Dig This! Tuesday

Time agin for one of my non-posts, which means I post something almost totally devoid of new content. So, here are a couple of things that got my attention from the web today.

• A 2001 black space monolith action figure. I'm gonna buy one, strap it to my forehead, and hope to evolve.

You may have noticed in the sidebar to the blog that I have an interest in wine, beer, and booze in general. It intersects with a passing interest in science here--

• Grapes ain't gettin' enough sex. This NYT article explains how genetics and cloning are resulting in inferior wines.

Finally, in the comic book department, as the nerd world rushes to weigh in on the folding of Wizard, here are some mildly inspired parodies of Batman Covers:

• Batman v. Internet Memes.

Here ends the churning of other's ideas represented as work-on-my-part.

Monday - Shotgun Rules

So, it's Monday morning. I've got a mountain of work I'm trying to climb. Only one cup of coffee aboard the system so far, no coherent thoughts in my brain - and isn't that just a great reason to keep reading? - but I want to not disappoint all the readers out there. All, like, three of you who tune in regularly. So rather than have something organized and coherent, I'm taking the shotgun approach, hoping that if I fire enough little nuggets, one or more will stick in you.

• Glenn Beck is a moron. He's an hysterical little girl, with a shaky grasp of both politics and history, who hopes that if he's shrill enough you won't realize how asinine his ideas are. The irony is that his listeners/viewers apparently don't recognize his tactics as those favored by the very shadowy political movements he wants you to fear. Hitler could shout with the best of them, just like you, Glenn.
• Nancy Grace seems to come from the same journalistic school. If you're loud, you must be right. Her confrontation with John Gosselin did something I didn't think was possible: made me feel bad for him.
• The Phillies played baseball in 20-degree weather last night. This to me is a clear sign that places where winter falls this early should not have baseball teams, and that THE SEASON GOES ON TOO DAMN LONG! In the 1970 World Series, with the Oriels of my boyhood dreams, there were two games played by this time in the calendar, and we aren't even out of the playoffs, yet.
• I have to admit, the Yankees played a couple of great games. I still hate them.
• Although I can appreciate the historical symmetry of a Dodgers/Yankees series, that's only marginally more interesting than a LA/LA series. Go Phils!
• Cub Scouts has come a long way since I was a kid. Camping in a fort, with an outdoor movie and indoor plumbing really isn't "roughing it."
• It's frighteningly easy to get yourself piled with work, just by being a nice person and having a genuine desire to help people out. So I've heard.
• Many parents don't understand the concept of movie ratings. Apparently, they think: "Yeah, R. That means it's something the family watches together." On a psychotherapy note: if you take your little kid to see Zombieland, you can't complain at them for not being able to get to sleep, or if they start gnawing on your fleshy parts.
• Nobel Peace Prize. I'm just sayin'.
• And finally, dinner with famous comics guys is a lot of fun. Listening to Mike Mignola and John Arcudi go at it and getting a glimpse inside the Hellboy universe... good times.

So, there, in no particular order was my week. Go ahead, pick out the pellets.

Watch This

Just to avoid the inevitable individual questions people will ask me, I'm going to add this to the blog and get it over with all at once. I'm going to commit to electronic paper my thoughts on Watchmen.

If you're a fanboy, stop reading now, because I don't need any more death marks on my head.

In full disclosure, although I've been reading comics for decades, I've never been a Watchmen devotee. I read it when it first appeared - I've got all the issues tucked away in plastic somewhere, as well as the first leather-bound compendium - but never quite understood the amount of worship it still inspires.

So, when I went to the first IMAX show of the morning, I really wasn't expecting all that much. What I got was both more and less than even those mediocre expectations. This film looks beautiful, with loving detail to every stylized pose, an animated lighting kick on every drop of the copious amounts of blood. In my theater, the sound alone was worth the price of admission. The performances were great, even in the small, thankless roles. Individual moments of this film are brilliant. And yet, and yet...

It's just too damn long. By the time all the monologuing by Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan arrives at the climax, I wondered if anyone realized how far into self-parody it had all slipped. Maybe it would be okay if everyone wasn't so glum, and if everyone hadn't taken the whole business so seriously.

A story that was originally delivered in monthly installments, and paced accordingly, cannot be consumed straight up in 2 hours and 43 minutes. The screenwriters should have acknowledged the different medium, and instead of using the comic as unbreakable blueprint, reformed the story for the screen. My choice would have been to let Rorschach loose with his cleaver on much of the backstory.

It's also too damn bloody. Ask anyone, I'm not squeamish, I'm down for a bit of the old ultra-violence, but when I have to look away from the screen... there's something really off kilter. It creates a tone break with other parts of the film that drags the viewer out of the story entirely. It also made me scared for humanity when the guys in the row behind me were groaning orgasmically at every rending of a human being. That's what they came for, apparently.

And yes, the blue animated penis on Dr. Manhattan is distracting. Ditto the "greatest boomer hits" soundtrack.

