Is it wrong that I want this guy to continue committing crimes in similar fashion? Look, I fervently believe robbery is wrong, but the dichotomy here is that it is also AWESOME.

Boy, a whole week blew by and I said nothing, according to that little calendar way down the sidebar that gently indicates posts. I also don’t feel like talking about Ms. Goshdarnityoubetcha from last night’s debate, so I’ll go back to the food theme and mention one of my favorite beverages. Mainly because I fear Blue Sky will stop making it, a fear born from the fact that Fred Meyer recently stopped stocking it and now I have to go to Whole Foods for it. It’s their Peach Mist tea soda which tastes good and has an oddly calming effect. Also no corn syrup. Please encourage the consumption of this fine drink so it doesn’t vanish.

I’m going to try to schedule some posts for next week, since another calendar here tells me I have JURY DUTY.

UPDATE: This Australian kid is a future super-villain and should be sent into deep space on a rocket now.

I usually think we make way too much of actors because we often conflate them with roles they played, essentially treating Ed Harris like he was the first man to orbit the Earth instead of the one who gave us the intolerable biopic Pollack. But Paul Newman really did live up to the hype. He’s not frozen in time at Cool Hand Luke because he did great work in every decade he lived. I always particularly appreciate him as Sid Mussberger in The Hudsucker Proxy, not afraid to play comically despicable. I also love that the Pixar team appropriately got him to play a race car in Cars. And though he likely didn’t concoct the ingredients personally (or did he?), his Family Italian dressing is something I always have to have in my fridge.

Paul, you were the real thing!

Kiel Phegley at Marvel.com tried to make my rambling make sense, but I just never come off well when answering questions on the phone. For instance- what am I even talking about here?

Jeff Parker: I appreciate it, too. [Laughs] What I’m interested in is starting in the next issue, little cracks start to come through the stories, and you start to get this weird second story happening, so I’m curious to see what everybody’s going to say. We played it pretty straight in the first one, but then you’re going to start getting some of the “Well, it’s the Sentry, and he’s crazy!”

Good luck decrypting me, Parkerologists of the early 21st Century. I spew more undecipherables, like this:

Jeff Parker: Yeah. We’re directly involved with it. It works surprisingly neatly into it, but I can’t tell you [more]. Obviously you saw the solicitation for the DARK REIGN: NEW NATION issue is classified. It’s like, “Who’s in this special?” Everybody assumed Agents of Atlas were in it because my name’s on it, [so] I guess I just let that one out. [Laughs]

WHAT THE HELL AM I TALKING ABOUT!!!???

I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to clear up misconceptions about how editors and writers and artists actually work together and how projects at Marvel come about, when all most people need to do is read Tom Brevoort’s blog. Here’s a good recent piece with Tom over at CBR that explains the landscape really well, I’m just going to start sending people to it, like right now.

The problem is, if you pop into a forum and objectively explain the process, everyone virtual-nods and seems to digest what you’ve said, and then immediately default back to a fantasy version of how it works. Again, I’m only going to drop Brevoort links from now on, and send them all into what I like to call THE VOORTEX.

Over at Newsarama, we all sound like hopeless mumblers compared to the radio pro John Siuntres. These are always great, even if I’m in them. John and I talk about the upcoming Agents of Atlas and the oddly disappearing X-Men First Class. Go listen, or Momma Cage will MAKE YOU LISTEN.

Man, I have not been to that show since it was merely a Klingonfest, but now it’s become the Cosplayah Mecca, once again documented like crazy by the Mad Photographer Patrick Sun. Pretty impressive flickr pools, go check it out- and judge, judge, judge.

At Comic Book Resources!

-was originally a planet where the last words uttered were, “Okay, fire up the supercollider!”

National Geographic has a good article on the supercollider and the God Particle online now. See you on the Event Horizon!

*Don’t worry, I’ve run the numbers and this will not create a tiny black hole. It will, however, open up a stargate.

Now, the hell if I’m going to listen to this, nothing offends me quite like the sound of my own voice. But you feel free to go over to Marvel.com and listen to their podcast version of the Stern show with me and host Jeff Suter talking about AGE OF THE SENTRY which ships this month. This week maybe?

That’s the FRANKENSTEIN monster and The Hulk, because it had to happen. Coincidentally, right at Halloween. I talk to Vaneta Rogers at Newsarama about how the characters are related, mythically and stuff.

Zack, you gotta get faster, Vaneta is all ON these stories!

