I've been stuck in a Hobbit reverie for days now. At supper Michelle and Pallas were apparently counting to ten in spanish and they asked me how they did and I was like, "Uh, sorry, I wasn't really paying attention. I was in Middle-earth." But uno dos tres they did it perfectly the second time around.

A Twitter discussion led me to go get my copy of Unfinished Tales, a book I've had nearly as long as The Hobbit. I got it from my Grandpa's store, which was (it's still around, actually, my Grandma still runs it) a health food/ insurance agency/ Christian bookstore. When I saw this book I was so excited, expecting another tome of high adventure, though little ten-year-old me was sorely disappointed as it was nearly impenetrable. It's kind of got the same vibe as The Silmarillion (which I finally did read while tramping around New Zealand) though it is more just scraps and stuff covering all three ages of Middle-earth.
One of the briefer sections is an account by Gandalf of how he came to be part of the Dwarven company and why he convinced Thorin to recruit Bilbo Baggins. I thought there might be a little back-story for Thorin regarding the name Oakenshield. If you haven't seen the movie yet I won't say anything more, but I just wanted to see if there was a Tolkien provenance for what was shown onscreen. Well, it wasn't here but there was a brief mention of the orc Azog so that was cool.
Yeah, all this info is freely available on the internet but sometimes it's fun to pull a book off your bookshelf and look it up yourself. I knew I saved that book for a reason!

It was 29 years ago this Christmas that my Grandma gave me that copy of The Hobbit, with hundreds of stills and sketches from the Rankin/Bass animated feature that came out in the late 70s or early 80s. It pretty much changed my life forever. Not to put too fine a point on it. I was already a Star Wars nerd but the thing about my generation is that we didn't have the ability to watch our favourite movies whenever we felt like. The VCR was still a couple years away, at least in my house. So the only thing a nerdling could do was read books. (And comics, of course.) I even memorized the poem Sam tells Strider and the other hobbits when they're camping out by the stone trolls- the one that starts "Troll sat alone on his seat of stone/ and munched and mumbled a bare old bone/ for many a year he had gnawed it near..."
After the Lord of the Rings movies came out I could pretty much die happy. Though I had the better idea of going to New Zealand and visiting some of the sites where scenes were shot. Like Hobbiton:



So all I really wanted was for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey to be at least as awesome as this:



It was! And so much more. Especially since Sherlock and Watson are such key elements (though Benedict Cumberbatch doesn't have anything to do with this first movie).
We saw the 3D but not IMAX. As far as Frames Per Second goes, I don't really know what we had. Michelle asked me if it was the 48 FPS and I told her I only counted 36.

Merry X-Men!

Kiss was never really my kind of band, I was a little too young. Death was more my style. The band Death that gave us the whole genre of death metal. RIP Chuck Schuldiner. Death did a cover of a Kiss song, back in the day. It was called God of Thunder and it's a pretty kickass song. Chuck does this amazing deathy growl of the chorus where he goes "God of thunder! . . . and rock and ro-o-oll."
Oh man when that song first came out did I wish that rock and roll part wasn't in it. It just cheesed up the whole song. Well, actually the song is so awesome that it was able to withstand the cheesy onslaught. But come on, as if Thor needs more in his portfolio than just thunder. Because what's more awesome than a thunder god?
The Marvel Now series Thor: God of Thunder says the answer to that question is nothing! Well, maybe one thing. We'll get to that in a second.

As someone who happily professes a love for death metal, maybe it comes as no surprise that I've been a fan of Thor all my life. That most Frazetta-ish of Marvel superheroes was also one of the most versatile, since he could be hanging out in Asgard with his fellow immortal Norse gods battling trolls and frost giants, and then he could hop over the Rainbow Bridge to Midgard* to fight Kang the Conqueror alongside Iron Man and Captain America. Then the next issue he would gladly take to space to aid Beta Ray Bill in stopping Galactus from devouring the planet Poppup.
Jason Aaron prefers to play a more god-like, heroic fantasy take on Thor, and Esad Ribic is the perfect artist for his interpretation. We are treated to no less than three different Thorian eras, or Ages of Thunder if you will. We get a young, brash Thor who relishes leading vikings into bloody battle. Current Marvel Universe Thor off gallivanting in space, and a far-future Thor who looks an awful lot like his dear old dad Odin. Not necessarily a good thing.
In each of these timelines Thor faces the menace of something known as the god butcher. A monster that goes around butchering gods of various pantheons. Thor, being a god from some pantheon or other, is square in the god butcher's sights. Not that Thor has any intention of being butchered, but he might not have much say in the matter. Because this guy butchers gods. That's what he does.
Having established that in the first two issues, I'm now curious to know why. I can dig it, and accept him as a worthy foe for Thor, I just hope there's an intriguing origin or motive for ole GB. We get a hint of the anger and contempt he feels for gods in this sequence:

SO bring it home for us, Mr. Aaron! What's more awesome than a thunder god? A god butcher, apparently. But I say thee nay! Thor shall prevail. What's a god without someone to have faith in him?

