Guys say and do stupid things for girls sometimes, no matter how much we psyche ourselves up or tell ourselves otherwise.

Real life is awkward. I was at the movies the other day and waiting on a friend. He was going to show up late, so I was keeping an eye out. I saw someone who I thought was him walk in, so I waved him over. He waved back and came to sit down. When he got about a seat away, we both realized that we didn’t know each other at all. He sat one seat down from me and we both quietly decided not to acknowledge what happened.

Basically, mere seconds after you do something cool like a cat flip? You’re going to do something perfectly normal and awkward like float down a hallway. You can’t have the awesome without the mundane.

How often do people eat in comics? According to my friend Chris, not often enough. I agree. So much of our entertainment is geared toward big things happening, whether explosions or laser eyes, that we miss the small things that make the big things matter. Case in point: Joe is about to do something, so he eats. What do you do in real life before doing things? You eat.

And dig that “no stabbing” sign.

black is something to laugh about. black is something to cry about.
created: It’s Digital December at ComicsAlliance, and we’re gawn in. So far, I’ve got interviews up with Boom!, IDW, and Dark Horse. On Thursday, DC Comics hits. On Friday, ???. Next week… something more. 2010 is the year that CA put the boot to your favorite comics news site.

It’s also music countdown at the Factual Opinion, so I’m pitching in to help out Marty Brown and my Joe Casey Fan Club brothers Sean Witzke and Tucker Stone figure out what was good this year. You can check the entire category here, and check out the first of my contributions on the top 50-31 songs list. More to come, of course, including a bit of writing that I ended up being really happy with. That’s rare for me, so stay tuned.

black is serious. black is a feeling.
consumed:
–Charlie Huston wrote a short story, The Impossibility of a Diaphanous History Machine, on the Mulholland Books site. I like Huston’s work. He writes dialogue like people talk, where punctuation may not mean what it traditionally means, and I dig that a lot. This story is about bombs, and I like the gag about mental ones.

-Here’s a piece he wrote about children, poverty, and fuel for stories. I generally don’t like people writing about writing. I think that you should just shut up and do it, because “This is how I write” is one of those things that’s just awfully boring, but this is practically a statement of intent. It’s hype. A voice coming out of a dark alley that says, “I have a gun.” Needless to say, I’m hyped for this new book. Drops in 2012, though.

–Huston’s website is here. Get familiar.

–Matt Seneca goes in on a Wonder Woman piece by Bill Sienkiewicz. It’s from an aborted series written by Frank Miller and drawn by Sienkiewicz called Wonder Woman: Bondage. I would trade every issue of Wonder Woman and JLA published over the last five years to see this series. That creative team is one of the best in comics. Every time they get together, somebody needs to sit up and take notice.

-I liked this comic by Sloane, especially the way the grid explodes toward the end.

-Ron Wimberly posted a dope story, too.

-Did y’all hear that they killed Brother Voodoo?

-I read Felipe Smith’s Peepo Choo 3 on my lunch break today. That series is three books long and I dug them a lot. They can be mean and gross, hysterically so on both fronts, but man, they click along pretty well. Last volume had a great action scene, while this one ended up having a lot of heart. Morimoto Mazza Fakkin’ Rokkustaa is one of the best new characters of 2010, too. More on this later, once I sort my thoughts out on it. I kinda laughed at the end. I don’t need more, I think the wrap is fine, but I’d read more.

-Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba&! 9 was fantastic, as expected. Juralumin got one of the hands down best scenes in the book, Yotsuba has some great physical comedy with an exercise ball, and Azuma nails some really nice things over the course of the book. The dinnertime conversation which was very adult, the Yanda/Yotsuba relationship… good stuff. The translation still bugs the life out of me, though. Do I really need to know what the Japanese onomatopoeia for rolling is? And do I need to see it untranslated every single time? Just write “roll roll roll” and we’ll get it.

-The translation really and truly sandbags the book. Stop explaining and just show us. They did well with a dinner scene that would have been tough to translate without notes, but for every one of those, there’s a “Fuuka-onee-chan” to wade through.

-New music: on pause. Been listening to old stuff and have been too busy to buy new joints. Gotta get a lot of stuff did before the Christmas break, and that means doing a couple weeks of work in a few days. Gross.

-But while we’re on the music tip–one of my favorite lines this year is from Evidence, on Copywrite’s Three Story Building. At the end of his verse, he goes, “Started to rap, told my mama I’d be Common/ She thought I meant normal/ I said, “Let’s be honest.” Something about that stuck with me, it’s just ill from top to bottom.

-Copywrite is responsible for another line that I think about a lot. It’s from “Fuck Soundcheck,” off his T.H.E. High Exhaulted tape from forever ago. “I don’t blame you for being wack. I blame your fans for being dumb enough to feel you.”

