May 31, 2003

The Animatrix and another book that i read (very different from the first)

this has a street date of June 3rd, but i have it now because the store doesn't follow such silly rules. i haven't seen them yet, but i have heard the soundtrack that was packaged with it. the first half rocked my meerkats, the second half only had them scratching their heads. that second half really wasn't very good at all.

a note on the book: i wish it had more historical context. it is mainly about the problems of today (Columbia, N. Korea, China and Taiwan, al-Qaeda, etc.), and there is some historical context (mujahideen that US helped train for Soviet-Afghan War turned around and formed al-Qaeda and similar groups who then bomb stuff of countries they don't like). but really, that's it. it tries to explain why these Muslim guys hate the west (and certain middle eastern countries), but nothing else. why is Columbia all fucked up? who knows, but it is. why were the British allowed to draw maps after World War I? who knows, but they were.

another note: from reading this book, you would be led to believe most of the world is fucked up because of two things: fundamentalist Muslims and oil. this is simply not true. Columbia, Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico have neither (well, some, but not enough to be an issue). North Korea, China, Japan, and Taiwan, also none. Somalia, Ethiopia, the Congo, and South Africa, none. yet they are all fucked up. i understand that that author was more worried about the here and now and how they affected the US, and that is mostly oil and fundamentalist Muslims right now, but that makes the title misleading somewhat. it's not what every American should know about the rest of the world, it's what every American should know about the rest of the world in context of the US.

and Canada just sits up there like a crown on America.

now reading: What Every American Should Know About the Rest of the World: Your Guide to Today's Hot Spots, Hot Shots and Incendiary Issues- Melissa L. Rossi

thecomicman spoke @ 01:29 PM |

May 24, 2003

i have finished a book

Isaac Adamson's third book in the Billy Chaka series is the best and worst of the three all at the same time. i will elucidate why anon (no spoilers).

Adamson had problems with his endings in the first two books. they were both very rushed. you got the payoff, and then there was a small five-page chapter explaining the payoff and boom! the book ended (these books are mysteries, by the way). in this third book, you get the payoff sooner (well, not really because the book is longer, but you get farther from the actual end of the book) and you get some more explaining. which is good because this was a particularly hard to understand mystery that started all the way back during World War II. so it was satisfying to figure shit out at the exact time (actually, just a bit sooner for me) that the protagonist does.

now, for the bad parts. in the first two books (Tokyo Suckerpunch and Hokkaido Popsicle), Billy Chaka comes off as a hip, twenty-something writing about what kids in Japan like and don't like. he travels to Tokyo a lot and writes his stories for his magazine Youth in Asia (great pun, i know). he's basically a Japanophile or whatever. he likes his job and he loves Tokyo. come to book three. Billy Chaka seems so much older now (he sounded forty to me) and spends a lot of the book complaining about how goddamn hot and crowded Tokyo is, and how he's so goddamn old now and shouldn't be writing about what kids all the way around the world like (the magazine he works for is based in Cleveland, Ohio). it made for some interesting moments in the novel, but this isn't the Billy Chaka i know and love. reading the novel, i feared this was going to become a trilogy instead of a series.

now to some more good parts. Adamson still has his wit. every book so far is just ridiculously funny at the right times. he has yet to make a joke that wasn't funny or where i was like "there shouldn't be a joke there." it's great.

his supporting characters are awesome and he's actually brought some of them back in ways that make perfect sense. after all, everyone else still lives in Tokyo after Billy Chaka goes back home to Cleveland.

the mystery is still very engaging and super hard to figure out. and that's really cool. and as always, Billy Chaka just stumbles onto these things. in this installment, he just happens to be at a particular pachinko parlor where a woman with a mole has a seizure, and then he's embroiled in this mystery that's almost fifty years old. it has a great 'everyday guy' vibe to it. hell, i could be sitting at a pachinko parlor in Tokyo come Christmas time and then get embroiled in a fifty year old mystery (improbable, not impossible).

final word: three and and three-quarter stars on a five-star scale

now reading: Dreaming Pachinko- Isaac Adamson

thecomicman spoke @ 02:59 AM |

May 23, 2003

oui oui, y'all

as it invariably does, the conversation after the store closed turned to what an Oklahoman Frenchman would sound like. that was the best we could come up with.

now reading: JSA: Fair Play (Book 4)- Geoff Johns

thecomicman spoke @ 11:44 PM |

'Charade' v. 'The Truth About Charlie'

so here it is, the long awaited movie discusion. anchors (and spoilers) away.

