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I am not sure what to make of Marvel's Secret Wars Crossover event.  It feels a little contrived, a little too scripted.  It's as if Marvel took all the past crossover events that were successful and repurposed them. Humorously, the architect of this new universe is Doctor Doom, who in the first Secret wars series had for a time being control of the Battleworld to which the Beyonder had brought the many the many villains and heroes.  This time around however, Marvel has made the battlefield a lot more detailed, hence, the incorporation of other crossovers. Battleworld itself is divided into separate realms, each reflective of the crossover event or concept Marvel wants to push.  So, for example, there is a Korvac Saga area, an Two Marvel books somewhat related to each other explore the stories that happen on the edges, the Red Skull and  Siege.  Admittedly, both titles piqued my interest.  The Red Skull is an iconic villain, so absolute in a way, that the name itse

.My wife and I shelled out the few dollars to see Avengers 2: Age of Ultron this last Sunday.  I know I am late to the game, that the movie had been already released, several months closer to home video, and in all likelihood, I would have bought it once released had my wife and I not been passing by a dollar theatre showing the film,  It was a quiet Sunday and an empty theatre.  No fan boys were present, only the few families living on a budget. Disney and Marvel have done something quite amazing, though predictable, when you look at such franchise greats like Star Wars, the James Bond films, and more recently the Harry Potter movies.  They have built an interconnected universe much like a perpetual motion machine, a kind of domino set-up only requiring a tip to set the whole thing in motion.  They have a wealth of material in which they can use to develop Single character movies a la Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, which can feed into a larger, more comprehensive movie.  Even minor

Life has many puzzles pieces. There are bits and pieces which taken by themselves are just a part of the picture, a tiny part of the picture. They require you to examine the curves of the pieces, the extrusions, the cavities, how some have angle sides. You try to sort through the pieces, looking for a brother piece, the echo of the other, the cause of the other’s shape, or perhaps the reason for it. A slight smile in the hallway from a bitter co-employee, the drizzle cold on a rainy day. The car accident five minutes ahead of you. The car that takes several minutes to order in a drive through. It is easiest to find the border, the corners, and work in, where your thoughts touch the world, something familiar, a keystone on which the image of the rest of the world. Sometimes, you find a lone piece, oddly shaped, begging to fit in, to match up extrusion to cavity. How do we put the puzzle together? Do we leave it sitting in a box on the shelf? Do we engage in deciphering it, pour at the

One of the problems that genre of Anime suffers from is how poor the dialogue is in the English dubbed versions.  (I can’t speak to the original Japanese versions since I don’t speak Japanese.)  The dialogue is always stilted, unnatural, generally expository, and usually explaining something that is obvious.  Many times the characters scream at other in a tone and intensity the rarely wavers and quietly ponder to themselves making external and internal dialogue happening inside their heads.  A lot of Anime is about grand standing between two opposing characters with one coming out as a victor.  I think that it is the poor dialogue which hampers the plots of these shows.  It tends to make the conflicts of the show superficial.  I suspect that the dialogue is used more often than not to hide the fact that the writer’s of the Anime really have no understanding of their characters or control of the plot.  I suspect that the writers are trying to hide the fact that they have no clear idea

The last time I had a best comic book cover of the week, I choose the same artist, Andrea Sorrentino, whose work on Green Arrow was spectacular.  I was disappointed when he and Jeff Lemire left Green Arrow.  Certainly, the book has not been as good since.  I like this cover because it highlights what a good cover ought to do, suggest what is inside but not reveal too much.  The solid red cover with the two words, Hunt or Die, the monochrome images of the characters of the book inside of each letter of the words Hunt and Die.  Andrea Sorrentino operates on the premise that the reader only needs the necessary elements to work themselves around the art, and nothing more.  It is spare but powerful.  The image also suggests a sense of urgency, a sense of adversity, a sense of finality, all of which are on going themes in the book. 

