Keep on truckin’

So, this  comic book blog has been pretty short on comic booky content lately (and it’s about to happen again), but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and things should be back on track soon.

(I swear I didn’t do that last part on purpose.)

I also hate to see the Post going dormant for so long, so I just wanted to give you an update on what’s happening here at ol’ Rancho Maxo. The boxes are packed (mostly), the truck is loaded and on Wednesday we begin the three-day drive from Austin to Delaware, where I’ve never been and where I’ll be moving to for at least the next few years. Adventure!

Speaking of which, does anyone have any tips for driving through Tennessee? So far all my wife and I have been able to come up with is plastering the car with Confederate flag stickers, blasting “Sweet Home Alabama” and driving like hell.

Speaking of speaking of things, I’ll also be trying to spot-blog about the trip on Twitter as much as endurance, time and wi-fi connections will allow. Follow along, why don’cha? I’m almost positive I’m going to insist on being called “Snowman,” so it should be fun.

And seriously, I’ll be talking about comics again very soon.

No, seriously.

News from the front

As you might have noticed (since I’ve been mentioningit at every opportunity), I’m in the middle of moving. Specifically I’m moving from Austin, Texas to just outside Wilmington, Delaware in just under a week.

If you’re picturing rooms filled with boxes, stacks of furniture and piles of random stuff, you’re not far off.  And if you think this has kept me from posting lately – actually, from doing anything much beyond cramming things into cardboard boxes – you’d be right on the money. In the meantime, I hope you’ll hang in there.

See you in Delaware!

…

Speaking of comics, I picked up Superman #700 this week and was left … underwhelmed. I don’t have it on hand for reference (things in boxes, remember?), but the impression I was left with was feeling a little lost in the story. I wasn’t keeping up with the War of the Supermen-slash-Fall of Krypton stories, and the chapters definitely felt like continuations of plots that were a mystery to me. The J. Michael Straczynski storyline begins here, and having Superman walk across America is fun in a Hard Travelin’ Heroes kind of way, but the clunky heavy-handedness of the introduction in this issue makes me a little leery. Also, can Superman get a strong, distinctive artist? Please.

Pleeeeze?!

…

Don’t forget, the Great Caesar’s Movie Club due date is July 19! Superman III! Do it!

Announcing – Great Caesar’s Movie Club!

Here’s something the average person might not realize about comic book geeks: We’re usually geeks about a lot of other things, too.

For instance, I’ve noticed that a lot of my fellow comic bloggers are also big movie fans, with passions ranging from genre films to black-and-white classics and including everything in between. I’m no different – I love movies, and just like with comics, I love to talk about them and hear other people’s opinions. So, with that in mind I give you a new feature here at GCP:

GREAT CAESAR’S MOVIE CLUB!

Here’s how it works:

Once a month I’ll announce the current movie club selection, along with a due date. If you’d like to participate, write a review and post it to your own website on that date (with a link to Great Caesar’s Post), drop me an e-mail telling me about it, and I’ll link back to it here. It’s so easy an actor playing a caveman could do it!

Of course, there’s no obligation to play – if you do a review one month, you don’t have to review the next month’s selection if you don’t feel like it (jerk).

What kind of movies can you expect? Well, I’m a fan of the Swedish school of postmodernism as much as the next guy, but in this case I’m going to try to keep selections in the sci-fi/cult/Weird category. Superhero movies probably won’t show up too much, just because those are a well-covered subject already, but in honor of this blog’s inspiration the first movie club pick is:

SUPERMAN III

Oh, yeah – the one with drunk Superman.

It’s also the one featuring a weirdly cast Richard Pryor, a fight between Superman and Clark Kent, and Annette O’Toole as the One True Lana. Superman III is available on the Netflix, so get to it!

Here are the details:

Great Caesar’s Movie Club!

