Not Wednesday, but...Comics

My copy of the new hardcover collection of Wednesday Comics finally arrived in the post today.  I've not started to dig into it yet, but I will say a couple of things.  Like the original series, the production design is just brilliant.  I love the overall design, but what really stands out to me is the frontispiece with two different variations on the comics themselves arriving to a newsagent/front door delivery. 

The colours also look much more vibrant on this paper than they did in the original run; I think that's one of the overall things that they neglected in the series.  On most of the strips, the colours seemed to be designed for modern paper and not the newsprint that the series was printed on.  As such, some of the beauty of Ben Caldwell's Wonder Woman piece was lost that's regained here. 

What I do have a complaint about, though, is that this collection is smaller than the original series.  Although this book is still oversized, it doesn't match the broadsheet view of the originals, and I think something's lost in making this book smaller.  The original series felt right in the hands, this hardcover feels a little awkward; not necessarily in length, but it feels as though it should be an inch or so wider.

Happy Happy, Joy Joy

It's unsurprising that as the series progresses, Happy Town is indeed getting better.  I thought last week's episode was a little bit like treading water, but this week was certainly firing on all cylinders.  Shame that the show's been cancelled (what possesses them to essentially cancel it after only airing the two parts of the pilot?)

So...is it Alejandro...or Fernando?

I watched the Lady Gaga video for "Alejandro".  I think I liked it.  Overall, I like the song more than "Telephone", with it's ABBA meets Madonna style (which is saying something since I don't like ABBA), but the video...bizarre art piece.  I love the production values, evocative use of black, white and red, but part of me is still left scratching my head thinking, "what?"

Unthoughts Unknown

I caught the pilot episode of NBC's Persons Unknown tonight.  I thought it was a decent entry into The Prisoner/first-season of Lost/Cube vein of storytelling, with a group of strangers waking up in a deserted hotel in an initially deserted town with no recollection of how or why they got there.  I think the cameras themselves are the interesting part, some sort of black market reality television is what I'm thinking right now.

I did, however, catch a continuity error between the episode and the preview for next week.  When we're shown Eleanor's fortune cookie message in the episode, "Kill your neighbor and you will go free", is on one line.  In the preview, it's on two.  I wonder how many months went by between filming the pilot and starting the reason of the series to cause that gaffe?

Costing an Arm and a Leg...

I like the new Broken Bells video for "The Ghost Inside". Granted I'd probably find watching Christina Hendricks watch paint dry interesting, but well...

I am convinced that people are psychotic.  Entertaining, but psychotic.  What possesses people to write a blog from the point of view of a cat?

New King

I got the trade edition of Stephen King's new novella, Blockade Billy, yesterday (still waiting on the limited edition hardcover to arrive) and read the entire thing in maybe an hour.  The title story is only about 80 pages and the bonus short story, "Morality", only runs another forty or so.  There's no supernatural element to either of the stories, although to me that's not a deal breaker.

You may ask why I bothered to buy both, well, I preordered the limited edition before the announcement of the trade edition because I wanted the novella, and then ordered the trade edition because I wanted the bonus short story.  After having read it, I think I may have just stuck with the limited edition (I'm looking forward to reading it again, with the illustrations), but I don't necessarily feel any regret over purchasing the book twice in different formats.  I've done the same thing for previous Stephen King works (like purchasing the hardcover editions of the first four Dark Tower novels, getting the Pocket Books editions of Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, and Pet Sematary for the new introductions, the illustrated edition of Salem's Lot, both the individual serialised Green Mile and the hardcover collection, the new edition of Danse Macabre, and the pop-up version of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon), so I guess it kind of comes down to a collector mentality.

Anyway, with regard to the content, "Blockade Billy" was a good read.  It's not particularly deep, and there's nothing all too shocking, but it's an entertaining story, well told.  I like the backdrop of old school baseball and King does a good job of fleshing it out.  "Morality", on the other hand, isn't bad, although I think I could have waited for it to be collected at a later date with more stories.  It hinges on the main character doing a morally reprehensible act for someone else, but when it comes down to it, the act could have been so much worse.  Maybe it just shows you where my morals happen to be, but it didn't seem to be the thing that would cause the overall moral decay of the character to the extremes presented.

Personally, I think a variation of the idea -- basically living a "good" life but doing a "bad" act in order to choose between the two; leading to the argument between Aristotelian and Modern ethics -- was done much better in Brian Bolland's contribution to Batman: Black & White.

Getting Lost

I'll not go into any spoilers here, but I just wanted to say that the ending itself is kind of what I came to expect over the course of this season.  Back in January, I decided to go back and re-watch all of the previous seasons.  Due to unforseen events, I only ever got through season one and haven't moved on from there, but after tonight, I think I'm going to finish it off.  Maybe write about it.

What I do find funny, though, is the amount of people decrying the ending, saying that it was terrible, and that six years of our collective lives have been...well, um...lost.  I think the ending itself proves that old chestnut; it's not the destination that matters, it's the journey.

A Society For Rent, Not to Own

I find this horrifying, particularly the externsion that "the anti-circumvention rules would criminalize the ordinary behaviour of millions of Canadians, such as copying a CD onto an iPod or recording a television program for later viewing."  This type of possible law especially coming from a country where file-sharing has by and large been legal -- it's one of the reasons why we have a levy on recordable media.  I'm not for downloads of pirated copyrighted material, I'll be among the first to admit that it is indeed illegal, but I'd also defend the idea of "fair use" and I think the extremes of this reform is ultimately harmful. 

Days of the Old

Over the past few days, I've been importing old posts from earlier incarnations of this blog, as well as other projects for your perusal.  I'm still trying to figure out what happened between 2004 & 2009.