Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Oct 8, 2024 10:59:06 GMT -5
I finally got hold of the TPB of the comic adaptation of Dino De Laurentiis' Flash Gordon movie from 1980, by Bruce Jones and Al Williamson. I'm a gig fan of Williamson's art and I love this movie too, but it's taken me years to find a copy of this at a price I was happy with: they seldom come up for sale here in the UK. I'm really pleased to have tracked this down.  |
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Oct 8, 2024 10:46:12 GMT -5
*exploits opportunity to talk about the entire Age of Apocalypse storyline and hopes she's impressed* And is she? Ever? |
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Oct 8, 2024 10:29:14 GMT -5
My first and only experience of attending a Comic Convention was when I went to a small comic and Doctor Who memorabilia convention in Watford, Hertfordshire back in the early '90s. The comics for sale were mostly UK ones, which I wasn't really into collecting, and it was full of dorky looking, socially awkward, overweight men with bad body odour. I swore "never again!" and I've stuck to that. You comics people are weird!   Worse yet when they try to flirt with girls.
Mercifully, you'd have to imagine most of them would be too scared to approach females.  |
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Oct 8, 2024 10:28:18 GMT -5
Yeah, this sounds like one of those urban legends to me. I'd love to see the source for this, but I'd be amazed if Columbia House Music Club were indeed pirating record company and music publisher's stuff and getting away with it. I got a lot of the details wrong (the article is 13 years old) but it's still pretty shady. link
I believe there was a more in depth article... maybe on Cracked? But I can't find that one, now. It revolved more around the cassette industry. Don't think that link is working right. I'm getting an article about Sir Alexander Fleming's original penicillin mold sample being up for auction.  |
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Oct 8, 2024 10:25:19 GMT -5
Sounds good. When do we want to start. Keeping in mind a number of Americans have a three day weekend coming up. When do you suggest would be a good time, with that in mind? I'm pretty easy really. |
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Oct 8, 2024 5:55:13 GMT -5
I'll have to think if I can come up with ten. There's lots of music I was introduced to through my parents' general musical tastes but neither of them were great album-buyers themselves so I'm not sure there are that many specific records I could list. Love the idea of this, but while I enjoyed going through my parents’ vinyl a lot as a kid, similar to Berkley I can only think of 5 albums that ended up shaping my musical tastes. If I added in the 5 most important albums I got myself early on, that would actually tell more the full story. I did listen to a lot of my dad's records, but perhaps influenced by only a handful. I may be able to come up with 10. I know I can come up with at least 5. I like the idea, but I don't know if I can come up with 10 albums. Definitely a few that got me going in the direction I went, though. OK, so since most folks seems to be struggling to come up with more than five albums that were discovered via your parents' record collection, I think we'll need to expand the parameters a little bit. I kinda like supercat's suggestion of including the most important albums we bought ourselves early on. So, perhaps we could do a Top 10 run down of albums that you encountered young and which greatly influenced your musical taste, starting with 5 albums from your parents' record collection (and compilation albums are allowed), followed by 5 albums that you yourself picked up early in your musical journey that influenced your tastes. What do we think? if the rules could be loosened to allow representative albums of artists we were introduced to by our parents, directly or indirectly (which would probably be a greatest hits or best of compilation in many cases). I always assumed that Greatest Hits-type albums would absolutely be eligible. A compilation album is still an album, after all. |
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Oct 8, 2024 5:25:24 GMT -5
My first and only experience of attending a Comic Convention was when I went to a small comic and Doctor Who memorabilia convention in Watford, Hertfordshire back in the early '90s. The comics for sale were mostly UK ones, which I wasn't really into collecting, and it was full of dorky looking, socially awkward, overweight men with bad body odour. I swore "never again!" and I've stuck to that. You comics people are weird! That said, I used to regularly go to a Comic Mart in the early '90s that was held at a hotel/exhibition centre in Central London. This was purely a comic market with sellers stalls though, and was a very different experience to that one convention I attended. I only stopped going to Comic Marts with the advent of the internet and sites like eBay. The London Comic Mart is still going strong and is held every few months at The Royal National Hotel in Russell Square, London. I've been planning to go and visit again for quite some time, but haven't gotten around to it yet. |
