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!”
Lost 6.11 – "Happily Ever After"
Apr 08Last time on LOST:
In every universe, Jin and Sun are in love.
In every universe, Patchy loses an eye.
Everybody loves Keamy.
Jungle Strike Tina Fey is bad at planning, raiding, following orders.
Sawyer likes cocoa.
Widmore wants Jin to see his package.
The Island? Totes not done with Desmond.
So, what about this week, brother?
Corporate bagman Desmond Hume needs to get rocker Charlie Pace to skinny-tie-wearing Daniel Widmore’s bash in time. But can a straight-laced businessman and a strung out bass player do anything by the book? Unless that book is titled “How To Crash Your Car Into The Fucking Ocean,” the answer is a resounding NO. And who is Penny?
Meanwhile, on the island, C. Wids is experimenting with electromagnetism to see if it will kill Desmond (it doesn’t) and Sayid rescues Desmond just before he could learn useful information about what Widmore is up to. Typical! Oh, LOST, can’t you ever avoid a comedic timing mishap? Wah wah wah.
“Happily Ever After” may be the best episode of the season to date. Desmond episodes are always some of each season’s stronger episodes and are usually the episodes that help to construct the spine of LOST‘s mythology. Instead of just flashing through time, as he’s wont to do, this episode focuses on Desmond flashing between the 2007 Island timeline and the 2004 mirror universe. And of course, we find that Mirror Desmond’s life is great on the surface…but it’s not as rosy as you’d expect. Desmond is working for Charles Widmore in an ill-defined ‘right-hand man’ role that gives him a giant pile of money, lots of travel and absolutely no friends or family. Contrast this with our Desmond, who lived a pretty mendicant life (ex-monk, ex-military, ex-sailboat racer, ex-button pusher) in order to earn the loving family that he eventually gets and always wanted.
Or did he?
As the cryptic and canny Eloise Widmore (formerly Hawking) points out to Desmond, the universe has given him what he wants – the approval of Charles Widmore. With that revelation – clack! – the pieces fall into place. That’s what explains the major divergences in the mirror lives of our losties. Hurley is lucky. Sawyer is a white hat. Jack is a parent. Locke has a relationship with his father that apparently doesn’t include attempted windowcide. It makes sense, but how does Eloise know this?
Out of all of the outstanding mysteries that I don’t expect we’ll ever get answered, ‘what is her deal, anyway?’ is the most frustrating. I mean, she shows up, gives cryptic info about the metaplot like it’s Halloween candy and then bam, nothing. This is a woman who orchestrated her own son’s murder at her own past self’s hands and who knows unknowable secrets about ‘the universe’.
Another interesting element of this week’s ep is Desmond’s flashback (flash-forward) to Charlie’s death in the season 3 finale. In most of our other flash sideways scenes, we’ve had characters experiencing odd deja vu moments where they almost recognize that something’s off before their reality reasserts itself. Usually, these happen in front of mirrors. They’ve been ambiguous – how much do the characters know? But this week’s deja vu moments makes it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that Mirror Desmond remembers at least a flash of the other timeline, as evidenced when he wigs out when drowning Charlie presses his hand against the glass and Des recalls “NOT PENNY’S BOAT.” We get further confirmation of this when Daniel confesses to having a similar dissociative experience after seeing Charlotte for the first time. The universe, Eloise told us way back in season 3, course corrects, and if the sidewaysverse isn’t the way it’s supposed to be (as strongly suggested by this episode) the continued cute intersections of our losties back in LA is not just coincidence. And now that the lid is off that particular revelation, it looks like Desmond’s going to start kicking the back end of the season into high gear, brother.
No One Loved Gorillas More
Apr 08
(Inspired by Fred Van Lente on Twitter)
#GorillaManHasAPosse
Lost 6.10, "The Package"
Apr 07
So does every pair of lovers on the island need to have their stars crossed?
This is a show that has a big thing for tortured romance. Whether it’s the unrequited triangle of Kate/Sawyer/Jack, the gone-too-soon tragedy of Sayid and Shannon, or the torn-apart agony of Sun and Jin, the course of true love never does run smooth on Lost. It makes me pine for the days when Bernard and Rose were a more regular presence, although there again, you’ve got the terminal cancer.
