Watching traffic trickle in, though, it’s funny where I’ve gotten some random search engine views from. I moved a bunch of old blogs over to this site (stuff I done on Blogger and MySpace in the past), a few which mentioned movie celebrities. Apparently dropping a Kelly Clarkson or Hugh Grant reference in a blog pulls immediate metrics.

Silver is so dramatic.

I managed to get a little comic reading time in this week. Polished the trades for Marvel’s Annihilation #2 and #3.  I don’t usually go for any of the deep-space-crazy books from either Marvel or DC, but I’d heard so many good things about this serious (and the Abnet and Lanning books that spin out of it) I figured I’d give it a try. Plus, I got a good chunk of the series and related books on the serious cheap at Chicago Comic-Con ’09.

I read Annihilation #1 shortly after Con, and liked it quite a bit. Had never heard of any of these characters outside of Nova, but I immediately liked Drax the Destroyer’s character and arc. I was surprised to discover that Nova was part of a Green Lantern Corp-esque galaxy police force (the “Nova Corp”, ‘natch) as I hadn’t seen him in anything other than some New Warriors issues waaaay back in the day. Not that the Nova Corp stick around long. I enjoyed Richard Rider and his plight as the last of the Novas, and his trouble dealing with all of the power he’d been infused with.

Book #2 didn’t thrill me. I’m no Silver Surfer fan, and I’ve always though Galactus was a big silly. The Surfer arc left me underwhelmed, though I do get a kick out of Firelord and was happy he dropped in. Super Skrull’s four issues featured art with cool character designs but inconsistent quality. The cartoony style just didn’t hold up, and moments that should have been serious looked comical. The trade finishes up with Ronan the Accuser, an exiled Kree judge, jury and executioner prone to dramatic pronouncements and being a big jerk. The art and storytelling felt like something out of Heavy Metal or 2000 A.D., with a definite Keith Giffen flare (Giffen wrote the Surfer story, actually). Seemed a big tangled mess at the end with a bunch of random characters thrown in. And any more fan-service shots of Gamora and her warrior-thong and I might have tossed the book in disgust. I’m so tired of the super-comic ethos that powerful, intelligent women feel empowered by running around in no clothes. Nothing says comfortable fighting wear than a string bikini.

Annihilation #3 started and I felt like I stepped out of the movie for a restroom break and missed some really important stuff. There must be some offshoot stuff they decided not include in the trade, or they felt like the story was going on too long already anyway, but #3 starts with the various and sundry characters from the first two collections all teamed up and fighting the big bug-apocalypse. Nova’s problems with being super-duper-powerful are not mentioned, a bunch of new people show up that seem to be important but who I’ve not encountered before and everything has gone from a micro-story scale to a macro-scale. Things get really messy, and then they get tied up very neatly, in very short order. A couple of characters introduced in #2 don’t show up in #3, which is pretty relevant to how the big plot goes down, and I have no idea why they weren’t there. Either the off-camera stories I didn’t get cover their involvement and later absence, or the writer realized that keeping them around would pretty much negate their big flashy ending. Hmmm…

Then they padded out the trade with a bunch of character bios (many of which were already included in Vol #1 & #2) to make the book the same size and pricepoint as the others. Cause, you know, Marvel really likes to do that.

All harping aside, I enjoyed the book enough to keep reading to the Conquest extension and more Nova stories (but maybe that’s cause I’d already purchased the trades – $5 TPB bins are awesome like that).

Another fantastic show from Carbon Leaf. Last Friday, a small contingent of Armadians attended the CL headlining show at the Blueberry Hill Duck Room. It was the band’s first sold-out St. Louis show, which they were obviously excited about. Somebody offered Doug a hundred bucks for his ticket (which he turned down). The concert was incredible, an absolutely revelatory performance. Carbon Leaf is my favorite band. Wen and I have seen them live four times now. This show was my favorite so far. Interesting show highlight: they began their encore by going completely unplugged. No mics, no amps, just the band (sans drums) projecting “Learn to Fly” to a packed room struggling to remain silent. Other highlights – friggin’ everything.

