60. The more entertained you are by the people around you, the less what you’re doing seems like work.
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Author Archive for blakemp
As was announced a few months ago, Boom! Studios, the company that has been doing a bang-up job with the Muppet and Pixar comics for Disney, has snagged the license to Disney’s classic characters. Last month, they kicked off the classic Disney line by bringing back the four most prominent titles from Disney’s past. I thought today I would look at what they did with each of them.
Mickey Mouse and Friends #296 was the book that kicked off the return, beginning a long serial featuring Mickey, Donald and Goofy as sorcerers. This is a far cry from the usual Mickey fare, which in the past has usually consisted of gag strips, detective stories, or other adventure fare. This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen Mickey and company in a fantasy setting, but I’m not really wild about how the concept has taken over the book entirely. In the past, the Disney comics were all anthologies, and dedicating a single title entirely to a long-term storyline… it’s just not the same. On the other hand, Boom! recently announced that this storyline is going to spin out into an ongoing series, so hopefully the space in this title will be filled with more traditional Disney comics.
Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories returned with issue #699 (just one off from the big 700), and the beginning of a new storyline in which the Disney stalwarts are called in, as superheroes, to find the missing Money Bin of Scrooge McDuck — which was stolen with Scrooge in it. Pretty much all of these returns feature stories taken from the European publishers of Disney’s comics, so while this isn’t a brand-new story, it’s new to American audiences. Donald as the Duck Avenger is mostly a new concept — in fact, the only one of these characters I’m sure has shown up as a superhero before (in the American comics, that is) is Goofy, alias Super Goof. I’m okay with the “Justice League”-type concept of bringing the characters together, but I rather miss some of the other long-running serials that used to be a part of this title — comics featuring the likes of Chip ‘n Dale, Scamp, or even solo adventures of Mickey and Donald. Fortunately, like the fantasy story in Mickey’s title, Boom! has announced the superheroes will be spinning off into their own series, which will hopefully allow more classic stories to find a home again.
Uncle Scrooge #384 is the book that’s the most like its old incarnation. This first issue features two short stories, although they clearly take place in a sequence. The stories themselves are pretty old-school as well: Scrooge buys a castle in Germany and sets off with his nephews to search it for treasure. Meanwhile, Magica DeSpell (the witch who’s always out to snare Scrooge’s #1 dime) races after them to… well… try to get her hands on the dime. The story could easily have been popped into any previous run of the title without anyone noticing the difference, and that may be why I really liked this issue. I don’t mind a new approach with these books — clearly, there’s a need to shuffle things around to snare new readers — but that doesn’t mean there should be no room at all for the classic stuff. If this is the only title that understands that… well, I can live with that.
Finally, we’ve got Donald Duck and Friends #347, which I have to admit was probably my favorite of the four. The story is the beginning of a longer serial, but it’s a highly Donald-esque serial. After Daisy blows Donald off for having the temerity to fall asleep in the movies, he finds himself in the company of an attractive young female duck with a startling revelation. Donald has been leading a double life, one even he doesn’t remember. But now, to save the world, Double Duck may have to come out of retirement. The book was silly, funny, and just the sort of thing that we’ve always gotten from Donald’s stories, even if this one lasts longer than the ones we’re used to.
There’s some good stuff here, and really my biggest complaint is that there aren’t enough of the old-school comics available. I’m hoping the fact that two of these books are set to get spinoffs means that Boom! recognizes the desire for the more classic stuff. I’m fine if the new stuff is there. I just don’t want it to be the only thing we have in the pull folder.
We’re heading into the second big movie season of the year, the time when the studios roll out all of the major Thanksgiving and Christmas releases, plus the Oscar contenders, treats for the kids in us all, and even the odd sci-fi epic. This week, Kenny and Blake sit down to discuss all of the major releases for November and December, from A Christmas Carol to Avatar and everything in between. In the picks, Kenny gets creative with the movie Hot Fuzz, and Blake stays quasi-traditional with the first issue of The Marvelous Land of Oz Contact us with comments, suggestions, or anything else at Showcase@comixtreme.com!
2 in 1 Showcase Episode 144: Holiday Movie Preview
Inside This Episode:
I’m doing pretty good so far with NaNoWriMo. One week in and I’m about two days ahead of where I need to be, and I’m having fun with my novel-in-progress. So good, in fact, that I wanted to give you guys just a quick nugget of the book. Here’s the prologue, which I wrote on Halloween night, right after the clock struck twelve and it was officially November 1…
Prologue
If Josh Cambrie knew the crap he was in for after he died, he would have made a more concerted effort to stay among the living. He wandered the Halloween Festival of Fear, alone, his date having abandoned him for a guy in a Conan the Barbarian costume (and not a square of cotton padding to fill out the muscles, either). Josh was dressed as a scarecrow, and like Kelly’s new Conan, he had the physique for his costume. Josh was thin, spindly – even sickly if you looked at him from the wrong angle. To be frank, it was astonishing that a zombie would bother to bite somebody with so little meat on his bones. Then again, it was just his luck to run afoul of the only member of the undead in the world to count Weight Watchers points.
