Especially for anyone who even seriously ponders creating their own comics or comic strips or web comics (McCloud did a very cool webcomic on Comic Book Resources, back in the day), these are all musts. But they are great reads and don't feel remotely like homework.
I feel angry with past me for deliberately ignoring this book. I've had Understanding Comics and Making Comics for a while, but I didn't think I would find Reinventing Comics any useful, after all, it was all 200 pages about webcomics? I was already into them, and that was the part that everybody seemed to talk about. Turns out that the book is way beyond just that. I'm thinking this book could have been useful when I was writing my thesis about comics.
The Big Sleep, at least, has a strong whiff of having been free-written about it. I haven't read much about Chandler, so I might be wildly incorrect, here.
I might be wrong, as it's been ages since I've read it/read about it, but I seem to recall that it's two Black Mask stories that Chandler jammed together to make a novel.
It's plausible. One about blackmail, one about a missing person.
