Tagged: Oni Press

The Tweeks interview Bryan Lee O’Malley!

OMG, we are huge fans of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series, so we were totally excited to talk with the series creator, Bryan Lee O’Malley — who you might also know from Seconds or Snot Girl or Lost at Sea.

Also, before we forget, if you are Scott Pilgrim fans too, you won’t want to miss the newly released Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Card Game put out by Renegade Game Studios and Oni Press. It’s a deck-building game by Keith Baker that has double sided cards with video-game-style combo moves unique to each character and life choices you’ll have to make about if you’ll solve your problems with hard work and empathy or video game violence. Such a tough choice.

So anyway, watch our interview with Bryan to find out who has influenced him, why he’s so funny, and what he has in store for us next. If you haven’t read his books, definitely get on that. We can’t recommend them enough!

Box Office Democracy: Atomic Blonde

It’s hard coming here to review Atomic Blonde after ripping in to Valerian last week.  I said Valerian was a gorgeous movie with well-executed action sequences that didn’t click for me because the script was a genuine chore to think about.  Atomic Blonde has a lot of the same problems, and at times looks like someone’s aesthetic Tumblr came to life on the condition that it had to recite a tired spy story to stay alive.  I’m not sure why, but it works for Atomic Blonde.  Maybe an overdone spy story is just more fun than an underdone science fiction story.  Maybe Charlize Theron and James McAvoy are just that much better than Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne.  It could be as simple as grey and neon and the fall of the Berlin Wall is a better mood than the promise of a fantastic science fiction world if you get beyond the bland corridors.

Atomic Blonde has the kind of story you swear you’ve seen a hundred times but can’t quite place any of them.  It’s kind of Skyfall meets The Usual Suspects if you only pulled the worst bits from the latter and the best bits from the former.  It’s set in 1989 just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a file containing the names of every agent from every country working in Berlin has fallen in to the wrong hands.  The list also contains the identity of a notorious double agent.  MI6 sends in Lorraine Broughton (Theron) to retrieve the list and rendezvous with David Percival (McAvoy) an agent who has been without supervision so long he has “gone native” which in this context seems to mean that he’s playing a Mad Max villain dialed down to 70%. The story has enough twists and turns to keep it interesting, but I never felt like anything made enough sense.  The combination of the unreliable narrator and the endless double crosses makes everything one or two degrees too muddled for me.  Not that this is a movie that wants to be remembered for its plot; it wants to be remembered for its action.

This is a movie directed by someone that started as a stunt coordinator who then hired a top notch crew of stunt and fight choreographers.  The action beats in this movie are completely nuts.  There’s a one-take continuous fight scene that travels through an entire building that is spellbinding.  Because movies have become so enamored with quick-cut action scenes this becomes instantly anti-cinematic and feels even more real.  A rejection of the Bourne model of fight scenes (ironically made by people who did work on fights in those movies) and a statement that this is a movie where fights are longer, more brutal, and have a more lasting effect. The other fights are also superb but they were also universally featured in the trailers, including the climactic fight scene, so it felt like I had seen everything else before I got there.  I know that the people who make the movie don’t cut the trailers but the marketing people did this movie a disservice by putting out so much of the good stuff for free.

I don’t tend to like movies that use grey as their primary color, and Atomic Blonde uses an awful lot of grey, but it works here because they use it exclusively to allow pops of other color.  Berlin is dreary and sedate in this film but none of the characters are.  Everyone has something about them that jumps off the screen be it hair, clothes, some kind of prop.  Lorraine gets all three.  The locations sometimes defy belief (there were neon pink lights in flop house hotels in 1989 Berlin?) but I like beyond belief if it lends itself to a better looking film.  Atomic Blonde is slick without being shiny and that’s worth a lot for a movie that’s supposed to be set in such a pivotal moment.  I would roll my eyes at any movie that wanted to end with the backdrop of fireworks, but if the Berlin Wall is falling and the fireworks look like the kind of thing you see from people in cities where fireworks are illegal it kind of makes it okay.

I would absolutely watch Atomic Blonde if I saw it on HBO, I might even buy the graphic novel to see if it makes the plot any easier to understand.  I appreciate that I seem like a hypocrite for praising this movie after slagging a movie with similar attributes a week ago, but I don’t care.  Cool counts.  Atomic Blonde is cool and catchy and sticks with you.  It pushes itself above mediocrity through grit, charisma, and gumption.

