Raiders of a Lost Art

I remember devouring Marvel Comics' Return of the Jedi movie adaptation for months after I saw the movie. The movie came out in May, and back then, it took a loooooooong time for a flick to come to video rental, let alone purchase. So, what was a kid to do? Well, play with the toys and read the comic book adaptation of course!

The 4 issue mini series was beautifully illustrated by classic Star Wars artist, Al Williamson. It covered all the movie's beats and it looked damn nifty to boot. It was an action-packed emotional rollercoaster echo of the film. I read that series until all the damn staples fell out!

“The Official Movie Adaptation” was a phrase that graced numerous comic books in the 80s and the 90s. Whether it was DC Comics' adaptation of Tim Burton's Batman (which is still my favorite Jerry Ordway comic), Marvel Comics' haunting Dune Super Special or Topps Comic's vision of Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula (filtered through the Mike Mignola), the comic industry released some top notch renditions of their celluloid counterparts.

Comics also have a history of continuing popular franchises. Hellboy publisher Dark Horse Comics made its mark with a series of fantastic Aliens continuations and Marvel continued franchises like Star Trek, Robocop, Doctor Who, Indiana Jones...the list goes on and on. I gotta say, the four colored funnies treated the movie biz a lot better than the celluloid moguls treated them. Hollywood churned out such piss poor adaptations like Captain America, Spider-Man & The Deadly Dust and Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. Dark stuff, my friends, dark stuff.

Somewhere along the way, my interest in “Official Movie Adaptations” waned. Maybe it was my burgeoning interest on video games, my growing (at a snail's pace) social awareness, or my discovery of the fairer sex, but somehow the art form was lost on me. Every once in a while, I'll take a look at stuff like Dark Horse's Indiana Jones and The Crystal Skull or the Superman Returns Prequels, but to no avail, it's as if there's a disconnect...somehow the doors to that particular pleasure have been closed for good. It's as if I've lost my taste for it, and that's a little bit sad.

The Threefold Man?

After the events in this week's Doctor Who episode, "The Stolen Earth," one has to wonder why Sylvester McCoy appears on it's companion episode of Doctor Who Confidential. Just what is he doing with that umbrella?

Late To The Party: World War Z

Max Brooks' World War Z hit in 2006 and quickly became a New York Times Bestseller. I got around to reading it this week.

Man alive does this book rule!

Brooks is able to do something no zombie film has been able to do; show the massive scope of a zombie infestation. By using several narrators, Brooks explores different points in the story's history. From the first outbreak to the aftermath of the war, Brooks grabs the audience by our shirt collars and thrusts us into a world where the dead rise not just in Pittsburgh, but in Kyoto, Siberia, Yonkers...everywhere!

It's something that's never been done before and hot damn, it elevates the zombie genre to whole new heights. I give it an A+!

Hellboy: The Science of Evil

As a casual gamer, I tend to be pretty easily impressed. Give me something nice to look at, lots of things to smash and some witty or clever moments and I'm happy. Konami's Hellboy: The Science of Evil does just that.

The game is not as in depth as Grand Theft Auto or Metal Gear and it's nowhere near as terrible as that old PS2 fireworks game. It's just a beat-em up platformer with a ton of familiar characters and environments.

Hellboy is Hellboy and he's fighting through a world with English witches, vicious werewolves and monsters of all shapes and sizes. Overall, the game has a very old school feel. You run around a level, beat the tar out of all manner of mythical beasts and you solve a puzzle or two.

If you're a Hellboy fan, check it out. If not, you've probably seen this before and you really should move on to Katamari or something like that.

Let's Go Clubbing!

Coming all the way from Japan (Dragonball Z, Sushi, Tora! Tora! Tora!) is the perfect gift for baby seal clubbers everywhere; PARO!



Paro Robots U.S. Inc. will start importing the popular Japanese robot, Paro: The Robot Baby Seal. The cute little bringer o’ doom will primarily be used in retirement homes as a substitute for pets. That said, we all know why it’s really coming to America. It’s here to fulfill humanity’s primal desire to club baby seals!

Read the cover story here.

Beards, Blondes & Bullets

"There's no doubt that other Earths exist, simply due to the sheer vast numbers of other stars and galaxies in our universe."-Geoff Marcy, Planet Hunter

Between Final Crisis # 2 and the last episode of Doctor Who, I find myself neck-deep in Parallel Earth stories. So, imagine my astonishment when I saw an article entitled " Astronomers on Verge of Finding Earth's Twin" on Space.com.

