Dan

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Everything posted by Dan

  1. Yeah, the multiplayer is hemorrhaging players. It's not going to be full price for long.
  2. It's absolutely beautiful. I was tempted to get it monthly when it came out, but as pretty as it was I really didn't feel like I would be getting $4 worth of entertainment every month, and the story as a whole is not a $48 story. I found it being sold as a twelve-issue set at a convention for $25, and that was money very well spent.
  3. 1963 #1-6: A series of one-shots from 1993 (with titles like Tales of the Uncanny and The Tomorrow Syndicate) by Alan Moore, paying tribute to Marvel Silver Age comics. The art was mostly handled by Rick Veitch and Steve Bissette, with some inks from Dave Gibbons, Don Simpson, and others. This was interesting to read now, with yet another of Moore's "superhero comics are stupid and smelly and I hate them" interviews making the rounds; the industry has broken Moore's heart, but his love for the medium was very real at one point, and this is a pitch-perfect take on the very early days of the Lee-Kirby-Ditko Bullpen. It barely qualifies as satire; this is pure homage. It ends on a cliffhanger that never got resolved, due in part with (stop me if this sounds familiar) feuds with Bissette and publisher Jim Lee. Black Widow (2016) #1-12: The Chris Samnee/Mark Waid limited series. Unlike a lot of their other collaborations like Daredevil and Captain America, this is mostly Samnee's show. Waid provides dialogue as needed, but this story, a very 1960s spy story, is largely told through visuals (to the extent that Samnee is credited as a co-writer), with a focus on Natasha's balletic action style. It's gorgeous, but I read the whole thing in about 90 minutes.
  4. "Suffering" is way overstating it. The good stuff is genuinely fun. I just wish it were a lot more consistent. Also, it would REALLY like you to pay for shit like costumes, fighting combos, etc. When it dips below $20 I would totally recommend it as the game you play between big, 60+ hour epics.
  5. Avengers: This game is intensely frustrating. The actual gameplay is repetitive button-mashing in bases that are all 100% identical to each other that blur together that can get old fast. However, it's wrapped up in a really good story with KILLER voice acting. Kamala Khan steals the entire game. The characters all have vastly different fighting styles so you can change things up, and no lie, it's genuinely fun the have the Hulk just smash the shit out of everything. There's probably 40+ hours of gameplay if you go through all the side missions and what have you, but the actual campaign is MAYBE 15 hours long. This is reasonably entertaining in chunks, but it's not a $60 experience.
  6. Mockingbird (2016) #1-8: This was an absolute blast. Chelsea Cain's Bobbi is sarcastic, hypercompetent, and game for pretty much whatever gets thrown at her. These eight issues are very, very fun and go by in no time. Kate Niemczyk's art is always clean and great to look at. I do have one major issue with the story, however (CW, sexual assault): Which is a damn shame, because on the whole this was a ridiculously entertaining series.
  7. While you and I have very different takes on Joey Lauren Adams' skill as an actor, Mike, I am pretty much right there with you on Chasing Amy. This is a movie about mature adult relationships written by someone who has very, very clearly never been in one, and tackling LGBTQ issues by someone who, by his own admission, had just befriended his first out gay person (Guin Turner's Go Fish was on the festival circuit at the same time as Clerks). The fundamental, core conceit of this movie is that men are incapable of handling the idea that women had any kind of a sex life before they met. Like, this is just a given and treated as obvious gospel truth. No. No.
  8. From a story standpoint, Flash could probably hang around for a bit longer, but it should probably wind down sooner rather than later. Barry is arguably the central Arrowverse character now, but that could be reworked. Legends feels like it's running out of gas as well. But with Superman and Lois and Stargirl coming on board, this train still has a little while to go.
  9. For all of my ongoing frustration with Smith, I can't ever totally get down on Clerks. I saw it in its theatrical release over a dozen times and it's no exaggeration to say it changed the way I interact with film forever. I was 20 and this was the first movie I had ever seen that depicted people my age taking and acting the way I and everyone I knew did. That plus the whole myth around the kid who made a movie all by himself for no money was inspirational. You can't put your hand on your heart and say it's a perfect film. Hell, it's really not a very good movie. But it was important enough that I will never be able to write Smith off completely.
  10. Femforce #1-10: Somehow these just fell in my lap. This is a small press book (Americomics) from the mid-80s that combines a handful of good girl characters from the Golden Age, either straight up (Ms. Victory) or as thinly-veiled substitutes (Harvey's Black Cat becomes She-Cat), teaming up to do whatever the hell. This. Was. AWFUL. The story is dull and nonsensical, and the artwork (which should be the main draw as the whole point of the book is hey, look at the ladies) is pretty bad. There are some reprints that aren't bad (some Matt Baker stuff from the 50s is pretty decent), but on the whole this was a waste of time and I can't believe this book lasted more than three decades. Jimmy Olsen (2019) #1-9: This, on the other hand, is genius. Set up like an old Silver Age anthology title with a bunch of short stories across multiple timelines per issue that manage to thread across multiple issues while simultaneously braiding together into a cohesive whole, featuring a Jimmy that is somehow modern while at the same time being the Silver Age buffoon who is metaphysically incapable of staying out of catastrophic, spectacular trouble. And due to the way it's set up, it actually works better as an issue-to-issue experience. Matt Fraction, man.
  11. The Best of Comix Book: In 1975, Denis Kitchen and Stan Lee got together to come up with Comix Book, a countercultural magazine that would be published by Marvel Comics that offered pro rates to high-visibility underground comix creators. However, Stan got nervous, so the magazine would tone down the subversive elements significantly, all but eliminating any reference to sex, drugs, nudity, or profane language. If you are wondering what the fucking point to Comix Book was, you are in line with the vast majority of the intended audience, and it only lasted five issues before folding. However, it did provide a showcase for early creators such as Trina Robbins, Mike Ploog, Harvey Pekar, and Basil Wolverton, as well as the very first three-page version of Art Speigleman's Maus. An interesting curiosity, but there's always the sense that this was, by its very nature, doomed to fail.
  12. Midsommar: Indescribably beautiful. Deeply unsettling. 24 Hour Party People: Surprisingly funny biopic of the Factory Records/Madchester scene with Steve Coogan.
  13. Don, if you liked this (and yes, McGregor was THE T'Challa writer), you might want to seek out "Panther's Quest", a story that stretched across Marvel Comics Presents #13-37 (it was eight pages an issue, so it's not as insanely long as that sounds). T'Challa goes on an undercover mission into South Africa at the height of apartheid, and it was written by McGregor and the art was by Gene Colan. That was the story that got me loving the character back in the day.
  14. Yeah, the play was basically a cartoon, and they play it as such. Listening to the play actually makes the comic make a lot more sense. Big Apple Comix #1 (1975): A sort of semi-underground comix anthology, edited by Fabulous Flo Steinberg after leaving Marvel, with a running theme of paying tribute to New York City. Specifically, pre-Guiliani "haven of filth and crime but we love it anyway" NYC. It has that almost quaint quality where what was super transgressive in 1975 is almost adorable now, but this comic is filled with work from Marvel mainstays like Archie Goodwin, Neal Adams, Herb Trimpe, Al Williamson, Mike Ploog, John Severin, and Wally Wood, so unlike the vast majority of underground comix, this is actually pretty good.
  15. Starstruck: collects #1-13 of the 2009 IDW series, which in turn collected expanded versions of Starstruck #1-4 and Galactic Girl Guide strips from The Rocketeer from Dark Horse (1990), which in turn collected expanded versions of Marvel Graphic Novel #13 and Starstruck #1 from Marvel/Epic (1985), which in turn collected strips that had appeared in Illustracion+Comix Internacional and Heavy Metal (1982), which in turn adapted the 1980 off-off-Broadway play by Elaine Lee (Vamps). Yeah, there's a history. At one point mentioned alongside Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns in lists of groundbreaking adult-oriented comics from the 1980s, you don't hear a lot about Starstruck any more. It began life as a play with a decidedly Douglas Adams/Rocky Horror vibe, a modern-day, kitschy send-up of old fashioned space opera with a weird, sharp sense of humor. Written by soap opera actress Elaine Lee with set design by Michael Wm. Kaluta, the two of them collaborated on telling a story for the underground comix scene that led into the play, concerning space heroines in a far-distant future with multiple overlapping storylines, digs at religion, consumerism, and the Girl Scouts. Lee is exploding with ideas, arguably too many ideas, as it can be hard to follow the story at times, but the whole thing is epic, and sweeping, and very, very funny. The art, on the other hand, is some of the most beautiful I've ever seen. Kaluta was a master, and here he channels European SF comics storytelling, especially Moebius, to create rich and lived-in worlds that are all gorgeous in their own unique ways. Charles Vess does some of the inking, and it's all newly painted by Lee Moyer. Todd Klein even does some of the best lettering of his career.
  16. I don't give a thought one way or the other to the movie itself, but what we learned here today is if the fandom screams loud enough, and acts shitty enough, the studio might cave in and go back and change shit. It happened with ME3, it happened with Sonic, and it's happening now with JL. This is a very, very, very bad precedent to set, and I am not happy about it.
  17. Dan

