#gary wolf

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

Have you read Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary Wolf (1981)?

yes

no

I didn't finish it

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onOct 3, 2025

[goodtimesgreatmemories]

Cactus Jack and Mikey Whipwreck defended the ECW World Tag Team Championship against The Eliminators. In the end, Saturn and Kronus defeated Cactus Jack and Mikey Whipwreck to win the ECW World Tag Team Championship for the first time. After the match, Whipwreck was attacked by Cactus Jack and Raven. Joey Styles interviewed the new champions until Saturn and Kronus were attacked by Francine and The Pitbulls. (ECW Big Apple Blizzard Bash 2/3/1996)

[khelinski]

"I could never figure that," said Roger." I mean why humans don't like Toons. We're no different from humans, not really. We have different mannerisms, and different physical makeups, and a different way of talking, but we have the same emotions. We love and hate and laugh and cry exactly the same way humans do."

Gary Wolf

[semper-legens]

18. Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, by Gary Wolf

Owned: Yes Page count: 236 My summary: Eddie Valiant, private eye, doesn’t work for Toons. But when Roger Rabbit comes to his door asking for help, he literally can’t afford to turn him down. Soon Valiant’s up to his neck in a case that’s getting more complicated by the minute, and the clock is ticking. Can he untangle all the threads before it’s too late? My rating: 2/5

You may recognise the title of this book. Because it is the book upon which hit film Who Framed Roger Rabbit is based. For a long time, I have been curious about this book, because I know that it is nothing like the movie. The movie is a lot lighter and wackier in tone, whereas the book is closer to an actual private eye noir book, being dark and gritty and full of sex and violence. My question was, is the book good in its own right, or is this a case where the movie is genuinely better? And the answer, as you can probably tell from my rating, is ‘nah’.

The main character is Eddie Valiant, and Eddie Valiant is a racist misogynistic prick. He’s also a private eye, who takes a case helping Roger Rabbit work out why his bosses aren’t giving him his own cartoon - until Roger Rabbit shows up dead, and Valiant swerves into helping solve Roger’s murder. Valiant himself is not a good person, and while he gets slightly less racist against Toons as the story progresses, he’s still a regular racist, as well as a misogynist and an otherwise odious person. As well as that, his voice wasn’t that interesting to read. I was expecting a hard-boiled noir narrative, but Eddie’s narration is pretty straight, apart from a few flourishes or colourful metaphors here and there.

Aside from that, the world of this novel is just grim. Nobody’s a good person! I’ll get to Jessica later, Roger’s nice but also pathetic, and everyone else has a hidden shady agenda and a laundry list of bigotry. There’s a horrible moment later on in the narrative where Eddie confronts a villainous character who is dressed in drag, and the story just swerves into violent transmisogyny for a chapter, portraying this character as a joke and a perversion. Even Roger, the nicest character, was accidentally mind-controlling Jessica and wanted to frame Eddie for murder!

Okay, let’s talk about Jessica. Poor Jessica. You know how in the movie Jessica’s genuinely a good, nice person who doesn’t like being oversexualised and loves her husband? Yeah, this Jessica’s a golddigger and a ‘slut’ who lies about being sexually assaulted to save face and wants to sleep with every man she comes across. It’s a gross, misogynistic stereotype, and such a bad characterisation! Eddie finds a porn comic she did when she was younger, and she protests that she was drugged into doing said comic, but two men involved in the shoot claim this isn’t true and Jessica enjoyed it. The narrative treats their account as real and Jessica’s as a lie, despite none of them offering evidence and the fact that the men have a motive for lying about it. It’s disgusting, and Jessica herself is a shallow cardboard cutout with boobs. Just makes the movie version so much more impressive by comparison, that she manages to be a proto-feminist character despite this origin.

I feel like I must mention here the few bits of praise I have for this book. The idea of Toons in a real-life world is interesting, Toons speaking with word balloons and this being a plot point is a cool detail, and things like Toon doppelgangers are nice ideas. It’s just that good ideas don’t really go for much when the whole isn’t a good experience.

In short, stick to the movie, it’s less gross. Next up, back to good media, and another check-in at Webcomics Town!

[the-final-sentence]

You could see a long way, but not half as far as Roger had gone.

Gary Wolf, from Who Censored Roger Rabbit?

[rrrauschen]

At the beginning of Xanadu's second decade of development, Nelson was pleased with the project's caretakers. The last time he had come this close to having a working prototype was in 1972, when time ran out on his rented Nova. Now, the inventor's brainchild was more mature. Miller and Gregory created an addressing system that used transfinite numbers, an arcane area of calculus they had both studied in college. They called the new addresses "tumblers"; the tumbler system allowed readers to create links to any arbitrary span of bytes, whether or not the author had marked them. With tumblers, Miller and Gregory could give a similar address to every document and fragment of a document in Xanadu's sprawling domain of words, pictures, movies, and sounds. The address would not only point the reader to the correct machine, it would also indicate the author of the document, the version of the document, the correct span of bytes, and the links associated with these bytes.

Unfortunately, though the design was innovative and the algorithms interesting, the Xanadu code was depressingly nonfunctional. As 1979 stretched into 1980, and 1980 into 1981, Nelson continued to lecture about the imminent release of the greatest information software of all time. Xanadu, he promised, would make the central concepts of computing - files, for example - obsolete. In Xanadu, there would be no immutable files, only a mass of material that could be organized according to the reader's preference.

Gary Wolf, {1995} The Curse of Xanadu

[jessicarabbitworld]

The movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit was based on Who Censored Roger Rabbit, a novel by Gary K. Wolf.

It was followed by other stories over the years, Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit, The Road to Toontown, and Who Wacked Roger Rabbit.

[goodtimesgreatmemories]

In the main event, Chris Jericho defended the ECW Television Championship against Pitbull #2, Shane Douglas and 2 Cold Scorpio in a Four-Way Dance.

Jericho was eliminated by Scorpio via pinfall. Scorpio was eliminated by Pitbull #2 via pinfall. In the end, thanks to Francine turning on The Pitbulls, Shane Douglas defeated Pitbull #2 to win the ECW Television Championship for the second time. (ECW Hardcore TV 7/23/1996)