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.
- One of the shitty side-effects of war (of many) — and one that people forget about — is the dangers of large scale violence and ideological struggles on the cultural legacy of wherever it’s happening. As the Taliban took hold of Afghanistan we saw this with the ancient Buddha statues which rest in the region. What’s more is those statues were different than others: they seem to suggest some sort of ancient offshoot of Buddhism. Well now we’re seeing the same thing in war torn Mali. The fleeing militants torched the Ahmed Baba Institute, where some “30,000 priceless items of scholarship dating back to the 13th century” are… were, kept. These priceless items are a part of the “Timbuktu Manuscripts”, which were for a long time housed by private citizens of Mali whose families dated back thousands of years. The manuscripts delve into things like Math, Art, Astronomy, Arithmetic, Calligraphy, Science, Medicine, etc.
Here’s a good article on the fate of Manuscripts. It delves into the burning of Ahmed Baba, the hiding of some volumes by locals, and attempts by South African scholars to secure others.
- An article discussing what may happen to comic books should the government employ censorship to them. The article goes on to talk about the 1954 “psychology” book Seduction of the Innocent, a travesty of human creation that delves into — in the book’s words — “the influence on comic books on today’s youth.” The release of the book and subsequent hearings in the Senate ended in sweeping censorship across the spectrum of the art form and a decline for the business economically (until the Stan Lee/Steve Ditko era began). Here’s to hoping Mr. Biden and whoever he’s talking to about gun violence don’t touch comics.
- The idea that the military enlists (generally) the poor, uneducated, or generally lost to their ranks is nothing new. A recent article at Slate talks about a fee one could pay to essentially wave enlistment to the Civil War. “Such famous Americans,” notes the article, “as Grover Cleveland and John D. Rockefeller took advantage of [the] provision.” The substitute fee was $300, or about 5 grand in today’s terms.
- Also on Slate: Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Aaron Swartz. Swartz was something of an internet pioneer, with credits including work on RSS, Markdown, Reddit, and even Creative Commons.
“Hanging over his death is, of course, his persecution at the hands of U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz. People commit suicide because they suffer from depression, which he did, not because they’re being railroaded by the U.S. Attorney, which he was. His crime was breaking into a random closet at MIT and mass downloading academic journal articles from JSTOR. Obviously if you get caught trespassing, you’re going to face some legal consequences. But not a federal case with talk of million dollar penalties and decades-long jail sentences.”
Another excellent article, sort of a sequel to that last one, is THIS ONE. It discusses whether or not Swartz’ death will make the open-access market more mainstream. Wikipedia calls open access “the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewedscholarly journal articles. OA is also increasingly being provided to theses, scholarly monographs and book chapters.”
- Hope you had a good first holiday. I will be in Chicago for New Year’s Eve, so this will likely be my last post until next week. 2013, damn I’m getting old.
- Wow… so it turns out Quentin Tarentino has similar taste to me! That makes me feel warm and fuzzy. Okay, I openly admit to not knowing who, much less seeing any of his flicks, William Witney is. Apparently he was a director who also worked at Republic Pictures with John Ford, and QT has quite an affinity for the guy. I watched Stagecoach in a film class once. And although I can respect certain scenes for plowing the way for action flicks (particularly the open range chase scene), I really found the entire thing lacking when sandwiched between movies like M or Rules of the Game. Not to be a dick or a snob about it or anything, but like it’s just an action movie from 1939. A damn good action, but still. Nothing more, nothing less. So I’ve always sort of thought John Ford wasn’t as greats as THE greats. Even Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance… they’re just sorta boring.
I thought I was on my own… the “John Ford is just an early version of Gore Verbinski” theory. In a recent interview Tarentino talked about American Western movies (as Django Unchained is modeled off of non-American Westerns, particularly Spaghettis) for TheRoot. In it he talks about how Whitney is one of his American Western heroes, and how John Ford is a racist pile of shit. And here I thought I was the only one, silly me.
- Speaking of The Root, they’ve got an impartial and practical article up right now in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings, and the media’s coverage of the event and what to do about it. Mental health in schools being the major focus.
- I’m loving the Saga #8 cover. It speaks volumes about the character. Saga is easily one of the best new comics of the last few years. Out of all the comics I read — a large variety — Saga is one of the books I consistently look forward to.
