HORRIBLE!!!

Beware: Mild Dr. Horrible spoilers (but surely you've watched it by now; the final part's been up for about 45 minutes!)


If you're wise, you will already have been following the wonderful web experiment of Joss Whedon and his Mutant Enemy cohorts known as Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, which has been amusing us greatly this week. In a fit of Whedon-love we stayed up to catch the third and final part of his musical masterpiece that isn't Once More With Feeling or the theme to Firefly, and if the previous two installments were hilarious, this was hilarious and heart-breaking. Really heart-breaking.


This year we've only seen a couple of Whedon projects come out, and both featured tragedy. The final issue of Astonishing X-Men was gut-wrenching, with Whedon giving his favourite character, Kitty Pryde, a heroic moment that dooms her to eternal torment, and Dr. Horrible ends on a note that echoes the final scenes of both De Palma's Blow Out and Coppola's The Godfather. (Yes, I'm comparing Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog to The Godfather. What of it?)

So, I ask this seriously. Mr. Whedon, if you accidentally wander across this blog post on your journeys through Netland, I'm offering to come to LA and give you a really big hug and a blueberry muffin if you will, just once, not have one character in your work suffer horribly. I understand that it adds a lot to the impact of the story, and with Dr. Horrible it was a nice play on that awful Women in Refrigerators device lazily used in comics, but really, you're killing us here with your beautifully structured sadism. You big, brilliant, disgustingly talented meanie you. (P.S. Thank you for 45 minutes of genius.)


ETA: And by Whedon, I of course mean the Clan Whedon, including his brothers Jed and Zack, and honorary Clan member Maurissa Tancharoen. You're all wonderfully evil, and I simultaneously thank you and damn you. Mostly thank you, especially for the Thoroughbred of Evil joke which has delighted us so much this week.

Ain't Got Time To Read! *

The limp I am currently exhibiting has nothing to do with my triumphant return to the gym after several years of very enjoyable, though enfattening lethargy. It's because I decided to walk around a town centre for about an hour yesterday morning, trying to find cheap copies of The Orange Box (note to bargain hunting gamers; even cheap copies are not that cheap yet), and then pacing around Waterstone's for ages, even though I wasn't going to buy anything. These are the things I do when I'm very very tired and my judgement is as impaired as that of a drunken businessman with haunted eyes trying with manic urgency to buy magnums of champagne for disinterested ladies even though his bank account is empty and his Ermenegildo Zegna shirt is caked in vomit.

With a new interest in health and the very likely possibility of long job searches ahead of me, my reading time is in danger of being severely cut into, with the result that my to-read list may explode in size if I'm not careful. I'm already just plodding through Naomi Novik's Empire of Ivory (which has already been definitively covered here by Canyon), not because I'm not enjoying it (I am, a lot), but just because I keep wanting to grab every other book from my shelves and read them all at the same time just to reduce the size of that list. It's like a multi-book pile-up in my head. Even before I get to the books I have at home, yesterday I strongly considered getting Peter F. Hamilton's The Dreaming Void, John Gray's Black Mass (though it would probably annoy the shit out of me, even taking into account this PWNing by populist philosopher and obviousness-stater A.C. Grayling), Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma, and Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope. Canyon pointed out that I would probably never read it and would just stick it on a shelf somewhere, and I probably would, between my unread copy of My Life by Bill Clinton and my unread copy of this bigass book on Nixon. Nevertheless, it's important to know what he's like, especially now that it seems almost certain it will be him going up against my boys.


Even without buying yet more books (as well as the ones on our Amazon.com list, including Matt Taibbi's The Great Derangement and pretty much every book linked by the Worst President Ever tag), my to-read list is already way too big. At the moment I plan to follow Empire of Ivory with Mass Effect: Revelation by Drew Karpyshyn, which could well be a total waste of my time, but I wanted to get through it before I play Bioware's Mass Effect, and by "play" I mean "become obsessive about for about a week and then stop playing due to time constraints, and never go back to, just like I did with Jade Empire". After that, another Naomi book, this time The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, yet another book I got as a hardback (as a very much-appreciated Christmas present) and have yet to read even though it is now out as a paperback. The large amount of unread hardbacks on our shelves drives Canyon into fits of apoplexy, and I really can't argue with that.