*Midgard means Earth, as if I needed to tell you that, true believer!

Another Owie Badguy commission! This one by Zimeta, who is MistyTang's sister. Surely one of the hardest working artists around- she's accomplished the pretty much unheard of feat of updating her (current) webcomic , May The Rain Come, once a day for well over a year. And she even found a few minutes to squeeze in some quick commissions so I hit her up for her take on ole Owie.



Badguys Beware! by *Zimeta on deviantART

So I was all set to talk about Deadpool tonight but then I get home and jump on Twitter and discover that Gail Simone has been email-fired from Batgirl. Which pretty much sucks. I got the first New 52 Batgirl Hardcover that just came out and loved it. A lot, actually. Since I'm in Hinton right now my copy is 300 kms away, and kind of stuck in storage anyway since we are getting our basement finished at the moment. So I can't really flip through it again for purposes of review. But trust me, it's great.
Gail Simone will be fine, I'm sure. Thanks to Twitter and other online arenas, she has much more of a devoted following than many other creators. Arguably she may be the biggest name in comics. She's up there anyways. Frankly it's hard to see why DC would treat someone who is truly an ambassador for comics this way. DC loses. Gail loses. And we the readers lose. Again, Gail will land on her feet just fine, but poor old Batgirl is probably going to suffer.
I've never met Gail or even tweeted with her but I've definitely been Gail-adjacent. She was out to Happy Harbor, our local comic shop for FCBD a few years back, and she was on a panel at  SDCC when we went- about writing LGBT characters. And just the other day I swear to god she tumbld this photo of mine so if that doesn't make us bffs I dunno what would. Here is another photo I took of a cosplayer from Calgary bringingthe Barbara Gordon love, a fitting tribute:

Comics being the visual medium that it is, it's easy to be drawn in by a particularly striking image, such as the cover to Thunderbolts #1. I lobe the reds and the white background, and other than the Punisher, I am a fan of each of the characters. The actual comic didn't do much for me, but again, being the first issue, it was mostly just setup. General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross has in recent years found himself as the thing he hated most in all the world- a hulk. But red! Anyways he decides to gather a team of other red guys and gals to be the Thunderbolts. I guess we're lucky his name wasn't Stormin' Norman otherwise this comic might be called the Stormins.
Actually the Thunderbolts name has been used in various guises for a long time in the Marvel Universe, usually as a team of super-villains being rehabilitated by working as a team on the side of the good guys. This incarnation is actually a little different in the sense that all of these characters occupy the shadowy in-between state of being neither villain nor hero, exactly. Shades of grey, more. Or red, in this case. Red Hulk, or Rulk as his buddies call him, has actually lately been an Avenger so he's solidly good. Which is why he's leading the team I guess. Elektra is an assassin  but she's not a bad assassin. Venom, (Flash Thompson, not Eddie Brock) is actually an army operative and Deadpool and Punisher are basically psychos with guns but for the most part they prefer to shoot bad guys. So really, not super-villains. I might pick up issue #2 to see how they actually work together as a team. Deadpool is always good for a laugh, and the Punisher is famous for his sense of humor too. Oh sorry, that sentence should have "utter lack of a" in front of "sense of humor".
The parallel on the DC side would be Suicide Squad, the first trade paperback collection of which I read and enjoyed. Any team with Harley Quinn on it is one I want to be on, though the explosives implanted in your brain part would kind of suck.But how else do you insure that such a collection of super-criminals toes the line? Plus, they have a bipedal shark! So I might give DC the edge in a head-to-head tussle of the bad-guys-working-for-good-guys genre.

