Hey, you wanna watch this Spider Woman motion comic, but don't want to spend $10 on iTunes like I did? The good news is you don't have to. It's upon Hulu now (all but the last part, which I expact will be up in a week). I still don't know how I feel about the final result, I will probably prefer the print version in the end, but it still is an interesting foray into a new medium. Alex Maleev's art looked better in the book, but it still looks great here. What are you complaining about, it's free.

BTW I broke down and have a twitter account. It is a source of great shame, but at least now I can pay attention to the Best Show feuds. My favorite person to follow so far? Tie between Jon Wurster and Roger Ebert.

Why I don't read X-Men comics

Strangely, this is pretty calm when compared to the whole time travel thing.

from Eye on Springfield

Neutral professional

"The 20th Century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy" - Alex Carey

I found this somewhere in a paper I was reading last night that about the idea of "the myth of the neutral professional*. Basically, the point was that there is no such thing as neutrality when in a position in which you are to teach or present. As a teacher, you can abstain from presenting a dissident opinion when teaching politics or history, but that in doing so, you're perpetuating the dominant power. It says that neutrality, or at least the attempt at it in these instances is really the passive acceptance of the status quo. And even if you present the two major competing ideologies involved, who's to say you're not leaving a third or fourth out, and thus not giving them equal attention, blah blah blah.

I disagree with a lot of the points made in this article, not the least that I feel like the author has so liberally biased the article that it will fall to many of the concepts presented within it. Nonetheless, it's an interesting read and short enough that some of you might actually be interested in reading it.

So there's that.

*this is relating more to the more literal definition of the word. Or at least I'm told.

I know I said I was taking some time off, but 2 things happened:
First, I was going over lecture notes about web 2.0 and libraries 2.0 (I am promising here and now that these terms will never appear here again) and there was a passage to the extent of "if you can't find the time to post to a blog regularly don't bother" and then I felt guilty.

Second, CRYPTID SIGHTING!!!!!! This is all over the nerdly realms of the internet, but in case you don't frequent the same dorkish corners of the web that I do, basically what happened is that a Vermont man allegedly caught on his camera phone some footage of the Lake Champlain monster "Champ". One of the great things about camera phones is that things like this are boung to start being mroe plentiful, right? Well, that and and blurry videos of celebrities in airports).

Anyway, this looks to be the first "major" recorded sighting of Champ in over 30 years (see the picture above). So if you live in the Lake Champlain region, get ready for the invasion of sweaty folk and drunk people with harpoon guns.

I've always been interested in the golden age of piracy (though the modern age is just as fascinating to me for different reasons), probably an offshoot of my general curiosity regarding famous outlaws through history. Or just a byproduct of my colossal dorkery. In any case, it's fascinating to me the lengths people will go to live outside of the law. I've never romanticized the notion of piracy in any era, least of all the 17th and 18th centuries. There is really no aspect of that lifestyle that appeals to me. I have a terrible aversion to scurvy and losing limbs. I'm not a very good fighter. I hate rum. and make no mistake, these were by and large awful, awful people. But I love the idea of these drunken madmen just infuriating the largest and most powerful forces that the world had ever seen at the time. But anyway, that's neither here nor there.
National Geographic just put out some pictures of artifacts found on what's almost certain to be the Queen Anne's Revenge, which was discovered sometime in the late '90s. This is probably the most famous pirate ship that ever existed, and almost certainly the basis for the ship in those Johnny Depp movies*. It's also one of the few pirate ships whose name I know**, despite its relatively short lifespan as a pirate vessel.

Anyway, check out some artifacts here and at the link above. Then eat some fruit to avoid scurvy.

This reminds me that I should point out that I actually can't stand the weird hipster obsession with pirates and acting like pirates and Talk like a Pirate day and whatnot (I'm looking at you, Portland). While it's cute to run up the Jolly Roger (which might be the most boring pirate flag ever), never forget that these were reprehensible people that kidnapped, tortured, murdered, raped, maimed, etc... It's fun to paint them as Robin Hoods, but in most cases they were barely literate thugs. For every fun-loving and playful corsair, there is a sadist like Edward Low that really nobody should be emulating. Anyway, enough of that.

*what happened with those? The first one was so much fun, then they followed it up with overwrought mythologies and ubermenshian crap... much like the Matrix trilogy, now that I think about it. Maybe we should pass a law that in the case of trilogies, all works must be complete and hashed out before the first day of filming starts.

