| New Comics! |
[Jun. 2nd, 2010|12:30 am] |
Hoo! Haven't been here in forever!
I'm still around however. You should check out my new comic On the Bounty. That I just started. Let's see if we can pass the three month bump!
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 10th, 2009|03:04 am] |
From Warren Ellis:
"Alan Moore once told me that, in conversation with Julie Schwartz, it has come up that Schwartz, who started out as a literary agent during the pulp years, had met HP Lovecraft. As Alan retells it, he couldn’t help but ask Schwartz what Lovecraft was like. And Schwartz said, “y’know, when I met him, I said to myself, I gotta remember what this guy’s like because in fifty fuckin’ years Alan Moore’s gonna ask me…” |
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| "Tear down the bearing wall/ Put up a picture window..." |
[Aug. 19th, 2009|04:41 pm] |
 Just under a decade after Nirvana snarled to life with Bleach, Harvey Danger's Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? came out of Seattle kicking and screaming to little fanfare. Too cool to be nerd-rock, to smart to be mainstream, history will undoubtably consign them to the one-hit-wonder pile for their "essential 90s" track "Flagpole Sitta" despite Merrymakers being as good or better than anything their fellow Seattleites ever produced.
Their first album is perfect from stem to stern. Most one-hit-wonders produce albums of padding around a single flash of genius, here their one hit doesn't even stand out against the equally magnificent "Carlotta Valdez" or the painfully bitter "Down at the Terminal Annex". Each song has a voice and a unique purpose, while never deviating from the band's own sound. It was described as "a rebellious kid kicking over trashcans in his neighbourhood." Their follow-up album King James Version is at worst just as good an offering.
Though lead by Sean Nelson's deceptively boyish vocals, the real voice of Harvey Danger is in Jeff Lin's raspy guitar underlining each lyric with the frustration and anger inherent in every song no matter how happy it seems to be.
Harvey Danger hit a nerve with their anger that stood out in a field of angry young men. This was an all encompassing rage. Anger at the world for not being more perfect. Anger at themselves for their failings. Angry at the postmodern world, tired of being ironic. They were the quintessential 90s band, and they hated the 90s.
Not the rebellious youth fighting society. A rebellious mind loathing the body it is confined within.
Though anger might be too strong a term. Not a humorous act by any means, the band managed to occupy that particular space usually reserved for jesters and stand-up comics; the single voice of reason laughing and sneering at the obvious folly that no one speaks, or is allowed to speak of. A fly in the ointment. The mustard on the wedding dress/ the weevil in the watercress.
We saw Harvey Danger at their last show in Brooklyn, at the Bell House on August 8th. They played the standard set, and concious of their audience for one of their final shows, took all the questions and requests they could. The audience was full of people who looked just like lead singer Sean, a group of like minded folks listening for their sound. They played for more than four hours straight. It was a great show, I'm proud to have seen it.
It was an amicable parting, so we could always hear more from the band in the future, not to mention their separate projects. For now they should be satisfied leaving behind an amazing body of work. For my part, I'm going to keep forcing everyone I know to buy Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? just to spread the word and keep it playing if nothing else.
Friends will turn against you
People disappoint you every time
So if you've got greatness in you
Would you do us all a favor
And keep it to yourself? Keep it,
Keep it to yourself.
[edit] Here's Sean's blog about the Bell House show in which he describes exactly how I felt about the concert, and says everything I wish I'd thought to say here. It's a great little club if you ever get a chance to see a show there.
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| Spread the Word |
[Apr. 16th, 2009|05:37 pm] |
If any of you are fans of the Turtles, help us spread the word!
The above banner is for issue 59 written by the inimitable Tristan Jones, and you should all go read everything he has done with the Turtles, like right now.
But what you should really really do is help Tales out by posting this banner in your blogs, as a sig, or where ever to help spread the word. On the superhero scale, the Ninja Turtles really rank up there with Spider-man and the X-Men in terms of recognizability and popularity, but though everyone knows them and their various spin-offs, not a lot of people read the comic where it all began. Join in the fight to change that now!
