Let’s start with the big one then, eh? The one everyone — including the publisher — thought would be a good idea to spoil for themselves and everyone else going in (:sigh:)…
- BATMAN INCORPORATED #8.
This issue picks up right where the last one left off: with Damien Wayne suited up as Robin, Grayson and Gordon facing a mob of indoctrinated Leviathan, and Bruce trapped in a safe at the bottom of a pool atop Wayne Tower. If this scenario sounds familiar, it is… and Morrison played with the idea of Batman being trapped in a safe one too many times before last issue. See, Talia knows he’ll get out. Eventually. It’s just what he does. Her plan is to have him take enough to get out that he can’t stop what’s to transpire underneath him, in the corridors of his corporate headquarters. What does transpire is insane. I can’t believe — after all the time he’s spent molding him into such a likeable, cunning, loyal person — Morrison would have the gall to do this. The big moment is handled well, especially the art. This is some of the best art we’ve seen from Burnham on the title yet, at least those couple pages. It is brutal. It is colorful. It is shocking. But I have a sneaking suspicion Morrison is not done yet with that particular character. On top of the big moment, we’re getting imagery from all over M’s run from the past 7-ish years: the girl Ellie who Batman gave a job at Wayne Ent., the ouroboro symbol, the Dick/Damien double punch, Ninja Man-Bats, there’s even a bit of Black Glove. If you’re just interested in seeing the big moment though, and have not been following the run, please… just stick to Scott Snyder.
- AVENGERS #4-6
It’s a little hard to review these as a whole. In a way, each of these issues of Jonathan Hickman’s iteration of The Avengers are actually stand-alone tales; introductory type one-offs that detail the rise of some of his more obscure team members (with overarching threads weaving throughout). The first issue tells the wonderful, other-worldly story of Hyperion… a rather obscure character from Marvel’s back-catalog. This is apparently another version from another alternate Universe. Hickman has been quoted as saying this character is very important to the long, three-year plan he has for his run on the title. The second (#5) takes us back to Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men (ironically enough), which I actually just reread last month. Another big-scope, outer-space tale of an Iowa farm girl discovering sentient technology, putting it on, and becoming the first human member of an Imperial guard of an alien race. Another relative unknown from Marvel’s back issues that Hickman would apparently like to use in his run. Then we come to Tamera Devoux of number 6, a brand new character for Hickman’s story. We learn that Tamera was in a car crash and suffered amnesia, and lost her baby girl. The Universe herself has possessed her. When asked why, the Universe replies, “Because she is broken. Because she is dying. Just as I am.” The art on all three is handled by Adam Kubert, who I’m familiar with cause he opened Morrison’s Batman run back in 2006. He does wonderful work. But these covers are making me crave some Dustin Weaver Avengers stuff. Handled intelligently, as always from Hickman. And the end of 6 sees the “White Event” at hand. So things should pick back up here in 7.
- I’m giving an album AllMusic gave a fairly glowing review of recently. The album is called “Cover Art”; the debut from a new Jazz-based group of musicians called The NEXT Collective. What’s interesting — considering the amount of talent and experience that comes with the group — is that this is an album of covers. But it really does not feel that way, considering it is instrumental music: jams that go on without much structure beyond, “alright, just keep in the key Drake initially had…” It’s an interesting way to do a debut, and it’ll test your opinion on how artistic covers can or cannot be. If you didn’t know it, you’d think this is a collection of 10 original and very organic songs, recorded with very few takes. This is the cover:
- That blog I spoke of last week is now up and running (though the visuals may still change). The first piece is mine. Which means you’ll know my real name. Oooohhhh… I’m definitely trying to flex some creative muscles I haven’t used in some time; I’m sure it could be better. But it was a blast to get back into more creative writing. There’s definitely a thesis, I hope it’s as clear to everyone else as it is to me. Hopefully this will turn into a good little music blog for people to RSS and follow on Tumblr, cause it’s a great mixture of people writing for it.
“A pair of psychology professors have discovered that a hockey player’s month of birth influences how scouts and coaches judge his talent, and this subconscious selection bias often puts the wrong players on the roster. The study, published online in the journal PLOS ONE, found NHL teams have long underestimated the talent and potential of players born in the second half of the year and tend to overlook them in favor of relatively older players. That is exactly the opposite of what they ought to do, said James Deaner of Grand Valley State University. For any given spot in the draft, players born in the first three months of the year are more likely to be successful than those born in the second half of the same year. “If teams really wanted to win, they should have drafted more of the relatively younger players,” Deaner said.”
