We had a super "pre-honeymoon" trip to the great city of Nashvegas, where the traffic ain't bad and the shopping is easy. We got to visit friends and have some terrific meals and put our worries, such as they are, behind us for a while. It was a very nice trip.

The kids were very good on the ride up, which made a nice change. Usually when it's a road trip to meet their mom, they're a little wired and bitchy, but they did great this time. We got to town about half an hour ahead of schedule, giving us time to run around and play at Centennial Park before the "prisoner exchange" with their mother. We met up at a highly-regarded meet-n-three called Rotier's which has some good reviews at roadfood.com and some downright excellent burgers. The Hipster Son got some awesome roast beef with fried zucchini. Deb's looking well and the Hipster Nephew was in a terrific good mood. He was very playful and fun. After lunch, we all went back to the park and let the kiddos run around for a while.





After waving goodbye, Marie and I went to the Great Escape in Madison, for some wonderful finds. Last time, I bought two but left behind three Japanese volumes of Cat's Eye and hoped they'd still be around. Not only were they still on the shelf, but the staff got tired of looking at them and marked 'em down to 99 cents each. But the real find came in the cheap bins - a full dozen 1967-68 issues of Pippin for 49 cents apiece. This features comic adventures of all the mid-60s icons of British TV cuteness: Pogle's Wood, Sooty, The Woodentops, Camberwick Green and the like. They're completely wonderful.

Having shopped very well, we moseyed back over to Inglewood to hang out with Tory and Natalie in their new-to-us place. Tory's mom was in town from Panama arranging and assembling a giant array of donations for her mission, and it was nice to visit with her again. We caught up and talked road trip plans and shared music and had a wonderful afternoon.

In the evening, we went to get another great meal at Pied Piper Eatery down the road. Brooke joined us there and we had a great time. Pied Piper has done their interior with some really interesting decor, using lots of old records and memorabilia for themed table displays, and the food is really good, too. I couldn't finish my "Jerry Garcia Chili Pie" but everybody else found room for some wonderful brownies, pies and ice cream.



After dinner, we went to Comix City Too for a little more shopping. This is where Brooke has her pull list, so she needed to head this way anyhow. It's a very good store for new stuff, and they stock an impressively wide variety of recent collections and comics, but if you're in the market for digging through boxes and finding bizarre treasures and stuff you can't order from Previews, there's not a lot for you here. So Marie and I didn't find anything, but we enjoyed browsing. We all went back to Tory and Natalie's place and kicked back with her mom for a couple more hours.

Around nine, Marie and I were beginning to tire down, so we said our goodbyes and went back to the Vandy neighborhood and got a room at the Hampton Inn on 20th and West End, which I can certainly recommend. It's ideally situated for everything we wanted to do Saturday morning, priced right and extraordinarily comfortable. Sunday morning, we got out around 8.30 and took a walk around the neighborhood, finding a completely bizarre bit of signage at a printing company that I've never noticed before and walking (or perhaps "ambling") around the Vandy campus before meeting John and Ashley for breakfast at Noshville.



Marie was a little disappointed in Noshville this time out. It's become one of our favorite Nashville eateries, but I think she likes lunches and dinners there more than breakfasts. I was as pleased as could be, though. I had an order of lox and they gave me a giant plate full of toast and veggies and cream cheese. It was really great.

After breakfast, the four of us walked across the street to the Broadway Great Escape for a little more shopping. I bought a Manic Street Preachers CD that I missed and Marie and Ashley compared notes about folk and bluegrass selections. Comic-wise, luck wasn't with me here, but this remains a terrific store all the same, and certainly worth visiting. Well, we got done and then walked back to the hotel to check out. John and Ashley met us there and then we all drove out I-40 to West Nashville, where Great Escape has opened a third, outlet location, and where the venerable Knoxville bookstore McKay has opened a branch in town. These two awesome stores are within walking distance, with both a White Castle and a Jack in the Box between 'em. Travelling book-shoppers like us from towns with neither of these lovely fast food chains: this, then, exit 204 off I-40 is where you need to go. You can kill five hours here easy.

I got a couple of dirt-cheap hardbacks that I'd been wanting at Great Escape and Marie cleaned up on dollar CDs. At McKay, the ladies dug through the SF books and made recommendations, but I think I found the real score: a two-dollar copy of The Bundled Doonesbury with the CD-ROM still intact. Aggravatingly, I learned later that this is one of those retarded Windows 95-style CD-ROMs which requires that you have the disk in the drive even once you've installed it, but I'm glad I put off buying it all those years ago, since I found a copy so darn cheap.

Well, I was pretty shopped out myself and John and Ashley were ready to call it a day, so we said our goodbyes. The original plan had been to hang in town for another couple of hours, but we elected to grab a quick snack at White Castle and make our way. We stopped in Chattanooga for an early supper at one of our favorite BBQ joints, Sugar's Ribs. If you've come down I-24 in the last several years, you've certainly noticed this place on the ridge. We first ate here last year and it immediately eclipsed any other Chattanooga-based cue joints we've been known to try. From singing servers to unbelievable sauces to some friendly goats outside to whom you can feed your leftover corncobs, this place is awesome.



We got back home around 7 and unwound. Sunday, we took it easy and read. Marie cooked up a darn fine steak for dinner and we enjoyed some peace and quiet, even if I was a little moody, missing the kiddos and everything. But our honeymoon is in less than two weeks! I am very excited about that! We went ahead and booked a room in Montreal at a B&B just four blocks' walk from the place we want to have for supper on that Monday night.

This week: more kid-free peace and quiet. That's the plan, anyhow. I hope you're off to a great week!

One evening last week, we all sat down to watch The Maltese Falcon. We didn't do this just to show the kids one of the ten or twelve best films ever made, although we should certainly do more of that, but to prep them for something almost as wonderful in its own way: "Legacy of Death."

If I were to list my favorite episodes of The Avengers, nine of the top ten would certainly be Mrs. Peel stories, with maybe a Purdey or two. But my all-time favorite is a Tara King adventure. "Legacy of Death" is a completely ridiculous, over-the-top parody of The Maltese Falcon, with the great Stratford Johns sweating profusely as "Sidney Street," accompanied by Ronald Lacey, who would later play Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark, in the Peter Lorre role.

It's a fine reminder that Terry Nation had been a gag writer for the likes of Tony Hancock before he started scripting adventure stories. At one point, Johns gives this breathless monologue about how long they've been travelling the globe tracking down this "Falcon Dagger," and I don't know whether there's ever been anything so funny on television before or since, at least until some dimwit of an assassin tries to jump from a roof onto Steed about fifteen minutes later. I've watched that a good dozen times and lost my shit every single time, and I don't know that I've ever heard my son laugh so hard. But it's mainly Johns who walks away with this episode, and Patrick Macnee is a very gracious star indeed to let him get away with it.

At one point, Tara has fallen captive to the Baron von Orlak - and no villain has ever had a name so great, which is why I've pilfered him twice for my own stories - who tells her that the Falcon Dagger which all these mad criminals are chasing has brought death to everyone who has ever possessed it. "Then why do you want it?" she asks, not unreasonably. There's the most perfect beat ever before ze baron replies "I haff answered enuff of your qvestions!"

"Legacy of Death" is remarkable in my own memory for a really odd incident from my more active days in Avengers fandom. I used to co-run a very nice little fan site with a fellow named Scott, who handled all the emails from readers. One day, and this was either shortly before they came out or on DVD or when only the Mrs. Peel episodes were out, he got an email from a guy who wanted to know in which episode Tara was "tickle-tortured." So ever the polite host, Scott told him that in "Legacy of Death," Tara is subjected to the old "Chinese water torture" trick - a bit that seems quaint and innocent in the wake of waterboarding - and that she later turns the tables on Sidney Street and tickles him with a feather duster, but that there isn't an episode in which Tara is tickle-tortured. Then he forwarded me the email with some amusing, memorable comments about foot-fetish-fucktards.

A couple of weeks later, of course, the dimwit wrote Scott back to complain that he'd picked up a copy of "Legacy of Death" from somewheres and Tara isn't tickle-tortured in it, and did Scott know what episode that was?

Well, in recent days we've been doing pretty well. The high point of the weekend was probably going record-and-book shopping with Kevin, David and Steven and enjoying a damn fine dinner in Decatur at Mediterranean Grill. I was extremely good and didn't spend much - the high point was finding an extremely nice condition Paul Robeson record for $3 - and we had a fine day out, even if the heat was pretty oppressive.

Tonight, my folks have invited us over for supper and tomorrow we have to get the kids packed for their three-week trip to their old Kentucky home and Friday morning, we are Nashville-bound for a little two-day getaway. I'm hoping that some things I left behind at the Madison Great Escape are still there. It's only been, what, eight months since I was last in town. Ah well, either it was meant to be or it wasn't!