Welcome back to the ongoing series of Reviews From Someone With Kids Who Rarely Sees Movies In The Same Year They Are Released or whatever I was calling this movie feature. I feel I don’t have to do any kind of SPOILER! warnings because everyone in every country has usually seen said films before me. Actually I’m kind of catching up, not being as far behind as usual because my kids are becoming easier to babysit, and the reason I hadn’t seen Kingdom of the Crystal Skull yet was my own delaying tactics.

Simply, Raiders of the Lost Ark was a benchmark for me and the kinds of entertainment I liked growing up. In 1980 I was old enough to go watch movies by myself when dropped off, and I thought my head had exploded, seeing so much of what I’d wanted on a screen all at once. I ran to the lobby and called my mom to tell her to come pick me up later so I could sit through it again ( a kid from my school sat next to me and babbled throughout, I wanted to watch it intently this time). Jump ahead a generation to a big gang of my studiomates going en masse to watch the Fourth Indy Movie, and me later hearing disappointment from trusted fans. So I finally went the other night when it was second-run at one of the McMenamin’s theaters here, which serve beer and food while you watch the movie- I hedged my bets. No, it wouldn’t retroactively ruin my childhood, but it might make me feel bad for everyone involved, admittedly a weird familial thing to attach to a group of entertainers but I suspect many of you can relate to it.

As often happens when you turn your expectations down way low, I was pleasantly surprised. Not that it couldn’t have been a much better movie, but the fact that I bought it as an Indiana Jones movie was quite an accomplishment. Beforehand, I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that a sequel nearly 20 years later could connect enough to convince me that it was part of the world of the first three, but it did. I didn’t have problems with the sci-fi elements like a lot of people did, I always assumed since it would be in the 1950’s that the story would go there- that was the dominant B movie/serial genre of the time. Going the route of burying it in the past was the right way to do it (I also was dropped off to Chariots of The Gods as a kid).

Of course I am disappointed that Lucas and Spielberg pulled off the revisit- which I think would be the hardest part- and then didn’t get the screenplay to the point it needed to be to make this a Great Indy film. I realize that you’re up against a lot with a movie like this- all the actors and filmmakers have windows of availability to commit to a particular film, and at some point you have to go with what you’ve got that everyone generally agrees to. But the Koepp script feels rewritten and there’s way too much of everyone running through the plot barking exposition that we can’t even follow. It’s at that point you have to streamline and let go of some of what you think has to be in there for this to be an Indiana Jones movie because it’s getting in the way of the story moving up to another level. Sure, throwing John Hurt in does absolve you of any number of sins, but wouldn’t it have been novel to flesh out the villain for once so she’s sympathetic? Or to go a little deeper into Indy himself and walk a bit on the line that Unforgiven did with giving the final word on this kind of escapist protagonist (keep in mind I do not mean with the kind of tone Unforgiven has, but looking back at the body as a whole in that way).

The refrigerator escape didn’t bother me so much, but that’s more because I wasn’t really engaged in the opening of the movie- just like I didn’t appreciate the winking bit of showing the Arc of the Covenant- Indy referring to it in the tunnel in Venice in Last Crusade did that better. All of that opener could have been more of a build to a bigger reveal of Indy and it would have felt right. The problem with wanting to jump into ‘rollercoaster ride’ mode is that it doesn’t trust the audience, and brings this down to the level of the Mummy series or National Treasure- any of the kinds of movies that usually run in the shadows of the Indiana Jones series. The right way to think is like the Daniel Craig Bond movie- strip out what we assume a James Bond movie has to have and define what makes a James Bond movie. I’m not asking for too much because the director is Spielberg- it’s not like he isn’t capable of that. But again, I suspect it comes down to having to go with the script you’ve got at the right time. I guess I’m thinking of Bond here because after the H-Bomb escape, Indy is subjected to Dr. No shower-scrub that is all you need when exposed to a nuclear blast.

Now I’ll counter myself some (I love sabotaging my own arguments!)- the father-son moments could have been given more heart by looking back at the ones from Last Crusade. And someone correct me if this was in there and I just never noticed it, but one of my favorite Indy details-again mostly from Last Crusade- is his tendency to throw off a mean smile after a narrow escape that usually dooms his pursuers. That was a characteristic that always added a nice twist to the adventure genre, a hero who doesn’t acknowledge the deadliness with a “whew!” but zings Death each time with a “hah!”.

