Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Dec 3, 2022 5:26:21 GMT -5
None of these concepts interest me overly, but I voted for the Hulk because that was at least a reasonably good TV show for its era. I've watched a handful of episodes in recent years and it holds up reasonably well too.
I used to watch the George Reeves Superman show on Saturday morning kids TV back in the 80s, but I never really liked it very much. It seemed pretty old fashioned even then and was totally inferior to the Christopher Reeve Superman films of that era.
The late 70s Spider-Man show was utter rubbish. Really poor plots, poor acting and terrible special effects. It also, other than having Peter Parker as Spider-Man, had only a passing resemblance to the comics, with very few of the usual supporting characters making an appearance. If memory serves, J. Jonah Jameson in the TV series was actually quite a nice, understanding boss!!
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Dec 1, 2022 9:48:37 GMT -5
Now I'm up to the arc where everyone, including the Masked Marauder, a criminal mastermind, thinks Foggy Nelson is Daredevil. I love old Daredevil. At times, it reads more like a parody of Silver Age super-hero comics. And at others it just reads like terrible Silver Age comics. Mike Murdoch, anyone?? I too generally enjoy early Daredevil, but Christ, some of it is utterly dire.
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Dec 1, 2022 6:04:16 GMT -5
Very sorry to hear of your loss, codystarbuck. Hang on in there and try to keep your thoughts positive.
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Nov 30, 2022 16:38:40 GMT -5
It's surprisingly excellent. I had a few of the mini giveaway issues that came with Atari cartridges when I was a kid. I'm wondering how they tie into each other. 🤔 Those earlier giveaway issues follow a different, earlier crew of the starship Scanner One (a terrible name!) than the regular ongoing Atari Force comic does. Some of the original crew do appear as minor characters in the later regular DC comic, but something like 20 years have passed. Only Commander Martin Champion is common to both crews. Both crews end up fighting against the villain the Dark Destroyer (a terrible name!). Gerry Conway's writing and characters, along with José Luis García-López's artwork are what make the stories in the second, regular series so good. Terrible starship and villain names aside, it's a fantastic comic. I had a bit of a crush on the character Dart as a young teen. She and the rodent-like thief Pakrat were my two favourite characters. There's an Atari Force review thread around here someplace that shaxper started some years back. I don't think it ever got finished though.
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Nov 30, 2022 4:23:12 GMT -5
Shameless plug time: here's the video for the new single from my band The Kynd, "Whispers & Tones"... "Whispers & Tones" will be released digitally on 9/12/22 via the Rock//Paper//Scissors label and will be available on all your favourite dowload platforms and streaming services. I really like the lo-fi "indie" aesthetic of this video: reminds me of early '90s videos by the likes of The House of Love, Ride or The Charlatans. "Whispers & Tones" is the first single to be taken from The Kynd's long-awaited second album 'TIMELINES'. You can Pre-Order 'TIMELINES' on Limited Edition 180mg Vinyl and CD now from Bandcamp: thekynduk.bandcamp.com/album/timelines
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Nov 30, 2022 3:59:38 GMT -5
All true, but let's be honest with ourselves for a moment: this is just a cynical cash grab tie-in with The Rings of Power TV series -- nothing more, nothing less. The timing of it alone makes that obvious. That said, I am kinda tempted to pick this book up, as I don't actually have all of Tolkien's various writings on the Second Age, only the stuff that is included in the LOTRs appendices and The Silmarillion. Also, Brian Sibley co-wrote the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of LOTRs, along with Michael Bakewell, and that might well be my favourite ever adaptation of it. Publishing is a for profit business. Many books don't turn a profit. I am not going to fault a publisher for putting out a sure thing in the holiday season. Some may call it a "cash grab" but it's simply a smart business decision if you are in business to make money. You can be cynical if you choose, but every product released in the entertainment industry by a for profit company is intended to generate as much revenue as possible. Criticizing them for doing so is like criticizing someone for taking a job to earn a paycheck. It's a necessity in the market that exists in our current civilization. If you don't, you're not in business for long. Spoken like a true capitalist! It's not really an accurate analogy to compare it to someone taking a job to earn a pay check though. Tolkien is long dead, and so too are his direct descendants, so any profit