Under anesthetic, subdivided and synthetic

If anyone's done this before (and it's not hard to believe someone has), I don't know about it. So, in the grand tradition of The Llama Song, I give you....



Note: the click-thru big version is 400x400 and over 4MB. So be warned.

Edit for derped HTML.

Double Edit for the video version. Sorry, no sung lyrics. You do not want to be subjected to my singing voice. It is a wretched, terrible thing.

Got to see The Avengers in IMAX 3D. UNF. Worth it, worth it, worth it. The movie has purchase on my soul now.

I am sick, but two of my favorite teams are winning: Boston, and whoever's playing Miami, so, bonus. Orlando will be sitting the rest of this one out, sadly enough. Wah. Throat scratchy, sounding like Christian Bale Batman. Uncool So here's something cool to alleviate it.

( 59 pics below.... )

Didn't like The Avengers? Then maybe you should just lay down and sit this one out. Yes, you'll probably notice a bit of...repetition, you know, because Nyan Cat and owls aren't repetitive enough on their own.

One pic is somewhat spoilery for the film, but not a game-breaker, I don't think. Feel free to correct me. Consider this impetus to see it. You got sick days, use 'em.

( 42 pics below.... )

So one of my favorite recent comic book runs was Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's turn on Astonishing X-Men. It was quite the trip. You're not going to find many artists with the level of detail and depth Cassaday brings to the table, and Whedon's got a compelling passion for and awareness of the series and its legacy. They each have a downside or two -- some find Whedon's characters sound too similar, have disdain for a few particular plot twists he seems compelled to bring to every series he works on, and some of us could put our kids through college between Cassaday completing issues. But now that it's over and we're not clawing down the door to our LCS for the next issue, I think we can appreciate it all more.

Before Joss's 25 Astonishing issues, Grant Morrison (the delightful Scottish madman who gave us We3 and The Invisibles) took over New X-Men for a lengthy run, and while he saved most of his typical wide-eyed ideas for the last arc (set 150 years in the future), the duration of his run breathed new life into characters we'd given up on (Scott, Jean, even Emma Frost gets a new level of complexity and empathy) and added quite a few new wrinkles to the series mythology (Cassandra Nova, the Stepford Cuckoos, and the then-unthinkable Scott/Emma pairing) while subtly foreshadowing one hell of a revelation we all should've seen coming. Whedon doesn't quite serve so many screwballs with the established characters (except maybe Lockheed), and his few good fake-outs just aren't quite on the same level as Morrison's -- but they're not bad (except for maybe the identity of the second arc's antagonist, which is a conceit I still have trouble with), and he gives us Abigail Brand, for which I'll always be thankful.

The only reason I'm blathering about Whedon's Astonishing instead of Morrison's New X-Men is because the former has received the motion comic treatment. It's been tried before with other series (most notably Watchmen) and is not without virtue -- from what I could tell of watching the adaptation of Whedon's first arc, "Gifted," it seems verbatim (and panel-for-panel) from the comics, which is only occasionally jarring when referencing outside the history of this particular series (the state of Manhattan, Jean, the particular X-Man who appears suddenly in the fourth chapter). Otherwise understand that it's Joss Whedon dialogue, and if you're into that sort of thing, you should be quite happy. The first chapter's...uhm, not quite "animation," really, but its "movement," I guess, is pretty choppy (with no mouth movement whatsoever) -- later chapters have lip-synch and some interesting breathing-like effects on torsos that make it a bit more kinetic. The voice acting is...serviceable -- Emma's accent (or lack thereof) grates, but otherwise it's still better than Australian Wolverine or, for that matter, Halle Berry. And while "Gifted" is the first and only arc up at the moment, word is the three subsequent Whedon/Cassaday arcs, "Dangerous," "Torn," and "Unstoppable" are also getting the motion comic treatment, and I'm...curious as to how they'll turn out.