According to the article, astronomers found 3 worlds more massive than ours but small enough to most likely be rocky. To make things more interesting, the planets are orbiting a single star. That's gotta be a pretty crowded solar system, especially of all 3 are somehow capable of supporting life.

Meanwhile, here on Earth, we're exhausting our resources at an alarming rate, overcompensating for our love of slaughter by humping the hell out of each other and cluttering the space outside our planet with garbage! Oh, and we get into petty squabbles over things that really aren't worth killing over. What if there's life on these similar Earths?

Um...why would we want to find 3 other planets like ours?

Oh well, it's really all just speculation. While not much is known about the Earths, one thing is for certain; they are not parallel worlds. If anything, they're more like siblings...triplets, actually. So, I guess we're all going to have to wait for facial hair, Billie Piper or 1940s super heroes.

Fuck The Cows

We lost a legend on Sunday.

Sadly, the AIM homepage decided to link a clip from the mind numbing reality show, The Two Coreys. Oh, the things George Carlin would say about this. No, I take that back, he wouldn't talk about it. Instead, he'd look at the pillars of mediocrity that hold up this ridiculous celebrity obsession that's become America's culture and he'd tear them down with words more vicious than the bite of a rabid wolf yet more eloquent than Ginsberg.

God, I'm going to miss George Carlin. Rest in peace, motherfucker.

Akurō

It's coming...



It's only just beginning.

Here's a trailer for the next episode, "Stolen Earth" and it's rife with SPOILERS...

You're out of time...

Yesterday, 9 mixed and mastered songs leaked yesterday. They're from a rather infamous record. Many people have been waiting 15 years for the record. Some have come to think about it like the promise Jesus made to his Apostles upon the Ascension...

Want to take a guess as to what I'm talking about? It's pretty damn obvious.



A few of these tracks have popped up in the past, but they were usually demos or cleaned up soundboard recordings. These 9 songs are super clean, they're definitely mixed and mastered. For the first time, we have a real peek at the legendary (or is it infamous?) Chinese Democracy. "Madagascar" is my favorite track, though "There Was A Time" and "The Blues" are nifty. Thing is, it may be 'cause those 3 tracks are familiar since they were leaked a few years ago as demos. I have to listen to the tracks a couple more times.

Maybe we'll see the record before the end of this decade after all.

I saw The Happening tonight...

I don't know what was worse for that movie; competing with The Incredible Hulk or Mark Wahlberg's douche-chillingly bad performance (and he's usually good!).

On the upside, there are a ton of mesmerizing shots of Zooey Deschanel's beautiful baby blues that made me swoon and some awesome shots of trees.

All in all, it's like watching a William Shatner episode of The Twilight Zone.

Late To The Party

I've been aware of the BBC possible Time Travel/detective thriller, Life On Mars for about a year and a half to two years now, but I never had the chance to watch past the first episode. Today, I rectified the situation. I watched the first 3 episodes back to back and hot damn is it a great show!

The series is about DCI Sam Tyler (Doctor Who's John Simm). In 2006, he's hot on the trail of a serial killer, listening to David Bowie's "Life On Mars" on his iPod, when he gets hit by a car. He awakens in 1973, with the same song playing on his 8 Track.

Confused, Sam stumbles around believing he's in a coma, but the more he takes in of this world, the more he begins to think he may have actually traveled back in time.

The show dances the Sci-Fi Line with more skill and finesse than Lost ever has, partially because EVERY character sells the show's universe. Like Sam Tyler, the audience doesn't know what happened, but it's a helluva compelling ride!

Check it out before ABC butchers it this fall.

Say it like you mean it!

Saw this quote on Gawker today and I thought I'd share...

"I walked through Union Square on my way to acting class and got offered loose joints. Drug dealing was a great tradition in this city. There are other traditions people can get involved with in this city. When I was younger, I used to get a bottle of wine and get drunk under the Staten Island Ferry... so there are things like that you can do." — Alec Baldwin, at a PETA event. He was suggesting an alternative NYC tourist experience. Now THAT is imagery.

Let all the children lose it, let the children use it...

Today, Democratic presidential hopeful, Barack Obama, announced he will not partake in the public financing system for presidential campaigns.