“But with The Dark Knight Returns being given the full conversion treatment, this criticism of the film can no longer be the result of compression failure. The problems of the film do not come from lack of loyalty to the source. Far from it – this movie shows us, once more, that overzealous reliance on the original work is not necessarily a boon. A lot of what made The Dark Knight Returns such a good comics was, well, comics-related stuff. The movie tries to re-use some of these elements which remain inert in a medium not suited for them – there are long parts in the novel in which Batman’s actions are interjected with a point/counterpoint-style TV show, Miller and Johnson’s art scatter these discussions (along with dozens of other occurrences) all over the page, they become a representation of fragmented culture (as opposed to the more unified and direct media age that gave birth to Batman and his ilk) and watching them, we realize that Batman no longer operates in a world he was not meant to inhabit (and why the story must end the way it does).”
This is what a lot of people fail to comprehend: there are certain storytelling tropes that are completely unique to sequential art. These tropes may very well explain why (some) comics have turned out to be about the things they’re about; these tropes lend themselves very well to certain high-concepts, visual action, and narrative succession. No matter how faithfully you adapt a comic to a film, or television show, or web series… it still will never be the same thing as reading the comic. Because sequential art — though it’s been around since the Dawn of Man — is one of the most unique storytelling mediums we have, for many reasons I won’t get into here.
“A privately-owned unmanned US space capsule arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, bringing to the space outpost food, scientific materials and other crucial equipment.
The capsule named Dragon was captured—with the help of a robotic arm – by NASA Expedition 34 Commander Kevin Ford and Flight Engineer Tom Marshburn, 5:31 am EST (1031 GMT), when the ISS was over northern Ukraine, US space officials said. The craft, owned by SpaceX corporation, will now be inspected via cameras, brought to the Earth-facing port of the ISS’s Harmony module and bolted into place by commands from mission control.“
- I have a shitload of comics to read. I AM EXCITE. I’ll have reviews up here this week. Also I hate how nobody gave a fuck about Morrison’s Batman for the past year until a major character got whacked, and now advanced orders for the next issue are selling out.
“Present Shock is a big concept with profound implications for culture, politics and business. A simple visualization (borrowed from Adrian Bejan’s theories of flow systems) is to think of time as a river flowing at a certain pace. Below a certain threshold, the movements of things on the river are fairly linear and predictable. You launch a barge in the river here and three days later you have drifted to there. This is historical progress as we have come to know it over the millennia But when the speed of the flow increases beyond that threshold, the river becomes turbulent, non-linear, unpredictable. Such is the state of time in 2012.
What does this mean? Rushkoff breaks up “presentism” into five symptoms or challenges and matches each with constructive solutions for pressing the pause button. The “aha-moment-per-page ratio in Present Shock is high. Once you identify these concepts for yourself, you will start to see them everywhere.”
“This may sound incredible, but in recent years, research on using signals from the brain to operate machines has taken great strides. Scientists have developed brain-machine interfaces that allow paralyzed humans to move a computer cursor or even use a robotic arm to pick up a piece of chocolate or touch a loved one for the first time in years. Nicolelis has set his sights even higher: He wants to get paralyzed people up and walking around. If he succeeds it could be a tremendous advance. Right now he’s still developing this technology in monkeys. There’s a long way to go.
But Nicolelis was brimming with confidence in January when I visited his lab at Duke University to see how his work is progressing. “We’re getting close to making wheelchairs obsolete,” he said.“
- I’m going to be working on music all day today. In fact, I’ll probably hop to it after writing this. I’m staring at three pages from my creativity book — one ripped out — trying to discover the natural succession of songs as they should unfold in relation to what the album is about. What it means to me. This is easily my most personal album I’ve ever done, as it vaguely (it doesn’t beat you over the head or anything) tells the story of the hardest years of my life. So far. But in a meta-way, this time… this experience, is kind of what birthed the idea and the sounds that would become my current musical persona to begin with. It likely wouldn’t exist in this way without this experience. So it’s all a little bizarre. About halfway through I’m remixing the very first track I did officially under the pseudo-name, in an effort to recreate the frustration of what was happening boiling over and me finally going down to the basement and making this droning, Electronic beat. So… I’m excited.