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected several titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

One missing gem is THIRD WORLD WAR by Pat Mills and a variety of artists, including co-creator Carlos Ezquerra, John Hicklenton and Sean Phillips. Borrowing from the listing I wrote for the Touched by the Hand of Tharg fan site, the series "concerns a near-future where corporations have grown so powerful that they can conscript soldiers to assist them in clearing the native populations of south and central America from regions necessary for their economic stranglehold over Western consumerism. "



Third World War was one of two series chosen to launch the twice-monthly anthology comic Crisis in 1988. The plan was to present a pair of 14-page color episodes in each issue, and these would later be shrunk and compiled in the smaller American comic format. It gave Carlos Ezquerra the opportunity to work in full color for the first time in his career and so, already unsatisfied with the long-term plans to conclude his ongoing series Strontium Dog in 2000 AD and now having the chance to work with Pat Mills, the artist jumped on board.

It's a real shame that it's not a better series, but it's certainly a polarizing and fascinating one. As I said over at Hand of Tharg, "Truly, it's hard to disagree with the points raised in this series, especially as companies like Wal-Mart and Starbucks continue a stranglehold on the marketplace, but it's done with such po-faced pretension that the final product is incredibly disagreeable. Mills depicts Christian characters, not for the last time, as two-dimensional retards, and the 'open-minded' heroes, Eve and an eco-terrorist named Paul, who would later resurface as the titular character in 2000 AD's Finn, are only open-minded insofar as they reject conventional society in favor of paganism and rebellion."

There's a lot more to Third World War than most American readers saw. Ezquerra only stayed with the series through its first phase, set in Central America, and opted for a return to Judge Dredd rather than illustrate the wild adventures awaiting Eve when she returned back to a very ugly, near-future Britain where economic collapse has sent most of the nation's youth to find the only work available, as gunmen for corporations. Without a consistent artist, the strip as a whole suffered, but individual installments by Hicklenton, Phillips, Glyn Dillon and others were fascinating. Joined by co-writer Alan Mitchell, Mills put Eve through the ringer in a long battle of wits against a drunken police inspector obsessed with her.

It's tempting to use my blog as a platform to prop up unavailable comics as really being gems of overlooked brilliance. Third World War is not one of those. It's highly flawed and very dated, but that's actually what makes it so very interesting from a present perspective. Pat Mills has long been an iconoclast of a writer, bucking convention and presenting antiheroes as protagonists. This was the first time, though, that he really threw caution to the wind and really railed against the social injustices that he perceived. It's Mills without restraint, as the editors of Crisis stepped back and let him have his platform. The result is never subtle and it almost every page screams "right on!" like an undergraduate on a free speech platform, but every page is equally fascinating, and the artwork is often just amazing.

Plus, you know, it makes you think.



Third World War originally ran for 49 episodes, each about 14 pages, throughout the first 53 issues of Crisis. With nearly 700 color pages in total, this looks like a good bet for a three-volume paperback collection. I've been crossing my fingers that Rebellion would begin licensing the material from Crisis, and give it the same high-end treatment that they do with 2000 AD's stories. It's long overdue, but what do you say, Rebellion? Why not put this back into print for a new generation to consider it?

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The Reprint This! features:

Ambassador Magma
Angel and the Ape
The Angry Planet
Armitage
Axa
Axel Pressbutton
Black Jack
Black Orchid
Cat's Eye
Cobra
Steve Ditko
Doctor Who Adventures
Doonesbury
The Inferior Five
Johnny Red
Judge Dredd in the Daily Star
Jungle Emperor
Major Eazy
Marvelman
Missionary Man
The New Adventures of Hitler
Oh, Wicked Wanda!
Pussycat
Rat Pack
Robot Archie
Sapphire & Steel
Shade the Changing Man
The Stainless Steel Rat
Steed & Mrs. Peel
Sugar and Spike
Tales from Beyond Science: The Rian Hughes Collection
Third World War
Thunderbirds
Tippy Teen
UFO Robo Gurendaiza
Urusei Yatsura
Gahan Wilson
The World's Greatest Superheroes
Zenith

I am so red-faced! I've quietly listened to hundreds of CDs and streamed countless songs from this radio station and that over the years in my cube, but I finally made two of my co-workers beg me to turn down something.

Who was this banshee shrieking over a cacaphony, who caused someone two aisles away to send a very polite email asking for mercy, you ask? It was that awful Joni Mitchell. Of all people.

Sad restaurant news from up in Woodstock today. Bob-O's Burger and Chili has folded. They were a new fave. Man, I'm going to miss that chili.

In the light of following updates from the streets of Tehran via HuffPo, that looks awfully trite, but man. If you missed out on those sausage burgers, you really missed out.

In possibly related news, in less than a month, we're going to road trip 3000 miles through 13 states and two provinces and won't have to turn around even once to tell the children to knock it off. Sounds like heaven.

Gary Kamiya has a brilliant essay over at Salon:

"Beneath their talk of spreading freedom and democracy, the neocons have always hated and feared Iran. There are several reasons for this, including the state of enmity between Iran and America spurred by the Khomeini revolution and the 1979 hostage crisis, but the main one is that Iran is Israel's most dangerous enemy. Removing Iran as a threat to Israel is the main strategic goal of the neoconservatives, and that goal is far more important to them than "liberating" the Iranian people.

For the truth is that the neocons' supposed "idealism" was and is in fact a fig leaf covering utter, cavalier indifference to the massive death and destruction their reckless -- but so "principled" -- policies caused. This was true of Iraq, for which the Bush administration did not even keep figures of Iraqi deaths, and it is even more true of Iran."

Sam's Strip was the third newspaper comic devised by Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas, the team better known for Hi & Lois and Beetle Bailey. It ran for a little less than two years before the creators, unable to make much headway selling it, pulled the plug. It really is an odd little strip. Sam is a well-meaning grouch who's very much aware of the fourth wall separating his four panels from the rest of the newspaper funnies, and periodically interacts with his peers, with cameos by everybody from Charlie Brown to the character who'd later become Grandmama on The Addams Family.

Naturally, the strip became a fast favorite of comics afficionados, who enjoyed the in-jokes and what we might term as "metatextual commentary" if this blog was any more po-faced than it actually is. With regular asides to the readers, light commentary on current events and trips to a prop closet stocked with a variety of word balloons, Sam's Strip was lost on many comics page editors, and the strip never had more than 60 client papers.

Well, it might have been a failure in its day, but Sam's Strip has grown into a cult classic over time. Fantagraphics recently released a very nice paperback edition which compiles the series in its entirety. It includes annotations to explain some of the topical references of the early 1960s and commentary by Jerry Dumas. This may not be a book worth going too far out of your way to sample, but if you enjoy newspaper funnies, then this might be a very nice addition to your bookshelves. Give it a try!

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Read more of what I've written about the publishers at A Journal of Zarjaz Things.

Read other reviews of this book:

Chris Barat at News and Views
KC Carlson at Comics Worth Reading
Allan Holtz at Stripper's Guide
Chad Nevett at Comic Book Resources
Andrew Williams at Den of Geek

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The biggest news of the last month comes from the good folks over at Titan, who have finally confirmed the rumors - hardback editions of the terrific Johnny Red are in the works. The long-running series by Tom Tully and, initially, Joe Colquhoun, ran for a decade in the pages of Battle Picture Weekly. This is a big favorite of mine, and one of BPW's best series. I've been rereading the John Cooper-drawn era lately and it's a consistently wonderful strip which you should all check out. The first in what we hope will be an annual collection is due in September.

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The second biggest news of the month - and any other month, it'd be the biggest - is that Steve Holland of the wonderful Bear Alley blog has formally announced he's going into the publishing business with Bear Alley Books, looking at doing small print-run, complete editions of classic British comics, done right. Holland has the knowledge and the commitment to make certain his collections are as comprehensive and good-looking as bookshelf editions can be, and I wish him all the success in the world with his new venture. First up from Bear Alley, later this summer: complete collections of the time-travelling war yarn The Phantom Patrol, with art by Gerry Embleton, and the excellent late sixties occult thriller Cursitor Doom, with art by Eric Bradbury and Geoff Campion. Steve's commissioned new covers by Chris Weston and John Ridgway for the titles.

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In other news, as if you didn't have enough books to buy this year, the long-rumored Groo Treasury has finally been scheduled by Dark Horse. This 336-page collection of the earliest episodes of the comedy strip by Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier is due in October, which is nice, because I was not keen on filling up on those little 80-page collections of the old Epic Comics series. That'd get a little expensive.

