Stuff We Like This Week: May 15 Edition
May 15
In an effort to combat our occasional…okay, okay, near-constant negativity, we give you a regular feature full of nothing but love — Stuff We Like This Week. Appearing every Friday, SWLTW will recap the things that have set our little nerdly hearts aflame within the past seven days.
Coming Monday: Poodoo
May 14Ten years ago next Tuesday, on May 19, 1999, George Lucas unleashed Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace onto an unsuspecting world.
I’m not exaggerating when I say I haven’t been the same since. I’ve spent the past ten years bitching, obsessing, and writing about Star Wars, wherever they’ll have me–and sometimes, when they won’t have me, I build my own goddamned website so that I’ll at least have myself.
To commemorate the horror, the bliss, and the strangeness of the past ten years I’ve spent as a Star Wars fan, I document my journey in Poodoo, a collection of my Star Wars-related writings.
Featuring an introduction by real doctor and college professor Steven P. Millies, Ph.D, Poodoo is about 100 pages of screeds and sundry.
Poodoo will be available on Monday, May 18, 2009 as an ABSOLUTELY FREE PDF ebook download. I’ll be tweeting, e-mailing, blogging and what-not about it pretty much all week next week, cause I’m excited.
In fact, I’ve teased once or twice over on Twitter about an upcoming top-secret project I was working on, and this was it. But seriously: Who gives a shit? I’m not Geoff Fucking Johns or James Fucking Cameron; no one really cares what I’m working on, unless it’s cookies, and then suddenly everyone’s Mr. or Ms. Interested, like, “Matt, can we have some cookies?” and all that.
Whether you give a shit or not, I do give a shit, because I’m me, and if I didn’t give a shit about the things I myself choose to do, I would be in store for some serious medication and therapy.
Please stop on by and check it out next week. Thanks!
Four Color Critiques: Atomic Robo, Jersey Gods
May 13It feels like it’s been awhile since I’ve actually blogged about comics. This week’s delivery from Heavyink is probably a good excuse to get back on that horse.
I got two books in the mail this week: the first issue of the new Atomic Robo mini and the fourth issue of Jersey Gods. It’s rare that all of the books I read in one sitting make me this happy.
If you aren’t reading either of these books, I really gotta recommend that you check them out.
Atomic Robo and the Shadow From Beyond Time #1: This installment of Robo (from 8 Bit Theater scribe Brian Clevenger and Scott Wegener) takes place in the 20s and pits Robo, Charles Fort and H.P. Lovecraft against things that are best described as…squamous. Clevenger’s wry comic timing distracts from the bulk of this issue consisting of talking expository heads as Fort tries to enlist Tesla’s (and then Robo’s) help while Robo tries to get rid of the two writers so he can study. Wegener manages to make a character with no facial features exude attitude, which is no small feat. The new Atomic Robo isn’t as laugh out loud ridiculous (in a good way) as the Free Comic Book Day “Atomic Robo Hates Dr. Dinosaur” story, but it’s well-crafted, fun entertainment that is even better if you’re already a fan of the Cthulu mythos.
Jersey Gods #1-4: I managed to snag the first issue of this Image title at NYCC this year and, just like Helen Killer surprised me last year, this year Gods was the book that I kept passing around to friends and forcing them to read. I probably should have had the issue slabbed and graded immediately, since Glen Brunswick and Dan McDaid signed it, but I guess I fail at investicomics.
Jersey Gods is certainly similar to Joe Casey’s Gødland, a book that is maybe Casey’s best work but still a book that I am a bit lukewarm about. Both are indebted to Jack Kirby’s cosmic work of the 60s and 70s, and McDaid definitely has a streak of The King in his artwork (which is some of my favorite comic art right now, check out his sketchblog), but the book doesn’t live in its influences too much or lean on them too heavily. While Jersey Gods is a mash up of cosmic superheroes and Patsy Walker-style romance comics, it embodies the best of ‘Mash-Up’ Age comics and makes itself its own thing in the process. I’ve been following the Barock story and the Zoe story with equal zeal and can’t wait for the next issue, the last one in the first arc, to see what happens to the two leads. We know from the previews that ran prior to the book’s launch that they end up married and in suburban Jersey, but dammit, I want to know how. The book is equal parts action, drama and humor with a touch of Kirby nostalgia and that should make it compelling to everybody who reads comics.
Neo-Trek: The Brick Wall
May 12
Neo-Star Trek has been consuming my brain all goddamn week. The build-up was amazing, the onslaught of rapturous Twitter-reviews stoking my skiffy-lust as I made my way to the Cinerama dome on Saturday. I’ve loved this franchise since I was a wee one. The idea that it’s suddenly relevant again, that it’s back in all its live long and prosperish glory, is a potent thing. It reminds me of the way I felt when I found that battered copy of The Lost Years at my local library, or the way my heart just fucking stopped the first time Major Kira Nerys stomped her combat booted way through ops. Star Trek — like Buffy, like various incarnations of the X-Men — is one of those icons of geekiana that just does it for me.
So I suppose I went in with reservations, too. Nail-biting excitement mixed with a weird kind of fear.
I wish I could follow that sentence up with some kind of definitive statement. Like, “but guess what? My ass was kicked” or “and then it was stupid so I cried into my gagh and went home.” My reaction, however, was one of those frustrating, complicated things that I’m having a hard time fitting into a zippy one-liner.
SPOILERS behind the cut.
A Star Wars Fan Reviews Star Trek 09
May 10I’m savagely unapologetic of my Star Wars fandom, and have been since a young age. A friend of mine has a four year old son who needs to know everything about Yoda, down to what kind of nuts and roots and berries he puts in his stewpot on Dagobah, and I self-identify with that kid pretty heavily.
I’ve never had the same passion about Star Trek. Yeah, I watched it. It was okay. I just never got passionate about it. Never understood the Big Deal. I liked space wizards with laser swords. I liked the bizarre, nonhuman-looking aliens that were just hanging around everywhere – not the staples of action set pieces or important characters, just guys hanging out. I liked the fast pace and the action and the melodrama much better than what I perceived to be the rather mundane proceedings aboard the Enterprise.
For me, Trek has always been the Elvis to Star Wars’s Beatles. Even before 1994, when Tarantino first introduced that forced dichotomy into my brain.
I loved the new Star Trek movie with complete abandon.
Friday morning, I was talking to Matt about the movie, and I realized something very important. Well, two very important things. First, all of the things I said I loved about Star Wars were on full display in this movie, and they did them all better than any of Lucas’s prequels did. Second, a lot of those things were already staples of the series – I just never noticed it because I was too busy being blase’ about the lack of midichlorians or whatever.
It’s easily the best summer tentpole film I’ve seen in about a year. In fact, the last time a movie made me go “I need to go see this again immediately,” it was probably the first Pirates of the Caribbean flick. It’s the best Star Trek movie I’ve ever watched, running neck and neck with Wrath of Khan – the only one of the movies that I’ve actively rewatched several times (as opposed to leaving it on because there’s nothing better on TV).
Just like J.J. Abrams, I went into this movie basically knowing only that Kirk and Spock are the overwhelming OTP among slashfic writers. I knew that people loved Kirk, but I never got it.  I think I get it now.