That’s Doldrums new album, “Lesser Evil”, released yesterday on Arbutus Records. Canadian (Toronto) -based Electronic music that isn’t trying to make you dance (though you probably could), but that doesn’t get weird for the sake of it. There’s a hint of that new wave of Canadian electronics in here, the sounds we heard from Purity Ring and Grimes in 2012; those textures are supplemented with the more analog sounds of a group like, say, Black Moth Super Rainbow. The vocals are surprisingly un-effected out (generally speaking), and there are nods of good old-fashioned storytelling inside some of these songs; but it is not afraid to use a voice as a pure and simple instrument in and of itself as well. On top of that you’ve got these rhythmic, hypnotic back-beats that have clearly been recorded live, with a kit, in a large room with padded walls. Definitely worth checking out.
- I really hope Warren Ellis will be getting some amount of dough from Iron Man 3, if the movie is directly lifting his nanotechnology, biological modification, Extremis from his run on the character.
Speaking of Uncle Warren, he’s apparently been inspired by newspaper comic strips, and has been releasing single panel comics on his website of late… as part of a world he calls “Scatterlands”. Here’s the latest:
- Artists Ryan Ottley and James Harren have a Tumblr where they release non-comic pieces of art they’ve been conjuring up. There seems to be themes, too. Like the other week they called ‘Shadow Week’. The site is called “THEBOG“. James just posted this, as winter is not over yet:
- More comic stores are refusing to sellOrson Scott Card’s new Superman book on account of his straight-forward, clear stance on gay rights and indeed lesbians, gays, and bisexuals as people too. I love that Mark Millar came out and said something to the tune of, “that’s the thing about free speech, it isn’t always something you’re going to agree with. But that doesn’t mean you ban someone, you threaten their livelihood.” Actually Mark, that’s the thing about Free Speech, you can sell or not sell whatever products you choose as dependent upon however you feel about said products, production methods, or producers themselves. And while we’re at it, work on your dialogue please.
- Very interesting perspective here. Former ‘sex worker’, now journalist on what feminists get wrong when it comes to prostitution (from Guernica): WAGING WAR ON SEX WORKERS.
“I’ve been free in my writing to have that opinion. I’ve never been constrained by journalism in a formal way in which I have to hear both sides. I don’t even know who “both sides” would be on this issue. No, I’m not going to have a debate with you about how you feel about sex work. It has no impact on what happens tonight with the police in the streets. Our feelings alone don’t change what happens with the police, what happens in jail, what happens when someone tries to go to the welfare office, the unemployment office, or any kind of state agency where a criminal record comes up for prostitution. How we feel about the commodification of sexuality and violence doesn’t actually translate to those people’s lives. A lot of the debate is really academic and a waste of time.”
- The latest Watch Dogs video looks unbelievable. Too bad this is a PS4 game, cause I’ll probably wait to buy one of those ’til they go down in price. I still haven’t finished even 50% of Skyrim, and have Dishonored to get into. A new Playstation will guarantee one thing though, super outrageously cheap games on eBay and Craig’s List for the last system. Anyways, here’s that video:
- That Sioux Falls group Phantom Balance — I discussed them a couple posts ago — is releasing a new album called “Loser” tomorrow I believe. I’ll stream it here either tomorrow or later in the week.
- New How To Destory Angels (Trent Reznor’s latest band; his wife is the singer, and Atticus Ross co-producers/performs) is streaming. The new album is called “Welcome Oblivion” and will be released March 5th. 13 tracks at 65 minutes. On Columbia Records. Wikipedia’s labeling it as “post-industrial” and “electronica”.
- To get personal shit out of the way (even though I know very few people who may be reading this care; and those who are probably have been linked here by google searching “george tooker”): That job I interviewed for last week? I got it! I’m getting closer and closer to a final product with this album I’m working on. It should be pretty neat. My wife is pregnant, so soon I’ll be able to share all this art and music and information with a mini-me. Also, my life will obviously get insane… so, I may have to shut this thing down. Okay, enough of that.
- Some of my buds from across the pond, specifically Daniel the curator, will be starting a music blog very soon that I’ll occasionally be writing on. I’ll definitely be linking to it once it’s up and running, I think he’s shooting for a Tumblr-based site.
- New Game of Thrones trailer:
- Jonathan Hickman has been teasing a new creator owned project that comes out sometime in March with Image Comics. This is the latest teaser:
- I saw Beasts of Southern Wild last night and I really, really enjoyed it. Surreal, haunting, powerful, peaceful, humanistic, with a very something-bigger-than-you vibe to boot. The occasional glimpse at the extinct ancient beast “Aurochs“, who have risen from their frozen states, melted out of the ice caps, is perhaps the best visual metaphor in film this year. The acting is top-notch with the occasional good. The directing and cinematography are beautiful, from the fireworks celebration early on to the parting shot of the characters strolling carelessly as the power of the rising ocean bears down on them. There needs to be more movies like this.
