Lost 6.12, "Everybody Loves Hugo"
Apr 19
Seriously, everybody does.
While the takeaway from this week’s episode was clearly meant to be its final few minutes (otherwise why put it there?), the entire hour showcased a great character, a really underrated actor, and more touchy-feely for Lost’s final season.
More after the jump, for those who DON’T WANNA BE SPOILED (OR ARE ALREADY SPOILED)…
The Bin – 4/16/10
Apr 16
Once, in ages past, four nerds banded together and vanquished the forces of darkness that lurched in squamous form across the countryside and skulked necrolently through the catacombs beneath our cities. When the threat had passed and the land was safe, they took Stuff They Liked, a bunch of Links and a Miscellany of other treasures and had them sealed away in…The Bin.
Legend foretold that the riches contained within would spill forth once again in a time of great need. A time…like today.
Nerdly Advice: Lightning Round
Apr 13Most of the time, nerds force advice onto anybody they make eye contact with. You can tell it’s coming if you hear words like “Actually.” But sometimes nerds need advice and have nowhere to turn without damaging what they believe to be their credibility as wise sages.
Nerdly Advice is a safe and anonymous haven where you can ask your nerd questions and get nerd answers full of Jeff’s delightful misanthropy. This week, we tackle several different Important Questions. Have a question of your own? Email us at nerdlyadvice (at) gmail (dot) com.
Jeff, should I buy an iPad?!
I like the idea of the iPad a lot. I’m a believer in lightweight, intuitive-interface tablet devices making a lot of changes in the way we do a lot of things (I worked in the health care industry for awhile, where I think the iPad can do huge things in terms of revolutionizing the way patient data is charted and analyzed). Some pundits can complain about the iPad murdering innovation, but what it’s really going to do is get a bunch of people in the industry off their asses and working to make a better, more user-friendly tablet while Apple will keep refining its hardware until it gets it right. I don’t believe it’s had the perfect iPod until the recent iteration of the Nano, and it cribs a lot of features from the Zune, whose newest version is basically a matter of preference over the iPod Touch – long strides from a competitor whose first offering was a joke.
The iPad has flaws. It will get better. Or a competitor will fill those gaps with a superior product. Get that. Unless you have a giant pile of money. Then you should buy two and send one to me.
What am I going to do after LOST is over?
You might want to consider falling in love or adopting a pet. Maybe starting a book club or designing a board game.
Harry Potter and the Alert Nerd Giveaway!!!
Apr 13Hey muggles! (Har!)
You, yes YOU, the awkward fella in the home-sewn wizard robes and real lightning tattoo, and YOU, the gothy gal who insists your mom calls you “Hermione” when she calls you down for supper–all of YOU can win wonderful prizes and the gratitude of an adoring nation with Alert Nerd’s “Real Magic of Harry Potter” Online Giveaway!
Courtesy of Scholastic, we’ve got a prize pack including the paperback box set of the Harry Potter series and a $50 Visa Cash Card. Here’s a picture; drool away.
Scholastic is also running their own contest to celebrate the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, the new Hogwarts-themed land opening at Universal Orlando in June. Let me tell you: I am DYING to see that, and I live about twenty minutes away. I may camp out. No promises. You can win one of FOUR trips down here to Orlando to experience the Wizarding World for your own self.
We’ll be returning to the world of Harry Potter for some themed posts over the next few weeks. In the meantime, to enter the giveaway, leave a comment on THIS POST and tell us who your favorite Harry Potter character is…mine is Snape, and I’m guessing everyone else’s is, but PROVE ME WRONG. Contest ends April 30, 2010; US residents only please, or international folk with friends in the US willing to send them prizes.
Good luck, muggles! (Again: Har!)
Cult of the Author, Death of the Character?
Apr 12[Occasionally, Jeff punches up posts from his personal blog and posts them here because his readership doesn’t care about comics and junk like you guys do. This is one of those posts.]
It’s not a book that’s going to launch you to superstardom or put you at the top of the sales chart but I was really proud of what I was able to do on that book and hopefully it will hold up for Ghost Rider fans. I also was happy because I think we brought some new fans to the character.
–Jason Aaron, on his Ghost Rider run.
