Comic Book Tattoo

I'm not a big Tori Amos fan. I think I've heard a couple of songs. Maybe. I didn't plan to buy this book. It's big. It's expensive. And it's a bunch of comic short stories based on the song lyrics of a performer I, to be truthful, have no interest in. Then I saw the book. Wow. Just, wow. From the cover to the last page. Did I mention wow?

The cover is a retro steam punk kind of thing and just knocked me on my ass. The short stories are by some of the best comics artists and writers in the business. And some who aren't. In the business I mean. It's all good stuff. I got so fired up thumbing through this thing that I plunked down 50 bucks for the hard cover. Once I'm done reading it I'm going to put it out on the coffee table for friends to flip through. Most stories are very short and can be read in a few minutes. I'm not going to give a blow by blow of the work in here. I'm too lazy for that. But I will say that I'm taking my time reading it. A few stories a night. I'm about halfway through after 3 weeks and looking forward to the next 3 weeks before it runs out. I'm still not a big Tori Amos fan. I skip the lyrics that introduce each story for the most part. But the works inspired by those lyrics are well worth the time. Linger over them. It's a treat.

Testing..

Testing...testing. I've been gone for while. I'm back now. Buckle up.

This Year's Comicbook Resolutions

This year's comicbook resolution is to spend less on comics. Nice, eh? Someone posted a similar resolution on The Pulse and got a snide remark for their trouble. I have to agree though. Last year I spent too much money on crap books. Last year's resolution was to try more new stuff. I found some neat books that way, but most of what I tried was just plain bad. Once again Sturgeon's Law is shown to be true. Ninety percent of everything is crap.

I dove back into Marvel to see what was happening there and was rewarded with a slap in the face. Hey Bendis, slow down a little. Take a few minutes to actually reread what you've written before you send it off to the artist. Maybe if you weren't writing half of Marvel's output you might have time to actually think about the words your were putting down. I did come to my senses early enough to avoid the Decimation nonsense however.

Same thing goes with DC. Over all I prefer DC books now days if I'm going to buy mainstream, but that covers a lot of territory. I mean, DC includes Wildstorm and Vertigo as well as the usual stable of men and women wearing their underwear out in public. And any company that gives Grant Morrison a license to go ape shit with a stable of second string characters, well, you've got to give them their due. Of course the whole "Infinity cross over let's restart the DC universe just one more time" thing uses up most of the credit they built up with Seven Soldiers...

Most of the new books I tried were from independent publishers, which now days seems to mean anyone other that Marvel and DC. I found a few gems. most of it was garbage and a few things were just plain offensive. They are gone and my lesson is learned. That's very sad. The only way to try so many of these books is to preorder them and hope for the best. There is some much out there that most shops just can't afford to carry them. Even if they could there just isn't enough shelf space.

2005 was the year I started really hunting down strips on the internet. The payoff was better there. Sure, it's still mostly crap, but you can sift through it pretty quickly to find what you like and it doesn't cost a cent. (If you're going to jump down my throat and start yammering about the time spent sifting or the cost of online service, you can piss off already. that's not what I'm talking about and you know it.) It was the year I discovered Apple Geeks and Sordid City Blues, just to name 2 that have become regular reading for me.

So that ended up being more of a wrapup of last year that a look forward, but it sort of, kind of maybe, shows where my head is at. Spend less money and have a better good stuff to crap ratio. Let's see If I can stick with it.

New Comics 1/6/06

Here's what I picked up at the comic shop this week.

Shonen Jump Feb 06
Seven Soldiers:Frankenstein 2 of 4
Ironman #5
Y The Last Man #41
Down #2
Down #3
The Contract With God Trilogy Hardcover
Dr. Slump Volume 5

Overall a pretty good week.

Happy New Year

I haven't been hungover like this on New Year's Day in a loooong time. Sometimes it's good to be stupid.

Loading my iPod part II 9:17 AM

It's 5 hours after I started and it's only about half-way through the 2765 items I am transferring to my iPod. Man, USB is slow. My old firewire iPod can be reformatted and everything transferred over in less than 30 minutes. Granted, my Mac is an older G4 with USB 1.0, not the recommended USB 2.0, still, it's glacial. Hey Apple! Fire wire compatability on the next one, okay?

Saturday Novermber 12, 2005 4:28 am

The first Saturday I've had off in a month and I wake up at 4 am. Nice. I just can't sleep lately.

So I'm downstairs in my studio updating my new iPod. I have an older one. The last model before Apple added the click wheel. The one with the row of buttons above the wheel. It's pretty good. I gave it to my wife to keep the rugrats entertained in the car. I got the new one.

