I know my limits!

Some friends and I were supposed to go drinking last night, but several desertions resulted in the plans falling through. My friend John’s response when I invited him along was of particular note, as he suggested that I’ve been drinking a lot lately and that “Maybe you should cut back a little.” I thought about his words and I believe I had what alcoholics call “a moment of clarity,” wherein a previously obscured truth becomes painfully evident. In my moment of clarity I realized that John’s a real asshole and I need to have fewer friends who stand in the way of me having a good time.

Glad I got that all sorted out, now I can finally move on.
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Since all the squares bolting led us to have a less than party sized group, we wound up going to the movies instead, and saw War of the Worlds. I had a decidedly lukewarm response to Spielberg’s last two forays into science fiction, with AI and Minority Report, but I thought the trailers for this movie looked okay, so I went in with guarded optimism. The movie delivers on the spectacle, as the alien machines tromp around and break a lot of stuff. Not all the CGI looks believable, but for the most part I bought into the illusion.

The movie does a good job putting the viewer on the ground right alongside Tom Cruise’s character, and not knowing the extent of what is going on. The characters are interesting in that they don’t fall into any of the typical heroic types. Dakota Fanning is precocious, but refrains from acting like a creepy little adult like she normally does. Also, Tom Cruise’s character is not the “wrongfully put-upon single dad who is actually a good dad” usually seen in movies; instead, at several points in the movie you see that he is actually a really bad dad. While having the characters be flawed brought them down to earth, I have rarely seen a movie with so many people in it that I felt I needed to slap some sense into. The kids especially, with Dakota Fanning’s screaming and the son’s irrationality, are about as good an advertisement for birth control as I’ve ever seen. Well, other than this.

(Side note: I stole my friend Kevin's seat while he was buying popcorn and I was repaid for my jerky conduct by having the kid behind me kick my chair all through the movie. Moreover, the guy in the row in front of us kept making dove noises. I don't know why it pissed me off so much, but it did.)

I was impressed by how closely the movie stuck to several plot points and themes from the original novel: minor things like the reaction of birds to the aliens, and more significant plot points like the breakdown of social niceties in the midst of the mass exodus. The scene in which the mob overcomes the van was particularly powerful. Conversely, the movie fails whenever it deviates from the themes of the novel. I can accept giving Cruise’s character kids in order to humanize him somewhat, but having him (highlight white text to read spoilers) blow up an alien with grenades or giving him an insight that lets the soldiers use their rocket launchers undercuts the point that humanity is completely powerless before the colonizing force of the aliens. In giving in to the summer blockbuster mentality and having the hero kick some ass, Spielberg weakens the story’s critique of imperialism. Also, the very end of the movie smacked of pandering to the test audiences.

As well, the movie strives too hard for relevancy by incorporating several heavy handed references to 9-11 (with the distance shots of the first walker standing in a cityscape covered in smoke, and with Tom Cruise coming home covered in dust) and the war in Iraq (with the crazy basement guy declaring that occupations never work). When Wells wrote the original story he just wanted to blow up some places that he was familiar with, everything else just fell into place. I can’t help but think that this movie would have been better served if the makers had followed a similar strategy.

Overall, the movie was average. I liked the spectacle, but I never connected with the characters or the events on screen. I definitely did not get the gut wrenching involvement that I sensed the movie makers intended for the audience to have. I wouldn’t call this movie a waste of time, but I don't think you'd lose anything in watching it on DVD rather than in the theatre.

They never shoulda given you nerds money

Here’s an article that discusses the process behind creating the Batmobile for the new Batman movie. They interview the car’s designer, who relates some interesting tidbits about the specifications, including the fact that the four fully drivable Batmobiles are capable of going from zero to 100kph in 5.3 seconds. Having a roadworthy Batmobile is intriguing, since, as far as I know, the Burton and Schumacher versions were just fiberglass shells and would’ve fallen apart if they’d gone that fast.

The filmmakers used eight Batmobiles in total: four for driving, two for scenes in which characters got in and out of the cars, and

Two more Batmobiles, empty rolling shells, were shot out of huge air cannons to create leaping shots like those in which the car jumps through a waterfall into the Bat Cave.

