REVIEW SUMMARY: The first issue of Dark Horse Comics latest Star Wars offering, returning to the characters from the original film.
MY RATING: 
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Shortly after the battle at Yavin IV, both the rebellion and the empire struggle to recover from their losses and make headway in their campaigns. A rebel scouting party is ambushed, leading to the conclusion that something threatens the rebellion from within.
MY REVIEW:
PROS: An interesting glimpse at our heroes, and some great scenes communicating just what a galactic rebellion entails.
CONS: Uneven pacing, with a lot of soul-searching and catch-up information interrupting the narrative and sapping the story of momentum. By issue’s end the story has barely started. It fails to feel like a continuation of the movie.
BOTTOM LINE: An imperfect first issue showing hints of promise, but its too early to judge. Not quite up to the standards Dark Horse has maintained with the property.
Warning: spoilers ahead.
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In a recent Twitter exchange the subject of Banacek came up.
For those too young to remember, Banacek was an NBC series starring George Peppard as a suave Polish investigator assigned to uncover the mystery of objects and people that went missing under seemingly impossible circumstances. It struck me that you could not pitch a character like Banacek today; He was a womanizer (the first episode features the ever-yummy Anitra Ford serving him champagne while he watches TV), smoked cigars, and his job was to help insurance companies avoid paying claims. You might pitch it as a period piece, a la Mad Men, as a window to a less-enlightened time, but never as a modern show, at least not without significant modifications. It got me thinking about what SF/F TV characters would fail as new creations today.
To be clear, I do not mean reboots or reimaginings. I mean characters existing as they did when they were originally portrayed on TV, with their personality traits and behaviors intact, and pitching them in today’s social and political climate. We’ve come quite a distance from couples sleeping in separate beds, but there are things considered taboo today that were rampant on TV past.
Here are few that came to mind…
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Last week brought us Christian Cardona’s excellent fan film based on the opening chapter of the comic book Y: The Last Man.
Y: The Last Man was a 60 issue comic by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra beginning in 2002. It starts with every male mammal on Earth dying horribly, all at once, and without explanation. All except two.
Yorick Brown is an aspiring escape artist with a Capuchin monkey named Ampersand. He’s in the middle of proposing to his girlfriend Beth over the phone (she’s in Australia) when the event happens. Yorick’s mother is a congresswoman, who now has an even more urgent interest in the well-being of her son. So under the protection of the lethal Agent 355, Yorick sets out to find cloning expert Dr. Alison Mann, who may be the world’s only hope. But all Yorick wants to do is get back together with Beth.
The series had a rather wide scope as it explored the misadventures of Yorick and his impact on the world at large. Some social-political realities of a unisex world were explored, such as the fact that majority of the surviving US lawmakers are Democrats, or that the only country with a functioning military is Israel. There are also a ninja, Cosmonauts stranded in orbit, religious fanatics and (in one memorable storyline) a dominatrix. Conspiracies and hidden agendas abound. Every character has a back-story rife with secrets. There were plotlines about what happens to male-dominated religions when the females remain true to their faith, how the transgendered adapt to cope with the new world, and what art might look like in a female-only society. It was a truly compelling series, with a unique set of characters and a staggering spectrum of motivations. Not exactly post-apocalyptic, and not exactly dystopian (depending on your definition of both), it was in turns heartbreaking, hilarious, thought-provoking, and terrifying.
And, I say again, it has a monkey.
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We’re a quarter of the way through 2012 and the Science Fiction/Fantasy comic book landscape has certainly changed since last year. While long-form mainstays like Fables, Elephantmen, Hellboy/BPRD, and Conan continue in peak form, there are a number of quality genre books out that do not require knowledge of baggage-laden continuities. There are also genuine SF titles coming into their own, and some well-handled licensed properties currently gracing the comics racks.
Last year saw the incredibly talented Nate Simpson release Nonplayer #1, a beautifully drawn book about augmented reality and MMORPGs. It made such an impact that the film rights were optioned almost immediately. Unfortunately we have yet to see a second issue, but in recent weeks a couple books have make a similar splash…
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It is Christmas, Hanukkah, Mithras, Festivus, and Solstice Week…and that means it’s time for the 2011 Bad Day Studio Holiday Card.
This one’s a 5500 word beast of a tale about power outages, podcasting, and time travel called Candle Gardens.
It is dedicated to two friends of mine who died this year, but it goes out to anyone who found themselves in the path of nature, misfortune, or any force outside their control.
Happy Holidays to all the SF Signal readers and irregulars!
[Editors note: You, too, Jeff! Folks should also check out Jeff's holiday greetings from 2009 and 2010.]
Has this ever happened to you?