-I’m not saying that I believe that it’s a fair statement or anything that you should say in polite company. But it’s probably true.

-You hear that Steel might be dying next year in this Doomsday event? I should probably care more, but I could care less, instead. Sorry, John Henry.

-New issues of Chew, Bulletproof Coffin, and Atlas hit ComiXology today. Be nice to catch up on the first two and to ditch a few floppies of the last one.

-I keep trying to think through why I’m uncomfortable with “fun” being a crap descriptor of a comic. I’m trying to purge it from my vocabulary because it’s become vague and meaningless. I think Tucker came closest to how I feel with his review of Batman & Robin 17, a book I thought was mediocre at best. Something else I need to think through, clearly.

black is us, the beautiful people.
David: Amazing Spider-Man 650, Thunderbolts 151
Esther: Batman and Robin 18, Birds of Prey 7
Gavin: Batman And Robin 18, Green Lantern 60, Green Lantern Emerald Warriors 5, Green Lantern Plastic Man Weapon Mass Deception 1, Time Masters Vanishing Point 5, Avengers Academy 7, Chaos War 4, Chaos War Thor 2, Strange Tales 2 3, Thunderbolts 151, What If Spider-Man, Darkwing Duck 7

You ever have somebody you can talk to freely? That kind of free wheeling, free association, talking just to talk and maybe be a little clever sort of thing? Where you can have a conversation where you’re both saying a lot of nothing, but it’s still time well spent? Graham is really good at writing those conversations.

Every year, my best friend Sean and I have a habit of giving each other horrible Christmas gifts. From memory, he’s gotten me a “three wolf moon” t-shirt, Suburban Commando, Jingle All the Way and the Country Bear Jamboree. With the movies, it means that I have to watch them and he has to be there to endure it next to me to make sure. Well, the joke’s on him that one time because I genuinely enjoyed Suburban Commando!

Sean gave me an early Christmas gift recently and the other night we had the privilege of watching WWE Films’ Knucklehead, starring the Big Show.

Do you want your movie poster with or without toppings?

WWE Films have released a lot of wrestler-starred movies over the years, usually in the form of cheesy action movies with the likes of Steve Austin, John Cena and for some reason Ted Dibiase Jr. They also did a horror movie with Kane and a serious family drama with Cena. When I heard about Knucklehead, I was initially interested. Big Show has always made me laugh and the idea of putting him in a comedy as a big doofus only seemed natural. I was totally onboard. Then I saw the trailer.

Wow. Okay, um, so you know that saying about how a movie trailer is the studio trying to dress up the movie to make it look like how they wish it was? That’s what we have here. As far as I can tell, this is as entertaining as you can possibly make the movie look with the hour and a half of footage at your disposal. Yes, the best selling point they had in their repertoire was, “Big Show takes a monster shit on a bus.” Personally, I might have played up that the climax of the movie is Big Show vs. Terry Tate, Office Linebacker, but I don’t know if that million dollar idea carries over to other potential viewers.

I’m going to go full spoilers on this baby, so consider yourself warned. Not that it matters, since if you’re reading this, you’ve either seen it already and want an echo chamber on how bad it is or you’re morbidly curious on how terrible it can possibly be.

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I said I wasn’t gonna talk, but I changed my mind.

A lot of the power of King City comes from the fact that Graham is writing about relationships. Everybody has them. This one is about Joe and Earthling, his cat. Have you ever had pets? Then you’ll understand their relationship. There’s a definite childbirth subtext here, too, isn’t there? Introducing a new father to his child.

Brandon Graham’s King City is one of my favorite comics this year. Over the next twelve days, at noon even, I’m going to show you a reason why. KC speaks for itself pretty well, and if you have to know how I feel about it, I wrote about it here. I could fill these up with blather, but just read that and reread it every time I post an image.

Ask your comic shop guy nicely and he might be able to get all twelve issues for you. If you don’t like them, well… sucks to be you.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s all make out in the comments!

-We cold open on a discussion of a recent issue of Scott Snyder & Rafael Albuquerque’s American Vampire.
-Esther doesn’t like Skinner Sweet much
-And she doesn’t believe that his name is awesome, either
-This one is about villains, and how villainous is too villaionous for villains to be.
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-See you, space cowboy!

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Fairly small week, though thankfully with help from Was Taters to bulk it up slightly. It’s definitely a good thing as it introduces me to Thor’s amazing facial expression.

The Wolverine story in this week’s What If is pretty dire. Just saying.

Batgirl 16
Bryan Q. Miller and Dustin Nguyen

Booster Gold #39
Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Chris Batista

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