It's Thanksgiving Week, Signal Corps!

I shall be as bloated as this Thanksgiving parade balloon by Sunday

It's Thanksgiving Week here in the United States of America, and that means people will begin spreading all over the country in short order as we find time to rejoin with family and friends.  Or, of course, some of you may take advantage of a couple of days off and head for a long weekend on the beach somewhere.  Man, that sounds nice.

Anyway...

I just thought I'd get this out of the way before we got distracted by other things.

This year we've got The Dug & K en route to sunny Austin/ San Marcos, TX and we'll be having a nice, relaxed Thanksgiving that, for scheduling reasons, will culminate in Turkey Dinner on Saturday instead of Thursday.

I expect most of you will start disappearing by Tuesday.  We'll keep posting all week, I guess.  Catch up whenever you can.

Donald with a blunderbuss.  What could go wrong?

So Thanksgiving is a good time to take stock of all the things that are more or less going your way.  And as a 21st Century person of middle-class means, I suppose I've quite a bit to be thankful for.  Heck, living in the 21st Century seems to be something to be pretty thankful for when one considers the alternative of spending three months on a boat to end up on Plymouth Rock and then watching everybody keel over in your little colony from the plague, the vapors and whatnot.

So let's just put a big check mark next to "man has conquered some of nature, and I won't be eaten by an otter unless something goes very wrong" as something I'm thankful for.

A semi-teary farewell to "Batman: Brave and the Bold"

So this post is going to be kind of weird.

And probably pretty whiny.

Batman: Brave and the Bold only aired for a handful of seasons, and I'd argue that the first season was spent largely trying to find the right footing and tone.  Scripts were still coming in that first year that seemed a bit like team-up episodes written for Batman: The Animated Series, and one episode (I believe a Christmas episode) featured the death of the Waynes as a flashbacky plotpoint.

It just felt... weird juxtaposed against robot Santas and other DC Comics madcap shenanigans.  But the second season it seemed like we'd come over the top of the hill, and the show did nothing but pick up speed and do loop-de-loops right up until the wacky end.  The basic gist of the show was a riff on the Bronze Age-era of Brave and the Bold comics, a DC team-up book mostly featuring Batman and another figure from the DCU (Superman did the same in DC Comics Presents).  The creative team found the right balance of hilarious OUTRAGEOUSness for the adults and mixed it up with gleeful mayhem and action, and managed to introduce an astounding amount of the DCU to an unsuspecting audience.

It featured episodes done entirely as a musical (with a singing Black Canary), sit-com episodes, winking-4th-wall-breaking episodes with Batmite, brought Silver Age Superman in all his glory to TV (really for the first time), featured a Justice League v. Legion of Doom baseball game, and mined every corner of the DCU, right up to a Creature Commandos adventure this season.

Mostly, for the past two years, its really been my favorite show on TV.

Brief break from blogging

So, I just figured out I am really, really busy the next few days.  Rather than try to make time I don't have, I am taking a work-related break/ hiatus.

Ya'll take care, and we'll be back soon.

Brooksie's Belated Birthday

A belated birthday to Ms. Louise Brooks, who shares a birthday with Veronica Lake, yesterday, November 14th.  Brooksie would have been 105.

and then there was the time I found out my favorite movie was "heavily borrowing" from another movie

This evening I finally watched the 1942 film The Glass Key, a movie I've been trying to see since I first watched (and thoroughly enjoyed) the pairing of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake in This Gun for Hire.  Ms. Lake would have been 92 today, and so TCM was showing some of her films.

all movie posters are better when they feature William Bendix playing a little chin music

At age 15 I rented Miller's Crossing from my local video store. I had just seen The Godfather for the first time the previous summer thanks to my uncle's remarkably good movie selection (he also showed me Das Boot) and I was young, impressionable and learning about both gangster flicks and cinema. And so when Miller's Crossing landed in my VCR, I simply had never seen anything like it.  My entire world of gangster movies came from Godfather I & II and maybe The Untouchables.  I was utterly unfamiliar with the topsy, turvy world of the likes of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, etc...

Con Report: The League Goes to Wizard World

Oh, my.

Well, it may be that comic conventions simply are not my thing.

I attended the 2nd Wizard World Austin for two hours on Sunday.  The Wizard World Comic Conventions are a far cry from the weird invasion of ballrooms at the Holiday Inn off the river I attended as a youth.  The scope is much larger, the square footage fairly impressive, and, of course, we've gone from two of three guys in Star Trek uniforms to a wild array of all kinds of outfits, and people in booths catering to people in outfits.  The big attraction seems to be the celebrities.  Wait.  I meant: the "celebrities".*

In my mind, I have many people I would like to meet.  Athletes.  Statesmen.  TV personalities.  Actors.  Authors.  The reunited cast of the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is not at the top of that list.  And if I DID want to meet most of these people, slipping them a $20 bill for the privilege of meeting them isn't really what I'd have in mind.  I still don't know what it means for an actor to be making their money off of appearances at Wizard World conventions, but its nothing I want to think about a whole lot.  And not something I can very well ignore if Wizard wants for me to participate.