That right there is the coolest image ever. Getting to shoot hollow Batmobiles out of an air cannon is the best job I’ve ever heard of. (Well, second best). In fact, should I ever become ludicrously rich, I’m installing one of those bad boys in my garage, so that I won’t drive onto my street so much as launch onto it. Seriously, how much would that rock?

(via The Comic Reel)
(more Batmobile info at Howstuffworks.com)
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Speaking of nerds and their money, a commonly known piece of nerd lore is that when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles craze erupted in the late 80s, co-creator Kevin Eastman took a little of the kajillion dollars he made and bought one of the original Batmobiles from the 60s TV show. And he married B- movie queen Julie Strain.

Now that’s a guy who stayed true to his roots; he gets rich and his list of priorities looks like this:

1. Buy Batmobile
2. Find Julie Strain

You are inspiration to us all sir, and I salute you.

What did Peter Laird do? Let us all down, that's what.
(image courtesy The Original 1966 Batmobile)
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The History of the Batmobile is a page that takes a comprehensive look at the evolution of Batmobile over the past sixty-five years. The site catalogues over a hundred different Batmobiles culled from comics, movies, TV, and toy designs, and provides commentary on each one. What I found particularly interesting were the concept designs for Batmobiles in the various movies, including a Batmobile design by HR Giger(!). Lots of images and trivia, go take a look.

Somewhere a pygmy weeps

I picked up eight new comics last week, which makes it the busiest comic week I’ve had in a long time. Everything was reasonably good, but nothing really stood out. I haven’t posted new reviews for a while, so for some of these I might review the current issue as well as the previous issue.

Now, in the order that I read them:

Queen and Country: Declassified Vol. 3 #1- I need to admit that I was in an exceptionally bad mood when I read this comic, a bad mood directed at the comic itself. I had ordered the first issue of volume 2, and this one showed up instead. My retailer’s been really good about a couple of things lately, so I didn’t raise a fuss about this being the wrong comic and I bought it anyways. On the drive home, however, I got mad at myself for buying a comic I didn’t really want, and when I sat down to read this book I was angry at it.

I think maybe that my anger made me hypercritical, because everything this book did rubbed me the wrong way. The multiple jumps back and forth in time in the opening pages made the narrative disjointed and hard to follow. Moreover, the artist's tendency to draw many characters with no shading or shadows made most of the people look the same, which hurt the storytelling as well. I finished the book with no interest in any of the characters or the situation.

I seem to be in the minority in not being impressed with the book; I’ve read three other reviews that all give this book top marks. However, even after going back and reading the comic again, the first impression has stuck, and I don’t think I’ll be buying any more.

Supreme Power #17- Maybe my bad mood affected the rest of my reading, because I didn’t like this book much either. Nothing much happens in the issue, other than a series of conversations that don’t leave us much further ahead than we were at the end of last issue. The pacing of this comic didn’t bother me for the first twelve or fifteen issues, because even though the book was slow, things were happening. The issues since the fight with the super powered murderer have seen the plot slow to a crawl. The darkness of the world Straczynski has created is starting to wear on me too. I didn’t feel empathy for any of the characters in this issue, and thus felt distanced from the story. Finally, the two characters I find most interesting, Nighthawk and the Blur, don’t appear in the issue at all. This book has been good enough in the past that I figure I’m in until the end of the current run, but if the pace and tone keep up like this I’m going to wind up dropping the title.

Hellboy: The Island #1- Any week when an issue of Hellboy comes out is a good week. I could go on forever about how much I love Hellboy, but you’ve heard it all before. Suffice it to say, the only reason you should have for not reading Hellboy is that you’re doing anthropological work with tree people in Borneo, and you don’t want to blow their minds with Mignola’s groundbreaking work. Sorry pygmies, you’ll have to make do with what you’ve got.

I mean, just look at this stuff:


The story picks up some time after the last Hellboy mini, The Third Wish, as Hellboy washes up on an island and has a series of hallucinatory experiences. The art, as usual, is beautiful, and the real entertainment comes from Hellboy’s "regular Joe" attitude towards the oddities he routinely encounters.

