nixsight

I know I haven’t been great about reviewing stuff, lately, and as such failed to tell you that I read and enjoyed Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s first issue of “Batman & Robin”.

The second issue came out this week. Don’t have the time to review it properly, but whether or not you’ll like it will depend on whether you like this next image:

That’s right: Robin is fighting conjoined triplets… who can kick-box holes in walls!

Don’t worry, though… there’s still plenty of time to make up your mind about the new series. Just bear in mind that next month:

BAT-QUAD BIKE-GOD!!

It’s been sufficiently long enough that I can no longer be accused of being current or timely if I talk about some of the books that I bought at the Bristol convention last month.

The Sea #1-3/Flower Eater – Will Kirkby

Will Kirkby’s “The Sea” sneaks up on you. Each book is a cute, horizontally bound half-sized mini-comic, allowing the story to unfold in the three-panel chunks normally reserved for joke-centric funnies or webcomics, and indeed the first few strips in each follow that micro-delivery formula pretty well, although the joke set-up is used to deliver an immediately pretty macabre story.

This, for example, is the first page:

The simple, expressive cartoon lines, often taking a fixed view of the main character through each micro-chapter, adds to this sense of a fairly basic story, about a man adrift at sea with his somewhat troubled past – a claustrophobic monologue carrying us along.

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Oh, by the way you guys… We totes watched the new “Star Trek” movie last week. I should have posted something about it before I proposed to Girl One a couple weekends ago and everything went quite, quite peculiar.

Oh, yeah, by the way you guys… I proposed to Girl One a couple of weekends away and she said “yes”! Since which everything has been quite hectic.

But anyway, right, “Star Trek”. Loads has probably been said about it already, much of which I’d just repeat if I went into too much detail – one of the problems with being the last to the party on such a blockbuster. If, by way of a review, I say that it was a pleasant surprise, and a fun and noisy cinematic confection of fairly universal appeal, you’ll get that we liked it, right?

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I reckon it’s time to shake out the cobwebs on some of the movies we’ve seen recently…

I’ve almost definitely forgotten some, by the way. You will excuse the lack of bells and/or whistles, yes? As always, I’d love you to tell me what you think of these movies, or my assessment of them, in the comments!

Valkyrie

Tom Cruise is, despite being a bit barmy, almost always watchable in movies. His work in “Valkyrie” is no exception, despite offering him a lot of chances to be Very Serious Indeed. (more…)

Ah, balls… Started this post a couple of weeks back, then lost the bugger in a stupid saving mishap. Let’s try again…

Y The Last Man Vol 9: Motherland/Vol 10: Whys & Wherefores – Brian K. Vaughan & Pia Guerra (with Goran Sudzuka & Jose Marzan Jr)

For a few months, “Y The Last Man” was my obsession.

With a high-concept premise, a mission-critical set of mysteries, and subplots and character arcs that flowed alongside and across each other in a perfectly natural way that washed over the reader like stir-fried genre-mashed awesome, the series was that rarest of things – an extended narrative that almost makes all of the cliches, like “page turner” and “couldn’t put it down”, acceptable to use.

Add to that a setting and scenario that couldn’t help but breed satire, social commentary and thought-provoking conflict, and characters that actually have their own characters, rather than just being extensions of the writer’s personality, or puppets at the service of the story, and you’ve got about the best long-form narrative in mainstream comics in probably over a decade.

In fact, though it’s a shade more populist than “Sandman”, and a tad less profane than “Preacher”, it’s a more consistent work than either of those hallowed books – it never quite hits Ennis’ best excesses, or Gaiman’s literary verve, but it never suffers the – however rare – terrible dips in quality that both of those books suffered, especially just prior to their final acts.

And the final two volumes of “Y” are no exception. Vaughan keeps things popping as much as in previous books, and Guerra does a good job of keeping the large cast and by now impressive array of plots and subplots coherent with clean lines and consistency of characterisation.

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I love a good musical, me. I also really like Girl One’s family, and having stuff done for me.

A couple of weeks back – on Saturday 16/05/2009 – I experienced a perfect confluence of these three things, when Girl One and I went to London on a day-trip – long arranged by the Girl herself, and all but forgotten by me – to see Les Miserables at Queen’s Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue with her parents, sister and brother in law.

It was a relatively early weekend start for us – and coming just a week after the lack-of-sleep fest of the Bristol Con the week before, I’ve found I’m still recovering a couple of weeks later. Still, early or no, we managed to get to Waterloo around 10.30, only a little bedraggled and hungry.

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I’ve read a couple of write-ups about the Bristol Comic Expo 2009, & I’m sure that between them, & the various podcasts around covering the event, they’ll give a better reckoning of the event than I could, but the con each year is a big deal for me so it seems odd not to mention it.

The convention was reduced from previous years, from two and a bit days to two, and from the previous quite large railway station hall & Ramada Hotel to just the hotel.

I think people were expecting the event to be disappointing, especially with the limited amount of space and subsequent small number of available tickets, but with the Small Press Expo (SPExpo) taking place at the Mercure hotel just around the corner on the Saturday, and hastily affiliated with the main event, I was cautiously optimistic.

(This is of course all bullshit. The fact is I knew that people I enjoyed drinking with would be there, and a late night hotel bar, so it was always going to be groovy.)

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Dan Lester – Author of “Bell, Book & Handlebars”, an account of his cycling tour of the UK’s supernatural hotspots – has returned to Elephant Words, after a triumphant six month engagement in the colonies.

His first new piece is a deceptively simple piece of faked-up ephemera that has one absolute killer idea at it’s core. It is called “The Museum Of July 22nd, 1987″, and exists here.

This seems like as good a time as any to take a look at some of my favourite moments of Mr Lester’s previous run at Elephant Words. His first post came on 29/07/08, but his first appearance came a week earlier:

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Very quick “state of the nation” post…

I’ve taken a six week stretch off from Elephant Words contributing, to try and get a breather and get on top of the other stuff that I need to get on top of, such as this site, the novel, my birthday and actually running Elephant Words – a role that I’ve been performing only very badly for the last few months.

Dan Lester, of “The Incredible Lesters”, will be returning to Elephant Words to cover my absence. You may know him from such websites as “Forever Golden – The Official Bea Arthur Fansite”, “Cyclops Fun Hour” – still the only blog discussing accessibility and disability awareness in comics – and “Monkeysmightpuke.com“. He is also the author of “The Monkey E’er Spanked – Being An Exhaustive History Of Onanism In Web Poetry” – still looking for a publisher, folks! – and “The Dan Lester Mysteries“.

If you didn’t read him before, you should definitely read him now. His first new post was up today, and it’s here: “The Museum Of July 22nd, 1987“.

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Dan In Real Life

Dan is a parenting advice columnist, a widower, and a single dad, struggling to bring up his three daughters alone, and seemingly on the edge of blowing his relationship with all three of them. That’s what this film is about. It’s a comedy-drama about parenting. (more…)