“The public financing of presidential elections as it exists today is broken, and we face opponents who’ve become masters at gaming this broken system,” The junior Illinois Senator said. “John McCain’s campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs. And we’ve already seen that he’s not going to stop the smears and attacks from his allies running so-called 527 groups, who will spend millions and millions of dollars in unlimited donations.”

The public financing system was created in 1976, after the Watergate Scandal. However, Theodore Roosevelt first suggested public funds in 1907 as a way to ban private contributions, discouraging graft, special interests and the like. Funny how things turn out, no?

Senator Obama's campaign is funded by all kinds of people through his website. According to Robert Gibbs, Mr. Obama's communications director, "more than 90% of the campaign’s contributions were for $100 or less." Many of Mr. Obama's contributers are young and first time voters. Now, while there's hardly a special interest in that group, I do wonder about that other less than 10%. Also, the sky's the limit on how much he can spend.

So, 32 years later, the proverbial pendulum's swinging the opposite way. If Mr. Obama's gambit is successful, private funding will break again, as the special interest groups will start providing private funding and the political arena will once more look like it did to Mr Roosevelt. Hopefully, they won't be during this campaign. It's messy enough as it is.

Guilty of Being [a] Wino

I saw this on witz.org and I thought I'd share...

Best. Photoshop. Ever.

Get Down America!

Back in 1976, the citizens of the United States were still reeling from the Vietnam War, Watergate and the tragic losses of men like John F Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X the decade before. The great hope in the American Dream was replaced by something darker...cynicism. Just look at the movies of the time; Marathon Man, Network, Taxi Driver...the list goes on and on. However, there was a writer who saw the tone and turned his cynicism to satire. He was writing one of the most successful comics on the stands. His name was Steve Gerber. His comic? Howard The Duck.



The American people had a lousy choice ahead of them. They could pick political stooge, Gerald Ford, or they could pick the inexperienced peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter. Heck of a choice, right? No wonder we were so damn cynical!


At the time, Mr. Gerber was working on one of the more popular funny books on the newsstands; Howard The Duck. Howard hailed from an alternate reality where ducks became the dominant life form. So, he was no more or less ridiculous than the 2 choices presented to the American people. In issue number 8, Mr. Gerber decided to toss Howard The Duck into the political ring. As Gerber stated in Back Issue Magazine, “the nature of the character lent itself to satire,and being the first election after Watergate it was a very peculiar time in American political history.”

Long story short, Howard found himself working as a security guard at the All Night Party's national political convention. Howard saves one of their candidates and the party decides to nominate Howard for President.

There's a scene in Batman Returns that's very reminiscent of this story. Howard's Campaign Manager, G.Q. Studley, tells Howard and his friend that candidates don't think, they recite. Howard in turn bites Studley's nose. Remind you of The Penguin much? Anyway, the thing is, here was Howard The Duck, an absolutely ridiculous character, showing us how weak our politicians had become. Sadly, it's still true today. Sure, there's a lot of rhetoric, but said speeches tend to contradict both Senator Obama's and Senator McCain's records.

Howard The Duck's run for president, while short-lived (it ended with a bathtub sex scandal), cast a mirror on the shambling American political process. It's unfortunate that the book's audience was a bunch of kids who couldn't wait to see Howard fight a giant beaver at Niagra Falls in the next issue.

I miss Steve Gerber's work tremendously. I would have loved to see what he would do with Doctor Fate in our current political climate. At the same time, at least he's no longer trapped in a world he never made.

Great, Just Great!

So, I decided to go to Vermont for a few days this August. I haven't had a real vacation in 5 years and, well, I just need to get away for a bit and refocus. Unfortunately, it seems I'm walking into the plot of a Lovecraft story.

The story in question is The Whisperer In The Darkness. In the story, the narrator uncovers old legends about monsters living in Vermont's uninhabited hills. These creatures, the Mi-Go, abduct people who venture or settle too close to their sinister territory. I haven't read the story in years, and truthfully, now I'm afraid to...Great, just great.

Want to see a crazy lawyer?

I watched Michael Clayton this evening and I gotta say, what a helluva character piece. George Clooney got a lot of accolades for this flick, and with very good reason. That said, the real star was Tom Wilkinson.