That said, there are some folks who are going to just be done with whatever made them "famous" in the first place, and in this respect, Wizard World is actually seems sort of neat.  Take pro-wrestler The Million Dollar Man.  That guy is not a teen-ager anymore, but he still has lots of folks who'd love to meet him, and that I get.  Last year Adam West came to sign autographs, but he's Batman.  I get the connection.

But, no, I didn't get anyone's autograph.  What I will say is that Kevin Sorbo of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys fame is a really tall guy (taller than me, and I'm, like, 6'4" or so) and I have no idea how old he is.  He still looks remarkably young.  Good on you, Sorbo.

Signal Watch Reads: The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath is among the books you're supposed to read that I was never assigned in K-12 or during college (I only took one literature class in college, and I don't know if we read anything by an American author.  Film and History degrees.  Sorry.), and as Tom Joad never dawns a cape in the book, nor does Ma Joad fight a robot or gorilla, it fell to the bottom of my reading list.  But as part of my program to catch up on books you're supposed to read that also translate pretty well to audiobook, I recently finished the 22 hour odyssey of Steinbeck's best known work.

No doubt in the era in which it was released, the book was a piece of propaganda, and I imagine it was intended as something like the socially-conscious work of Upton Sinclair in books like The Jungle, using popular media to draw attention to the circumstances of those who'd been caught up in the crush of economic and environmental turmoil in the farming communities of the south-central United States (in our case, Oklahoma) during the 1930's.

As a quick summary - the book follows the fortunes of the Joad family which, like everyone else in their Oklahoma community, is devastated by a bad crop, and loses their farm to a large industrial concern (the books makes plain this misfortune befalls most small farmers in the middle states).  With farm as home, they have nowhere else they can go and earn a living, and so take to the road to California, where they believe jobs will await them picking fruit.  It follows the hardship of crossing the country when there's no money to start with, and the reason all those Okies believed that this would work.

Signal Watch Watches: Green Lantern The Animated Series first episode

This evening Cartoon Network debuted the real start of DC Entertainment's all new DC Nation concept, kicking off an hour-long episode of the all new Green Lantern The Animated Series.

The show is the first 3D animated weekly show from DC, and I think it'll fit in neatly with both the other DC programming that's in 2D (such as Young Justice) and the very popular Star Wars: Clone Wars, which is some lovely 3D animation.

The GL of choice for this series is Hal Jordan, whom I guess the studio believed would be every kid's favorite action hero after the summer blockbuster, which...  yeah.  Luckily, the producers of this program (which include Bruce Timm and his style imprinted upon 3D), just sort of went off and did their own thing, more or less.  Honestly, they strayed quite a bit from the comics as well, and that's fine for this GL fanboy.

Not much time is spent on set-up.  Likely the producers were hoping kids had seen the movie or watched other GL material.  Instead, we get a quick overview of the basic GL concept, and then a pair of Green Lanterns grab an experimental (by Oan standards, so...  its really neat) spacecraft that's kind of a Lantern itself, and go off to find out why Lanterns are dying out in deep, deep space.

Happy Nigel Tufnel Day, people

Today it's 11/11/11

How DC Comics got me to stop worrying and learn to love the trade

You know, from the moment I read about the DC relaunch back in June, I knew it was going to wind up changing my buying habits.  And, indeed, that seems to be the case.


I'm already buying fewer floppies (sorry, comics industry) and planning to buy trades of series of which I've only read an issue or two.  In truth, DC really seemed to get their act together on trades right up until about a year ago, and then started getting a bit confusing about them all over again.  For a while, it seemed like the plan was that if a story line wrapped up in January, in February or March we'd see a hardback edition (usually about the same cost as the issues) and then in late summer or fall, we might see the trade paperback.


I thought it was pretty fair, as far as release windows go.  But, yeah, figuring out when the Green Lantern and Wonder Woman trades were going to come out (a few of the series I went in "all trade" on a while back) has been a bit confusing, and it seems less likely that you can predict releases again.  


Still, its worlds better than the 90's when it was utterly unpredictable what would get a collection and what would not.


But, Wednesday DC announced their publishing plans for trades for the New 52 (no word yet on other collections), and it looks like a nice, easy to understand plan aimed at putting volumes of books on the shelf at retailers and in your home.  Maybe not surprising as current Editor-in-Chief of DC is Bob Harras, who ran DC's trade collections division and built it into the business I came to trust.