**Others would be Bartholomew Roberts' Royale Fortune and Captain Kidd's Adventure Galley

Picture above: Howard Pyle's depiction of Blackbeard's last battle. In addition to being probably the definitive pirate artist (there's a whole book, check it out), he was also a profound influence on N.C. Wyeth, which in turn makes him one of the most important influences of his era. Plus, this. So he's okay in my book.

View-Master R.I.P.

There was an interesting article in last week's Economist about the decline of the View-Master, and a few mentions of its history and many uses. I know that it's really just the advance of technology and that these things cannot compete with a PS4 or whatever, but it still made me nostalgic for that time when I had one of those things. Despite it being somewhat antiquated by the early 80s when I used mine, it was still a pretty interesting toy to have. In addition to having all the discs for whatever movies and stories were popular with me when I was using it (The Black Hole and The Jungle Book were two I remember well), I also had whatever discs could float down through siblings, relatives, rummage sales, trips to national parks, etc...
So, as a kid I ended up with this weird , encompassing view (haha) of not only my own pop culture, but also that which preceded my by up to 40 years or whatever it was I found. It was kind of humbling, being presented with decades of expired fads in the face of your own, knowing that someday, Thundercats would be just some really godawful show to be exploited for nostalgic purposes by VH-1. And me, I guess. It reminds me when a friend's dad saw us all playing G.I. Joe out in the neighborhood somewhere and he decided to show us his old figures, which were at least 5 times the size of ours and looked much more like dolls than anything else we had at the time. Cloth fabric clothes instead of plastic!!??

Anyway, remember the View-Master fondly, folks. It's almost gone.

DOOM

How awesome is Steve McNiven? His artwork has only gotten better and better since Civil War, and it was already pretty breathtaking by then. In addition to being one of my favorite artists to ever draw Spidey, this week he gave us... DOOM in the future! Is it a coincidence that this image was released the same week that (formerly MF) DOOM's album leaked? Probably not. That said, who cares. I love this art so much.

(queue up the Quiet Riot)

Finally got around to seeing the Watchmen movie...

and I really liked it. Despite some of the more widespread complaints (the one about the music is completely valid), I thought it did a great job trying to tell the general story. I thought the opening credits were among the best montages in a movie I've ever seen (and for some reason felt almost Scorsesean). Of course I had my little nitpicks (he was supposed to look like Clark W. Griswold, right?), but in the end it was a film and I enjoyed it. It definitely left me with a lot on my mind.
First of all, I think that if I hadn't read the book several times, I probably would have spent the bulk of the film either completely confused or bored out of my skull. I don't mean to say this in a pretentious literary catfight way, but maybe to illustrate my own ignorance.
The story itself is not all that tough to follow, I guess, but I think so many references are made to the book without full explanation that I'd spend too much time focusing on the wrong things. It took me a few reads of the book before I really grew to appreciate it for what it was, and I can't imagine things being much different with the movie, though sometimes the really obvious stuff goes over my head and I have to assume that you are a more astute viewer/reader than I.
But I also think that the biggest challenges to this film are the medium in which it's told and the time which it's released.
One of the things that I think works the most for the comic medium* is that the artist decides exactly the pace in which the story is told. You can set panels as rapidly as you want, and rely on the reader to use their imagination to fill in what happens between them. One of the most jarring things about any comic movie to me is the fight scenes. In reading comics, you really have to make every punch, dodge, kick and parry count, since the last thing the reader needs is to see every little motion. Celluloid makes things harder, since you have to fill in those blanks, and often times the director tries to do that as quickly as possible, thus making every fight scene look like a fast-forwarded kung fu movie. As someone who spent a lot of time watching martial arts films in his youth, I can stand to watch a real-time fight every once in awhile. The same can be said for the conversations that take place. The reader also can take seperate time to ingest both the art on the page and the dialogue/narration being read, unlike the movie where both eyes and ears must be alert and receptive. I don't think either medium is superior, but there are definite advantages to either.
As far as the timing... it can't be stated enough how dramatically this has an impact on the story. Even reading the book now leaves one slightly unimpressed unless they consider both when it takes place and when it was written, which are the same, but also wildly different. With that I mean that both were around 1986, but I'm reffering to the difference between the political landscape and the comic book landscape. While we certainly haven't ended terror and war from our national mindset, it's hard to compare to that of the cold war, which I think might have seemed a lot more terrifying at the time. I mean, I was 8. My strongest memories of the cold war were probably formed by Rocky IV, Iron Eagle, and a slew of Chuck Norris films more than the newspaper or talking about bomb shelters. I'll never know how the Cuban Missile Crisis** would have affected my life, as much as in ten years, young adults might not have any idea how badly 9/11 fucked us up.
The comic landscape is a whole other story. Because despite the ills of America at that time: the post-hippie malaise aroused by Watergate, the oil crisis, and whatnot, despite the appearances of crack and AIDS, despite the beginning of the end for American manufacturing... comic books were still pretty goddamned optimistic and, well, still pretty much written for children. With a few notable exceptions***, most comics were bound by the comics code not to mention anything happening in the real world unless veiled in allegory so thick that it you find yourself comparing vampirism to AIDS (seriously!). Watchmen, along with books like Frank Miller's first two Dark Knight stories were pretty fucked up. It's hard to explain the leap they made in terms of storytelling. Imagine never knowing any Batman other than Adam West. Imagine going your whole life with the ridiculous dialogue, dumb plots, dumber villains, and enough piffs and pows to make you hate life. Then, you see Batman Begins. Hell, even the Burton Batman would freak you out a bit, but we're talking so much more than that....
These books effectively brought an end to the bronze age of comics by themselves. To go back and read it now, one has to basically ignore anything that was written after them. I can't say that writers like Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, etc... would never have existed without these books, but they certainly would have a different set of limitations on them.
I really don't even remember how I ended up on this tangent, but I guess my point is that it would be hard not to be a little underwhelmed by Watchmen, considering the decades of praise that have been heaped upon it. But it's such a massive milestone in the art of graphic storytelling that it can't be denied status as one of the all-time greats. The weird part is, I don't even think it's among my 3 favorite Alan Moore works. But that's a whole other post, and one which I might well have already written...