Tweeks: Bad Machinery 7 Review

Bad Machinery by John Allison just might be our favorite graphic novel series. The 7th mystery: The Case of The Forked Road. This one has time travel, science, and a great story for the girls to solve. You don’t want to miss this book — or our discussion about it!

Tweeks Review Comics That Make Us Hungry

This week we review two amazing comics anyone who bakes or cooks will love.  We talk to Nutmeg writer James F. Wright (the art is by Jackie Crofts) and compare that comic about two girls who bake brownies to Space Battle Lunchtime by Natalie Reiss on Oni Press.

 

Tweeks: Invader Zim! Volume 1 Review

Back in the day….back before we were born even!…there was this much loved cartoon on Nickelodeon called Invader Zim. But check this out the powers that be at Oni Press have brought it back. And last weekend Volume 1 of the comic series was released! It was written by Jhonen Vasques & Eric Trueheart with artists Aaron Alexovich and Megan Lawton with Simon Troussellier and Rikki Simons.

Would be spoilers to say that we love it and now we not only want to watch the TV series, but we’d like new episodes as well?

The comics follow where the cartoon series left off. It’s about boy named Dib who knows that Zim is really an alien who wants to destroy the world, except no one believes him. It’s rated for teens, but we feel like these books would be loved by younger boys too. It would be loved by anyone who likes funny stories and fart jokes, actually. Watch the video and we’ll explain further.

Tweeks Review Part-Time Princesses from Oni Press

When people (usually parents) find out we have this show on ComicMix, they will always ask us for recommendations for the kids in their lives. Sometimes it’s hard to think of things off the tops of our heads, so the smart thing to do is to just watch all our videos, but adults don’t have time for all that. But the fact is, we don’t have time to review everything we read and love (Maddy reads like a book a day…true fact.)
Case in point, Part-Time Princesses by Monica Gallagher came out in March & was one of our favorites from Comic Con this summer. If you are buying a holiday gift for a tween on up, this would be a winner. It’s real high school girls who get to be pretend princesses and kick a little butt. The four main characters, Courtney, Amber, Tiffany, and Michelle work at a lagging amusement park as princesses and need to take their jobs a little more seriously when their big life plans start to fizzle.  These are real girls who are awesome being who they are.
What’s really cool about Oni Press is that they have so many books exactly for kids like us. If your tween/teen (or even you) likes this then we also recommend the Bad Machinery books, Princess Ugg, the Courtney Cumrin series, & The Avalon Chronicles.

Tweeks: SDCC 2015 Part 2: The Haul!

This week is our 2nd San Diego Comic Con Recap…and our HAUL!  See all our stuff (well, most of our stuff) we got at the con, watch us play KISS pinball,  & hear our exciting stories about the Scholastic Party, meeting Jem, the fashionably nerdy mixer,  Holland Roden, Snoopy & Belle in fashion, & a lot of other stuff.

 

Molly Jackson: Blocking the Block

So, this week has been plagued. Yes, I have been plagued with writer’s block. I know you’ve heard of it. I just can’t settle on a column topic or a message or anything else. Right now, I’m probably breaking the unwritten rule of telling the reader this, but I’m naturally a maverick.

All week, this has been weighing on me. I have plenty of options, which have lived and died as columns in my mind.

I could talk about the latest ticket debacle for NYCC. Last week, we all watched (or in my case, participated) in the maddening scramble for tickets. Then the Internet bemoaned the difficulties of getting a ticket and swore off ever trying for tickets again. Which we all know is a lie. Let’s be honest. Because next year, we will all try again.

It’s still a show people want to attend, and as of last year, the biggest show in the US. It may be insanity to get tickets and to go, however it can be an amazing experience. NYCC really needs to get a better ticket system going though. It’s just mean at this point.

Or I could highlight the awesome open submission request from Oni Press. You might know Oni Press as the publisher of Scott Pilgrim, or one of my favorite stories, Resurrection. They now have an open call for new writers and artists. The best part of this is how they want minorities writing stories about minorities. They are requesting diversity in their stories, right off the bat. They also put a stop to rape as a plot device. Especially after last week’s Game of Thrones flop of an episode, this is going to be a very hot topic to avoid for a very long time.

I’m actually excited about this because it screams new stories to me. I want to see the creativity of new writers and artists at a publisher like Oni. I don’t what they make happen in this new drive for talent but it will be amazing.

The worst part is that I still can’t settle on a topic for a column. At least this bought me another week of working on it. Hopefully, the new creativity from Oni washes over me.