Wandering the park alone, not knowing or particularly caring if Kelly would have a ride home with her Cimmerian king, he decided to force himself to have a good time. This would have been a brilliant idea, had it proven even remotely possible. The roller coaster was a bust (literally, it broke down with three people remaining in line ahead of him), and the last time he’d gone on a Tilt-a-Whirl he’d been left with three days hugging the toilet bowl. The Haunted House, he decided, would be his safest bet. Not likely that he’d run into Kelly in the dark, and maybe a good scare would manage to wipe the depressed look from his face.
Of course, that was the great thing about the scarecrow costume – the mask covered his entire head. His coke-bottle glasses fit under there as neatly as his enormous ears, his matted-down haircut was invisible, his acne across the bridge of his too-small nose was as good as clear. No one could even see the small brown blob underneath his chin, the birthmark that his mother always tried telling him looked like a lion, but that he thought just looked like he’d been eating chocolate and hadn’t wiped his face well enough.
Chocolate if he was lucky.
Christ, it was amazing that Kelly had even agreed to come here with him in the first place, wasn’t it?
He was told that actors in a Haunted House are trained to leap at the most terrified-looking person in a group, but Josh was going in solo. In front of him was a giggling mob of teenage girls, each of whom seemed to make for a welcome target when someone was primed to leap out from a casket or reach a mummified arm out from behind a hidden panel in the wall. Since the actors invariably blew their wads on the girls, they were always resetting themselves when Josh walked past. He tried not to focus on the idea that actors paid to terrify people seemed to have no interest in him at all.
After about 20 minutes in the house, Josh wandered into an area lined with rows of pretty authentic-looking corn stalks, with yellow lights twinkling at him in pairs – eyes watching him from behind the rows. Interesting effect, one that worked pretty well, he thought. It would be better if they tried to shape the lights a bit, they were too round to really work as eyes, but an A for Effort. He even felt appropriately dressed here in the cornfield, even though he didn’t actually feel like he fit in any better than he did anywhere else.
There was a chill across his back when the gurgling sound began, and the zombie that moved out of the cornrows reached out at him, hissing and snapping his teeth. Josh didn’t scream – didn’t even flinch. He just rolled his eyes and said, “Dude, I really think you wandered into the wrong scene.”
He turned to continue after the girls on the path, but the zombie wrapped its clawlike hands around his arm. He turned, starting to get angry at the pushy kid in the zombie getup. “Look, man–”
Whatever threat or ultimatum would have followed was lost when the zombie’s thick, yellow teeth chomped through the burlap shirt that was part of his costume and into the admittedly thin flesh of his arm. He shouted, yanking his arm back out of instinct, but succeeding only in helping the zombie rip out a chunk of his arm. Blood spurted into the air and dripped from the mouth of the hungry ghoul. Josh screamed again, but still had the presence of mind to back away, flailing, and bolt from the scene. He rushed ahead, shoving aside the teenage girls (who threw some decidedly un-ladylike language at him, not that he was in any condition to get into a snit about it) and through one room after another. In an Egyptian crypt, he nearly trampled an old woman in a walker. In Dr. Frankenstein’s lab, he actually shoved the Monster himself over into the lab table, eliciting some joyous laughter from the kids Frankie had been trying to terrify. Finally, he stumbled through the exit door and fell right onto the pavement, rolling to the feet of a little man with a big smile.
Josh looked up at him, seeing someone dressed in all black, which wasn’t exactly unusual at this time of year. The small figure had no hair, but a wide, toothy grin spread across his face like he was looking down at a well-cooked steak. He held something in his left hand – cradled it, if one was going to be honest – but Josh wasn’t even paying attention at that point.
“Dude! There’s someone in there… someone friggin’ biting people! You gotta call someone, you gotta–”
“Joshua Cambrie.”
Josh blinked, surprised to hear his name from the lips of this stranger, startled just enough to arrest his panic. “I… yeah, that’s me, but…”
“Eighty-two years old,” the little man continued. He reached out with his right hand, grabbing the burlap mask that shielded Josh’s unseemly face from the rest of the Halloween crowd. With one fierce yank, he pulled the mask away, exposing Josh to the elements. Josh looked up, seeing a horrible gleam in the man’s eye, and suddenly he was far more terrified than he was when it was just the walking dead after him.
“You die,” the man said. “You die alone, from a pulmonary embolism in your sleep, after a tragically lonely and pathetically uneventful life.”
“What the hell?”
