Friday
A sunny, not terrible day.
School finally out, older son Travis came with me to work today. My assistant is on a campground down in Tennessee, at the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival, for a sort of bluesy Woodstock, so I thought I'd bring in an extra pair of hands for some help. That's worked out fairly well, as I had Trav process bulk samples, run some sieve analyses at various stages, run some points on a few tests, do some clean-up, etc. for $5/hr. We picked up some drinks and things on the way in so there was a stash to hit through the day. Lunch out at nearby Olympia restaurant (a Greek, family-operated pizzeria) and more work after that. A good day's experience for him.
There was something of a holiday feel around work today as people were coming and mostly going seemingly at will, and a great many people were already mentally down at the ballpark for the annual company outing to see a Phillies game.
No, I'm not going.
My latest Westfield pack arrived today, so I'll have the past three weeks (including this one) of comics to catch up on. A minor resolution is to do at least a small column with at least a line or two on each. I'f I can't muster at least a few comments on each series then how can I justify buying it? So, there should be something on that later this weekend.
Younger son Nick is invited to an end of the school year movie party tonight, so I'll momentarily be dropping him off there, then picking him up around 11. Fortunately I tried doing a preliminary run earlier only to find that the directions were... lacking. All appears to be straightened out now, but I'll find out shortly. National Treasure is what was chosen, which has the benefit of being a film Nick hasn't seen already.
Off I go...
Comments
SG and I saw NATIONAL TREASURE together on one of our first movie dates. I remember enjoying it more than I expected to, but it was likely the company, not the film.
I've picked up a few new comics lately... the new Rucka CHECKMATE series, a few back issues of THUNDERBOLTS and MARVEL TEAM UP, and I'm keeping up with 52. I think I'm about to strike T-BOLTS off the list, though. Nicieza's scripting is an odd low key addiction, but after more than a year of this, I'm finally starting to see that we're never really going to get anywhere with the series. On the other hand, he killed that rotter Genis, and now the apparent future Avengers roster established by Slappy in AVENGERS FOREVER can never come into being. That works for me, too. Maybe I should keep buying. I don't know how much more half baked road to redemption angst I can take, though.
Treasure strikes me as entertaining escapism with leaden historical notes based on what I saw -- when I arrived to pick Nick up the movie was still running. I saw the last 10-15 minutes of it projected sharply onto an enormous wall screen a good 12 feet across. (The interior of the house was grand.) Eventually I'll get to watch it.
I hadn't added Checkmate to my list because I wasn't particularly intrigued by the organization and have already slid towards entirely too many monthlies/limited series being on my list, so that was an easy I'll consider the first trade collection deal.
I gave Kirkman more than one opportunity on MTU, and he failed to hold me. Had he done more single-issue or two-issue stories the situation likely would have been different, but he kept having longer-range connections and threats that felt forced from the outside, amateurish and, obviously, of little interest to me. My impression is that because he's "hot" Marvel is pulling their standard playbook calls (especially for the Quesada era) by having the "editor" do little more than make sure his pillow is fluffed and his glass full when he's not raining praises down on the latest script to be submitted. My impression with Kirkman's Marvel work is that he needs someone else to comes up with plots for him. That one was an easy drop for now.
Thunderbolts continues to be superhero soap opera with pretensions to grand plots Nicieza really can't quite pull off convincingly -- all the elements to be expected of a writer who cut his teeth in an era when Chris Claremont was seen as lord of the comics writers -- at least over at Marvel. So, yeah -- too much soap opera and too damn many dangling plot threads without a sufficient credit history to assure us that they'll be satisfactory even if he does address them.
On the other hand, I at least partially like the mix of characters and am interested in seeing where and how far things go during the current Civil War plotline where a nearly omnipotent Zemo is not only taking advantage of the situation but appears to have at least convinced himself that his motives are pure and benevolent. This makes him more frightening by far than a traditional villain who's only in it for riches, glory and self-gratification.
As for Genis, well, he's been killed off at least once before, and this is comics after all... still, indications are that if Genis comes back it won't be Nicieza's doing.
I was fairly tired after the long day and the extended trip retrieving Nick, so I've only read through the Civil War material (Thunderbolts, Amazing Spider-man, Civil War #2, Civil War Frontline #1) so far. All items to be addressed in a posting of its own.
That leaves several other comics to go, including issues 4-6 of 52, where I'm interested in seeing which threads are developed sooner rather than later, and which prove to be of interest to me. The tight group of writers working on this ripped through it at such speed that my impression at the convention was that what we're seeing now feels like ancient history to them. Granted, it's a weekly, but they already we past issue #26 in terms of completed, submitted and approved scripts as June started.
Most likely it's getting trickier on the back end, as more of the One Year Later tales have accumulated and it becomes more difficult to find significant surprises to inveil. Much depends upon the characters one's interested in. I do know that DC's DiDio repeatedly made arch references and never failed to take advantage of a question concerning the New Gods, Darkseid, etc.'s conspicuous absence during Infinite Crisis, so I don't know how much of the tale will start to shift in that direction as the missing year rolls on but it'll be coming up somewhere.