prog | (no subject)

Hectic last couple of days. A lot of interference that is neither bad news nor really what I want to be doing. I think the next few days will be clear.

I finally wrote SCAT about The Gameshelf and where the hell it and I have been since 2006 started. I feel bad that it took me so long; I guess I was semi-consciously waiting for them to ask me about it first. I'd probably still be waiting if Joe the Director hadn't indirectly suggested this morning that I drop them a line.

I see Joe a couple of times or so a month, when he or his boss call to offer me a gig crewing a show for city TV. I did two today, which was a boo-boo, and part of the interference I mention. I don't mind getting up early to earn $45 by crewing a half-hour talk show -- quite the opposite, in fact. But I should have declined the opportunity to double it by spending over two hours in the evening tromping around the high school, helping to cover a student art show. This sapped energy reserves already depleted by my not sleeping much, and I spent the rest of the night on my couch reading comics.

(Arguably I was also being a good manager by simultaneously holding court and having lengthy conversations about work with the Andys. But I was still doing it on the couch with a comic book in my hands. It's very Web 2.0.)

The comic, BTW, was Planetary, which I borrowed from

rikchik. Wow, I love it, and I hope there's more. And it's also yet another late-1990s comic I'm getting around to reading only now. You know, I don't think I've read a single book-format comic that was published after 9/11, except for

uhusted's, which I've never written about because I am awful and now she's disappeared from LJ and alas. (Actually do any mutual acquaintances know why her LJ went away? Speaking of people that I should write, huh.)

I like "The Four" from that book, and the idea of villains who don't seem so much mu-hu-ha-ha evil as merely Randian. But for these guys, with great power comes great objectivism, and the line between that that muhahaism may get a bit blurry from certain points of view.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That's good... for some reason I was expecting the book I borrowed to contain a complete mini-series, and I was worried when it simply ran out of pages that this was all there was,

In retrospect it's kind of funny that, at least in the first collection, the multiverse that the characters seem to inhabit seems to be Marvel's even though it's a DC-published book. The alternate takes on the Fantastic Four and the Hulk are straight out of "What If", if I am remembering the title of Marvel's self-deconstructing comic correctly. (Which for all I know hasn't been published in 10 years.) (But Neil Gaiman's marvelous "1602" was basically a super-large What If story, complete with The Watcher orbiting sulkily and complaining of man's foibles.)

Ellis really knows classic comics very well - and he really seems to hate the modern superhero comics industry. There are DC parodies in Planetary as well, perhaps just not in the first collection.

Huh... that's a little surprising given that I picked up (from meta-info within the collection) that Planetary appeared, at least sometimes, as a backup story in Gen13, which I remember was a held as an epitome of post-Lee/McFarlane glossy and soulless superhero/action cheese back when I spent half my paycheck on comics. (OK, yes, I just looked it up on WP to make sure it's the same comic I think it is.)

Then again that article contains the most content-free sentence I've read on WP (today):

However, these sexual situations were almost always humorously or dramatically motivated.

Wow, something that a character did in a work of fiction was "humorously or dramatically motivated"? You know what, I'm just going to delete that sentence right now.