The Cipher 01/05/10
January 5th, 2011 Posted by david brotherscreated: I sent off 2010 and welcomed 2011 in style. Quality over quantity, right?
-AOL jawns: Comics for movie buffs, Digital December mop-up with a retailer and Archie
-Tom Spurgeon at Comics Reporter interviewed me and whoo, look at the size of that thing. I go in on a lot of subjects–fashion in comics, race and why Iron Man 2.0 is a vote of no-confidence for black folks and comics, the importance of art and story, what news stories journos should cover… click through, read it, tell me what you thought. The response on Twitter and Spurgeon’s intro was super flattering, so now I’m wondering where all the haters at.
consumed:
-As I type, I’m watching Ohio State beast Arkansas (as of the first half) on ESPN3. This is the future. I’d pay money for this service if it carried full seasons for the Buckeyes, Hawks, or Falcons.
-How come every sports broadcast ever has a blonde lady down on courtside/sideline? That’s definitely a trend, right? Holly Rowe on ESPN, Doris Burke on NBA 2k11. It’s always two dudes in the booth and one lady on the field.
-Buckeyes won, Pryor got MVP.
–Dark Horse Presents coming back is pretty cool. I missed out on it the first time around, but I liked the Myspace stuff they put up.
-Seneca update: he posted his top 10 list, get at it. He also liked Silent War.
-I figured out Black History Month 2011. I’m going to keep it under wraps, but what I’m thinking will probably be more work for me, but less time spent thinking and fighting on the page.
-You want to enjoy life? Every payday, take twenty or thirty bucks and buy yourself a fat steak. Cook it yourself on the stovetop or grill, seasoned as you like, and maybe some broccoli or corn on the cob or something to go with it. Then sit down with it and a nice movie and tune everything out while you eat.
-Bonus round: make it a point to carve something you don’t like entirely out of your life.
-This is what I do: open a billion windows on Wikipedia by accident. This week’s haul: Mass extinction, Doomsday event, wormwood star, Chang’e, Giewont, Year Without A Summer, Pararaton, Eschatology, and False Vacuum. I’ve liked been interested in eschatology ever since I was a kid, probably pre-teen even, and I usually find myself lost and reading about it once a month. It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Tough to wrap your head around. It’s too big.
-I’m a little behind on Persona 3. I just met Ken, the kid, but he hasn’t joined up yet. The story hasn’t quite coalesced just yet, though it’s flirting in that direction. I know that the Kirijo group did something, but that’s about as far as it goes. It’s interesting, though. I should probably play it more often than a few hours a week before bed.
-I watched Gurren Lagann
-I’m looking forward to that FLCL
-Been thinking a lot about space vs entertainment lately. I own a lot of books I’m not in love with that are just taking up space. I purged a lot of DVDs a while back, too. My new rule is that if I don’t see myself enjoying it more than once, I don’t buy it on physical media. The only exception right now are floppies, but since I can just trash those and I don’t buy that many anyway, it’s not a huge deal.
–DC Universe Online
-Did y’all hear that some professor felt so guilty about having to say “nigger” when reading Huck Finn that he’s producing a volume with “nigger” replaced by “slave?” What a big fat crybaby, man. Get over it.
-If you’re down to buy four dollar digital comics, do us all a favor and stop buying digital comics. Don’t encourage that nonsense.
-Brief, because I got these Best of 2010 posts to do.
David: ain’t nothing
Esther: Secret Six 29
Gavin: Azrael #16, Ant-Man and Wasp #3, Avengers Prime #5, Ozma of Oz #3, She-Hulks #3, Ultimate Captain America #1, Irredeemable #21, WWE Heroes: Undertaker #2
. I knocked out the first four volumes over the course of four days. Good bedtime reading, and so densely packed with jokes that each page is great. There’s a chapter early with a joke that revolves around Arale being a robot without a vagina, and Senbei is like “I didn’t put one on because I haven’t seen one before! All the magazines are censored!” Weird reading a comic for kids that’s like, “Dirty magazines? Yeah, our main dude reads them constantly and is a huge pervert. Also this chapter is about vaginas.”
. I’m trying to wrap my head around Gulacy still. His art style doesn’t quite appeal to me, but I like the way he does fight scenes. He can dip into the T&A well a little too much, but his camera angles and staging are good. More on this guy later, I’m sure, as I figure out who he is and how he came to be.
being her Jean Grey in New X-Men moment. 2D, however, just kinda follows along. He’s been stuck with Murdoc for years, and at this point, Murdoc’s kidnapped him and taken him to Plastic Beach. That makes 2D the damsel in distress, doesn’t it?
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.
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.
tape from forever ago. “I don’t blame you for being wack. I blame your fans for being dumb enough to feel you.”