However, despite all my gushing, I wasn’t bowled over by this issue. The dreamlike narrative again left me feeling disconnected from the story. The multiple footnotes were also distracting, and the one citing Gregory Peck’s dialogue from Moby Dick was particularly jarring. This was still a good comic, and I trust the editor when he says in the letter column that the next issue will make everything make sense.

Astro City: The Dark Age #1- Another comic that goes long between issues. I’ve been more and more impressed with Busiek lately, after reading Arrowsmith and Superman: Secret Identity. He takes worn comic book tropes- like two brothers, one on either side of the law- and stock characters, and makes them both believable and human. The characters in this comic are complex and sympathetic; I love that the police officer brother is more cynical about superheroes than the brother who is a criminal. Little plot bits like the Old Soldier standing against US soldiers, and the arrest of the Silver Agent, are clever and have me intrigued. I’m glad to see this book on the stands again.

Captain America #7- A sort of flashback issue, that while interesting, doesn’t appear to leave us much farther ahead than before. Of course, Brubaker could, and very likely will, prove me wrong by having all this information be relevant to the master plot. I’m liking Brubaker’s Captain America so much that I was disappointed that he doesn’t appear in this issue. The winding story is serviceable, but didn’t impress me as much as earlier issues. Particularly surprising for me was my lukewarm reaction to John Paul Leon’s art. Leon is one of my favourite artists, and I love what he does with light and dark, but he’s doing something different with his art here. It works, but like the rest of the issue, it doesn’t blow me away. It’s the curse of excellence I guess, that I’m disappointed with this issue because it’s “only” good. Even with my lack of enthusiasm for this issue, I’ll be picking this comic up next month because this series has been so good so far.

Doc Frankenstein #3- Clunky writing, beautiful art. The stories have just enough to interest me that I can excuse buying this book for the art. The anti- Christian nature of some of the dialogue makes me wince at points, and I’m as atheist as they come. Take for instance this scene after armed troops from the Vatican have captured Frankenstein and taken him prisoner:


I suppose that’s clever, but it’s the kind of clever where you think of it, laugh to yourself, and never mention it again. These guys saved it and put it in a comic book. Those Wachowskis really need to work on their subtlety. I like the art extras in this comic, like the sketch covers and the concept designs and the outtake scenes.

The New Avengers #6- How is it that this is the Bendis book I’m enjoying the most right now (and yes, that includes Powers)? What kind of Bizarro universe have I fallen into? This issue isn’t as good as the ones that came before it, as the opening story arc wraps up. The character interaction is nice, although Spider-man is noticeably quieter this time around. Now that I think about it, the plot is somewhat random and circular. The reasoning for the team being in the Savage Land is never explained very well. Also, a mass slaughter happens at the end, and no one is particularly broken up about it; the main purpose seems to be that Tony Stark gets a chance to try and make some sense of the Avengers’ name by suggesting that they do some avenging. While everything about the plotting in this comic seems somewhat forced (Wolverine’s presence on the team is awkward at best), the dialoguing makes the book entertaining.

David Finch’s art is serviceable, but I’m kind of cold on the Top Cow house style. Also, he has a moment where he engages in one of my pet peeves:


What exactly is Spider-man attached to here? I’ll tell you: nothing! They’re on a plateau! In the Savage Land! Shouldn't somebody have spotted that?

House of M #1 & 2- I picked up the first issue and was entertained. Bendis handled the large cast of characters much better than before, and the Copiel art was clean and dynamic. I particularly liked the scene with Magneto and Quicksilver, I think they’re an interesting family and I’d like to see Bendis explore their relationship some more. A couple of nitpicks: Falcon, Wonder Man, and Ms. Marvel/ Warbird aren’t allowed to fly to the top of the Stark Tower because they might draw attention, but the X-Men can land their jet on the building? And there’s a quinjet already sitting up there. Nothing’s as inconspicuous as aircraft taking off and landing on a building in midtown Manhattan, I guess. Also, having the X-Men walk in to meet the Avengers in their gaudy spandex just reinforces to me how much better the Morrison outfits were. I don’t get how Cyclops expects to be taken seriously wearing that gimp suit.

