The numbers are in and WATCHMEN starts fast and ends at a jaunt, while David Faustino shares the future of his STAR-VING series, we predict what will be in your bag from the comic shop this week, PERRY BIBLE FELLOWSHIP hits hardcover and Mike Gold reviews the Watchmen reviews.
PRESS THE BUTTON to Get The Point!
And be sure to stay on The Point via 
, RSS, MyPodcast.Com or Podbean
The weekend’s list of quick items:
Anything else? Consider this an open thread.
Happy Watchmas, everybody! Today’s list of quick items:
Anything else? Consider this an open thread.
This is the weekend where everyone is talking WATCHMEN, so why shouldn’t we? Meanwhile, J.J. Abrams apologizes for STAR TREK, Bud Bundy is a star on the internet and FATHOM will be a Fox.
PRESS THE BUTTON to Get The Point!
And be sure to stay on The Point via , RSS, MyPodcast.Com or Podbean
You know Hellblazer #63, the issue where John Constantine turns forty? Yesterday was like that for me, only with cheesecake. And today was definitely like that scene at the end.
So, now that I’m more or less recovered from that, today’s yesterday’s list of quick items:
Anything else? Consider this an open thread.
Editor’s note: With the imminent release of Watchmen, we thought we’d try and get a different perspective. So we asked Alexandra Honigsberg, a professional ethicist and genre author, to read the book for the first time and delve into the ethos of the world created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
If super-hero comics are the literature of ethics, then Watchmen is the literature of un-ethics. It is the template for what not to do and makes Batman look like a Boy Scout, even at his darkest Dark Knight. They make Dirty Harry look clean. There’s a new saying on the street that Bitch is the New Black, it Gets Things Done. Well, these guys and gals are certainly the biatch. But is there any way to redeem their actions so that the ends justify the means? Or, more importantly, that even the most inhumane or inhuman retains some sense of what it means to be human?
The study of ethics is the exploration of the good life and how to live it. Now by the “good life” I don’t mean the bling life. I mean a life that is honourable, virtuous and, on a profound level not shaken by the winds of change, happy. Happiness (or pleasure or joy or The Good). That’s the end, the ultimate goal, or what Aristotle calls “that at which all rational beings aim.” Ari makes a fine distinction between the acts of a man (animal, non-rational) and the acts of a human (rational) or what some of us might term the mensch (gender neutral). One of the biggest invectives that Laurie hurls at Dr. Manhattan/Jon Osterman is that, after working for so long in the lab and being so all-powerful (the man not only to end all wars, but end all worlds), he ceases to be human. Moore emphasizes this with quotes from Nietzsche, who claims that when we become evolved enough we will not need rules, we will have become extra-moral – the superman (not the Nazis’ bastardization thereof) who has no need of ethics as we now know them. But are we still human? Extreme means change the agent and therefore change the end (e.g., The Comedian’s total amorality). Can we still give a damn if we’re all god-like? Or in the midst of so much horror that no human could reasonably be expected to survive unscarred (think of the Holocaust), are we still human? What’s human? What’s life? What’s good and who decides? Who gives authority to whom and why?
Today’s list of quick items:
Anything else? Consider this an open thread.
Now I have to protest. Not because of the blatant commercialization of Watchmen, but because they used one of the sickest, most graphic pictures available for the mask.
I mean, look at it! Look! It’s disgusting and perverse! It stirs up all sorts of strange feelings inside of me. Thoughts of nuclear bombs and Egyptian pools and bikes in the snow and…
…excuse me. For some reason, I just remembered that I have to call my mother.
Picture from Action Figure Insider.
This week we not only hit the comic store for our Five Cool Things, but we stick around to meet the staff. Issues the Series is the web feature about Life in A Comic Shop and we hang out with two of the stars, plus comics’ brief shining moment at The Oscars, why funny books aren’t funny and set aside a good three hours now for WATCHMEN.
PRESS THE BUTTON to Get The Point!
And be sure to stay on The Point via or RSS!
Yowza! Another con comes to a close, and a lot of hi’s from the usual gang of idiots, renewals of acquanitances (hi Cooch!), the continuted con conversations– you know, the ones which you pick up again as soon as you see the person you haven’t seen since the last convention, and so on.
We’ll have a lot of detailed reports from our Mix of folks soon, but here are my fast general impressions:
* Very successful, on a number of levels. The con has worked out all the problems related to size, and even though this is the biggest yet, they seem to have knocked out the bugs and ran very smoothly. There were no particular problems that aren’t encountered by any other con its size and location (the usual like convention center food, bad wi-fi, nothing within easy walking distance, etc.). Sellout crowds, very well attended panels, yet still movable for the most part.
* Most of the publishers and vendors I talked to were very happy with their traffic and sales. Scott Kurtz sold out of everything by the end of Saturday. Everything. One can only imaging what Sunday would have brought with a kid filled crowd.
* Lots of costumes, which is a sign of a certain level of growth and maturity for a con, if not necessarily for the con-goers. We’ll have photos up this week.
* Paper and digital continue to share their uneasy alliance. Most publishers realize they now can’t survive without both components, and are trying to figure out how to make that work.
* I expected the entire con to be nothing but Watchmen, and was happy to be proven wrong. On the other hand, the crowd for Dave Gibbons at Titan Books at the end of the con was nothing short of insane, as you can see from the picture above– the line was five deep, as you can see in the photo. There are a lot of people eager for this movie, and not from places you might expect.
Hopefully, over the next few days, I’ll be ahead of the curve enough to get some real analysis done. On the other hand, since I still haven’t gotten around to doing my 2009 preview… oh well. Hope springs eternal– which, come to think of it, seems to be the overall theme of the convention.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
January 20, 2023
The Law Is A Ass #460: Those “For Life” Sentences Are Nonsense
February 24, 2022
