Even I was started to get annoyed with the amount of tweet-posts showing up on my livejournal and blog. In start contrast to blogs, tweets don’t have much re-readability, so I’m ceasing syndication of them on my livejournal and hiding them in my blog. It might even mentally free me up to write blog stuff more, but, er, we’ll see. Still feel too busy living life to write about it, more often than not.
This blog entry is part of a series where I’m going back and posting unfinished entries, if only to clear out my CMS.
This is last of three reviews I actually wrote for an intended project to review all the stories in the Project: Superior comics anthology, back in 2005.
Just to give you an idea of how far I actually got with this, all of the entries were written on June 25th 2005. So, I managed to spend a single night on it before never working on it again.
Story #3: Jeremy Tankard’s “The Costume”
The Costume starts off quite bleak. It’s about a young boy who gets his mother to make him a superhero costume, and how it affects his life when it emerges that he’s planning to wear it forever. Luckily, it has a relatively upbeat ending delivered in such a way that you can only expect in comics. It’s kind of an “origin” story for a hero, but bordering on meta-plot.
In the wider picture, The Costume can be seen as a tale about the importance of growing up and the point at where you stop being a child and start being an adult. It’s a good context to use for that sort of tale, a child who imagines he’s a superhero, and is eventually forced to confront the reality. It could’ve been far bleaker, but while it’s not exactly smile-time happy hour, you get a definite sense of hope from how it all finishes off. Tankard delivers a great plot in the space he has, and with an excellent sense of pacing and dialogue.
Tankard seems at home drawing everything from a woman at a sewing machine, to an asteroid being thrown at the earth. The cartoonish style conveys a wide range of emotions, and makes the fantastical stuff seem more believable in the universe of the story, because it’s drawn in the same style. It almost gives me a sense of early Disney work, actually, with its thin rounded limbs and exaggerated poses.
Ultimately, Tankard delivers a short story that relies less than most on a twist to make itself seem smart, and concentrates more on making the human element the focus of the ending. An enjoyable read.
Website: http://www.jeremytankard.com - Tankard’s site is utterly brimming with illustrations, and each one a feast for the eyes. Certainly worth a poke around, because there’s a lot to look at.
This blog entry is part of a series where I’m going back and posting unfinished entries, if only to clear out my CMS.
Presented without further comment, the second of three reviews I actually wrote for an intended project to review all the stories in the Project: Superior comics anthology, back in 2005.
Story #2: Brian Wood’s “The Watcher”
The second story in Project Superior is The Watcher by Brian Wood. Stylistically, it’s about as far away from the previous story, The Amazing Friends, as you can realistically get in comics. It contains no dialogue, barely any text at all, in fact, and there’s very little in the way of conventional plot or narrative. Unfortunately, there’s a price to innovative and unique, and in the case of this story, that price is making the story disappointing impenetrable.
Wood’s art is always glorious to behold, and this is no exception, though it’s actually hurt slightly by being coloured, compared to the monochrome sample available on his website. It’s rare that Wood both writes and illustrates a story, and it’s easy to tell that he’s got a talent for both. From his other work, that is. As a big fan of Brian Wood, I find The Watcher is something of a let down. It seems unclear what’s actually going on in the narrative, with too much left open to interpretation. I’m sure if that’s the case then it’s intentional, but I find it no more satisfactory to assume that, because it doesn’t change that I can get almost nothing out of reading it. Is the main character a hero? A villain? What’s he actually doing? Is he supposed to have powers? The more I think about it, the less hope I have that I’ll find any new way of interpreting it. I’m going to have to concede defeat on this one and just ask: What does anyone who’s read this think is going on?
Fact is, while I love Brian Wood, this is easily my least favourite thing out of everything he’s done. He recently took on the “indie comics do superheroes” concept in a 12-issue series of what he termed “graphic novellas” which was drawn by Becky Cloonan, and it’s fair to say that any single one of those issues is a vastly superior example of what heights can be achieved with the superhero genre if you give it to creators who can look at it sideways. The man’s one of my favourite writers, so it’s hard to be objective, but if I were to read this anywhere else I’d probably ignore it completely as a bad read and move on. If you like the artwork on this, though, it’s definitely worth checking out Channel Zero, which Wood also wrote and illustrated, and which has similar silhouetted photorealism and use of negative space. He is an artist unlike many others. Just, don’t make this story the only chance you give him, alright?
