Podcast #5 is up…and it’s still 2009!

I promised Erik Burnham that I would have all of our older recordings published before the end of 2009… and I have 1/2 hour left to make that promise KEPT. This one’s less than 10 minutes long. Just a brief recording that wasn’t worth throwing out, despite some audio problems, because I relate to Erik an old TV Special that I enjoyed.

I don’t even have any Amazon links for this one, because sadly enough, it was never released on video.

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The 15 Worst Comics of the Decade

The 15 Worst Comics of the Decade – ComicsAlliance.com.

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Iron Man 2 Trailer!!!!

Awesome!

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the Darker Seid of Life

By all means we at Monitor Duty should have written dozens of histories and recaps and essays about DC Comics’ vile Kirby demon, the evil New God Darkseid.  By now there should be hundreds of references and odes of love.  If kicked we might see it happen in the future, but I do not care to do that now.

Recently when I should have been working I googled for Grant Morrison interviews about Darkseid.  To tell you the truth I do not think that Mr. Morrison has anything profound  or unusual to say about the character but I like the way he puts together words and descriptions.   He puts together ideas that are not necessarily new or great in ways that are interesting and entertaining.  Honestly that is a good thing.  It does not matter whether the ideas are his or not.  His 52 co-writers claim that his virtue is not his creativity but his fearlessness.  He will go where his fellows will not and that seems like a strength to me (and a burden to editors and marketing staff).

Grant Morrison successfully delivers upon the marketing and communication of old ideas mixed together in way that editors would not let less experienced writers attempt.  That is the only reason I bother looking for his interviews.  I like his words; Ienjoy good poetry.  I do not care to give him credit for new meanings or new ideas.

Here is a quick Darkseid link dump.  It might be nice if, in the future, Monitor Duty has the greatest and most authoritative Darkseid link directory.  Let us leave that for the future.

• Marc Singer, who is not the Beastmaster, writes a defense of Darkseid against the Howling Curmudgeon, in that he declares why the character is a good one, but insists the biggest injury upon the character is its overuse.  They agree on the character’s three best stories but alos there are moe good stories with the character.  The most profound note is that the character is used best in stories where he seems to die a permanent death.  I think that the character is not made better by having no inner conflict, but to have the character have an inner conflict is to write him out of character.  Most good characters have inner struggles; to an extent it easier to see the super-villain in this case as a plot device.  In this light most villains are plot devices more than characters.  I can think of exceptions like Lex Luthor (depending on the writer, of course) and Doctor Doom, both of whom are self-realized as Darkseid is.  Yet Luthor (again depending on the writer) has a character arc involving his own jealousy, need for attention, his place in the world, and possibly friendship with Superman.  Doom struggles with vanity above all.  Darkseid has not issues.  He merely is.  He will never grow and he will never learn.  He will simply act, conquer, enslave, and at the end of the story arc in question he will die.  Occasionally he gets trapped in the Source Wall or something.
• A lot of this comes from a September calling for Darkseid essays.  Who has the time?  The point is that Darkseid “is a person” and I cannot say it is wrong because I sadly have read less Kirby New Gods material than I should, due to cost constraints.  As it is, what I declared in the point above is that recently Darkseid is a more a plot device, an abstract menace (as Galactus has almost always been) because while he may have been a person with a personality most writers simply treat him as an abstract personification of a dark ethos.
• The best response is this: by Keith Giffen in his Ambush Bug mini-series.
• Andrew Hickey insists that Darkseid’s desire to seize control of all life, the universe, and the entirety of creation and existence is borne out of fear of death.  Mr. Miracle is the logical counterpoint and the arch-enemy of Darkseid because as an escapological archetype he is positioned outside of the constraints of control.  Yet Scott Free himself is still not a direct and successful contrast because Darkseid name him and set his purpose.  That is Mr. Hickey’s point anyway and I am not certain I buy into it.  This plays all into ideas of “degrees of freedom” but as a Liberal Democrat (in the UK political sense) Mr Hickey’s views about what is acceptable as a definition or execution, application of freedom is suspect.
• The first Darkseid story I ever read was not the entire story but the final chapter of a JLA/JSA team-up story.  As was the the fashion at the time the occasional/formal meeting between the League and the Society finds it self linked to a third super-team, in this instance the New Gods.  I remember Justice League of American #184 (and here is the cover) because the New Gods were not only definitely super-heroes in this incarnation (and there is nothing wrong with that) but Darkseid has a personality, he is a villain with motivations and relationships.  In point of fact the bulk of the story is about relationships as well as a rise to power.  Upon his return from his most recent death in the New Gods strip from Adventure Comics, Darkseid punishes the Injustice Society for accosting his son Orion, clearly with a view of propreitry and seeing Orion as a creature, a prince, someone whose fate is more tied to Darkseid’s whim than mere encounters with bad guys.  Orion’s group consists of a Leaguer and a Society member.  All the split-groups  (I love how they follow the Gardner Fox tradition) consist of such a configuration.  For isntance Batman’s group has Mr. Miracle and the Huntress because both are versions of him in the different worlds of the different teams.  At this point each team resides in a different dimension of the DC Comics storytelling.   Because Darkseid has his relationship with the New Gods he seeks to teleport Apokolips to the spot where Earth-2 resides, destroying Earth-2 and thus landing his domain inside a universe where there would be no heroes, and no heroic New Gods.
• OAFE assesses/contrasts two Darkseid action figures making his size and sculpt major emphasis.  The Mattel version, which is the one really looked at, comes with a Mother Box as his accessory, and despite being smaller than the DC Direct Darkseid figure, is apparently just better.  Of course there is a brief history asserting that Darkseid only recently became a Superman villain despite that his first appearance was in a Superman comic.  He also discusses Grant Morrison’s formulation of the Anti-Life Equation.

