May 19 2005

Free Comic Book Day, pt 2

I’m very slowly making it through my stack of comics from Free Comic Book Day a couple of weeks ago. Here’re my thoughts on these most recent reeds:

  • Alternative Comics Presents – I know there’re some creators published by Alternative Comics who I really like–Nick Bertozzi, Rebecca Dart and Robert Ullman, just off the top of my head. Why then is this Free Comic Book Day anthology seemingly filled cover to cover with boring, boring, boring autobiographical stuff? Who knows…but I can’t imagine that this sort of thing would really win the uninitiated over to the world of comics. Judging from the covers James Kochalka has recently discovered Photoshop and is in the inevitable “if there’s something Photoshopcan do, then by God I’m gonna do it!” phase.
  • Comic Festival – I’m not exactly sure who/what entity produced this book—its unifiying theme is that all the artists are Canadian. I think it may be some sort of official Toronto Comic Art Festival thing. Anyway, there’s some great stuff in here, including: a great cover by Darwyn Cooke, a collaboration between Dave Sim and Chester Brown (it makes no sense, but it’s a cool pairing), and some brilliant stuff by Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca drawn in a cool Little Orphan Annie sort of style. One of the standouts is a story called “The Day that I Wanted to Fight Bruce Lee,” by Kagan McLeod, whom I hadn’t heard of till this—I’ll be on the lookout for more of his stuff.
  • Bone Sharps, Cowboys and ThunderLizards – by Jim Ottavanani and Big Time Attic. Although there was some dodgy storytelling that made parts of this somewhat of a chore to follow, it was one of my favorite books so far. Ottaviani’s stuff succeeds or fails largely on the artists involved and in this case “Big Time Attic” is a studio featuring Zander Cannon, whose series The Replacement God is one of the most underappreciated and undernoticed comics in recent years. This book features a single story that’s a teaser to a full-length book that’s (presumably) being released soon—I’ll definitely pick it up when it does.

May 19 2005

Revenge of the Sith

Yoda

Initial thoughts:

I’m still in a bit of post-movie euphoria, but…overall, ep III was surprisingly good…even great–the best installment since “Empire.”

What it had that ep I and ep II completely lacked was real conflict…not “conflict” in the sense of people fighting one another–the previous two films had that–but “conflict” in the sense of human conflict, characters who were put into situations in which they had to make decisions that had weighty consequences. This is basic Screenwriting 101, but having the players revealing true character through decisionmaking under a situation of conflict is a must-have for interesting narrative. In ep III you’ve got that in droves: Anakin, Obi Wan and Amidala all are put into rapidly degenerating situations in which they have to make these kind of decisions throughout the film. SW and Empire had a lot of this–PM and ATOC had very little.

And of course ep III features plenty of good ol’ fashioned space fighting and light sabre battles—thankfully, space battle-wise, this go round we’re free of the annoying “primative culture vs. technological culture” battle that plagued ROTJ and PM.

That’s not to say that there weren’t plenty of things not to like. The special effects, while often beautiful, are often over the top, as if the SFX crew were insructed to be sure to jam every square inch of the screen with something computer generated, mechanical and moving. Yoda still looks kinda silly bouncing around in the fight scenes; he has a bit of resemblence to those “black cat” fireworks that, when lit, spin around spastically spewing green flames. The patented Lucas goofy dialog is still there, although toned down a bit supposedly due to an actual writer who was hired to punch up the dialog a bit. There’s certainly nothing of the caliber of AOTC’s infamous “I hate sand” speech from Anakin (although I have to admit, I kinda enjoy watching the “sand” scene in a sort of Mystery Science Theater way).

More later…

May 17 2005

Goggles & Gloves, pg. 4

G&G, pg 4
(Click for larger image)

May 15 2005

Star Wars, Ep III – Got tickets…

I was greatly releived to hear that the local theater–the only local theater–showing Episode III had apparently obtained an additional print of the movie and had added another 12:01am showing…since the intial 12:01 showing was sold out by the time I went to get tickets.

EP III

May 15 2005

San Diego Travel Trauma

My advance travel plannning for this year’s San Diego Comicon has so far been less than hassle-free, as you can read about in my letter/warning published at Tom Spurgeon’s blog, The Comics Reporter:

Comicon, Travel Planers and the U.S. Grant Hotel