I was looking at some of the Warhammer comics from BOOM! yesterday, and I guess it got me thinking about adaptations. And then I decided to change my AIM avatar from Thelonious Monk (been using that one for almost a year) to Neil Fallon, and while I was looking around for a good pic of Neil I came across someone’s Pure Rock Fury parody (Pure Ork Fury) and suddenly it occurred to me that Robot Hive/Exodus would make the prefect concept vehicle for a comic. It’s all got to be framed by the alien attack on the Pentecostal Robots which begins at the end of Burning Beard:
Is the Land of Pleasant Living all a myth, perpetrated by the Cold War masters to justify a space program that has actually been fifty years of alien defenses? Fires sweep down on Elizabeth, robots make their way through the sewers of New York, battling alligators. The Meadowlands explode. The Robot Lords of Tokyo make their appearance midway through to warn the Pentecostals against attempting to use the Hyperdrive within the Sun’s gravity well (“Did you not know that the Royal Hunting Grounds are always forbidden?”).
I have a seven-year-old, who’s a voracious reader. Although he discovered a Spongebob go-kart racing game on nick.com yesterday, and he seems to be addicted to it for the moment. That aside, he reads tons of Bone and Pogo. By tons of Bone, I mean all the Bone there isn, since there’s only the nine volumes. He has the complete edition from Cartoon Books, signed by Jeff Smith (courtesy of Dad lugging it around San Diego until he could get it signed) with a cute picture of Fone Bone saying “Hi” to him inside the front cover.
Recently, he was reading a couple of Superman (the Animated Series) books his grandma gave him, with occasional words of Spanish mixed into the text. Is that a good way to learn Spanish? I don’t know. Today his other grandma gave him The Unauthorized Autobiography of Lemony Snickett, which look like it’ll amuse him. Further reports to follow.
I received a copy of the graphic novel Contraband from SLG yesterday– which I’d known was coming, but which I had forgotten about– courtesy of the writer, TJ Behe, who I interviewed a while back at comixology. I had previously skimmed about half of the book in a pdf preview, but with the physical book in hand I sat down this evening to give it a more thorough reading. Here then is my attempt at a review.
Well, I’ve been thinking about starting up a blog for a while now, just to share some thoughts from time to time. I work at a website called comixology.com, where among other things I seek out great writers and edit their articles for posting, and I conduct a lot of the interviews for our podcast, “It Came Out on Wednesday.” The goal with the interviews is to talk to the creator about their creation, what inspires them, what makes them interesting and unique. Largely as a result of doing those interviews, I’ve started to get really interested in comics.
From that statement you can probably guess that I’m pretty new to the field. Unlike most of the people I know in comics, I didn’t grow up reading them, or have any particular interest in them until quite recently. I still have no use for the mainstream superhero stuff; Marvel and DC hold no interest for me. But lo and behold, there are a hundred other publishers out there, many of them doing all kinds of interesting stuff.
So I’ll be maintaining this blog, maybe frequently, maybe not, to share some of my thoughts on the industry and on specific comics I like (or dislike). Perhaps it will be interesting.
