The Passion of the Kiefer

Now I'm not ridiculing anyone's beliefs here, but this has to be the first time I've ever seen a church trying to pass of the crucifiction/resurrection story as a popular television action thriller. I eagerly await Christmas, where no doubt we'll see parallels drawn between the old nativity story and that week's episode of The Shield.

number15dream

From Ye Olde Comick Booke Blogge:

Due to diminished readership and rising paper costs, it has been decided only fifteen comic titles will be published from this day forward. You have been charged with the decisions of which titles shall be printed and what creative teams will be assigned to them.

What fifteen comic books will we find on the racks next month and who will be the creative teams behind them?

Oooh...

(I'm assuming that the Japanese, Koreans and Europeans are quite happy with their healthy comics industries and don't need my "help".)

2000ad
w: various
a: various
Continues as it is, except with more readers and fewer crappy strips. The comics world needs 2000ad. Where would DC get all its writers and artists from?

Amazing Spider-Man
w: Joss Whedon
a: Skottie Young
Whedon's wasted on the X-Men; as anyone who's seen Buffy will know, he's got the humour and characterisation down for Spidey and his supporting cast. He's a perfect fit, and I'm baffled that Marvel have him slogging away at forgettable X-Men stories. Skottie Young is an artist who seems to be universally reviled, but he's got a funky energy to his art that I think would be perfect for Spider-Man. See also: Spider-Man Tales

Avengers
w: Robert Kirkman
a: Carlos Pacheco
Reading Marvel Team-Up, it's obvious that Kirkman could do this with ease, but I've been struggling to think of an artist. Pacheco is a great superhero artist who I'd like to see have a longer run on Earth's Mightiest Heroes.

Doctor Strange
w: Alan Moore
a: Mike Mignola
'Nuff said.

Fantastic Four
w: Iain Banks
a: Bryan Hitch
It's a sci-fi adventure book, so let's get in a great writer who knows when the sci gets boring and when to put in some fi. Banks says he can't grasp comics on a conceptual level, but we'd teach him and then pair him up with Hitch for a glorious year or so of aliens, space ships, time travel and Doctor Doom. Alternatively, I'd hand it to Morvan and Bucher, the creators of Wake, and let them run with it.

Green Lantern Corps
w: Warren Ellis
a: Ed McGuinness
DC's best concept, and it's never been done amazingly well (although the current series is okay). No hero worship of Hal Jordan, and no particular emhpasis on Earth's Lanterns. Just full on space policery of the highest order. And if the Hallites bitch and moan, we take it over to Marvel and call it Nova Corps or Star Brand Corps or Quasar and the Quasons or something and it'll be just as good.

Hawkmen
w: Grant Morrison
a: Frank Quitely
That's right. Hawkmen. Grant Morrison gets to use any or all of the various Hawkmen as he sees fit. If he can't make sense of the character's continuity, he can at least make some beautiful nonsense out of it.

Invincible
w: Robert Kirkman
a: Ryan Ottley
Continues as normal.

Iron Man
w: Tsutomu Nihei
a: Tsutomu Nihei
I'd previously attached this writer/artist to Batman, but I've thought better of it, and Nihei's approach would bring something genuinely new to Iron Man, and that's that Cronenbergish mixture of technology and horror. He'd need a strong editor though, as Nihei tends to turn all of his projects into clones of his manga Blame!, only with different lead characters.

Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD
w: Greg Rucka
a: ? (suggestions welcome)
Just after Alias turned up, I thought Marvel were missing a trick by not putting out a spy/special ops book. Put Fury's name on the cover, but make it a team thing, really digging into the underbelly of the Marvel Universe. And tie it in, subtly, with the other books, so that if one of Doctor Doom's labs is raided in Fantastic Four, you never know who did it unless you read SHIELD and see them doing the raid. Everything will be behind the scenes, even their appearances in other books.

Sergeant Rock
w: Garth Ennis
a: Carlos Ezquerra
Ennis can write war stories, as well as the similar-but-different genre of stories about soldiers, in his sleep. Ezquerra hasn't done a lot of US work, but he's a veteran of proper war comics back when they actually existed, and his style is perfect for tales about grubby and weary soldiers engaged in endless conflicts. Alternatively, I'd stick both of them on Captain America.


Spider-Man Tales
w: various
a: various
Pare down the Spidey books to Amazing (see above) and this "anything goes" title. This could be used to tell out-of-continuity stories, or tales about supporting characters, or historical stories, or even reprints. Whatever. A combination of Tangled Web, Webspinners, Untold Tales, Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane and MTU, perhaps even as an anthology (although US fans hate and fear anthologies).

Tales of the DCU, Featuring...
w: various
a: various
I don't know or care enough about the DCU to pick too many specific survivors, but there are enough good concepts and creators to put together an anthology and/or "anything goes" book. Perhaps it could even be weekly.

Thor
w: Neil Gaiman
a: Jim Lee
Gaiman has a gift for the mythology stuff, and Lee's bulky yet iconic style is perfect for the larger-than-life Asgardians. In it fortyish year history, Thor has had only two definitve creative teams, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and Walt Simonson. This would be the third. After a suitably epic twelve-issue run, I'd bring in Mike Mignola to draw, and if Gaiman leaves, to write too.

The Walking Dead
w: Robert Kirkman
a: Charlie Adlard.
Ain't broke.


That'll do.

Inspiration Hits Like a Brick in the Guts

For a long time now, I've been wanting to get stuck into drawing a regular comic, as it seems to me to be a great way to practise; the need to get at least a page done a week would keep me drawing and my skills would only improve with use (I hope). But I can't do humour strips, and I've been struggling to come up with any kind of plot for a dramatic, story-based comic.