. I read a review 
is unexpectedly good. Not that I don’t like Bilal, but it’s been a good while since I really sat down and listened to some old fashioned neo-soul/R&B sanging cat. He’s hitting those high notes like D’Angelo used to, and the album is overall pretty strong. Clever, emotional, on and on. I like it more than Cee-Lo’s 
, which is itself inferior to his Stray Bullets mixtape. Apparently they’re all from the same sessions, which makes The Lady Killer being aight pretty weird. Stray Bullets bangs.
is… aight. Kinda disappointed. It makes me want to listen to Red Gone Wild, mostly. Just aight isn’t good enough these days.
last week and finally got around to listening to it (that’s what happens when you go on vacation, you don’t do things). It’s nuts, totally worth whatever it was I paid for it.
had over me. Listening to it twice a day, minimum, had to stop. I put on OutKast’s 
and 
, two of my most favorite albums ever, back to back. I ended up running through Speakerboxxx/The Love Below and Big Boi’s solo record, too. Feels like I just replaced one addiction with another.
, dropped last week.
. I thought Pilot Talk was just aight. Spitta stayed in his comfort zone, which is fine, but a little boring on an LP. I like him enough that I’ll give him a second try, though.
: This was fantastic. Longer post next week, since I get some other stuff done first, but: yes, you want this. I let it sit for a couple months after reading the first twenty pages or so for some reason, but reading it all in a shot was a great experience.
by Zeb Wells and a whole gang of artists, including David and Alvaro Lopez, who I haven’t seen since their days on Catwoman with Will Pfeifer. In a way, this book is the best example of what I like and don’t like about corporate comics. Wells is telling a pretty good story and bam, a fairly crap X-Men crossover pops up. He treads water through that, managing to do some cool stuff with Doug Ramsey in the process, and then gets back to his ongoing plot. Except! After Wells gets two issues in and introduces his big bad villain and scripts a particularly fun issue for an old X-Force fan like me, we get a crossover with Siege that’s written by another writer entirely. And then, after that issue, is a three issue detour into X-Men: Second Coming. That’s gross. And yet, Wells is holding his head through all of this, and he’s created the only X-Men comic I’m even really interested in right now. Dude is good. I just wish Marvel would give him room to breathe, but I guess working with the X-Men comes with certain expectations.
. I like those odds. The version of “Sitting By The Dock of the Bay” is different from the one I usually get down with on Rock Band. I managed to pick up on that before I even looked up the titles. The RB one is “Take Two.” The one on the album sounds different, fuller maybe. Less raw.
today, wow. Glad I wanted before buying.
: This one is a six hundred page series of fight scenes, give or take a hundred pages, and makes a whole lot of cape comics look stupid in the process. “This ends now!” sort of fights, where you go and go and then your SECRET RESERVE OF ENERGY wins the day, are old and busted. Musashi coming down off the mountain and out of the shadows is the new hotness.
: This is my first ACN, and hey! This was pretty impressive. It was also a surprise birthday gift from 
: Fantastic, duh. Thanks to 
: This is the start of their run, and I read up through a couple volumes after this. I haven’t read this run in a couple years, and it’s still pretty good. I like how Carey put his puzzle pieces together.
not dropping in ebook format until December, though? I hated on the book when it was first announced because it sounded like an annotated rhyme book, and I cannot think of anything more boring. If it’s more of a memoir than a cheat sheet, it might be interesting.
? I wasn’t expecting that. I’m still not sure how to feel about it.
in one sitting, and it’s still plenty enjoyable. It’s still good and still about child soldiers. I’ve been in a holding pattern lately, but I’ve got 
, 
and Carlos Trillo and Eduardo Risso’s 
to take in. Also on deck is Takehiko Inoue’s 
in miniature. I can’t wait for the official release, as long as I can get the cover art with the dude with the sword in his head and not that ugly painting.
the other night. It was pretty good. It was kind of the anti-Bourne, and not really how the trailers made it out to be. It was a very quiet movie, though it opens on an effective bit of violence, which had the effect of making almost every scene very tense. You’re waiting for the explosion. It’s like 
and 
the other day in prep for an upcoming post. It’s wildly uneven, with Philip Tan not even doing the bare minimum in terms of storytelling or quality being the nadir and Cameron Stewart’s arc being the height. I’m massively frustrated by Morrison lately, and by the fact that what should have been a good story has been marred by crap art. I’m gonna try to work that out on the page, though, so stay tuned.
looks fantastic, though. Kid CuDi’s 
leaked as expected and it’s… good. I like it. I don’t like it as much as I like 
yet, but it took me a couple months to really feel that record. I figure two weeks from now and I’ll really really be into it. You know how that goes. If you want a taste, cop the single, 
or watch this Youtube: