March 14, 2008 on 1:25 am | In WWLA
So, for the sake of getting news up super fast, I’ll be giving over my blog to the Wizard Universe cause for the next few days. So, keep checking back here for all the breaking announcements from the conventions floor. When X,Y and Z get announced at DC Nation at 5:00pm PST, you’ll see’em up here at 5:05ishpm PST…basically, you’ll see them here first. So get the breaking bits here and then hit up WizardUniverse.com for longer stories and Q&As from the convention. Stay tuned folks, it’s gonna be a crazy weekend out here, but we’ll bring you so much content, it’ll feel like you were here even though you’re reading about it from your couch in your undies!
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March 8, 2008 on 8:37 pm | In Best of the Bunch
I like Wednesdays that surprise me.
Every week I usually have my picks: my best guesses at what books are going to get me giddy. Most times, I’m right on the money and the first books I’m grabbing are the books that keep me talking all week. Great as those reads may be, having your perennial favorites be top picks gets a little predictable.
Then, there’s those other weeks that come along when books A, B and C seem like the most exciting, but X, Y and Z end up making the week memorable. It’s that type of freshness added to my reading list here and there that keeps me coming back for something new.
But the best weeks, by far, are the ones where the books I’ve guessed would be good turn out great and the leaps I’ve taken with other books aren’t let-downs but really enriched my weekly reading.
And with that long explanatory preface over, this week was one of the best kinds where the no-brainers and favorites definitely delivered along with the leaps.
The top “no-brainer” of the week has got to be Logan. I feel like saying, “I shouldn’t even have to explain why Brian K. Vaughan and Eduardo Risso working on a Wolverine book is awesome,” actually insults your intelligence as readers, but if you need telling, check out what this week’s QB crew had to say about this “Book of the Week.” Quick related side-note: I love referring to a last page cliffhanger by saying, “Holy crap, the last page dropped a bomb!” And this book dropped the bomb, calling out “Little Boy” on the page…
Freakin’ awesome!
Another book this week I could rattle on all day about is Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera’s Scalped, but Andy Serwin already took care of that for me, so check his blog to hear why you need to be reading this book. Trust me, grab the first two trades, give’em a read and you will wonder how you’ve been getting by as a comics reader without out.
Now, the “no-brainer” for most that really was a leap for me was this week’s Green Lantern. I was editing columnist Jamie Dunst’s Corps Curriculum roundup—which, as a guy who’s never read much Green Lantern, reads like an update about the denizens of the Mos Eisley Cantina to someone who’s never seen Star Wars with all the alien names being bandied about—and got so freakin’ excited after Laira became a Red Lantern that I think I became a Lantern fan on the spot! Seriously, I read that panel and I could just see the splash page down the line with a rainbow of warriors from different factions meeting on an intergalactic battlefield for a crazier and more colorful Hobbit-esque “Battle of Six Armies!”
Another book I gave a read after editing some related stories was Image’s Dead Space. After giving the ol’ edit to Kevin Mahadeo’s interviews with the writer Antony Johnston and artist Ben Templesmith, I thought, “I like Johnston’s Wasteland and I dig Templesmith’s art on Fell, I’ll give this a shot.” While most versions of video games in other forms of media haven’t been great successes, this book really drew me in and had me itching for more issues and a shot at the game, so much so that I snuck into Thursday Morning Quarterback and tacked that very statement onto the end of the Extra Points section (Ok, ok, I didn’t so much “sneak” as I said, “Hey Andy, did you give Dead Space an Extra Point, cuz I dug that book, man.” He said “no” but I could, to which I said, “I’m doing it!”)! I think I’m most excited for the next issue because while this one didn’t have mass amounts of alien assault or monster mayhem, it was a really creepy laying-out of the story that shows all the little pieces that will inevitably lead to the type of clusterf— that lead to a video game about a guy alone on a monster-filled space station. Plus, eery ghost scenes like this are just intriguing for a big sci-fi fan like me that loves cross-genre stories…
Now, I’ve got to call out Halloween: Night Dance. As I’ve said in other posts, “Halloween” is my favorite horror franchise and I think that’s because it’s not just gore for gore’s sake, it’s always had a very creepy psychological aspect to it and it took place in a small Illinois town that, being from the outer suburbs of Chicago, I could always look at and go, “Wow, that could be my town!” Plus, that setting always made me a little nostalgic for Halloween night back when I was in High School. Anyway, after editing TJ Dietsch’s interview with writer Stefan Hutchinson—I read and edit a cool story, I like to check out the book and that happened a lot this week—I grabbed last month’s first issue and this week’s #2…
Between the ever unraveling mystery of Lisa with her nightmares and the creepy drawings she keeps getting from a young neighbor kid, the plight of the out-of-towner who’s been hospitalized after hitting a young woman fleeing Michael Myers with his car and seen his wife skewered, things are pretty nuts in this comic…and I like it! The inner monologue keeps changing so reader’s get all of Lisa’s anxiety, all the craziness of Mr. Denial-about-his-wife’s-murder as he contemplates how to rescue his love that readers know is long gone and the terrified thoughts of each new victim, the book builds to that frantic, breakneck thought process of being chased by a silent, sadistic unstoppable killer that the classic “Halloween” movies instilled in viewers.