I picked up the second issue based on my somewhat enjoyment of the first. This one fills in the blanks of where everyone has wound up in the alternate world that has somehow sprung up. This book has no plot that I can discern, it’s like an extended montage. Moreover, we have the cliché of the world being warped and only one person remembers (!). What’s worse is that the one person is (shock and awe) Wolverine. Argh. The art is still nice, and I’ll pick up the next issue to see what the big surprise is, but this issue was entirely missable.
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Crap, that was a lot of writing.

End the oppression

After a whole winter of complaining about the snow, I’ve been holding back on saying anything about the recent hot weather, but god damn, is it hot. The day before yesterday was 33° Celsius, and the Weather Network website informed me that with the humidity taken into account, the temperature felt like 43° Celsius. That’s just stupidly hot; some might even say oppressively hot; and I for one am sick of being oppressed.

What’s worse is that we're only in June.
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Over at the Isotope Virtual Lounge, Jock has posted a series of style guides he did for Batman Begins. Follow the link to see some nice pen and ink drawings, like this one:



(via Fanboy Rampage)
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Finally, at the New York Times site, author Neal Stephenson writes an interesting op/ed piece about Star Wars. He makes an interesting (and novel) connection between tech support people and the Jedi, calling the Jedi:

the geekiest people in the universe: they have beards and ponytails, they dress in army blankets, they are expert fighter pilots, they build their own laser swords from scratch.

And (as is made clear in the "Clone Wars" novels) the masses and the elites both claim to admire them, but actually fear and loathe them because they hate being dependent upon their powers.

The article is funny and short, go read it.

"My CPU is a neural net processor... a learning computer"

I haven’t updated in several days, which has apparently caused several people no end of hardship. I had to get my computer fixed alright? Geez, I didn’t realize we were dating.

Among other things, my CPU has been running hot so I got them to put a fan in. The problem is fixed, but now my already loud computer sounds like a jet engine. Anyways, it was technical difficulties that led to the lack of posts, not personal laziness. Actually I got my computer back on Tuesday, so it was five days of technical problems and four days of laziness. But I’m back. For now.
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I saw Batman Begins last weekend and I had a few thoughts that I wanted to get down. I liked the movie quite a bit overall, and I’m happy to see that it’s getting so many good reviews. Going in, I was hoping for adequate, and the movie was much better than that. The focus in the opening two-thirds (?) of the movie on Bruce Wayne and the process of him becoming Batman was effective in humanizing the character. I felt the tragedy of his loss here, perhaps better than anywhere else I’ve ever seen. Some minor tinkering was done with the origin story, but I didn’t mind because the changes held true to the spirit of the original stories. Using fear as a theme was a good idea and made sense of the choice of the Scarecrow as the costumed villain of the movie. The casting was spot-on perfect, and was almost a dream team of who you’d want to play the various characters. That said, not everyone had a lot to do; Gary Oldman in particular seemed to be spinning his wheels. I’m wondering if they’re going to be able to get everyone back for the inevitable sequels, considering name actors like these will all want their characters to develop.

I liked the pacing and the steady build-up to Batman’s first appearance; I was actually excited to see Bale as Wayne assume the character. I thought the scene in which he dangles Flass from the building and interrogates him was excellent, and sold me on Batman as a scary bastard. I also liked the scene where the Scarecrow hallucinates Batman as a demon.

That said, all the problems I had were to do with aspects of the movie after Batman shows up.

I didn’t like the cowl. The whole thing looked bulky and I saw none of the new neck mobility touted in so many of the interviews before the movie; the headgear looked as stiff as ever. I liked the shape of the mask better in the movies that came before, and I wish they’d been able to keep that look and give him a way of looking side to side. Also, while I liked how they explained the functionality of the costume, the character still looked stiff instead of agile.

I hated him gliding around on his cape. I can accept that the cape stiffens up like that- good idea- but rather than using it to slow his falls, he’s hang gliding around the city. I kept thinking that he was going to flap his cape like wings; if he had I would’ve gone into an apoplectic fit and swallowed my tongue.

I wish we’d seen him stopping some minor crimes, some muggings or something. It’s a bit of a superhero movie convention that once the hero reveals himself he establishes a presence in the city by stopping a series of crimes; you see it in Superman and in Spider-man. It may be worn, but it’s a convention I like.