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DC has announced they're releasing what might be the first-ever collection of Mike Grell's weird 1970s swords-and-lasers fantasy The Warlord, a title I enjoyed for about seven weeks when I was twelve, in their Showcase Presents line. The 528-page book, scheduled for September, reprints the character's debut in the anthology 1st Issue Special and the first 28 issues of his own book. If I was still in touch with a couple of guys I went to middle school with, I'd let them know, but I'm not, so I'm telling you.

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So ten days ago, I was talking about how somebody needs to release more old Osamu Tezuka comics in the US. Well, the company Digital Manga Publishing is way ahead of me; there's a complete, done-in-one omnibus collection of Tezuka's 1968-69 serial Swallowing the Earth due in July! Great news, I am looking forward to seeing it. For more Tezuka, the wonderful Helen McCarthy is putting the final touches on a big, image-heavy coffee table biography of Tezuka for Abrams, the company that brought you Mark Evanier's wonderful tribute to Jack Kirby last year. The book is due out in October. And speaking of Abrams...

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In another example of what's either a late April Fool's gag or definitive proof that everything that ever appeared in a newspaper is going to end up in a hardcover collected edition before much longer, Abrams is bringing out a collection of Stuart Hample's Woody Allen comic strip. No, I never knew there was a Woody Allen comic strip, either. It ran in the 1970s. The book is entitled Dread and Superficiality: Woody Allen as a Comic Strip and is due out in November. With an introduction by Buckminster Fuller. Oh, now I know this is a gag!

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Finally this time, a couple of interesting Judge Dredd collections from Rebellion are in the pipeline for November. The 14th volume in their Complete Case Files series will include all the 2000 AD strips up to prog 700, including the epic "Necropolis" and all of its lead-in stories, drawn by Carlos Ezquerra. The collection won't include the separate serial The Dead Man, which ran for a few months prior to "Necropolis" and dumped readers on their heads with the beautiful revelation that the two strips were intricately connected. Happily, The Dead Man is getting its own trade collection alongside CCF 14, so new readers can enjoy all of its beautiful John Ridgway artwork and read it at the same time as the main Dredd strip.

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That's all for this month! See you in July!

Fifty-odd newly received pics, after the cut.

Alternately, you can just visit my LJ scrapbook and see the tag "wedding" for all 90-odd photos I've labelled as such.

( Read more... )

Captain Blood and the Perils of Indie Comics. Yarrr, me hearties, where be the good funnybooks, then?!

Over the last week, Marie and I considered our honeymoon war chest, along with a list of possible destinations, and concluded that what we would enjoy the most is a good old-fashioned road trip. We've settled on New England, that strange land where all the interstates are toll roads and where I hear tell that the crab cakes I can't enjoy on account of my shellfish allergy are mighty tasty. We have tweaked and adjusted the proposal and pencilled and sketched and sat down with a copy of the Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives book and Google Maps and some minor league baseball schedules and considered when we need to be in Knoxville to pick up the kids at the end of their summer holiday, and I think we have a basic skeleton in mind.

Over an eight-day, 3000-mile trip, we will be visiting Asheville, Baltimore, Boston, Bridgeport, Buffalo, Charleston, Charlotte, Manchester, Middlebury, Montreal, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Toronto* before finally meeting the kids at Smokies ballpark outside of K-ville. Some of these will just be very short stops with a leg-stretching and a meal in mind, some will be longer affairs. We'll be visiting some friends, and possibly meeting up with others, seeing two ball games, looking in on some good comic shops that I know of, hopefully finding some old antique malls on the side of the road, touring Marie's alma mater and ideally finding some motels with free wi-fi. The budget looks good and I'm already super-excited about leaving. Tragically, we're not getting started for five and a half weeks!

Last night, I had a wonderful moment of serendipity. Our current schedule leaves us very little time in Baltimore. Really, we're just planning to arrive late, get a room somewhere, and in the morning, get some breakfast and drive through Fells Point so's I can visit the station house from Homicide: Life on the Street, and then get out of town because that's a big driving day. So I mapped it out to see where that was, and a little later, I read of a good-sounding breakfast place in the DDD book and looked it up. It's also in Fells Point, only two blocks north of the station house. Hooray!

I'd love to hear suggestions from anybody familiar with the towns we're going through. Do you live along the way and would you like to meet up? Can you recommend any great bookstores, restaurants, unmissably cheesy tourist traps or record shops? We especially need to know about great comic shops in Boston and Philly, and whether you can get somethin' to eat in Charleston, West Virginia that's not a Bob Evans. Let me know, because we want to pack in as much as we can!


*not in that order, of course.

We stayed very, very busy this weekend. It was not very relaxing at all!

Friday night, we went to listen to a bunch of drunk country clubbers yammer about their homeowners' associations. For those of y'all not local to Ettalanna, that means we went to see a show at Chastain Park, where a goodly number of the patrons don't care who is playing or why, it's just where they go since they bought series tickets and when an act is onstage, they just need to raise their voices. As it happens, the acts on stage were Portland's Pink Martini and Sneakin' Out, and the bunch in front of us were bound and determined to live up to the Chastain stereotype.

Sneakin' Out is a surf-rock trio, and a very fun one. I can honestly say that I have never heard a better surf rock medley of "Paint it Black" and Beethoven's Fifth before Friday night. Pink Martini is a twelve-piece, apparently the result of a dozen music and language majors all getting together at a small college and electing to mix up a dozen disparate, obscure interests together. They put on a very, very good show, performing songs in at least six languages (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and Croatian), though I confess my interest wandered a time or two during some of the longer pieces. They performed "Brazil" as an encore and just knocked it out of the park; that was amazing.

Saturday was a very, very long day. Nothing went quite as planned and I think we were all getting on each others' nerves, but mostly we just had to keep resetting the bar and change arrangements. We did have a nice lunch at Barker's Red Hots anyway, and sampled all the yummy milkshake flavors at the Zesto on Ponce in the evening.

Sunday morning, the Hipster Son and I went to see Land of the Lost. Well, objectively, it's not a good film, but I certainly laughed myself stupid. I knew going in that it would be far less an adaptation than a typical Will Ferrell comedy using previously-existing imagery and ideas, and so I wasn't disappointed. Well, the purist in me chafed at the decision to give the "evil" character the same name as an existing character from the original series. Call him "Bill" or "George" or any damn thing but "Zarn," for heaven's sake. That said, my Krofft nerdblinkers aren't screwed on so tightly that I can't enjoy a good yukfest.

It would have been a better film had it not been assembled from the handbook of stupid adventure movies. Yes, the lead character has a crisis of faith and everybody else has to move on without him, briefly, and a supporting character learns that the "informant" has given them false information, just like three hundred other films crafted from the same hotdamned playbook, and that's what made it frustrating. I'd have laughed just as loudly had the gags appeared in a movie not assembled by committee, and the jokes were good enough to deserve a lot better. There's an ongoing gag about Grumpy's brain being the size of a walnut which has a killer payoff. Ferrell and McBride were very funny, and the designers and effects artists made a dimbulb plot shine a lot brighter than it should have.

I said a time or two that there was just no way this film could possibly be worse than the '90s adaptation and I was proved right. I'm sure almost all of you had better things to do on Saturday mornings in 1992-93 than watch a Land of the Lost remake, but I suffered through it for two seasons, such is my Krofft loyalty. I'm sure you've got better things to read about, and I know I have better things to write about, but briefly, the first season of that was pretty pisspoor Land of the Lost, but it was about acceptable by the really low standards of American adventure TV for kids. Actually, there were elements of what could have been better in there. The main writers were Len Janson and Chuck Menville, who'd been writing for Filmation shows for more than twenty years. Menville passed away as they were putting season two together. His last script was about an aging Paku making his final visit to the valley, and it was better than all the good moments of the other 25 episodes put together.

With Menville gone, there wasn't anything left to stop LOTL90 from turning into the worst, mealy-mouthed, message-driven, morally-upright example of "values" TV for kiddies you ever saw. It was like they let the producers of Barney & Friends tell them how to finish season two. There's one about drunk driving - the family in this version drove their jeep into the valley - but even that one's not the worst. See, in this adaptation, the Sleestak are three criminals with crocodile heads and gladiator-wear: a boss-man and his two bumbling sidekicks who bully the sixteen year-old Kevin. There's one episode where the Paku finds a laser stun gun, and so the teen decides to teach the bumbling sidekicks a lesson. It's a gun control / bullying episode. Heaven knows I'd rather take a blow to the head than watch '90s Star Trek. I'd rather watch every stinkin' episode of Star Trek than look at that thing again.

So yes, the new movie is a million, billion times better than the '90s version, thereby meeting my expectations.

Actually, I'll tell you what's really obnoxious about the new Land of the Lost. It's that it's sparked the laziest writing from entertainment journalists I've ever seen. I've read about a dozen short articles mentioning the original series in the last week, and every last one of them refers to that series as "cheesy," "campy" and "trippy." I want to see the press kit for the new movie; I've a feeling its press officers started it.