(I've had a go now and then, but it's mostly been using other people's characters, and I really want to just go off in my own direction for a bit.)

But a few days ago some ideas started to come together, and I've been pretty regularly jotting down bits of plot as well as whole panels and pages (in rough of course). I don't know when I'll get around to actually starting it since I'm going to be in a state of hellish confusion in a couple of weeks (we're going to try to move again), or how it'll be published (I think online is a definite, but whether that's on my site or as a stripblog or whatever, I don't know), but I'm just pleased that I have an actual workable idea for a story, because all I want to do is tell stories.

So that's just to keep you posted on what's been going on here. Posts have been rare of late, and will be even rarer when I'm back in Blighty in a couple of weeks, as I'll have little or no internet access, but I shall attempt to keep, um, "you" posted on what's going on with both moving and my webcomic ambitions.

Enough

...of these so-called "comedies" about the soul-crushing ennui of life. Or at least, if they have to be made, let's see about putting something funny in them, so they actually live up to their descriptions. Bloody hell.

Random Selection

In my twenty-odd years of video gaming, I don't think I've ever used the SELECT button on a game console's controller. Has anyone? Or is it some vestigial remnant of something from gaming's past, kept around merely out of a sense of tradition, like an electronic appendix?

Better Than Nothing At All

Today, I have been mostly submitting some new comic reviews to SBC, adding a new page to my website, and failing to find our copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

England Prevails

The move didn't go well; in fact, it could be considered an utter failure, as we didn't in fact move anywhere, and we're back exactly where we were two weeks ago, occupying the dark corners of my in-laws' home like a pair of cockroaches. With fewer legs and reduced invulnerability to poison and nuclear conflict, obviously.

But it wasn't a waste of time, money and effort, at least not to us. We learned some important things, decided some other important things, and got to catch up with almost all of our friends over there.

Upon arrival, we stopped to recharge at the posh London abode of Alex, Soni and the hitherto-unknown Jill (Gill? I failed to check), before heading off to Bristol, which is of course where all the magic was supposed to happen. Except it didn't. We learned two very important things there: (1) we really didn't like Bristol at all, which came as a surprise to me, as I really liked the town on previous visits, and it was my idea to move there; and (b) given our current situation, we discovered that getting a flat or house was going to be prohibitively expensive and complicated. Mostly complicated.

So we gave up.

We decided to return and rethink our strategy, and instead treat our "move" like a trip. So we visited friends and familiar places and had a great time catching up and reacquainting ourselves with good old Blighty. One day, we went to Brighton, our original choice for the move, and Meg fell in love with the place. I've always loved it, and it was only because we'd expected it to be out of our price range that we rejected it. But it turns out that Brighton is on a par with Bristol, and even cheaper in many cases. It's closer to most of our friends, and it's closer to London, a place I dislike, but one that holds much promise for Meg's career goals (I have no goals of any sort). So Brighton is where we're going to go. We've come up, thanks to excellent advice from friends, with a workable plan for making it happen. A real plan. A real good plan.

So if all goes well, and there's really only one little thing that can go wrong and even I'm not quite that unlucky, we should be living in Brighton by the end of the year. Thanks to everyone who expressed concern at my vague and ominous postings while we were away; it meant a lot, and we'd be grateful if you can all cross as many spare fingers as you have (borrow some from the Yakuza) when the time comes for us to try again. Cheers.


While back in my homeland, I caught up with 2000AD, which is on a creative high right now, and also decided to give Iain Banks another go. I'd read a few of his books back at school, just before my flirtation with higher education, and thought they were merely okay (although The Wasp Factory is an astonishingly good debut, and would make a cracking BBC2/Channel 4 drama, assuming they could find a suitable lead), but Waterstone's had a three for two offer on his books for some reason, and while I didn't end up buying any from there (due to not really liking his work all those dusty years ago), my interest was piqued enough to pick up Excession at Gatwick. I ended up watching films on the plane instead (Chicken Little is terrible but has a superb last five minutes, Æon Flux is a generic post-Matrix actioner with pretensions of profundity (and is nowhere near as good as the original cartoon, much as I hated the art style), Romancing the Stone is just as enjoyable as, but more derivative than, I remember, and The Lion King is an excellent film obscured by Disney's novishness), but I'll get to Excession at some point in the near future, and I'll report whether I still don't get on with Banks' scifi. Maybe.

Oh, and while in Blighty, I finally read the copy of number9dream we bought ages ago on the cheap, and I loved it. Much better than Mitchell's first (fewer boring bits), and I'm not sure why so many people hate the ending. It made perfect sense to me. I suspect I'll get around to reading Cloud Atlas circa 2008.

Oh, and oh, and I just watched V for Vendetta, and fair's fair, they didn't do an awful job of it.

Drat! And Double Drat!

The move is not going well. Plans A and B have already gone tits-up, and plans C and D look like going the same way. Guh.

I'm Leaving on a Jet Plane...

Right, we're off. With luck, I'll be posting on the road (as it were), and I'll perhaps be able to set up some internet at the new house/flat/bedsit/cardboard box.

Until then, a quiz: what is the greatest mismatch of movie and movie soundtrack? Which film has the most inappropriate main theme or song given the film's tone? Answers in the comments, please!

See you in a bit!!!

Gulp!

Well, we're moving back to Blighty on Wednesday (yes, this Wednesday), and it's about as hectic and insane as you might imagine. But I think I might have become desensitised to the whole thing, as it just feels like I'm going on a trip. I expect the panicking will start when we get there.