I am home sick today, my third round with a stomach bug in a four-week span, so let's talk Superhero Movies.

Recently, Time Warner announced that they were ramping up their slate of DC Comics-based movies in a desperate attempt to play catch-up to Disney’s unprecedented success with the Marvel Cinematic Universe:

• Batman v Superman: Dawn of ( Read more... )

You know what?

I don't care if it's been over-hyped.

I don't care if parts of the previews might look a little iffy.

I don't care if Ryan Reynolds is playing Hal as a flippant jackass; this is, after all, Hal Frakking Jordan.

Deep down inside, all I care about is that the superhero who's been my very favorite since I was six years old had made ( Read more... )

Well, Mearls started it:

This is a placeholder to remind myself to talk about core stories in my next post, particularly as they apply both to superhero RPGs and to the comics themselves.

Notes to Emphasize:

• Different characters (and teams) have different core stories.
  
  • Batman's Core Story is not the same as Superman's.
    
  • The Fantastic Four and ( Read more... )

"Hollywood Is Lazy, Unoriginal and Risk-Averse", whines yet another critic.

These columns crop up all the time, and nine out of ten of them give the impression that this is some horrible slide into the abyss from some mythical golden age.

The irony, of course, is that they been appearing since the film industry began.1

These guys forget2 that, ( Read more... )

Charles Stross explains why he's burned out on "Steampunk".

It boils down to "90% of Steampunk is crud", of course, and over at Futurismic, Paul Raven's commentary applies the inevitable and immortal coda to that clauseI enjoyed both articles, and my superficial summary should not be construed as a dismissal; both Stross and Raven do provide some ( Read more... )

leonard_arlotte says, "Now the true test would be to enter some text from a particular author, and see if it comes back with that author's name"
athelind grauphs, "LOL!"
athelind grauphs, "I think it's just a very noisy algorithm with huge error bars. it's not ENTIRELY fatuous, since it tells me that I write like H.P. Lovecraft much of the time, in circumstances where, yes, I'm ( Read more... )

wordslinger might find this amusing, as it's tangentially related to her much more rigorous project of stylistic analysis ( Read more... )

In which Your Obedient Serpent submits that villains are best used sparingly.

In which Your Obedient Serpent Ponders the Penguin.

As some of you may recall, I have a Blogger account, reserved, in theory, to be my soapbox for ranting about pop culture in general and comic books in particular. I originally established it with the intent of participating more fully in the "comics blogosphere".* Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect. Due to the inconvenience of the interface ( Read more... )