Wallet say, "Ouch double feature!"

Skipping a weekly trip to the comic shop can be useful: it keeps you from browsing and getting more than you planned the next week, because you've already got plenty.

This and last week's comics:

Ex Machina: March to War TP
and
Y: The Last Man--Kimono Dragons TP
Enough cannot be said about Brian K. Vaughan, but it still has all been said. I think I'm buying all of his books right now, and loving them.

Emissary #6
Doesn't grab me as much as the opening issue anymore, but the series is halfway done, so I'll probably sit it out. It still looks very pretty, and that helps, too.

Stargate: Atlantis--Wraithfall #2
But that one's for my sister, not for me. Doesn't mean I can't read it first, though.

TransFormers: Escalation #1
Still a very satisfying read both on a nostalgic level and on a qualitative level.

The Dark Horse Book of Monsters
The fourth, after the Books of Hauntings, Witchcraft and the Dead. They're good examples of how anthologies should be done--the individual stories are fun (or, since they are horror, rather creepy) but the full package is so much more than the sum of its parts.


Lots of doubles this week: two licensed books, two BKV trades, two stories drawn by Juan Ferreyra (he did a story in the Book of Monsters as well as Emissary).


Monday's new fiction may be a little late, since I'll be away receiving presents. That's right, rest of the world! Santa comes to the Netherlands three weeks early! It's because he loves us best!

(And also, I'm running low on haiku. But that's my problem.)

Haiku House of Horrors V: The Hungry Night

Silent is the night
One scream rings out then is gone
Silent is the night



(Hush. It's still Monday in plenty of timezones.)

This week, wallet no say "Ouch," but do Dance of Joy.

So, this week I actually skipped my trip to the LCS because I'm pretty busy with money-paying work. (Not to worry, though, they're holding everything I was gonna get for me anyway. Sheesh, seriously--as if I'd risk missing anything.)

But in lieu of new comics, some thoughts on older ones. A while back, I got a long run of the original New Mutants. Three things:

1) Those old, eighties X-books were really damn good. The New Mutants are easily overlooked--they had no Dark Phoenix Saga, or Days of Future Past (aside from maybe the Demon Bear saga, but find me a non-X-reader who's heard of that one). But the strength of the X-books has never been in the big, defining stories for me. It's in the long, drawn-out soap opera, following characters that you genuinely care for. And New Mutants has plenty of that.

2) There were so many more normal, everyday things in the characters' lives back then. School dances, sleepovers, school trips to Asgard, rock concerts. A lot more contact with everyday life outside of the Mansion, on the whole. I'd like it if we could see some more of that again, particularly in books like New X-Men.

3) Illyana. Illyana, oh, how I miss thee...

Haiku House of Horrors IV: The Ghost

One life gone too soon
Now and ever roaming lost
Never to find peace

Wallet say, "Ouch!"

Ugh. My dollar/euro conversion price went up this week. Can't really complain much, since I was getting stuff pretty cheap, but still. This'll mean ordering less books down the line.

This week's comics:

TransFormers Spotlight: Hot Rod
I have to admit, ever since I first saw TransFormers: The Movie (where he immediately got turned into Wussimus Prime) on our old TV in the attic many years ago, Hot Rod has been a favorite of mine. So this one, I was looking forward to--and I wasn't disappointed. The Ultimate-style continuity Simon Furman has created for the IDW Transformers books is a great mix of the old and the updated, and the Spotlight issues do a nice job of exploring previously-unseen corners of TF lore. The only thing I was missing is that the characters didn't feel as well-defined as they could be. Hot Rod, though, is definitely his own bot. I believe he'll show up in the upcoming Escalation. Can't wait.

Shadowpact #7
Is Tom Derenick the official regular artist on this book, now? Not his biggest fan. I'm giving this book a full year and then deciding whether to keep it on my pull list, and Derenick could be a deciding factor. It's not that I don't like the book--I do, and it's got Detective Chimp, fer chrissakes--I just don't know if I like it more than anything else I could buy for the money. Plus, the DCU is already slowly dying on my pull list. Aside from Teen Titans, Shadowpact is pretty lonely.

Outlaw Nation TP
Cheap, massive, Essential-style format? Check. (Former) Vertigo ongoing? Check. Y: The Last Man artist? Check. Haven't read this one yet, but it's looking pretty good so far.

The Telltale Production Production Blog.

Okay, I guess I should put something here about my writing, since this blog ostensibly exists to promote it (and, to a lesser degree, my translation work).

I write both prose and comic book scripts. The goal is, of course, to eventually live of that, but I'll also just be posting some material here on the website. I've already started--every Monday, you can read the Haiku House of Horrors right here on the blog. I've got a few more of those, and if I run out, I'll see if I can't replace it with something else.