After the movie, the four of us went over to chetbakerfan's place. dramaqueer and playright joined us for a big organization project. David owns more movies and DVDs than any ten of you, but has been looking for a new way to put his house together and use the space to good effect. So we assembled several shelves and made considerable progress in sprucing the place up. The kids were a pretty big help, too! The Hipster Daughter was very handy in moving stuff around for us, and my son built three of the shelves by himself with just a little supervision.

David bought us dinner at Pasta Bella as thanks, and we got over to my folks' house just in time to watch a wonderfully fun twisty-turny Criminal Intent, with Goren and Eaves untangling a baby's kidnapping. We also got to meet this nice girl that my brother's seeing. We left the kiddos there since my folks will be watching them for most of the month, and got back home around 10.30, pretty exhausted.

We're not doing much of anything the next few days. Well, we have a lot to do, but nothing that'll take up entire evenings, anyway. Actually, most of the rest of the month will be pretty much demand-free, which is good. In July, we've got a trip to Nashville and a honeymoon to organize. I'm having lots of fun pencilling in the early details for that...!

I hope you all had a good weekend and this week goes wonderfully for you!

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected several titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

Obviously, the Japanese artist Osamu Tezuka is a big favorite here at Reprint This! headquarters, and the good folks over at Vertical have done a lot in the last year or so to increase his presence on English-language bookshelves, adding his classic series Dororo and Black Jack to their lineup. This is really just scratching the surface of all the wild array of comics he worked on over his forty-year career. One missing gem is AMBASSADOR MAGMA, a terrific comic in which humanity gets caught in the middle of a war between a galactic conqueror and his army of dinosaur-like monsters, and a kindly wizard and his trio of super-powered robots.



Ambassador Magma's central characters were the Murakami family, news reporter Atsushi, his wife Tomoko and his son Mamoru. In the first episode of the comic, the villainous Goa transports their home back to prehistoric Earth in a demonstration of his power, demanding that Murakami tell the world to surrender or be destroyed. Young Mamoru snaps pictures of Goa before he returns them to the present day. As he's developing the photo, a rocket lands outside and transforms into a fifty-foot robot called Magma, who takes Mamoru and the camera to a remote volcano. There, the wizard Earth confirms that his old enemy Goa has returned and enlists the Murakamis as his new allies.

The series is remarkably fun wish-fulfillment for kids, particularly when Earth creates a new "boy robot" called Gam in Mamoru's image as a surrogate son for Magma and his wife Mol. Gam is just about the greatest best friend character in all of comics: a super-powered buddy who can turn into a rocket and take you anywhere, and then beat up legions of evil henchmen with his magma-fueled super strength. In each of Ambassador Magma's first two lengthy comic storylines, the heroes confront alien duplicates along with an array of terrifying giant monsters as Goa crafts new plans for his conquest of our planet.



Ambassador Magma first ran in the monthly magazine Shonen Gaho from May of 1965 until February 1967, by which time a well-remembered live-action TV series was running. After Tezuka concluded his work on the comic, his studio continued it for another six months, along with a companion tie-in feature (six-page illustrated episode recaps, apparently) that ran for a year in the pages of Shonen King. The TV show, known in the US as The Space Giants, is a downright terrific program. It beat the better-known Ultraman to the air by about a week, and made the most of its shoestring budget by telling its stories in four-part serial format so that they wouldn't have to build so many sets and monster costumes. This resulted in stories that have aged very well, with believable characters and downright fascinating imagery. If Ultraman was Japan's Thunderbirds, low on plot but high on spectacle and explosions, then the TV Ambassador Magma was its Doctor Who, where intricate storylines and character development made for a far more rewarding experience. When The Space Giants finally got a decent run in American syndication more than a decade after it finished in Japan, it gained a huge audience of kids who would have sold their younger brothers for some merchandising, but practically nothing was available back then, least of all the original comics.

In fact, the program seems to be caught up in one of those interminable trademark disputes between a company which has no visible intention of making any money from it, other than suing anybody else who tries, and people who've made efforts to obtain a license to make comics with the better-known American name on it. This probably shouldn't impact any potential English-language release of the original comics, which should be called by the original title anyway and not get embroiled in the squabble over trademark, but it's a real shame that the characters have faded from the public view since nobody other than us nostalgists have seen the gang except in passing for better than twenty years.



Many, many moons ago, I did some research into the production of the TV series and my job would have been a lot easier had SciFi Japan been around. There's a terrific guide written by Bob Johnson on their site now which focusses more on the program, but also has some background about the comic and the various configurations of the reprints available in Japan. I'm of the opinion that the whole series could easily be collected into a pair of large-format volumes, and they'd make a great companion to Vertical's Black Jack books. So how about it, guys? Then you could get started on Jungle Emperor and Vampire and Cyborg Big X and Princess Knight and Amazing Three and...

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The Reprint This! features:

Ambassador Magma
Angel and the Ape
The Angry Planet
Armitage
Axa
Axel Pressbutton
Black Jack
Black Orchid
Cat's Eye
Cobra
Steve Ditko
Doctor Who Adventures
Doonesbury
The Inferior Five
Johnny Red
Judge Dredd in the Daily Star
Jungle Emperor
Major Eazy
Marvelman
Missionary Man
The New Adventures of Hitler
Oh, Wicked Wanda!
Pussycat
Rat Pack
Robot Archie
Sapphire & Steel
Shade the Changing Man
The Stainless Steel Rat
Steed & Mrs. Peel
Sugar and Spike
Tales from Beyond Science: The Rian Hughes Collection
Thunderbirds
Tippy Teen
UFO Robo Gurendaiza
Urusei Yatsura
Gahan Wilson
The World's Greatest Superheroes
Zenith

So anyway, as I was sayin', we got married.

We tried not to take too long getting photos done, but, scatterbrained as I was, it didn't occur to me that people would be waiting for us to get back to actually have dinner. Fortunately, there were some pretty amazing appetizers, including some delicious fruit and some wonderful jerk chicken skewers and incredibly tasty fresh shrimp with a mild sauce and pea pods. So people socialized and munched on those while we climbed the lighthouse to get some pictures taken. The caterers did an overall great job. We used Vickery House Catering, and while I realize my readership in south GA / north FL is pretty small, I'm going to say this so's the ole Google will bring in potential customers looking for recommendations: They were 99% perfect. Honestly, the only bum note for the whole ceremony and reception for us was this: apart from the cake which Marie shoved down my gob, we didn't get to enjoy our own wedding cakes! We actually had to do the garter / bouquet / cake things earlier than would be preferable in order to get the photographers out the door, and once we finished, we set our slices of cake down and resumed mingling, only for the tables to get bussed while our backs were turned!

But that was our own fault and mistakes happen in the heat of such excitement. The food was just jawdroppingly good. We had roast beef - and enough of it to confirm it makes great sandwiches afterward - and chicken in a thick sauce with mushrooms, and lots of people were raving about it. Their staff did a fantastic job, and I even got a little of the jerk chicken after the appetizers were retired so I could confirm how downright yummy they were.

Beforehand, we had bought four boxes of various wines, based on labels that I found amusing or the recommendations of the fellow at Harry's. Those and some extra donations were placed two or three per table, and we invited guests to choose a table with a wine they'd like to try. It didn't really work as planned - people just moved bottles rather than themselves (and I realized afterwards that I was just as guilty!) - but I also heard some nice comments about the selection. (I really like Queen of Hearts Pinot Noir 2006 myself.)

It was so, so nice to see everybody. As confirmations started coming back, Marie and I were overwhelmed by just how many people would be making it... I just wish we could have invited everybody, but the facility had a pretty strict occupancy cap (and I bet y'all didn't even notice the off-duty policeman we had to hire, either). Several of my mom's crazy friends came, and I got to meet another of Marie's dad's brothers, John, and her mother's brother Karel. Quite apart from Dave coming down from T'rontuh, we had lots of people make pretty amazing road trips to get down here for this, and we have just been equally flattered by all the love and thrilled to get to see everybody who could come in one place.

I realized as I stood up after the toasts that I didn't actually have anything to say, but I was reminded that a month or so back, I was reading Cary Tennis's advice column at Salon, and the subject of a massive faux pas at a wedding was raised. The message board (or Letters) was, one after another, angry readers spitting how much they hate the idea of "destination weddings," and how insensitive they can be. Well, the practical side of me raised an eyebrow, because every wedding ceremony is a "destination" for somebody, and I believe that Marie's mother and father should have had the least travelling involved of anyone. But the guilt-ridden side of me still panicked, and so I tried to make sure everyone who could come had plenty of other options and fun things to do, and just let our wedding be one of many things goin' on while our guests were in town for swimming, shopping and eating.

