Monsters with Sandwiches

My wife Sara has started a new tumblr thing called Monsters with Sandwiches.

(What is Tumblr? It is like a attempt to rebrand blogging as a thing for hipsters rather than nerds? Cause that's what it looks like).

This started because Sara was reading the New Yorker and I was bored and reading over her shoulder and noticed the little cartoons that dot the essays -- not the cartoons with punchlines, but little cartoons, often connected to each other, that just provide some visual break-up on a page filled with words. I asked her what she would draw there, given the chance, and she said "Monsters." I said "What are the monsters doing?" And she said "eating sandwiches." So I gave her a stack of 3 x 5 notecards, and a black pen and made her draw bunches of them. We put them in frames and gave them to everyone for the holidays, and now they have their own website.

I am going to put them here occasionally. If you want some for your blog in whatever form -- doodles in your essays, links, profile pictures, grab Sara through the comments on the Tumblr thing.

Mister Miracle 13 & 14

[Andy Bentley looks at the next two issues of Miracle Man as part of looking at all the New Gods stuff.]

Mister Miracle #13 The Dictator’s Dungeon
Mister Miracle #14 The Quick and the Dead

Mister Miracle 13 and 14 share a number of similarities as Jack Kirby begins to settle into a groove for his final few issues. The villains, King Komodo and Madam Evil Eye, are not from Apokolips, but they share an inspiration: the third reich of Germany. Komodo is revealed to be a fugitive WW2 German scientist which is part of the inspiration for Darksied’s perverse assistant Desaad. Madame Evil Eyes is posing as the leader of a satanic cult and satanism has been linked to Hitler’s army in many forms of fiction, most notably Raiders of the Lost Ark. Both villains have secret lairs with hidden panels and trap doors for Mister Miracle to evade. Miracle ultimately disposes of both of them by using some amazing and previously unseen powers originating from the circuitry in his cowl. These resolutions were the most disappointing aspects of the issue as Miracle’s powers seem to grow with every issue.

Free Form Comments

Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If I forget, remind me. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.

ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy.

AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore.

You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.

WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If I see a big free form comment that deserves more attention, I will pull it and make it its own post, with a label on the post and on the sidebar that will always link to all the posts you write for this blog. I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music, books and iPhone apps.

Jason Powell: Claremont Post-1991 X-Men?

[Jason Powell wrote this in a comment last week, and I wanted to elevate it to its own post:]

I suppose now is as good a time as any to say this, since others have asked me. (Which is, on the whole, very flattering, that people apparently are enjoying this blog-series enough to ask about future ones.)

Most of Claremont's latter-day X-Men stuff just isn't interesting enough to me to want to review them individually. X-Men: The End is dreadful; GeNext is a mess; Exiles was bland; Forever started out being at least fun, but is swiftly becoming a bore; as for his returns to the mainstream X-Men universe ("Revolution," X-Treme, the brief Alan Davis-Chris Bachalo run) ... I simply haven't read any of that. (Sorry, Jeff.)

The Nightmare Before Christmas: The Anti-Christmas Carol

(Ok, yeah, I should have posted this before Christmas. I wrote it before Christmas, but then I realized no one would be looking at the blog till after New Years. I have never been timely.)

My mother loved Miracle on 34th Street and I responded as a teenager by insisting we do these kind of anti-christmas movie marathons every year: Scrooged, The Ref and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Scrooged: Bill Murray. Nuff said. The Ref I have not seen in years and imagine it would be terrible to watch now. I liked it because I think I really identified with the way Dennis Leary tore into suburban facades -- years later this would re-emerge in the form of American Beauty, which also took apart suburban facades as embodied by Kevin Spacey.

What makes The Nightmare Before Christmas entertaining to me now is of course the loving design of everything in it, which I don't think has been rivaled since: Coraline, while great in many ways, has nothing on this movie. This has to be the main thing: the literally two-faced mayor, Oogy Boogy Man made out of bugs, skinny Jack fallen into the snow, Sally made out of rags. The songs are largely forgettable except for a few good lines here and there ("There's children throwing snowballs instead of throwing heads / they're busy building toys and absolutely no one's dead"; "And since I am dead I can take off my head to recite Shakespearian Quotations").

But the thing I return to again and again are the themes which are surprising and well developed for a movie that, like Coraline, could have still been a great movie if it coasted by with something far less smart.