I know, I know, Mr. Wilkinson was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but the man's performance blew me away. He plays Arthur Edens, a New York Defense Attorney defending a monstrous, Times Square-advertising conglomerate that's been poisoning Middle America since the early 1990s. Edens is a manic depressive who stops taking his meds. Between succumbing to his own demons and seeing the innocence in a teenage plaintiff, Arthur Edens has a revelation: He's a glorified janitor for the bad guys. Mr. Wilkinson's performance is both subtle and brazen. At one moment, he's babbling about the best bread he's ever had and the next he's a shark quoting New York State law. Stellar stuff, definitely worth watching!

Live Every Week Like It's Hulk Week

Don't make me angry, you won't like me when I'm angry.

When I walked into Universal Pictures' and Marvel Studio's The Incredible Hulk, I felt residual pangs of disappointment from Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk adaptation. I suppose it's only natural since it's only been 5 years since Hulk Dogs and Absorbing Dad. The original flick gave me douche chills, and douche chills make me angry. Thankfully, The Incredible Hulk's title sequence washed away the dread, much like an actual douche. Weird, no?

Director Louis Leterrier had a tough job with this flick. Mr. Leterrier had to make us forget the existential mess from 2003 and capitalize on the recent success of Jon Favreau's Iron Man. He did a fantastic job! The movie connects to ol' Shellhead's cinematic debut with a few references to Stark Industries and SHIELD as well as to a handful of Marvel staples. He delivers a slam bang action story with the heart of the TV series. This IS the Hulk!

The supporting cast is weaved together from the decades of comics continuity and even a TV show cameo in a seamless fashion. The movie moves at a solid pace, delivering the perfect balance of tortured Bruce Banner and the savage Hulk. So, please check out the movie and maybe you'll feel the same excitement as the kid above.

The Poor Man's Iced Coffee

Given the economy and the heat, I thought I'd share a discovery I made on Monday morning...the Poor Man's Iced Coffee!

It was about 9 o'clock in the morning, I was thirsty and it was stifling outside. I desperately wanted an iced coffee, but I was too broke for Starbucks. So, I shuffled around the kitchen looking for a pick-me up that wasn't hot. Then I had an epiphany...instant coffee dissolves in water!

So, I present to you my recipe for Poor Man's Iced Coffee.

3/4 glass of water
1 teaspoon of instant coffee mix
1 fistful of ice
1 splash of flavored creamer

First, toss in your instant coffee mix. Then, pour the water into the glass and stir them together. After that, toss in your ice and to top it off, add some French Vanilla creamer!

I know it sounds gross, but it's pretty delicious. Enjoy!

The Uncontacted and the Flying Object

Recently, the Brazilian government's Indian affairs department, Funai, took several bird's eye view photographs of an "uncontacted" Indian tribe in the Acre region on the Brazil-Peruvian border. The photos illuminate a world that we, in a "civilized society," have only seen in movies and read about in history books. It is evident in the photos that these Amazonian natives are ready and willing to defend their way of life against insurmountable odds. It's truly marvelous that these people exist.

Consider this, we all probably know someone's who's seen a UFO, a ghost or some other extra normal phenomenon. Generally speaking, these phenomena tend to scare the living hell out of the folks who see them. That's not the case with our uncontacted brethren. In the photo above, they stand ready to defend their ground. Who knows what they think the plane above is? One thing, however, is certain...to them, it is an unidentified flying object and they've deemed it a threat to their way of life.

Why is it that when we see something like that, we're filled with a mix of curiosity and dread while the Amazonians staunchly defend their makeshift rampart?

Endless Doctor

I know the above image isn't of our current Doctor, but I really like it.

OK, onto the news...

Lying In The Gutters and IO9 are reporting that Neil Gaiman (Sandman, American Gods) may be joining the TARDIS' writing crew come 2010, when Steven Moffat (Jekyll, Press Gang) takes over as show runner.

Personally, I think this is great news. Mr. Gaiman, a pronounced Who fan, will most likely bring a nice touch to The Doctor, similar to Moffat's touches in classic episodes "Blink" and "The Girl In The Fireplace."

Moffat brings a distinctive feel to the character. Aside from introducing one of the best Who supporting characters (Captain Jack Harkness) since Romana, Moffat's episodes focus on who The Doctor is without overdoing the doom and gloom. They're the most balanced episodes in the revived series (I just want to note that I love what Davies and company have done, but Moffat is by far my favorite of the show's writers).

Neil Gaiman is the right kind of writer for a Moffat series. The man knows mythology and I think that's just what our favorite Time Lord needs right now.