If you're just coming over from the movie timeline, well...things are a bit convoluted. Forget X-Men: The Last Stand (please). Scott and Jean married, but Scott drifted into having a psychic affair with Emma Frost (who is their contemporary and not a '60s-era character and trying to reform) -- before he could choose between Jean and Emma, Magneto turned Manhattan upside-down and killed Jean, only to be beheaded (yes, really) by Logan. Colossus (Kitty's boyfriend) died to stop a mutant-only virus from killing them all off. The Professor battled his genocidal long-lost twin sister (!) who he thought he strangled in the womb (!!) and has apparently absconded for parts unknown, leaving the school in the hands of Scott and Emma, who're now in a relationship. That's about all you need to know to delve into the motion comics, and really, as far as X-Men continuity goes, that's probably the best jumping-in point there will ever be. Yeesh.

From my take on the series as a whole earlier this month: The book to this point is about a knife's-edge balance of opposing forces that's tipping into pandemonium (and looks to take that first fatal step in the very next issue).

So. My three-word review? ( Quite spoilery, I guess.... )

The ever-awesome alasdair at his blog makes a bold statement:

Of late, the subject of DC’s reboot has come up in the sort of conversations I mention. And I think it’s worth saying this: DC’s new reboot, when viewed collectively, is one of the most creatively bankrupt pieces of shit the medium has ever put out, and if there is any justice in this world, it will be remembered as the moment that DC began the death spiral that ultimately lead to the collapse of the American comics industry.

Seriously: if you are buying any one of these fucking pieces of crap, just stop. If you’re telling yourself that one of the titles you’re buying is better than the rest, even if you’re right about that, just stop. Every single week, in addition to a load of titles that are just an undifferentiated mass of bland crap, DC manage pump out a couple of pieces of hideous crap that fall somewhere on a spectrum between “unfortunately sexist” and “outright misogyny”. From where I sit, if DC are managing to publish one or two titles that aren’t complete shit, I assure you, it’s a mistake that they’re bound to be rectifying soon.

Read excerpts from Catwoman and Red Hood and the Outlaws online. Don't buy them. Flip through them. Those are just the two most egregious pieces from this week. There've been worse. There'll be worse still. There may be one or two titles in the lineup that are, by some statistical anomaly or the result of a pact with a chaos lord, good books. There are others which are merely mediocre and they stand out as the paragons of the line. The rest is four-color slurry, best left to sluice through the grates and into the sewers, never to be polybagged.

They had the whole of reality to retcon and start afresh and managed to distill each comic to its barest essence -- so they could foul the very soul of the title, insuring it would never bear edible fruit. It's a garden fertilized with mulch made in the 90s, sprouting with swords and spikes and impossible knees and pouches and capes...this is not a proper garden; nothing green can stay.

Alasdair is right: And even if I’m wrong about that, you know what: if a few good comics have to fail, just so this reboot can die on it’s arse, and ultimately put the shambling corpse of the comics industry out of it’s misery, then that’s a price I’m willing to pay.

Which reminds me, I do need to review one of the series Alasdair talks about above, one of the few still readable, and write a lengthy piece as to why you probably shouldn't read it. Maybe later.

From the Wikipedia entry on Roy Harper, aka Arsenal:

Afterward, Slade and his team arrive at South Pacific Island to kill cult leader Drago over the arena production of blind warriors; however, his team, Arsenal, and Cheshire betray him, revealing that they had been working with Drago.[13] While Shade is captive, but Drago refuses to allow Roy and Cheshire leaves his decision, which angered Roy and Cheshire to attack Drago, as fails that Drago is signal handle. When Roy is imprisoned with Shade and confided in Roy about his and Drago past.[14][clarification needed]

[clarification needed]

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"What I hope is that people take from it the unlikelihood that a piece of paper, with little ink drawings of figures, with little written words, can make you cry, can make your heart soar, can make you scared, sad, or thrilled. How mental is that? That piece of paper is inert material, the corpse of some tree, pulped and poured, then given new meaning and new life when the real hours and real emotions that the writer and the artist, the colourist, the letter the editor translated onto the physical page, meet with the real hours and emotions of a reader, of all readers at once, across time, generations and distance."

