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| 2009-12-22 02:32 |
| Random Geekishness |
| Public |
| batman, blogged, comic books, comics, costume, dc comics, dread, friends, games, japan, law, livejournal, music, news, radio, random, rock, star wars, the 1980s, video games |
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1) An interesting discussion on the Shortpacked! official board has been about the fact that the Diamond Distributor company uses the Batman standard to judge title sales. That is, every title they sell is compared to how well it does against the specific DC comic book titled Batman. One of the readers has suddenly made it his mission to create a comic book and attempt to sell a CentiBatman's worth of copies of it. (As the value of a Batman in copies is somewhat variable there is some luck involved.)
2) News relayed to me by Aaron ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ps238principal Williams that a British court ruled against Lucasfilm in a copyright case involving the Imperial StormTrooper costume from Star Wars. The judge had declared that the costume was "industrial design" rather than "scuplture" under the legal definitions (the copyright on it had run its course) and become public domain. My immediate thought was on the status of car design--whether the motorcars built before 1995 were suddenly made public domain by this ruling.
3) There are only six or so songs left to vend in my quota for Dread & Terror.
4) All of a sudden somebody is following my LJ via Blogged. I'm supposed to have a Widget working to tell me more about that as part of the LJ, but I haven't figured out how and where to put it up. Welcome, Kikuko...hope you are comfortable here.
5) According to the Japanese site www.saiani.net, the game Armored Core will have an OAV spinoff released sometime in 2010. I'll be watching for this in my usual around-the-blinders fashion.
6) Jon Bon Jovi was on Fresh Air yesterday. He says he absolutely hated the music videos his band made back in the Eighties. I wonder what the boys would have done if they had more creative control back then.
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| 2009-11-13 12:32 |
| What Do You Mean "Wii", Paleface? |
| Public |
| backward compatible, car chase, cars, comic books, comics, crime, dc comics, full frontal nerdity, games, gaming, humor, nascar, race cars, superheroes, video games, webcomics |
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( Gothama Mia! )
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| 2009-10-30 11:49 |
| Writer's Block: Who will you be? |
| Public |
| comic books, costume, dc comics, fandom, fantasy, halloween, holidays, marvel comics, stuff i want, who am i, writer's block |
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Have you any idea how difficult it is in these parts to find a suitable peaked cap to convert to a Fifty Mission Crush so I can cosplay Blackhawk or the Sky Master? I've been trying for YEARS.
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| 2009-06-05 17:01 |
| Backward Compatible |
| Public |
| backward compatible, comics, dc comics, fandom, fantasy, full frontal nerdity, games, gaming, humor, superheroes, webcomics |
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( Willful Violations Of The Comic Code--What Is Virtual Reality Coming To? )
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| 2009-06-02 20:32 |
| More Dispatches From the Consolation-Prize Childhood |
| Public |
| childhood, comic books, comics, dc comics, driving, education, learning, nostalgia, toys, travel, who am i |
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Hey.
I've decided, if funding becomes available, I'm going to the Morristown Tech Center to "audit" the Aviation Maintenance Technology program. It will take a year and a half, and a couple thousand dollars or so, to do this. I put in my application today, and sometime in the coming days I'll take the aptitude exam. I don't plan on starting courses till this Winter--although if a "slot" opens this Fall (there's a waiting list) I'm not sure I'm ready to take it. It all depends. The instructors tell me that I can't exactly just pick and choose separate courses. I pretty much have to take the whole program.
I'm too old to think of this program as a way to a new career. But since I haven't been able to start a career with the education I have, I don't have much to lose--and I've lost too much already.
* * *
After visiting the Tech Center, I went to a comic book store and was looking through their small press books. I came upon a smattering of "Modern" issues from the late Seventies. Now, as I mentioned before there was a publisher named Charlton that was basically a DC knockoff house. Modern took up where Charlton left off by reprinting Charlton's back catalog. They only lasted a couple years.
The reason I know this was because most of the time when I was a kid, the comic books I got came from cheap three-packs bought at the five-and-dime, the supermarket, or Woolworth's. When they ran out of Whitman or Charlton, they threw in Moderns. Anyway, I had some of these, either ones I bought myself or got from trades with neighborhood boys.
My childhood was very "consolation-prize" calibur. It was rare that I got exactly what I wanted and usually had to settle for the "Brand X" knockoff. The TV ads made me TOO brand-conscious. But at the same time, I could sometimes be happy with the knockoffs because through them I could make something of my own, that wasn't 100% Madison Avenue/Hit Parade/Next Year's Cliché.
If there's a "genuine article" me out there, I wonder how he's doing these days. Your Brand X has been sitting on the shelf too long, and someday, the revenge of Brand X will come upon the world.
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...Full Frontal Nerdity is. Kinda.
Another comic book I used to push aside in search of something else in the stores' long boxes.
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Birthday prezzy.
Differs from the DC Archives hardcovers by having about 30% more material (practically everything before War Idyll with the exception of the Christmas story "Silent Night")...but presented in black-and-white from the inks. Great if you want a complete collection cheap, not so great if you prefer the better production values of the Archives.
Going to spend some time adding to my various notes on the series...and since I'm inspired, I'll probably add a little something to this blog in the coming days.
FP
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Hey.
This Article On MSN about upcoming comic book movies and yesterday's viewing of The Dark Knight got me to thinking about the possible sequel. I just want to put out where I'd want to see it go. Chances are, this won't happen.
