This is just far too good...

...and, as one commenter on Pandagon put it, also "sadly appropriate," considering how Edward's stalkerish actions are commonly construed as so utterly romantic. Oh, thank you Rebellious Pixels for reminding me how - even though it may not have been perfect - Buffy was still head and shoulders above a lot of similar shows out there.

P.S.
Oops, sorry about the weird size of the thing.

A very 'not good' comic

Hey, remember that bit in Kill Bill where Bill (speaking of whom, let me just say "RIP, David Carradine") says "This is me at my most masochistic?" Well, for some reason that quote just kept popping up in my head while I was reading through the latest volume of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic. 'Cause yep, masochism really is the only way I can explain why I'm reading it at all, really.

It's not to be wholly unexpected. A common, if unfortunate side-effect of any fandom is that sometimes one will continue to invest in something long after one has become no longer, well, invested in it, just as a way of supporting it, or perhaps just out of habit, or some kind of anterograde amnesia-style perpetual forgetting of just how bad it's gotten. Perhaps it can just all be chalked up to a very misguided sense of what exactly 'fan loyalty' means. Maybe it's just Emotional Branding.

Anyway, to sum up, what I'm getting at here is that I really did not enjoy Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Time of Your Life. To summarise, ToYL is a story in which Buffy is brought into the future by a centuries-old and apparently evil (although in actuality, really just very confusing and seemingly confused about her own motivations) version of Willow, who, for some reason or another, opts to start a fistfight between Buffy and her far-future counterpart Fray. Buffy then kills future Willow before coming back in time, the end. Somehow this took four issues and for some more apparent reason, I felt a little ripped off. You know what's a good deal if you like both superhero-versus-superhero punch-ups and Joss Whedon? That Astonishing X-Men special he penned a short for a little while ago that also collecteda bunch of old comics in which the X-Men met, fought and then teamed up with other Marvel super-heroes like the Fantastic Four, the Avengers or Spider-Man. This new, Buffy/Fray one on the other hand, is a confusing mess that seems to ultimately lead nowhere and really perhaps is just an excuse to get people to shell out $15 for a very brief and poorly justified fist fight.

Oh, and don't even get me started on the non-entity that is the story's so-called sub-plot. Some magical monsters attack our heroes, who then fight back and win. Yes, it really is that simple, and yes, it somehow took four issues to tell. Damn you, decompression!

One interesting curiosity though is that this collection also contains a one-off story based around the Buffy animated series that never was, which is slightly weird, because surely that makes it a spin-off of essentially nothing. Sure, the unaired pilot is still floating around the internet for those who wish to find it, and yeah, I think they may have released some toys/statuettes/maquettes 'based on the series' before, but those may have just been solicited and then disappeared into the ether like that BtVS tarot deck that was solicited a while back (and I must admit, I so would have bought, in probably not my wisest of purchases), but still, I find the whole thing a little odd. So yeah, there's that little curiosity there.

Anyway, I guess that's me done until I inevitably buy the next volume of this stuff and then begrudingly review that.

Ooh, luckily I picked up the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen too to help cleanse the pallet (ThreePenny Opera references for the win!).

"How do you like my new uniform?"

Get a load at the new look Harley Quinn, as redesigned for the upcoming video game Batman: Arkham Asylum . (Her old look is featured below, in case you need a reference.) Personally, whilst I can kind of understand the thinking that must have gone behind the redesign (a mix of "we need a more realistic costume," and "we need to turn her into something that'll make her more evidently appealing to teenaged boys."), I still think it all looks a little American McGee's Alice for me. And hey, whilst I enjoyed that game back when it came out, now I think I'm more inclined to go with the line of thinking that brought about this particular Penny Arcade parody. Sometimes Todd McFarlane-ising things is not the most sensible way to go.

Consider it just the grumblings of a comic fan, but I just don't think putting a girl in a corset and leather boots compares to the simple yet dynamite design work on display in Bruce Timm's original creation. And hey, if they were worried that people wouldn't find the look realistic, they probably should have checked to see whether people have actually tried to pull it off in real life...

Haskins! Fairy tales! Feminist criticism!

A Mimi joint

Ok, you know what's weird? That a couple of years ago, Spike Lee made a short film about/starring Mariah frickin' Carey.



I mean, am I the only one who finds this odd, who doesn't immediately lump those two together in their head? I mean, I just find it jarring considering some of the subjects of Lee's other, feature films, no?