'Charade' was good. the acting was good, the storytelling was good, and the damn mystery was intriguing (or would have been if 'Charlie' hadn't ruined it, but that comes later). Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn were believable characters. well, not Grant because he lies about who he is throughout the movie, but he's believable in the sense that you believe everyone of his personas until you're supposed to stop believing him (persona number three), but again, you're supposed to stop believing him because it makes who he actually is that much more surprising. and Hepburn can really play that confused woman thrown in the middle of something big really well. she really makes you believe she was confused and frightened throughout the movie (whether she actually was is best left to better judges of character than i). and they had some good chemistry. you could see that maybe these two characters could fall in love if placed in the situations they were placed in.

the bad guys were pretty cool too, especially James Coburn as Tex. they were different people. Herman was impatient, Gideon was methodical, and Tex was crazy. you could've told them apart even if they had been triplets.

and again, the mystery was intriguing. you didn't know what was what, especially with two major characters changing identities (hee hee, i said titties) as often as Hepburn changed outfits.

and my God was this movie funny. all the one liners could have sunk a boat (my personal favorite was at the end after Grant has proposed to Hepburn and she says, "I can't wait until we have lots of little boys and we can name them all after you," in reference to all of Grants personas).

now, all that 'Charade' was, 'Charlie' was not. the acting was subpar, the heroes had no chemistry, the villains were exactly the same (except that one was an old white guy, one was a young black woman, and the third was a middle-aged Japanese guy), and this was painfully unfunny. also, this movie telegraphed the ending, which was unfortunate for me because 'Charlie' didn't deviate at all from 'Charade' and i watched 'Charlie' first. the new Burton 'Planet of the Apes' may have sucked like the Mets, but at least it had a different surprise ending from the original. 'Charlie's plot was exactly the same as 'Charade's with absolutely no deviance. did i repeat myself? now you know how i felt.

even Tim Robbins couldn't save this movie. his turn as the double-dealing Bartholomew was crazed and gave away the fact that he wasn't who he said he was, whereas Walter Matthau's original Bartholomew was subdued and patient, and you believed he actually worked for the government.

and the deaths of bad guys in 'Charlie' was so ridiculous. in the first movie, they get murdered by Dyle in cold blood. that's great. Dyle is a vicious man who wants the money he got screwed out of so long ago. in 'Charlie,' they die accidentally because Dyle happens to show up and the villians think they see a ghost and get run over or have a heart attck or whatever. and the ending: Dyle just gives up? ludicrous. the man waits for many years to get this money that he has coming to him and instead of fighting 'till the end (as Robbins' crazed performance implies he would), he simply gives up because someone says, "Haven't you lost enough?"

stupid Jonathan Demme. man needs to learn how to re-write a mystery properly. first rule: don't use the exact same twists that the first movie did, jackass.

now reading: JSA: Return of Hawkman (Book 3)- David S. Goyer, Geoff Johns, Stephen Sadowski

thecomicman spoke @ 11:42 PM |

May 20, 2003

let me bitch about the DCU for a second here

i know, i know... this doesn't look like a 'Charade' vs. 'The Truth About Charlie' post to me, either. you'll get one soon enough. i gotta get something off my chest first.

the DC Universe has long since been the place to get your monthly doses of confusion. someone comes back to life, or worse yet, someone you thought was dead turns out to be a copy from two universes away or some such nonsense. pound for pound, DC has more time paradoxes, alternate universes, dimensions of higher orders, and other strange theoretical phenomena than every other comic book universe combined, and no where is this more prevalent than in the new Justice Society of America. i have read the first four trades and already i got time traveling, resurrected heroes, alternate universes, and threats from beyond this realm. but what do you expect from a team that has Hawkman, the Spectre, Dr. Fate, Sentinel, and Black Adam in its roster? not that i don't enjoy these stories, but i feel bad for some of the less cosmically-inclined characters. i mean, what exactly is Wildcat, boxer extraordinaire, good for on the other side of the universe, or against an otherworldly threat? nothing. there was one really cool story that took place after a murder. it was a mystery and the team had to figure it out. this is where everyone was able to help out. it was good and it worked, and no new Earths were created in the process.

