs, the journeys of the various characters, and the level of artistry and sophistication that underlies each narrative. These volumes leave no doubt that the Hernandez Brothers deserve the highest accolades within comic writing and, in Jamie’s case, artwork; and (once again) that we all owe a huge debt of thanks to Fantagraphics, who published both the original comics and these collected volumes. If you treasure the likes of Pete Bagge’s Hate or Dan Clowes’ Eightball and haven’t yet checked out Love & Rockets, here’s the perfect excuse.
