I promise.

Regularly scheduled content as soon as I turn  in the three papers due next Tuesday and Wednesday. Until then, enjoy this image and its prospects. 

Fancy

From the Kilby/Brunstetter “fancy” Holiday party. Apparently this is “dancing.” Honestly, this party came at the right time, I was on the verge of grad school burn out.

Comic of the week

Phonogram 2 #1: The Singles Club.

Golden Globe Nominations

Well, they’ve been released.   So, let’s get all nit picky. The Snark begins now: 

BEST MOTION PICTURE—DRAMA: So, was Revolutionary Road, that the Leo-Winslet reuniting movie? What was that even about? 

BEST MOTION PICTURE—COMEDY: Burn After Reading blew.  That was the worst ending in the history of film. Just lazy.  Mama Mia, whoever nominated that should get cancer of the eyes of the mouth and the feet. Easily in the top three poorly written things to ever see production, with music by Abba. I mean I guess its a good thing that Abba is still in circulation but they have to thank this musical for that, and that’s really a piss poor reason. But, yeah, the only people I know who still listen to Abba are from Cleveland, which should say something.  In the end, give it to In Bruges.

ACTOR—DRAMA: Fuck yeah, Mickey Rourke! 

SUPPORTING ACTOR: How, wait, why is Dustin Hoffman nominated for Best Actor in a Comedy and this category? Weird. But: Heath. Yeah.

SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Marisa Tomei. She’s a favorite in this house. 

DIRECTOR: I haven’t seen any of these movies, but I did see the Broadway production of Frost/Nixon. I’m going to say Danny Boyle.  And Ron Howard? Sorry, not much skill involved filming two guys talking. I’m sure there is more to it in that movie, but, sorry I’m going to be short-sighted.

SCREENPLAY : Peter Morgan-Frost/Nixon- done.  

So, Wall-E for best Animated, easily. Should be nominated for Best Movie too.  Miley Cyrus, Bruce Springsteen and Clint Eastwood nominated for music?! Wow, best music nominations ever, if you live in a trailer and have shingles.  Christ, I don’t understand what the big deal is with Bruce Springsteen. 

We’re baffled that Entourage gets nominated for anything anymore.  The show is just the same shit over and over again and it wasn’t that interesting to begin with. Samantha Who? No, seriously, Samantha Who? That show is still on? I thought it was canceled after two episodes. In the end, Mary Louise-Parker because no matter what the Emmys say: Tina Fey should not act.  And John Adams should sweep the categories its nominated for.

50 Things I like about comics.

Based on the Savage Critics post, that I found today while writing one of the three ten page papers I have to do for finals for grad school. I decided this would be a nice break. 

5 Creators That I Will Buy Anything From, Sight Unseen
1. Darwyn Cooke
2. Brian K. Vaughan
3. Grant Morrison
4. Ed Brubaker
5. Joss Whedon

5 Creators That I Would Probably Buy Anything From, But Would At Least Look At First
1. Brian Michael Bendis
2. Matt Fraction
3. Geoff Johns
4. Warren Ellis
5. Greg Rucka

5 Artists Who Continually Blow My Puny Little Mind
1. Paul Pope
2. Gabriel Ba
3. Seth Fisher
4. Andy MacDonald
5. Darwyn Cooke 

5 Pretty Much Perfect Comics, If You Ask Me
1. Seven Soldiers #1
2. Scalped #1
3. Criminal vol. 2 # 7
4. Casanova # 1
5. Starman # 10

5 Comics That Changed My Life, And Why
1. The Flash vol. 3 #1 - Six years old, the woman who would be the closest thing I had to a grand mother gave it to me and forever changed my life.
2. The Dark Knight Returns #1: A gift from my gay computer teacher sophomore year of high school, I finally realized what Batman was SUPPOSED to be clearing the Adam West fog.  
3. Daredevil [the Bendis run]: Showed me the ultimate potential in what can be done in a superhero story.  Easily the best run on a superhero book ever. 
4. Its a Bird…:  A true life story about the struggle of a writer, Steven T. Seagle, and trying to wrap his brain around his new assignment: Superman and how it connects to him personally. 
5. Impulse:  A series that at the time was so intensely personal to my life, in high school, that I forever became attached to the character.  

5 Comics I Collected The Entire Run Of
1. Tom Peyer’s Hourman
2. Sandman Mystery Theatre
3. Transmetropolitan
4. Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man
5. Impulse (first 40).

5 Characters That I Wish I Could Speak Like (growing up)
1. Bobby Drake (Iceman)
2. Peter Parker
3. Wally West
4. Yorick Brown 
5. Danny Rand.

