No, no, no, yes, no – Thanks a bunch USA Today.
Jun 13So, the discussion of women in comics got co-opted today in order to pimp the new Fantastic Four movie, and it’s enough to make grown man who happens to like reading comics cry. Comic fandom just got sucker punched by marketing execs.
Everyone had a look at the USA Today article? Here we go.
Ding Ding – and in this corner, The Strongest One There Is
Jun 13As I’ve said before, the past year of turning the bulk of the Marvel Universe into pricks I could care less about, has created a strong desire in me to see them all beaten to snot. And with issue one of World War Hulk coming out today, it’s time to smash.
The heroes we loved as kids, because they stood for all the right things and had the strength to back those principles, are now the focus of new story themes – the fear of a world where we can’t protect our children, the fear that the people of power who used to protect us are now following agendas we have no say in, and in the name of protecting us, are make dark, dark choices. They don’t stand for what we’d like to do ourselves, they now stand for what we don’t want to see happen, are afraid is happening, and we don’t think we can affect the change needed to keep it happening.
The list of heroes that are still fighting this shift in heroic principle is short. And the one that got the shaft hardest is now back. And the retribution starts here.
A Tale of Two Reviews
Jun 10My full and unhinged enjoyment of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer hinges on one totally unreasonable question: Will they give us Kirby Galactus, or something exponentially less cool?
Jack Kirby’s design of Galactus embodies everything that is great and fun and strange about the Marvel Comics of the 1960’s: He’s a gigantic dude in a purple outfit with horns on his helmet who devours planets, but feels kinda bad about it.
The idea that we would see even a quarter-assed version of this character on the big screen sends me into fits of geekish delirium.
However, in a slightly odd twist of events, even the fanboys/plants over at Ain’t It Cool can’t seem to agree, serving up two very different reviews of the film. And they’re not just different in the “cool as balls” versus “suxorz” sense; one claims we see a full-frontal Galactus several times in a Kirby design; the other claims Galactus is some kind of boring, formless tornado thing.
As cool as the trailers have been, I find it almost impossible to give Fox and director Tim Story enough credit to actually bring Kirby’s Galactus to the screen. Still, a guy can dream, can’t he?
Bye bye, Countdown
Jun 08Maybe it’s just the fact that my fucking boss made me fucking angry this morning by asserting that comp time ISN’T company policy, and that if I didn’t want to travel FOR WORK all weekend, I should have said so and NOT gone on the trip. Yeah, I’m sure THAT would have gone well.
But I’m crabby, and so I’ve just dropped Countdown. It’s going nowhere yet, it’s not getting there all that quickly, and there’s enough annoying moments for me that it’s just a bit of a drag, to be honest.
With 52, I was drawn in by the sheer novelty of it, and that kept me interested even when the storytelling flagged. Working without a net on a weekly book, the four talented writers were driven into flights of fancy that I don’t think they would have attempted if they had the time and forethought that they would get on a monthly book.
Countdown just feels…lumpy. Flaccid. It lacks a certain spark. So all you’re left with are relatively disconnected scenes surrounding relatively uninteresting characters.
If it gets better–or rather, if the voices in the Comics Multiblogoverse say it gets better–I will probably return, and fill the gaps via dollar bins. Or at least pick up the trades. But right now, that’s $12 a month I’m saving.
(I also dropped Amazons Attack, for similar reasons, although it has a spark thanks to Will Pfeiffer’s scripting and Pete Woods’ pencils. It just makes little sense to me, there is WAY too much death and destruction for its own good, and it’s kinda jarring to be reading this big-ass apeshit event happening at the same time as Countdown. Bleah.)
Hawkeye Pierce on the Zombie Apocalypse
Jun 07Poking around the World War Z website, I made a strange discovery – if you go to the world map and click on Tao, New Mexico, you’ll hear a snippet of the book as read by Alan Alda. The site doesn’t say it’s him, but trust me, it’s Alda. After 34 years of M*A*S*H repeats (lovingly, I should clarify), I’d know that voice anywhere.
I can only assume that it’s taken from the audiobook version. I’m not a big fan of audiobooks – but given that this is an entire book collecting various first-person recollections of the war against the zombies, I think I might like this audiobook. I’ve downloaded their 10 part, expurgated podcast of the audiobook, so I guess I’ll know soon enough.
Plus, y’know, Hawkeye Pierce is in it, so it’s kind of hard to resist. I wonder who else will put in a vocal cameo.
[update] Thanks to Mark, I had to find out who the entire cast was. Max Brooks is on it, but then Brooks is a regular voice actor in Saturday morning cartoons, so that’s not a surprise.
Max Brooks as Max Brooks
Alan Alda as Arthur Sinclair
Carl Reiner as Jurgen Warbrunn
Jurgen Prochnow as Philip Adler
Waleed Zuiater as Saladin Kader
Dean Edwards as Joe Muhammad
Michelle “Mrs. Max Brooks and playwright” Kholos as Jesika Hendricks
Maz Jobrani as Ahmed Farahnakian
Mark Hamill as Todd Wainio
Henry Rollins as T. Sean Collins
Eamonn “Hey, It’s That Guy!” Walker as David Allen Forbes
and Xolelwa Azania
Ajay Naidu as Ajay Shah
John Turturro as Seryosha Garcia Alvarez
Dennis “Hey, It’s That Guy Too!” Boutsikaris as General Travis D’Ambrosia
Becky Ann Baker as Christina Eliopolis
Steve Park as Kwang Jingshu (I know the name, but a NASCAR driver is confusing google)
Frank “New York Theatre Dude – no good links” Kamai as Nury Televaldi and Tomonaga Ijiro
Rob Reiner as “The Whacko”
John McElroy as Ernesto Olguin (not sure – Speed Network dude?)