I’m a fan of Jason Aaron. I have been since The Other Side, and I have followed basically all of his work at Marvel Comics and am reading Scalped – his Indian reservation-set crime saga – in trade format. Of all the writers to touch the character in the past decade, I think that he’s come closest to providing a ‘definitive’ Wolverine, and well, any reason to not be embarrassed about having a soft spot for Wolverine is good news in my book.
It got me thinking, though: I’ve read Aaron’s work on Ghost Rider. I liked it. I thought it was a pretty great Ghost Rider story, but it didn’t make me a Ghost Rider fan, just cemented that I’m a Jason Aaron fan.  It’s interesting I’ve shifted from being character-loyal to creator-loyal, specifically writer-loyal. There are exceptions – I’ve always read Uncanny X-Men even during some of the bleaker creative periods in the book’s history; I’ve always been loyal to Legion of Super Heroes in the same way. However, The Thing is one of my favorite comic book characters of all time – maybe even my absolute favorite (if Batman didn’t count) – and yet I don’t read Fantastic Four on a regular basis and haven’t for a few years. Yet, at the same time, if you told me that Brian Wood was writing a book starring NFL SuperPro, I’d pay my $2.99 per issue to read it.
Comcis, I hear pretty often, are like soap operas: the evil twin scenarios, the melodramatic romances, the deaths that never quite seem to stick and, of course, the fans’ fervent belief that either this one will be the one that does or that Greenlee will be back any day now. Time is fluid in Pine Valley and Port Charles and relationships are, too.  The improbable happens as if it were the natural, and every once in awhile, there are vampires or angels or something to spice it up a bit. They both lean on serial storytelling staples and so it’s nor surprise that they have them in common.
There’s a certain simplicity to the ‘comics are like soap operas’ viewpoint, with the insinuation that you’re expected to not really care about the quality of what you’re consuming, but rather bask in the comfort of the familiarity. But I’ve watched soap operas, and my general opinion of them is that they are absolutely fucking terrible and nonsensical (Colby’s in college? She was three years old two weeks ago!) a vast majority of the time. Their saving grace is that they’re free, not three bucks every thirty days. I’d rather have a good story, dammit. The truth of the matter is that open-ended serial storytelling is not often concerned with telling a good story, but rather on being consistently entertaining from issue to issue. Telling a good story, sometimes, yes, but not the good story.
I was reading Kevin Rubio’s Tag and Bink Star Wars comics recently, and at the end of the first issue, the titular protagonists are killed in the explosion of the Death Star. The meta-joke becomes that there’s one issue left in the series and the main characters were just killed off.* Rubio starts off the next issue by spending a few pages explaining why the characters didn’t actually die (Vader selected the troopers standing behind Tag and Bink in the background to fly his wing while they slipped away on a stolen Imperial shuttle).
There’s definitely value – both from the POV of the writer and the reader – in the occasional “Cyclops is dead!”/”Cyclops is still alive!” fake-out**, but relying on that kind of cliffhanger as a crutch (and I’m not saying that that’s what Kevin Rubio is doing, since Tag and Bink Are Dead is a two-issue miniseries, after all; I’m just using it as an example because it’s fresh in my mind) seems a bit like spinning the wheels without actually going anywhere. I have a profound attraction to the shared universe of Marvel and DC, but an equally strong attachment to contained stories with a beginning, middle and end. Batman doesn’t have that. Batman persists instead because he is a myth and not just a story, just like every other superhero icon we’ve created in the modern age***.
That shift in perception has accompanied my shift from character devotion to creator respect. I don’t have to read every Batman story, so I will just focus on the Batman stories that I want to read, and those are typically from people whose work I like, regardless of where I found it before. And if I stumble across something I do like, I’m going to seek that creator out elsewhere. Demo is one of my favorite comics ever, and I’d never have found it if not for Generation X.
What’s important to you when you read comics? I was looking through a few random 90s comics not too long ago and a lot of them listed the penciler before the writer. In that era of our fandom, it was the cult of the artist. Is it a cycle? Will we see this come back around?
*This is not, mind you, an indictment of a comic whose main character dies at the end of each issue. Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba’s Daytripper – a comic where that exact thing happens – is aggressively excellent in basically every way.
**This is a real thing that happens during Uncanny X-Men’s “Dark Phoenix Saga” – Scott is ‘killed’ on the last page of one issue and proclaimed to be not actually dead on the first page of the following one.
***Or, as Grant Morrison puts it during his “Batman, RIP” story, “Batman and Robin can never die!”
