I'm reading James Kochalka's Superf*ckers from Top Shelf. Its this surreal comic about a bunch of teen aged superheroes who live together. Story about how they (don't) get along, get high and unknowingly save the world. There are some hilarious characters in this and if you're familiar with Kochalka's '6 yr old with a pen and potty mouth' style you can sure as hell expect disturbing graphics and ridiculous side plots. Good stuff - funny as hell. Four issues in total.


This image is hidden for guests. Please login or register to see it.

Edit: Somebody shift this to the MBG section.

Watching this Kiwi TV show Outrageous Fortune about a family of criminals. At the start of the show the father/ husband is sentenced to 4 years in jail and the story revolves around the mom who wants the family to go straight and only do legitimate work. She's hampered in her quest for honest hard work by her family which is the grand dad who suffers from Alzheimer's, twin boys one of who is a lawyer after falsely claiming Maori heritage to get a job, his twin who's a royal fuck up and working for a Chinese family that may or may not be involved with the Triads, a daughter who wants to be a model but is currently a stripper and the youngest daughter who's just plain old evil. Overall, very entertaining so far and solid time pass.

This sounds like Arrested Development from the land down under. Promising.

^^ Yeah, a slightly more serious version of that with lots of T&A

^^ oh good to know!

saw this film noir Night and City, based upon a hustler whose lifestyle affects the lives of the people around him in different ways. Pretty solid film and good for a one time watch.

Just read 11 issues of John Layman's Chew, illustrated by Rob Guillory. Its about this "Cibopath", viz. a person who can trace the history of whatever they eat (from oranges to bacon to corpses to shit!), Tony Chu who is a detective working for the FDA. The comic is a nice mix of noir, sci-fi and interestingly, a vampire angle. Lots of T&A and gore - recommended.

Saw Howl's Moving Castle today. Story is a Spirited Away retread but it's still very good, with some touching moments, and the visuals are downright astounding. This is another Miyazaki classic.

It's been one of those weekends when just about everything I've watched has been at least good if not fucking brilliant. A few more like these and I might just get cured of terminal curmudgeonitis. Anyway, here are a bunch of films I recommend unhesitatingly.

I decided to start what I called the deranged lawmaker double bill with Mad Detective This is a very entertaining constantly engaging Hong Kong based thriller about a detective who uses psychic powers to crack cases - he believes in reliving what the criminal did, talks to his dead wife who appears to be his psychic familiar of sorts and cl aims to be able to see the inner personalities of people. Halfway through the film, you realise he just might be plain delusional when it is revealed its been six months since he last saw his psychiatrist. Saying anymore would be getting into spoiler territory.

Up next was Bad Lieutenant the only Herzog movie I've ever seen (and I suspect the only Herzog movie ever made) to have a notionally happy ending. Nicholas Cage is the titular bad lieutenant, strung out on drugs most of the time to quell a chronic back pain. Through the film, his drug, hooker and gambling habit find him in fuckloads of trouble, with huge debts to pay, and little cash in hand to pay them with. This IS Cage's best performance in years - he doesn't overact too much even when he's supposed to be high as a kite. For the most part, the movie has a very sombre depressing vibe to it. A very good movie that really doesn't make you conscious of its near two hour long running time.

Toy Story 3 returns to the form of the original Toy Story and I daresay even surpasses it in a few sequences. Gone are the forced and pointless Dreamworks-esque 'references' to other films that bogged down the pace and plotting on TS2. The plot is pretty much cadged from the first couple of films - x crisis happens and its down to Woody to save the day/help the toys escape blah blah. What makes this movie terrific is (comparatively speaking) VERY little preachy bullshit on friendship, bravery and courage. I have a feeling Disney figured Marvel had the market for this cornered and that they wouldn't even try competing. The toys are also in genuinely perilous situations far more often than I remember. It's easily the gutsiest Disney has been in a LONG time. Great gags, terrific action (much more so than that turd of an A-team film) and some genuinely affecting sappy moments.