Website: http://www.brianwood.com - An up to date, constantly redesigned and totally jam-packed site contaiing information on his past, present and future work, and best of all, a livejournal where you can read his latest ramblings. The livejournal, in fact, which first pointed me in the direction of Project: Superior. Would that all comics creators were so dedicated and enthusiastic.
This blog entry is part of a series where I’m going back and posting unfinished entries, if only to clear out my CMS.
This entry was notes for a “best of 2006″ entry that never got written, which indicates my favourite stuff of that particular year. Had I finished it, there would’ve been a tad more discussion of my choices, and probably a lot of them would’ve been changed too. But here’s what I was thinking of writing about:
Top 5 tracks:
Sway - This is my Demo (This is my Demo)
Captain - Frontline (Welcome to Hazelville)
Sabaton - Attero Dominatus (Attero Dominatus)
Charlotte Hatherley - Behave
Basskniv3s - Weapons of Mass Media
Genius - DJ Yoda - The Amazing Adventures of DJ Yoda
Disappointing - Tenacious D - Pick of Destiny / Placebo - MedsComics:
Phonogram
Local
Civil War #2
Project: Romantic
X-FactorLate to the party award: Scott Pilgrim
Best gig - of the obvious contenders - Radiohead at Hammersmith, YYYs at the Forum, Tenacious D at Hammersmith, and the Placebo instore, I’ll have to go with the second. I’ve been waiting years to see YYY’s live and while the rest were all good, there’s never the same magic when you’ve seen a band before. YYY’s didn’t disappoint, and I got some excellent moshpit fun to boot.
Remember 2006? Phonogram, Scott Pilgrim, a new Placebo album… not entirely unlike 2009 in that respect.
This blog entry is part of a series where I’m going back and posting unfinished entries, if only to clear out my CMS.
Presented without further comment, the first of three reviews I actually wrote for an intended project to review all the stories in the Project: Superior comics anthology, back in 2005.
Story #1: Martin Cendreda’s “The Amazing Friends”
The Amazing Friends is about a group of three, middle-aged men who dress as superheroes, fighting crime and preserve liberty, and receive all the attendant media glory. The thing is, it’s quickly evident that they only really do the first of those three, and instead of fighting crime or injustice, opt for the easier assignments, like rescuing cats from trees. Or claimng to have done. And even that’s in-between going to lapdancing clubs. Meanwhile, their pure-intentioned friend tries to become the fourth member of the team…and, a plot emerges.
It’s a comedy. Or tragedy. Depends on whether you’re concentrating on the jokes, or the overall plot structure. One of the strengths of indie creators is that they often examine things on an entirely human level, so in this case, rather than a story about superhero impersonators, you get a pretty sad story about self-sacrifice, those that make it because they’re genuinely trying to improve the world, and those that don’t because they’re only interested in themselves. Self-sacrifice is one of the driving elements of many superheroes, and it’s not unusual to find out that a key element of their stories is a focus what they lose out on in order to make way for the good they can do. Arguably, self-sacrifice is what makes a hero, and that’s more or less the point that Cendreda’s story is making.
Artistically, he has a mildly expressionistic cartoony style, and that’s not unusual in indie comics. His dialogue is pretty strong, especially the contrast between the wannabe-hero who speaks “in character” when he’s wearing his costume, using 50’s-style self-consciously fake phrasing such as “Tally Ho, Heroes!” while his friends speak, even dressed up in public, using a more realistic (and crude) manner that betrays their true attitude towards the superhero gig.
It’s a nice opener to the book, since it easily shows you the “indie creators take on superheroes” premise in an easily readable conventional way. You can tell it’s about superheroes, but you can tell from just looking at the art that it’s not going to be the normal take on them. I’ve wondered how they chose who went where in the book, but it’s fair to say however “The Amazing Friends” ended up at the start, it does a good job there.
Website: http://www.zurikrobot.com/ Lots of info on some of his other projects, though, it looks a little bit out of date at the time I’m writing this
This blog entry is part of a series where I’m going back and posting unfinished entries, if only to clear out my CMS. Yes, I have run out of self-congratulating taglines. Well, now I have.