So, that's two books right there, and that's not counting the dozens of others I have my eye on right now, such as George Crile's Charlie Wilson's War, James Dallesandro's 1906, Greg Bear's Quantico, Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes (another much-appreciated but unread hardback Christmas present that is about to come out in paperback), David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, Patrick O' Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, and the Mass Effect Strategy Guide. Yes yes, this is all a lie. I'll most probably read the large amounts of comics I have filling our spare room. Even ones by Brian Michael Bendis, though hopefully they won't involve semi-naked women being humiliated by supervillains, or pissy, defensive, insulting jokes about the justified criticism just because he knows the blogosphere really are onto something.

Why am I blithering on about this here? Because while reading today's newspapers I found a couple more to add to the pile, and I've not yet bought them, though I really must. Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott, and Dan Atkinson, have written a book on the illusory magic of The Market, called The Gods That Failed. It sounds like a nice companion piece to Thomas Frank's One Market Under God, which I have talked about before, and think is essential reading for everyone, be they right-wing, left-wing, fiscal conservatives, blinkered laissez-faire obsessives, chrometophobic Socialists, Scrooge McDucks, or sentient coins of the realm. The Elliott/Atkinson could be as good. Here are two extracts from the book, if you're curious.

The other book I discovered tonight is Joseph Lanza's Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films, partially because that's an awesome title, but mostly because it sounds very entertaining. Ken Russell discussed it in this column in The Times, and this section definitely appeals to me:

[The] chapter revealing stories behind the scenes on Altered States is nothing short of revelatory - I appreciate the eye-opening account, now that the other side has had its say. It was with the stocky New Yorker and respected novelist Paddy Chayefsky that I had my heavyweight bout. He was the impossible-to-please writer-producer of the sci-fi epic about the effect of mind-bending drugs on a Harvard scientist, Dr Jessup. We sparred from the start, over the high-falutin' hi-sci dialogue, the colour of the set, the luncheon script sessions, the meetings over Sanka (a brand of decaffeinated coffee) and pressed turkey sandwiches, camera angles, tracking shots and over Paddy taking the actors aside for private chats on how to play the scene.

We slugged it out round after round, as Lanza details with quotes from all sides. And it all came to a head when I lost it on the phone and gave Paddy a final tongue-lashing. “Why don't you take your turkey sandwiches and your Sanka and stuff it up your ass and let me get on with the f***ing film!” Now, that's literature.

Awesome. Altered States is one of my all-time favourite movies, and there isn't enough literature on the making of it, so this is automatically an essential purchase. Still, how will I fit all of this in? Life is filled with distractions, both better than reading and far far worse than reading, and they're not going away any time soon. If I was even more misanthropic than I sometimes can be when under large amounts of stress, I could wish for a similar situation to that in Time Enough At Last, but that Rod Serling would probably screw me but good.


Guess I'll just have to clear time by not watching TV instead.

* As the title suggests, this post is dedicated to the memory of Sgt. Blain Cooper, brave soldier and sexual Tyrannosaurus, regrettably killed by a Predator armed with a plasmacaster, whatever the hell that is.


He, and his chawin' tabaccy, shall be missed.

Lazy Post Courtesy of Coverbrowser.com

While futzing about on the internet in an effort to keep my weary head from crashing into my desk like a paperweight dropped from a great height, I stumbled across a site that's pretty famous but passed me by completely: Cover Browser, which archives old comic covers so that good people can marvel at these pop culture relics, and lazy bloggers (i.e. me) can nick them and make jokes about them that have probably already been told.

I note that years before DC's Minx imprint, they had already experimented with capturing the female market with Girls' Love Stories, which dealt with such issues as birth control, emancipation, wage inequalities, and body issues. I mean, I guess that's what they were about. I could only find covers where the female protagonists agonised over boys, for some reason.


Silly. Didn't your mother tell you monochrome men will just use you for sex?


Chronic flatulence?