*(I'm not using the term graphic novel, because I think that this applies to more than that. A really great arc in a long-running comic deserves the same attention/respect that a graphic novel does).
**I'm sure I've mentioned this on here before, but one of my favorite professors in college used to love to tell us how during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he and his girlfriend lugged their mattress down to the basement of his apartment building, bought all the canned goods they could find and a case of whiskey and then spent the duration having as much drunken sex as they could. He always sounded like they were a little disappointed when after two weeks or so they emerged from that basement to find the sun still shining and kids playing on the lawn.
***The most obvious example is the incredible Green Arrow/Green Lantern series by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams, which tackled some pretty racy stuff for the time, including drug addiction, untion busting, hippie cults, etc...

I really didn't want to go on and on like this about a movie that's already been covered to death. The worst part is, I probably could've written this long before I saw the movie, but it's what was sort of running through my head as I was watching it.

"Sex Cauldron? I thought they closed that place down!"

Note: If I ever become a brainwashed sleeper agent who has a trigger phrase to remotely activate them, I want mine to be "They should call this book Johnny Deformed!"

Great. Now I'm seriously considering watching all of the Swartzwelder episodes in a row.

If you've never had the chance to read Watchmen, or want to give it a runthrough before the movie comes out, you can watch the entire motion comic here . Though my bandwidth here prevents me from watching any of it, I've seen the first few and I know they're the actual book. I don't know if they would make watching the movie itself more enjoyable, but it'll give you a chance to get brushed up with the book or see if you'd like it.

So yeah, that's a nice little treat. I guess it is LONG though. Eh, you got 6 weeks to get through it if you want.

(from I Read Comics)

Tales of the Black Freighter

While I'm excited for this Watchmen movie, I am going into this with a good deal of reservations. Namely, I don't think it will be as universal a success as some of the other superhero movies that we've seen as of late. Not because it's a bad story or because I don't trust the director or anything, I just don't think it will work well as a film. I also think that when audiences go to see this expecting a superhero story, they're going to be disappointed. Obviously, I want the film to succeed, and so I'm hoping that doesn't happen.
But as more and more details emerge, I'm starting to get hopeful... for the DVD.

"Tales of the Black Freighter", a story within the larger story of the Watchmen book, is a profoundly messed up story that I was certain would never be admitted into the film. It would screw up the pacing for a 90 minute film, and it would probably just confuse audiences. It turns out I was right, but they're still animating the thing anyway for release on DVD. The trailer was released today.

I'm happy about this, because the story is one of the first things I considered when I heard they were actually going to make this movie. It's a great story, however disturbing, and it would be stupid to make no attempt to tell it with the movie.
How it will be released, though, is yet to be seen. Sure, it'll be by itself on DVD, but I'm wondering if when releasing the film on DVD they could splice scenes from this movie throughout the tale in Watchmen. It's probably much harder than it would be worth, but I guy can dream...
Anyway, I'm excited for how it turns out. For now...