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Oct 8, 2024 5:00:34 GMT -5
Growing up in the UK in the late '70s and 1980s, I always understood (rightly or wrongly) that I couldn't order the stuff I saw advertised in U.S. Comics. I'm guessing I got that information from a parent. I was sorely tempted by a lot of the things I saw advertised though. The only things I ever ordered from the back of UK comics were a set of Dennis the Menace and Gnasher badges from the Beano comic...   And the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back from a tiny classified ad for the still-very-young original Forbidden Planet shop in London, in the back of an issue of The Empire Strikes Back Weekly. This would've been circa 1980 or '81, I guess. The badges are long gone, but I still have that original copy of Donald F. Glut's ESB novelization on my shelf today. |
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Oct 8, 2024 4:55:20 GMT -5
I read a great article about he Columbia House music club... and how all of their stuff was bootlegged... Apparently, they got so impatient waiting for backlogs of shipments of cassettes of the music they legitimately paid for so they could distribute to the "club members", they just started making their own cassettes, liner notes, etc. But that Culture Club cassette you got from them was of inferior quality, and would soon wear down or get tangled up in your neon green dual cassette deck. Eventually, they would just forego the legit licensing of the music and just pirate the stuff outright. THAT is how you sell a cassette for a penny and still stay in business. I'd like to see this article. And more importantly, their sources. Music publishers are very litigious when it comes to copyright violations. I'm having a really hard time buying this. Yeah, this sounds like one of those urban legends to me. I'd love to see the source for this, but I'd be amazed if Columbia House Music Club were indeed pirating record company and music publisher's stuff and getting away with it. |
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Oct 8, 2024 4:26:00 GMT -5
Crikey, I'm really behind with this thread now, but I'm gonna keep plodding on with my comments on the issues reviewed so far... THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 57–58   The cover of Amazing Spider-Man #57 is pretty good, but it's the cover of #58 that I prefer of the two. As much as this causes problems for Peter, think about his poor Aunt May whose concern for her nephew’s safety causes her to suffer yet another shock which puts her back in the hospital. Lol…Aunt May's back in hospital…AGAIN! Sweet Jesus, someone mark her as "do not resuscitate" and just be done with it! I kid, I kid…When Ka-zar, lord of the jungle comes to New York with his loyal sabertooth Zabu, J. Jonah Jameson manages to convince him to go after Spider-man and bring him to justice. It's cheesy as all hell, of course, but I really get a kick out of Ka-Zar and Zabu coming to New York. The "jungle man in the big city" schtick is something that has been explored before in this series with Kraven's appearances, but the interactions that Ka-Zar and his sabretooth tiger have with New York's police and ordinary populace are a lot of fun. Though the previous issue ends with Spider-man defeated for good… The big cliffhanger at the end of ASM #57 feels a bit forced, to be honest; surely any reader must know that Spider-Man isn't really dead. Stan's caption in that final panel, telling us that the "Battle has ended…forever!", is obviously just a deliberately misleading turn of phrase, rather than a genuine announcement that our hero is dead. I can't believe that any reader, even back in the late '60s, was fooled by this. …things are resolved fairly quickly as Ka-zar and Zabu get him to safety, and the web-swinger awakens with his memory restored. As I mentioned in my last post, I often find amnesia sub-plots to be intensely annoying, but Stan's writing and dialogue is again good enough to keep me from getting bored – though I must admit that it is a relief when Spidey finally gets his memory back. While J. Jonah Jameson’s scheme to use Ka-zar against Spider-man didn’t go so well, the conniving publisher doesn’t waste any time getting started on yet another plot. J. Jonah Jameson’s latest scheme involves Professor Smythe who has built a new version of the robot which once, almost nearly defeated Spider-man. This new robot is much more powerful than the last and, is given the more dramatically appropriate moniker Spider-Slayer. This new robot contains some of the same features as the original, including the view screen which allows Jameson to observe what the robot