7/14/2012

A few things:

1. Directly below this post (right here) are the show notes for the official launch episode of Comic Books Are Burning In Hell, another 3000+ word testament to the legacy of childhood obsessive-compulsive symptoms. I think the show went pretty well - it's a huge discussion of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, with yelling and joking and everything. We're gonna be switching back to a multi-book format next week, though we're already planning future special episodes devoted to certain 'big' releases: Love and Rockets #5 and Building Stories, almost certainly. We hope you'll drop by every Thursday.

2. In case you're wondering what happened to the show notes for Episode 0.8, I wound up spending all of my scheduled show notes time working on this analysis of Before Watchmen: Ozymandias #1, thus inadvertently forming an Alan Moore trilogy with my weekly column last Tuesday. It's just now that I'm realizing the show notes are essentially a second weekly column that's insinuated itself upon my life. Sorta nice to be writing so much again, though. Anyway, I liked how the Ozy piece turned out a lot; it's a weird comic, in that the art proves to be far more sophisticated in its interfacing with the original than the completely awful script (see, however, the most recent Silence!, starting at 01:20:30, where bobsy takes issue with my generosity). I expect it might well prove to be this project's The Kingdom: Offspring - an uneasy dollar bin charmer that outlives its origins in a high-profile, high-grossing, entirely unnecessary and now-forgotten follow-up to a vaunted superhero favorite produced in spite of the abject disinterest of one member of the original team. "Nothing ever ends."

3. I also interviewed Richard Corben for The Comics Journal, as a sort of official launch point for a series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations he's working on. One bit of info I never found a place for in my introduction or the interview itself is that Corben is actually still working in animation, having most recently created sequences for the 2010 Windows/Mac game Darkstar: The Interactive Movie, a throwback of sorts to the '90s heyday of full-motion video computer adventure games. Boy, it'd be something if I just up and started writing about computer games, eh?

4. Oh, right - did you know today is the eighth anniversary of this site? I apparently made a bunch of pony jokes in my first post, which is ironclad proof of my precognitive aptitude and impeccable taste. I also recall a bunch of early cracks about the futility of starting a new comics blog at a time when the scene seemed tipping past oversaturation; now I'm part of a podcast, and experiencing exactly the same feelings. Ask me what I think about kids in five years. I might propose.