Here’s a stack of new paperbooks that have recently hit my desk: Included are The Ganymede Takeover by Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson, The Secret Of Red Gate Farm by Carolyn Keene (1931 edition), Stories Of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang, Jennifer Blood, (Vol. 1) by Garth Ennis, King Conan: The Scarlet Citadel by Timothy Truman, and Count To A Trillion by John C. Wright.
There’s a mistake on my part in the video. The Scarlet Citadelis adapted from a Robert E. Howard Conan story, as it turns out it is one of the ones I haven’t read.
Here’s a look at a the first two issues of Fatale by Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips. Each issue of which includes a wonderful essay by Jess Nevins!
One is on H.P. Lovecraft and the other is on Edgar Allan Poe.
I also talk about the Deluxe hardcover edition of Criminal, also by Brubaker and Philips, and why you should pick up the floppies (single issues) as opposed to the trade paperback collections.
House Of Secrets, a comic shop in Burbank, California, hosted this live reading of a Criminal short written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Sean Philips. It’s called 21st Century Noir and delivers on every aspect of that title.
Here’s a complete episode of YTV’s The Anti-Gravity Room from the second season (episode 11 of season 2), titled The Global Village.
This episode includes a discussion of what anime is, a substantial look at the then new “anime sensation” called Ghost in the Shell as well as interviews with Carl Macek, a pair of South African cartoonists, and a young Garth Ennis in Belfast!
Ennis’s comments about the internet, near the end of part 2, probably still reflect his attitude today.
Comic Book Men is a new reality show produced for AMC. I watched the first episode. Sadly, I don’t imagine I’ll need to watch another.
The main problem is that for a show with COMICS in the title it just isn’t focused enough on comics themselves. There are too many toys, there’s too much character flavouring, and there’s just way too little substance to care about. It takes the recipe of fake drama that other “reality” shows use and sets it in a comicbook store. There’s the strange customer coming in to pawn something for the guys to talk about. There’s the fake competition over nothing. It’s like the producers told the directors to stay as far away from comics as possible. And the camerapeople were told that if they stopped moving the camera they’d be fired. There’s cute banter, a bit of comics nostalgia, but not enough about comics. The guys themselves, they seem like perfectly fine dudes. that’s cool, but the reason I go to a comic book store is to get comics – to hear about new comics. I don’t got to comic book stores for drama or for the jokes. The focus is just wrong.
I wouldn’t mention the show at all except there is one fairly interesting aspect to Comic Book Men that’s worth sharing. That is that the core of Comic Book Men is based around a podcast (or rather a fake podcast based on real podcasts).
Now I’ve seen podcasts mentioned in dramas (Numb3rs had an episode in which a criminal had a podcast), and The Ricky Gervais Show podcast was turned into an animated HBO show, but this is the first show intended for television, at least that I’ve seen, that incorporated a podcast as part of the actual show itself.
The moving cameras, the reaction shots, the bed music under ever line spoken, all that stuff doesn’t make the show better, it just makes it slicker. Below you’ll find that most interesting part of the show – the podcast. I just wish they were talking about some comics I could buy in a comic book store.
