Forced Withdrawal

4 COMMENTS

This is our last Wednesday before we head off to this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, which is always a weird sensation. On one hand, our pilgrimage makes us heroes at my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me if they can housesit (and where my longbox with the first-print Silver Age Batman comics are in the house. And if we have security cameras. Which we do, you treacherous bastards.)… but on the other hand, it means that this is the end of our new comics for the next two weeks.

Believe it or not, even though the biggest Western comic book convention in the world starts on a Wednesday, you can’t find a new comic book to buy there to save your Godforsaken soul. Oh sure: if I stood in the comics retailers section of the convention’s main floor, waving around a fistful of hundreds, and screamed, “Action Comics #1 me now, bitches! And gimme that real stuff, none of that Grant Morrison shit,” I’d be beating well-stocked and willing retailers off with a stick. But when it comes to new books? It’s bubkis for you, True Believer. They just don’t haul that stuff out to the West Coast with them… not when they know that, once they get back to their home stores, they will be faced with people like me who went to the convention wanting to trade in their SDCC-Exclusive Deadpool-themed Fleshlights in for enough store credit to pay for the books they missed while in San Diego.

So it is a bittersweet feeling to have it be a Wednesday, and to come home with new comics, knowing it is the last batch we’ll be getting for a couple of week. But still, it is a Wednesday, which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But if you need to take a break from new comics for a couple of weeks, there are worse ways to go out. There’s a new issue of The Walking Dead (and God, how I would like to be able to tell Robert Kirkman that I like how he wrapped the story he started before last year’s SDCC), the opening chapter of DC’s Trinity War in Justice League, the second issues of personal favorites Superman Unchained and Astro City, a new issue (finally) of Jonathan Ross’s and Bryan Hitch’s America’s Got Powers, and a bunch of other cool stuff!

But you know how it is (particularly with all the other prep work going into getting ready to cover SDCC): before we can review any of them, we need time to read them. And I promise: we will try to make as much time as possible to review as many of these as we can before the convention starts up. But until we can do that…

See you tomorrow, suckers!

Categories: Site Business

July 10, 2013 by Rob

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4 Responses to "Forced Withdrawal"

The Hirsch Effekt

Jul 12

Sounds good, have fun at the Con!

(You DO have first-print Silver Age Batman comics…?)

Is Walking Dead still something that’s awesome? I’ve never read an issue in my life (late to the party, then turned off by overhyping; simply can’t get into stuff when everyone is shouting in my ear I have to get into it) but had a really funny conversation with a friend yesterday, who doesn’t know anything about comics and collects no other series, but loves all things zombies. And yesterday, once we were on the topic, he couldn’t stop complaining how he was totally excited by Walking Dead first, but thought it got pretty repetitive and boring later on. I basically confirmed to him that that’s what a lot of people on the comics blogosphere say. But after I inquired how far he was into the series, he told me he had actually only read the first 5 trades and was so disappointed by the 5th that he hasn’t read on since. So he thinks things started getting repetitive at about #25! Damn. I guess I’m still gonna take a look some day, but since I trust that guy’s judgement, it didn’t really sell me on the series any more, ya know? 😉

Reply
- Rob
  
  Jul 12
  
  Oh, SDCC is a blast. Keep checking in next week for a bunch of comics news from the con, straight from the source (and follow our Twitter feed; we live Tweet all the panels we attend, so you can get the latest news from the convention straight from the firehose).
  
  And I do have a bunch of Silver Age Batmans. There was a sweet spot, between, say, 1986 and 1989 (when the first Batman movie came out) when you could get Batman books from, say, the late 50s through the 60s in decent condition for just a couple, three bucks a piece. That said: please don’t steal them. I am an American from Generation X, so those books are the closest thing to a retirement fund that I have. 😉
  
  When it comes to The Walking Dead… well, in my opinion, it’s in a weird period right now. Robert Kirkman has been sticking with a single storyline for the past year (and the most recent solicits show that he’s sticking with it for the next three months at least), and it just feels like it has been dragging. It feels like Kirkman has started pacing the comic like the TV show, which is fine when a new story installment comes out every week… but when it’s only once a month? It feels extremely slow.
  
  That said: the villain in this latest long arc, Negan, is well-written enough that, when Kirkman finally has someone put a bullet in his face, it will be glorious… but Jesus, I wish someone would pull the Goddamned trigger already!
  
  But overall, The Walking Dead is well worth checking out. When it broke, the idea of a neverending zombie apocalypse story was just about unprecedented, so it wasn’t like any other similar story out there. And while that freshness has been dulled by the TV show, it is still, in general, a very good book, taken as one long story. And given the high profile of the show, the trade paperbacks are generally available in just about every public library, so you can try it out for no cost (at least you can borrow the books in American public libraries; I’m not sure about the library systems in Europe, so your mileage may vary).
  
