An obsessive focus on marginal pop culture to avoid dealing with current geopolitical events
Not that I need to justify not wanting to talk about beheadings, ethnic cleansing, and other unpleasant shit.
In a BAD SIGNAL list mailing thingee, Warren Ellis, he say:
The titles of the four Apparat books, along with the names of their illustrators, follow:Further information will be released next month.
- SIMON SPECTOR: illustrated by Jacen Burrows
- QUIT CITY: illustrated by Laurenn McCubbin
- FRANK IRONWINE: illustrated by Carla Speed McNeil
- ANGEL STOMP FUTURE: illustrated by Juan Jose Ryp
Couldn't find an official web presence for the latter, sorry. Regular readers will recognize Carla Speed McNeil as the writer/illustrator of FINDER, which I really should take up reading again, and I'm pretty sure I bitterly regretted once mentioning/linking Laurenn McCubbin's XXX Live Nude Girls because I doubted the people searching for that and ending up here were really interested in a comic series by that name.
If you're looking for a stroke comic, it isn't one. Actually, if you're looking for a stroke comic, um, ick. Go away.
Of course, Apparat is being published by Avatar Press of beautiful Urbana, IL. In addition to the Ellis and the Alan Moore and the Antony Johnston,they do also bring the ick, but I thought I'd asked you to go away. . .
But wait! There's more!
On the Champaign-Urbana tip, kind'a, if you squint a little, there's Thank You For Not Breeding, "a new animated documentary by Nina Paley (in production)."
The mentions of Final Fantasy and Gojira notwithstanding, I am not Asian. Which is good, as I'd have to give credit to McDonald's for using their copyrighted phrase, "I am Asian™." Noticed at Boing Boing, which has lots of other interesting links I'll not bother copying, so go visit them.
Seen at Stomp Tokyo, the is-that-still-on? Drew Carey Show, is, um, The TV show that's quietly going away:
For all the attention given to this week's "Friends" finale, another long-running comedy taped its final episode a few weeks ago -- and few people outside its Hollywood set were aware of it.The finale of "The Drew Carey Show" is expected to air on ABC sometime this summer.
[. . .] ABC didn't even bother putting it on this season. New episodes will premiere on June 2, and the network will show two first-run episodes a week during the summer -- the television equivalent of an afterthought.
Which is why I were confused. That, and there's that timeslot thing:
The program premiered on Wednesday nights, an evening where it has inhabited four separate time slots. It's also been shown regularly on Tuesdays. And Thursdays. And Fridays. And Mondays.
That article is at CNN.com, an arm of the AOL Time Warner empire. Which produces the show.
There's an article in the current edition of Time about DC trying to revitalize the Superman franchise. The surprising thing is that they name-checked Mark Millar's Superman: Red Son miniseries; the not terribly surprising thing is that DC is also part of Borg Warner.
Sorry. Time Warner. Those names confuse me sometimes too.
If you're wondering why this surprised me:
I've done this more like the Golden Age Superman where the story really starts with him coming from the Russian farmlands to the big city of Moscow, as idealistic and trusting in the system as our Superman is with regards to capitalism and the American Way. I didn't want to make fun of communism because it's such an easy target. I wanted to do something more Shakesperean and start with a man who just tried to do the right thing and ended up making some terrible mistakes along the way. It's a commentary on the collapse of the Soviet Union, of course, but like the best science fiction I use it as an allegory for the world we're living in and Superman's takeover of the world with pre-emptive strikes is really a very fair dissection of what's been happening in America over the last ten or fifteen years. It's all about Empires and the fact that these monolothic structures are doomed from the beginning. It's actually a very serious work, moreso than you might expect.
No reason.
Right, think that's enough rambling for one entry. Hell, for one day.