Dork out moment: Doug, Wen and I walked up to CL guitarist Terry Clark after the show to shake hands (and hugs from Wen). Before even exchanging a greeting, he tells us that the bands sound tech had spotted Doug’s shirt (which says “Joss Whedon is my Master Now”) and excitedly called the bands attention to it through their ear-monitors. Turns out the band just watched all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD via their laptop while on tour. They were completely stoked to see a Whedon fan in the crowd. We all dorked out for a minute, and insisted that they spend some quality time with “Firefly” next (appropriately, I was wearing my “Browncoat” shirt from “Serenity”). It’s good to know that our favorite band is our kind of people.

Hot Blog-on-Blog Action: awhile back I commented on a short story collection, “Little Gods” by Tim Pratt, that I had really enjoyed. I sent the author an email telling him how much I liked the book, and which stories I found most affecting. He was kind enough to write back about a week later. He also apparently checked out my blog (the link is on my email signature), and wrote about my comments on his own online journal (he linked off to me, too). Pretty cool. This evening, we made a Borders run and I picked up Pratt’s novel “The Strange Adventures of Ranger Girl”, to be perused during our upcoming trip to New York to visit Mary and Gene.

I also cashed in all of my Christmas gift certificates and, with a 30% coupon, picked up Absolute Sandman volume one for just over fourteen bucks (it’s regularly priced at $99). I discovered Sandman with issue #50 in early high school and have been a Neil Gaiman fan every since. This Absolute edition collects the first four story arcs of Sandman in an oversized hardcover with a gorgeous slipcase. The pages have been recolored, and it includes a slew of “special features”. Now, if the absolute editions just come out every Christmas, maybe I’ll be able to use this tactic again…

Last weekend I attended a book signing in my hometown by one of my high school teachers for her recently published book of poetry, “Leaving the Limberlost”.

I stupidly wrote the quite long journal entry about the visit in my web browser, then MySpace crashed before I could save it. I can never bring myself to rewrite a lost blog like that, so here’s a summary: 1) it was nice to see my teacher again, and talk shop about writing; 2) chatted up some other old instructors who didn’t recognize me at first with the long haired that characterized me in school; 3) had nice chats with my (long-time-no-see) high school friends Jessi and Ben. Jessi runs the coffee shop that hosted the signing which is really cute. Ben and his adorable wife actually live pretty close to Wen and I. He’s a dentist now; 4) a little hometown nostalgia got me stalking through the MySpace High School listing to find profiles of my old classmates. There’s quite a few of the folk in my class and the ones around it on the ‘Space. Mostly, I was struck by how old most of them looked (though I should note that Jessi and Ben both looked almost exactly as I remembered them). In particular, any classmates who had children looked in the neighborhood of 40ish, instead of our actual late twenties / very early thirties.

Scary stuff. Made me examine myself in the mirror for signs of age. Over the last year or so, I’ve been told several times that people think I’m a guy in his mid-thirties who looks like he’s in his late twenties. I’m not really sure what to make of that…

As previously mentioned, Wendy and I are flying out to NYC later this week. We’re working on all the preparations now. It’s been a very long time since we had any kind of vacation, so we’re pretty excited. I’m hoping Gene and I will be able to attend the New York Comic Con for a day (it happens to be going on the weekend we’re there) but, in general, we’re just stoked to spend some time with the McKellys.

Currently:
/// watching Invasion (complete series on dvd). Three episodes from the end. It’s pretty good.
/// reading Peter and the Starthieves (sequel to Peter and the Starcatchers).
/// watching Batman: The Animated Series season #1 while I work out.

So now I’m doing this to. This blog thing. My intention is that it is for my benefit – a writing exercise to get me to put something down in prose (almost) everyday. I’m getting better at this in general, sitting at Starbucks on my lunchbreak, scribbling stuff into my little notebook. But I don’t think it would hurt to have another forum for easy expression.

Let’s see how long I keep this up…