okay, end rant.

now reading:

thecomicman spoke @ 02:44 PM |

May 19, 2003

belated

happy birthday... to you,
happy birthday... to yo-hoo,
happy birthday... thecomicman can,
happy birthday... to... you.

it was actually yesterday, but i forgot.

now reading: JSA: Justice Be Done (Book 1)- James Robinson, David S. Goyer, Steve Sadowski

thecomicman spoke @ 12:45 PM |

May 18, 2003

The State of the X-Union Address

before i go and start spinning your brains on the three separate X-squads running around right now, first i'm gonna give you a tiny little recap of what was happening immediately before what we got now.

Claremont was given the reigns of both X-books to work his Claremont magic on. unfortunately, no one noticed he was insane until it was too late. before he got fired (for what seems like the umpteenth time, i might add), he managed to mire both books in about twenty different storylines that were gonna take ten years to finish up. this is right after twenty other writers had just cleaned up his previous messes.

well, in order to fix it the writer immediately after Claremont (i forget who) chose to pare the X-men down to three (!?) members and have them take on Magneto who was two seconds away from taking his mutant army in Genosha and ramming it down the world's collective throat. the three members remaining were Logan, a recently-dead-but-okay-now-except-for-the-new-mean-streak Summers, and his wife Jean. Jean pulled a collection of newbies and old friends together at the mansion (like an invincible mob enforcer and a beat up Dazzler) while Scott and Logan snuck into Genosha.

long story short, Jean and the Bad News Bears version of the X-men landed in the heart of Genosha just in time to help Scott and a captured Professor Xavier watch Logan gut Magneto, ending the war before it even started. okay, that was immediately before the big shake-up. where were the other X-mainstays like Beast, Nightcrawler, and Colussus? well, Colussus was already dead, courtesy of the Legacy Virus cure, but the other guys? no one seems to care enought to tell me.

after that, we got our three X-squads: the Uncanny X-men, the New X-men, and the X-treme X-men (fyi: those are the names of the books, not the teams).

the Uncanny team consisted of Nightcrawler, Angel, Chamber (recently graduated from Gen X), Iceman, and Wolverine. later they were joined by newbies Stacy X and Husk, also from Generation X, and to the surprise of many, Northstar (gay Canuck) and the Juggernaut (ex-evil asshole... still an asshole, just not evil). most recently, Havok and Polaris have returned, and Stacy X left.

the New team consisted of Jean, Scott, Beast, Emma Frost, Wolverine (man is a cash cow), and Professor Xavier, but he's not really a team member. they were later joined by the new Chinese healer Xorn, and... that's it. just the six of them.

the X-treme team (Claremont's new book) consisted of Psylocke, Thunderbird (the new Hindi one), Bishop, Rogue, Storm, Beast (for three issues), and Sage aka Tessa, Sebastian Shaw's old telepath, who, thanks to a retcon, was an undercover agent trained by Xavier. this team has seen the most change. from the get go, Claremont started playing musical chairs with his mutants. he killed Psylocke and gutted the Beast, sending him back to the mansion to go through his secondary mutation. then Gambit joined, along with newbies Slipstream, Lifeguard, and an honest-to-God Hong Kong martial artist in Red Lotus. Red Lotus left almost immediately (unfortunately), followed by Slipstream, and then Lifeguard and Thunderbird. then Rogue and Gambit lost their powers, and they left, too, leaving Storm, Bishop, and Sage. Claremont recently threw Cannonball in there to fill space, i assume, and brought Wolverine in to help out (apparently, a man can be in multiple places at the same time). crazy-ass Claremont.