“For many years, I have been writing and following resistance movements and the new economic policy. I’ve always found that the chances of coming upon despair are much greater in middle-class households, than on the ground where people are actually fighting. Middle-class people have the choice between hope and despair, just like they have the choice between shampoo for dry hair and oily hair; they have the choice between doing politics and interior design. People who are fighting don’t have a choice; they are fighting and they are focused and they know what they are doing. They are arguing with each other a lot, of course, but that’s all right.”
- I feel really bad for bands/musicians that put out records in December: chances are they’ll be left off any year end “Best Of” lists simply for when their record was released. And, as we know, this is not always their choice. It really is getting absurd how quickly everyone releases their year end lists. It’s like December 1st hits, and all of a sudden it’s legit. Have at it. When really, if you think about a “Best of the Year” list, they shouldn’t even really be coming out until January of the following year.
“One of the great challenges we face as a nation is how we preserve the realm of privacy from government intrusion in the modern age, when so much of what we do in private is recorded by virtue of the phones we carry, the emails we send, the credit card transactions we engage in, the computers we use. How do you preserve this value that is absolutely critical to a liberal democracy when technology has made it easier and cheaper for the government to monitor our every move?“
- Hurricane Sandy as the Fibonacci Spiral/Sequence:
- I wonder how close this is to the character from 2001…? Someone has decided to make a HAL9000 robot for purchase and — I’m assuming — mounting on your wall somewhere? You can preorder it for $500 right now. LINK.
- Then we got some what looks to be hockey jersey’s that are really fucking nerdy and awesome at GeekJerseys.com. This Link jersey is really, really fucking awesome:
DNA sequencing of 36 complete Y chromosomes has uncovered a previously unknown period when the human population expanded rapidly. This population explosion occurred 40 to 50 thousand years ago, between the first expansion of modern humans out of Africa 60 to 70 thousand years ago and the Neolithic expansions of people in several parts of the world starting 10 thousand years ago.
- Warren Ellis FAQ featuring some interesting writing questions. Such as:
I was wondering if you had any advice regarding making ideas more important. I have pages of different events + characters that I can only develop so far because, after a time, all I can add to them are “WHO CARES?” and “WHY DOES THIS MATTER?” (I’m talking about events characters will go through. “Statues come to life all around Greece” is immediately followed by “WHO GIVES A FUCK?”) Does this ever happen to you? Thank you very much for your time, and sorry if you’ve answered a similar question!Ungh. This is a really tough one. There are two ways, maybe, to attack this.
1) One way of doing it, and this works okay for standard dramatic storytelling, is this: what do your characters WANT? The secondary questions are, what stops them from getting what they want, and how far are they prepared to go to get what they want? But start with the simple first question. What your character wants defines how we perceive and feel about them in the story. Find one thing they want, and see how that feels to you.
2) From a certain view, stories are two things. There’s what the story’s about, and what the story’s REALLY about. Wells’ WAR OF THE WORLDS is about a Martian invasion of Earth. But it’s REALLY about something else entirely. There’s a subtext: there’s the thing Wells wrote the story toactually talk about. What you may be encountering is having a story that’s all surface, or a story with a subtext that isn’t working out for you. Find out what you really want to say with your fiction. If it matters to YOU, it’ll matter to other people.
“The key is you don’t want to copy the blues; you want to capture the mood. On III, we knew we wanted to allude to the country blues but, in the tradition of the style, we felt it had to be spontaneous and immediate. I had this old Vox amp, and one day Robert plugged his mike into the amp’s tremolo channel, and I started playing and he started singing. And what you hear on the album is essentially an edit of our first two takes. The band had an incredible empathy that allowed us to do things like that.
But that gets back to what you were saying before: You can’t overthink this music. Mood and intensity can’t be manufactured. The blues isn’t about structure; it’s what you bring to it. The spontaneity of capturing a specific moment is what drives it.”
- The new POS is streaming in it’s entirety at NPR. I do have some initial reactions about it, but I’d rather just wait to write a proper review after multiple listens.