  And your buddy does have a point; some elements do get a little repetitive (Negan is remarkably similar to The Governor, for example). But read in trades, you get around the more recent slower pacing… and keep in mind: the one “repetitive” element that has never changed is that any character can die at any time. That gives every issue the sense of uncertainty that has kept me reading through the recent slow pacing. Borrow it or find used copies of the first couple of trades on the cheap, but give it an honest chance. It ain’t perfect, and its slower and less fresh than it used to be, but it’s a good read for the most part.
  
  …By the way, I don’t know why your comments get caught in the moderation queue now and again. We’ll be upgrading pieces of the Web site this weekend, so hopefully that will clear up the issue. Our default policy is that, once someone comments and is approved once, they are automatically approved after that… but considering our Webmaster is an unreliable heavy drinker who I only ever see when I look in the bathroom mirror, something might be messed up. 😉
  
  Reply
The Hirsch Effekt

Jul 12

Well, let’s face it, there are political reasons for me not being approved…NSA, Prism and that Snowden guy, there’s controversial stuff going on right now. We had a prominent german politican just recently requesting that Snowden be awarded the nobel prize for peace. Also, when Obama did talk at the Brandenburger Tor just a couple of weeks ago and was all like “Yeah, I can take my jacket off and be casual, we’re among friends”, the response was all like “Fuck you, we were more into Obamania then your own country, now you disappointed our hopes and destroyed our dreams, you’re even spying on us…and you still haven’t closed down Guantanamo, damn liar!”

So I’d like to think I’m taking a big personal risk right now, commenting on a Boston based blog with no protection whatsoever while things are so tense. Also I’d like to make some really tasteless jokes that involve Adolf Hitler, George W. Bush and Jews, but I fear that my humour already doesn’t really make it through translation and it won’t help my hopes of not becoming a big surveillance target, so perhaps I’d better leave all those topics alone. 😉

Sweet spot between 1986 and 1989. Well. I was like 3 years old when the first Batman movie opened. First one I saw in a movie theater was BATMAN FOREVER, which by the way I’ll still defend to this day as being ridiculously fun and awesome. If you want to draw parallels now to me already defending both M. Night Shyamalan and Scott Lobdell in your comments section and theorize about what exactly went wrong in my pop culture socialization, feel absolutely free. 😉

Like I said, Iwill be looking into Walking Dead…someday. Something that’s been talked about with such high praise certainly deserves a look. I guess I could have totally got into that back when 28 Days Later kinda revived the Zombie thing, I watched that film so many times. But it’s years later and I’m largely over that Zombie thing. It’s almost tougher to sell me on Zombies these days than it is to sell me on Vampires, as far as oversaturation goes. That’s certainly another point for me personally re: freshness.

Also, having established my all around poor taste, I’ve always liked Mummies the most myself. How come there are so few good Mummy stories out there? The classic Karloff one, a few nice Hammer films, Bram Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle…hell, I almost managed to talk myself into Tim Seeley’s recreation of Rob Liefeld’s Bloodstrike, since that involved Mummies with laserguns. We need more Mummies. If Mummies were to rise from their graves and travel all the way from Egypt to the USA to eat all the Zombies in Walking Dead, I’d buy 10 copies of that shit tomorrow!

Reply
- Rob
  
  Jul 14
  
  Dude, if the NSA is on high lockdown alert over what I think about, say, Batman: Year Zero, it is the end of the American Experiment and you have nothing to fear from us… that said: I have taken to routing most of my Internet traffic through a variety of European countries via VPN. So as far as the Feds are concerned, based on traffic analysis, you and I might be the same person. And actually, that should probably make you afraid. 😉
  
  And I will forgive you Batman Forever; while it’s a bit campy for my taste, at least Joel Schumacher didn’t give in to every single one of his basest instincts, the way he did with Batman And Robin. Of course, I say that now, with three spectacular Christopher Nolan Batman movies since then to wash the stink off. As an example: Bill Buckner was one of the most reviled figures in Boston after the 1986 World Series – I was at Fenway Park in 1987 the first time Buckner came back to play, and I thought a Goddamned riot was gonna break out – but once the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004? Well, it’s a lot easier to forgive a loser once you’ve won, you know what I mean?
  
  And honestly, I think mummies have gotten short shrift because zombies and vampires might mean the end of the world, since they reproduce and spread. So with those monsters, you can get a nice apocalypse story going, but with mummies? It’s closer to a simple slasher flick. So it’s probably possible to put together a good mummy flick (or at least one that doesn’t force us to watch Brendan Fraser pretending he’s Indiana Jones), but it’s just too small in scale to make a good summer blockbuster.
  
  And that just made me think: if you look at it with the right kind of eyes, Friday The 13th: Part 2 might be the most violent and visceral mummy movie ever made…
  
  Reply