It seemed to have worked okay. Some of my parents' guests even traded up to extend their vacation over at the lovely King & Prince Hotel. The only real complaint I've heard was that it wasn't long enough of a vacation for anybody. But seriously, and again, we were just thrilled and bowled over by all the love and all the guests and family, and so glad everybody could make it.

And extra-special thanks to everybody who helped us throw this party, from the awesome facility staff and caterers to our parents and the friends who came down, especially our unheralded musical co-ordinators Kimberly (ceremony) and David (reception), and our lines, and Randy for marryin' us. We really did have a blast.

Traditionally, the happy couple leaves and the party goes on without them. Unfortunately, we were having such a good time that we closed the place down and said "so long" to just about everyone else. Other parties cropped up on the beach and at the Hampton Inn back at Brunswick after the Historical Society had shooed us all out, and I understand that a splendid time was had in many other places, for many more hours.

And, ah, well, let's see... we spent time with some of Marie's kinfolk on Sunday morning, and packed the car and a cooler, and left the bridal cake topper in her mom's freezer, and hit the road and learned to our immense displeasure that the awesome Jomax BBQ in Metter is actually not open on Sundays, and got back to my folks' place and they took us to supper at Old South in Smyrna, and then we stayed up late and enjoyed a nice day off on Monday.

The beginning. (And yeah, that's a li'l syrupy, but we're newlyweds, and just that way.)

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That's the Hipster Daughter, with my mom in the green and our family's friend Janice in the blue.






dramaqueer caught the garter and Kimberly the bouquet.


carisjax came up from Florida to attend. That's davemerrill and rainbowwisher behind him, and here they are again...




mrdisco99 and his beautiful wife mdoodleaf13, making this one stop on their coastal tour. Didn't Interpol write a song about that wine?




destron_gmx245 and theprimrosepath were actually staying in our hotel! We saw John at breakfast Sunday morning.


That's Marie's aunt Vickie in the blue.

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Continuing the recap of the wedding weekend...

Well, Saturday morning was pretty long and restless. It was made worse because there are cellular dead zones all over St. Simons Island, principally centered right on top of our hotel. We speculated that it might be due to dampers confining wireless signals to the hotel lobby, but whatever causes it, it affects every carrier - Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, everyone - and so when we wanted to make a call, we had to wander around outside and find a signal.

I had a light breakfast at the hotel with Marie's aunt Marie, and the Hipster Son and I took a nice long walk before we drove out to Brunswick, where my folks were staying, to spend a little time chatting with them. Dad was really tired and restless, as we expected. He just can't relax anywhere except home. We drove around Brunswick a little - you know, it just occurred to me that I still haven't seen the city's downtown area - and went back to the island for lunch at Brogen's, where you can find the best hamburgers for many miles. I like the Kokomo, which is a burger with sliced ham, melted cheddar and BBQ sauce. Mmmmm!

We met up with Neal, David, Todd and Samantha, who were shopping and enjoying the perfect weather, and then, happily, bumped into destron_gmx245 and theprimrosepath, who had come to town as well. (This fulfilled a silly little daydream I had... knowing that we were, bluntly, inconveniencing the daylights out of everybody we know by having 'em drive so darn far to see us get hitched, I really hoped everyone could make a wonderful vacation out of the weekend and just have the wedding be one of several memorable events. I envisioned some of our buddies just bumping into each other in town and was so pleased to see it happen, ever so briefly, even if it was buddies who didn't know each other!)

The rest of the afternoon was spent kicking back and reading. I finished the second of Laurie King's revisionist Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes novels - it was not as good as the first - while the boychild stayed with the others and played lawn lacrosse with his new toys. Meanwhile, Marie had sent word via Anne that she was missing her shoes. Apparently they didn't make it to her mom's place after all. Anne and I searched the room and the car while everybody else was turning the condo upside down failing to find them. Fortunately, she had the pair of white shoes she wore Friday night - they weren't a perfect match, but they were okay. My fellas started congregating at my room around 4. Dave III unfortunately left his dress slacks back in Brunswick, necessitating a last-minute turnaround and delay while he rushed back to get dressed. This worked out all right, because the delay allowed Marie's stepmother to attend at all; she had been bit by one of her incredibly excited, overactive dogs and required bandaging before she could come to the lighthouse.

All this while we were watchin' the brilliantly macho John Wayne film Hellfighters on AMC. That's a great film if you like watching John Wayne yelling at people and socking them in the jaw.

Well, tanned, rested and ready, we made our way to the gazebo to get started. Our guests had been waiting in the hot sun quite long enough, though I hope everybody was sympathetic for the delays. The service was performed by sprocketship. Many years back, he and I got ourselves reverendized so's we can marry folk. I've never done it myself, and neither had he, but since Randy's known Marie and I both for such a long time, it seemed natural and right to find a position where he was able to do something wonderful for us as a couple rather than in either of our lines. He had lots of great ideas and kept the service simple and sweet and did a spectacular job.

As for the music, well, the actual reception playlist had been worked out weeks previously, but we didn't consider what to walk down the aisle to until just before we left. Randy had suggested all the menfolk enter to the theme from The Magnificent Seven. Anne and Samantha entered to Sarah McLachlan's cover of "Wear Your Love Like Heaven" and Marie entered to "Always" by Erasure. We departed to "Extra-Ordinary" by Dressy Bessy. There were no songs about heroin, but I reckon Donovan wrote "Heaven" under the influence of shrooms or somethin'.

Marie looked absolutely astonishing. My lovebird became my Aphrodite. Neither of us have stopped smiling.

There are an awful lot of photos I want to have with this essay (and more to come), but in deference to my LJ readers' ability to read their friends page without encumberance, I'll temporarily hide them and remove the cut after this entry falls off most of their pages. We won't receive the professional shots for a few days yet, and my camera was in my pocket, so these come from the libraries of chetbakerfan, dramaqueer, mpceccato and raddaradda, and I hope we see many more in the days to come.

Tomorrow, the reception, the wrap-up and the thanks. Pics after this cut! ( Read more... )




With Marie's father and her mother


With my parents


With my parents and my brother


Official at last, the Hipster Family


The Hipster Son with davemerrill and dave_iii, and a li'l sister behind him


We climbed the lighthouse after the ceremony for pictures...









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Well, I think some people want to hear a word or two about how this weekend went, so here they are.

That said, if you're reading me for comics stuff, I'm afraid it'll be all wedding vacation pics all the time 'til Friday. And if you are sick of the comics stuff, enjoy this lovely vacation! Some of my friends have been emailing and posting pictures, and I'll be incorporating some of the best of those into these posts.

We left for the island Thursday morning. The car was packed and the kids were behaving and the cat was at her vacation resort and we were on time. We gassed up, stopped by my folks' house to pick up my son's bathing suit, and got to Griffin a little after 11. For lunch, I picked out a place called McGhin's Southern Pit BBQ, a few miles south of Atlanta Motor Speedway. Their website may be unhelpful, but this place is completely fantastic, and if I still maintained a list of the best BBQ restaurants in Georgia, it would rocket into the top five. Next time you're travelling through Georgia, make time to stop by!

We took the Golden Isles Highway (US 23/US 341) down, which is so much nicer than the interstate and only about twenty minutes longer if you do it in one go. We also let the kids have a twenty-minute running-around break in Lumber City, which added to the trip. We dropped Marie's dress and some other things at her mom's house and visited with her for a few minutes, then checked into our hotel, St. Simons Inn by the Lighthouse, and stretched for about an hour before walking to meet Marie's mom and aunt Bertie, along with her husband, Uncle Bruce, at Mullet Bay for dinner. We also met up with Marie's brother Karl and sister Anne along the way. We see Karl, who lives in Mississippi, every couple of months, but Anne doesn't get out of Memphis much, so the kids and I'd never had the pleasure of meeting her before.

Folks, I have to boast - while it is very well documented that I really hit the jackpot with this wife (!!!) of mine, I also really lucked out with a wonderful family of in-laws along with her. Here's my bride with my new brother-in-law and sister-in-law, on Friday night:



Well, we had a very good dinner Thursday evening (I enjoyed my sauteed mahi-mahi very much!), and we all went back again to Marie's mom's condo to visit for a good while longer. I started feeling droopy after a couple of hours, but the Hipster Son was still keyed up and ready to play board games, so the other three of us walked back to our hotel and he stayed there for a round or two of that "Ticket to Ride" game that Marie and Karl like so much. Man, did I ever crash.

Friday morning, we started things off with a trip to the beach at low tide and all had a really great time. We visited with Marie's father, and with his sister, who is also named Marie. There are ten Henderson siblings, and five would be at the wedding. Anne joined the Hipster Family for breakfast at The 4th of May. We spent the day walking and shopping and relaxing, and also met Aunt Vickie Henderson, and swam at Dr. Henderson's pool. For lunch, I had a thoroughly decent bowl of gazpacho at a place we think might be called Paradise Cove (it seems to have six or seven names, depending on whether you're ordering food, coffee or beer), and the kids and Marie had light meals at Barberito's.





