Buys
DVDs: Some UK offerings this week, including the complete The Office and the complete Spaced. It's the second time I buy the latter, the first being a gift to a roommate, which gave me the chance to sample the series. Obviously, I was sold.
Books: Douglas Coupland's newest, The Gum Thief, and Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys. Two of my favorite authors at their best. Or so I've heard and choose to believe it.
Comics: The Fable tie-in 1001 Nights of Snowfall, and though I don't usually mention singles, I have to mention the full run of Bill Mantlo's Micronauts I got my hands on. It includes the very first American comic I ever owned, a tattered copy of Micronauts #5, since lost. I could never tell which issue it was because the only thing I remembered was the splash page:
Takes me back to before I could even read English.
"Accomplishments"
Books: Read Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby this week, darkly funny novel about a journalist who discovers a culling spell and inadvertently starts killing people until he embarks on a road trip to destroy every version of it with a realtor who makes her living selling haunted houses. As with other Palahniuk books, it's a veritable anarchist's manual and has a little twist at the end. If each of his novels weren't aiming at different targets, I'd get sick of his literary tricks (repetition, catalog riffs), but it's a quick read that never gets boring.
DVDs: Since university opens the coming week, and I'll be busy as hell (it's where I work), I knew I couldn't realistically watch and write about Voyager every day. So I pushed hard yesterday and got about a week ahead. So yeah. Done with Voyager. Wow. Quite a trip, with lots of lows, but some surprising highs too. I'll let the remaining reviews tell the tale. I can't really tell you how the DVD extras are since, as I've already admitted, I bought an Asian bootleg through eBay (I got screwed basically - they had the pictures of the real thing) and it doesn't have all the extras. Some, but not all. It's too bad, but at the same time, I'm not a big fan of the way Star Trek extras are put together.
Improv: My improv group, Les Impromptus, has this cool video introduction we play at the start of each evening, but we thought it would be nice to change it for our second season. so I was put in charge of storyboarding it, and we filmed it the next day. We were only missing three shots when the sun came down, so I'd say the storyboards were a good idea to speed things up. In the original intro, I was seen reading the Aquaman Showcase. In this one, I'm of course holding Volume 2.
RPGs: Last Monday, I stole an idea from Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol and ran with it for my Black Ops campaign. It's the bit where the Brotherhood of Dada steals Albert Hoffmann's bicycle on which the first LSD trip occured. Tied it into the US presidential campaign too. After an intro in which one of the characters water-skied while tied to the Loch Ness monster, the bike was stolen from Warehouse 23, leading our heroes along a merry (I should say hallucinatory) race through Arizona (with a sidetrip falling into the Grand Canyon) and saving McCain and Obama from themselves as their big debate became fueled by acid instead of cow dung. You know, the usual Black Ops adventure.
New Unauthorized Doctor Who CCG cards: 16, all from Classic Who's last story, Survival. There'll be about two dozen cards coming out of this serial by the time I'm done.
Someone Else's Post of the Week
Chris Sims' Invincible Super-Blog got an early lead with "The Satanic Son of Superman", a hilarious analysis of Action Comics #410, written by none other than Cary Bates of True Believers new-found fame. Sims makes a persuasive argument that he should be included in the same club as Kanigher, Haney and Mantlo.
Having been tagged with a meme by the effervescent Googum on the subject if my favorite blog post EVER, I've had a hard time coming up with something. My first blogger was Dave Campbell and I read Chris Sims every day, so I'm obviously a fan of comedy writing. However, it's the posts that really make me think about the medium that I think are the best, and there I have to give it to the Absorbascon. Scipio's developped a ton of concepts, analogies and comparisons, giving a literary slant to that trashiest of all sequential art genres: the superhero comic. The best? Take your pick. I'll go with the first of many on his pet concept, the Dynastic Centerpiece Model. A short one that invites to click the label and learn more.
