Funk Babblings

I just watched the first episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer season eight. Well, OK, I just read the first issue of it -- it's being done as a comic book.

( Great Muppety Odin! )

Oh yeah, and apparently there will be a second comic book series of Serenity. (You have read the first one, haven't you? The one that takes place between Firefly and the movie?)

Someday I must go to the San Diego Comic-Con. Seems like there's always cool stuff happening there.

It seems that among the things happening there was a string of announcements from J. Michael Straczynski. Let's see, we have Ron Howard slated to direct a movie (Changeling) that JMS wrote. We get a 12-episode SF-comedy radio series for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, The Adventures of Apocalypse Al. We get a new JMS TV series called Borrowed Lives. His excellent Rising Stars comic book series will become a TV series. His Midnight Nation graphic novel may become a film, as may a one-off comic book called Dream Police (hadn't heard of that one). He'll also be doing a new comic book called Bullet Points.

Oh yeah, and some Babylon 5 projects. Sure, a B5 video game is coming, but the big news is Babylon 5: The Lost Tales, a direct-to-DVD collection of 20-minute stories, "stories that I wanted to tell during the B5 series but never had the chance to develop." Unlike the previous B5 spinoff attempts, it will focus on the prominent B5 characters -- at least those played by actors still living. (So no G'Kar or Dr. Franklin, but maybe Delenn and Ivanova!) And it will be released next year.

(Thanks to duriyah for sending the link!)

This weekend we'll be heading to Columbus for Marcon. Every year at Marcon I end up buying a pile of books, usually stuff that's hard to find locally, and often rare or out of print stuff. Last year's take included my first real effort to get into graphic novels beyond Sandman.

( And also Elric... )

( My fictional influences )

Saturday I took nontacitare to the local comics shop. Between the two of us we bought six graphic novels, among them:
1 "Sandman" ("The Dream Hunters")
2 "Amazing Spider-Man"
1 Batman ("Arkham Asylum")
1 "Black Orchid"
1 "Promethea"
2 written by J. Michael Straczinski
2 written by Neil Gaiman
1 written by Alan Moore
2 drawn by Dave McKean

I was blown away by the second volume of Promethea (a series recommended by featherynscale). The first volume was an intelligent and off-kilter, yet in many ways typical, superhero origin story. But the second one includes a "hyper-reality" sequence with digitized actors, a magic lesson performed as a tantric sex scene, and finally a trip through the Tarot linking the major arcana with evolution and human history and mythology and kaballah and magic and science -- it's impossible to get it all in one reading.


After the comics shop we went to see an entertaining performance of the musical Pippin. That show includes some interesting theatrical elements, the most striking of them being the climactic stripping out of all theatrical elements, down to the bare bright lights shining down on a stage empty of everything but a few uncostumed actors. Another thing I noticed was a high proportion of red-headed actors in the cast -- about a third of them. I started wondering if that was part of an intentional red-themed color scheme going on.

I keep intending to write about all the books I've been reading, but it's inching closer to a year's worth of books, and sadly I don't think I could do any of them justice at this point. I may still try (wading through an 845-page book means the read-books-pile isn't growing so quickly), but it's still getting less likely.

But what I can talk about is comics.

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