Okay, read the last two titles together: The 40 Year Old Virgin, Unwanted Woman. It seems like the second line might explain the first…
(On a side note, this is the second post with pictures from my new camera phone. The image quality is pathetic compared to the good camera—640×480 vs. 5 megapixels—but it’s a lot more convenient to carry around, and quite adequate for this type of photo. And it’s much better than the expendable camera was, especially at the end of its life.)
It’s less than a week to Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19). Dougal Campbell has a WordPress plugin to piratify yer blog.
Arrr, I be thinkin’ about it!
I think all of Warren Ellis’ crop of new series have launched at this point. I’ve picked up the first issues of Fell, Desolation Jones, and Jack Cross.
Ellis is one of a few writers whose name will get me to at least look at a new book. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I don’t. His superhero stuff doesn’t appeal much to me, with the exception of Planetary, which is on my must-read list on those rare occasions that a new issue comes out. (Others include Neil Gaiman, Joss Whedon, and Joe Straczynski. Heck, Joss actually managed to get me to pick up an X-Men book!)
Desolation Jones tells the story of an British ex-secret agent living in exile in Los Angeles. In fact, there’s an entire community of ex-spooks living in L.A., an open prison that the city’s normal residents don’t even know about. Jones underwent an experiment, the “desolation test,” that left him both enhanced and destroyed. Many of the people he knows underwent similar experiments. There’s a man who only needs to eat four times a year—but ends up chewing through entire herds of cattle when he does. A woman whose pheromones trigger fear and revulsion, and literally has to beg Jones to spend an hour with her just to stave off the loneliness. Despite the background, the book is more hard-boiled detective than thriller. And the characters are well-drawn, both literally and figuratively. Issue #1 had me interested enough to check out issue #2 (despite some of the less savory aspects of the story). Issue #2 had me hooked.
Jack Cross is pretty much a straight-forward thriller, with an ex-agent brought back into action, a conspiracy within government agencies, etc. I’m just barely curious enough to look at #2, but it’ll have to be really interesting to get me to keep going.
Fell just came out last week, and breaks from the other books in several ways. First, it’s designed to have a complete story in each issue. Second, it’s designed to be cheap. By telling a highly-compressed story in 16 pages, with text pages filling in the rest, it keeps the cost down below the magic $2 mark (if just barely). As for the actual content—it’s another detective story, this time about a quirky police officer with an excellent intuition, Richard Fell, who ends up in a hellhole city called Snowtown. As promised, there’s a complete story, but there are also hints of something larger. Eveyone Fell meets is disturbed in one way or another. And the book is so full of story, I didn’t even notice it was 2/3 the length of a typical comic. Definitely good enough to check out the next issue!
It’s always strange when you throw out wacky ideas, then see them turn into reality. About four years ago, a bunch of us were sitting around talking, and someone uttered the remark, “Diet Spite.” From there we filled an entire page with culinary brand names made from abstract concepts, not unlike the Wheat-Free Chaos we found a month ago.
One exchange went like this:
Kelson: “Diet Red.”
Daniel: “Sure, that’s red.”
So it was a surprise to find this can at Trader Joe’s:
Truth is stranger than fiction. It just takes time to catch up.
My regular comic store, Comic Quest, didn’t get any copies of Peter David’s Spike: Old Times. Yesterday I checked at Comics Toons and Toys. They were also sold out. Today I started looking around more of the Orange County area.
First step: Mile High Comics. I figured it was a long shot, since they’re the most well-known comic store on the internet, but I wasn’t in a hurry to read it, and it would save me the trouble of driving around the county. Naturally, they didn’t have it.
So I started calling stores I knew. As I was about to start, I noticed an email on SuperHeroNews saying, “Mile High Comics in LA, burned down last night, more information as we get it.” The first store on my list was Netherworld Comics, which used to be a Mile High store, but is in Garden Grove, not Los Angeles. Their phone isn’t picking up. And they’re still listed as an affiliate on Mile High’s website. And there aren’t any other Mile High stores in southern California. This doesn’t look good for Netherworld. Edit Sep. 7: Yes, it was them [archive.org]. Figures. I’d only been in there a couple of times, but it was a nice store.
Okaaay… Next step: Diamond’s Comic Shop Locator. Unfortunately it only lets you search by ZIP code, and only shows the nearest three. Since I’d already been to two of the stores, I only got one phone number out of it. No luck there.
Time to do it the old-fashioned way: the phone book. (Katie remarked, “There’s nothing wrong with being old-fashioned, especially about a book called Old Times.”) There are surprisingly few comic stores in central Orange County. I only got three more numbers out of it, and one of them specializes in vintage comics. Not surprisingly, none of them had any copies either. (One offered to order it for me, but I simply declined rather than pointing out that it was already sold out at both the publisher and distributor.)
Next stop: eBay…
There are two books I picked up recently that demonstrate how not to tell a story with pictures: Teen Titans #27 and the manga of The Nightmare Before Christmas.
First, Teen Titans #27, first half of a two parter by fill-in team of Gail Simone and Rob Liefeld. I’d planned on writing a more thorough review, but Comics Should Be Good beat me to it. And yeah, reviewing Liefeld’s art feels like a cheap shot, but sometimes ya just gotta go for it. Simone’s story isn’t bad, but it’s hard to follow. In particular, there are too many places where the art isn’t about story or action, it’s about showing the heroes or villains in dramatic poses. And yeah, you want the occasional dramatic pose, because you want to show off the costumes. That’s part of the genre. But you need to convey what’s actually happening. As dramatic as the last two pages were, I couldn’t figure out just what Kestrel was doing without looking at the “Next issue” blurb!
And then there are the places Liefeld left out dramatic poses that should have been there. The issue introduces a quartet of teen villains, but only one of them gets a full-body dramatic view, two get only action shots, and one—well, let me put it this way. I had to flip back to the beginning to be sure that there really were four of them and not just three. He’s in two panels with only his head and shoulders visible in the entire book. He’s not named, there’s no sign of powers or special skills, and he’s wearing a shirt and tie. I have to wonder whether Liefeld just didn’t get around to designing a costume since the character gets eliminated halfway through the book.
Anyway, onto The Nightmare Before Christmas. Continue reading
I’m sure every English-speaking chemistry student has joked about “Avocado’s Number” (the number of particles in a guaca-mole). Now the joke has gone professional, with this package we found at Trader Joe’s.
The back has a bit about Avogadro’s number, and admits that “there aren’t 6.0221367×10²³ avocados in here, but 5 plus avo’s isn’t bad!”
