Unfortunate Mutant Power Manifestations - Part II of V

Still don't really have internet access, but things are starting to resemble order again - enough so that I actually got today's strip done a couple hours early.

I think the UMPM series pretty much speaks for itself, so instead, a brief comment on the latest Avengers books - for Christ's sake, get Spider-Man and Wolverine the fuck off of these teams. I told myself it made sense for several years, when there was always some major thing going on like the SHRA or the Skrull Invasion, but for either character to be hanging out at Avengers HQ - let alone two of them simultaneously! - waiting for Kang the Conqueror or Dormammu or whomever to show up is completely ridiculous. Brand New Day is actually becoming the more tolerable context for Spider-Man in 616, and I can't have that.

Invisible Mansion

Two things:

1) I moved over the weekend, and between the time commitment and the lack of steady internet access, I didn't have a lot of stripping opportunities. Ah, strip-creating opportunities, that is.

2) C'mon - Invisible Mansion? That's funny shit.

UMPM Part II on Thursday - that's a promise.

Unfortunate Mutant Power Manifestations - Part I of V

In honor of Second Coming and the five new mutants - the "Five Lights" - whom we'll soon be meeting, this officially begins my first regular series of strips revolving around one topic. I still want to leave room to talk about other stuff as it comes up, so UMPM will be running every Thursday, while Tuesdays will remain devoted to...whatever else strikes me.

As a postscript to Second Coming and my earlier comments on it, I'm happy to say that I'm sufficiently impressed with Matt Fraction's work (which I'm choosing to credit almost completely with the success of Second Coming) and the new Heroic Age status quo that I'm going to start following Uncanny X-Men regularly again - for the first time in around 120 issues. They've made so much hay about this vampire business that I hadn't even realized there might be something else coming that keeps the Hope plot moving. My optimism is still of the cautious variety, and I may change my mind before too long, but for now I can't wait to see what's next.

Shadowland #1

So yeah, I guess we can forget what I said last month about Daredevil not wanting to kill people.

I'm not sure what to make of Shadowland yet. I've been reading DD since the Bendis run, and yeah, on the one hand this seems like a natural climax to the last several years of the series the same way Siege was a natural climax to the last several years of Avengers stories. But again, there's still a weird gulf between DD in last month's #507 and DD in Shadowland. I have trouble buying that he's suddenly that much further down the dark path than he was in Japan. There's a chance, of course, that he's being influenced by some magical Hand whatever now, but that would be way too easy...and kind of a cop-out from having to deal with the more realistic...let's say, grittening of the character that's been going on for a while. Like Tony Stark losing his memories of the entire SHRA period.

And speaking of the dark path, now that Elektra is getting involved in the story, the huge freaking deal that's going to be made over Bullseye's murder just makes that much less sense - she's killed dozens and dozens of people, but that's okay because gosh darn it, she tries to do good, but DD kills freaking Bullseye, after being directly provoked, and he simply must be stopped? And that firm moral judgment is being made by the guys who put Wolverine on multiple Avengers teams at the same time?

RIP Harvey Pekar

'Nuff said.

Why I Don't Read DC #1

If you've read at least a handful of my strips by now, you've probably noticed I almost never touch on DC stuff. I find Batman and Green Arrow fundamentally interesting characters, and I try to keep up with them somewhat, but the universe as a whole turns me off almost entirely.

Luckily I have Mike - the aforementioned roommate - to keep me apprised of the important goings-on, whether I want to be or not. Needless to say, most of our conversations are of the "you'll never guess what they're doing now" variety. So much so that I'm pre-emptively calling this strip #1 of what will become the "Why I Don't Read DC" series, because that's how certain I am that there will be more of this.

Fair use notwithstanding, I suppose I should credit Shawn Davis and Jamie Grant, whose decent art from Green Lantern #55 I used in lieu of my own for the first panel. It's very important to me that, simplistic as the "drawing" style may be, the strips don't come across as lazy - but I meant it when I said that I just couldn't make that funnier. I guess that could be seen as a compliment.

Star Wars: Legacy #49

Anyone who knows me would tell you how surprising it is that I managed to make it this long without doing a strip about a Star Wars comic. SW is an even bigger obsession for me than the Marvel U, and I read pretty much everything that comes out. There's been an enormous controversy recently over Legacy being cancelled as of issue #50, and while I've said my piece (and more) on the matter in other areas, I really wanted to do something with the series while I still could. Luckily, there's no shortage of weird in it to wring some funny out of. If you don't read the series, now would be a good time to start looking at the trades, but be warned - this isn't as far from the truth as you'd like to think.

Google Earth

First in-strip F-word! Yay!!

I have a long and storied history with internet mapping. A long, long time ago, MapQuest, who was pretty much the only game in town at the time, became the first site to give you the option of seeing satellite views of something. I've always been a huge nerd for aerial photography, so I thought this was pretty much the greatest thing ever, and I immediately went about assembling a ginormous patchwork-quilt poster of Manhattan from dozens of MapQuest's tiny little photo bits (the entire view at this point was maybe a 300px-wide square). Said poster come out to around 3' by 5', and is hanging on the wall behind me as I type this.

Fast-forward several years; Google Maps made it much fancier and more useful, but satellite photography was still pretty much it. Enter Street View. The day I discovered that quickly became a maelstrom of nostalgia as I first zoomed around to famous places I'd visited, then the homes of family members, and finally all my old apartments going back to college - I even looked up the alley where I got mugged once.

And it was on there!

So surely Street View was as good as it could get, right? I flirted briefly with Google Earth when it was first released as its own application, but in those days it wasn't nearly fleshed out enough to really get its point across. Recently, though, they've integrated it with Google Maps, which has triggered yet another wave of obsessive zooming - except this time I'm literally flying over and around three-dimensional buildings!!

As far as things have come in ten years or so, Google Earth still feels like it's only just getting started. Huge swaths of Pittsburgh, for example, have barely been touched by the modelers, and even my own not-inconsiderable internet speeds can take a bit to really give you a fully-realized major metropolitan area.

But imagine what we'll be able to do with this in another ten years?

The Big Bang Theory

Totally true story.

For a while, I was able to safely ignore The Big Bang Theory. I was aware of it, but it kept enough distance from my Venn Diagram that I didn't really have an opinion of it. After a while, I heard that Sara Gilbert had a recurring role as Johnny Galecki's love interest, and having grown up on Roseanne and the fantastic Darlene/David storyline, I had to give it a shot, at least for novelty's sake.

After suffering through the entirety of Sara Gilbert's first episode, the sullying of Darlene/David's good name was maybe in the top five things that annoyed me about it. My impression of the show is that it's essentially a geek minstrel show - the mainstream public having a laugh at what they think are the ways of a certain group of people, without really knowing anything about them, and said group largely allowing it, if not eating it up themselves.

Nevertheless, I was still able to basically ignore it for a while, though signs of its increasing success were and are prevalent. But alas, in the last couple months, my roommate has finally taken to it, and thanks to seemingly the entire fucking series being scattered throughout YouTube in 3-10 minute chunks, I've been enduring daily barrages of it from the other side of my wall. To paraphrase my favorite movie (featuring Sara Gilbert, I might add), I didn't like the show before, but I fucking hate it now.