Now showing: Superman III (1983)

Due date: Monday, July 19

Clothing: Optional

By the way, if you get around to the horror movie part of Blogger Town you might notice that this is very similar (some might say identical) to the format used by Stacie Ponder over at the excellent, you-should-be-reading-it Final Girl. Stacie has given me the very generous thumbs-up (seriously, you should see the size of her thumbs) to crib the format, because she’s cool like that. Thanks again, Stacie!

Jam-packin’

If you’ve been following the Post since the old days (y’know … last week), then you might know that I’m in the process of moving from my current home in Austin to a new start in Delaware. Right now that mostly means being neck-deep in my least favorite part of moving – the packing.

Oooh, packing, how I hate you! Hold on, give me a second so I can go shake my fist at it.

OK, I’m back. So yeah, packing is a lot of ugh as far as I’m concerned. Still, it can have some perks now and then – particularly when my wife asks me to finally gather all the random, free-range comics from the various cubby holes I’ve let them nest in.

In the end I found issues in almost every room of the apartment – the living room, the office, both bathrooms (shut up), the bedroom and (surprisingly enough) the linen closet.

I can’t be the only one who leaves comics scattered all over the house, right? I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I don’t bag-and-board and climate-control and all that; I’m more of a reader than a collector. And for better or worse, that means I leave comics behind me like Hansel dropping hoagies.

(Wow, that sounds so much worse out loud.)

All in all it didn’t turn out to be as many as I thought it was going to be, but it was still enough to fill another long box. And I only stopped to read a comic, like, twice.

I swear.

Ahem.

Adventures in Sound #21

See Adventures in Sound 1-20 in the archive!

Rounding up some random comic book thoughts

Since I’ve been more or less inactive for the past few weeks, there has been some random comic book news floating around in my head that I’ll now share with you, all bullet-list style.

(If you’re going to do a list, it might has well be of high-caliber. *snert* Oh, I crack myself up.)

So I was disappointed to hear about the cancellation of Unknown Soldier, which will be ending with issue #25. The Vertigo book has been one of my favorite titles since its debut, thanks in large part to writer Joshua Dysart’s slow-burn story of one man’s tortured psyche smoldering away in the war-ravaged country of Uganda in 2002.

Dysart’s use of the brutality in Uganda to update the Bronze Age character has been masterful, and gives full dimension to the mysteriously lethal and psychologically damaged Dr. Moses Lwanga. The art was always solid, and I also appreciated the essays on what Uganda was like during this time that Dysart included in most issues. The scope of the real-life events helped give the story perspective, as well as being just a solid serving of information I think most American readers probably missed the first time around.

I’ve always wished more comics could  be like Unknown Soldier, and I’m disappointed that there’ll be one less now.

HTMLComics.com dared the U.S. Department of Justice to shut it down for copyright infringment, saying that even though full issues of comics were being made available at the website for free and without permission, it was acting as a library and nyah nyah nyah.

Can you guess what happened?

I’ll be honest: I’ve downloaded things from shady sites. I’m not proud of it. But I will say (and here come the excuses) that it has always been a temporary fix – once I confirmed the storyline, found the single panel I was looking for, or read enough to decide whether I wanted to read more or not, the download was deleted. Period.

If I’m reading something regularly, or even if there is a back issue I want to own, I go out and buy it. Downloading because you don’t want to actually pay for something is stealing, and it hurts the artists and writers we as fans claim to love so much. Eventually it hurts the industry, which in turn will end up hurting the reader who suddenly is looking at yet another price hike for comics with less content and more ads.

Does the contradiction make me a hypocrite? Probably. Is there some sort of middle ground? You tell me. (Seriously – I’m interested in everyone’s opinion on this).

Finally, there was the sad and shocking news about the murder of ThunderCats writer Stephen Perry.

Perry (who also wrote the comics Timespirits, Psi-Force and Wally Wood’s THUNDER Agents) had been missing and the evidence, including a severed arm and then other dismembered body parts, painted a grim picture. Perry was unfortunately going through a hard time in his life, but had been getting some support from the Hero Initiative and seemed to be getting back on track.

Sadly, it was a recovery that was senselessly cut short.