* Is it just me, or does the new, numerically enhanced trailer for the Friday the 13th remake (via Jason Adams) deliberately evoke this YouTube montage of every killing from the entire series?
* A collection of David B.’s dream comics? Where did this come from?
* Another thing about the end of Secret Invasion: So now Iron Man, title character of the hugely popular and effervescent film starring Robert Downey Jr., is not just a privacy-invading, gulag-running tyrant, but an incompetent one to boot, who is now staggering out of office in ignominy? That’s one way to play it, I guess. I’m not one to assert real-world allegories, but if you had to pick one real-world political figure with that basic career trajectory…let’s just say it’s not a person with whom I’d align the lead character in Marvel Studios’ main movie franchise.
* That being said, whatever problems I may have with the multi-year Civil War/Initiative/World War Hulk/Secret Invasion/Dark Reign uber-event as a story or as a vehicle for likable characters whose core concepts remain intact, I’m impressed as hell by it as an editorial/organizational/marketing mechanism. If you’re the kind of person who’s interested in the status quo of a shared corporate superhero universe in and of itself, I’d imagine it’s rather exciting to see all the ducks in a row on such a consistent basis.
* Hey, look, a new Doves album is on the way. I like this band a great deal. (Via Pfork.)
* Apparently I also like this band:
* Now here’s something that College Sean T. Collins would have paid money to see: A French prankster played Mario Kart in real traffic. This is the result. Just wait till you see the banana peels. (Via Topless Robot.)
* Look at the cover for Antony & the Johnson’s upcoming album The Crying Light. (Via Ryan Catbird.)
re: the editorial/organizational/marketing mechanism at Marvel… mmmmmmmmmmhm. enough to make a DC guy like me hang my head in shame.
The super story of the Marvel U has remained the most consistently entertaining part of all their books for the past five years. I don’t buy almost any of the “important” books in the Marvel line, but I think it’s pretty fun watching where the group mind mutates the story from year to year. Of course, the internet makes this enjoyment a lot easier.
The Friday body count skipped over the destruction of an entire space station/city in Jason X – pushing death toll for the humble boy from Crystal Lake, the Thoreau of slashers, into truly staggering numbers. That place was a city, so you got to figure hundreds of thousands, at least, should be added to the count.
That’s a good point. I have a lot of fun thinking and talking about the Marvel Universe meta-story, but (with very few exceptions–Avengers Disassembled, Breakout, the Death of Captain America, and World War Hulk) I have basically no fun at all actually reading it. It’s not a coincidence that the only Marvel books I’ve been buying are at best tangentially related to the main story. (Captain America is kinda sorta an exception, but that really is its own animal no matter how important Cap has been to the central story over the past two years or so.)
Compare and contrast with DC, which after an extremely rough period circa Countdown is finally lining up behind its two best writers, Morrison and Johns, and thus the books I’m buying are actually driving the meta-story rather than dodging it–Final Crisis and its tie-in minis, Batman RIP, the Lantern saga, eventually Flash Rebirth. But a) that’s still a much more disparate bunch of storylines than Marvel-style “everyone gets invaded by the Skrulls”/”everyone gets conquered by Norman Osborn” plotting; b) there’s still a lot of top-down pseudo-event stuff with ambiguous branding going on to distract from the main storylines–Faces of Evil, Origins and Omens, Sightings, etc etc etc.
Why must you constantly hate on Ulysses S. Grant?
Re: the new Friday the 13th trailer. I don’t know why, but that new trailer leaves me really cold. It has all the elements I’m looking for in a Jason flick, but it all feels so recycled from earlier efforts and not in any way that adds something dynamic to the effort. Mind you, I’m the guy who thought the remake of the Hills Have Eyes was a step up from the original, so for all my love of 80’s slasher fare, my opinion may not be the most reliable.
Re: the Marvel/DC thing. I’m connecting more to the DC stuff myself as evidenced by my own buying and reading habits and I think for me it boils down to Marvel’s through-lines feeling like a collection of story-beats that just exist to move to the next story-beat – more like bullet points than real, honest to goodness stories. Whereas the DC stuff may be more spotty, it at least feels more like every story I’m reading exists for it’s own sake. I recognize that there’s that element of “And this sets up this, which will set up that,” nonsense there as well, but Johns’ and Morrison’s work, at least for me, feels more specific to the story being told rather than existing solely to serve as talking points for the interview where they’ll announce the next big event. Again, as Sean pointed out, some of the Marvel stuff I’m liking best is really self contained (Cap, Iron Fist, etc)- everything else just feels like a never ending game of dominoes with no end in sight.
Not sure if that reads as coherently as I would like, but I think you get my point.
Whoa, did I serious write “never ending game of dominoes with no end in sight”?
For a guy who edits for a living, I should be horsewhipped for that.
To continue on our MSP mind-meld, after listening to them a bunch recently, I’m really depressed that the music industry, in all its infinite wisdom, decided that the best Britpop band to export and promote to the U.S. was Oasis. Fucking a.
I know I shouldn’t have expected Antony to stop creeping me out after that Hercules album dropped, but I really thought he was going to stop creeping me out after that Hercules album dropped.