Don’t trust your office to some amateur building! Hire a professional!
Of course, what I’m really concerned about is what it does on its day off…
Irritable Liquid?
Found on the side of an AM-PM convenience store today:
That’s one cranky glass of water.
Or maybe Odo?
My best guess is that they were trying to say something like “inflammable,” decided it wouldn’t fit, and misused a thesaurus.
Variations on a Theme
I read Shadowpact #2 last night. So far the book does read better than Day of Vengeance, probably in large part because Bill Willingham can set his own schedule instead of the must-be-6-issues policy of the Infinite Crisis lead-ins.
One of the villains struck me as familiar, though: an albino swordsman with a magic sword, apparently allied to a sinister god-like being, who has picked up the nickname, “the White Rabbit.”
Maybe it’s just the timing—just a few days ago I read a comic about Elric, an albino swordsman with a magic sword, allied to a sinister god-like being, with the nickname, “the White Wolf.”
Actually, I was first reminded of Count Zodiac from Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse, largely because Zodiac is based in the 20th century, rather than an ancient sword-and-sorcery landscape. Count Zodiac is one of at least three versions of Count Ulric von Bek*—the others appear in The Dragon in the Sword and the trilogy that begins with The Dreamthief’s Daughter—and, like Elric, an incarnation of the Eternal Champion.
The Eternal Champion in all his forms fights for the balance between order and chaos, and often finds himself fighting for order while indebted to a lord of chaos. At least two versions** of von Bek are albinos who wield the Black Sword (Ravenbrand, rather than Stormbringer), and while I don’t recall Ulric himself being linked to a demon the way Elric is reluctantly linked to Arioch of Chaos, the von Bek family has ties to Lucifer going back to the Hundred Thirty Years War. Continue reading
When it has to be there in a Flash
A while back I was driving on the freeway and noticed a truck with this logo:
OK, so I’m maybe a bit focused on the Flash, but then I started looking at the design.
- Red as the main color
- Sans-serif capital italics (just like the longest-running versions of the Flash logo)
- A lightning bolt that runs from the upper right to the lower left.
Hmm…
It got me thinking about commercial applications of super-speed. Not something that turns up often in the super-hero genre, but it shows up occasionally. Kapitalist Kouriers is the first one that comes to mind. They were a trio of Soviet defectors who decided to sell their services as couriers and, from time to time, heroes for hire.
¿Cómo se dice, «duh»?
NPR’s “Morning Edition” ran a story today on the rise of the Spanish-language television market, and Univision in particular. They led into it with a remark that Spanish-language coverage of the World Cup has been getting higher ratings than the English-language coverage.
This should surprise no one, given that soccer (as we norteamericanos call what everyone else seems to refer to as football) isn’t terribly popular in the USA, with two notable exceptions: Parents of 6-year-olds who want to put their children into a sport, and the duration of the World Cup. El fútbol, however, is wildly popular in Europe and Latin America, and we have a lot of recent immigrants from Latin America.
So no, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that there are more Spanish-speaking hardcore soccer fans than English-speaking ones.
Double your Angel, double your fun!
It seems that there will be two Fallen Angel collections on the shelves this August. To coincide with IDW’s book collecting the first story arc of their series, DC is reprinting their TPB of the first few issues of the original series.
Fallen Angel started as a creator-owned book at DC and ran for 20 issues. DC published a TPB collection of the first 6 issues, but stopped there. As much as the cancellation rankled, DC gave it a lot of opportunities… it just wasn’t a good fit for the DC brand (it probably would have thrived at Vertigo) or the DC sales targets.
After it was canceled, Peter David took the series to IDW, with J.K. Woodward taking over the art from David Lopez. The first arc set in place a new status quo, and finally answered two key questions: Was Lee really a fallen angel? And if so, how did she fall? Fallen Angel proved to be a better fit with IDW, who immediately extended it from a 5-issue mini to an ongoing series when sales figures started coming in.
I highly recommend reading DC’s trade, which Amazon still has in stock. If you like that, pick up the next issue of the monthly. (Keep in mind that the art style is vastly different, and twenty years have passed, story-wise, between the end of one series and beginning of the next.) I don’t know how easy it’ll be to pick up the back issues, but the IDW trade will be out soon.
And who knows? If capitalizing on IDW’s success works out for DC, maybe they’ll see the light and collect the remaining 14 issues!
Campaign Camp
Now that the election is done, here are some of the campaign signs we saw that elicited some unintended laughter.
I couldn’t decide between two captions: “But I did not hunt the deputy…” and “I didn’t think they were in season.”
This isn’t funny on its own, but coming right off the Lost season finale, all I could think was, “Vote for me, brother!”
Uh… I hate to break it to you, but that’s green…