On the other hand, superhero movies also have the convention of people reacting in cute disbelief whenever they see superheros for the first time: doing double takes, rubbing their eyes, or looking to see if their drink is spiked, and such. I hate that shit. And in Batman Begins, every scene with the batmobile had people saying, “I gotta get me one of those,” or similar comments that drove me up the wall. I liked the new batmobile, and I liked that it looked functional, but the filmmakers were clearly more enamoured with their car than I was.

Finally, much of the plot hinges on The League of Shadows’s plans to raze Gotham because that’s what they do apparently. In history they’ve toppled great cities when their civilizations have become too corrupt, and that’s the way they see Gotham. However, the movie never establishes Gotham as the urban dystopia the characters keep telling us it is. It actually looks like a nice place to live. I wish they’d borrowed the aesthetic of Alex Proyas’s The Crow movie, or something similar. Also, is Gotham really a center of civilization in the same way that Constantinople and London were at the times that they were destroyed?

But all of these are nitpicks. Even though I had (admittedly minor) problems with the Batman stuff, the Bruce Wayne scenes were perfect. I especially liked his sense of humour; like the crack about the weaponized hallucinogens. The movie was good, and well worth watching. I’m looking forward to seeing what this team does with the next one.

Shizzit is right!

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This is a Dave Gibbons panel from the classic Alan Moore story, “For the Man who has Everything.” What I never noticed before was the sound effect:



Is that the sound of Superman’s laser vision? Or is that the sound Mongul makes as he gets lasered by said vision?

Reason number two you don’t mess with Superman: He’ll burn you until you swear like Snoop Dogg, biatch!
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From over at Warren Ellis:



Nothing to say about it, it’s just cool.
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One of the adjustments I had to make in moving to Ontario last year was getting used to all the different road signs here. This one, for example, we don’t have back home:



What exactly does this mean? Watch out for the dump trucks that randomly drive into traffic at high speeds? Look at the motion lines behind the truck; he's not slowing down.

What kind of Mad Max world have I come to? Ontario: it’s the most dangerous place to drive on Earth.
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Finally, go take a look at my friend Paul’s blog, where he’s got the funniest post on bad album covers that I’ve ever seen.

Pork chop sandwiches!

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This is why you don’t mess with Superman. Are you tougher than an elephant? No? Then go home.
(link via BeaucoupKevin)
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This photo made me exclaim when I saw it. I no longer scoff at a comic character with a word balloon next to them with only an exclamation mark in it; I now know what it sounds like. Anyways, the photo:



Go see more here.
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And finally, I’ve learned that not everyone has seen the remixed GI Joe public service announcements, so here’s a link.



I don’t care if you’ve seen them, they’re still funny! Well, most are funny, some are just bizarre. This one’s the best one; you might have a different favourite, but you’re wrong.

Hanging with the band

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Went to a concert last night and saw a band called the Pocket Dwellers. I hadn’t heard of them before, but they were recommended by my friend Sofia. I’m not sure how I’d class their music, it’s kind of a jazz/ hip hop/ funk sound. They’re a traditional four piece band (singer, two guitarists, drums), with two more people on horns, and another person on turntables. The highlights of the night came in the various solos, particularly a bass solo near the end of the show. Overall, I got a great value for my fifteen bucks; the Pocket Dwellers headlined, with two bands as openers, and all three bands were very good.

The real point of the story, though, concerns what happened after the show. Me and the group I was with went to go get some pizza, and then we started looking for a cab home. As we were standing on the corner, we saw a van pull up to the red light and the Pocket Dwellers were driving. They recognized us from the show and they waved, and one of the girls in our group jokingly asked if they’d give us a ride home. They didn’t look too willing at first, but when we told them that we were on their way out of town, they told us to jump in. We had a friendly talk with them on the drive and they dropped us off within blocks of home.

