On comics and other pop culture topics, including archived Comic Book Commentary posts from 2005-2007.
This guy I work with says, "I've really mellowed out the past month or so."We're preparing for a massive move over the weekend, almost everyone on my floor is shifting places, and he's calming himself down as he tells me and a co-worker about the storage facility where we can send the overflow of boxes of media kits, etc."I lost my mother last month."I hate moments like that, especially with people I barely know. I never know what to say and, not being particularly religious or anything, even the simplest platitudes like "God bless." are awkward. Worse, though, is that…
As an unashamed, born again player of Dungeons & Dungeons, I was excited by last month's official announcement that Devil's Due was on the verge of "acquir[ing] the license to the entire D&D® library." While I've enjoyed some of the D&D-based novels TSR/Wizards of the Coast has published over the years, too many of them have been bland, formulaic marketing promotions for their latest gaming supplements or campaign setting, and I hadn't picked up a comic book version in...well, ever, actually.My return to D&D two years ago coincided with my return to comic books, and it was at my first…
Sin-sational!?!In a word....hardly. In two words, not really; but in any case it's a movie that should be seen. In fact you can use just about any cliché in the book to describe Frank Miller's Sin City and be dead-on. It's a jaw-dropping, eye-popping, action-packed, must-see crime drama that's very well-acted. It's also a campy, over-dramatized, mechanically flawed film that tries to be too true to its roots. It's one big contradiction, and so is this spoiler-free review.Sin City is not a traditional movie adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City Graphic Novels, it's a direct translation from the page to…
It's a sad fact in the comics industry today that succesfully launching a brand new title is a Herculean feat for the Big Two, requiring a massive marketing and promotion campaign with no guarantees of success. For independent publishers, it's a near impossible task. Even sadder is the fact that the lower half of the Diamond Top 100 - wholly dominated by mainstream super-heroes, historied licenses and/or A-list creators - typically bottoms out around 25,000 copies, making "successful" a somewhat relative term. So what to do when a really good comic book comes along, one not in the front of…
Comic books I like generally fall into one of two primary categories: 1) well-written, character-driven fare (Gotham Central, Ex Machina); or, 2) old school, straight-up fun comics (Ezra, The Losers). A third category - the thought-provoking, big idea classic - is a rare treat that usually starts in one of the two other categories before transcending it.Hoarse and Buggy's Western Tales of Terror is a great example of that second category: old school, straight-up fun comics combining the peanut butter and chocolate of Cowboys and Zombies...and it's an anthology, to boot!Narrated by Pete, a sarcastic, foul-mouthed, undead cowboy - "I…
It's no secret that creative types can be pretty thin-skinned when it comes to their art, especially when they're in their early developmental stages. Personally, when I first got into the poetry slam scene - competitive poetry readings, for the uninitiated, where original poems are performed and then judged on a scale of 0-10 by five random members of the audience - I was pretty thin-skinned, ready to curse out, throw beers at, or fight judges who gave my poems low scores. After awhile, as happens to most poets on the scene, I matured, wrote and performed better poems, and…
Blame it on the Cartoon Network's Mucha Lucha for my even giving El Zombo Fantasma a second glance. Or credit it, depending, but if not for it, this book wouldn't have even registered on my radar and that would have been my loss. I'd never heard of El Zombo's original 3-issue run, published under Dark Horse's Rocket Comics imprint, but I've liked the [completely unrelated] cartoon the few times I've seen it, used to love wrestling back in the earliest days of Wrestlemania, and have been on a zombie/undead kick recently, so I was intrigued by both the cover and…