I've never really liked Superman as a character. Always had a hard time relating to him, especially contrasted against...well, pretty much anyone, particularly Batman, probably his most common foil. Where Bruce Wayne's alter ego is a product of fantastic wealth, Olympic-level training, peerless deductive skills and deep-seeded childhood trauma, Kal-El is...just an alien, gifted by his inhuman biology to be almost invincible, unless you happen to have a specific green radioactive crystal lying around. He's an easy character to write poorly (as JMS proved pretty handily with his "Grounded" arc, the success of which would fit neatly on a microscope slide), but so damn hard to write in a manner that's true to his nature and still dramatically resonant. By my count, three relatively modern stories have done it well -- Alan Moore hit it twice with "For the Man Who Has Everything" (the animated adaption of which being possibly the only adaptation of his work Moore has ever enjoyed) and "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" which would've served as the perfect end of the Silver-Age Superman.

In the tone of the latter tale came Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's All-Star Superman. Given that Frank Miller's All-Star Batman and Robin gave us a laughably outrageous take on the Caped Crusader that the [ahem] iconic "I'm the goddamn Batman" bit is pretty much the only aspect of that series salvageable, that Frank Quitely's art is an acquired taste at best ("Oh God, it's the potato-faced people again"), and that Grant Morrison's approach to his subjects can be charitably described as "eccentric" (and not-so-charitably as "insane" or "deranged" or "utterly incomprehensible"), I was expecting the title to flicker into obscurity and be entirely avoidable.

It is the complete opposite. It is indispensable. No one who is the slightest fan of the character should be without it. Anyone who considers themselves a fan of the medium should at the very least read it, and if that leads to eventually buying a copy, I wouldn't be surprised.

When I'd heard that there would be an animated adaptation, I was...excited, if a mite worried. It didn't strike me as a good choice for adaptation, if only in that a lot of Quitely's art was powerful in its invocation of motion and continuity while being static images -- some of the majesty is lost in moving it from the printed page. And there's simply no way to compress twelve issues of concentrated awesome (well, okay, ten if you discount the Bizarro issues, but that's my personal preference) into a coherent DVD, and slavishly trying to do so gets you Watchmen, and let's not do that again, okay? I knew that Dwayne McDuffie -- who'd brought us the better moments of the DC animated universe -- was a talented storyteller, but he had a hell of a lot on his plate this time.

Like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, I had one must-have deal-breaker scene that had to be in the adaptation. Unlike those two, my scene didn't make it in this time (yes, it's Regan; what, was it too dark?), and that colored my impression of it greatly. Part of why the adaptation didn't gel for me as a whole is that necessary omission that ran against my personal grain -- lose the Bizarros, fine, I'm all aboard that, but why do we get the two pompous Kryptonians and we lose the Chronovore in Smallville? We miss the Jonathan Kent scene? Thank God the prison break bit stayed in, at least, or else I'd have been no end of pissed off. Adaptation decay's to be expected, I know, but I question the judgment of anyone who'd keep the Kryptonians -- or five additional minutes of punching, really -- and lose the most emotionally effective parts that made the original so brilliant. On whichever level those choices were made, I think they were made poorly, and the whole product suffers as a result.

Which is not to say I didn't like it -- the Sun-Eater, the aforementioned jail break, Ed Goddamned Asner, Alexis Denisof, Luthor's super-powered realizations -- I just didn't like it as much as I think I could have. The animation for Solaris in particular (and some of his fight scenes) was awful, the new Luthor/Quintum ending rang hollow, and I don't blame anyone for being disturbed by Jimmy Olsen's perplexing peripheral inclusion in this little endeavor. Maybe I'm just too close to the original work to be entirely objective -- if it leads more people to hunt down the original comics, it's a worthwhile endeavor, but I see this movie as a seriously flubbed opportunity, and that's kind of crushing.

"In the one Mythic moment we’re all united, kissing our Lover for the First time, the Last time the Only time, honouring our dear Dad under a blood red sky, against a darkening backdrop, with Mum telling us it’ll all be okay in the end. If we were able to capture even a hint of that place and share it with our readers, that would be good enough for me."

She gets ventricular arrhythmia right. Also she reminded me that I needed to get my Flecainide refilled.

Disclaimer: GDBM does not appear in this update. ( 42 villainous pics below, featuring capitalism, culinary atrocity and workplace mishaps.... )