An armored figure gazes out the viewport as an induced wormhole blossoms open, disgorging a swarm of war-mecha towards his fortress habitat. Ten thousand coordinated targeting masers paint the slowly spinning hull. The figure smiles at his attackers, then transmits a signal. Suddenly, the strange-matter tentacles of an ancient AI construct thought lost for millennia emerge from the darkness. Within moments the entity begins burning through the swarm, its insane mathematical laughter shrieking across the radio spectrum. The armored figure trains the fortress weapons on the remaining war-mecha, and, just before he speaks, the SUV with a “COEXIST” bumper sticker that you’re about to pass swerves into your lane without signaling for no good reason.
I have an hour-plus one-way commute to work. These hefty slices of confinement and solitude have one benefit: they allow me time to catch up on podcasts (such as Nerdist and another one who’s name escapes me) and radio shows (Stephen Fry’s English Delight and The Infinite Monkey Cage are favorites) but the bulk of the time is taken up with audio books.
Last year I listened to over 500 hours of science fiction audio, far outstripping the number of meatspace books I read. I’ve become cognizant of two things: First, nothing breaks dramatic tension and rips you back into the real world like idiot drivers; second, much of my relationship with the story is shaped by the narrator of the audio book. Over the week or two it takes me to listen to a book I become accustomed to the style of the reader. They become a traveling companion, and a reader/listener dynamic inexorably asserts itself chapter by chapter. By the time we approach the story’s climax I find myself identifying shifts in tone or delivery as portents that things are about to happen.
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It’s Christmas Week, and that means it’s time for the 2010 Bad Day Studio Holiday Card. It’s a little tale of bad behavior, a strange visitation, and what happens to pain during the holidays. I give you “Roadside Epiphanies“!
May your Holidays be merry ones!
The sky is downright Jovian.
I’m driving up Route 95. The audiobook of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl is playing. His description of the humid climate of Thailand seems to be in combat with the air conditioning. The windshield fogs up more than once.
Most Readercon weekends it is either oppressively hot or unnaturally stormy, as if the weather of some inhospitable world has taken up residence. This year the heat wave which has dominated the northeast for the past week is past its peak but still present. Livid cumulonimbi hold court over Burlington, Massachusetts, creating inverted canyons almost too big for the sky to hold.
My printout of the program grid sits on the passenger seat, with panels and events already highlighted. Part of my pre-con prep. This year is Readercon 21. Damn. I’ve been attending since number 2 when I was in my mid-twenties. Some years it’s just a day-trip for me, but I get there. I assume some strange time-contraction is in play because, considering that the convention skipped a couple years, this inexplicable passage of time means I am getting older, a fact that is simply unacceptable.
That faint reminder of mortality lightly permeates the weekend for me, as last year Charles N. Brown passed away while returning home from Readercon. As I walk the halls and peruse the Bookstore I catch glimpses of so many writers who have been regulars at the con, whom I’ve gotten the chance to speak to, hear them read their stories and discuss their origins. Recalling the accumulation of experience also reminds just how much this mid-year exploration of the literature of ideas has been a constant in my adult life.
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Bob Fingerman is best known for his comic series Minimum Wage (Fantagraphics Books), as well as the graphic novel White Like She (also Fantagraphics). In 2010 the collected edition of From the Ashes (IDW), a “speculative memoir” featuring Bob and his wife Michele in post-apocalyptic NYC, was released.
His second novel, Pariah, comes out from Tor in July. He will also have a short story in the eagerly anticipated zombie anthology The Living Dead 2 (Night Shade Books).
SF Signal has the opportunity to talk to Bob about the apocalypse, zombies and mutants. Oh my!
Jeff Patterson: Post-Apocalypse stories have roots as dystopian cautionary tales, but in the last few years the Post-Apocalyptic Comedy has become quite the robust sub-genre in film and comics. What about it appeals to you? And why do you think it appeals to audiences?
Bob Fingerman: Has it? I must have missed all of it. Unless you mean that hilarious comedy movie, The Road. I kid. I haven’t seen it yet, but I gather it’s somewhat lacking in chuckles. Has there been an uptick in PA comedy? Other than Peter Bagge’s Apocalypse Nerd I haven’t seen any. I’d like to, though. All approaches to post-apocalypse entertainment hold great appeal for me. I just love the genre. Maybe not so much in reality, but as a backdrop it can’t be beat. You have modern people thrust back into medieval times, but still craving their iPhones and what have you. It’s freedom from the status quo, but with plenty of peril and challenge. And if, like me, you choose to furnish your wasteland with mutants and the living dead, it’s too much fun. As for audiences, who knows? I just think we as a species are equally attracted to and terrified by the prospect of it all going kerflooey.
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Last week John asked my opinion on the recent highly-publicized Superman/Batman comic book auctions.
Comic fans are a chatty lot, and there has already been quite a bit of debate over the sales and the goodly sums paid. We’ve seen this kind of thing before, the most infamous occurrence being the advent of the speculator boom in the 80s and 90s.