a note on New X-men: i was racking my brains trying to figure out why that number seemed ridiculously low for the New team, when it hit me. technically, only the six are full-fledged members of the X-men, but Grant Morrison has been setting his stories squarely in the school, so i've been getting a lot of students who are doing cool things with the X-men. some kids of note are: Beak, a kid who looks like a bird without the added benefit of being able to fly; Glob Herman, a see-through kid made of biological wax; Angel, a mean Latin girl with dragonfly wings who can't be scared into behaving, not even by Logan; the Stepford Cuckoos, five (now four) identical sisters who can share minds and were being trained by Emma; the Special class, taught by Xorn and consisting of Beak, Angel, Ernst (a tiny, wrinkly girl with super-strength), Dummy (a living fart in a containment suit), No-Girl (an invisible girl who may or may not exist), Basilisk (a big, one-eyed idiot who can flash-freeze others by thinking hard enough; unfortunately, he is an idiot), and Marta Johanssen (a telepathic brain in a spherical jar that Ernst carries around).

a note on secondary mutations: many mutants have been developing this and according to Grant Morrison, it's because of the exponentially rising number of mutant births. some secondary mutations of note are: Beast's transformation into a more feline body, the return of Jean's Phoenix-level telekinesis, Logan's jump from healing factor to outright regeneration, Angel's ability to heal with his blood (eww!), Emma Frost's ability to turn her skin into diamond, Black Tom's turning into a tree (i really don't know), and Multiple Man's increased number of possible duplicates. these are the ones i know. there might be others out there, but i'm positive there'll be more in the future as plot dictates.

a note on supporting cast: besides the aforementioned students at Xavier's, there is also Sammy, a fish-headed kid who can breathe underwater, Annie, a new, human school nurse, and her mutant son Carter. these guys are all appearing in Uncanny. X-treme has no supporting cast that stays around for longer than two issues. but then again, neither do the team members.

now reading: Danny, the Champion of the World (Puffin Novels)- Roald Dahl

thecomicman spoke @ 11:07 PM |

May 17, 2003

this is what happens when you leave me alone for too long

i have spent most of the day dancing naked to horrible pop music.

that image is what you get for not keeping me company today.

the next two entries will be the current state of the X-men and a critique of 'Charade' and its remake 'The Truth About Charlie,' not necessarily in that order (sorry Rick).

thecomicman spoke @ 09:57 PM |

May 12, 2003

Buddha Punch and the Magic Pepper Flake Theory

these are two stories that some of you have heard already from me in person, but for those of you who haven't, here you go:

Buddha Punch

on Wednesday, after my final, i took a subway train to work like i always do. when i got out at 42nd, i noticed a Buddhist monk get out as well. he was ahead of me and took the same stairwell and everything that i always do. when we got to the surface, some kid started screaming "Here Buddha, Buddha, Buddha!" over and over. and when i say kid, i don't mean an eight-year old, i mean a kid in his late teens. the Buddhist monk walked over to the kid, punched him in his goddamn face, and walked away. the kid crumpled to the ground, and i had to stifle my laughter. the monk just walked away. all i could think was "holy Hell, you're not supposed to do that." now, it is quite probable that this monk wasn't a real monk at all. he could have been an actor having a bad day, he could have been on his way to a costume party, but i choose to believe that he was a real Buddhist monk because it's the closest i'm ever gonna get to a real life Bulletproof Monk (in theaters now!)

The Magic Pepper Flake Theory

on Friday, at work, i went to Cafe Metro to take advantage of their Pasta Day, in which they sell their pasta and pasta accesories at discounted prices. i got linguine with tomato basil sauce and free parmesan cheese and pepper flakes. i came back to the store and went upstairs in the back to eat. i was happily reading some comics and eating my makeshift spaghetti when i see a pepper flake fly out of my plate and out of my field of vision, past the bill of my cap. apparently, it came back, went around the bill of my cap, over my glasses, and into my eye. "back, and to the front, back, and to the front" kept flashing in my brain. i spent the last half of my lunch attempting to wash out the flake and incredible pain out of my eye. this pain is quite possibly the worst pain i have ever felt.

both of these stories are as true as they come.