sees, while also displaying an image of his own face, but boasts superior strength and the ability to walk on walls. The second Spider-Slayer (though it's the first to bear that moniker) is way cooler and looks far more menacing than the original. I think John Romita was much better at designing this kind of robot tech than Steve Ditko was. As for J. Jonah Jameson, his moral and personal crusade against Spidey has already led him to align himself with several dubious individuals, but Professor Smythe is by far the loopiest…so far! To his credit though, Jameson soon realises that Smythe is insane and just out for blood-thirsty revenge against Spider-Man. Not that Smythe's mental state will stop the editor from actively bankrolling the development of a third Spider-Slayer in ASM #105 and #106. Spidey defeats the Spider-slayer by luring it to Smythe’s lab, where the spiders that he uses in his research cause the robot’s tracking circuits to overload and explode. The "robot getting its circuits overloaded" plot resolution had already been seen in many sci-fi TV shows and films by this point, but it works well enough here and at least seems vaguely plausible as an outcome. Plus, as you say, it's great to see Peter Parker, with his web-fluid depleted, having to use his brains and science smarts to defeat the Spider-Slayer. Overall, these are two great issues. Stan Lee and John Romita give us a fast-paced and hugely entertaining story, with twists and turns a-plenty. Spidey himself is really put through the wringer in #57, with his amnesia forcing him to steal food and sleep rough in Grand Central Station, and then he almost reveals his identity to JJJ because he's forgotten why he wears a mask, though he's saved by Ka-Zar crashing through the window at the last second. The soap opera elements with the supporting cast are as entertaining as ever, although they occur without Peter, since he is missing, having lost his memory. On the artwork front, Romita's work in the fight between Spider-Man and Ka-Zar is ASM #57 is really great, and the battle with the Spider-Slayer in #58 has some very inventively composed panels. So yeah, another couple of top-notch Spider-Man comics here. |
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Oct 7, 2024 11:54:56 GMT -5
My wife and I put our house on the market last week and have pretty quickly found another house which really ticks a lot of boxes for us. So, it'll be interesting to see how many offers on our house we get in the next few weeks.
Getting our house listed has been fairly full on though, as we wanted it on ASAP. I think it's going to be going live on the Estate Agent's website and other sites like RightMove etc today or tomorrow. We already have one viewing arranged for this Wednesday from somebody who spotted the "For Sale" sign outside the house late last week.
Anyway, it's all kind of exciting so far.
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Oct 4, 2024 19:49:06 GMT -5
In the past I have bought music on vinyl, cassette and CD. And today, I still listen to and consume music on CD and vinyl. F*ck Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music etc, for the way they exploit and rip off hard working musicians. so a fan buying a CD is better for you financially? Or is that even crappy too? Much better in terms of royalty rate, yes. |
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Oct 4, 2024 19:15:59 GMT -5
In the past I have bought music on vinyl, cassette and CD. And today, I still listen to and consume music on CD and vinyl. F*ck Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music etc, for the way they exploit and rip off hard working musicians. I use Bandcamp. You keep what you own and the money you use to pay for the album goes directly to the artist. I think it's run by Epic? The people who do Fortnite and the Unreal Engine? Yeah, BandCamp are pretty good. The indie band I'm in are on there. It's a great way to sell merch and physical copies an album or whatever, without the company screwing you over. But it does tend to be cult bands (like mine) that are on there, rather than anybody mainstream that the majority of people actually want to listen to. |
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Oct 4, 2024 19:05:17 GMT -5
Hey Slam_Bradley, supercat, tartanphantom, berkley, and anyone else who wants to join in...I was fondly thinking about the top 10 album lists we've done in the past and got to wondering whether anyone would be interested in doing a "Top 10 albums that your parents introduced you to that shaped your musical tastes" run down? |
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Oct 4, 2024 19:00:43 GMT -5
In the past I have bought music on vinyl, cassette and CD. And today, I still listen to and consume music on CD and vinyl. F*ck Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music etc, for the way they exploit and rip off hard working musicians.
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