Saturday, April 17, 2004"Out of Context Theatre presents...."
from Fantastic Four in The House of Horrors Big Little Book (Whitman, 1968) - courtesy pal CullyFriday, April 16, 2004"Lois, you tramp!"
Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane #29 (DC Comics, Nov 1961) - cover by Curt Swan and Stan KayeThursday, April 15, 2004
He asked, and I agreed; I'm apparently to expect some AiT/PlanetLar comics in the mail pretty soon, which will be fun. However, I'm not all that great of a reviewer, especially when compared to some of the other people who have already done their part for Big Larry...their reviews are like "counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor"* while my reviews tend to be like "duh...pictures purty," so don't expect too much. Here, I'll give you an example:
Action Comics #814, first of the "new direction" (again) Superman titles, features the work of the much-maligned Chuck Austen (sometimes deservedly so). But, as someone who has been reading the Superman comics uninterrupted since the '86 reboot (and for several years prior), I can honestly say Austen does a perfectly acceptable job here. It's fast-paced, entertaining, amusing in parts, and sets up future plotlines nicely. It's not groundbreaking work, but it's enjoyable. People complaining about Supes and Lois and others acting out of character...well, their characters are no more different than what occurs during any creative team change. So, this comic isn't the war crime people seem to think it is. Okay, there you go. Expect more like that when the AiT/PlanetLar box shows up. * If you're gonna steal, steal from the best.Wednesday, April 14, 2004MST3K, new comics, Hello Larry, the Unlightable Being of Bareness, jinxing, and gratuitous footnotes. Not to mention too long of a title.
Okay, so you know the Undersea Kingdom serial that the Comedy Central version of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 had run in front of some of their fourth season episodes? Well, the cliffhanger on one of the serial's chapters had the hero and his boy chum standing on a mountaintop that gets blown up real good by the bad guys. Certain death for the hero and the boy, right? Well, with the next episode of MST3K, we get the next chapter of the serial, where we see a repeat of the cliffhanger from the previous chapter...only this time the hero and boy very clearly jump away from the mountaintop before it explodes. Joel and the 'bots, watching in the audience, shout and hoot in disbelief, upset that the makers of the serial had so obviously cheated.
And that's what I was reminded of when I read the new issue of JLA, #96, when it was explained how Batman escaped being shot point blank in the previous issue. I fully call "no way" on that. But, hey, it's still nicely drawn. I haven't had much time to read everything else yet, not that I got a whole lot. I did read the last chapter of 1602 (hello, room for a potential sequel!), the new Fables (more clues to the Adversary's true nature...though a particular person is mentioned as a slave of the Adversary at the very end, I think there's a hint in the story that this slave may actually be the Adversary...anyone else think that?), and JSA (I love me some Golden Age DC characters). I also picked up the new issue of Mad, though this may not be the best issue for me, as the main parodies include Alias, Everwood, and Survivor, TV shows I've never seen. It does have "A MAD Look at Bowling" by the always-funny Sergio Aragones, so that's nice. Oh, and Larry? Don't worry 'bout me...I've got plenty of energy! I've posted on this weblog of mine every single day since I started in early December (whether I've had anything to say or not, har har), and I plan to keep up that streak, though I'm sure I've jinxed it just by mentioning it here. I have no idea why I'm posting every day...at first, I think it just to let early visitors to my little corner of the interweb-thingie know that this wasn't just some fly-by-night weblog, that I intended to keep adding new content as often as possible and they should all visit equally often. Plus, I had this fear that if I didn't post every day, all my visitors would vanish overnight, and I'd turn into one of sites featured here. Now, I think I'm mostly driven to post every day by that very same obsessive/compulsive behavior that drives me to collect comics and make "want lists" for issues I don't have.* Maybe I need a good week-long power outage to break me from the habit, to shake the feeling that if I don't post, something terrible will happen...like, I don't know, the Earth will spiral out of its orbit and fly right into the sun, maybe. Until that happens (some kind of enforced break, not the destruction of the Earth...though that would do it, too), I still intend to post every day for at least the near future. It may not always be posts of this length, it may occasionally be just an amusing comic cover if I happen to be busy that day**, but I'll have something up here. Unless, like I said, I just jinxed myself. * Just fanzines and some issues of Sugar & Spike and Herbie. It's not a big want-list!
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