The moments of grandeur, like when Night Owl and Silk Spectre suit up and go crime-hunting, or when Rorschach faces down an entire prison, are definitely there, but they can't quite overcome the need for a lot of cumbersome exposition.

In the end, if you like the graphic novel, you won't be disappointed in the movie. If you don't know or don't care about the graphic novel, the film will strike you the same way.

Pros of Cons

Continuing my thoughts on NYCC... yes there were plenty of good things about the con. Top of the list: Ghostbusters. These guys in the pic were humping the soon-to-be-released video game from Atari. Great costumes, nice proton packs, even better game demo. Can't wait to slime my way across virtual NYC in June.

Top of the list for free swag -- the magnetic S.H.I.E.L.D. insignia from Marvel. Looks great on my desk drawers, right next to the magnetic hula girl and magnetic Mach 5. Good on you, Marvel.

The absolute bestest part of the con, though, were the professionals in attendance. While this may sound like an obvious suck-up, I'd merely point out that this isn't self-evident, because comics, like every other industry, has its share of douchebags. Any of the really bitter blogs can dish on those people. Besides, none of the people I'd be sucking up to are ever gonna read this.

I was on a bit of a mission to find qualified writers to teach a comic writing course at Drexel University in Philadelphia and met some really fantastic industry guys who were not only helpful, but immediately responsive. Randy Stradley at Dark Horse not only put me in contact with someone almost before I got home, but I swear the man was on the floor every hour on Friday looking at artist's portfolios. That's a lot of hours and a lot of pencilled boobs.

Steve Wacker, editor of Amazing Spider-man, who manages to turn out an (almost) weekly book, was on hand and also generous with his time. Perhaps that's because we were sharing jokes about Tom Brennan, the assistant editor on the book, and and an old friend of mine. Yeah, I'll betray old friends for career advancement. But it'll always be in a funny context. Simperin' Steve (his name for himself, not mine), also hosted a pretty hysterical panel on Story Structure in Comics, along with Pete Tomasi and Frank Tieri. Imagine a hot, sweaty room full of wannabe writers and artists. Actually, overfull. Spilling into the hall. All of them after that magic bullet-point template for stories that they can just fill in and be whisked away into comics super-stardom (your own Twitter feed!). The panel basically told them the truth: the story dictates the structure. They couldn't handle the truth. I love watching other writers panic.

One final pro at the con, actually even before I got there, was an old friend and former student who now professionally blogs about comics (which sounds like something you take medicine to correct). Paul Montgomery was much nicer to me in his blog than I have been to him, so you should go and read it here.

More? We'll see.

Jabbas, Leias, and Venkmans: NYC Comic Con '09

First, let me get this off my chest: I should really be reading student essays. The little parasites - theoretically - put a lot of work into it, and I should respect that. But... they mostly suck, so I'm blogging instead. Is this wrong? Sure, it is, but that's me and if you don't like it, there's a little x somewhere on your screen and you should piss off, right now.

That being said, let me talk about New York Comic Con.

This would be the point where most people put in some Star Wars quote (yeah, you've already seen those blogs). Why is it that people who seek to rag on the comic scene are criminally deprived of originality? That is to say, how scathing a critique are you issuing when you quote the number one geek fanboy of all time, a guy who is not particularly known for his writing? Scum and villainy? If that's really the best you can come up with for this event, stop blogging. Ditto any "clever" word pun that ends in -gasm.

The way I'm going to start my con-commentary is with my own coined word - notice the lack of "gasm-ing" but the way I still work in the sexual connotation - here it comes, wait for it, okay tah-dah... I want to talk about swag-hags. These are the con attendees who show up with the biggest bag and proceed to fill it with anything and everything they can get their hands on, provided it's free. Now, you can tell the pros from the fanboys because the pros bring their own bags, usually emblazoned with the specs of some previous, "superior," event. I'll see your NYCC and raise you a SDCC. The fanboys take whatever receptacle they can get their hands on in a frenzy of hoarding.

The swag-hags are notable for taking any piece of garbage and putting it in their bag, regardless of the quality of said object. Or, as a not-to-be-named source from one of the big comic houses put it, "do you know how much of that free stuff was just piled up under my desk last week?" Yeah, folks, there's a reason it's free. I don't want to get all high and mighty, because that leaves you with the wrong impression. I myself had a bright yellow swag bag, but it was from Dark Horse, which is a mondo-cool group. I kept the side with the Hellboy II logo turned in ('cause mondo-cool isn't a phase I'm willing to attach to that film). But in my bag, you wouldn't find multiple copies of comics that no one would buy, I was carrying my coat. Of course, I needed to take the coat off because the ambient temp in the Javits was set for the comfort of those costumed conventioneers pictured at the top of the page.

The really hysterical part of that picture is that those people didn't arrive together, so the girls actually came to the con looking for stormtroopers. Unfortunately, with the temperature so high, and those guys completely encased in neoprene and plastic, I'm sure they were so dehydrated by the end of the day that erectile function was simply not an option. That's okay, though, because there were plenty of guys released on a day pass from a suburban basement somewhere who looked an awful lot like Jabba...

TBC...