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Friday, March 09, 2007

What's up with the blog?

  • I was all intent to keep my live blogging of Jerry Robinson's excellent The Comics coming at ya on the weekly day basis. Honestly, I was. I still plan to as there is way too much stuff in there that I need to share with everyone, like Alex Raymond's Secret Agent X-9, Ham Fisher's Joe Palooka, the woman's increasing contribution to comic strips as both characters and creators, and those wonderful essays by creators such as Charles Schultz, Chic Young, Hal Foster, and Walt Kelly that are sprinkled throughout the book. They are all coming. I just need to make some time and sit myself down in front of a scanner.

    And as of this weekend, I am back to buying comic books on a semi-regular basis so expect an idiotic thought or two on things like muscles and spandex.

  • The Forbidden Planet blog has a little bit about the comic adaptation for William Gibson's Neuromancer which was put out by Epic Comics back in the eighties. I absolutely love William Gibson. I first read Neuromancer in 9th grade and have read pretty much everything he has done. The scans are not the best, but here they are.

  • After a week or so, I see that I am still on Dick's enemy list. Surprisingly enough, my little rant about kids and continuity somehow failed to make his itinerary of things to "HATE" on. Maybe I should comment further on Civil War? Think that will get him to stomp his feet? Like maybe if I said that the problem with Civil War is Mark Millar's inability to stray away from the overuse of splash pages lead to precious amounts of screen time for character development being left on the cutting room floor. Because really, less character development/explanation and more splash pages CAPTAIN AMERICA FREERIDING THEM F-16 SONS OF BITCHES THROUGH SHIELD HEADQUARTERS is exactly what makes a damn good comic book.

    A friend of mine that had the chance to read some of the Civil War scripts early last summer told me how Mark Millar would state something to the effect of "Oi! This Splash page will fetch ye' a fine 'mount of quid! Wot, wot!" Its very gracious for the artist he works with, giving them scripts with one and two page splashs that they can turn around and sell for trillions of dollars. Unfortunately, we seem to have found ourselves with the MOST! IMPORTANT! MARVEL! STORY! EVER! that has left out any possibility at being a decent story so we could have some more Where's Waldo-ish two page spreads.

    Now that I got rant out of the way, I can make good on this newfound "enemy" status, because damn it, son, I NEED THOSE HITS.

  • Last night my friend and I were discussing the death of Captain America over dinner. In our somewhat stunned, exaggerated reactions to the shocking event, my girlfriend gave us some sound advice on how to deal with such tragedy that I now extend to my dear friends on the internet:
    "Oh god! You boys are so stu-pid! You're crying over Captain freakin' America, a fictional character! You KNOW he is going to come back! I mean, come on!!"

    It helps if you read it with the same kind of inflection that a girl from The Hills or Laguna Beach would use.

    But enough about my significant other. What about yours? Did s/he console you with flowers? Insult you with stupid remarks? Let you buy one extra book at the comic shop because you were sad that Captain America was all shot up?

    How have you spent the past few days mourning the loss of an American Legend?

5 comments:

Jason said...

My wife just cast a withering look at me when the news came on the TV. As if I personally was delaying the "actual" news with my "geek" news. But, she did laugh quite a bit at the Colbert Report version.

Speaking of the Colbert Report rant last night. He put it all in such perfectly (fake) snarky terms that any crap I write trying to be funny about Cap's demise will just fall flat.

I'm actually looking forward to this arc of Cap quite a bit, I may actually buy the singles instead of wait for the trade as this is the first thing to get me excited about mainstream Marvel in quite a while. It's as if Brubaker picked up the stinking turd that was Civil War and found it was only a delicious Baby Ruth bar. Fortunately, the Initiative still sucksd, so I can focus my hate on that.

As for mourning poor Steve Rogers, I picked up a 40 of toll-free (O.E. 800) on the way home and will toast to his honor after the kids go to bed.

Dick Hyacinth's Ghost said...

You've been on the enemy list (or to be more accurate, you've been the enemies list) for more like a month, ever since you accused me of backpedaling. I haven't added anyone else because I don't think any other candidates I've considered would really understand the duties inherent in being an Official Dick Hyacinth Enemy.

I don't even remember that rant about continuity, but I think you're basically right; the only problem is that it creates another generation of obsessive compulsive readers incapable of judging a book on its own merits, rather than how it fits into the big picture. Maybe this wouldn't be the case if "shared universe" wasn't a part of the picture, I don't know. I think Ultimate Avengers did run on Cartoon Network, BTW.

Jason said...

It does seem like Millar spends far more of his time on thinking up cool one-liners/splash pages and pre-casting the movie of the book than actually figuring out any deeper themes to his books. Sometimes, this works (Ultimates Vol. 1) and sometimes it fails miserably. Civil War could've been a cool fight-comic, but Marvel really wanted to jam the political allegory-square peg into the circle hole.

Jon Hex said...

All I can really say about Cap dying is that I'm glad Brubaker did it instead of Millar, who would have totally fucked it up.

Now, I plan to get some kind of malt liquor beverage (or six) and drink every one in honor of not only Cap, but of Brubaker as well, since he made me give Cap a chance after the 'incident' in Civil War #7.

Spencer Carnage said...

Dick,

That's interesting. I only saw it pop up on my technorati thingie about a week or two ago. Either way, I am honored that my insults have garnered me such praise. Thank you.



Jon & Jason,

You make me proud to be an American.


Carla,

Yes, but did you upsell them on the Civil War? That's the real cash cow. 7 issues. That's like $50 right there.