“To wander Manhattan is to step into the modern fulfillment of an earlier age. The hurtling traffic, the stylish storefronts and bars, the pyramids of cupcakes, the lantern light of iPhones—it may all seem dreadfully contemporary, but its antiquity lies in the time of steam. “New York is a product of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution,” Lewis Lapham observed in the fall 2010 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, “built on a standardized grid, conceived neither as a thing of beauty nor as an image of the cosmos, much less as an expression of man’s humanity to man, but as a shopping mall in which to perform the heroic feats of acquisition and consumption.””
- We’ve Just Found The Nearest Exo-Planet… it’s revolving in the Alpha-Centuri galaxy. Unfortunately it is still 4 light years away. So… impossible to get to.
- This Munich subway looks like something out of a realist science fiction flick:
- I’m tuning into the War Rocket Ajax podcast at Comics Alliance right now, mostly because it features an interview with Jonathan Hickman, who I’m a fan of. He might even turn me into an Avengers reader, a feat previously thought impossible. But when I tuned in I was pleased to hear them talking about El-P and Killer Mike, and apparently they talk about hip-hop alot on their podcast (and BBQ). Then they pointed towards a Comic-Con called ColaCon, which blends comics and hip-hop. Fucking awesome. This year Ghostface and Phife (from Tribe Called Quest) are playing. I may have to become a regular listener.
The Nova Convention, three days and nights of readings, panel discussions, film showings and various sorts of performances that sought to grapple with some of the implications of the writing of William S. Burroughs, concluded Saturday night with a program at the Entermedia theater. Actually, the convention was not entirely over; there was a midnight rock concert featuring Robert Fripp, Blondie, and other rock performers. But it was over for Mr. Burroughs and his inner circle, who all went immediately to a private party.
The convention drew an interesting cross-section of people, and one suspected that only Mr. Burroughs could have brought them together. There were more or less conventional poets, novelists, performing artists, composers as diverse as John Cage and Philip Glass, rock musicians, serious students of American literature, street types and others.
All or almost all of them had been touched in some way by Mr. Burroughs’s varied body of work, which includes straight hard-boiled prose fiction, autobiography, nonrepresentational writing using the cut-up technique invented by Brion Gysin, science fiction of a sort, barbed satire, accounts of drug experiences and attitudinal or political pronouncements.
And here’s some audio from the convention as well:
This may not be “Exhibit A” of why DC’s rebranding strategy blows, though it is certainly C or D. I’m not begrudging them for what they’re trying to do with all this “New 52 Issue Zero” stuff, and I honestly think it will lead to their intended goal: attracting and keeping new readers. But in the words of many o’ Conservatives, the strategy will and does have a slew of “unintended consequences”. One is bothering people like me, who read very few mainstream DC books (umm… ONE); whether it crossed their minds or not, they’re risking the loyalty of their current readership to fish for new readership. Does the risk outweigh the consequences? But forget about numbers and market shares and all that shit and think about comics artistically for a minute. Is it good for a comic artistically to disrupt the flow of a story arc by shoving in an introductory single issue into the mix? What does it do for the comic? What does it take away? With a Grant Morrison book (especially this one), this takes away more than it gives. To be honest, it gives very little. What we see here are tropes, scenes, and iconic imagery from the entirety of Grant Morrison’s Batman opus: the Island of Doctor Mayhew, the bell and the open window, the funding from Wayne Enterprises, the recruiting. None of this is necessary. Part of the fun of getting into a Morrison comic is the wanting… the craving, to go back and re-read older issues. When you do this on your own, it’s rewarding. When someone points out all this stuff to you to get people to read what you’ve been reading for some 7, 8 years, it’s insulting. Granted, Morrison and the art team of Burnham/Irving do an admirable job with the task given. But no new revelations plus a hand-holding journey through the past just equals tediousness in the end, I’m afraid. Skip this, return with #4 (which really is #12 considering they already started into “#1″ earlier this year and not counting this #0 which isn’t really part of the run and…. see how confusing this shit is?) which promises to plow the story forward.