I opened my eyes to the darkness and silence. I had to rely on the sounds of our cat, her half-meowing, half-growling, a noise she had recently adopted when Valerie had left town on a conference. It had been a difficult few days with Valerie gone, her absences felt by Pippa and me when she was at her conference. It was as if all the warmth and the music of the house had suddenly up and left leaving behind only a tepid and muffled feeling, flat and unenergized. It was as if upon her departure, all the gravity of the house left with her, stranding Pippa and me orbitless in a vacuum of space. Her departure left the cat and myself to figure out how to fill the space she occupied when she was here. On my part, I had just gritted my teeth and barreled through Val’s absence, knowing that soon she would return and return to her role as our caretaker, the one who prepared meals and tidied up after us, the one who led the cadences of our lives. Pippa probably was not so sure. Or perhaps, it was

l wrote my first creature at 12   When I did not know enough of the world except that it is sad   I drafted a lone protozoan transparent and a curled tail   At sixteen my teenage angst found fruition in a modern fairy tale   It burrowed into a high school literary magazine   A den in a forest of other creatures   It was a small ecosystem a big fish and all that   A few years later I made a monstrous thing with the help of a exterminator named Burroughs   It was an ugly thing taped together with bits and pieces of words I had found and liked   It lived and then died too soon in someone else’s yard printed on copy paper   Then, when I had Found a source of income To fund my efforts I began experimenting On my own   But then age Had aged me Had aged my perspective Had aged my thoughts, words, The way I put together My animals   I made Daring moves That made sense And the creatures Were obscured By sophisticated thoughts

I remember I discovered music as young child.  My father had a record player and a number of record albums.  I remember pulling out a number of albums and listening to them over again, never getting tired of them.  Some of them were classic records, records by the Doors, Donavan, Cat Stevens, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, songs one might hear on an oldies station or even a classic rock station.  But the records that he owned that I enjoyed most were his folk albums, records released by the Kingston Trio and the New Christy Minstrels.  There was something about the use of unconventional, traditional instruments like banjoes and harmonicas paired with multiple voices.  There was something neat about the music which seemed unpretentious and accessible.  There were no stars, no personalities, just music. For some reason, the folk of that era disappeared, covered up by rock and roll and by disco and soul and eventually rap and dance, and so on, so that folk had all but disappeared.  And then U

Children like to bang on things.  They come out of their mother’s predisposed to swinging their arms, hands open, palms facing down ready to clap them on their legs or to clap them together, smiling widely when they do.  It brings them joy to make such noise, and, making such noise is an expression of joy by the baby.  Baby toys are developed with this in mind, incorporating the child’s love of noise into the toy itself.  They sleep in cribs with dangling mobiles which perpetually make noise while moving in repeated circles.  We give them jack-in-the-boxes which play tunes and then end with a loud bang when a clown pops out of the top of the box.  We gush at the child who has gotten into the kitchen pots and pans and has taken to beating on them with wooden spoons. A child’s life is constantly filled with noise.  And a child’s ages into a teenager and then into an adult swimming in a sea of sound with little respite.  And seemingly, as the world also ages, it gets noisier and noisier

Comic book event tie-ins can be fun.  I really liked the tie-ins with the Blackest Night event.  DC did a great job in incorporating the main theme of the event into the short mini-series, delving into death, a subject that is often over-dramatized in an issue or two and then seemingly wiped clean from the consciousness as the next crisis occurs.  I recall Donna Troy, Wondergirl, being revisited by her dead husband and baby and having once again to struggle with their loss as they are literally biting her.  But crossover events are more often than fall short of the promises contained in their promotions.  Take, for example, Marvel’s Original Sin crossover event.  I am sure that the meeting at Marvel started with someone saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” and ended up with Uatu the Watcher being murdered and several heroes learning secrets, that up to now had never been disclosed.  We found out that Thor has a sister, Angela, a character seemingly folded into the Marvel Universe, and,

Saturday meant no work, although he had been trying to rise early in the morning to avoid the humidity and the heat of the day that seemed to seep in earlier and earlier, even though it was September, and technically fall, when the leaves were supposed to turn orange, yellow, and brown.  But those trees didn’t exist in Texas, only the short, lone kind, with boring light flowers, which, when spent, fell to the ground, and were trampled upon in a brown-grey mush. Beside him, his lump of a wife lay.  He had noticed recently that her hips had started bursting at the seams, that her rear-end had exploded, had become lumpy and soft, and that she had suddenly become disproportionate, that her top half of her body, her torso, and more particularly, her chest, did not match her large bottom half, the meaty thighs which reminded him of legs of mutton munched upon English kings of old.  She had cropped all of her hair off in a bold move one day which made her seem even more bottom heavy.  It wa