Michael Hutchison: September 2006 Archives

Robert Downey Jr. will play Iron Man.

Not being a Marvel fan and having never read any more Iron Man than a Hostess advertisement, I don't really have any feelings one way or the other on this. What do you all think?

UPDATE: Sorry, the link was mis-formatted and did not appear earlier.

The Agony Booth has been making its way through the various Star Trek TV shows in chronological order, doing two horrible episodes from each show. Now they're up to the worst of the worst, the pitiful Star Trek Voyager episode, Threshold.

That's the one where Paris takes a shuttlecraft...a SHUTTLE, mind you...to Warp 10, and doing so turns him into a lizard.

There are so many things wrong with that episode that I shudder when thinking of it.

So long as I'm posting about comic book writing, I'll transition to this piece I've wanted to link to for a while. (Of course, if you read from the top of the blog, is there any way to transition topic to topic?)

Andrew Klavan of Libertas wrote an essay about the "realistic" dialogue in United 93 and it intrigued me because I see a lot of my own writing in it. Maybe I should excerpt it at length and then get back to my thoughts on it.

jasonlatour - Be careful what you ask for...

Jason Latour (or LaTour...hard to tell when it's all written together in lowercase) has posted a 14-page letter that artist Alex Toth wrote to Steve Rude in 1986. Steve apparently asked Toth to give him feedback about his pencils for an issue of Comico's Jonny Quest. I don't know whether Steve asked Toth to be brutal, but Alex is. Very.

I am sure some of you will find it very funny, as Alex Toth is devastating in almost every panel. "FAKE!" is the most frequent comment. (I wish Alex would elucidate as to why something is fake or what Rude could have done better.)

For me, this was just plain informative. I learned a lot from the critiques, like the importance of not having your title character as a tiny figure facing away in the first panel.

I don't know that this falls under any category of our usual talk here, but I just feel obliged to warn you all:

IF you are still using iTunes 6.x and iTunes is bugging you to upgrade to iTunes 7.0, don't. At least not until they fix all the bugs. I love love love love love iTunes but they did something to it for version 7.0 that has turned it to utter crap.

I don't know enough about software to say what exactly they did, but here is what happens:

It used to be that I could fire up music or a podcast and let it play while I turn on my "Red Ace Squadron" game (and keep the music off within the game) so that I could relax with a little World War I dogfighting action. Now, the podcast speeds up like a record skipping from groove to groove. It happens if I open too many windows in my browser, or have too many applications open, or if I open a webpage in Firefox that has embedded music or video, too. My suspicion is that it's somehow related to Quicktime being more integated into iTunes than before.

So they took an awesome piece of software and made it suck. Good going, guys. (Remind me to mention this next time my uncle starts harping on us all to get rid of our PCs and join him in the glorious Apple cult.)

If you've been wondering where I've been, what's been taking up all my time, why I haven't been posting much, or what I'm doing to try to make money while I'm looking for a job...

HERE IT IS!

It's the all-new, all-different "Comics Relief", my site where I'm selling off my comic book collection. Thanks to Collectorz's new comic book database, I've now gotten covers for almost all the comics in the collection. I've also changed the display from tiny little boxes to images large enough that you can see the covers without enlarging them. I also added "Plot" and "Notes" displayed in the list, moved the issue # and the price to a better position, and added navigation to both top and bottom of the page. I put a Shopping Cart button at the top of the site where you can always access it.

What's even better is that the site now includes dozens of trade paperbacks that I'm selling, along with other books. I've also added DVDs for sale.

The advantage of that is that you can more easily pad your order to reach the $30 level, where I'm throwing in a free signed copy of Metro Med (supplies are getting low!), or the $75 level where I throw in signed copies of all my comics.

You may notice that the price levels dropped for the free giveaways. That's true. The reason I did that is because it's harder to reach that levels when I've cut the prices on thousands of comics.

My hope is that the better display, expanded inventory and lower prices will get the site hopping. Upcoming trips and holidays are going to require some cash and this is one of my few remaining sources of income. I hope you'll check the site out and pass the link on to your friends.

Now that this is done, I'm going to work on my next Monitor Duty project.

I'm going over a few of the better books I bought from Scott Beatty during his last clearance sale. "Cinnamon: El Ciclo" is fantastic! I wish I'd bought this and supported it at the time. It's a taught thriller with compelling characters, plenty of violence and grit (though without anywhere near the swearing and gore you will read in the average DCU comic these days!)... and I just wish I'd known it was a five-parter and Scott was only selling me the first four installments! Now I'm going out of my mind to try to find part 5. Wish I lived closer to "The Source"; guess I'll be picking it up in October.

The Plot in brief: a young woman named after the DCU's old western character (what a simple way to explain the new character!) goes on a crusade against the band robbers who shot her father...and ends up being hunted by a daughter of one of the men she killed. Cinnamon goes to make her last stand, not knowing that her quarry is currently involved in a high-profile runaway case.

