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short appreciations of poetry and pop culture
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Jason Powell has taken on the yeoman's job of doing an issue by issue analysis of Chris Claremont's 17 year Uncanny X-Men run in an effort to make me feel bad for saying Morrison invented all kinds of things he did not in his New X-Men run, and for spelling Claremont "Clairmont" in my superhero book.
Scott McDarmont (Scott91777) is an Instructor Of English at Radford University, Radford VA, an avid reader of books by guys named Chuck, he usually “waits for the trade” on comics unless Frank Miller is somehow involved. He owns more Def Leppard CDs than Bob Dylan CDs and he is ‘Ok’ with this and, while he may answer different publicly, he secretly feels that The Empire Strikes Back is the best movie ever made. He also feels that there are two kinds of people in the world: Indiana Jones people and John McClane people. He considers himself an Indiana Jones person
Jill Duffy, girl reporter, is a professional writer and editor in New York. She spent five years covering video game development in both San Francisco and London, examining the art, science, and business of the industry, and in 2006 was named one of the top 100 most influential women in the game industry. Her work has appeared in The Examiner newspaper in San Francisco, where she was the food section editor, as well as Game Developer, Gamasutra.com, Intelligent Enterprise, DigitalTrends.com, and several other publications. She holds a BA in English from the University at Buffalo. Indeed, she is on the Twitter and also keeps a blog about food.
Andy Bentley is a graphic designer in upstate New York. The first series of Batman movies got him in a comic book store and the DC animated series made him a life long fan. His senior thesis was a short film on the culture of comic books. Animal Man, Starman, and Preacher are among his favorite comic runs. He is an avid toy collector and enjoys playing basketball, mash-ups, karaoke and dark beers. He will be sequestered most of September with The Beatles: Rock Band.
Would you like to write for this blog?
Scott McDarmont (Scott91777) is an Instructor Of English at Radford University, Radford VA, an avid reader of books by guys named Chuck, he usually “waits for the trade” on comics unless Frank Miller is somehow involved. He owns more Def Leppard CDs than Bob Dylan CDs and he is ‘Ok’ with this and, while he may answer different publicly, he secretly feels that The Empire Strikes Back is the best movie ever made. He also feels that there are two kinds of people in the world: Indiana Jones people and John McClane people. He considers himself an Indiana Jones person
Jill Duffy, girl reporter, is a professional writer and editor in New York. She spent five years covering video game development in both San Francisco and London, examining the art, science, and business of the industry, and in 2006 was named one of the top 100 most influential women in the game industry. Her work has appeared in The Examiner newspaper in San Francisco, where she was the food section editor, as well as Game Developer, Gamasutra.com, Intelligent Enterprise, DigitalTrends.com, and several other publications. She holds a BA in English from the University at Buffalo. Indeed, she is on the Twitter and also keeps a blog about food.
Andy Bentley is a graphic designer in upstate New York. The first series of Batman movies got him in a comic book store and the DC animated series made him a life long fan. His senior thesis was a short film on the culture of comic books. Animal Man, Starman, and Preacher are among his favorite comic runs. He is an avid toy collector and enjoys playing basketball, mash-ups, karaoke and dark beers. He will be sequestered most of September with The Beatles: Rock Band.
Would you like to write for this blog?
The Best of the Blog
- HAMLET MASH UP
- KILL BILL AND MILTONIC ALLUSION
- Favorite Comics
- Open Letter to Anthony Lane
- Star Trek Review
- 3D Glasses: Beowulf, Coraline, Up, Superman
- MORRISON'S NEW X-MEN: THE ISSUE BY ISSUE ANALYSIS
- Whedon's Astonishing X-Men: The Issue By Issue Analysis
- The Maxx
- Russell Edson's "The Fall"
- John Ashbery's "This Room"
- The Heresy of Paraphrase
- Edward Gorey's The Curious Sofa
- Harold and the Purple Crayon
- The Mountain Goats's "Fault Lines"
- Superman Returns
- Spiderman 3
- Pan's Labrynth and Children of Men
- Buffy, Angel and Evil
- Beowulf, David Lynch and Evil
- In Defense of Ally McBeal
- The Surprising Will and GraceSeries Finale
- A History of Violence
- All Star Superman and Jamie Grant
- Lex Luthor's Desk in JLA: Earth 2
- Frank Quitely and a Detail from WE3
- Casanova and Pathos (Guest: Matt Fraction)
- Hellboy
- Brad Winderbaum Interview
Best of the Blog: Comment Threads
- Alan Moore and Blackest Night
- Abrams v Whedon
- Lost Projects
- No Country for Liberal Men
- Dark Knight
- Miller and the homosocial
- Style v. Substance
- Growing Up and Art
- Favorite Comics
- Comics Events
- Planetary 26
- Heroes Pilot Debate
- Rhymes
- Cover Songs
- Live vs Recorded Hip Hop
- Batman (and others) on Film
- Ratatouille
- Pirates 3
- Little Kid Jokes
- Fictional Crushes
Guest Blogging
- Andy Bentley (New Gods)
- Brent Saltzman
- C Lue Disharoon
- Chad Nevett
- Chandler Bennett (Miracleman)
- Charlie
- Cove West (Lovecraft)
- Erin (Captain Fugmerica)
- Gordon Harries
- Graham Tedesco-Blair
- HCDuvall
- James Wheeler
- Jason and Ximena
- Jason Powell (Non-X-Men)
- JASON POWELL'S ISSUE BY ISSUE ANALYSIS OF CLAREMONT'S X-MEN
- Jill Duffy, Girl Reporter
- Lucas
- Mitch Montgomery (Reviewery)
- Ping33
- Plok
- Sara
- Scott91777 (Miller, Music and Miscellany)
- Stefan Delatovic
- Streebo (Black Summer Review)
- Tim Callahan (Reviewery)
- Ultimate Matt
Blog List
Bio Stuff: Published Work
Is your copy of How to Read Superhero Comics and Why missing pages?