Oh, and ignore the bullshit about a free iPhone too. Sorry, but this is the only version of this video that I could find online.

Meh, it's ok. Provided you don't get motion sickness...

Ah, fuck it. That new Star Trek movie absolutely defies any attempt to take it seriously at all.

Also, I just want to do my part to make sure that this is making the rounds:


Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

Trekkin'

Ok, I just wanted to quickly jot down some of my thoughts regarding the new Star Trek film before I actually see it later today (I may do a follow-up post once I have actually seen the thing).

Firstly, I imagine that, judged purely on its own merits, this new film is going to be a great success indeed. I can see it being a slick, exciting and fun example of action-scifi-blockbuster fare.

However, my main issue with the film lies more at the conceptual level. In that respect, this film kind of reminds me of Gus Van Sant's Psycho: it's a perfectly good film, as far as films go, when judged on its own merits, but the real headscratcher is why the film even exists at all. Who the hell thought that the world desperately needed a remake of Hitchcock's Psycho?

Indeed, whilst a bold, new direction was very much needed in order to bring life and public interest back to the Star Trek franchise, I do wonder about the wisdom behind harking back to the franchise's Kirk-and-Spock origins, which almost seems to ask us to imagine this film in the same vein as other classic-TV-show-reimagined-as-modern-film releases of the last several years. Is that what Star Trek needs, not a Grace Park Battlestar Galactica but a Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson Starsky and Hutch?

Ok, that was perhaps an unfair comparison, I admit, but my main point remains: what does it say about the future of the franchise that the only way to bring it forward is by looking back, by fetishising the past? Is this 'reinvention' really just a way to sell us on old ideas a second time around? Will we be seeing Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Next Generation twenty years from now when the whole thing goes full circle?

Still, I see that sacrifices have to have been made in order for the money-men behind all of this to have even signed off on making this new film. The thing does have to be saleable, after all. But still, that worry is there: can this new direction actually bear interesting fruit in years to come (they're already working on Star Trek 2, you know) or will the whole thing prove to be a shiny-but-shallow excercise in wistful nostalgia taken to infinite regress?

It's good to see a Nazi and a Communist getting along

Wow, comics sure are awesome, aren't they? You know, I recently discovered a comic book idea so absolutely insane I simply had to bring it up here. Now, I know that using real-world figures as comic book villains is nothing new, but for some reason this particular variation on that old chestnut strikes me as particularly weird for some reason. Readers, meet the Lethal Legion...


Zyklon (Heinrich Himmler), Axe of Violence (Lizzie Borden), Cyana (Lucrezia Borgia (Lucrezia Borgia? Really?!)) and Coldsteel (Joseph Stalin. JOSEPH FRICKIN' STALIN!).

Also: "Zyklon"?! Holy insensitivity, Batman! Did I mention that his superpowers include actually firing poisonous gasses at people? Also: Lethal Legion Lizzie Borden totally has an axe for a hand.

I now know that I must own Avengers West Coast #98-100, which introduces these guys. Luckily, Free Comic Book Day is tomorrow, so I imagine I'll be in the vicinity of a comic book shop.

Real Riot Grrls

Pussy Superstar

Tsk, that's annoying. One of my all-time favourite fan-made music videos has apparently disappeared from the internet. If anyone finds a surprisingly well-edited-together music video for Jack Off Jill's "Strawberry Gashes" featuring Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel (note: not this one) please send it this way.

In the meantime, I did discover this video that I'd somehow never seen before whilst I was searching.

Too angry to blog properly (probably #1 in a whole series)

God, I go away for a weekend and when I return all hell breaks loose. I'm too angry/tired for a real blog post but here are the headlines.

Texan politician says that Asian Americans should change their legal names to more Westernised ones in order to make things "easier for Americans to deal with." (I'm pretty sure that the Americans who are Asian American deal with it just fine, thanks).

Stupid films still think that rape jokes are ok.

And oh yeah, amazon.com have completely fucked up by basically lumping in books by gay authors (such as Jeanette Winterson and Stephen Fry) in with erotica and pornography and tried to make the whole lot invisible to users. This reeks of censorship and homophobia. I've been meaning to write a full-scale post on this, but things are developing too quickly for me to really dedicate a whole lot to what I think without some new detail cropping up. All I know is that amazon aren't going to be getting any medals for the piss-poor way they're handling this, either.