If you find this in a dollar box or something, grab it. This thing ought to be adapted into a low-budget movie! It's just the right length and certainly reads like one.

Kryptonese Alphabet

I think my brain melted just from trying to comprehend it. Yet I have a friend who is turning that into a font!

Why is it we have people who are making fonts for comic book alien alphabets and translating the works of Shakespeare into Klingonaas, but there are still tens of thousands of Iraqi documents awaiting translation and examination? If only we could tell nerds that they're captured documents taken from a Zobloingian flying saucer. People would gather at special rooms in comic conventions just to see who could translate the most pages in a day!

"The Ring" is just one of the scariest movies I ever saw. Hard to explain why...I think it's more the atmosphere and the editing than anything else. I mean, even the DVD MENU is frightening! I once put the DVD in, pressed play, went to get a drink...and when I headed back downstairs there's just this awful sound and the eerie blue light. CREEPY! And I'd already SEEN the movie once, so I know what happens in it.

And now the Bunnies have done a 30 second version of The Ring and THAT is frightening!

What the heck is it about this MOVIE?

A new 3-minute video promo for the digital hi-def Star Trek is now online.

Man. I'm actually rather excited to see it.

Spoilers.

Spoiler space.

Don't click on the extended text unless you're reading 52 or really don't care at all about DC and never, ever plan to read it even a year from now in a trade.

But I have to talk about this because I'm fit to bust.

Unfortunately, my plans for commemorating 9/11 on the site have gone kerflooey because I'm going to be out of town until Wednesday. I knew this trip was coming up but I never found the time to prepare any articles. My plan is to do reviews of the various 9/11-related comic books. I still plan to do that, but it will have to wait until I come back. However, all of the Monitor Duty contributors have been invited to participate and some of them may have reviews posted before I return.

I went back into Fanzing's archives to find my original editorial from right after 9/11. Want to hear something ironic? The issue published in July of 2001 was the "Our Worlds At War" issue.

Kind of jumped the gun on that one, I guess.

Anyway, here's my original 9/11 editorial. At the time, the death count from the World Trade Center was still estimated to be around 7000; I thought about amending that editorial, but I think it's better to let it stand as an example of those early days of the fog of war. The only other error in it that I can see is that, if I recall correctly, 17 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, not all of them. I think I even knew that at the time; it was just sloppiness on my part.

Oh, and I predicted that security would be a lot rougher in the future on all middle eastern men due to the actions of the hijackers; this was before all of the groping and inconveniencing of everyone equally just so they wouldn't feel singled out. At the time, planes weren't even flying, so I didn't know that would be our solution. Oh, and (this is embarrassing), I predict that "we may tighten up our borders and begin enforcing our immigration laws". No one has ever confused me with Nostradamus.

See you all on Thursday. Remind me to tell you all about how my brother's film shoot went. I now know a lot of stuff about the Transformers movie that I won't be able to repeat without getting him in trouble.

Cox & Forkum has a 9-11 cartoon that they add a new panel to on each anniversary. A great idea. Here's how it stands in 2006.

I know, my posts have been infrequent of late. Here are just a few music vids to make up for it.

Most amateur music videos made up of clips are poorly edited. Goes with being amateur, I guess. Still, this one has some very well-timed clips. What's amazing is that this isn't anywhere NEAR the amount of sexy strutting footage one could find in the history of Star Trek, really. Kind of weird when you consider that's not what the show's about.

This one, unfortunately, falls victim to the "find footage that matches the lyrics exactly even if the resulting video makes no sense" syndrome. That said...Galileo! Galileo! Galileo! Galileo! Galileo figaro! Magnificoooooooooo!!

(I laughed out loud at exactly 03:00 on the counter.)

What? A BIRDS OF PREY TV SHOW video?

This one's great, but too many recycled clips:

Enough disco. Here's an original music video for Z'ha'dum!

I'm off. Need to get something to drink and off to bed.

So, you bought all of the episodes of Star Trek on VHS at the rate of one a month for $20 each. Then they released it again, with two episodes on each tape. Or was it the other way around? Didn't matter, you bought them all over again.

Then they went to DVD, and you bought all the episodes on DVDs, with each DVD costing $20 with 2 episodes on each DVD.

Then, after you'd bought them all, only then did they release three season sets of the Original Series of Star Trek with a honkin' huge price tag (though nowhere near as much as buying them individually). And you bought them all over again.

If you're one of these Trekkies, get ready.

Now they're digitally remastering the whole series for the 40th Anniversary of Star Trek. Why they didn't do this just a couple years ago before issuing the season sets is beyo-

What am I saying? It's obvious why.

Double Dip City.

Anyway, yes, the whole Star Trek show is being redone with CGI starships, enhanced backgrounds, new galaxy shots through the viewscreen, a redone opening title with an all-new version of the theme song...and it's all in HD.