Bio Stuff: Other Online Work
- Teachers vs Cell Phones
- Using Media to Pace your Classroom
- Superheroes and Fashion Panel at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Casanova Review
- Reconstruction: Posthumanism (an issue I co-edited)
- X-Men, Emerson, Gnosticism
- Harold Bloom's Pal, Donnie Darko
- Superheroes (Oxford Student Paper)
- X3 (Oxford Student Paper)
Bio Stuff: Interviews
Read, free and legally, the comic book in which a villain's name is inspired by my own (Doctor Klock)
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March
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- Free Form Comments
- Grant Morrison's New X-Men 134
- Comics Out March 28, 2007
- From Sharon Old's Sex Without Love (Commonplace Book)
- Grant Morrison's New X-Men 133
- TV Week in Review
- Free Form Comments
- Grant Morrison's New-X-Men 132
- Comics Out March 21, 2007
- From Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled (Commonp...
- Grant Morrison's New X-Men 131
- The Television Week in Review
- Free Form Comments
- Grant Morrison's New X-Men 130
- Comics Out 14 March 2007
- From William Butler Yeats's Vacillation (Commonpla...
- Grant Morrison's New X-Men 129
- The Week In Review: TV
- Free Form Comments
- Grant Morrison's New X-Men 128
- Comics Out 7 March 2007
- Bryan Curtis on Michael Crichton (Commonplace Book)
- Grant Morrison's New X-Men 127
- TV: The Week in Review
- Free Form Comments
- Grant Morrison's New X-Men 126
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March
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14 comments:
Sorry I haven't been around much lately.
I'm a guest on the most recent Comic Geek Speak special about DC's 52. But due to my lack of participation up in here I can hardly urge any of y'all to spend the 90 minutes listening to it.
There have been a LOT of 12-hr days at work. But I think I'm going to catch up on here and may make some new comments to some old posts over this upcoming weekend when my wife is in Milan for work. ;)
After reading your Morrison X-Men commentaries, I've finally realized why I love his JLA run and hate his X-Men one. For DC, it seems like he decided to make tell good stories ABOUT the JLA. For Marvel, he wanted to elaborate on some interesting ideas he had, using the X-Men...
I just wrapped up Will Eisner Week on my blog, looking mainly at The 'Contract With God' Trilogy. If anyone wants to check it out, I have links to the whole series in this post. Any comments or questions would be appreciated. It was a lot of fun looking at Eisner's work. he was a real genius at creating comics. I really need to read more of his stuff.
Geoff, if you don't have enough to read already, I would wholeheartedly recommend the comic Livewires: Clockworks Thugs, Yo!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livewires
If Morrison failed to deliver pop sexy mutant cool, then Adam Warren offers up pop sexy mecha cool. All the characters look like Calvin Klein models, engage in crazy/ridiculous plots (what is the ultra-mysterious "White Whale" actually doing? We don't know and we don't care) and ALL the dialogue is self-conscious pop culture allusion- "That's Righitie! I'm an Aniston-Haried piece of cyberbooty!"
My blog is over at http://bigmattyj.blogspot.com; I haven't updated in in over a week because I've had so much school & work recently, but I'll try to write something this weekend.
Wholeheartedly seconding Voice of the Eagle's recommendation of Livewires -- apart from the "pop sexy mecha cool" implicit in the look and feel of the comic, there's a really impressive density of concepts tossed out along the way. One of my gripes about folks like Morrison and Ellis is that while they do make a stab at working real pop science concepts and conceits into their stories, too often it comes across as "look at the latst cool factoid I discovered, let's take several moments to sit and contemplate vacuum point energy which doesn't really have anything to do with the story but I thought it sounded neat." Which may have been a feature of prose scientifiction in the days of Gernsback...but when SF matured it grew beyond having characters pause the action for infodumps. Livewires feels much more like "proper" SF in that regard: a crazy reckless love of the ideas, but also a situation that grows organically out of those ideas and smashes them into proper characters having to cope with the implications. It's very cyberpunk but I liked it better than any of the prose cyberpunk I've read.