generated by this new re-packaging of his writings is not benefiting the author, his wife or his children -- it's benefiting the Tolkien estate, which is now run by people who never knew the man. So, while I absolutely believe that creative people and their immediate families should get financially rewarded for their work and acknowledged that publishing is a for profit industry, this book only financially benefits Tolkien's Grandchildren and Great Grandchildren, Christopher Tolkien's second wife, and third party corporations like Amazon and Embracer, who now own the rights to JRR Tolkien's works. Like I say, I'm not disputing that it's not a useful book to have in the marketplace, or even necessarily saying that it shouldn't have been put out by the concerned parties -- they are profit making organisations, after all, as you say. And I put no fault on anyone who might want to buy this (as I say, I'm kinda tempted myself). But let's call it what it really is -- a cynical cash grab by the Tolkien Estate and Amazon -- and not attempt to paint it as just a poor honest author trying to make a buck. Further, publishers have always sought to maximize revenue from Tolkien's works, in fact the Lord of the Rings exists as a trilogy instead of as a single book as Tolkien wanted because Allen and Unwin wanted to maximize sales and revenue on it, so it being a trilogy, and not a single book could be characterized as a ash grab by the publishers, as they wanted sales of 3 books instead of one for their investment in Tolkien. That's the publishing business, like it or not. This is partially incorrect insofar as Allen & Unwin's primary reason for splitting the book into three was because paper was in short supply in the post-War years and therefore rather expensive. So, splitting it into three volumes kept the price of each book down, while also allowing customers 18 months or so to spread out the cost of purchasing the whole story. They were concerned that a single hefty volume would be prohibitively expensive and would put people off of buying it. I'm sure there were other commercial reasons designed to increase profits behind the decision too, but again, any extra revenue generated by packaging it as three books instead of one directly benefited the author and his family, as well as Allen & Unwin, not Amazon or descendants who never knew Tolkien himself.
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Nov 30, 2022 1:27:27 GMT -5
From wikipedia's write up of the book: So it compiled everything Tolkien wrote relevant to the Second Age into one volume, rather than having to own multiple volumes and sift through them. Kind of like a greatest hits album for a musical artist or one of those year's best collections for a genre (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, detective, etc.) which has been a practice in entertainment industries since the mid-20th century, especially around holiday time. It gives them a solid, recent product to sell to consumers who want the convenience of having it all in one place and not have to track down or own several different volumes (or magazines, or albums) to get the stuff they are interested in. Might not appeal to someone who owns it all already, but these volumes sell well, often outselling the sources the collect material from and putting in front of readers who would never spend the time or money to track down all the individual sources. All true, but let's be honest with ourselves for a moment: this is just a cynical cash grab tie-in with The Rings of Power TV series -- nothing more, nothing less. The timing of it alone makes that obvious. That said, I am kinda tempted to pick this book up, as I don't actually have all of Tolkien's various writings on the Second Age, only the stuff that is included in the LOTRs appendices and The Silmarillion. Also, Brian Sibley co-wrote the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of LOTRs, along with Michael Bakewell, and that might well be my favourite ever adaptation of it.
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Confessor
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Wearisome
Nov 30, 2022 1:08:32 GMT -5
via mobile
Post by Confessor on Nov 30, 2022 1:08:32 GMT -5
I always enjoy the EC horror and sci-fi books (and the Piracy title too), but yeah, I agree that you can't read too many in a row or they become mind-numbingly formulaic. The artwork is almost always a treat in those comics though, and I can't say I've ever found them to anymore overwritten than a lot of other Atom Age comics.
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Nov 30, 2022 0:58:07 GMT -5
From the dollar bin at my LCS looking forward to finally reading this series. It's surprisingly excellent.
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Nov 25, 2022 21:03:58 GMT -5
Interesting topic, Kurt. I'm kinda struggling to think of any super-villain team-ups I actually like off the top of my head, but I'm sure some ideas will come to me in time.