I think there is something to be said that properly written the villain is a character but this applies to every character.  It is also important to note that the ending of the story as well as how often the character appears has serious impact for story quality.

(1 votes, average: 1.00 out of 5)

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A Mystery Solved!

One of the distinct pleasures of comics geekdom is finding a story, long since forgotten, that sheds light on some trivial mystery. I grappled with such a mystery over three years ago when I asked if anyone knew if Tubby Tompkins’s first name was, indeed, Tubby, or if it was just some sort of nickname.

Reading the eighteenth volume of Dark Horse’s Little Lulu reprint series, which collects issues 82 through 87, I came across the answer.

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Superman and Batman team-up really worth it?

UPDATED: Coding corrected.

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Sgt. Rock movie? Yeah, right.

Oh look, Akiva Goldsman is a producer. And it’s moved from World War II to the future. Next thing you know, he won’t be American…because that would be “jingoistic”.

Relax. This will not get made.

Look, they missed their chance to do it right by casting Bruce Willis in the 1980s. Stallone and Schwarzenegger? Nope, that didn’t happen.  And this current generation of pretty boy actors is very short on the kind of men who could pull this off.   Unless we’re going to cast Gerard Butler or Robert Downey Jr. in every comic book adaptation, I doubt they’d be able to get past the casting stage.

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Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special

I’ve always meant to see this. As we enter the holiday season, it’s time to relax with the Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special. NSFW, contains language, etc. … though it’s nowhere near as explicit as the real comic.

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Bill Willingham: I’ve Seen the Future and It Is…Safe?

Bill Willingham has a twist on the whole idea of why we live in the future yet there are no flying cars.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Batman Movies, Part 3

Tune in for our third and final Batman podcast, sponsored by TooManyLongboxes.com. No, we’re not doing the podcast quarterly! We now have better equipment and will turn them around much faster. Here is the last of the three Batman podcasts that I recorded in January with Erik Burnham.  The sound is improved, but after this one they should all sound as good as my introduction to this third installment.

 

 Monitor Duty Podcast 3 -- Batman movies part 3: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Batman Begins
The Dark Knight
What’s Next?

In case you missed them:

Batman movies podcast Part 1
Batman movies podcast Part 2

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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DC Comics is now DC Entertainment…and Levitz is out!

First Marvel gets bought by Disney.  Now DC Comics becomes DC Entertainment.

Is this the first step towards the death knell for the comic book?  It sure seems as if both companies are more focused on pitching comic projects as new media.  (I would like to see a live action DC product BESIDES Batman!)

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Disney acquires Marvel Comics for $4B?

Reportedly, Disney has purchased Marvel Comics for 4 billion dollars.

In related news, “Spider-Man 4″ is now filming, with Spidey battling the evil Dr. Flubber.

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“Offline” indeed

I was reading this archived message board post about how Nightcrawler was created.

Why? I was learning more about Dave Cockrum and had found a link to it.

This message board post from 2002 is Dave’s write-up about how he first conceived of Nightcrawler, pitched it to DC as a member of the Legion, and then brought it over to X-Men as a member of the New X-Men.

Dave posted to the board as “Dark Bamf”. Then I looked again at the board member information when this caught my eye:

“Member Is Offline”

Dave Cockrum passed away in 2006.

“Offline” is an interesting euphemism.

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Geoff Johns revisits some old favorites

Over at Dixonverse, they’re discussing a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while:  Geoff Johns seeming to go overboard with the material from a number of Alan Moore stories.  While I like much of what has been happening…indeed, Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps are the ONLY DC Comic books I still buy… this does bug me somewhat.

Mogo, and the F-Sharp Bell, and Qull of the Five Inversions: they’re from short stories.  Moore managed to tell very intriguing stories in far less than 22 pages (let alone multi-issue story arcs taking half a year)  and they were one-off throwaway bits not intended to be the launching point for epic sagas.  “Tales of the Green Lantern Corps” was an uneven back-up series that would occasionally produce a gem such as “Quarzz Terranh Knows Joy” (or whatever it was called) and sometimes introduce a Corps member interesting enough to revisit later (such as Ch’p, Stel and the Green Man).  The point was to take the Green Lantern mythos and do something you couldn’t just do with Hal Jordan, such as ending with the GL’s death (or a credible possibility of death on the last page, which isn’t the case with Hal) or showing an alien approach to using the ring.

“Mogo Doesn’t Socialize” is a wonderful story that loses most of its ending’s power if you’re going to use Mogo again and again in other comics.  It’s like having Rosebud the Sled, Verbal Kint and Tyler Durden as a recurring superteam in the DCU.

The bounty hunter from that same story showed up in GL Corps.  Know what bugged me?  I guess I always thought that story was ancient history, not a current event.  The Book of Oa contains tales of things that happened to Green Lanterns throughout history… and we’re talking an organization with 3600 members that has been active for a BILLION years!

Qull of the Five Inversions?  I was pretty sure he was just a liar.  After all, not long after that story was published, the entire GL Corps was destroyed after their execution of Sinestro caused the Great Battery to lose power.  (Remember, how only Hal, John, Guy, G’nort and a few others had rings, and it was a while before the Corps was restored?)  Then in 1994, Hal Jordan causes the deaths of all the Guardians…so Qull’s prediction of drums with blue skin couldn’t be true.  The whole point of the story is that Qull manages to produce fear in Abin Sur, and he dies because of the starship he is flying in instead of using his ring.

By the by, Johns’ interpretation of that story is very literal: there are aliens called the Inversions, and there are five of them.  Huh.  I always thought that was just Qull’s name, that there were five things “inverted” about him.  If there are only five creatures on that whole cordoned off planet, that’s way less scary.

As has been pointed out about the Black Mercy, it’s taking one cool story element (a McGuffin excuse for telling some cool imaginary stories) and running it into the ground.  The Black Mercy shouldn’t be packaged with the Mongul action figure as though it’s his primary weapon.  It was a plot device, pure and simple, and next time Mongul appears he will resort to something else.

All of these little elements that Alan Moore rattled off as throwaways… Ranx the Sentient City, the Children of the White Lobe, Sodam Yat, etc. … they were cute references to a mythology we haven’t heard yet.  That was neat-o.  Spending several years setting all of them up as canon seems like it’s missing the point.

If I wrote a story where Batman encounters Rip Hunter and Rip says, “Last time I met you was fighting alongside your daughter during the Atlantis/Paradise Island/Gorilla City war… oh wait, that hasn’t happened yet!”, do I need to worry that some kid who loves that issue will, fifteen years down the line, spend three years building up to a Atlantis/Paradise Island/Gorilla City War mega-event as a glorious in-joke where that disposable humorous line comes true?

Look, Blackest Night seems like a great storyline and I’m looking forward to reading it.  And I like Johns a lot, really!  But Johns should be a writer who tells his own stories instead of “What happened to those characters at the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths?”or “Let’s start integrating as much Kingdom Come future into the DCU as possible!” or “What if Blackest Night really did happen?”  He should be creating the characters and telling the stories that cause future fanboy-cum-writers to want to revisit HIS work.  And hopefully, they’ll have editors that tell them to just do their own damn stories.

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25 years later, Larry Hama’s life makes sense

Larry Hama’s name is synonymous with G.I. Joe. He is known throughout comic fandom as the guy who wrote the bios for the action figures, as the guy who took what could have been a rather silly and short-lived toy line and brought it to life with deep characterization during his very long run on the G.I. Joe comic book.

For 25 years, people have been throwing out the line “And knowing is half the battle!” whenever they were talking to Larry. Until this week, he never knew this was a line from the G.I. Joe cartoon show (or rather, the PSAs at the end of the cartoon show). Larry had never seen the cartoon.

Just imagine what it must be like to have heard this phrase for almost half your life and never realized people were trying to make a joke for your benefit. Larry must have thought this was just some popular aphorism! Now, after ages of wondering, he finally knows why.

And knowing is half the battle!

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WASFen Convention report

This last Saturday, I attended the 3rd annual WASFen convention. That’s the Wausau Area Science Fiction Enthusiasts. Organizer Evan Cass invited me to be a Guest of Honor after meeting me at last year’s Wizard World. I found it to be a fun time, with several hundred attendees to the one-day convention.

It gets off to a slow start, probably because it is a largely local crowd and many of them are taking their time on a Saturday morning. Of course, “first thing in the morning” is when the news media shows up with their cameras to cover the convention. By afternoon the interviews were hopping, the tables were getting plenty of visitors, the most famous Guests of Honor had small lines at their tables and I had had sales of only a little less than I make during two long days in Artist’s Alley at Chicago. Actually, that isn’t a fair enough comparison: Chicago also costs much more in transportation and hotel and I have to buy my table space, whereas WASFen’s space was free and I got the Guest of Honor treatment. That makes WASFen probably the most profitable convention I’ve ever attended!

The guests of honor included sci-fi and fantasy authors such as Patrick Rothfuss, Kelly McCullough  and Kathryn Sullivan, plus comic book creators John Jackson Miller (who also does the webcomic Sword and Sarcasm) and Tim Seeley. Kathryn has three interconnected juvenile fantasy books, and I had to buy one of them (“Talking to Trees”) because the write-up on the back intrigued me. A teen-age girl takes her brother’s silver bracelet because it matches her outfit,  unaware that it is a magical key to another world!  He’s the protagonist in the other novels.  It piqued my curiosity enough that I grabbed a copy for my niece Jenny.

I didn’t have enough spare time to explore the vendor area.  The table space seemed quite affordable to the vendors who were there, and there were about 7-10 different vendors with probably enough room for 6-10 more next year.  The vendors included a few creators as well, such as Jonathan L. Switzer of “Scwonky Dog” and Jim Yoho of Episode Fun, a goofy look behind the scenes of The Phantom Menace. (Liam Neeson is represented in the comic as a trailer, since he refuses to come out after having read the script.) I also met Ryan Schwartzman of Dorkfathers, a comic shop in nearby Merrill.

There was another room for readings and other features, such as a one-man Rocky Horror Picture Show (My wife loved that one!) and another room for gaming.

The day’s program began with Q&A for the Guests of Honor, including me. (I’ll have that video online sometime soon.) This was followed by a Jeopardy tournament, which sounded like fun. The categories included: The Demon, Swamp Thing, WildCATS, Sandman, Marvel 2099, Marvel Epic, Marvel UK, Savage Dragon and The Ray. Yes, The Ray. Unfortunately, the categories featured not one of my favorite characters, so I was at a serious disadvantage. Somehow, I still won!

The interviews and trivia game were run by David Alan Cohen, a gregarious and funny guy whom I could probably talk comics with for hours and hours. (Unfortunately, he does not yet have a microphone headset and a Skype account, so he won’t be in any Monitor Duty podcasts soon…but maybe someday!) David has an excellent voice, reminiscent of Kevin Pollack or Albert Brooks (or Kevin Pollack doing his impression of Albert Brooks). He was also selling his comic collection, and having won $30 in comics from his Comic Book Jeopardy game, I stopped by to spend it. Hey, guess what’s written on the ends of the boxes in his collection? The Demon, Swamp Thing, WildCATS, Sandman, Marvel 2099, Marvel Epic, Marvel UK, Savage Dragon and The Ray. Well, you write what you know.

The show concluded with a costume contest that graded the participants on how much work they put into the costume, its quality as a costume and whether they would act out something appropriate for it. I was invited to be one of the judges. One person came as raccoon Mario from Super Mario World 3. When asked where he(?) got the tail and the ears, Mario replied, “From a leaf”. Bonus points! The winner was a tie between two women who came as the light and dark mages from Final Fantasy. The contest was then followed by a charity auction with all proceeds going to a local women’s shelter. Evan, who probably hadn’t slept much the night before and by then was quite burned out overseeing the whole show, was running on fumes while performing as auctioneer. I believe at one point, while holding some DC Heroclix, he fell asleep and then ordered waffles. (Kidding!) I won a couple items which I’ll probably donate in turn to the FallCon auction.

