Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Bad People Marry Bad People
Friday, May 20, 2011
Work Email: Service Announcement
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Yes, Yes, and Yes, Please
Until now.
The Recycled Bike (facebook.com/recycledbike) is a place that recycles bikes. Everything about the place is dubious and suspect, but we were happy to write them a check, anyway.
I’ll keep you posted on a) whether or not we actually get the bike we paid for, b) whether or not the bike we get is “hot,” and c) whether or not they do good work.
I have high hopes that the update for all three of those points will basically be, yes.
In Embrio
Perhaps weirdly, Green Lantern has always been one of my favorite super heroes. There are not a lot of casual comics fans—and I wasn’t more than a casual comics fan until recently—that can say that.
Most people, in my experience, tend to gravitate toward the icons (Batman or Superman) or the not-quite-iconic-but-almost-there-(maybe) (Spiderman or the X-Men (which almost always is code for Wolverine)). These preferences stem mostly from their experiences with the movies and cartoon series from the ‘80s and ‘90s. I know this because I lived this—I loved Batman because of Tim Burton’s first Batman film and the animated series that followed.
But I was introduced to the Green Lantern via an action figure that my cousins had that no one else would play with because their dog had chewed off both feet and one hand. The head was scarred, but still, for all intents and purposes, a head. It was nice to have an action figure that looked like he’d actually been through some of the epic battles that we orchestrated in my cousins’ basement.
So, when I became serious about reading superhero comics, after Batman, Green Lantern was a foregone conclusion for me.
The upcoming Green Lantern movie, then, has become something that I am interested in much more so than anyone else I know. I followed cast developments early on (Nathan Fillion would have been way better as Hal, sorry Ryan Reynolds) and have been relieved as subsequent trailers and footage have looked better and better (the first one had me worried).
A few weeks ago, to feed into the media storm that the studio is trying to build around the film, the DC Comics blog, The Source (http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/), started a strange-ish series of posts in which, "every Monday-Thursday, as we count down the days until the movie arrives in theaters June 17th, The Source will be revealing images, bios and fun facts from the comic books that every Green Lantern fan is gonna want to know" (http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/2011/05/07/free-comic-book-day-special-edition-green-lantern-the-essentials/).
Today’s spotlight is a biographical sketch of the villain Hector Hammond. We read that "Growing up, Hector Hammond was always an outcast. Only interested in science, he never competed in sports or played with his peers. Hector preferred the company of a book to that of his friends" (http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/2011/05/17/senator%E2%80%99s-son-becomes-scientist/).
Do you think that superhero comics fans—who on some level, at least, think it would be cool if this stuff was real—are ever concerned that almost every one of them (minus the science part—maybe) fits the description of a burgeoning, hydrocephalic super villain?