So for me, this was still entertaining and a pleasant surprise, but falls into the Temple of Doom range rather than the peaks of Raiders and Crusade. Similarly, I was happy to see that I didn’t mind Shia LeBeouf (still hate that name), though someone more likeable could have filled that role. I don’t think I’m asking too much of an Indiana Jones movie; my nitpicking doesn’t really come from trying to keep the Sanctity of My Childhood. Rather because it was this series along with Jaws and Star Wars that created the paradigm shift in American film, where what used to be B Movies took the role of A Movies, and now we have some of the greatest actors of stage and film filling even minor roles in a Harry Potter entry. I’m not condemning that, far from it- it’s the type of thing I do for a living and I’m all for genre escapism dominating the box office most of the time. But we can also elevate what to expect from a B Movie.

The look of it was right and it felt appropriately ’50’s to me, but ultimately much of what does work in Crystal Skull is due to Harrison Ford jumping into the role as earnestly as he can. He gave it his best and didn’t cross the line that many actors will of letting us know that they know they’re in a movie, Brendan Fraser. This goes some way to redeeming a string of unmentionable movies in recent years- rock on, Harrison.

Amazon air-lifted my fat copy of SCORCHY SMITH AND THE ART OF NOEL SICKLES yesterday! This is truly a thing of beauty. I’m not going to ramble on about how incredible it is, because Leif Peng already did that much better in a post the other day. Thanks Dean Mullaney, for a top notch production. This will sit proudly next to my IDW volumes of Terry and the Pirates, when I’m not poring through it. I’m projecting back to me in 1990 who would have killed to have a Sickles book like this, so excuse me if I open a temporal loop that must later be repaired.

You may have seen the news that Virgin Comics has folded up like a Transformer and driven away. The only interruption for me is that it kills a short Gamekeeper prequel I had written and Ron Randall and Ron Chan were working on, other than that I was done with all my Virgin work. I’d like to point you to the talented Ashish Padlekar, who worked with me on the Walk-In series. If any of the Indian artists who worked in the Bangalore studio get wider known, he should be one of them. That book was a lot of head-trippy fun.

But now where will I get paid to write characters who swear?

When John Woo’s FACE OFF came out, I thought the whole world had gone mad. Everyone I knew was raving about it like it wasn’t a big steaming pile and even NPR pieces were talking about the premise completely straight like it wasn’t too much to swallow even by Woo standards. They could have easily made up some sci-fi hoodoo about remapping brains that would have been more plausible than SWITCHING FACES so suddenly your own wife can’t tell that you have a different body (and they didn’t switch their vocal cords did they? Why did they sound like the other? And I’m someone who usually has no problem believing a man can fly (though I draw the line on him said flying man being a creepy superstalker who abandons a family and only fights crime in “post”, thanks WB for erasing that movie!).

But now, technology has caught up with Travolta and Cage! Surgeons in China and France are getting good at putting whole faces on patients. To spare you I tried to make this one with the bear-attack victim kind of small, but if you click to the article, you’ll see a couple that will make you do a double take.

I’m glad advances are being made to help people get back to a non-Jonah Hex life, but I still think Face Off was awful.

First, I‘m talking about the HULK vs. FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER coming up this Halloween over at ComicMonsters.com, appropriately.

Then, for you layabouts down in the Los Angeles area, there’s a cool appearance/signing over at Meltdown Comics, and my main thug Doselle Young will be there. Heck, maybe Walter Mosely will be there too. Here’s the details and sweet cover…
DATE: SATURDAY, AUGUST 23RD.
TIME: 3-5PM
WHAT: A BOOK SIGNING FOR THE DARKER MASK
WHERE: MELTDOWN COMICS in HOLLYWOOD.
7522 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, Ca 90046
323. 851.7223

First, you can read me and Paul Tobin talking about the upcoming AGE OF THE SENTRY miniseries at Marvel.com . And then you can go read Paul’s first story with artist Ramon Rosanas, who we’re all becoming huge fans of. For nothing! Now that’s a value. The giant bear doesn’t actually show up until issue 2, but I think you’ll be pleased with what’s in the debut. The hillbillies are in issue three, for hillbilly fans who have been asking.

Fred Van Lente, the Man of Plenty, and I speak about the Adventures books over at CBR, and yes, we address that offhanded Kirkman line about the books “talking down to kids.” But mostly we just sling Yo Momma jokes at each other. Pretend to be working on your powerpoint presentation for Thursday and go read us yakking instead.

And don’t forget, there’s a Colleen Coover page in this week’s X-Men: First Class, so snag that.

“And it [the set] was full of dwarfs and all kinds of people. I love dwarfs. They’re the happiest people in the world. And I loved to chase them around the set and stuff like that. So the whole thing was colossal fun.”

From the George Khoury piece on the 1980 Flash Gordon movie at CBR this week.

X-Men: First Class#15 is out this week, drawn by the InKomparable Karl Kesel. Go read the first few pages over at Comic Book Resources.