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Wausau is a lovely, small city in the center of Wisconsin and it contains roughly 40,000 people. At least, that was the population when I lived there in the mid-1990s. That’s right, this was kind of a Old Home Week for me. From 1994 to 1996, I lived in a small duplex apartment and wrote radio advertising for WOFM when I wasn’t rewinding VHS tapes professionally at Blockbuster. In my spare time I read comic books and watched my five free movies a week. And that’s all I did. Wausau is certainly a nice town. Only problem is, there was never anything to do! How I wish someone had organized something like WASFen when I lived there.

I believe WASFen may have a chance to really take off. After all, Wausau, Wisconsin, is centrally located for comic book fans from all over Wisconsin, eastern Minnesota, northern Illinois and Da YouPee. It’s on a straight route from Minneapolis to Green Bay and straight north from Madison. When talking to Evan about the possibility of finding more pros that might want to attend, I pointed out that I knew many guys from the Twin Cities who attended a convention in Des Moines and that’s a longer drive than the simple three hour tour to Wausau.

The nice thing about a convention like WASFen is that I’m meeting comic book readers who may never make the majorly expensive trek to Wizard World in Chicago, or even to FallCon in the Twin Cities. In other words, it’s a whole new market, and I got to meet some great people…and move some product, which is always nice.

After the con, Evan Cass and I talked about the possibilities for 2010. WASFen was a thrill and I hope to be back next year.

Check them out on MySpace, and visit the Facebook page for Evan Cass, the organizer of same. If any sci-fi/fantasy authors or comic book creators are thinking of attending a future WASFen con, they should contact Evan. (His info is on the MySpace page, right under the picture of Yours Truly.

Evan, thank you very much for inviting me.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Metro Med trailer and Facebook page

I’ve created a new Facebook page for Metro Med.
This also allows me to have an embeddable version of the comic book’s trailer:

If you’d like to embed this in your blog or other web page, use this code:
<object width="400" height="224" ><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="http://www.facebook.com/v/1179573177875" /><embed src="http://www.facebook.com/v/1179573177875" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="400" height="224"></embed></object>

If you’re near the Wausau, WI, area, don’t forget to visit WASFen this weekend!

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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WASFen plans

Maybe I haven’t ever been to Comicon, but I will be able to say that I’ve attended a convention this year.  The Wausau Area Science Fiction Enthusiasts have invited me to be a Guest of Honor at their convention in Wausau this Saturday!  If any of you are in central Wisconsin, be sure to hit that!

As we haven’t had a vacation trip of any kind since last August, Melinda and I are making it a three-day weekend.  We’re going to stay at a fancy hotel room on Friday night, and then Saturday after the con we’re going to a bed and breakfast somewhere north of there.  I lived in Wausau from 1994-96, and I’m going to show her Rhinelander and Crandon (where my folks lived for a decade), so I gave Melinda free reign to pick the place we stay.  She spent much of Monday night hunting for B&Bs and not finding anything quite right.

Here is our conversation as we were driving to work Tuesday morning:

Melinda: I looked at places in Merrill, Rhinelander and Waukegan.

Me: You could even look in Crandon.  Even that’s only a 90 minute drive after the convention.

Melinda: How far is it from Rhinelander to Waukegan?

Me: I don’t know where Waukegan is.

Melinda: Duh.  I mean Waukesha!

Me: You mean Wausau?

Melinda: Wausau!  Yeah, that’s it.

Me: Are you sure the places you looked at last night are even in the city we’re going to be visiting?

Melinda: Maybe I should double-check.

Note to the WASFen folks: If we don’t show up Saturday, it’s because we’re in Waukesha.

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Best picture from Comic-Con yet!

I’m not going to be a bandwidth-thief.  If you want to see it, go to Big Hollywood.

The first commenter wins the caption contest: “For once, middle-aged, out of shape fanboys have the perfect body type for the characters they’re cosplaying.”

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Support John Ostrander!

Writer John Ostrander suffers from glaucoma, and many of his industry friends are holding fundraisers to help him pay for his surgeries.  Visit Comix4sight.com.

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