The past few weeks, I’ve fallen accidentally in love with a show 14 years too late. The Judd Apatow produced Wonder Years of my generation (or technically… the generation above mine) has finally caught the apple of my eye and has me a bit nostalgic.
Marvel’s promise that everything will change after Captain America: The Winter Soldier was no understatement. A solid plot, witty banter, some very surprising returns and couple seeds for future films resulted in what may well be the best Marvel film yet. Marvel seems dedicated to show that not all comic book movies are the same. The upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy is clearly set up to be an action comedy, and Winter Soldier is at its heart a political intrigue thriller. It still carries the hi-tech trappings and gadgets of a superhero story, but it’s a much more grounded film, touching on rather sober topics like dealing with life back home after a term in combat, the eternal questions of how much freedom will people surrender in the name of safety, and the simple question, “Who do you trust?”. There’s no way to discuss the film without hitting numerous spoilers, so before we do this, does anyone want to get off? (more…)
UPDATE 3/31: Round 4 is over. Vote in the Elite 8 round now!
UPDATE 3/28 Midnight: We swear, we don’t know how it happened. But we screwed up the totals from Round 3 on a few of the contests, and reported the wrong winners in some contests.
First, our apologies to Grrl Power and Awkward Zombie for misreporting their results, and our apologies to Order Of The Stick and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for getting their hopes up. Sorry, folks.
Now, how we’re going to solve the problem: we’re going to replace the strips in the contests, and ComicMix is buying votes to match the current votes for Widdershins (72) and Monsterkind (143), effectively setting the contests at dead even. This allows us to start a new poll right now, which makes the contest even again.
[socialpoll id=”2194504″]
Because of the late start, we’ll extend the voting time for this contest to Sunday at midnight.
Again, our apologies to all concerned.
Round 3 is over, and we’ve raised another $153 for the Hero Initiative. Now we’re down to the webcomics Sweet 16! Round 4 of the Mix March Madness 2014 Webcomics Tournament starts now!
People are now beginning to buy the winning votes, making the difference for Dick Ruby and Widdershins— so get your votes in early and get your friends in too.
In deference to the folks at Emerald City Comic Con voting lasts until Midnight Pacific Time on Saturday, March 29! Here are the latest standings…
So that snot-nose college boys thinks he’s putting one over on me, hah? Foreign bastard. I mean, look at his name. I don’t even know how to say it. True Dough? Tree dee- you? First name Garry? Yeah, sure it is; Prob’ly something like Garovitchsky. You see what he’s doing with his comic strip…did I say comic strip? What I meant was commie strip. Anyway, you see today’s paper? This Tree-dee-you is reprinting crap he did I don’t know how long ago…twenty, thirty years!
Now, in the first place, I don’t pay for crap that’s that old. If I read the news section, I wouldn’t want to read about stuff that happened twenty-thirty years ago. You feed me stuff that’s twenty-thirty years old, what you’re doing is stealing my money ‘cause I don’t pay for stuff that’s twenty-thirty years old. It’s like them sissy-boys and their wine…just shows how stupid they are, plunking down fifty-sixty dollars for wine that’s fifty-sixty years old. Not that I seen ‘em do it. Fella on the train told me about it. Anyway, his Tree-dee-you is too lazy to do new commie strips so he’s feeding us old stuff, thinks we’re too dumb to notice.
But that ain’t the worst of it. See, the old stuff don’t even look like the new stuff and so what the snotnose is telling us is that his commie strip has changed. Sure it has. Damn well told it has. ‘Cause he changed it! What he’s trying to do is, the sneaky sonuvabitch, he’s trying to make us think that stuff changes. Planting the idea in our heads. Planting the idea in our kids’ heads! So pretty soon we’re going to believe that the earth is way old and not just the six-thousand years we know it is and that evolution is right and holy scripture is wrong and all that dumb type of stuff. Did I say dumb? Just look out the window. See anything changing? When was the last time you seen your Aunt Sadie change into a monkey? When did you see a monkey change into Aunt Sadie? Boy, they sure must think we’re stupid.
Know what I bet Tree-dee-you watches on the teevee? I bet he watches that Cosmos thing that on Fox on Sunday night and how come it’s on Fox anyway when Fox usually knows better? Anyway, it’s full of stuff about everything changing and some of it doesn’t even look like anything I ever seen. Prob’ly whoever’s making the pictures is taking drugs. Not that I really watched it ‘cause I got better things to do with my time but it came on one night and before I could find the remote I accidentally seen some of it and boy-howdy, I tell you it made me sick.
I gotta go now, but remember, they’re watching you and they’re out to get you.
Photo by NCMallory 
(For reasons that will become obvious, this, my first column in about a month, is to be run both on www.MichaelDavisWorld.com and on www.ComicMix.com. Go nuts; read it twice and offer contradictory comments!)