DVDs: Some UK offerings this week, including the complete The Office and the complete Spaced. It's the second time I buy the latter, the first being a gift to a roommate, which gave me the chance to sample the series. Obviously, I was sold.Books: Douglas Coupland's newest, The Gum Thief, and Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys. Two of my favorite authors at their best. Or so I've heard and choose to believe it.
Comics: The Fable tie-in 1001 Nights of Snowfall, and though I don't usually mention singles, I have to mention the full run of Bill Mantlo's Micronauts I got my hands on. It includes the very first American comic I ever owned, a tattered copy of Micronauts #5, since lost. I could never tell which issue it was because the only thing I remembered was the splash page:
Takes me back to before I could even read English."Accomplishments"
Books: Read Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby this week, darkly funny novel about a journalist who discovers a culling spell and inadvertently starts killing people until he embarks on a road trip to destroy every version of it with a realtor who makes her living selling haunted houses. As with other Palahniuk books, it's a veritable anarchist's manual and has a little twist at the end. If each of his novels weren't aiming at different targets, I'd get sick of his literary tricks (repetition, catalog riffs), but it's a quick read that never gets boring.
DVDs: Since university opens the coming week, and I'll be busy as hell (it's where I work), I knew I couldn't realistically watch and write about Voyager every day. So I pushed hard yesterday and got about a week ahead. So yeah. Done with Voyager. Wow. Quite a trip, with lots of lows, but some surprising highs too. I'll let the remaining reviews tell the tale. I can't really tell you how the DVD extras are since, as I've already admitted, I bought an Asian bootleg through eBay (I got screwed basically - they had the pictures of the real thing) and it doesn't have all the extras. Some, but not all. It's too bad, but at the same time, I'm not a big fan of the way Star Trek extras are put together.Improv: My improv group, Les Impromptus, has this cool video introduction we play at the start of each evening, but we thought it would be nice to change it for our second season. so I was put in charge of storyboarding it, and we filmed it the next day. We were only missing three shots when the sun came down, so I'd say the storyboards were a good idea to speed things up. In the original intro, I was seen reading the Aquaman Showcase. In this one, I'm of course holding Volume 2.
RPGs: Last Monday, I stole an idea from Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol and ran with it for my Black Ops campaign. It's the bit where the Brotherhood of Dada steals Albert Hoffmann's bicycle on which the first LSD trip occured. Tied it into the US presidential campaign too. After an intro in which one of the characters water-skied while tied to the Loch Ness monster, the bike was stolen from Warehouse 23, leading our heroes along a merry (I should say hallucinatory) race through Arizona (with a sidetrip falling into the Grand Canyon) and saving McCain and Obama from themselves as their big debate became fueled by acid instead of cow dung. You know, the usual Black Ops adventure.New Unauthorized Doctor Who CCG cards: 16, all from Classic Who's last story, Survival. There'll be about two dozen cards coming out of this serial by the time I'm done.
Someone Else's Post of the Week
Chris Sims' Invincible Super-Blog got an early lead with "The Satanic Son of Superman", a hilarious analysis of Action Comics #410, written by none other than Cary Bates of True Believers new-found fame. Sims makes a persuasive argument that he should be included in the same club as Kanigher, Haney and Mantlo.
Having been tagged with a meme by the effervescent Googum on the subject if my favorite blog post EVER, I've had a hard time coming up with something. My first blogger was Dave Campbell and I read Chris Sims every day, so I'm obviously a fan of comedy writing. However, it's the posts that really make me think about the medium that I think are the best, and there I have to give it to the Absorbascon. Scipio's developped a ton of concepts, analogies and comparisons, giving a literary slant to that trashiest of all sequential art genres: the superhero comic. The best? Take your pick. I'll go with the first of many on his pet concept, the Dynastic Centerpiece Model. A short one that invites to click the label and learn more.
Comments
The Absorbascon is one of the greats--heck, I think I'll check it out now.