Around five, it was time for the rehearsal, so we all changed and got everybody together at the lighthouse gazebo - my parents and my brother (who drove them down and stood in my line), Marie's dad, her brother and sister and mom, and many of our friends who all helped pull this thing off, including (let's see if I can do this alphabetically) amysvoice, chetbakerfan, dave_iii, davemerrill, dramaqueer, playright, raddaradda and sprocketship, along with his Non-LJ Super-Awesome Cool Girlfriend(TM) Kimberly. We beat down exactly where we needed to be and got most of our silliness out, and then made our way to J. Mac's Island Restaurant.

My folks treated us all to a knock-down ohmigawd awesome supper at this real fancy place that Dr. Henderson had recommended. Some of us drove and some of us walked. Dr. Henderson picked up his wife along the way, and Marie and I stopped into our room to pick up gift bags for our lines, delaying us just long enough to run into Uncle Martin Henderson and his daughter Jennie, who's about Marie's age I think, along the way. Well, the dinner was just amazing. I had the best calamari I've ever had, along with some truly wonderful lamb and a creme brulee like none of you have ever tried. Oh WOW this was good stuff.









We had a real good time at the rehearsal dinner although the service was, amusingly, not-quite perfect, but grin-inducing when there were hiccups. At one point, one of the servers knocked over one of the partitions separating our room from the main dining area with a colossal clatter - luckily, nobody was sitting at the table on the other side, onto which the partition fell. With everybody staring at the hapless, embarassed server trying to right it, Dave III instantly stood up and pointed in the other direction, melodramatically yelping, "LOOK! An incredibly distracting thing over there!" and thus saving her further scrutiny. Anyway, he and Amy got to share globetrotting stories with my father-in-law, and my family sat with Marie's mom, Karl and Anne. The Hipster Kids drank fourteen sodas each while nobody was looking, and Marie and I hope that we mingled and chatted enough. That was a good, good meal.

Afterwards, Marie and I kissed farewell ostentatiously and then we made our separate ways. The Hipster Son came with me, Dave, Neal, Randy and Karl and we all got rained on. We started at Brogen's, where the beer was good but the music was too loud and the frou-frou drinks were weak. (Dave: "I think this margarita's pretty weak." Neal: "Let me have a taste; I'm the queen of frou-frou drinks.") The Hipster Son kept us from being admitted to a couple of other establishments, what with Glynn County ordinances being pretty clear about minors in bars after ten, so we ended back at that Paradise Cove place for some Longboard lager and some good conversation with the menfolk.





The boychild and I got back to the hotel around 12.30 and I had an awful night's sleep, since I was so darn excited and stuff.

In part two, pants go missing, shoes go missing and dogs start biting. Seriously! Stay tuned!

We are home! And we are hitched! And it was awesome!

Details and pictures to come in the next few days!

Oh, and NOW she's saying "Absolutely no songs about heroin!" Jesus!

This whole "picking a song for Marie to walk down the aisle to" business sure would be a lot easier if she'd quit vetoing every darn thing I suggest. Eno's "Needles in the Camel's Eye" has joined Cheap Trick's "Surrender" and, blunty, everything with a laugh track (so no Charles Nelson Reilly, period) in the "dammit, Grant, take this seriously!" pile.

If we ever get this figured out, we're gonna go get hitched. Y'all take care and we'll see y'all real soon!

So my PC is infected with the Trojan from HELL.

I have Windows Defender and Spybot AND a Symantec anti-viral running. Yesterday, while my PC was filling with popup boxes - if you got any spam yesterday, it probably came through my PC - all three programs told me that my system was running fine. I upgraded to the latest editions of Spybot and Symantec and they still told me the system was okay.

For $100, Symantec guarantees that their techs can remote in and clean your system. Fine, I said. Three hours later, they agreed to refund my money. Have you ever heard of that happening?

The tech said the reason they can't clean it is because the trojan has infected an operating system file called ndis.sys and it can't be fixed. I apparently need to take my box to the Geek Squad and have them perform a repair installation of this important file. I'm kind of in favor of, you know, just deleting ndis.sys, but the tech says that would not be a good idea. And no, I have no idea what I did with or where I put my Windows XP installation disks. They were not with all the other install disks like they should have been. He cleaned everything else and removed the few other places where the trojan had left its spoor, so the files on the computer are safe, but until ndis.sys is replaced (apparently), the PC can't be used online.

This was a very tedious and very long day, and if you've ever tried chatting while forty gajillion popups are appearing on top of your chat window, I don't recommend it. So now we have a big PC that's not connected to the internet anymore, and Marie's laptop is. This required doing some furniture moving, and the generation of lots of clutter which should have been pitched long ago. Between this and the mild damage to the carpet downstairs, the Hipster Pad is not as pretty as I would prefer it.

If you know anything about removing ndis.sys things, let me know... I could probably persuade Marie to bake some cookies which are far better than any money can buy.

Well, don't we look like two nice kids fixing to watch our favorite minor league ball team win a game or two? Ah well, file what happened this weekend under "Hopes, Dashed."

We really had a terrific time Saturday and Sunday despite what happened at the ol' ball game. It's a rotten state of affairs when the Mighty Mud Hens, who have been going to Richmond for umpteen years to kick the AAA Braves' asses, suddenly find themselves unable to accomplish anything now that the Braves have returned to Georgia after however long it's been. (The G-Braves, formerly the Richmond Braves, started life here as the Atlanta Crackers many, many moons ago.) Well, we had a good time all the same. Gwinnett's stadium is really nice. We got there at 4.30 on Saturday, intending to get good seats, kick back and read a little and let the Hipster Daughter run riot and find other kids to play with. But two and a half hours before the game started, it had almost sold out! The only tickets left were for the "berm," the grassy hill behind the outfield! Who'd have thought the Gwinnett Braves could sell out their stadium so quickly...



Ohhhhhh, that's why. Nobody told us that Tom Glavine would be pitching while in rehab! Well, you can't complain about people wanting to see a local hero up close and personal. Kind of hard to cheer against Glavine, to be bluntly honest.

Turns out he didn't have a very good game. His first two innings were pretty good, but the Hens scored three runs off him in the third and Glavine was retired. The G-Braves then turned up the offense and scored nine runs before the skies opened up again. We'd already had an hour delay because of rain, and the game was called after five innings.

* * *

Meanwhile, the Hipster Son spent the day with sprocketship at a small convention called TimeGate, where he got to meet the writer Terrance Dicks, and got his copy of the Target novelization Doctor Who and the Time Warrior autographed. They also watched him do a live commentary on The Five Doctors, an episode which I believe Sprocketship need never watch, ever again, since he's seen it so many times. They also watched the actress Mary Tamm, who played the first Romana, give a live commentary on The Stones of Blood. They had a fine time over the two days, and bought some trinkets in the dealer's room and even played a little Illuminati. Well, that's all we need!

* * *

On Sunday, I had hoped to take my dad back out to Gwinnett for the fourth game, but he really didn't feel good - he took a fall down the basement steps earlier in the week. In a series of amusing occurrences, I had decided on Saturday to go ahead and buy two Sunday tickets while I was out there, before realizing the reason for Saturday's sellout was Glavine being on the mound. So I got two fantastic seats and Marie said she'd come with me, while the boychild went back out to the con and the girlchild went to the grandparents' to play.

Sunday's game was another disappointment for the Hens, but we still had a great time. Pitching for the Hens was Georgia Bulldog baseball great Brooks Brown, but he was having a rough day. The Hens managed a single run thanks to a solo homer by Ryan Roberson, shown below, but with seats so good and a day so pleasant, it was still huge fun.





Surprisingly entertaining were these big inflatable, Krofft-like characters called "Zooperstars." They all have little pun-names like Harry Canary and Ken Giraffey Jr. and there were five of them doing bizarre stunts for the kids. Now, most of this didn't prompt much more than a grin, and then this character called Mackeral Jordan came out. I wish I'd have photographed this thing. Mackeral Jordan eats people.

It was a complete surprise and totally hilarious. They had an actor dressed as a bat boy antagonizing the character. Mackeral got fed up with that stuff and swallowed him. 7500 people were at this game and every one did a double-take and roared. I thought I was going to cry from laughing. Then - and this must have taken some awesome co-ordination from the two people now in this suit - the character started "spitting" out the "bat boy's" helmet and clothes, before finally coughing up the actor, now dressed in his boxers, who made a hasty retreat to the G-Braves' dugout. Bravo, that was hilarious. The Zooperstars make appearances at all sorts of minor league ballgames, and if you've got kids, they will have a blast. Below is Harry Canary dancing on the Hens' dugout. Click the pic to visit the Zooperstars' website. You'll also see the G-Braves' mascot, cruelly wielding a broom in honor of the sweep, but that's what ya do when somebody comes to town and drops every stinkin' game. Ah well.