I originally saw this quote on Wikipedia and it amused me so much that I put it in an empty post so that I could post it on my blog with the comment “Whoever said this has confused the meaning of the words ‘invaluable’ and ‘worthless’” in a hilarious satire of Wikipedia’s notorious unreliability.
“Wikipedia is an invaluable research tool.” — Anon.
Well, I finally did it.
This blog entry is part of a series where I’m going back and posting unfinished entries, if only to clear out my CMS. If you think it’s boring to read, imagine how boring it was to write.
This was written on June 25th 2005. It was the introduction to my first ever attempt at a blog project, which is described in full below. I intended to use the project to get myself blogging again after losing a bit of steam now that I was working at Yahoo!. Clearly, that didn’t pan out, and I wrote 3 reviews before hitting a story I couldn’t wrap my head around critically, which stopped me dead in my tracks. My plan was to write up everything then post one once a day, but I never got anywhere near completing it. Here’s the introduction:
I mentioned buying Project Superior the other day. It’s a collection of 54 stories by around 45 indie creators, published by AdHouse all about superheroes (which, for all you philistines reading this, is something indie comics tend not to touch because it’s pretty overexposed in the mainstream) - thus, what you get is 288 pages of some really excellent short stories. Since they’re only a few pages long and all quite different in style and subject, I’m going to try and review one story a day for as long as it interests me to. Hopefully I’ll make it through the whole book, and in my own deludedly optimistic world, give a bit of exposure to something that deserves more interest that it’s been getting. I’m certain it’ll be a journey of discovery for us all. I’m less certain about the “one review per day” thing, but it’s a nice target at least. They’re only going to be short reviews, and hopefully I won’t ruin all the jokes by trying to write a synopsis. I might steal one or two, but I’m definitely going to avoid giving away the ending.
So you know when you come to buy it, this is what the cover looks like:
And now, the first instalment of your soon-to-be-regular feature.
Was that brazen optimism, or just foolish posturing at the end there? We may never now. At least it’s finally out there. I should say that if nothing else, I’m quite impressed that the free image-hosted image still works, this long after it was first uploaded.
I’ll be posting the few reviews I did actually write in the future, staggering them with stuff that’s different, if not necessarily more interesting.
This blog entry is part of a series where I’m going back and posting unfinished entries, if only to clear out my CMS. No, I don’t have anything more interesting to do with myself.
Another short one. Can’t remember why I didn’t post it. I think I planned to go and find examples of amusing links on Google Trends, but I only ever had this one:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=exam+papers&ctab=2&geo=all&date=all
My point is: “I like it how you can tell when exams are based on how the graph goes.” Not particularly insightful, I admit. The date this was originally written has been lost, but hilariously, I can use Google Trends to check out when the service launched, and conclude that I probably originally intended to post this in Spring ‘06.
This blog entry is part of a series where I’m going back and posting unfinished entries, if only to clear out my CMS. Contrary to what this level of self-obsession implies, I am not a narcissist, but it isn’t for lack of trying.
This is an utterly pathetic example of an unfinished entry. You have to wonder why I didn’t just delete it really, but that’s how obsessive I am about preserving every single damn word I commit from brain to screen. If I ever become a famous author and then die, and they publish a “Salmon of Doubt”-style book of incomplete work, it’s going to run to about 26 volumes, and 90% of them will resemble this post, written April 30th 2008, when I briefly decided to post links to all my CBR reviews to my now-defunct workblog. I quickly realised that would be a ridiculously tedious task that I’d never keep up with, and added an RSS feed to my sidebar instead.
Only 3 reviews from this week’s shipping list.
Hulk Vs. Hercules - When Titans Collide
Uncanny X-Men #497
Mighty Avengers #12
Just so this entry isn’t too pathetic, here’s something else about my CBR reviews. I’ve been doing it for about a year now, and it’s still good fun. I enjoy being part of CBR, even though my time is hideously constrained and I usually only get two or three reviews up there a week. I’m slightly concerned that doing so many reviews, both for CBR and Comics Daily and anywhere else that’ll have them might one day harm my dream of comics authorship in the future, but for that reason I’m careful to only write things I feel I can stand by as critical assessment. And obviously, the day I start getting comics published, I’ll stop reviewing them immediately so that there’s no conflict of interest. And in any case, I’ll be using a pen-name chosen long ago, so no-one will know it was me. I’ve got all the bases covered!