Okay, I get it that comic cons are now viable outlets of nerd passion/fashion, but honestly I don't need to see these people on TV. I don't need 200 cosplay updates, and it's impressive that the Princess Leia bikini is still getting mileage, but I don't care.

I read comic books. I talk about them, a lot. As the target demographic for these media updates, they are just making me hate TV. STOP.

Please don't make me hate TV.

(I'm sure that not many people feel as bombarded with this stuff as I do, but here we are)

Cover, Incognito #2

How awesome is Sean Phillips?

I'm still not sure about this book, but I will pay attention to anything he draws
because it always looks amazing.

Incidentally, if you've never read anything that he and Ed Brubaker have done,
you're missing out.

(jacked from Phillips' blog)

When it was announced that there would be a Hellboy movie a couple of years ago, I just couldn't see it working. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with the idea, but the two things that always made that book so strong for me were Mike Mignola's amazing art and the way old folktales and myths were incorporated into the story. I figured that those two characteristics would at best just help to shape the story.

I was very wrong. Obviously, Mignola's art was an influence as well as the mythos. But I hadn't counted on Guillermo Del Toro. the first movie was much better than I expected. But the second movie, which I just finished watching, was fucking fantastic. It might be my current mood or whatever, but it ranks among my favorite movie of 2008. Sure, there was completely misplaced pop songs that showed up randomly, and Seth McFarlane's voice can be distracting. But then Dark Knight was a half hour too long, and I haven't seen a single Oscar nominee*, so there you go. This movie was funny, smart, imaginative, and featured an abundance of Tecate and kittens. Also, I now have a weird crush developing on Selma Blair. and Ron Perlman. Yikes.

No, it wasn't completely loyal to the comic, but I've yet to see (or really want to see) a comic book movie that is. So yeah, there's an official HDF endorsement. Although, if you're already of the mindset that you won't like this movie, you probably won't. But I hope you do.

*I refuse to watch since they seem to be by and large the most depressing group of movies ever assembled. I WILL watch Slulmdog Millionaire sometime in a few days, but I'll leave the rest of that shit for the commitees.

note the painting in the background

by Joel Aron
(via Riotclitshave)

Since I know for a fact that I'm the only one here watching Battlestar Galactica, I've done you the favor of presenting to you my audible responses to the new episode tonight, the beginning of the end of the series:

"So they're space hobos. On planet Earth. Wait, why am I still watching this?"
.
.
"Oh, well that's really nice, to -OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL? OOOOOH WHY?"
.
.
"Where did all those fistfights come from?"
.
.
.
"Wait, so he's making it with a robot now?"
.
.
"Seriously. where do they keep getting all this booze in space?"
.
.
"this is aggressive and disturbing."
.
.
"I need to know about this. Are they drinking space gasoline? It looks like scotch or something, but I cannot see any way how they could distill in that environment. Plus, these guys are all too drunk to gather the ingredients."
.
.
"oh yeah, these two."
.
.
"I'm trying to think of another show that's as depressing as this one. M*A*S*H? Mama's Family?
.
.
"Even in the future, an eyepatch is an eyepatch".
.
.
"There is absolutely no way that we see this happening in this show"

So there you go.

Silos

Here's some pictures of an abandoned Russian ICBM*silo in Kazakhstan. I'm obsessed with stuff like this, and would love to track down some of these in the US if I weren't so completely terrified by them.

*Inter Continental Ballistic Missile, for those who haven't seen Spies Like Us too many times.

There's a big trend in things to do with these old things, including such illustrious purposes as LSD lab and living space. I'm kinda partial to the latter, if you convince me its location wasn't pre-programmed into some ancient Soviet missile that's been in the hands of some idiot warlord for a decade.
Still, that would be such a kickass place to live. I would set mine up so people would thing I was this really passive and friendly Bond villain. I mean, check out this dude! It's like living in the not-too-distant future! WHO'S WITH ME!!???

Here's a list of missile base coordinates within the US, including a nifty little package you can install on your neato Google Earth. Look up one near you and set my ass up a room in it!

PS I will not move to Kazakhstan.

Not sure if you all saw this the other day or not, but last week the Wall Street Journal featured an article about a Russian academic and analyst that predicted the downfall of the United States in 2010 and the eventual sectioning off of different sections to various world powers.
It's a pretty terrifying idea, not to mention a pretty unlikely one, but think of the fan fiction* if could produce...
or the bad movies.

*Can reality -even proposed reality- have fan fiction? or even fans?