NOTE: They are NOT adding in CGI characters that never existed before, nor mucking about with the story like Lucas did by making Greedo fire at Han. Still, I stand by my subject line. Maybe I need to make that into a T-shirt.

Now, the good news: Star Trek is coming back to television syndication, so you don't HAVE to buy it on DVD. Though you will.

Hat tip: Libertas. Libertas' article also has this link to a preview video, though I haven't been able to get it to work right in Firefox. I opened it in IE and it works

Still hungry for more? Well, back in the 1990s an enterprising (sorry) CGI company named Digital Stream pitched "special edition" episodes to Paramount (or perhaps they were approached by Paramount; not certain) with test footage for the episode Doomsday Machine. Want to see it? Here it is, on YouTube courtesy of our old friends at The Agony Booth!

Frankly, this test footage was right to be rejected, unless the final version would have been much better.

Ten days ago, I lamented that I wouldn't be able to grab The Tick vs. Season One due to my being unemployed. So, I get home from an errand and there's an Amazon box at my door. I figure that's suspicious, since Melinda and I have pretty much stopped all online ordering over the last month and a half. I open it up...and it's The Tick!

And I've never even heard of the guy who bought it for me. Never corresponded with him, never talked in comments, never chatted on the Message Board...nothing! He's just a Monitor Duty reader from the Netherlands who wanted to say thank you for all the entertainment he's gotten from our site.

Wow. Brings a tear to the eye.

And no, I don't think he was smoking anything funny. I know, I know, it's the Netherlands, but get your mind out of the gutter.

So wherever you are, Jeroen Mostert, thank you! You Rool N R 2 Cool 4 School! I'd send you an e-card, but your e-mail address wasn't included in the packaging.

I can't say it any better than Gail Simone did, so here's Gail:

Early this morning, the Texas home of award-winning writer/artist Lea Hernandez, my friend and co-creator of the graphic novel Killer Princesses, caught fire and burned. Half her house is now gone, and the rest is smoke-damaged. In addition, she lost at least six of her family’s beloved pets, two dogs and four cats. If you knew Lea, you’d know how devastating that is.

She’s lost a great deal of her family’s possessions, including irreplaceable art. She doesn’t yet know the full accounting of what’s been lost at this time.

Most know Lea as the brilliant creator of such works as Rumble Girls and Cathedral Child. She drew the Marvel Mangaverse PUNISHER book, and has drawn for TRANSMETROPOLITAN, among many other accomplishments. She is also the co-founder and original editor for GIRL-A-MATIC, one of the most important venues for female-friendly comics created to date.

She’s also my friend, and it’s entirely possible I wouldn’t have a career in comics if she hadn’t asked me to write Killer Princesses for her to draw.

And finally, Lea is one of the last great firebrand hellraisers in comics.

Lea has two (wonderful, amazing) special needs children and right now they need a place to stay and some clothes to wear. More than that, they need
some help, and fast, in the form of donations to her paypal account. Lea’s a proud person so I’m going to ask FOR her. This is important, and a great chance to do a wonderful thing for a creator who has consistently enriched this industry we all love so much. Please, take a moment and send WHATEVER YOU CAN to Lea’s paypal account and help make this time a little bit less painful for someone who would do the same for you if the positions were reversed.

If you’re a retailer, I ask that you set up a donations jar. If you’re a creator, I ask you to think of how devastating this would be to your career and donate what you can. If you’re a reader, I’m asking you to take a moment and hit the paypal link. You’ll be doing something heroic and you’ll feel great about it, I promise.

Read what Lea had to post on a neighbor’s computer while wearing her pajamas.

Donate (PLEASE) to her Paypal account at: divalea@gmail.com

Finally, if I understand the story correctly (as told to me by Lea’s good friend and current Girl-a-matic editor), it was Lea’s daughter hearing the smoke alarm that allowed the family to get out in time, so for God’s sake, do everyone you love a favor and CHECK YOUR SMOKE ALARMS.

Thank you so much for helping. Really, any amount you can send will make a difference. That’s all I can say.

And also, if you have a blog or a myspace account, please spread this around as best you can. Every little bit will help and every eye that sees this might be someone who donates.

Sincerely and gratefully,

Gail Simone

You can keep up on Lea's status at her LiveJournal.

Grandma turns into Batwoman

TatsuSoft: Fan Games has Hunt the Wumpus that you can download!

I remember playing Hunt the Wumpus on my TI 99/4A!

*sigh*

Yes, I had a TI-99/4A. We sold my Atari 2600 to pay for it, and within a month Texas Instruments announced it was getting out of the computer business. Typical.

Say what you will...Parsec was a fun game! It was so much fun to die because you were one pixel off in navigating the cave.

Oh, and check out the other Tatusoft games. Some of them look fun.