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| N.L. makes history with power sale through Quebec |
[Apr. 2nd, 2009|12:29 pm] |
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For the first time in more than four decades of often raucous relations, Newfoundland and Labrador made the deal with Quebec for what are called wheeling rights, in which power generated in Labrador passes through Quebec. Under the terms of a 1969 deal, power generated at the Upper Churchill site in Labrador is sold to Hydro-Quebec, which then can resell the power at significantly higher rates.
Is this deal as momentous as it seems? Upper Churchill is one of the main roadblocks still keeping Newfoundland from feeling at all part of Canada, and a major thorn in the side of our national identity as Newfoundlanders. Does this... fix that?
There totally wasn't enough pertinent info in this article. |
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| On media stars crossing into other media |
[Mar. 29th, 2009|07:32 pm] |
From Eddie Campbell:
I see that the author Ian Rankin was interviewed this week at Newsarama, on account of his new gig at Vertigo, writing a so-called 'graphic novel':"...a lot of people hated the film of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I loved it! I think I went and saw it three times! I liked the characters, and the idea of them as the first superhero fighting team. That’s just a great idea. As a creative writer, that just really appeals to me, genre-hopping and playing games with them.
I loved V for Vendetta as well. I thought it was very true to the source material, very faithful. I thought, “being Hollywood, they’ll make him take off the mask, we’ll get to see his face.” Nope. Loved From Hell also. I think I liked it better than the comic book, which is very hard to follow in parts." But we need not worry because he is actually really truly quite brainy. In figuring out how to write comic books, this is what he came up with:"What I did was I got a copy of a book called Understanding Comics and the others by Scott McCloud. And I thought they were really quite cerebral. It was like, “What happens in the space between the panels is almost as important as the panels themselves, because time has passed, and you’ve got to imagine what has happened between these two panels.” With any luck he'll fall through the space between the panels and we'll be spared.
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| Buy the book! |
[Mar. 15th, 2009|01:47 pm] |
PS: You should all go out and get Tales of the TMNT 56 by my buddy Tristan Jones and Paul Harmon, who's one of the best (non-mirage) Turtles artists out there.
You should especially get this if you were a fan of the new cartoon, as it introduces some "cartoon" characters into the "comic" universe. Sweet.
[edit] Also, you should go read this incredibly awkward and hateful letter from Watchmen screenwriter David Hayter first begging you to see his movie again this week so that it makes more money, then in a second letter, apologising that he just compared the experience of going to a movie and the movie itself to rape. Funny ol' world ain't it?
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| Canadian Movies |
[Mar. 11th, 2009|10:14 pm] |
Living in the US, every now and then folks ask me about what movies are like in Canada. From now on, I will direct them to this article.
A Canadian filmmaker who lost an eye in childhood as a result of a shooting accident is planning to make a documentary film using an electronic camera concealed inside a prosthetic eye...
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| Saw Watchmen, wot? |
[Mar. 9th, 2009|11:13 pm] |
Yeah, so Watchmen. Actually not that bad. We figured on the comic movie scale of 1-10, 10 being The Dark Knight or Akira (I guess... what else rates a ten?) and 1 being Faust: Love of the Damned, Watchmen probably rates a 7 or 8. It was fun. On the actual movie scale it's probably only about a 6-6.5, but still a pretty good achievement considering what COULD have been adapted out of Watchmen.
One thing that's still causing fits of rage for me is the reaction to Dr. Manhattan being naked. It was a good measure of the maturity level of our audience to see who started giggling whenever he showed up (thankfully only a couple). But people won't shut up about it now. It's there in the comic, it perfectly illustrates his divorce from humanity and our society, and it was really brave of them to put it in the movie.
Full frontal female nudity happens so frequently we're desensitized to it. Just a few years ago, a fully nude female rated a PG-13 or R, while a naked man meant an automatic X. But put a naked man in a movie and people twitter about it for weeks. Great.
PS: Whoa, twittering about something works as a double entendre now. Weird.
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