Greg Burgas of Comics Should Be Good! (and can’t we all agree with that, hm?) dives into the musty longboxes to find Ragman #4, from 1977 by Bob Kanigher and “the Redondo Studio,” and proceeds to review the heck out of it.
Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog presents…Ask Road Rage Venom!
Mike Sterling explains what is the Pieta (Michaelangelo) and what isn’t (Superman nuzzling Wonder Woman’s chest).
Doctor Impossible is a supervillain; Fatale is a superheroine. They fight, and you know who wins. The end.
OK, maybe that’s not enough.
I haven’t been keeping track, but there seem to have been a lot of novels about superpowered folks lately. I mean, besides the usual licensed products. There was Robert Mayer’s influential Superfolks back in the 1970s, the “Wild Cards” series off and on for the last couple of decades, and then Michael Bishop’s Count Geiger’s Blues in the early ‘90s, but, otherwise, there wasn’t a heck of a lot out there for a long time.
But in the last couple of years, there have been books like Tom DeHaven’s It’s Superman (which was officially licensed by DC Comics, but was a very different kind of book than the usual), Minister Faust’s From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, James Maxey’s Nobody Gets the Girl, and others – on top of the increasing numbers of licensed books, it feels like we’re getting a lot of superheroes in prose these days.
When this summer hit, only one image popped into my head, and it wasn’t a black spider, a drunk pirate, or a dorky kid with glasses. All I saw since day one was a semi truck that turned into a 50-foot robot. So as you can assume, going into the film my expectations were a little high, and you had better believe they were met with bells on.
Seeing as this film is truly the ultimate summer blockbuster (thanks, Mr. Bay), I’m going to have to break down this film like I do all others with the acting, the plot, and of course the one thing that ties the entire movie together: the effects.
Starting with the worst note and working our way up, the acting wasn’t the worst I’ve seen in a Bay film, but wasn’t exactly Gone with the Wind. I don’t know about you, but I expect when I’m going to see a movie about giant robots from space, I want Gone with the Wind.
Putting aside my disdain for Shia LaBeouf, I was just like every other fanboy out there on the Internet that rolled his or her eyes when the list of cameo’s for the flick got released. Bernie Mac’s presence in the film was completely superfluous, other than about eight seconds, his entire sequence should have gotten well acquainted with the floor. As well as John Turturro’s scenes. Turturro plays the cocky secret government agency role very well, but after about 10 minutes, it becomes too much to handle, and he needs to go away. When doing the entire exposition scene of Megatron and the plot-focusing All-Spark cube, there was no need for a cocky government type. Just faces of awe.
LaBeouf and Megan Fox did a decent job of playing the frightened kids… at first. But once the imminent threat of world domination became second priority to LeBeouf’s parents finding him alone in a room with a girl, the film kind of lost its head. As scary as chracter actor Kevin Dunn can be, a gigantic robot with a sword is far scarier. Finally, Jon Voight, Josh Duhamel, and Tyrese “Hero For Hire” Gibson played roles that were both aiding in the “Bay” way of showing the how disasters effect people on a human level, but these characters were effortlessly forgettable in comparison to the robots.
The fifth issue of Helix, a free on-line magazine dedicated to publishing stories too extreme for regular print SF/F magazines, has just been published, with new stories by Esther Friesner, Brenda Clough, and others.
Locus, the newsmagazine of the SF/Fantasy field, has mailed their July issue, and posted a profile page about it on their website. The July issue includes interviews with Peter S. Beagle and Paolo Bacigalupi, results from this year’s Locus Poll, and lots of news and reviews.
There’s a new issue of SF Site for July, with lots of reviews, a listing of new books received, and whatnot.
Strange Horizons has an update every Monday, and this week is no exception; new this time is a story by Jerome Steuart and a poem by David Lunde.
Well, after 12 years John McClain is back in full force with Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth sequel in the series, and the sixth sequel to come out this summer. I have to say going into the flick I wasn’t expecting much, especially after seeing the trailer, which only made me believe Ric Meyer’s micro-review in saying that this isn’t a Die Hard sequel, it’s actually the unwritten sequel for Unbreakable. So between that and the fact that this is the first Die Hard film to receive a PG-13 Rating, I was less than excited for it.
