Category: Comic books & strips

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Embarrassment of bitches

In summer, our office hours are 8am-1pm on Fridays. It’s a nice treat, getting out before the weekend traffic, even if it’s just to get some shopping done or get home early.

Today, I stopped off at a comic shop on the way home, to pick up the new issue of Buffy: Season 8 for Amy. I hadn’t been to a comic store for a while — probably since the last issue — so, even though I’m in a cash crunch for the next month or so, I browsed the recent releases.

It was then that I realized the comics gods were taunting me.

It wasn’t enough that I found a new book by Eddie Campbell. No, it wasn’t even enough that I found

No, dear reader. Above and beyond all that, I found Comics Gone Ape, a book about the history of primates in comics. Presumably, it will include the great Jimmy Olsen: Gorilla Reporter.

Clearly, the comics gods want me to go broke. But you’ll be glad to know that I calmly paid for Amy’s comic, walked out of the store, and quietly sobbed as I slumped over the steering wheel of my car.

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Lazy Sunday

It’s a quiet Sunday here at Chez VM. Well, it was louder earlier in the day, when I was shredding bills and records as part of the process of rearranging my home office. The process started when I bought a new desk on Wednesday, replacing the two tables that occupied a wall of my room. The process continued yesterday, when I picked up a leaning bookcase from C&B, a desk organizer from Pottery Barn (they don’t list it on their site), and a couple of bulletin boards and paper drawers from the Container Store. Today involved figuring out where to put everything (hence the bill-shredding). If there’s good light tomorrow morning, I’ll take some pix and post them for those of you who are obsessed interested in such things.

Before buying up this stuff, Amy & I finally got to the local (within 30 miles) Imax to catch 300. It was

  1. a hoot
  2. utterly insane
  3. possibly the gayest movie ever (okay, the Gayest. Movie. Ever.)

I enjoyed it a bunch, even if it did overplay the “we’re fighting to defend reason and logic” angle. Gerard Butler was fascinating to look at, and this hearkens back to my original post about this flick: I’m more interested in the stylization of the movie, and the filmmakers managed to get the lead to resemble classical Greek art. I’m not talking about the chiseled abs phenomenon, which are major contributors to the “gayest movie ever” trophy, but the angles of his face, his beard, and his hair somehow gestalted into this living representation of a Greek bust, to me.

We had a laugh later in the day, when we noted that Gerard Butler’s filmography includes Beowulf (where I thought he looked a little like Paul Rodgers) and Attila the Hun. Looks like he can’t get away from historic slaughter flicks. Still, he did a great job in this one, making the Spartan king a, um, raging Scot. It’s not a movie to be taken seriously as history, but it was a thrill ride. My biggest problem with it is that it’s success means that the director is going to get the greenlight to make a movie of The Watchmen, which will be a disaster.

This morning, I realized that I’ve had a pretty strange run of Easter-weekend trips to the movies. I don’t tend to go to the movies often, but I guess there’s something about Easter: Hellboy in 2004, Sin City in 2005 and 300 in 2007. Can’t remember if I saw anything last year, and I’m not finding any references in the blog, which as we know is a backup drive for my brain.

Anyway, I hope all my Christian readers have a good Easter today.