Harry Brown The always reliable Michael Caine takes on the Chavs in this Brit avatar of Gran Torino. Except unlike Eastwood, Caine does a lot more than mouth off in a surly undertone and is a stabbing, gun shooting killing machine. And what's better, he does so in an entirely convincing way. The movie makes a few nods to it being the late 2000s with the chavs filming the mayhem they get up to on their mobile phones - something that really happens on a fairly regular basis. Great performance by Caine and even the chavs who are all imminently hateable, with none of the 'but they are people too' BS that generally gets in the way of liking films like this.

^^ give link for harry brown?

Read a bunch of comics over the last week:

The Forty Year Old Hippie - Ted Richards Old, obscure comic strip put out by Rip Off! Press. Read the Collected Volumes No.2 and its a comprehensive 40 odd page collection of the comic. The strip starts off with the protagonist, a far-out hippie, proudly proclaiming 'Two-hundred trips and they’ve all been bummers—but I ain’t givin’ up!' while poppin' a pill. Easy to see where this one goes - each short strip is a different 'trip'. Pretty funny at times with some counter-culture social commentary here and there - entertaining.

One arc up here: http://www.tedrichards.net/03_cartoons_01_fyoh_01.php

Beach Safari - Mawil Witzel An 'allegorical' graphic novel, Beach Safari tells the tale of a bunny stranded on an island with three beautiful women. Bad illustrations and pointless fucking indie/emo story where the bunny falls in love with one of the girls and the other two girls make fun of him and then the girls finally leave and the bunny is all alone, again, stranded on the beach. Fuck that. Waste of time. Top Shelf put out tons of these minimalistic, indie turds out of which very few are worth getting.

Hieronymus B. - Ulf K. A 'silent' comic where purely pictorial dialogue prevails, Hieronymus B is a clerk working in a gigantic office with a million winding staircases and endless rooms. He goes from room to room searching for a paper he needs to file and that's when shit starts getting surreal. Damn neat black & white artwork, which is good enough reason to buy the comic (there is hardly anything resembling a plot in this comic).

The Man Who Loved Breasts - Robert Goodin From the same dude who illustrated Rugrats and American Dad we get this aptly titled novel: Stanley, a man who works in a meaningless data-entry job, suddenly has an epiphany that he loves breasts.......and quits his job to open a bra manufacturing company. All is well and Stanley is a happy and rich man, until all the wimmenz start burning their bras in the feminist movement of the late 1960s. Decent artwork and a run-of-the-mill story with hardly any direction, this one was a tiresome read. Another boring entry in the Top Shelf catalog.

Tricked - Alex Robinson This was the 2006 Harvey Award winner for Best Graphic Album of Original Work and its no surprise after reading this 300 odd paged gem. There are 6 main characters with each chapter dealing with a single character in cyclical order. The chapters are numbered in descending order and they converge at chapter 1 [the last chapter] where all the characters are together in one room where drastic events unfold. The characters are great and have well-built backgrounds - Ray Beam, lead singer/guitarist of the now-defunct Tricks, struggling to write music for his second solo album; Steve, a bi-polar disorder affected schizo who obsesses about the Tricks' music while working as a computer technician; A waitress who has just broken up with her fiance; A con man; A teenager who's on the lookout for her father and an employee at Ray Beam's PR company. People who like Strangers In Paradise, Blankets and Love & Rockets will surely like this, but this will also appeal to fans of Drawn & Quarterly's autobiographical parody authors because of the very earthy characters and their day-to-day doings. The story is highly entertaining for the most part albeit being slightly cheesy and predictable towards the end. There are tons of humorous moments as the plot ricochets from character to character.

Got Harry Brown off BTjunkie. It's fairly well seeded.