I’ve been to a lot of concerts in my life, but never before has the band given me a ride home. Thanks for nothing Bono. Whoever I see next will have a lot to live up to now; any band that doesn’t drive you home has nothing on the Pocket Dwellers. That’s all I’m saying.
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I should point out too that one of the opening bands, Sweatshop Union, were excellent. They’re a hip hop group with six people rapping simultaneously. They remind of Swollen Members or Black Eyed Peas, but not really like those groups at all. Seeing all six of them rapping together and weaving their words around each others’ was worth the price of admission alone. I may have been less impressed by them if I’d just heard an album of their music since I would’ve assumed that all the mixing of sounds was done with studio tricks. Seeing them live, however, was a real show. I recommend them highly.

You can hear music from the Pocket Dwellers here, and from Sweatshop Union here.

Lessons in graphic design

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This cracks me up:



And look, it's a t-shirt!

This, on the other hand, is an example of exceptionally bad design:




(links courtesy BoingBoing)

Let's get cynical

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When Jim Steranko rants about comics I roll my eyes and move on.

When Carmine Infantino says, "I'm from a different generation. Things are grimmer now. Look at Sin City. And still later, Elongated Man's wife was raped and murdered? That's not a comic book", I get sad.

As Warren Ellis has said, “The DC universe is a dangerous place to be right now. Don’t drop the soap.”
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Speaking of Warren Ellis, remember a few weeks ago I was talking about all the funny stories he told at the Toronto Comicon? Well, they’re all here. Listen to a bunch of audio clips of him answering questions. Even if you don’t like Ellis’s work, or don’t know much about comics, the one about Garth Ennis’s stag is worth listening to for comedy value alone. I quite enjoyed the Alan Moore one as well.
(link via Comics.212.net)
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And finally, Mike at Progressive Ruin posted a link to this a little while ago, it’s the “Tusken Raider Encounter” Lego playset.



I guess “Tusken Massacre” didn’t play as well. Is this like labelling Vietnam a “conflict” instead of a “war”?

Guess who's back, back again

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I’ve been reading The Outbreak lately and it’s got me thinking. For anyone who doesn’t read it, The Outbreak is a blog written from the viewpoint of a person living in a world where a zombie outbreak has occurred. I wrote a few weeks back about blogs written from the points of view of superhero characters, but this blog is not so much about the character as it is about the world he lives in. The other blogs I mentioned before- like The Velvet Marauder - create fictional worlds as well, but what really separates The Outbreak from the others is that the people who leave comments do so as if they were in the world. (A caveat: Other fiction blogs may do this as well, this is just the first place I’ve seen it).

I find this really interesting for several reasons. I took an English class a few years ago where we looked at writing in various media and whether it could be considered literature (Des, was it called The Boundaries of Literature?). I took the class because we were going to be reading comic books, but we also looked at popular music lyrics, video games, screenplays, role playing games, and writing on the web. The internet stuff didn’t have too much to distinguish it from traditional writing, except someone might write a story with hyperlinks embedded in the text that would lead the reader in different directions, but the examples of “web literature” that we looked at didn’t seem like they were doing anything unique with the medium.

On its own, The Outbreak is story written in journal format, which is nothing new. But with the comment system, and more importantly, the way that people have been using the comment system, we’ve got something different. The conceit behind The Outbreak is that the zombies are everywhere, but they haven’t destroyed everything; some utilities still work, and the internet is somehow still up. Thus, when people comment, it’s like a community of survivors. Commenters talk about what’s going on in their own cities, and they add to the tapestry. The result is participatory fiction; there’s a central narrative, but all the voices contribute to the whole. More importantly, unlike most web fiction I’ve seen, the addition of the commenting system means that The Outbreak could not be reproduced in print form without having to alter and adapt it.

It’s an innovative use of the web, and specifically the blog format in order to create something new. There’s no reason that we couldn’t start seeing other fiction blogs written in different genres and settings, all with the readers contributing to the story. I’m interested to see what things look like in a year. I bet there’s a paper in this.
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Side note on that class I took, I did a presentation on The Onion as web literature, and I read out the Holy Shit, Man Walks on Fucking Moon article. It brought the house down, but the best part was when someone from the class came up and told me afterwards that he’d never heard someone swear so much in a university presentation before. Little things like that warm my black heart.
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I didn’t post last week because I was working on a paper. For those of you paying attention, remember a week or two back when I said that I was resuming daily blogging? Yeah, that might’ve been a little optimistic.