I have a friend named Larry Schlam, a noted child’s rights advocate and a former Bronx street-corner singer. Back around 1973 he and I were cutting through the Montgomery Ward store in downtown Chicago and I wanted to stop at their donut shop, which was excellent. Larry, who is prone to eating frog’s legs and sushi (not necessarily together), explained the concept of “empty calories.” This past month, I learned the concept of invisible donuts.
This winter, the convention has been to slip on the massive ice floe that has engulfed most of this nation east of the Rocky Mountains. That’s not for me. I don’t roll that way. A month ago I took a fall about thirty feet below the ice, at the Times Square subway station. Had this not been an accident, I would have had the foresight to bring along a coffee can to collect contributions. Intention aside, I managed to pulverize my left shoulder – and, of course, I’m left-handed. I’m damn near left-everything.
But I say “pulverize” instead of “break” because that’s exactly what happened. Several X-Ray technicians, emergency room personnel, and my surgeon-to-be all wondered why I wasn’t on a morphine drip. Nonetheless, my shoulder replacement surgery was scheduled for about two weeks later, doubtlessly so I had time to reflect upon my behavior. However, I was given Oxycodone and Vicodin to battle the pain. They said I was stoic. I said it hurt.
Both are opiates and are taken recreationally by some. Contrary to common wisdom medicine is an art form and not a science – what works for you could be no more effective than a Skittle for me. The meds helped with the pain, but the concurrent high was insufficient for me to break out my Jimi Hendrix albums. So it goes.
When it finally came time to go under the knife, I was told I’d be in hospital for one night, maybe two. Surgery was scheduled for the last Monday in February. But I woke up on Thursday with a bit of grogginess and that whole unmentionable catheter thing (yes, guys, you too can squirm). Being in compos mentis, I figured I was wrong and the surgery must have happened on Wednesday.
Well, I was wrong. The new shoulder went in on Monday, and Tuesday evening I had a severe reaction to the anesthesia. My blood oxygen was down to a near-lethal level and I was acting like – in the words of my gifted daughter Adriane – a 220 pound drunken three year old. Evidently I was funny and charming, but I scared the hell out of the assembled medical practitioners. As I do not drink alcohol and do not have a street drug problem (they called around to confirm this), they were dumbfounded.
Meanwhile, I was having a blast. Prior to my blood oxygen train wreck I announced to the assembled masses that two boxes of invisible donuts had just materialized on my chest. Given the circumstances, I believe there was some attempt to quantify the humor of my revelation. A short time later, Adriane saw me pantomiming eating those donuts. She asked “Are you, ah, eating those donuts?” I responded mouth-closed (even in my condo in Wackyland, I endeavor to remain polite) by opening my eyes brightly and nodding happily.
I’m told I spent Wednesday in the ICU until my numbers recovered, and I was discharged the following Friday. My new shoulder has more chrome in it than a ’57 Buick and I still can’t use my left arm for more than a few minutes – this piece will have taken me about six times as long to write. After a few more doctors, I’ll be starting physical therapy in a couple weeks. Larry Hama, who’s been through this type of thing and just had a hip replacement, advised me “Whatever the therapist tells you to do, do it.” That’s good enough for me.
So I haven’t quite disappeared from the planet as of yet. I’m blessed with good friends, comrades who cover for me without squawking, a wonderful slew of professionals at Norwalk and Stamford Hospitals, and a daughter so awesome and self-sacrificing I wonder what I did in a prior life to deserve her.
Invisible donuts are just as satisfying as the real thing – but getting them is a bitch.
Mike Gold will get back to performing his weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information. He thinks this will happen on Sunday, March 16th. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color. Gold also joins ComicMix’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.michaeldavisworld.com, and chances are you’re presently reading these words at one of those two venues.
“I love zombies. If any monster could Riverdance, it would be zombies.”
—Craig Ferguson
We’re not the only ones obsessed with—ahem—[[[The Walking Dead]]]. Everybody seems to be in on it.
Here’s a very, very, short list of zombie movies:
There are lots more.
Probably hundreds.
Yeah, everybody loves zombies.
Everybody but me, that is. (Okay, I did love Shaun of the Dead.)
The first time I saw a zombie movie was way back when, and it was George Romero’s classic Night Of The Living Dead. Only I really didn’t see it because I was terrified and spent most of the time either cringing, with eyes closed, in my movie seat. Though it wasn’t the zombies themselves so much that scared me—it was the claustrophobic terror of being trapped with no way out that did me in.
It’s probably that experience that turned me off zombies forever. (Except for Shaun of the Dead).
Vampires? Love ‘em to death. My therapist would say that’s because Dracula and Angel and Spike represent the sexual fantasies that resonate with the underlying forbidden desires that lurk within my psyche. It doesn’t have anything to do with Frank Langella, David Boreanaz, or James Marsters.
