11/10/2005

I'm waking up...

*Ok… things are finally starting to calm down here. Luckily, I have a brand new column to pick up the slack for today. It’s about the ill-fated journey of Pokemon to the newspapers, and how it relates to Tokyopop’s funny pages-bound titles today (whenever those titles arrive on said pages - all the stories seem to be quoting January as the start date, though the creators of Van Von Hunter appear to be under the impression that their strip isn't starting until June of 2006 or so). Also, fun with definitions, and how ‘manga’ may be becoming as detached from nationality as ‘comics,’ and what that might mean for everyone.

*Infinite Reading Dept: Abhay Khosla reviews Infinite Crisis thus far (scroll down to find it). That's all you need to know (“i think i've asked this before and already gotten a ‘yes’ in response but: Johns wants to have sex with Starfire right? because I've only read a few of his comics and they've all had characters stop and go ‘Man, I want to have sex with Starfire. I want to ejaculate Bat-semen onto her Star-breasts, even though I'm secretly dissapointed alien girls don't all have three breasts like in Total Recall.’”). Mark Fossen also has some very interesting things to say about the industry critique of it all.

So who’s with me, speaking as someone who doesn’t actually read a lot of DCU books, in hoping that the whole thing turns out to be a heated rejoinder to the Darwyn Cooke/Mike Allred school of Silver Age idealization, with the notion of ‘taking things back’ to an earlier 'world' ruefully pilloried as the metafictional equivalent of genocide and the current DCU cast of characters pulling it together to beat the shit out of Ye Olde Superman (who’s probably some villain in disguise of under some form of manipulation) and reestablish the rightfulness of the current DCU climate as What is Necessary with a few small bones tossed to the crowd as the heroes learn to try and be nicer and more trusting to one another, hopefully with Superman remarking “It’s our universe… for better or worse” at the end while Batman stares warily yet respectfully off to the side as a cosmic vortex of light envelops them all into whatever premise alterations are required by that ‘one year later’ thing? Because that would be pretty funny, and I like things that are funny.

*(EDIT: 1:47 AM 11/11/05): Extra value bonus for a short post - the exclusive internet trailer to Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, the comics adaptation of which is supposed to arrive next week from Vertigo. Sort of chintzy (knowingly?), but individual shots look pretty good. Then again, individual shots of Requiem for a Dream looked pretty nice too and I wound up hating that one, sooo...