The rain held off until we'd been in the car for about twenty seconds, then it went drip-drip-DUMP like a Miyazaki film. Once we got back to the interstate, we pulled over and waited for it to finish, it was that heavy. We got back to my parents' house and they bought us a yummy dinner from US Cafe. Mmmmmmmmm!

* * *

One more picture for you: for lunch on Saturday, we had burgers and shakes at the Zesto on Piedmont. Check out this awesome light fixture. I want one in every room!



I hope you all had a great weekend! Up to Sunday night, we sure did... yesterday was disappointing, but more about that another time, if ever.

Well, we're getting married in TEN DAYS, and first and foremost among the tomfoolery I just don't think anybody should have to deal with in the TEN DAYS before their wedding is that the drain under the kitchen sink has cracked or has otherwise failed, leaving a small flow of water into the basement. It's not a full-on flood like I had four years ago, although it has ruined a couple of treasures. So my folks are meeting somebody tomorrow who's going to basically rip apart the basement ceiling, and a plumber who's going to come by Friday morning to put a new pipe in. LOVELY!

I still feel really, really rotten about Marie's Russian typewriter getting all moldy and gunk.

Free time's kind of at a premium at work, because I've got a ridiculous amount of stuff to get finished before my month-end one week from today. I'd prefer having the chance to work Memorial Day to take care of more stuff so the 26th and 27th won't be insane... I'm rather behind on my planned Updates at the Bookshelf, but I may get one or two more done before we leave.

The Mud Hens will be in town in three days! GO HENS! Well, actually they'll be in town tomorrow, but I'm only going to the games on Saturday and Sunday.

Well, I pretty much ruined a relaxing weekend by having myself a godawful night's sleep at the end of it. Insomnia and intensely vivid dreams combined to give my head a really good kicking this morning. Mercifully, I'm ahead enough at work that a little zoning out mightn't be the end of the world. Well, atop the usual "type a paragraph every few minutes and then post it in LJ after a couple of hours" zoning, anyhow.

We're finished with the three weeks of spring football with the Junior Jackets. The Hipster Son's coach caught me Thursday evening and asked me to get him some extra practice snapping. sprocketship duly came by Friday and had him snap several dozen snaps. He did another hundred with me and then with Marie Saturday morning, but it still didn't do much for his ability to shotgun snap very well. We went to the jamboree Saturday morning and he was quickly retired from center and moved to defensive lineman, where he seemed to do a lot better. At one point, he had two fellows on him, and he broke through both of them, and at another point, he spotted the plan behind the line in time to change direction and get first grab on the running back, assisting in bringing him down after a one-yard gain. I think he had a lot of fun, and maybe he'll continue with it.

Other than that, we did a fair amount of sleeping and watching TV. An episode of The Saint surprised us with a guest appearance by Patrick Troughton as an Italian police inspector, and an episode of Gilmore Girls which surprised us with a guest appearance by dramaqueer's pet obsession Grey Gardens, which Lorelai and Rory were watching in the pre-credit sequence, and an episode of Stargate SG-1 which surprised us with a guest appearance by a Grey, although not, surprisingly, a countdown clock ticking down the microseconds before Carter or Jackson said the word "Roswell."

Sunday morning, I saw that Castle has been renewed for a second season, which is good to hear. It's a very fun show and I'm looking forward to seeing it develop. Criminal Intent was pretty good. It was the first Goren & Eames episode this year to really satisfy me. It was followed by an In Plain Sight which I elected to watch because Richard Schiff from The West Wing was the guest star. IPS gets a little family-heavy-weepy for my liking so I rarely watch it, but this one paid off pretty well.

playright came by last night to make dress plans with Marie, and then they and the kids played Carcasonne while we sipped wonderful limeade and I watched TV. It was pretty nice. The other really good meal we had was on Saturday night when we drove up to Woodstock and had supper at Canyon's, which makes some downright amazing burgers. Yeah, it was a fine weekend... shame my rotten sleep schedule ruined the end of it! Yawn...

This coming weekend, we're seeing a couple of Mud Hens games and going to Athens but the days are going to be full of me trying to stay ahead at work. The "law of diminishing returns" really sets in as far as monthly progress around the 18th of every month. And then...holy wow, we're driving to the coast in ten days and gettin' hitched in twelve. Hope it stops raining down there by then.

(ETA: Well, I gave this entry a title but didn't really follow up... the kids and I had burgers at Sprayberry on Friday night. It was the evening of the spring varsity game and they presented the Junior Jackets before kickoff. Marie wasn't able to join us since she was working, but I brought her a sandwich from Cheeseburger Bobby's after we left. Saturday at Lassiter, she and I had hot dogs and the Hipster Daughter had a second burger. Then we went to Canyon's like I was saying, and then Sunday night we visited my folks and my brother grilled sausages and burgers for everybody. So it's salads all week for me for lunch!)

We went to Elberton when the Hipster Son was just a baby to see "America's Stonehenge," a bizarre construction assembled by an anonymous party. I was sorry to hear that this wonderful little piece of roadside Americana was vandalized some months ago. Wired Magazine has the story of this very odd place.

Poll #1399944 Radio, radio
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

I can't find nothin' on the radio. Yo, turn to that station.

Well, after the first few weeks of good weight loss, I've hit that (expected) wall, where the first ten pounds went away and nothing else wants to leave me. I'm maintaining a daily average of 1800 calories and walking the track at Sprayberry High waiting for the Hipster Son to finish practice, and that scale hasn't budged in a week. And today the boss brought some of his wife's wonderful cookies and since everybody on my side of the admin area is dieting, they're just sitting there untouched. Oh, there's grumbling.

The coaches have moved my boy to center this week. I watched a little of his scrimmages last night and he really, really needs some extra practice before Saturday's jamboree, else he get the nickname Hipster "High Snap" Son.

Speaking of sports, I think we all knew the Hawks were going to fall to Cleveland, and I don't mind losing to LeBron's team, but wow, it would've been nice to have won just a single game in the series.

I read the fourth issue of the guilty "pleasure" of Legion of Three Worlds. It's like they stuffed that comic in the Incoherentotron before publishing it. Fortunately, Marie brought back the new Showcase Presents Legion comic from Athens when she and Karl went to visit friends Sunday, so I can read some good Legion comics which I haven't seen. Shame we had to go back forty years to read 'em.

This weekend, I really need to take the car to Just Brakes before we start summer road trips. We've also got the second football jamboree and not a heck of a lot else, which is nice, since the next two weekends are completely packed full of baseball and weddings and things.

As for LiveJournal, I've started reading some of y'all's friends pages to pick up some new folk to read and... heh. Looks like y'all are indeed suffering from the same problem I have, because either most of your friends' posts are locked or they don't post as much as your feeds. What a revoltin' state of affairs this is. I guess we officially plateaued some time back and I just didn't notice! Anyway, if I've added you, hello! I'm not normally so grouchy!

You know, my LJ-friends page has been looking a little sparse lately, what with so many wonderful folk having up and abandoned the joint for Twitter or Facebook or even something that doesn't involve computers. My feeds are now outnumbering friends! I miss reading the stories people would share, and so I'd like some new people to follow.

Who are the most fascinating writers on your friends' lists, folk I am not presently following? Recommend me some groovy people with awesome stories to tell, would you?

(Incidentally, if you're like me and don't like seeing all that Twitter vomit when you're trying to read your friends' page, carriemonster posted directions on how to get that garbage off your reading list.)

(edit: Also, I'm going to resolve to do a better job finding time to respond to comments and your own posts. I have gotten pretty bad about the whole "interaction" part of this site and need to do a better job.)

I finished reading the second of DC's new Starman Omnibus collections, and I have to say that this is emphatically the right way to do a collected edition of a modern book. The fifty-buck hardcover reprints thirteen issues of James Robinson's superhero series, along with the first of the series' annuals and three issues from the anthology Showcase which feature the supporting players, along with considerable background details, commentary and sketches from the artists, who include Tony Harris, Guy Davis and Steve Yeowell.

If you've never had the pleasure of reading Starman, I really believe this is among the two or three best American comics of the '90s. It's the story of Jack Knight, a reluctant second-generation hero and the sixth to use the name, who defends the beautiful art deco metropolis of Opal City from bizarre crime. It's a book more about family and heritage and honor than it is fisticuffs and the usual superhero shenanigans. Robinson occasionally displays a tin ear for dialogue, but his narration is really captivating, and it's easy to get caught up in the grand sweep of Opal and her champions.