Like the last one, this one is my Christmas present. It's a pretty extravagent present, I'll admit. But screw it. I work Saturday's. Its pretty nifty. A little buggy though. For instance, if you are playing a video and you pause the video or just surf over to a song and hit the middle button, it will show you that you have switched over to the new song. It lies. The video's picture is gone, but the video's audio continues to play on, in slooowwwmmotiioonnnnn. It's creepy. You have to turn off the iPod to make it stop. You get around this by using the back button to get out of the video completely. Then you can go play a song. I should report this to Apple. They can probably fix it with a software update. They probably already have. Never mind.

It's also slow as hell to update. USB only baby. It takes forever, especially loading up videos. Other that those little drawbacks it's cool as hell. I got the big one of course. I have much, or little depending on how you look at it, to compensate for.

I love the video. I'm trying to figure out a way to pipe the video signal into my Prius display window. You can watch dvds in Japan. I want to watch my iPod here. While I drive. In rush hour traffic.

It takes a while to convert mpegs and .mov file to an iPod compatible format, but I just set those to run overnight. I'm using iSquint which can batch a folder so it's a breeze. The files aren't as small as the ones you get from quicktime and they have more artifacting, but it doesn't show up on the Pod screen and is tolerable when I'm watching on my 13 inch tv at work. Okay. Enough. So I sometimes have to work Saturdays, but I can watch tv at work. It's just that kind of job. A 60 hour week is still a 60 hour week. Alright?

I started this at 4:28. It's now 4:45. I still have about 2 hours to kill before the rest of the family gets out of bed. I guess I'll select another batch of songs to transfer to the new iPod. The last one just finished.

I've got to get some sleep.

Fantastic Four

Let's get this out of the way. I liked the movie. It's not a bad film. There are problems, no doubt, but I had a pretty good time and my kids loved it. Especialy my eight year old daughter. Jessica Alba has relaced Hillary Duff and Lindsey Lohan as her favorite actress. The Hillary poster is about to be replaced with Jessica as Sue Storm, The Invisible Girl. This is major in my house. Hillary has held the crown for 2 years now and Lindsey joined her about a year ago. Both have been swept away by Jessica. Something clicked here.

For all of the whining I've been hearing from the comicbok fan community, I thought Tim Story and the crew did a pretty good job. Reed Richards was Reed, living inside his head and not connecting to the people around him. Sue was frustrated with him and her brother Johnny. I didn't find her bitchy at all, a common complaint in many reviews. She was doing wahat Sue always did in the Lee/Kirby books, trying to get Reed to open his eyes and trying to keep Johnny in line. The Thing was great. The rubber suit actually worked for me. Except for the nose. Fix the nose. Doom was weak. That was the most disappointng part of this movie. The Doom stuff just dragged and he really wasn't that scary. And yet I still had a good time.

I've saved the best for last. Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, stole the show. The filmmakers and actor Chris Evans really nailed him. He's havng fun, digging his powers, pissing off his sister and playing practical joke on the Thing. His moments on screen really helped carry the movie. The other characters had their high points, but Johnny was always fun to watch.

So there you have it. The Fantastic Four is a fun movie. My daughter applauded when the movie was over and the first words out of her mouth were," Are they doing another one? Do you know when it's coming out?" A super-hero guy film that entertained a dad, an eight year old girl and her ten year old brother. Go figure.

Comics 6/29/2005

A very lean week.

W.I.T.C.H. Vol 1
Planetary #23
Kitty Pryde Shadow and Flame 1 of 5
Previews

Girls #2 - The Luna Brothers

I don't know. Blabber blabber blabber. Really. I don't know. I read Ultra #1 by the Luna Brothers. Someone gave it to me so I read it. Well drawn and actually well written. Great babes. I didn't read anymore. I wanted to, but I didn't want to be seen buying it. It would have felt like buying sleezy porn. I bought Girls #1. It was interesting. Well drawn. Well written. It felt like reading sleezy porn. I had preordered #2 so I bought it and just read it. It really felt like reading sleezy porn. Very well drawn and well written sleezy porn, with a great kicker at the end of the issue. I really want to read #3, but there's something just wrong about these books. It's as if they exist just to provide a venue for drawings of hot babes. But the writing is interesting. As far as off mainstream comics go, Girls is very well done. But it still feels like porn in a way that other cheesecake comics don't. In my day every 13 year old boy would have bought this book for obvious and nefarious reasons. Now they have the internet. I just don't know.