Am plowing my way through Zombie aka The New Dead a very impressive (so far) horror anthology edited by Christopher Golden. The first couple of stories were exceptional - 'Lazarus' by John Conolly styles Lazarus as a hapless victim caught in a limbo between a messiah intent on miracles and a family and community starting to get genuinely horrified at having a monster in their midst; 'What Maisie Knew' by David Liss is a darkly comedic whodunnit laced with zombie sex and torture. 'Life Sentence' by Kelley Armstrong, about a rich prick who wants to keep living no matter what, is a story right out of EC comics and 'Family Business' a beautiful inversion of the usual post apocalyptic world of zombie killers that would have worked even better if it had been a little less over-written. The not so great but still engaging stories include 'Delice' by Holly Newstein that's a fairly typical voodoo zombie narrative - again very in the EC tradition but not as fun as 'Life Sentence'. 'The Wind Cries Mary' would have worked brilliantly had it been conceived off by Ray Bradbury or Niel Gaiman; someone capable of writing in a florid but still moving manner. It's essentially a zombiefied O'Henry story let down by the very plain and matter of fact style of Brian Keene. The only unreadably awful story in the lot is 'Copper' by Stephen Bissette which with its annoying as fuck dialogue and tedious Ernest Hemingwayisms was the one story I could not and am not willing to complete. Around 10 more to go before the collection winds down to a close. The one story that I am reasonably sure is going to suck is the Joe Hill entry that's composed entirely of Tweets.

Sherlock Holmes - Guy Ritchie

Just in case you didn't see my Facebook status update. Yea so this Guy Ritchie movie is really more of a "buddy" action film set in the Victorian age, and to give it some name association, the Sherlock Homes property has been employed. Characters are unmoored from their origins and memorable lines are taken wholly out of context. If you want to be a Holmes purist, almost every frame of this film will give you something to whine about.
But if it's a fast paced pulpy no-brainer action thriller you want, this movie fits the bill well. The plot mechanics are entertainingly ridiculous, Downey and Jude Law have good chemistry (suspiciously better than with their respective betroth-eds) , the action is frequently good and the visual FX never reach the overwhelming proportions they take in other more expensive Hollywood productions. Also there's significantly less dialog here than in some other Guy Rithcie films I've seen, WHICH IS GOOD!


The House with The Laughing Windows - Pupi Avati

It's another Italian Horror/Slasher. A failed painter turned restorer comes to an isolated (island?) village to restore a macabre painting by a long-gone local painter about whom the local people whisper of several perversities. As the restorer settles to his work and tries to delve deeper into the history of the painter, weird stuff happens around him.
A lot of the fear factor in this film is generated from the atmosphere of isolation and decay and strangeness, recalling MR James and the non-cosmic horror of Lovecraft. It works well in those parts and the slasher bits are functional. On the whole recommended viewing for the hardcore horror fan.

Veniss Underground - Jeff Vandermeer

Oh badasserie, massive badasserie. Jeff Vandermeer and China Mieville appear to have been thinking on very similar lines. Like some of Mieville's good novels, this one also deals with mutations and deformities, alternate dimensions, enormous monstrosities and an engaging set of lead characters who get seriously HURT in the proceedings. Story is told in 3 acts: 1st act in 1st person, 2nd in 2nd person (an idea I am going to unashamedly steal if I write something worth the effort), and 3rd in the most conventional 3rd person. This one has my unmitigated admiration as a reader.

Holmes of the Raj - Vithal Rajan Holmes and Watson come to India during the end of the 19th century and have a series of adventures through the length and breadth of the country. Overall good fun as Holmes and Watson meet mowgli, kim, motilal nehru, aurobindo, radbindranath tagore, kipling and a whole variety of other characters as they solve cases mostly of political intrigue. The whole thing reads more like a fictional travelogue at times and Watson's constant ate this, ate that, ate some more of this and then had an upset stomach for three days is a pointless waste of paper considering it happens some 3-4 times in these stories and there's very little Holmes right through the book. Still, a fun light read.

Had i not been burnt so bad by so many Holmes pastiches I'd have definitely bought this. But after I read some utter BS which had Holmes and Oscar Wylde as gay lovers, I gave up on this genre entirely.