Having that frame of mind, I think I was able to enjoy the film much more. I wasn’t looking for a direct comparison to the first three movies, I just wanted a good John McClain movie, and that’s what I got. The biggest issue with Bruce Willis’ character is that Willis himself has so drastically changed his acting style in the last 12 years, that it’s like asking Walt Disney’s head to unfreeze itself and start drawing exactly like he used to. Granted the fun loving, swearing Bruce Willis that we remember from the first flicks is long gone, and we’re left with the bald, grumpy old man Willis who looks like he has to force himself to smile, but we all just have to change with the times, and even McClain has to age.
Following the formula of With a Vengeance, our hero is accompanied by a would-be sidekick, who fights spends a good chunk of the movie deciding whether or not this is a battle worth fighting, and of course breaking out of his mold by the end of the movie to become someone super cop John McClain can respect. This time around, we get Mac Boy Justin Long as the cowardly super hacker Matt Fuller. Long played the role just as any sidekick should, by accentuating the heroism of…well, the hero.
Also along for the ride were Maggie Q and Tim Olyphant as the evil duo. Everywhere I go, guys are falling in love with Maggie Q, and until checking out this movie I didn’t know why. She manages to play the seductive-yet-deadly henchwoman very well. And as per usual, Olyphant oozes charisma as the bad guy in this picture. I’ve been following this guy since Gone in 60 Seconds, and I’ve had nothing but good things to say about each of his roles.
I should warn you about these link-lists: Mondays tend to be longer than usual (since there’s a lot of content that goes up on the weekend, or early on Monday), and the beginning of the month tends to be longer than usual. Since we’re just past both of those things, this is going to be a really long one…
Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist reviews Dragons of the Highlord Skies by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.
A.N. Wilson reviews Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go in the Telegraph.
SF Crowsnest reviews a whole bunch of things this week:
Reviewed by Lillian Baker, age 8
I started making comics when I was three. When I was six, I made copies and started to sell them at soccer. Last year, when I was seven, I sold them at my dad’s table at the New York ComicCon. Alexa Kitchen wrote and drew her new book when she was seven, too. She’s nine now.
She is a talented girl. I can tell because I read a lot of her books. She makes up really really really good stories. I see that she gets inspired by Calvin and Hobbes a lot. She talks to her doll dog. His name is Kora 2. Other characters are Lucy, who is the girl on the cover, and Denis the cat.
It’s a book about drawing, not just funny cartoons. It’s very funny, though.
Alexa is a very nice girl.
Drawing Comics is Easy (Except When It’s Hard), by Alexa Kitchen, age 7
Published by DKP
$19.95
www.alexakitchen.com
(An editorial note: ComicMixers have no doubt noticed our intrepid crew tends to share certain fannish predilections. Among these is a lust for Apple technology. No less than five of us either ordered or purchased iPhones the day the thing came out. This is the first review; we’ll probably be referencing our experiences in the future. Now we can easily text message each other while getting our Doctor Who fix.)
I decided last week that I needed to have an iPhone. The hype had finally gotten to me, the slick GUI, the web features, all of it. This was further enhanced by my awful experiences dealing with Verizon Wireless and my Motorola RAZR breaking during normal use more than once.
It was no surprise that I reached to Apple in a time of need. Every computer I have ever used on a consistent basis has been an Apple from my parents’ Macintosh SE back in the late 80s to my current MacBook Pro. The thing I believe sets Apple apart from other companies is the concern they have for user experience. This is reflected everywhere from their more elegant operating system to their excellent customer service. The only serious problem I ever had with Apple was my parents’ Power Mac 8100, which had a power supply problem they were unable to diagnose, and plagued the machine for over a year.
The Internet was abuzz with rumors and speculation about how difficult or not difficult it would be to get an iPhone on the first day. I firmly believed I could wait at either Apple Store location in Manhattan and get an iPhone with no problem. However, I thought that waiting outside all day in the heat would be decidedly unpleasant. I turned my attention to Garden City’s Roosevelt Field Mall. It’s an upscale mall with an Apple Store and is the tenth largest mall in the country in terms of space. Certainly they would have room to enclose the line in comfortable air conditioning.