I hope to participate in the Classic Comics Xmas this time, as I sat last year out: initially because I was crazy busy with work in the run up to Christmas, but then I caught Covid and felt so ghastly that there was no way I wanted to write up 12 entries. This year, my December work load is a little less busy, and I plan to avoid the lurgy, so I hope I can participate.
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Nov 24, 2022 3:48:16 GMT -5
November 22, 1963. A day that will live in infamy. -M The day the Sixties began. On a somewhat similar note, I've always liked this Philip Larkin verse from his poem Annus Mirabilis (it's a slightly more Anglo-centric take on the dawn of the Sixties)... "Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) - Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban And the Beatles' first LP."
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Nov 24, 2022 3:31:38 GMT -5
Inched a little closer this weekend to completing my Jonah Hex series. Picked up issues #51 and #92, and while I probably overpaid a little for each of these, I haven't bought any classic comics in at least four months, so I had some money saved and figured that my want list is short enough that it wouldn't kill me to get what I wanted when I had the opportunity to do it. This leaves me just one more to go in the form of #91, which I can't remember the last time I saw one in the wild. I hate to go the eBay route, but if I don't find one in the next few months of my hunt, I may have to break down and just do it. I admire you fellas who only want to buy books that you find "in the wild". I guess you must live nearer a bunch of comic shops than I do or the comic shops near you are more reasonably priced than those in London. I'm pretty much eBay all the way these days when it comes to comics. The last time I was in a physical shop (about a year ago), I was shocked at the ridiculously extortionate prices being asked for even fairly common and not particularly sort after Bronze Age fodder. I kept thinking, "jeez, I've seen multiple copies of this book for way less than this on eBay."
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Nov 24, 2022 2:34:58 GMT -5
I hit the point in Swamp Thing where I feel that Moore was losing interest, so I decided to take a break (I'll finish it and head on in to Veitch's underrated run in a bit). So I'm reading the early 2000s Jonah Hex written by Palmiotti and Gray. What a great book. Solid one-and-done stories. Nice use of the classic character. Hex just seems to lend himself to great runs no matter how he's used. His first book was one of the most consistent of the era. The Lansdale-era minis were excellent. This Volume 2 is just super solid. I totally agree... The Palmiotti/Gray series is great. It's only in the later All-Star Western series that things go completely off the rails... It starts out OK, but ends up being substantially worse than Hex. Not sure if they just lost interest, or if the scripting was being dictated by the editorial staff. Either way, it's a hot mess from about issue 25-on. Crimebuster tried to warn me of this prior to my reading of it, but I paid no heed to his warnings. He was right.
I'm another big Jonah Hex fan and I really loved the initial Palmiotti/Gray run. As Slam says, it's mostly done-in-one stories and it's uniformly really good. I also really disliked the subsequent All-Star Western series. It started out being not too bad, what with having Hex in 18th century Gotham -- I thought that was an interesting spin on things. But it soon started to tie in with modern day Batman storylines, which I did not like. I finally dropped it when a time travelling Booster Gold turned up and whisked Hex away to modern day Gotham City, where he could team-up with Batman. Yeah, not good.
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Nov 23, 2022 12:43:18 GMT -5
British guitar great Wilko Johnson has died at 75. I've never been much of a fan of Dr. Feelgood or any of Wilko's other musical projects, to be honest, but his crazed performances on TV back in the 70s really fascinated me as a little kid. You really couldn't help but notice him, with his jerky, manic, roving stage movements, which were at once eye-catching, slightly comedic, and genuinely threatening -- he always completely owned any stage he was on. And he always came across as a good guy in interviews too. A massive influence on countless British punk, post-punk and indie/alternative guitar players, he will certainly be missed. www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-63728503
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Nov 23, 2022 12:29:54 GMT -5
Meant to post this in the thread ages ago, but back in the summer I picked up a copy of "City of Thieves", the 5th Fighting Fantasy role-playing gamebook, from a charity shop for a couple of quid. These are kinda like the Choose Your Own Adventure books, only much, much better. I used to absolutely love these books when I was a kid. Not sure if these were ever very popular over in the U.S., but Fighting Fantasy was a huge thing over here in the UK for kids and teens in the mid-to-late '80s. And "City of Theives" is one of the very best of the series.
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