5 Minor Characters I Love So Much That I Wish I Could Write Them (and, just because, what I would do with them)
1. The Daily Planet staff (See Gotham Central. Don’t even think about it anyone.)
2. Sandman (Wesley Dodds, what happened after Sandman Mystery Theatre #70, during WW II). 
3. Iceman (Just fucking love the character.)
4. Bart Allen (Bringing him back to life).
5. Ben Urich (cause I just dig the shit out journalist characters.)

5 Items That Only Exist In Comics That I Wish I Owned In Real Life
1. Green Lantern ring
2. TARDIS (okay, okay, I’m cheating).
3. The Flash ring.
4. Bowel Disruptor Gun (I feel like everyone puts this on a meme like this one).
5. Starman’s Cosmic Rod.

5 Random Other Things That I Love About Comics
1. The Comics Blogosphere. For all those stereotypes (comic book guy of the internet by the millions), and for the sheer fact that we can get paid to write about something we all love.  How utterly ridiculous and wonderful. 

2.  These quotes on books from legitimate literary critics and journals. A sign that people are starting to take comics seriously.

3.  Grant Morrison, for just being able to throw a curve that no one has ever seen before and still manage to get whatever he wants out of a story.

4. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, just for the balls of making a super team out of literary characters.  
 

5. 52.  Just for existing.

Notes for the week of Dec. 4, 2008.

I don’t know why the fuck I’m wide awake at 7am on a Thursday, but I haven’t been sleeping all that well this week because of the god damn crushing amount of grad school work I have to do.  I have three papers due on the 16th and one final next week, plus a page reaction on Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.  So, I guess its more accurate for me to say: I don’t know why the fuck I’m blogging right now when I should be putting a dent in those things.  Ah, build up to it I guess. 

• [TV]: So, Fringe is filming at Brooklyn College on Friday. I was going to go and I’m  on the list of extras, but considering the shit I just complained about above, and the fact that my iBook is going senile, I’m not.
• [Comics]: Comic Foundry is done after the next issue.  It seems like most of the blogosphere is crying out in agony over this fact.  Considering, this was probably the one publication for those of us who like the independent comics as well as the super hero comics with excellent writing literally cover to cover, we have reason to be upset. Plus, as an alternative to the very much so irrelevant Wizard line of publications, its just sad that there will be one less publication continuing to make that irrelevancy evident. Though there is one dissident, James Sime proprietor of the fine Isotope Comics shop in San Francisco, who didn’t care for the magazine.   I don’t know, I thought the covers were excellent modern NY magazine style, which is exactly what that magazine is, its a New York publication and considering Tim works in magazine art production here, it makes perfect sense to me that the magazine would and should look like that.  Though, of course, James is a guy who wears Electric Blue alligator suits and whether that’s awesome or taste-deficient is entirely up to your own perspective. So, yeah…I’ll just shut my mouth about that.
• [Comics, Part II]:  I hear nothing but awful things about X-Men: Noir.  I’m still going to get it because I think the story sounds neat but when I hear Greg Land referenced in a lot of the reviews it makes me cringe.
• [Holiday reading]: I went to the Graphic Novel reading at KGB Bar on Sunday night, and was wonderfully entertained by Kevin Colden, and Matt Thruber, but I really went to see Jonathan Ames.  I’ve heard a couple of Moth podcasts of his storytelling, and thought he was hilarious. Having read The Alcoholic, and thought that was okay, I enjoyed his performance and afterwards, I walked to the Strand bookstore and picked up his book Wake Up, Sir! and Duane’s The Wheelman. For a grand total of six bucks, I love that store. So I think combining these two books with the giant Infinite Jest should keep me pretty occupied in the six week holiday break between semesters.
• [Music]: So, I got Chinese Democracy last week, and to be honest, considering I was all of eleven when the last Guns N Roses album came out, and hadn’t really developed my musical taste I found the album not my taste at all.  So, yeah, pass.  Also: Its a sad fucking day when Coldplay and Lil Wayne get the most Grammy nominations when Coldplay has been virtually unlistenable for at least two albums and Lil Wayne, is just god awful. 
• [Social Butterfly]: That’d be me.  Why I’m stressing out with this grad school stuff now, because of all the wonderful parties next week. The final Media Meshing is next Thursday, I have a Fancy Party at Bekah and the Kilby’s household on Friday and the St. Bonaventure Alumni Holiday party is Saturday. So, I think this weekend I’m going to have to engage hermit mode yet again so I can hang next week.
• [Blogging]: For a while now, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to cobble all of my bloggy things (Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr) into one place and this place would be right here.  Instead of piece-mealing widgets with RSS feeds from Tumblr and the others, all of the content that I post on those sites would feed into this place, so readers wouldn’t have to click on the probably way-too many blogging sites I use for various purposes. Matt Fraction recently did it, and I want it to kind of work like that, but not blatantly rip-off his design.   I still have a bit of a ways to go, (I should register my own website and put it together with WordPress). So any recommendations towards how to get this to work, I would great appreciate. 

Comics of my Life: Introduction.

This is the first entry of a series featuring five comics that are permanently integrated into my life; five comics that I couldn’t possibly do without and wouldn’t know where I would be if I hadn’t read them.  This one serves as an introduction with subsequent entries featuring STARMAN, SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE, HOURMAN, Y: THE LAST MAN and the Joe Casey/Grant Morrison runs on X-MEN.

I’ve been working towards a series of posts like this, writing about works that I’ve appreciated.  I think it is important to first start where it all began, with Veronica giving me the first issue of The Flash vol. 3 #1.  The one with Wally West’s Flash racing the fighter jets.  To a six-year old I don’t think there was anything cooler. 

My Dad had been telling me about comics when I was quite young, like when he was teaching me how to ride a bike while on the rooftop courtyard of the Galaxy apartment building in New Jersey. He told me about Captain America, the Shadow, and how his mother threw all of his baseball cards and his comics away, all in between skinning my knees.  

My very first comic that I bought that wasn’t given to me was a Green Lantern annual with Hal Jordan smashing through a giant robot.  Growing up there were large amounts of comics that I read, including the tail end of Denny O’Neil’s Batman and leading up to the Death of Superman, which had to be the single-most traumatic event when I was twelve years old.  I remember it as clear as day:  I was the new kid in my sixth grade class, we had just moved to Weston, CT, and my friend Kenny and I both had the comic.  And I remember both of us being traumatized by what happened.  Kenny, as a presentation, had setup a mock newscast, and talked about the death and answering questions like what this would mean for the people of Metropolis.

For Kenny’s birthday, later that year, we traveled to Marvel Comics in the city and had a tour. Spider-Man walked on a table in the conference room talking about the history of Marvel Comics, how it was founded, then took us on a tour of the building. Through the famous Marvel Bullpen, through the printing presses and finally getting a grab bag of comics.  It was fantastic, and one of my most cherished childhood memories.  

Later that year, Kenny wrote in my yearbook: “It was fun meeting you this year, Dave.  Let’s get together sometime this summer and trade comics.”  And I remember thinking: “silly, you don’t trade comics like they’re baseball cards; you read them.” But now looking back his context wasn’t incorrect, even though I thought it was then, and according to my parents, I’m such a know-it-all.

High School, though, was my formative years with comics.  My computer teacher, had bestowed to me single issues of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns which literally changed the entire way I looked at comics. These two comics pushed me towards reading the two comics that forever will be one and two in my top favorite comics of all time.  

Those being James Robinson and Tony Harris’s Starman, and Matt Wagner, Steven T. Seagle and Guy Davis’s Sandman Mystery Theatre.

Though I think the unifying aspect of those comics was mostly that the characters now had changed to being something other than what they were.  They stopped wearing costumes.  Jack Knight’s Starman was a leather jacket clad, wisecracking antique dealer.  What I loved about that comic was this retro style to it. That could be attributed to the sensibilities of Tony Harris.  Just look at that character! Leather jacket, jeans, gets shot all the time, this gold staff with this weirdly pointed end and general bad attitude towards his father was something a sixteen year old could latch onto. 

It was with Starman when it crossed into the Sandman Mystery Theatre era that I became enthralled with that comic.  The retro feel of Starman had rubbed off on me and got me attached to Sandman Mystery Theatre.  Which played up my already natural attraction to noir.  These two books came along when I became obsessed with crime movies like The Usual Suspects, LA. Confidential, and The Untouchables.  Three films that appeal to me in virtually every way that an old school 1930s crime drama with a twisted mature angle did.  Sandman had the mystery aspect with the tortured Wesley Dodds and his nightmares of terrible crimes where he is forced to don a gasmask and a trench coat and goes out to gas various serial killers and niche crime dwellers to silence his nightmares.  Easily one of the best comic series ever done, Sandman is a series that I often like to go back to.    

These two works express in me three aspects that I’ve always loved: noir, family drama and retro throwback style. Rocketeer is another one. Throughout the next week or so I’ll feature five books that are my all time favorite books ever done.  Starting with the two books I just mentioned, and then going into the Scott Lobdell/Joe Maduiera run on X-Men to the troubled but far more interesting Joe Casey/Grant Morrison runs, to Tom Peyer’s Hourman, and finally Y: The Last Man.

The Chicken Dance never gets old.

And if you need me to explain to you why this never gets old, then you need to get your shallow ass to a video store and rent Arrested Development. Trust me, you’ll love me for making you do it.

Kevin Smith on directing Brandon Routh in “Zack and Miri.”

I was on set with Brandon and shooting the sequence where he acts incredibly gay. At one point I was like, ‘Hey man, I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth but doesn’t Warner Bros. have some sort of moral clause? I mean, you played Superman! Are you really allowed to do this?’

In case you haven’t seen Zack and Miri, Routh plays a gay porn star that Elizabeth Banks’ character had a high school crush on.  In a movie full of awkward moments, the exchange between Banks, Routh and his partner (played by Justin Long) was definitely the best part of the movie for me.  Quote via Peter Knox, who found it on the Sun UK.  (Careful! Batman: RIP *SPOILERS* at the Sun link). 

LPNY: The Hangouts.

These are segments, notes really, from places in my hometown and the various memories I have from them through the years. All can be found under the category: “home life.”

In the previous entry I mentioned the Board Walk, and where those of us who didn’t exactly fit into the grunge group would go and reside.  This was, and would separate into other areas, stores where our friends worked, people’s rides, etc. 

The Board Walk is above the band shell park, where when they weren’t having the orchestra there on Tuesday nights, we would hang out. Some of the skaters would try their tricks off the band shell, eventually leading to the cops not allowing skateboards anywhere near Main Street, but this was allowed for a summer or two. 

One of the places where I frequently hung out, was at Mr. Mike’s Express. Pretty much everyone hung out in random stores and we all knew each other, so it wasn’t a clique necessarily, it was just depending on who was still working and those of us who were off would go keep them company in the various tourist trap stores that littered Main Street. For example me and another guy and one of the current top luge racers in America would hang out was Mr. Mike’s Express, which is a now a Chinese place. Mr. Mike’s was literally the only pizza place where any of us would have pizza.  Well, that’s not true, it was the only pizza place in Lake Placid before the Bosnian mob learned how to make pizza from Mr. Mike.  So, we hung out at Mr. Mike’s Express, which was a branch off the main store that was down at the four-way intersection in town. The Express where my buddy worked was on Main Street, and like many of us I was a freeloader. Still am.  He would frequently offload slices to us, and we’d all hang out there until the next thing we would do which would be go down to the bowling alley and usually go off to either the Peninsula behind Howard Johnson’s, or out to the shooting range or what was called the Parking Lot.  Those scenes I’ll get in to in a later post.

In later years, and before I was twenty-one, we would stick with these hangouts. Things never really changed, when we weren’t working we’d hang out in each others cars and do ATLs, which stands for “Around the Lake.” Lake Placid itself, wasn’t actually in the town, it was just off the road that circles Mirror Lake. So we would drive around the lake just to figure out something to do, mostly stopping and just talking to others to see where we were doing that night, if we were going out to the Shooting Range, to the Peninsula or to the Parking Lot.  House parties were a rare occasion.  Those happened only about a few times a summer and literally everyone under twenty-one in town would show up to them so they were almost always a shit show.  

As things came along, we all moved and parted ways and Mr. Mike’s Express became a shitty Chinese place, and eventually found other places to hang out. As we got older, we gained friends who had their own apartments and the year I spent at home after graduating from college became something that we frequently did. 

Afterwards, a favorite of mine was Aroma Round. This very Friends type coffee shop in the restored circular oval store that used to be a bike shop formerly known as Mountain Run, was a favorite hang out.  As well as the Bowling Alley where we could get beers snuck to us by a friend, and I would play home run derby religiously.

In the end, thoughts like these are really not any different than others.  These things were portrayed in Dazed and Confused, Mallrats, and many other works–there are some finite differences between those kinds of stories and this one. Different people, places, but pretty much the same thing: where we would hang out before going out to some place to party.            

So many of the cafes where we used to hang out have changed.  Things have changed quite a bit on Main Street these days. Yesterday, during a walk, they opened a cafe/sports bar near where the Bead store used to be and now my parents harumph at it calling it something “those New Jersey people dragged over from their state.”  Suddenly all these retro free-trade outfitter stores, urban-esque boutiques and various other things are all over the place and now things aren’t as interesting.  This town, since that thing that happened in the winter of 1980, has been a tourist town for as long as I’ve been alive.  And continues to be so.