I could not have been more wrong. Standing in line at Roosevelt Field was largely a nightmare. The line was entirely outside on their southern parking garage structure with the overwhelming majority of the line on the top level of the structure, exposed to the elements. The heat and sun exposure got to me, leaving me with moderate sunburn; I was far from alone in that. To treat customers lined up to purchase a $500 item like that is ridiculous. They had space inside and they refused to use it to accommodate us. Mall security defended themselves by saying this was the same way they treated people lining up for the Playstation 3 but those lines were overwhelmingly eBay scalpers.
At 6 PM the lines were gradually let into the store and by 7 I was on my way back to Manhattan with an 8 GB iPhone. The Apple Store had plenty and I believe that one can still walk into any Apple Store in the area and buy one as we speak. Was it stupid to wait in line all afternoon for a product with a seemingly low scarcity factor? Probably, but sometimes it’s fun to be the first person you know to have something cool. I was ready to activate my phone through iTunes and be on my way.
Activation was, unfortunately, another arduous process. The AT&T server seemingly buckled under the strain of all the Mac addicts and stories of long struggles to activate were prevalent. It took my phone nine hours to activate. The iPhone will do nothing until activated so I had a $600 brick until 6:30 Saturday morning.
At that point I could use all of its fantastic abilities except for receiving calls. I was playing around with all of the wonderful iPhone features but every time someone called me I had to dig around in my bag for my old RAZR to answer the call. My number was not transferred to my iPhone until about 11:30 AM Sunday. It’s unclear whether this was a problem with AT&T or Verizon, but it was another inconvenience in a weekend filled with them. Everyone but Apple really screwed up this process and I can’t help but wonder if Apple doesn’t need to be more vigilant in choosing their partners including the malls they choose to put stores in and their cell phone network.
The iPhone, incidentally, is wonderful once it works. I urge everyone in need of a device that does all these things to go buy one as soon as possible. I hear they’re still plentiful at Apple retail locations, although AT&T owned stores by and large sold out Friday night.
I’m spoiled already. Seven weeks into this column, and I yawn when I see a DVD with only one audio commentary. It wasn’t even seven weeks when I succumbed to the Critics Disease, judging each new entertainment against the one I had seen the day, week, month, or year before.
For the most part, the illness symptoms aren’t as egregious for DVDs as they are for films, since it’s likely most people see more DVDs than go to the movies, and therefore have touches of the malady themselves. Besides, as I pointed out before, expectations are far lower for films seen on TV than they are in the cinemas.
Even so, some worthy discs (or double discs) can slip through the cracks while I’m la-di-dahing. Such is the case for Fantastic Four Extended Edition I first mentioned a column or two back. Don’t get me wrong: the actual film, despite the twenty minutes of reinstated footage, still isn’t as good as it could or should have been. But in the weeks since reviewing it, my memory keeps going back to the special features.
So now I feel I could have been a bit more adamant about the editions charms, especially with this sites readers. Maybe I should have mentioned that the extras come in two categories: the film, and the comic book. And it is in this latter category where the glory of this version truly lies. There are new, lovingly created docs each more than an hour long on the history of the comic from the 1960s until today, and on co-creator/artist supreme Jack Kirby.
Each features the cream of the comic worlds crop (Stan Lee, Jim Lee, George Perez, Marv Wolfman, Walt Simonson, Len Wein, Alex Ross, and many others) waxing enthusiastically about their writing and artistic contribution to the series (save for John Byrne, whose absence is accusatory, though his input is lauded) as well as the man who inspired them. Remember, grasshoppers, that the climatic locale for the first season of Heroes was called Kirby Plaza for a reason. The docs do a nifty, pleasing job of balancing art images with talking heads, and the overall effect is a warm and fuzzy feeling for a film that wasnt that rousing to begin with.
The first Fantastic Four film should be so lucky as to be remembered with the same fondness as its fantastic predecessor, Fantastic Voyage. In addition to sharing an adjective (or is that an adverb?), 20th Century Fox has released special editions of their respective DVDs at the same time. But Voyage, incongruously, is part of Fox’s Cinema Classics Collection.
Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist was not impressed by David Bilsborough’s debut fantasy novel, The Wanderer’s Tale.
The Baltimore City Paper reviews the new all-original anthology The New Space Opera, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan.
Another review of the Dozois-Strahan New Space Opera comes from Locus’s Gary K. Wolfe.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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