Looks like Fantagraphics is running a weekly Blecky Yuckarella strip by Johnny Ryan. Fun!
I mentioned one or two things that were announced at NYCC that interested me, and it looks like there were several others of note, mostly gathered in this post at Robot 6. For one, Dark Horse's Noir anthology of crime comics looks really cool; it seems like crime comics are on the rise, and since that' a genre that I'm coming to enjoy quite a bit, that makes me happy. Announced creators on the series include Brian Azzarello, Ed Brubaker, Rick Geary, Jeff Lemire, Sean Phillips, Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba, and several others. Coming this September. Awesome.
Also cool from Dark Horse: a miniseries by Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson called Beasts of Burden that functions as a sequel to their short stories in the Dark Horse Book Of... series. I think I've only read one of those, but I thought it was great and wanted to read more (did Dark Horse ever release a collection of just those stories? I thought they were going to), so this sounds pretty sweet. Here's an interview with Dorkin at CBR which contains some really nice-looking artwork. Man, I love Jill Thompson. Coming in August.
I'm not sure what to think about a new Alias miniseries from original creators Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos. That series is one that I love (although I should probably try to revisit it and see how well it holds up), but since it ended, Bendis seems to have done his best to destroy everything that made the Jessica Jones character interesting. Even the later issues of The Pulse, which also featured Gaydos on art, were agressively boring; I remember one that featured Jessica talking with Sue Storm about motherhood that nearly made me fall asleep. That, more than anything involving the Avengers or Houses of Ms or Secret Invasions, is where I started to sour on Bendis. I suppose he might have something interesting up his sleeve, but I kind of doubt this new thing will be much more than the usual "hang around with Luke Cage and discuss parenthood" story that Bendis seems to want to do with the character these days. Who knows, I'll see.
Oh, I should also mention that Viz is releasing Taiyo Matsumoto's GoGo Monster. And also Inio Asano's What a Wonderful World! Hells yeah.
And on a completely different note, I watched the movie adaptation of Wanted last night, and holy crap was it dumb. It made me long for the subtlety and nuance of Mark Millar's writing on the original series. And other than a few nifty visual ideas, it was pretty boring, filing all the rough edges off Millar's script to turn a misanthropic story about a world where supervillains won into a lame thing about assassins, because they are more likeable, I guess. James McAvoy was annoying (although I thought he did a pretty good American accent), and the plot was soooo stupid, basing itself on unbelievable convolutions of logic (so they turned him into a super-killer in order to get him to kill his father, and never expected that he might come back and use all his awesome powers on them?). Just...ugh. It did almost redeem itself at points through some cool visuals (I liked a shot in which we saw a train car fall down into a deep gorge and wedge itself between the walls, with the "camera" then swooping down until we could see the car from below; sure, it was all done in computers, but it was a nice bit of virtual camerawork) and ridiculous action ideas like guys shooting each other's bullets out of the air. And a lengthy bit in which McAvoy stormed through a factory shooting guys was pretty cool, even up through a bit in which he shot a guy in the eye, then stuck his gun in the eye-hole and kept shooting out the back of his head. That's the kind of over-the-top action I can get behind. But too much idiocy surrounded it, dragging the movie from "so bad it's good" to "just plain bad". Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Also: googling "Wesley Gibson" brings up no results? I could understand if his name was something made up, like Namchar Harkback, but isn't Wesley Gibson common enough of a name that something would pop up? That's the most unbelievable thing in the movie, which is saying something.
Huh, I just got 138,000 results on Google.
ReplyDeleteI liked three things about Wanted: The bit with the keyboard, Morgan Freeman swearing Morgan Freeman-ly and the fact that they serve a magic god-loom.
Oh yeah, the keyboard thing was hilarious. I was going to mention Morgan Freeman, but I figure this is just one in a long list of crappy movies that have attempted to give themselves some class by having him talk in his gravitas-lending manner. Not really anything new there, but it is kind of funny to hear his delivery of "motherfucker". And the loom thing is just ridiculous, going back to the origin story involving some Illuminati-esque weavers. That makes even less sense than everything else. If only they had come up with some connection between weaving and curving bullets; that would have also been pretty funny.
ReplyDeleteI didn't bother googling, because even though I figured it would give some results, but just the comic and movie would add a ton. But I did just try searching for Namchar Harkback, and there was one result: this post right here.