On an unrelated note, I want to completely retract a comment I made on an earlier post here a few days ago. Upon rereading the introduction of Xorn in the 2001 NXM Annual, I've changed my mind and decided Morrison didn't exactly play fair with the subsequent reveal that he was Magneto all along: characters state unambiguously that Xorn was imprisoned in China for fifty years and Morrison never gives any rationale for how they could be mistaken on this factual point...and that does call for clearer explanation. I don't object to leaving certain things vague -- the exact methods by which Maggie could pull off the disguise can be rationalized after the fact -- BUT when you give a reader clear and specific information and then contradict it without any justification, it's a cheat. It took me a while but I got there in the end, okay?
Ping: that's quite cool. Glad you are back.
Lurker: I think there are some good stories in the X-Men run, but you are right, ideas become more important than in JLA.
Matt B, U Matt: thanks
VoE, Rab: that sounds great. I will check that out.
Rab: Thank you for saying this. Too often I feel that people see my point with their brains, but then keep their old opinions. I have carefully explained to everyone I know why Oceans 12 is a great movie, but all I get in return is "I see your point, but I don't care, I still think it is stupid." I am trying to persuade people and I am glad I made my point.
I'll add to the recommendations of Livewires. It's an incredibly fun series, and I hope Warren gets to do a sequel to it sometime. Warren also has a miniseries coming out right now called Iron Man: Hypervelocity. It's great fun and has nothing to do with Civil War, so you can ignore that whole debacle while reading it. I've been meaning to review the issues that have come out already; hopefully I'll get to it sometime this week. Oh, and Warren also has a graphic novel called Empowered coming out this week from Dark Horse. He describes it as a "sexy superhero comedy".
I don't know if I've heard you talke about Oceans 12 before, Geoff, but I would disagree that it's a great movie. I thought it had some nice moments, but those didn't add up to a good movie, especially considering some moments that were downright awful. We could have a good debate about it, I'm sure. Sorry, I just had to throw my dissenting opinion into the ring.
Matt: read my blog for April 21st 2006 and follow the link there for the argument. Then tell me if you think Oceans 12 is lame. Ocean's 12 is one of my five favorite films of all time (along with Kill Bill, Dark City, a Few Good Men, and, oh, maybe Spartan or Grosse Point Blank).
Anyone still reading this: I now own a camera for videoblogging. We will hook it up, Sara will figure out how to work it, then Brad will help us with the software and uploading end, and then we will ready to go. It will take a while but steps are being made.
Geoff: When you cite Kill Bill as one of your favorite movies of all time, do you mean both movies taken together or just the first one? I liked the second one a LOT more than the first because it had the better bad guys.
Also, you've mentioned you didn't like Brubaker's Sleeper. What turned you off about it?
Troy: I mean both taken together -- If I had to pick I might also say I like part two better but one of the reasons I love it is because it subverts part 1: huge and glorious fight scenes in one become character driven talking in part 2. A slew of dead bodies in one becomes one guy killed almost bloodlessly in part two (and one person maimed).
Sleeper was boring. Just dreary. Tao is a very interesting character, for one, but Brubaker cannot write for him. If he cannot write for him he should not have used him.
Oceans 12: I read your article, Geoff, and I understand why you like the movie, but seeing actors on vacation is not my idea of a good time at the movies. To each his own, I guess. I'll agree that the movie has fun subverting expectations. There are also some really good scenes, like the laser dance scene you mention, or Topher Grace reprising his role as himself. And Soderbergh, who is one of my favorite directors, threw in a lot of really cool stylistic touches. I liked when the scene switched to Amsterdam, he introduced the location by showing pictures of the city in quick succession, with each letter in the word "Amsterdam" superimposed over a picture. That was cool. Or the final shot of the movie, a freeze-frame of Catherine Zeta-Jones laughing. But the good scenes didn't add up to enjoyment for me, especially weighed against the bad stuff, like the Julia Roberts scenes where she poses as herself. I found that painfully lame. And the big twist, where it turns out they planned to do a terrible job and get caught and have everything go wrong. I suppose you could call that subversion of expectations, and if it works for you, great. It just didn't work for me. You're definitely not wrong for liking it, and it's not a terrible movie, but I found enough I didn't like about it to say that I think it's not a great movie.
Here, I'll list some of my favorite movies. Feel free to disparage them if you like. ;-)
Brazil, Miller's Crossing, Raising Arizona, Reservoir Dogs, Spirited Away, The Limey, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove, Down By Law, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Whoa, that got away from me there. I was only going to put five or so, but I kept going. I always have trouble narrowing my favorites down to five or ten, and I almost never have an answer if somebody asks me what my favorite movie is.
Okay, I'll bite.
My five favorite movies are The Nightmare Before Christmas, Star Wars (taken as one big, six-hour film) The Dark Crystal, High Fidelity and Sin City.
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