- I don’t why — considering I’m a Minnesotan — I just recently heard of the Sioux Falls group Phantom Balance. Good Lord, they’ll tear your face off. This is the kind of thing that can only be conjured up in the midst of frozen lakes, crops, and wind chills of negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit:
- So I’m a regular reader of comics. At any given time I’ve got anywhere from 5-10 books on my pull list at the shop. But for some reason I have never read any Avengers stuff (I don’t read too much superhero stuff besides some classics and/or products of great writers). I was simultaneously trepidations and excited to jump into the deep end when I heard Jonathan Hickman (a writer who’s creator-owned work I follow) would be writing not one, but two, Avengers books. And though I firmly stand on the side of the “New Avengers/Illuminati”, I did catch up on the regular “Avengers” title last night. I read a lot of slightly negative things about the 2nd and 3rd issues of the book, which I don’t really understand because the quality is almost exactly the same as the first. But a lot of readers of comics — and your fanboys who don’t read comics — don’t have the best taste. Anyways I’m hoping these “Creators”, these spectacularly complex and borderline sympathetic villains, are revisited later on during Hickman’s run… perhaps reigniting the evolution of Mars and thus far surpassing Earth?
- An article on Wired is garnering quite a bit of views: Inside The Battle of Hoth. It basically takes a satirically serious look at the strategies employed by both the Empire and the Rebellion during the big first set-piece of Empire. But after reading this article, you’ll realize how inept and incoherent a military strategy the Empire employed in their best chance at wiping out 90% of the Rebellion with one stroke.
- NPR wrote a piece just in time for “Dilla Day”, about the legacy of the late James Yancey.
Why J Dilla May Be Jazz’s Latest Great Innovator.
“Dilla’s reach stretches way beyond hip-hop: For one, he’s recently cast a long shadow over contemporary jazz. He never belonged to jazz’s inner circle, but since his death in 2006 from a rare blood disease, his legacy has helped pull the genre back into kissing contact with modern popular music.
The jazz world today finds itself swamped with young talent eager for reinvestment in the discourse of contemporary culture. The shift has roots that run in a lot of directions. It’s a reaction to the neo-traditional revivalism that capped the last century, and to jazz’s withered commercial infrastructure in the wake of the 1990s CD bubble. Add to that the simple fact that millennial jazz musicians grew up listening mostly to hip-hop, R&B and rock.”
- Women In Video Games (Damsels In Distress…), put in similar situations over and over andoverandoveroverover.
- Relatedly, The Hawkeye Initiative is pretty brilliant in calling out mainstream superhero shit for their years and years of blatant misogyny and sexism.
“It started with an interesting disease, I guess. I started writing it in film school, which means I took eight years to write it, on and off. I was sick with the flu, and I had this fever dream. I was obsessing over the physical nature of my illness, and how I had something in my body that had come from someone else’s body, and how that was a weirdly intimate thing, if you think about it that way.
So afterwards, I was trying to think about a character who might see disease as an intimate thing. I thought a celebrity-obsessed fan might reasonably want Angelina Jolie’s cold as a way of feeling physically connected to her in some way. And then it developed into a metaphor, which I thought was an interesting way of discussing that culture.”
- Seriously, Lars von Trier’s newest film is called “Nymphomaniac“? I swear, that guy just lives to push people’s buttons. Which is awesome. I still haven’t seen “Antichrist”… and to be honest I’m a little frightened by the disturbing imagery within. I mean, I’m sure I wouldn’t be fainting or anything like that (as has been reported); but I’m not so sure about my psychological tolerance for self-mutilation of the worst kind. I did however really, really like “Melancholia”, part two of his “Depression Trilogy” (“Antichrist” being part one). Maybe I’ll give this new one a watch at some point.
- Robin Hanson over at Overcoming Bias posted an excellent little piece about why certain movies do better than others, the relationship between consuming fiction and our lives, and the status of known achievement:
“There’s an apt old curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Which highlights the fact that while we like stories with drama, we don’t actually want drama in our lives. If you ignore the very end, and the fact that the characters are very high status artists, Amour is quite realistic and by far the drama most likely to actually be experienced by many of you. Which is why most folks don’t like it, because they don’t actually want to see realistic ordinary drama.