So remember: Monday is New Fiction Day here at Telltale Productions.


In the meantime, keep your eyes open for news on the following projects:

Shadowlands is an ongoing crime saga filled with broken characters trying to fix themselves and the world. I'm developing the book with talented British artist Steve Dawson.

Hyper Action! is a superhero miniseries currently being drawn by Rodrigo Ramos Rodolfo of Brazil. Once he's got some pages in, we'll start looking at lettering and colors and the submission process.

Afterlife Tales is a horror anthology, conditionally planned for self-publication through print-on-demand. I'm currently writing stories for the first volume, uniting some old concepts that have been looking for a home for a long time.

My prose-writing efforts are currently focused on finishing off my novel-length Firefly fanfiction tale--my favorite of fandoms, and planned to be my last hurrah in the world of fanfic before focusing entirely on publishable material. Once The Unaired Season is completed, I already have some short stories and a fantasy novel lined up.


More news will of course follow right here, when it becomes available.

Haiku House of Horrors III: The Monster of Frankenstein

Of sinew and bone
Is dread monster made or man
Inside no soul rests

Wallet say, "Ouch!"

Or this week, wallet say, "Meh, I can handle it."

This week's comics:

Local #7
Another week, another Brian Wood book? Local is a bit of a weird book. I've actually disliked issues on first reading, but then they just seem to grow on me, enough to keep me fascinated. Now if only the book had something resembling a schedule.
Supermarket was excellent, by the way. Brian Wood's one of the few creators who can do the 'near future' thing and be weird and utterly believable at the same time. Add his always very human charactes and the beautiful art, and you've got a winner. Only problem I had was that the ending was a bit easy and unsatisfying, same as with the The Tourist GN from a while back.
(Heard Brian's become a father this week over on http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=3276. Congrats!)

Gotham Central: The Quick and the Dead
An all-Rucka volume this time. Ed Brubaker is easily my favorite writer of the two, but they're wonderfully in sync on this book. I really need to reread the whole series, though. So many characters to keep track off.

Haiku House of Horrors II: The Vampire

The call of blood sweet
Loose in a night-darkened street
A hunter awakes

Welcome to Plot Hole City. Population: 5 Trillion and Growing.

So I've been looking at some of the cartoons I watched back in the eighties, recently--TransFormers being the only franchise I've really kept up with.

After the Inhumanoids-debacle, I've now watched the first few episodes of Voltron. It's really quite an eye-opener. Watching cartoons you liked as a kid means losing your self-respect. (If you have any.) The plot holes are really staggering, and the characters are tremendously stupid. Some for instances: Events shown in ep.1 are referred to in ep.2 as if they occurred decades ago; and the people of this planet have these mighty mechanical lions that can save them from evil alien invasion, and they turn them over to total strangers. While there's no apparent reason they couldn't have used the lions themselves much earlier, to, y'know, save their planet from utter devastation?

The animation isn't so great, either, but I can forgive that more easily.

All in all, it makes me look at more recent animation like Pokemon differently. I may think it's crap, but some things that I loved as a kid were crap, too, so who am I to judge? I guess as kids, you're just better able to accept the Awesome and discard the Lame at will.

Thank god for TransFormers, at least. TransFormers has always been at the peak of all awesomeness, and will always remain there, and I'll have no one tell me any different.

Wallet Say, "Ouch!"

This week's comics:

Angel: Masks
Already heard good things about this one (it came out last week), but it's pretty pricey. I was at least expecting a perfect-bound book for that money, like the Spike oneshots, but no such luck.

Supermarket TP
Brian Wood has never quite been able to match Demo yet for me, but this one looks vewwy, vewwy good. And let's face it, how many books out there match Demo?

Star Wars: Tag & Bink Were Here
I read some of the recent two issues of Tag & Bink, but I haven't read the originals yet. From the creator of the Troops fanfilm, and funnier than you can shake a Gungan at. Funnier than a barrel-full of Wookiees.

Soulsearchers & Company #80
I actually stopped ordering this, but my store is accidentally still getting it for me. But since it turns out there's only two issues to go, I kinda like sticking with the book till the bitter end anyway. Not really funny enough to read just for the comedy, and too slapstick to get to care about the characters. Still, every time a Peter David book gets cancelled, an angel loses its wings. Maybe this one will drop by in David's other (better, I think) creator-owned title, Fallen Angel.)

Criminal #2
See? I saved the best for last. Two of my favorite creators on one book, working in such perfect synchronicity as is reserved for those rare, revered writer/artist pairs. I'm gonna go read this issue, now.