On top of that, Tim Seeley’s art and the colors by Elizabeth John and Courtney Via are so spot on for fall in the Midwest that as I read the carnival scene in issue #2, I actually got the smell of burning leaves and that rush of first brisk breeze and thought about going to grab a sweater. Great stuff!
That’s this week’s best of the bunch for me! Next week, more comics will be read and more bunches of books highlighted, but keep checking in to The Loudest Monkey all week for more comic talk and feel free to leave me comments over at the my blog’s official thread on the Wizard Universe Message Boards or shoot me an email. Till later on, monkey-lovers!
March 5, 2008 on 10:22 pm | In Monkey see...monkey blogs...
If you haven’t read this week’s Buffy (issue #12), you might want to hold off on reading the rest of this. There’re going to be some spoilers.
I should preface this post with a few points so it doesn’t just end up sounding like a rant, but then again it’s a blog, so it’ll probably end up sounding a little like a rant anyway. Forerunner one, this may get a little ranty.
Second, I’m a huge Buffy fan, and not just physically standing at 6′3. I could spend a whole Saturday rewatching a season, and the rest of the weekend watching another and I wouldn’t dub that “a waste of time.”
And lastly, I have a ton of respect for the New York Times. Coming from the University of Missouri School of Journalism, it was frequently cited as an example of one of the best if not the best newspaper in the world, and for good reason: It’s a great publication!
(Ok, here comes the “but” and the blog…)
But…
I’ve found some of their mainstream comic book coverage to be a bit wonky in the past and ran into the same situation again today with their article about a revelation in issue #12 of Buffy.
[The spoiler train starts here, this is your last chance to get off.]
I’ll admit that when I heard through the grapevine that Buffy was going gay in a scene of the upcoming issue, I groaned. At first, it sounded like a “ratings grab” type move: all shock, no substance. Then I came to my senses, realized how well this series has captured the show, put my faith in the creative team and hoped for some shock with a heaping helping of substance.
It was the right move—and a no-brainer really—because this issue was just damned good Buffy. Tender moments, action and hilarity all mixed in with a supernatural mystery and some cool new baddies. It had everything I always loved about the show and everything the comic has led fans like me to expect: greatness in storytelling. In the end, it was just a good Buffy comic, not a “HOLYCRAPBUFFY’SGAY!” comic, which makes sense as good creative teams have a tendency to put out good comics.
What doesn’t make sense to me is why the NY Times article treated this scene like it was some huge event. If you’re a Buffy fan, every issue is already an event already just because it exists. And if you’re a Buffy fan who’s not comfortable with homosexuality, I think you might have checked out in season four. More importantly, I think the question is really whether this is a big deal at all. It’s a main character of a popular series having a gay scene in 2008, not 1948 or even 1998. So, is it really a big deal? I don’t think so and hopefully most people are open-minded enough to agree.
If you’ve been “hanging around” with Buffy since ‘97, odds are her love life isn’t going to end your “friendship,” just like it wouldn’t if someone you’d known for ten years told you they had once experimented. Hey, it may make you gasp—as Joss points out in the article about the scene—but good relationships run deeper than that, just like the relationships of fans to their favorite fictional characters.
I ended up feeling partly compelled to write this post after this part of the article:
“But before fans start blogging frantically, they should know that Mr. Whedon is clear where this is headed. ‘We’re not going to make her gay, nor are we going to take the next 50 issues explaining that she’s not. She’s young and experimenting, and did I mention open-minded?’”
I think there’s something kind of inherently wrong with Joss having to defend this scene. Drew Goddard, Joss and Georges Jeanty are storytellers telling a story. Why do they need to defend themselves if their story involves homosexuality? They shouldn’t.
I don’t feel like fans will be compelled to blog “frantically” about this issue any more than they normally would. There’ll be plenty of normal speculation from Buffy’s devoted followers—myself included—itching for more from their favorite creators on one of their favorite characters, and while I could gripe about certain parts of the article that seem to demonstrate a lack of Buffy knowledge on the reporter’s part (Like this quote: “In a new issue of the ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ comic book series, being released Wednesday, Buffy sleeps with a fellow slayer. And, oh yeah, she’s a woman.” Obviously man, slayers are women.) in the end, I simply don’t think a fuss should be made about something in a character’s sex life especially when it happens so naturally in a great story.
Then again, while I’m admittedly overly optimistic and an idealist, I’m not naive enough to think that news about a popular character from a successful TV show originally portrayed by an extremely attractive starlet having a risqué romp isn’t going to draw attention. Odds are this reporter digs comics and needed an angle to pitch his editor in order to get a chance write about them or his editor saw this angle and knew there’d be an audience for the story or both.
In the end, if this national media coverage introduces 50, 500 or even 5,000 new readers to a great comic book, well then great, it was worth it! I’m just a guy on a blog having a bit of a fanboy rant, and while I think it’s backed by the best of intentions and a hopeful mindset that the world may be a more accepting place than it actually is, won’t the world be a better place with a few more Buffy fans in it? I think so. Plus, that’s less people who’ll think it’s weird when I keep putting on the DVD of the Buffy musical episode after a night at the bars!
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