Amour is about a women who gets sick and then dies. I was stuck by the fact that what most bothered her and her husband were the insults to her pride. They could mostly handle the pain, the drudgery, and the loss of opportunity. But the loss of status, oh that stung.“
Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staple’s space opera/love story has been consistently good since it’s debut last Spring on Image Comics. And it isn’t just me saying this: all over the net and in stores across the country people who have been entrenched in comics their entire lives are saying the same thing. What makes it so good? It delivers on everything only comics can do (unique, high-concept, bizarre), whilst also delivering everything a good novel or film does (beautiful, hopeful, funny, witty, with healthy helpings of heart). In this issue a character who has been mentioned before makes her proper debut appearance and definitely throws another piece into the puzzle, as she is someone with a personal connection to the new family that everyone is after. Upon second reading I’m seeing some parallels between this new, pseudo family in the corridors of The Will’s ship and the title family. And I’m starting to feel like I know Gwendolyn and Will as well as I do the main characters. Both are written and drawn with care, and definitely not painted as “bad guys”. They are real people, each with something that’s driving their hearts and actions. Staples draws brilliant expressions and gestures. She’s one of those artists that is neither highly stylized or highly detailed, just spot on. Whether it’s action or subtle conversation she’ll get the proportions and angles perfect. And Vaughan is of course a wonderful craftsman of character. Everything in this book breathes. Anyone who’s into comics even just a little owes it to themselves to at least give SAGA a try.
- NEW AVENGERS #2
While the lineup of Jonathan Hickman’s other — more popular — Avengers book just continues to expand, New Avengers is taking the opposite path, focusing solely on a very select few of the best minds of the Marvel Universe to tackle massive, mind-bending problems that have no easy solution. What’s happening in the pages of this book (only 2 issues in, mind you) is the reuniting of the think-tank type organization known as ‘The Illuminati‘: Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Namor, Black Bolt, Dr. Strange, a dead Charles Xavier, and Black Panther. The first issue saw a mysterious and other-worldly figure show up in Wakanda (Black Panther’s home country in Africa), to announce the destruction of Earth a result of a collision with another planet looming in the sky. What’s going on here is somewhat explained in the pages of this issue, though not entirely because even this team of geniuses does not understand this fully. Hickman uses his design skills (if he isn’t making money off of side graphics design gigs he should be) to present the high concept through the eyes of Reed. It’s heavy stuff, but the chart (for lack of a better word) Reed uses spells it out plainly. The team makes a decision to — if it comes to this — destroy another planet to save their own, at the behest of some of the more honorable and/or idealistic characters like Cap and Black Panther. It’s an interesting moral dilemma, and I’d like to see more of this type of conversation from this book. So far and for the immediate future it’s drawn by Steve Epting who does amazing work all the time. I still remember the days of Warren Ellis’ Thunderbolts and just being blown away by Epting’s work. I typically don’t read big superhero stuff like this, but I am very excited to see where this goes.
- THE MASSIVE #8
The Massive is easily the most plausible and realistic of these three books I’m writing about today, and I can’t stress enough how smart it is in the context of the World we live in now. When baby-boomers tell me that they haven’t seen such uneasiness and unrest in the world in their lifetimes (including the 60s) that they’re seeing now, I know that there’s something special going on with the human race. It isn’t good or bad, it’s beyond those terms. It’s beyond all previous applications of what we thought we knew. Transitional phase. The Massive takes these gigantic problems we face and cranks them forwards until they’ve snapped, and now the world is on full-on reset mode. Culturally, geographically, morally. And the organization known as “Ninth Wave” — who had in 2004 blockaded a gulf with their sister ships to protest one of the big energy companies, to give you an idea of what they do — is struggling to find their place in the new world that has emerged from the rubble of the old one. The current arc, this is part 2 of 3, sees the crew stumbling upon an abandoned oil rig in the middle of the Indian Ocean, where an ex-terrorist has supposedly found a new purpose and creating a thriving community on the decks of said rig. While they’re anchored a storm hits, and the entire rig gets put on lockdown. In this issue we really get to see new sides of the crew of Ninth Wave, beyond its leader Cal and his right hand (trigger) man Mag. Each of them have their own ideas of what their purpose is in a post-Crash society, and that is highlighted here. It’s looking as if this arc will usher in a change in the organization, for good or bad.