    DC Purge

    I have no idea how far this will go, but the industry is going to look very, very different a couple of years from now. Nobody wants to see something like this, as inevitable as it's seemed for a while now. Some of these people will find homes elsewhere, but this is devastating.
  18. The studio hired Joel Schumacher to make a big-budget live action feature-length episode of Batman '66, and he created the Platonic ideal of that. Batman and Robin isn't the movie anyone wanted in 1997, but it is the greatest possible version of precisely what Schumacher set out to do.
  19. If you could throw BWP up there that'd be awesome.
  20. Thor, because I'm not a fucking psychopath.
  21. Sunstone, Vol. 1 hardcover - collects vol. 1-3 of the Image TPB collections, which in turn collected a bunch of webcomics off DeviantArt. The most adorable BDSM erotica you're likely to see. It's definitely NSFW, but the real focus here is Stjepan Sejic's utterly goofy sense of humor and loving characterizations of two people stumbling towards each other as they get deeper and deeper into what began as a FWB situation. Charming as all hell, and that's not even taking into account the absolutely stunning artwork.
  22. I cannot believe I forgot to mention that a pilot for a remake starring Hannah Simone (New Girl) was made a couple of years ago but wasn't picked up. To the best of my knowledge, it is nowhere on the internet, but I would very much like to see this.