Miraclo Miles

     Not meant to be in the least comprehensive, but some of what's on my list of upcoming watch items:     Now that the Writer's strike is functionally over (next week will see the late night talk shows, and things like the much-missed John Oliver's Last Week Tonight returning this Sunday to HBO, as I saw it come back to life in my DVR pre-sets) - and hopefully the actor's strike soon to follow, with the new WGA contract template ideally helping to light the path - the gears of the entertainment machine should soon begin to turn again. Everyone seems very anxious to get back to work. With the promise of new work beginning to be more likely, we should see some more of what's been held in reserve begin to be officially scheduled -- those projects shot prior to the strike, that streamers had held back should the strike roll on into progressively leaner times.     Arriving today on Amazon Prime is a three-episode kick-off for the eig...

     Just finishing up a four-year stretch of doing Friday posts of tv, film and streaming media for the Consortium of Seven blog - which is shutting down on October 3, 2023 - I'm aiming to dust this place off and make a regular go of this blog for the first time in too many years.

    By the close of the 20th century it occurred to me that perhaps every place I'd seen a movie from childhood through my twenties no longer existed.    Time and commerce had closed locations, and even eliminated entire theater chains. Today's post is about the first couple theaters I went to, among the many that now exist only in memory and a few photographs that others had taken and managed to find their way into various Internet archives.    We moved down from Rhode Island into the house I would grow up in in the summer of 1966. This was shortly after my brother was born. I had just turned five that April. If I'd ever been out to see a movie before all of that, I have no recollection of it. We were living in base housing up in Rhode Island (my father had been in his first career, as an officer in the U.S. Navy, since the late '40s), so it's entirely possible there was something from back when I was maybe 3 or 4 where I was dropped ...

  A s some wiser folk have observed, remembered family history often varies from the details others remember. If relating some things eventually brings me some corrective epiphany, so be it, but for the moment these are my memories, and that's good enough for this and now.      My father was largely out of the picture by my 10th birthday.      There had been considerable, simmering tension on the home front for many years, well before I came along, but a blend of wanting to maintain appearances for propriety's sake - both in the eyes of extended family and of my father's superior officers, as he was in the thick of what would become his first career, in the US Navy - my mother's self-cripplingly rigid adherence to elements of her Catholic faith, and the stretches of relative peace at home while he was at sea, on deployment, combined to keep them technically together for far longer than they likely should have. My older sisters...

      Another of the posts that's almost entirely here for my own reference.       Largely on a whim, though in part spurred on by seeing how quickly even soon-to-be-released Omnibuses suddenly sell out, I've recently ordered some others that I hadn't initially jumped at.       There was a stretch where, primarily, the Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning team were putting out high-end work using a variety of Marvel's cosmic heroes, including having some latitude to develop them in new ways, and including creating some new characters. This was back when Joe Quesada was still in charge of the comics operations, and he had no interest in the space-faring characters. No one was doing anything with these characters, so it was all able to quietly fly without interference.  Eventually, their work tripped them up by becoming popular and successful, at which point others (Bendis comes quickly to mind) suddenly paid attention and wanted t...

     Not having posted about this (or anything else here) since mid-February ( and I've just updated that post with some notes in dark blue ), and having done some overnight ordering, it seemed like time.       Early this morning - so still late Friday night as far as the West Coast seller's system is concerned - I ordered four more, then stepped away rather than immediately moving ahead with a few more I was considering.       Incredible Hulk by Peter David Omnibus vol. 4. I'd previously passed on it because I know that this will include the tragic descent of the title, as the manic bean-counters at Marvel back in the '90s, panicked over the collapse of sales once the "hot artist"/investment pyramid scheme collapsed, greenlit the Heroes Reborn deal with the Image folks, and so viciously rolled through with Onslaught, then the cancellation and horrific relaunches/reimaginings for Avengers, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, Captain America,...

      While I continue to watch for more solicitations, I recently reviewed my standing orders to pin down (roughly) when I can expect to see the seven volumes which I paid for in 2021, which should finally be coming my way this year.       These are all the current release dates, so if I receive the books within three weeks of each of these dates I'll consider it a solid victory.       Lifting text from other spots has once again left me with odd font and formatting problems, and the extremely limited editor here on Blogger isn't giving me an easy route to correcting them. Given that maybe one or two other people are likely to ever see any of this - it's mainly for my own organizing - I'm not going to waste additional effort on aesthetics.       Set to release March 1st is Incredible Hulk Omnibus Vol 1. Collecting INCREDIBLE HULK (1962) #1-6, the Hulk stories from TALES TO ASTONISH (1959) #59-101 , and I...

       Today's arrivals are the first of the classic X-Men Omnibus collections, covering up through issue #31 of the series. I went with the Alex Ross reinterpretation of the cover of issue #1, both as it looked cool and that the alternative was one with the original Kirby cover... which I have inside the book anyway.       Once I have the second volume, taking me up through #66 - the final issue before it became a reprint item through issue #93 - I'll have the classic X-Men era covered.       Speaking of both X-Men and desired coverage, the other one that arrived today was Uncanny X-Men Volume 3, of the "All-New" era X-Men. This includes issues 154-175, Annuals 6 & 7, and several other items. While I also have volume 4, this is probably as far up the channel of the original series as I should have gone with this format... but I have the other, and hope I'll find at least some of it more enjoyable when I get around to re...