Marvel decided to do something similar to DC's New 52. Rather than rebooting their whole universe, though, they just sort of established a new status quo within the regular continuity.  Marvel Now they're calling it.   Lots of new series launches, though the primary focus seems to be on new creative teams taking on characters they haven't really been associated with before. So, Brian Michael Bendis who wrote like a thousand issues of all the different Avengers titles, is now writing All New X-Men.
Marvel Now has been rolling out since September but we are definitely right in the midst of it. I've been trying out a lot of the titles and mostly digging it.
Appropriately enough, the first Marvel Now title to launch was Fantastic Four (the original FF was the first true Marvel Comic back in 1961 yo. As if I needed to tell you that.) Matt Fraction is writing both Fantastic Four and FF. Wait, what? FF stands for Freedom Force. No, that's not right. I just read it too, what was it? Oh yeah- Future Foundation. The Fantastic Four, of course, is Reed "Mr. Fantastic" Richards, his wife Sue Storm-Richards the Invisible Woman, her brother Johnny Storm aka the Human Torch (back from the dead) and Ben Grimm the ever-loving Thing. As Fantastic Four #1 opens, Reed has discovered that the unstable molecules that form his stretchtastic elastic body are decaying. And there is no cure in the entire known universe. Luckily he knows where there are all sorts of unknown universes so he decides it would be cool to grab the other Three of the Four, as well as his kids, and go on a year-long educational trip through the Negative Zone and whatever other alternate dimensions they feel like exploring. Which is a great setup for Lost In Space-type misadventures, which I love. I like Fraction's writing so I know he'll have some good stuff in store. Issue 1 was all setup but you can bet the fantastic fun will begin in earnest next issue.
Reed sets up his little time machine dimension hopper gizmo to return them precisely four minutes after they leave, in subjective time. No big deal, right? But in case something catastrophic happens in those four minutes (and catastrophes happen about every three minutes in the Marvel Universe) he asks four friends to step in for those four minutes just in case. He recruits Ant-man, Medusa, She-Hulk (yay!) and um, Ms. Thing who is apparently Johnny's girlfriend in a Thing-like exoskeleton suit. FF #1 is also all setup, though a lot of fun while at it. I'm guessing issue 2 will go something like this:
Reed Richards: Thanks for covering for us while we're gone, Ant-man.
Ant-man: Yeah no problem. See you in four minutes.
Reed waves
Ant-man waves
Four minutes passes
Reed: Hi!  That was so much fun!
Ant-man: Cool! Alright I'll catch ya later.

I was hoping, but failed, to snag the Arthur Adams' (one of my favourite artists from waay back) variant cover for FF#1, a fantastic homage to Fantastic Four #1:

Pallas will regularly announce to complete strangers that she has changed her name to Wonder Woman. This makes me happy. I never read much Wonder Woman, though. Nothing against her- I always loved her. Loved. You know, I was the exact right age when the Wonder Woman tv show was on. In fact, I think I'll go watch the opening credits on YouTube right now. Excuse me...
Nah, the main reason I didn't read her was she was DC, and I was Marvel. Even more recently I've tried a few WW collections just because the great Gail Simone was getting rave reviews. But there was just too much backstory baggage, even for a guy like me who thrives on backstory. But I picked up the New 52 Wonder Woman hardcover collection at the library and I loved it. Now I wish I had bought it. If only there were some annual day devoted to giving loved ones gifts to brighten our dark Decembers.
Azzarello and Chiang present a Wonder Woman with close ties to both her fellow Amazons, especially her mother Hippolyta, and the various Greek gods that like to muck about in the affairs of women. The art is wonderful, with kind of a Samurai Jack vibe to it, nice and clean but with plenty of moody silhouettes:

There's a part I won't spoil where Queen Hippolyta meets Hera that I love love loved. Good writing.
My only caveat- the gore level, while perfectly acceptable to me, makes it a bit inappropriate for me to read it to Pallas. Which is fine, there are plenty of good Wonder Woman story books targeted to her age level. Those centaurs in the page above? They get created in a fantastically gruesome way. I can't wait until she's 9 or 10, though, I think she'll love it, as I do.
Here is a classic fight scene featuring Wonder Woman.

It's tooken a couple of years, but I've finally caught up on all the comics. Man, you will never believe what happened to Batman. And Captain America? He died. Twice. Or something like that. I'm not actually caught up on every single comic but I have a pretty good foundation of what's going on with most of the major heroes, or at least the ones I'm a fan of.
This is a pretty good time for comics fans, old and new. DC rebooted their entire line last year so new fans could jump on (rebooting is kind of a fact of life for characters whose history goes back 40, 50, even 70 years or so) and though I was never much of a DC kid growing up, I've been glad of the opportunity to get acquainted with a few new characters, sans tons of back issue baggage.
And even better, they didn't reboot Green Lantern. Because Geoff Johns has been writing the definitive GL saga for the last five years or so and it would be a shame to wipe all that away. His run has become one of my all-time favorite comics runs of all time. There's a part in the Sinestro Corps War that I love so much. Sinestro is all like "I'ma make you feel fear Hal Jordan!" And Hal responds by pointing out something kind of profound and even inspiring- Green Lanterns aren't fearless, they just overcome fear. Every. Single. Time. And then he punches Sinestro in the face.
Also there was Rage of the Red Lanterns and Blackest Night and Brightest Day and so on. For the New 52 initiative or whatever you want to call it, Johns did something kind of clever- Green Lantern now features the debut of the brand new Green Lantern of Earth, one Thaal Sinestro. So yeah, Green Lantern kicks ass. I like the Red Lanterns series, too.