Also, behind the scenes CBR gossip: I once got a slight dressing down (and reasonably so) for submitting a fairly unprofessional review I wrote of an issue of Jeph Loeb’s Hulk, where I may have slightly implied that it was representative of everything wrong with the industry and that Jeph Loeb was actually trying to write the most brainless comics possible. That kind of vitriol is now reserved for Comics Daily, where I am under no obligation to act professionally.
This blog entry is part of a series where I’m going back and posting unfinished entries, if only to clear out my CMS. It’s happening purely out of my own historical interest in myself. Vain behaviour or what?
This entry was last edited July 25th, 2008. It’s the start of an account of the ‘08 Latitude Festival, which I attended with Nikki, Seb, Rachel and Daniel. Prophetically, I realised that if I didn’t write it up “now” it wouldn’t happen. And it didn’t, probably because I was trying to get some of my earlier freelance work done at the time instead. If you read on, you will see that my write-up just about made it to the point where we pitched the tent before fizzling out, so unless you were there, there’s almost nothing here of any interest. Fun!
Just because if I don’t write it up now, it’s never happening, here’s my account of a weekend spent at the 2008 Latitude festival! Exciting, no?
Thursday: Having woken up ridiculously early, at 10am, Nikki and I loaded the car then made the uncertain journey to Finchley Central tube station where we would rendezvous with one Daniel Fawcett who was accompanying us on the journey. A brief excursion to a local Tescos wonderland to stock up on snacks (once again, I bought too many) and off we went. Or rather, didn’t, because as I belatedly discovered, leaving London on a Thursday is apparently an impossible task. Having left the house shortly after midday, we didn’t actually emerge from the M25’s horrible grip for almost 3 hours, leaving another almost 3 hours of limping down the A12 to follow, though part of that was used up in going to a Tesco Extra (which Daniel insisted should be called a Tesco Acre) partly to find a postbox Nikki could use, partly to indulge the opportunity to use some real toilets for the final time…
When we arrived at the site, the bad weather was thankfully holding off nicely. After learning from previous experience to pinpoint the car’s location memorably, we loaded up and set off the find Seb and Rachel, who had arrived earlier and pitched up alongside a couple of friendly-seeming girls, one of whom was a self-described Festival Virgin, amazed that Seb was planning to buy all of his food for the weekend, waving a bottle of Basil-infused Olive Oil at him, and the other of whom KNEW Alan Moore from hanging out with his daughters when she was younger and had David Mack/Kabuki-inspired tattoo sleeves which made her quite probably the coolest Festival Friend ever. In keeping with the spirit of Festival Friends, I don’t think any of us ever even caught one another’s names over the 5-day period. Take that, Facebook-stalking public!
Rachel had to clear out to attend her sister’s graduation, so once we’d sorted out the tents we went for a wander around the site, drinking in the strange natural beauty of the site (especially compared to Reading’s remarkably bleak aura) and scoping out the food choices. I went with a Hog Roast, as is the style at the time, though Seb was deeply disturbed by the fact the stall had the pig carcass just kind of there, on the oven, head and all still attached. Personally, I think that’s the best way to eat meat. When it’s straight from the corpse, you know it’s pure.
In what would become a Latitude Tradition, the evening was spent burning stuff on the campfire, screeching in pain whenever smoke entered our eyes and battling Simpsons quotes until we all went to bed, except Daniel who called us all wusses for going to bed so “early” when it was barely past 1am.
The rest of the weekend was, of course, amazing. Best festival I’ve been to in years, lots of excellent bands, comedians, all kinds of stuff that I could’ve talked about. Ross Noble ended his set by leading the entire audience in a conga line to the vegetarian stand, where they were instructed to all ask for chicken. Also, we saw Zombies being herded through the arena, and watched Grinderman blow the cobwebs out of everyone’s brains, and quoted Simpsons episodes around the campfire until we dissolved into incoherent laughter. It was awesome. Unfortunately, because I never did write it up, you’ll have to imagine it.
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