- Manhattan Projects #6
The title of this issue — “Star City” — refers to a sprawling metropolis of the former Soviet Union, the scientific and ideas mecca of the State. We have yet to cover any sort of Soviet ground beyond a vague propagandist notion of who they are and what they want via the Manhattan Projects leering eyes. Misunderstood by the Americans, perhaps… but they are not the good guys. This is made clear (though I find it interesting that they implore the Aldo Raine style of permanent Nazi branding; instead of a knife they opt for a cattle prod). The irony of Communist nations of the past is on full display here: even the greatest mind(s) of the State are subject to Big Brother compensation. Such is the case with Helmutt Grottrup. Grottrup, like many of the physicists and inventors in the book, was a real person. German, he worked for the Nazi’s during The War, developing the V-2 alongside Wernher von Braun (also a character in the book). After the War ended, he opted to work for the Soviets. He thought, mistakenly, that he would be his own master in The Union. That he would not be anyone’s underling, a less than desirable experience under von Braun. But things didn’t change. In the Soviet Union he worked under a man named Sergei Korolev, not so far a character. Korolev in the book might be replaced with a certain Dmitiry Ustinov. Ustinov was the Union’s Minister of Defense for years during the Cold War. Except in the book he’s represented as a brain in a jar with a large robotic body. Anyways, most of this issue involves Ustinov and Braun shoving Grottrup in corners to work and question nothing. Then there’s quite a twist at the end. I love how this book is simultaneously batshit crazy yet steeped in reality, and real people and projects.
- The Massive #4
At some point this comic will dip in quality. The interest it extracts from the reader will level off. And it will still be good, but not this good. Luckily, this peak still feels very far off on the horizon. That is because this world that Brian Wood has crafted with THE MASSIVE is so vibrant and alive the nooks and crannies to explore are next to endless. We’re still learning about “The Crash”; the series of cataclysmic natural disasters which led to a series of cataclysmic sociopolitical disasters. But forget all that for a moment. We also don’t know much about The Kapital or The Massive… the two ships of the (supposedly) pacifist conservatory non-profit Ninth Wave, or their crews. Not to mention Ninth Wave itself. Wood throws in a little taste this issue of the history of the organization and that of the main character, Callum Israel. Ninth Wave had apparently gotten itself on the shitlist of many governments when they used The Massive (the larger of their ships) to blockade oil tankers from exporting out of the Middle East. When 9/11 happened, their name was brought up vaguely, but not outright named. Ninth Wave went off grid. The organization stayed largely silent during a large chunk of the first decade of Century 21. All charges were dropped and their reputation was cleared though. So they resurfaced prior to The Crash. And now, in a post-Crash world their conservationist mission continues; as they see it as important as ever before. A post-Crash World where, as is shown in this issue, the rules and ethics of society have been swept aside. Callum knows this, and admirably (even with a gun pointed in his face in this issue) he sticks to his vow of non-violence. But he wasn’t always that way. We also get a good helping of Callum’s life pre-Crash. Very, very interesting. We learn of his history with a private military contractor (something all too familiar since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan). A glimpse at his former partner then and now reminds us that even with post/pre Crash Worlds, very different Worlds, some people never change. They only amplify. The biggest part of this issue that moves the story along is Cal getting supplies from a shady character, to say the least. The rest is backstory. But the backstory is so damn interesting, I’ll take issues like this all day long. This has got to be one of the best books on the stands right now.
- Nazi Buddha ‘Came From Outer Space’. Which isn’t the official title I guess; it’s just the one to get you to click on the link. It works. Turns out this ancient Buddha statue, discovered in the 1930′s via a Nazi organized archeological dig, was carved some 1000 years ago out of a meteorite that crashed to the Earth’s surface some 15,000 years ago. This has Indiana Jones written all over it.
Also from the BBC:
- Hubble Telescope Captures One of the Most Extraordinary Views of Universe to Date. The image comes from a result of astronomers pointing the Hubble towards a very specific patch of sky for around 22 days. Letting in 500-ish hours of light to the scope. It captured around 5,500 separate galaxies, including the farthest it saw, UDFy-38135539. Just to give you an idea, that galaxy is over 13 BILLION light years away. Which is of course so mind-blowing it is almost incomprehensible…
- Hey I made a new remix! It got a little dark… yeeeaaaahhh sorry about that:
Just to give you an idea of how different it is, here’s the original:
- Mikey Mictlan of Doomtree has a new album out. And he’s offering it up for FREE (but give him a few bucks, eh):
