Posts from — September 2008

If you like what goes on here, you might want to check out:

The Alert Nerd group blog, which I’m the junior member of. Someday, they’ll even put me in that fancy Twitter widget they’ve got.

And of course, I’ll be helping with BCC coverage this weekend for my paymasters at Newsarama.

And, not linked to my red-hot desire for self-promotion at all, check out Fantastic Fangirls. Being neither fantastic nor a fangirl, I have no dog in that particular race, but I do like intelligent, well-written comics ruminating, and FF has got that all taken care of.

Echoing conversations that I’ve had with Kevin and Rich within the past week, the too-young death of DC’s Minx imprint seems to be symptomatic of DC’s chronic allergy to self-promotion outside of its oh-so-clever house ads. Individual books in the line got some glowing press (The Plain Janes, Re-Gifters and New York Four - which are my favorite three of the ones I’ve read, incidentally) but I’m not aware of the books ever finding their target audience. Instead, the Minx line was relegated mostly to existing fans of the authors and artists involved, and I’ve noted the disparity between the target audience and the audience actually excited about the books in the past.

Why? I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve seen a Minx book in a Borders or Barnes and Noble, and I’ve certainly never seen promotional materials for them beyond the sampler I got at this year’s NYCC and the promo copy of Janes that Jim Rugg gave me at last year’s. In fact, I wouldn’t have been excited for Minx at all if it weren’t for Intertron pal Hugh Stewart, who’s been a bigger booster for the imprint than he’s had a right to be without being compensated by DC.

DC reminds me more and more of myself circa every middle school dance I ever attended. I stood against the wall, looking aloof, and wondered why the girls weren’t noticing. But hey, the people already in my clique thought I was awesome.

September 25 is likely to become a holiday among gamers in years to come, a less obnoxious alternative to the grudgingly-fun but way-played-out Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Why? Because Jack Thompson is disbarred. And while this doesn’t mean that Thompson is no longer two servings of Grape Nuts shy of a well-balanced breakfast, it means that his ability to antagonize gamers through the courts and as a talking head has been diminished pretty substantially.

As a sometimes gaming journo and a former Penny Arcade forums regular, I tingle with an undefined glee at the news of his long overdue comeuppance.

In the wake of his vicious, Twitter-based assault on former employer BOOM Studios, Kevin Church will be developing a new miniseries for Marvel. The project? Dazzler/MODOK: Strange Love.

Geoff Johns may be crafting the story of DC Universe Online, but fan favorite Roy Thomas has volunteered to write a 60-issue series explaining all of the inconsistencies between the game and established comics canon. When reached for comment, Thomas went on for two hours about the hidden connections between Tarantula and I, Spyder.

The much-hyped Bendis Vs. Kirkman panel taking place at Baltimore Comic Con this Saturday is not a debate. It’s a pudding wrestling match.

Pre-emptive Spotted on the Con Floor:

• Frank Cho seen sketching a girl with ridiculously large breasts.
• Me seen getting stared at when I try to get Art Baltazar to autograph every issue of Tiny Titans.
• Adam Hughes seen sketching a girl with ridiculously large breasts.
• Ultra-Rare print copies of Grok, the Alert Nerd Zine.
• Dan DiDio seen eating a child’s soul.

One of the programming ingenues from my place of employment recently left us to go to college, and he’s not happy with his roommate.

My Roommate Is A Creep is his chronicle of daily proof that hell is not other people per se, just the people that live with you (a truth I can attest to).

Some of the observations on display:

This morning I sprayed the entire room with Oust. I just got back from lunch and the room smells even more than before I sprayed it. Now, there’s a faint smell of Parmesan cheese. I really don’t appreciate the level of sanitation that it has come to in here.

Welcome to college, Matt.

I just got done reading A Darkness Forged In Fire, and as solidly okay as it ended up being, it was another fantasy saga with a world-weary outcast hero, his unlikely animal companion (that is symbolic of his repressed inner nature) a love interest that the hero could ‘never be with’ due to some social convention or another, a dwarven friend who has an especially genial relationship with the hero’s cowardly friend, and a barbaric friend who is totally smarter than he first appears to be. That totally doesn’t sound like anything I’ve read before.

Everything about it is a page from a Fantasy/Sci Fi Mad Libs, up to and including the title.

I don’t normally hate DirecTV - it gives me Food Network, Jurassic Fight Club, reruns of the 90s Iron Man cartoon, and records shows for me, too - but right now, I kind of do.

When my wife worked second shift at el hospital, it was imperative for us to record new shows and watch them later that night. Once she switched to days, the habit stuck, and we’re exceedingly used to watching stuff whenever we want to, a habit that betrayed us tonight.

We were visiting my wife’s grandmother in the hospital following a joint replacement surgery, and didn’t get home until maybe 8:40. Of course, we weren’t worried about missing House or (my wife’s current favorite show) 90210, because they were set up to record. Just like Fringe was set up to record immediately afterward at 9pm.

Which is great in theory, but in practice I came home to find that the Tivo box had malfunctioned, leaving us with duplicate 3 minute recordings of both House and 90210, duplicate recordings that started at 8:12 and ended at 8:15. I would later discover that Fringe didn’t record at all.

I can set up the Tivo (if it still works) to record the latest installment of the 902-verse when it reairs tomorrow night, but damned if Fox is planning to rebroadcast that episode of House anytime soon.

So, gas costs are still something like eighty dollars a gallon, and I drive a half hour to get to my comics retailer (insert another plug for Scranton, PA’s The Unknown). That creates a financial quandary, and the answer is cutting my pull list. And yes, one solution is to simply outsource my comics buying to Heavyink and cut the drive out altogether, but I like supporting local businesses, and local comic shops (so many of which have gone extinct) even moreso.

So, I’m taking a look at my pull list and seeing just what exactly I need to have.

DC
All-New Atom
Batman
Birds of Prey
Booster Gold
Blue Beetle
Final Crisis
Green Lantern
JLA
JSA
Legion of Super Heroes
Manhunter
Teen Titans
Wonder Woman

Marvel
Avengers: The Initiative
New Avengers
Mighty Avengers
Secret Invasion
Amazing Spider-Man
Captain America
Invincible Iron Man
Immortal Iron Fist
Punisher: War Journal
Uncanny X-Men
X-Force
X-Men Legacy
Young X-Men

Image
Dynamo 5
Invincible
Noble Causes

Dynamite
Zorro

It now looks a little something like this:

Some of those books (Atom, Noble Causes) are going away organically. Others, like Iron Fist, Booster Gold and Punisher, are rooted in creative team changes (and my dropping Punisher isn’t a knock on Rick Remender, who is an awesome guy - it’s just a convenient place to back away from Frank Castle - a character I’ve never really liked as much as I’ve liked what Matt Fraction was doing with him.

Looking at Marvel, I’ve still got most of those ’spine’ books - the ones that the flavor and plot of the larger universe are built on. As you might guess, I really like what Marvel is building right now and I enjoy their stable of creative talent. On the DC side, I’ve pared down to just the books I really enjoy. I’m on the fence about a few DC books, like Action and Batman, but not going to commit to them long-term, for various reasons.

On the Marvel side, I’m basically reading ASM on an arc-to-arc basis, and I flirt with going back to it full time, but never seriously enough to have it pulled for me.

Are any of the rest of you cutting your list? What are you keeping and what are you ditching?