The little man raised his hand, and something flashed. Something long and silver.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m about to spare you all that.”
* * *
Ten Evernaut points to the first person who recognizes the mysterious guy that approaches poor Josh. Have a good one.
Except for the two Green Lantern titles and the odd prologue, it’s taken four months for Blackest Night to touch upon any regular DC Universe titles. But look out, friends, because this week’s Doom Patrol #4 opens up the floodgates. To be honest, I haven’t sampled this version of the Doom Patrol before. I’ve read some of their previous incarnations, but I’ve never been a huge fan, and if it weren’t for the Blackest Night tie-in (and the Sinestro Corps ring that came with the book) I wouldn’t have picked this up. Still, I’m dedicated to reviewing the whole of Blackest Night here, and this counts.
As we’ve come to expect from the scourge of the Black Lanterns, this issue focuses on several late members of the Doom Patrol rising from the grave to cause havoc for the current members, including Niles Caulder’s late wife (who does not inspire the emotions that one would expect) and a rather curious Black Lantern that’s specifically sent to target the human-brain-in-a-mechanical-body hero called Robotman.
For the first time since this crossover started, I’ve found this issue to be a mixed bag. The Robotman stuff is promising, but I’m not really all that interested in the rest of the team or their respective Black Lanterns. The writing is solid enough, and the art by Justiniano is very good, but I’m just not connecting with this team.
Like many of DC’s current books, this title has an ongoing second feature, in this case the Metal Men. While the second story has nothing to do with Blackest Night, I read it anyway because… well… I paid for it. This story, by the old Justice League International creative team of Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire, features a robotmaker whose creations, a trio of bald supermodel dolls, wind up causing trouble for Dr. Magnus’s robotic creations. Unlike the main story, I took to this one right off. The JLI series by these creators is one of the highwater marks of the grim and gritty 80s, and as they proved with Formerly Known as the Justice League a couple of years ago, they haven’t lost a step. This story was funny, entertaining, and a treat to read. If the book was reversed, with Metal Men as the lead feature and Doom Patrol as the back-up, I’d seriously consider adding it to my pull list on a regular basis. As it is, I’m just glad that DC has announced the second features will be reprinted in their own series of trade paperbacks.
Doom Patrol Rating: 6/10
Metal Men Rating: 8/10
My first eBook is available!
If you missed the announcement in yesterday’s post, I just wanted to let you all know that the eBook version of my Christmas anthology, A Long November and Other Tales of Christmas, is now available from Smashwords.com. In addition to the novella A Long November, the eBook also includes eight other Christmas-themed short stories, as well as a new introduction and notes on each story, where they came from, and in some cases, how they fit in to the larger picture of my Realms.
Want to hear something even better? The book is available in various formats suitable for any eBook reader! Have you got your Amazon Kindle, like I do? Got an iPhone or iPod Touch? The Stanza reader, the Sony reader, or a good ol’ PDA? Or maybe you just want to read the text on your computer screen. You can get the book in any of those formats, and for a limited time, you set the price you pay. You can pay nothing at all, or you can kick a donation of any size over 99 cents (to cover the PayPal transaction fees) into the jar. So if you’re a fan of my work, even if you’ve read these stories before, cruise on over to Smashwords.com and download this book to read by the glow of your Christmas tree this season.
In the second episode of the Evercast, I begin a re-presentation of my first ever attempt at audio fiction, the Christmas-themed novel A Long November. Are you sick and tired of Christmas decorations going up before you’ve finished sorting through your kids’ Halloween candy? So is Duncan Marks, but with a wife and son who are certified holiday nuts, he can’t escape the yuletide greetings far too early. What’s worse, as our story begins Duncan encounters a mysterious (yet strangely familiar) spirit who is determined to drive Duncan to Christmas… no matter what. Also in this episode, I discuss how I first discovered National Novel Writing Month, and how that discovery led to the creation of A Long November in the first place.
A LONG NOVEMBER PART ONE: PREPARATIONS (EVERCAST #2)
Click here to subscribe to the Evercast on iTunes
Theme music by Jeff Hendricks. Evercast logo by Heather Petit-Keller. Additional music: Merry Freakin’ Christmas by the Mydols & Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) by Opp Sept Demo, provided by the Podshow Podsafe Music Network.
Send your e-mails to BlakeMPetit@gmail.com.
A Long November, along with eight other Christmas stories, is now available as an eBook from Smashwords.com. If you’ve got a Kindle, iPhone, Sony eReader, or virtually any other eBook-reading device, you can add the book to your device. Visit the book’s page at Smashwords.com!
We’re seeing more and more comics going the digital download route these days. From PDFs to iPhone apps, comics are becoming electronic. This week, I look into the pros and cons of comics via computer, and why — even though I unabashedly love my Kindle — digital comics still aren’t the thing for me.