And with that humiliation, Ayn Rand decided to leave her unfaithful husband and move to Russia, aka Nosmilingrad.


Who whoa whoa! Watch the man parts there, lady! Seriously, if she connected with that much force he'd be wearing them as bruised and battered earrings.


"When I first met Mindy on the beach I thought the overwhelming stench was coming from the sea, but boy was I ever wrong!"

Of course, most comics were aimed squarely at men, with even less subtlety. Check it out: Fight Comics! This week: fights!


He totally punched that guy's head off! As a man, I find that enormously appealing. Actually, if you go to the page where I got that from, you'll find a more apt name for that title would have been Bondage Comics. I can imagine William Moulton Marston was a big fan.

You hear a lot about dumbing down these days, and it's always nice to see that pop culture has gone through this before. It's not a straight line down, it's a churn, with dumbing down, up, sideways. we'll be fine. Still, the wonderfully named Crime SuspenStories went from something as intricate and wacky and imaginative as this...


...to this less complex concept several months later.


Despite that sledgehammer nonsense, the covers for the anthology titles of old have a lot more charm than the current crop of character-led comics, most of which just show poses of Wolverine growling and brandishing his claws, and that's not necessarily on X-Men comics. Back in the day, they had to tell a story.


Though I can't imagine what the hell this story could be like. I reckon the writer once overheard someone talking about "a jury of my peers" and misheard it as being "a jury of my bees", and went with it. I know I've had stupider ideas thanks to my lousy hearing.


Sorry dude, Lost just started. I'll be with you in a bit.


"If I am crowned Miss Doom 1954, I promise that I will use my title to promote hatred, misery and intolerance around the world, and will aid in the subjugation of the masses by dictators, mad scientists, and evil geniuses of every creed and colour. You puny scum." ::applause::

Some of those House of Mystery covers are incredibly odd and original, but every so often they just phoned it in.


I've lost count of the number of covers I've seen featuring a bat-shaped kite being laden with jewels by mysterious ghostly hands while a guy in a helicopter hovers nearby. Disappointing.


But Egypt looked away, impassive and uncaring. After all, Lost was about to start.

It's not just old timey suspense and horror comics on that site; more traditional comics turn up as well. I found one that adequately depicts the struggle I had with the kitchen floor yesterday.


Double cream + Mr. Muscle Kitchen Cleaner = The Glob.

I love almost all of the covers I've seen tonight, but some are done by artists whose brilliance surpasses even that, and have passed into legend. This is my favourite of the night.


Frank Frazetta, ladies and gentlemen.

Comics: The Good and The Bad

When the Black Canary Wedding Planner was solicited, I thought it was a little aberrant, considering the usual DC fare (months and months of Countdown crossovers, multiple Batman comics, and the odd lonely sighting of a Wildstorm title coming out 9 months late). Comics readers are most often male, and without wanting to seem like a cultivator of negative stereotypes, men don't seem to find stories of wedding preparations that thrilling. Besides, if they were, where's the Green Arrow Bachelor Party special? The only thing I could think of was perhaps DC was bolstered by the Minx titles, thinking that they could continue to bring female readers to their fold with wedding comics. Surely only someone who's never met or interacted with a woman really believes the phrase, "Wedding dresses!" automatically increases sales within that section of the readership. So it continued to mystify me. Until I read it, and came across this exchange between Black Canary, Vixen, Wonder Woman, and Oracle (relegated to the bottom of the panel). As ever, it's all about the improbably nubile women, this time with the added bonus of underwear. ::sigh::

Still comics can be great. I've only sporadically enjoyed Reginald Hudlin's Black Panther series, and have only been buying it recently because of the Fantastic Four connection. The current Marvel Zombies arc has been annoying, mostly because I find the zombie universe just really depressing. Don't get me wrong, I love zombies, but a whole planet of zombies just makes me feel sad and a little creeped out. Having them absorb Galactus' power and then attack the Skrull homeworld, while a very clever idea, just makes me even unhappier. So, with two strikes against the latest Black Panther, why did I like it so much? Because...

...everything is better with Thanos.