I prefer to interpret it (read: delude myself) as showing love for the comics of an earlier age. Yes, they were a tad naïve, and orders of magnitude inferior in both writing and art to much of the product generated since. Same can be said for a lot of art forms. But at the time they were new and exciting, a frantic burst of adventurous escapism spawned almost fully-formed from the pulps that preceded them.
Given current events in comics, I’d welcome some of that right now.
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Ah, Boskone.
I’ve got a weird kindred relationship with this con. I’ve been going on-and-off since my late teens, and a good number of books still on my shelves were purchased there. It was the first relatively nearby con I became aware of, and it moved from hotel to hotel, occasionally from city to city. The year I moved out of Springfield MA was the year it relocated there for the start of a 5 year run. It’s been back in Boston for most of the past decade, and I attend when I can.
The one element of Boskone that has never disappointed over the years has been the Art Show. Quite frankly it’s the yardstick by which I measure other Art Shows. This year I got to be part of it.
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REVIEW SUMMARY: A mainlined dose of beautifully rendered classic SF.
MY RATING: 
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: An omnibus of Al Williamson’s spectacular work on Flash Gordon strips and comics.
MY REVIEW:
PROS: Great reproductions, nice format, and a nice surprise.
CONS: None worth complaining about.
BOTTOM LINE: Over 200 pages of retro-sexy fanboy bliss.
The subtitle of this volume is “A Lifelong Vision of the Heroic,” and this book delivers on every page. After an introduction by Groo and MAD cartoonist Sergio Aragones, Mark Schultz gives us the story of how Al Williamson came to be the Flash Gordon illustrator-of-choice in the wake of Alex Raymond. What follows is a breathtaking collection of Williamson’s work from the 50s all the way to 2001.
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It is with great joy and merriment that I unleash the 2009 Bad Day Studio Holiday Card on an unsuspecting world. It’s a little ditty about the apocalypse and astronomy at the North Pole called “On This Longest Night“.
This is the 15th year I’ve done an SF/F story for the season. Previous tales can be found at the Holiday Card Archive.
Our good host John has been gracious enough to post to my last few cards, and for this I thank him.
I wish you all a happy and safe Chanukah, Solstice, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, Yule, Christmas, Festivus, Yak Shaving Day, or whatever celebration you take comfort in.
I’ll have the virtual fireplace on the main viewer while Klingon Karols play.
We’re a week out from Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, in my beloved Montreal.
Worldcons are fickle beasts, for the sole reason that there is just so damned much to do. We’re talking about thousands of people, hundreds of events, and every facet of this vast and ungainly thing we call “fandom” brought to light in some manner. Even after thirty years of attending cons, I still get little chills thinking about the singular experiences that never fail to pepper the long weekend: lucking into a Kaffeeklatsche; finding an unexpected pin next to my name on the Voodoo Message Board; encountering an author whose book I just happen to have on my person; having a wholly non-ironic conversation about broadcast engineering with a guy in an Elfquest outfit. Only at a Worldcon can you accidentally walk into a lecture about caring for your Stargate bobbleheads, wonder aloud why there are still Sailor Moon fans on the planet, and overhear extended passages from somebody’s “Me and Summer Glau Trapped on a Shuttlecraft in a Decaying Orbit” fan fiction while waiting for an elevator, all in one afternoon.
Even at their worst, Worldcons are magnificent.
I adroitly delude myself that I have the know-how and Con cred to efficiently maximize my enjoyment, but my plans, without exception, get tossed shortly after I grab my badge. Still, there are items and events that always tentpole the convention experience:
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Sad news this week as we learned that the last Munchkin has died.
They will be remembered as a proud people who weathered oppression and scandal. They were diverse. They were tough.
In a time when we humans focus on our relationship with Hobbits, and Oompa-Loompas publicly disgrace themselves, let us celebrate these kindly little folk, and the donut holes named after them.
Hey. I’m Jeff Patterson, from the slowly-reawakening blog Gravity Lens. John has graciously invited me to post over here, and I’d like to take the opportunity to vent about something that’s been gnawing at me.
After 30-plus years of reading SF and attending conventions, there are whole areas of fandom I do not understand: anime-based LRPGs; amateur neo-pagan Tolkien scholars; the three Fs of Filking, Furries, and Fanfic. But at least I can, in some bizarre way, comprehend what the attraction to these strange pursuits might be, regardless of there place on the geek hierarchy.
Then there is the incomprehensible. The truly alien.
I speak of the unceasing cute-ification of action figures.
A while back our esteemed hosts here at SF Signal posted an image of an My Little Cthulhu. I chuckled at it in an ironic way, not knowing the horror that awaited. In the past few years the market for little stylized figures has exploded. Minimates, Kubricks, and Mighty Muggs, all seemingly descended from Fisher Price ancestors, fill the toystores and specialty shops. The monthly Diamond Catalog is rife with them. This plague has infected science fiction. The genre’s finest heroes, monsters, and villains are reduced to the status of horrible two-inch tall eyesores.
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