So for this paper I had to read a book that I was supposed to have read weeks ago and write something on it by the Monday that just passed. Before I started reading I flipped to the end of the book and saw that it was 330 pages, which didn’t seem that bad. I read it all week, but I was so disinterested that by last Friday I’d only gotten to page 200. What I found odd was that if you looked at where I’d gotten to it didn’t even look like I’d reached the halfway point. I didn’t worry too much about it, and I figured things would sort themselves out by the time I got to the end.

Then on Friday I lost my spot, and as I was flipping around I saw that that at page 220, volume two started, and the numbering began again at zero. Which, just to spell it out, meant that the book was twice as long as I thought it was.

I told my roommate the story and in hushed tones she said, “You really are the worst student ever.” I’ve been telling her that for months, but she’d just laughed it off. Until now. Remember in the first Matrix movie, when people keep stopping and saying, “He is the One”? It was like that, except, y’know, not a good thing.

I read the remaining 350 pages all on Saturday, which goes to show that I can work when I have to. The paper is now finished, so the point of the story, other than me being the worst student ever, is that I’ll be blogging regularly again. For a little while at least.

Taking one for the team

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Joined my department’s softball team. At the game yesterday, I was playing second and I managed to stop a grounder with my face; such is my devotion to my team and indeed to the sport of softball.

A month or two back my doctor told me that some medication I’d been on for a while might have the side effect of leeching calcium from my bones. I got a bone density scan done and sure enough, my bones are not as dense as they should be. The doctor recommended that I avoid contact sports for a while. So as I’m reeling from being hit in the face yesterday, I’m wondering just how “Mr. Glass” I am, and whether I’ve just shattered my cheekbone. I seem to be okay, but that may just be the neurological damage talking.

If the bruise turns into a nice shiner, I’ll post a photo.
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Despite my parents being in town last weekend, I managed to ditch them long enough to go to the Toronto Comic Arts Festival for a bit. I attended a panel called “Comics in the Academy,” that had academics from English, History, Communications, Media Studies, and more, talking about teaching and studying comics in a post-secondary setting.

A few notes:

• I was interested in what each of the panelists had to say about their different approaches to teaching comics. Phoebe Gloeckner mentioned exposing students to bad comics as well as good comics, which hadn’t occurred to me. Even in Lit Studies I think the assumption is often that if you’re exposed to enough “good” literature, you’ll just recognize the bad when you see it; but we rarely deal with what qualifies some works as canonical and others not.
  

• Another panelist, Jonathan Warren, raised the idea of reading comics enthusiastically versus reading them critically. People will know all the minutiae of a character’s stories, but be satisfied with stopping there; critical reading, he said, means taking the next step after knowing the names of Peter Parker’s girlfriends in order. It seems like common sense as I’m typing it out, but a light bulb turned on when he said it. I wonder sometimes if I’m too close to comics to study them in an academic framework. I can look at video games, or TV, or popular music and apply critical modes of analysis to them, but I have a hard time doing the same for comics.
  

• Something else I found interesting was how problematic all the panellists thought Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics is. Gloeckner, for instance, pointed out that McCloud risks defining the form by writing about it in comic book format. Film theory, she noted, isn’t presented in film form. I know that McCloud’s book is contentious, but the panel’s attitude towards it suggested to me that I’m missing a lot of the book’s faults. I’ll have to read it again, but I’m wondering once more if I’m too close to the subject matter.
  

All in all, the panel was time well spent. I got a contact out of it, too. After the panel ended, I talked to one of the professors and he encouraged me to consider his university when I start looking at PhD programs. That’s always a nice ego boost, when professors try to court you. For their programs, I mean.
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I was also planning on attending a somewhat local academic conference on Tuesday, where there was going to be a panel on graphic novels. The three papers being given sounded interesting, and I wanted to see what comic book scholarship sounds like, but in the end laziness over the ninety minute drive, cheapness over the twenty-five dollar registration fee, and self satisfaction over having attended the panel at TCAF won out, and I stayed home.

Guess that was a kind of non-story.

I'd post the names of the papers, so there would be some item of interest, but the ACCUTE website seems to be down. Mebbe later.