Ghosts? The most popular theory professed by parapsychologists as to why people hang around after death is that he or she can’t let go of some relationship or need to right some great wrong. That’s gothically romantic. Especially since Patrick Swayze. Werewolves? Not so sexy or romantic. Okay, a million-zillion teenage girls on Team Jacob would argue with me. But they are sad souls—Seth Green’s Daniel “Oz” Osbourne in [[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]], David Naughton’s David Kessler in An American Werewolf in London, and the saddest of them all, Lon Chaney, Jr’s. Larry Talbot in The Wolf Man—for whom I can cry and with whom I can vicariously suffer the vicious vagaries of life as a monster.
But zombies?
No, thanks. I’ll pass.
(Okay, except for Shaun of the Dead).
Tonight (last night as you read this) is the premiere of Resurrection on ABC, which is based on the novel The Returned by Jason Mott and is produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment. The Sundance Channel had immense success last fall with the French television series The Returned, which was an adaptation of Les Revenants, which in English means They Came Back and which is on the list that opened that column.
Will it be more zombies?
It’s Zomb-A-Rama!!!!!
I don’t know whether he was a super villain or a sommelier, because in his origin story Reverse-Flash served a rather poor whine.
(Yes, I said that.)
First, we’re not talking about your father’s Reverse-Flash, Eobard Thawne. Or your older brother’s Reverse-Flash, Hunter Zolomon. We’re talking the New 52 Reverse-Flash, Daniel West. The one whose secret origin, which appeared in The Flash 23.2, was the biggest batch of bad whines since Mr. Boone got himself a farm.
(Yes, I said it again.)
Daniel narrates his own origin and makes a real sob story out of it. His mother died in childbirth. Daniel’s father blamed Daniel for his wife’s death so hated him. Daniel hated daddy back. Daniel did, however, love his sister, Iris West; yes, that Iris West. Daniel pushed his father down the stairs and daddy became a paraplegic. Then Daniel’s relationship with Iris soured. (Can’t you just feel the tears welling up?) (more…)
[[[Bill Hicks]]] died twenty years ago today, February 26, 1994. Most comic book fans know him from his appearance in Preacher #31, by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon:
Here’s the man at work, in a segment that David Letterman removed from his show:
This was his final statement:
February 7, 1994 –
I was born William Melvin Hicks on December 16, 1961 in Valdosta, Georgia. Ugh. Melvin Hicks from Georgia. Yee Har! I already had gotten off to life on the wrong foot. I was always “awake,” I guess you’d say. Some part of me clamoring for new insights and new ways to make the world a better place.
All of this came out years down the line, in my multitude of creative interests that are the tools I now bring to the Party. Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who’ve helped me. I’d read these words and off I went – dreaming my own imaginative dreams. Exercising them at will, eventually to form bands, comedy, more bands, movies, anything creative. This is the coin of the realm I use in my words – Vision.
On June 16, 1993 I was diagnosed with having “liver cancer that had spread from the pancreas.” One of life’s weirdest and worst jokes imaginable. I’d been making such progress recently in my attitude, my career and realizing my dreams that it just stood me on my head for a while. “Why me!?” I would cry out, and “Why now!?”
Well, I know now there may never be any answers to those particular questions, but maybe in telling a little about myself, we can find some other answers to other questions. That might help our way down our own particular paths, towards realizing my dream of New Hope and New Happiness.
Amen
I left in love, in laughter, and in truth and wherever truth, love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit.
More power to you, buddy. Hope you enjoyed the ride.
A sad day in comics is coming.
Sad days are in my opinion, the one thing that the comic book business knows better that any other entertainment business. Yes, other media has its share of sad days but those are usually the death of someone.
I wish (and so do you) I had a dollar every time I’ve heard some newscaster, after lowering their voice, state with deep, deep sorrow:
“It’s a sad day in Hollywood, Bart Simpson was shot and killed this morning when he smiled at a man in Florida. After the man shot the famed Simpson he told police he thought the smile was a gun. This was the latest in what has become a wave of ‘colored’ killings. Florida’s ‘Stand your ground ruling’ accomplished what critics of the law thought it was intended for, the elimination of Black kids from the cites of Florida. Once the last Black child was eliminated, killings of other colored youth (including cartoon characters) spiked to new highs.
Let’s see now, where were we before we were interrupted?
Back in the Mesozoic Era, there was something called the print media. You remember the print media, don’t you? It was in all the papers. Well, one of the all the papers that print media printed in was Comics Buyer’s Guide; or CBG as those of us who didn’t want to type out Comics Buyer’s Guide all the time called it. CBG was a weekly trade paper about the comic-book industry. It wasn’t as big and important as Billboard or Variety or even as vital as that paper that gives positive reviews to every movie no matter how wretched, because studios have to get their pull quotes from somewhere. But CBG was ours and we loved it.
And I loved CBG more than most, because for over two decades I wrote a regular feature called “The Law Is a Ass” for it; a column that combined legal analysis and comic books.
Legal analysis and comic books? How did that unlikely combination come about? (more…)
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
