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Category: Comic Books
Walt Simonson Alien drawing
Direct beam comms #5
TV
So there’s the Classic Doctor Who series that ran from 1963 to 1996 and a modern Doctor Who of ones from 2005 to present. Is there now a Classic The X-Files of shows that ran from 1993 to 2002 and a modern The X-Files of ones from now on? I suppose much of if the “classic” and “modern” labels will only have any meaning if the new Fox series is limited to just the six episodes or if there’s more than one season.
TNT is working on a TV series version of the film Animal Kingdom. That movie is one of my favorites, I thought it was one of the best of 2010, about a lives of a family of crooks that’s slowly unravelling after one is killed by the police and in retribution the family kills two cops. I think that’s why the movie is so interesting — it’s about something coming apart, destroying itself. It’s still too early to tell, but I don’t think that a (reportedly) series about a family of criminals that’s not coming apart but instead lasts season after season would be as interesting as the latter. Then again I’d be happy to eat my words since I didn’t think Hannibal or The Americans would be any good either and those two shows turned out to be two of my favorites.
Comics
The comic series Aquila, which ran in the pages of 2000 AD, is available in a collected edition January 12. Aquila: Blood of the Iceni is a sort of mashup of Conan the Barbarian and the writings of H.P. Lovecraft with the title character living in Roman Empire times in the place that will one day be the UK who’s brought back from the dead with one catch; he must provide souls to the ancient hungry god Ammit the Devourer. A god that’s always hungry!
In finding these souls, Aquila must do battle with winged creatures, an insane Nero trying to become a god himself and the natives of England who are out to push all foreign invaders off their land.
Books
CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis is a book of talks collected as essays by Warren Ellis who’s best known for his work in comics. Ellis has a knack for describing the times we live in from almost a future historical perspective. He comments on are everyday mundane things from cell phones to Instagram to traveling. But it’s how he sees them that’s so unique.
“Our ghosts are our history. Their voices are what we learn from. Our rituals are our methods, and our castings and workings are our scientific experiments, magical practices to learn the true names of things that mane the world. Because, in magic, when you name something you can control it.” — Warren Ellis
Apps
For the last few months I’ve been writing most everything in Scrivener using Markdown. I like how Scrivener organizes everything — I have one document for these Direct Beam Comms articles, one for my 2016 columns, one for random stuff… — and how I can export the finished product in just about any format I want.
And Markdown, a “…text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers…” is a nice way for me to format copy without having to worry about future-proofing my work. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years trying to figure this out. If I save everything as a Word DOC and in 20 years there’s no easy way to open the files then I’m screwed. What I’ve been doing over the last five years is saving all my work as rich text format (RTF) figuring that while this might not be the best way to save things, it’s got to be better than the proprietary Word format. Then I thought about saving out everything as HTML files, since those are essentially easily readable text files that anyone at any time in the future will be able to open.
Scrivener solves all these problems for me. I write things once using Markdown and then can export into whatever file format fits my preference. I’ll usually export a RTF if the piece is being published somewhere else and HTML so I can copy and past this content into my website. But I can also save PDFs, ebooks or a host of other file formats too.
Planet of the Apes comics magazine illustrations
The best of the rest
My favorite movies about movies that never happened :The Death of “Superman Lives”: What Happened? & Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau.
Both these movies, one about a Tim Burton Superman movie that would’ve been released in the late ‘90s and a different version of the Island of Dr. Moreau than the one that came out in ’96, are a fascinating look inside the moviemaking process. The reason behind why Superman didn’t live with Burton is because of the nature of the moviemaking business, of a studio in trouble after a series of costly flops and of being scared to finance another risky looking film. While Lost Soul shows that while the writer/director of a film can have an amazing vision, that vision isn’t enough to keep them their job when the two stars of the movie want him off the set.
My favorite comic strip: Willie & Joe: The WWII Years
I’ve been aware of the Bill Mauldin’s Will & Joe comic strip for many years now but only when it was referenced in other works about how accurately Mauldin was able to portray the life of soldiers serving during WWII. It was only after I bought the book Willie & Joe: The WWII Years and was able to experience the cartoons for myself, there are 600+ in the book, that I was finally able to see Mauldin’s genius first hand.
My favorite hardest working actor on TV: Bob Odenkirk
I mean, c’mon. In the space of two years the guy’s co-starred in two series; The Birthday Boys and Fargo, had the lead role in another with Better Call Saul and created, co-wrote and co-starred in the W/ Bob and David series. I guess Odenkirk’s one of those guys who’ll sleep when he’s dead — which hopefully won’t be for many, many years.
My favorite book: Roadside Picnic (1972) by Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky
I’m always on the lookout for old books that still resonate today. I heard of the book Roadside Picnic when I read about the ’79 film Stalker which was based on Roadside Picnic and decided to check it out myself. The book’s about the aftereffects of an alien visitation that only lasted a few hours but when the aliens departed they left all sorts of items behind. Is this “stuff” their garbage or something more? Some of it is extremely dangerous like a weird blue mist that turns bones of those who touch it to mush while others are beneficial like batteries that never run out of power.
Roadside Picnic mostly follows a new class of people dubbed “stalkers” who make a living and risk their lives venturing into these contaminated zones to take any of the alien leftovers and sell it to the highest bidder. But when the children of these stalkers begin displaying some weird birth defects, the question becomes are they only bringing out the artifacts or are they also bringing something else out with them?
My favorite post apocalyptic thing: Mad Max Fury Road
In an era when there are loads of post-apocalyptic TV series and movies, I think the best of the bunch was the fourth film of the Mad Max franchise. Fury Road plays like some extended fever dream; from characters speaking languages the viewer can’t understand, to the oversaturated psychedelic landscapes to a movie that’s made of almost constant action… But it’s these differences from all the other post-apocalyptic TV and movies that set Fury Road apart and made it one of the best films I’ve seen in quite some time.
My favorite collected comic: Hellblazer
I suppose the only reason I started reading the Hellblazer comic was because of the failed Constantine TV show. But if that’s what it took then I’m okay with Constantine being cancelled. John Constantine, lead of Hellblazer, is a self destructive demonologist who, when he’s not battling the occult, is someone who mostly just wants to be left alone. Hellblazer, stories deal with everything from yuppie demons to a bleak, early 1980s Thatcher-lead England and new age cults, both good and bad.
Hellblazer was released in ’88 and I didn’t start reading it until this year, so I guess a 27 year wait to read something as good as Hellblazer is okay.