A detour to New York City to consult one of the DC Universe's original heroes, the Sandman, is so note-perfect that the publisher should use it to teach new writers how to craft an engaging crossover, and a later story which pits Jack and two unlikely allies against a demon in a poster is surprising at every turn, with a clever conclusion that will have a lasting, fascinating impact on future stories. It's definitely a title worth reading, and thumbs up to DC for creating such a nice package. They plan to publish the complete 81-issue series and all of its side stories and supplements in six of these omnibus volumes.

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Read more of what I've written about James Robinson at A Journal of Zarjaz Things.

Read other reviews of this series:
Van Jensen at ComicMix
Randy Lander at Inside Joke Theatre
Greg Oleksiuk at PopMatters
Jason Sacks at Comics Bulletin
Paul W. Smith at Den of Geek

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In other news, perhaps the month's biggest announcement has come from Alan Moore, confirming the rumors that Top Shelf will be issuing a complete edition of his "published-in-many-places" comedy The Bojeffries Saga. This new collection will include a new 24-page story that artist Steve Parkhouse is said to be tackling now. Moore's announcement came in the second part of the mammoth interview that Pádraig Ó Méalóid conducted for The Forbidden Planet Blog.

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Fantagraphics has unveiled a little more about their forthcoming collection of Gahan Wilson Playboy cartoons. It's still on track for an October release. The three-volume slipcased hardcover is going to set you back a tidy $125, which means I'm putting $10 a paycheck in the kitty for this starting now. The book will feature introductions by Neil Gaiman and Hugh Hefner, and not only every cartoon that Wilson's contributed in his fifty-one year tenure with the mag, but his fiction and accompanying illustrations as well. The behemoth will clock in at more than 1000 pages. Can't wait, even if my accountant might want to have a word or two with me about it.

Speaking of Playboy, Dark Horse's collection of the two issues of the Hef-published Trump, mentioned here back in January, has been delayed and is due out in mid-August. This will feature classic work by Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, Jack Davis, Al Jaffee, Wally Wood, Mel Brooks, Max Shulman and many others. Incidentally, my son finished the first half of Fantagraphics' Humbug, the magazine that followed Trump, and not only proclaims it to be awesome, but also wants it noted that he's the only modern-day tween to have read it.

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In what sounds like it was a late April Fool's Day joke which went a little far, it's been strongly rumored that IDW is preparing a collection of Jack Kent's long-running newspaper strip King Aroo for later in the year. The strip ran for an impressive sixteen years before winding down in 1965, but it's incredibly obscure because only a single paperback collection was ever issued, in 1953, and because it only appeared in a handful of papers for most of its run. Some of the sample strips available online show it to be an incredibly charming and silly strip, reminiscent of Pogo with its puns and quirky characters, and while I'm curious to see more, I think IDW has something of an uphill climb selling this almost unknown character to a modern audience.

Speaking of Pogo, most recent word on the grapevine is that we'll be waiting until sometime in 2010 for the new line of Fantagraphics collections to get going.

And speaking of IDW, whether they are going to do something with King Aroo or not, they are planning a reprint of Elaine Lee and Michael Kaluta's 1980s SF serial Starstruck with new coloring.

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Over at DC, it looks like Peter Milligan's well-regarded '90s take on Shade the Changing Man is finally getting some long-overdue attention. A collection of the first six issues was released many moons ago, and it's finally getting a second later this year. Personally, I find Shade to have aged very badly, but I'm still looking forward to this earlier stuff from the run. But before that, DC is prepping hardcover collections from some of the other titles in their run, similar to the Starman books, including Fables and Alan Moore's Tom Strong. And they've finally solicited the Eclipso "Skinny Showcase" I've been talking about for August:

SHOWCASE PRESENTS: ECLIPSO TP
Written by Bob Haney
Art by Lee Elias, Alex Toth, Jack Sparling and Bernard Baily
Cover by Bernard Baily
One of the strangest comics villains ever stars in this volume collecting HOUSE OF SECRETS #61-80! On an expedition in the South Pacific, scientist Bruce Gordon’s dark side is unleashed after being exposed to a black diamond. Transformed into the powerful Eclipso, he embarked on an evil rampage as his good side attempted to reassert control.
Advance-solicited; on sale August 26 • 296 pg, B&W, $9.99 US

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If you're enjoying Drawn & Quarterly's collections of the Moomin comic strip, and who in their right mind isn't?, then you might want to check out some reissues of the classic Moomin picture books that Tove Jansson did in the 1960s and 1970s. The publisher is starting up a new line of children's books called D+Q Enfant devoted to "lost classics and new soon-to-be classics" which will include the old Moomin series. Fine, give me another reason to want to have another kid before too long.

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When I featured a blurb last month about our friends at Titan Books, I didn't have any news about Roy of the Rovers. Well, there's a new set of 1970s strips due in June - 208 pages of "scorching soccer action" from the period that introduced the hotheaded character Paco Diaz and took a hardline stance against hooliganism in the stands. Down the Tubes also points out that Titan's long-delayed Best of Battle is finally scheduled for next month as well. Fingers crossed!

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That is all for this month. I would like to thank everybody for reading and all the nice e-mails, and also let everybody know that June's updates will be a little delayed. Look for the feature article on the 5th and the news update on the 15th. Happy reading!

The Hipster Son had his first "jamboree" game this morning over at nearby Pope High. The format is that the six teams in the division (Sprayberry, Pope, Lassiter, Walton, McEachern and River Ridge) have four mini-games. Each one is set for a flat half-hour with hands-on coaching. Each team gets thirteen minutes on offense and thirteen minutes on defense, with a four-minute break. There's a ten-minute break between mini-games. Three games are in progress at any given time: one on the practice field and two in the stadium.

They don't really keep score, but to hear my son tell it, counting touchdowns, Sprayberry lost the first game to Walton. Game two against McEachern was going well, but was called when a player was pretty badly injured. Sprayberry won games three and four against Lassiter and Pope. My boy says he sacked the Lassiter QB in game three, and he was all thrilled about that.

Anyway, I only saw the first mini-game before going to meet up with chetbakerfan and dramaqueer. (We already had this day booked before signing up for football.) We had lunch at Salsa Havana and then went to IKEA to lay out and price new shelving for a big home improvement project we're going to do at Dave's next month.

Next Saturday, however, is the second and final jamboree day, and it will be held at Lassiter High. You're all invited to come see the kids play. The seventh grade rotation starts at 11.45 AM and will last for about three hours. Tickets should be $5 for adults, and you should probably bring some sunscreen. Lassiter is way the heck up here in northeast Cobb, on Shallowford Road about a stone's throw from the Fulton County line. I hope y'all can come out and cheer on Sprayberry on the 16th!

What else... Marie's brother's in town and they went to see Vienna Teng at the Variety Playhouse, and they're going to Athens tomorrow. The kids and I are going to the movies in the morning. I bought the new Chairlift album. I kind of blew my diet this afternoon, so dinner was plain toast and a glass of tea. My son has the most annoying ringtone in the history of telephones. I'm kind of worn out and my feet hurt. I'm reading The Beekeeper's Apprentice and enjoying it hugely, but I'm going to take a break and read some more James Thurber short stories before going to bed - I am beat!!

So, last night, the Hipster Daughter asked me whether she could have a boyfriend.

"Puh-LEEZE, Daddy! His name is Ryan and he's cute and he makes straight As! He's in the fifth grade and his parents are moving to California this summer so I'll never see him again! If he can't be my boyfriend before he goes, I'll die!"

"You just wanna smooch him."

"Ew, no! NO! I just want to hold his hand!"

"If I say yes, is there going to be smooching?"

"Can he smooch my hand?"

"I'll allow that."

"So he can be my boyfriend?!"

"I suppose."

"WOO-HOO! YOU'RE THE BEST DAD EVER!"

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On the other side of the embarassment factor, I was nine when I first discovered my dad's Playboys. I noticed that the Hipster Son, aged twelve, had secreted away an old Stuff with Ali Landry on the cover about a month ago and let it ride. (I went through a far-too-late-in-life lad's mag phase around 2000-2002. That was money poorly spent.)

I know where the magazine had been located previously. Most of those lad's mags, and some late '90s Playboys, have been in various stages of being discarded to the recycle bin for quite some time. There's been a small stack in the guest room that I intended to give a final flip-through before dumping, but honestly, other things got in the way and I only eliminated half the stack. I noticed Saturday night that the small stack was a little smaller. And let it ride.

Moving one of the dirty clothes hampers in the main restroom this morning and finding a late '90s Playboy hidden underneath it, well, that's not the sort of thing I let ride. There's "understandable sexual curiosity" and then there's "downright stupid." The stack is to be replaced before I get home. So I can throw it all out Friday morning.

That said, well, if a Maxim or something tame like that were to make its way under his bed before the stack goes, I don't think the world will end. As long as it's, you know, under his bed, and not in the linen closet.