Just got home from my night class a little while ago, and I’ve got to get my butt working on my NaNoWriMo novel if I’m going to hit my word count goal for the day. So rather than a full-blown blog post, I’m just going to hit on a couple of things that are on my mind.
How ’bout Dem Saints?
I’m not a sports fan, in general. I don’t watch a lot of sports, outside of the Olympics, but in the past few years (years, not months, that’s important) I’ve become a particularly enthusiastic fan of our hometown boys, the New Orleans Saints. After Hurricane Katrina slapped around our city a few years ago, the Saints became a sort of rallying point for the city. For good or ill, the team has become a real symbol of our hopes for the city, a living example of what we’re hoping will happen to the whole region. Seeing the Saints enjoying such an amazing season, in some sort of weird transference, is like watching the entire region pulling itself back up again. It means something. I don’t know how else to explain it. It just plain means something to us.
How ’bout Dat DVR?
A few minutes ago, my buddy Mark sent me an instant message asking what I thought of the new ABC series V, the first episode of which had been airing for about 15 minutes when he sent it. My response was, “I forgot it was on entirely.” Fortunatelly, the ol’ DVR was set to record it already, so I managed to click it on. I’m probably watching the same sequence as he was when he contacted me right now, and it’s not bad so far. But man, what did we do before this technology? How would I have kept up with shows like Lost, FlashForward, and of course the most important program of all, The Big Bang Theory? It’s like a miracle.
How ’bout Dat Evercast?
So I’m hoping by now that all of you have had a chance to download and listen to the first episode of my new podcast, the Evercast. I’ve been working really hard on this show, and I want it to be something I can be proud of. I think it will be. But I’d still like your feedback. How did you like the inaugural short story, “It’s Time to Play the Music”? What kind of stuff do you want to hear in the future? Comment here or e-mail me at BlakeMPetit@gmail.com.
How ’bout Getting Back to Work?
Don’t mind if I do. I’ve got a lot of NaNoWriMo writing to do on Opening Night of the Dead.
02
Nov
09
It’s that time of year again…
I wasn’t going to participate in National Novel Writing Month this year, honestly I wasn’t. I have so much going on, with two podcasts to shepherd, school to consider, and a dozen other things either in the hopper or getting ready to heat up. How on Earth could I even consider trying to squeeze in the composition of a 50,000-word novel in just 30 days?
And if all those reasons weren’t enough, how about the most obvious one: I didn’t have an idea. It’s particularly hard to write if you don’t have anything to write about. More than anything else, this is what was going to keep me sane this November. No idea, no feeling of inadequacy about not writing. Great, right?
Then, about a week ago, something terrible happened. I got an idea.
Like many of my best ideas, it actually came about when two totally unrelated ideas somehow married each other. One of the ideas is about two years old, the other older than that, and in fact they’re both stories I tried to write before. In both cases, the stories went nowhere because I realized all I had was an idea, not a plot. And, in fact, it was a third story that provided the glue to seal the two of them together.
In fact, it was a story you may have heard. It was “It’s Time to Play the Music.” While thinking about the stars of that particular story, I felt a tickling in my mind, a weird sort of literary magnetism, pulling two completely independent ideas that had nothing in common and making them… work.
At least… I think they’re going to work.
Here’s the synopsis of the novel, as it appears on the NaNoWriMo website. And warning — if you haven’t listened to “It’s Time to Play the Music” yet, the synopsis spoils the ending…
Tim Ferris and Casey King, two dead cops, are given a shot to get out of Purgatory and make it to the great beyond. All they have to do is go back to Earth and destroy a zombie so that the soul trapped inside can go on to its destiny. The only trouble will be finding the right zombie to kill, as their target sparks a plague of the undead during a Halloween festival full of all manner of things that go bump in the night.
Not bad, right? At least, I don’t think so.
What’s that? A title? Oh yeah, I’ve got a title. It’s actually rather unusual — most of the time the title is what comes to me last, after I’ve finished writing and re-writing and pulling teeth from my mind’s eye, and what a horribly mixed metaphor. But this time, the title is one of the first things to occur to me.
Opening Night of the Dead.
Catchy, ain’t it?
Wish me luck.
Halloween is over, but the boys have one last treat for you — our Trick-or-Tangent episode! This week, you steer the course of the show, as the guys answer your e-mails. Artist chatter, the state of the Shazam! family, spacefaring with the Guardians of the Galaxy, and even a letter in support of Twilight. Plus, Blake asks (okay, begs) your help in supporting his latest creative enterprise. In the picks this week, Kenny chooses the Justice League of America: The Lightning Saga graphic novel, and Blake is happy about the return of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories! Contact us with comments, suggestions, or anything else at Showcase@Comixtreme.com!
Episode 143: Trick or Tangent
Inside This Episode:
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