Stuff We Like This Week: August 14 Edition

Stuff We Like This Week: August 14 Edition

Aug 14

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.

Jeff: My geek-crush for the week is John Layman and Rob Guillory’s Chew.  I got the first three issues on my birthday last week and they blew me away.  My weekend guests devoured the issues as well (no pun intended) and had the same high praise.  Layman’s bizarre, darkly comic setting where the FDA rules over an America where chicken is outlawed and it seems like everybody has psychic food powers is energetic and really just pops off the page, aided in no small part by Guillory’s crazy-awesome stylized pencils.

Sarah: G.I. Joe is a Not Good movie in all those ways you sort of expect it to be Not Good: the overexcessive loudness, the convoluted “story,” the hamfisted way in which Dennis Quaid is forced to say “and knowing is half the battle!” G.I. Joe is not the thing I Like This Week. But there’s a little piece of it that captivated me throughout and therefore does earn this sought-after honor, and that little piece is Sienna Miller as The Baroness. I’ve always had a soft spot for Sienna because 1) I think she’s great in little-seen flicks like Casanova (charming!) and Interview (emotionally-nuanced!) and 2) she’s very pretty and wears crazy outfits and 3) a bunch of people seem to have a massive hate-on for her, which brings out my protective side. Maybe it was those pix with Balthazar Getty? I don’t know. It’s unearned!

Anyway, I think she’s fantastically watchable in G.I. Joe because she actually gets what movie she’s in and acts accordingly, making The Baroness into a snarling icon of battle-ready divadom. Try focusing on anyone else when she’s onscreen. It’s IMPOSSIBLE. The whole thing is marred by a weird Act III plot twist, which I won’t give away here. But just know that it’s stupid and de-fangs the character a wee bit. Still, in a summer movie landscape where lady action heroes are few and far between, Sienna’s like a leather catsuited breath of fresh air.

Matt: I enjoy Organizing Comics. I realize this is a dying art form (the organizing, not comics themselves) and yet I indulge in it anyway. I’m talking bagging, boarding, alphabetizing, and most recently, cataloging all my trade paperbacks and hardcovers so I don’t buy the same thing twice. Sitting on the floor surrounded by open boxes of comics and the smell of decaying newsprint and scotch tape…it makes me happy. It calms me. This week, I’ve been organizing the hell out of my collection, and I am finishing it this weekend, and it gives me great satisfaction and joy. Pathetic, I know.

Chris: When Topps bought WizKids, myself and others who were heavily invested in their HeroClix game thought, “This won’t end well. And it will probably involve baseball.”

And we were right – Topps immediately announced a Baseball Clix game. Because Baseball isn’t stop and start enough on it’s own, let’s make it into a table top game. Why they figured table top gamers would give a shit about Baseball the same way they give a shit about comic characters, I’ll never no. And the exec that thought the guys that do give a shit about baseball would happily become table top gamers, well I hope someone slapped him for that one.

And that was that – it took a couple of years a couple of failed games and it looked like everything was going to finally grind to a halt last Fall.

Only, it didn’t. It wasn’t announced, but WizKids was in attendance at SDCC and they were making Thor’s Chariot available. And the webpage they put up, along with a short, but pointed blog post, hints at the other reason WizKids slowed down – China. Apparently the scrutiny of Chinese toys, any Chinese toys, reached the point where WizKids literally had to rebuild their network from scratch. A PDF certificate on the website shows that all toys produced in China now have to be tested for hazards before being ready for re-sale. All this time WizKids has been working to get production retooled – and with the Thor chariot, it looks like it’s coming together.

And holy crap, am I happy!