now reading: Neuromancer- William Gibson

thecomicman spoke @ 03:52 AM |

May 06, 2003

The Many Faces of Warren Worthington III or, The Feathered Financier Flies For Free

Warren Worthington III is the mutant super-hero known as the Angel. but it wasn't always that way. he started out as a spoiled rich kid, until wings sprouted out of his back during puberty. most boys his age just had to deal with some extra hair. he used these wings as a New York City hero known only as the Avenging Angel. he had on a red costume and shot criminals with his trusty six-shooter. Professor X then contacted him and made him one of the original five X-men as simply the Angel.

years go by and he quits the X-men because of some personal matters. he joins two other super-hero teams (the Champions, which he bankrolls, and the Defenders) for awhile before coming back to the X-men. he returns almost immediately after Jean's death, but leaves again because he cannot stand Wolverine and his methods. when next he appears, he's bankrolling another team made up of the original X-men, but this time it's the mutant-hunting X-factor. whaaaa? relax folks, it's all a scam. they pretend to be mutant-hunters only so they can rescue other mutants in trouble. they moonlight as the X-terminators, a mutant team given a bad rap by the media. their PR guy sells the team out and tries to kill them by issue 3 or something. then the Mutant Massacre occurs.

the Marauders, a team of cold-blooded killers, inflitrate the Morlock tunnels and start killing them all. both X-factor and the X-men rush in, but take a pounding. in the process, Angel gets his wings amputated. gasp! in issue fifteen, he apparently commits suicide.

but not really.

Apocalypse makes him an offer he cannot refuse. he gives Angel his wings back, Angel becomes a willing servant of Apocalypse. this is like selling your soul to the devil for a helicopter, kids. Warren accepts and gets these crazy new metal wings that he can't really control, plus his skin turns blue. he's also now known as Death, the Fourth Horseman of Apocalypse. but it turns pretty okay, as X-factor knock some sense into him, and he starts calling himself Archangel.

he spends the next ten or so years brooding ("boo hoo hoo, i sold my soul and now i have blue skin and wings that talk to me in my sleep"). but then, ta-da! it turns out that Warren's feathered wings have been growing inside his metal ones for years. the metal molts off and the high flying Angel flies again on his own wings. there's some weirdness concerning the remaining residue of Apocalypse's influence that maifests itself as new wings of light (i don't know either). he cures another Horseman of Apocalypse (War for those scoring at home) and then is all better after getting his ass handed to him by Wolverine, who had just recently been an incarnation of Death.

but he's still blue!

that's okay, because a couple of years later, while Black Tom Cassidy (an old X-men villian who palled around with the Juggernaut) is going through his secondary mutation (of turning into a tree), Warren gets the blue sucked right off of him by an energy sapping... branch... of Black Tom's. then, to make things even weirder, Angel (oh yeah, he changed his name back after the metal wings were gone, but before the blue was gone) goes through his own secondary mutation. his blood can apparently heal anyone now, including himself.

throughout Angel's strange and varied life, the assets of Worthington Enterprises (Warren's Fortune 500 company) keep coming back to bite him and the rest of the X-men in the ass. the more eclectic of Warren's holdings include the X-Ranch, a mutant brothel in Nevada, the Lobo Corporation, whose President of Operations is a were-wolf that likes killing mutants, a manufacturing plant that makes a designer drug made from mutant genes (and where, oh where would they get something like that?) that gives ordinary humans powers for the duration of the high, and a company in China that uses humans and mutants as slaves for certain things, like sex and cigarette lighters.

the man needs to take a better look at his portfolio because at this point, i wouldn't be surprised if Warren owned Genosha when it was still a mutant slave-state.

now reading: Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth- Chris Ware

thecomicman spoke @ 03:16 PM |

May 01, 2003

this is me gloating

all the kids in my writing class love my fiction because it fuses the screenplay format with the prose. i can do it very well, apparently. it's only the old fogies (Halifax, ET) who seem to have problems with this "exciting new storytelling technique" (actual quote from a classmate).

but my grammar sucks. c'est la vie.

now reading:

thecomicman spoke @ 10:47 AM |