( Cut because of possible spoilers for Dark Knight )
And I'm not all that big a fan of Batman. Go figure.
FP
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Hey.
I take stuff to Paul Francis, I get stuff from Paul Francis. What went out: a set of resin Nazi Zombie figures I forgot I had, which I thought (correctly) that he'd like. What came back with me: a pile of Wizard and ToyFare magazine back issues, which a friend of his dumped on him. And a coffee-table book on the making of Batman The Animated Series--one of my favorite things from the Nineties.
And then I got a package in my mail--the Pirates of the Spanish Main cards I had traded for. Since a family friend was visiting for tea, I assembled a ship to show her what the game is about, and she thought it was very clever.
So between this and other things going on in my world, I'll be pretty busy.
FP
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I read Charlton war comics as a boy. Remember, those were the stories REJECTED from DC's war comics, with the names changed to protect the copyrights. The latest Stupid Comics kind of prompted this perspective. I know that what is presented in there is a contemporary WW2 comic, but as late as 1980 the same racist treatment of Asian peoples had persisted in the war comics, especially in Charlton's titles, which frequently presented stories from the Korean and Vietnam wars. The nastiness was still there, only shifted to the "Red" nations. Of course, it took a while for my attitude to evolve...or maybe it was because the realization that conflict could break out between any two factions. There is no such thing as an evil people, but there IS such a thing as an evil political system, or an evil ruler, or an evil regime making people do evil things. Saw a page of one a couple months ago, from an issue I used to own. Embarassingly bad. I thought I'd download it for "research" but ultimately changed my mind.
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--DC's been doing an awful lot of retconning in order to keep their central characters "young".
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Remember when Dad bought me a diecast Batmobile?
Well, he just took delivery of a batch of mail-order stuff he bought and this was for me:
I think this shot me up about five or ten Nerd points.
FP
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This site computes Heat Index and Wind Chill. Just bubbled in the figures off the kitchen thermometer and humidity dial. Answer came out 100° even.
This weather is activating a crud deposit somewhere south of my throat. I know I prefer being uncomfortably hot to being uncomfortably cold, but this has to aspire to suck. It does.
FP (who is not looking forward to eating hot pasta for dinner)
PS: for kiffie...
You can't ALWAYS get what you want, but try this Captain Desmo story on for size. Dunno how long it'll be accessible... but I'll try anyway!
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
These pages were photographed and printed on micro-fiche, then scanned from the micro-fiche, which is rather like camcording a movie, then processing a DVD from a second-generation of the resulting videotape! For the record, it's from More Fun Comics #69, circa 1941...one of Captain Desmo's last appearances.
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Okay, so I whetted your interest in Captain Desmo. Time for the full infodump...
Desmo is a soldier of fortune in the sky. When the comic starts, he's in Mongolia fighting bandits on behalf of the Chinese Army. Other stories take place in India, the Middle East and North Africa. (In the scant material I've seen, it isn't clear whether Desmo is his real name, or merely an alias. But consider this: "desmo" means "bat" and this is a DC title! Read into that what you will.)
Soon into his travels, he meets up with the Brooklyn-born street fighter Gabby McGuire, who becomes Desmo's partner. The two wind up being each other's trouble magnet and often one has to rescue or fight for the other. Desmo's reputation in the underworld is likely very high as once in a while a gang (air pirates, mobsters, assassins, bandits) would come gunning for them. Gabby, for his crude "street" social manners, is a relatively dapper dresser--habitually in a blazer with matching slacks and wearing a neat bowler hat. Whereas Desmo usually wears a blue dungaree shirt, brown riding jodhpurs and suspenders, chukka boots and a white aviator's helm with a black star sigil (whose significance I've yet to see explained as well). He even wears the helmet (goggles over his eyes) when he's nowhere near any plane. It took some difficult searching to find a story where he doesn't have his headgear on and I could see his hair (it's medium brown and curly).
To put Captain Desmo's qualities into perspective for the gamer crowd:
* He must know a wide variety of foreign languages (Chinese, French and Arabic as givens, and probably Hindi and several other Asian tongues).
* He's very tough physically, and well-conditioned from the combination of military training and experience. He can handle the high-G maneuvers of dogfighting as well as rough-and-tumble fisticuffs in the dark alleys.
* He has situational awareness approaching the supernatural (many comics aviator heroes do).
* He's a crack shot, not only with the guns on an aircraft, but with a healthy variety of small arms. It's very probable that he has exceptional natural eyesight.
* He has the instincts of a detective, especially when it comes to understanding the criminal mind and the methods of underworld organizations.
* Being an ace pilot, he can operate several types of aircraft. His most frequent type was a Seversky amphibious airplane (The Ship of Adventure), but this machine was being replaced at about the time the series concluded.
* Desmo has a better-than-average pool of resources than usual for a freelance adventurer. Not only does he seem to have ample fuel and maintenance support for his planes, he doesn't have much trouble getting relatively new equipment either when he needs to. But since his clients have included governments as well as heiresses and movie studios, it really isn't that much of a mystery.
* * *
My parents' church had their annual thrift sale overday. Mum donated a bunch of quilting instructional books, mostly redundant ones she had inherited from a neighbor. They got me two long-sleeved shirts and a rain jacket. My sister and my niece will receive a bounty of clothes.
FP
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This is a doctored image of the header for Captain Desmo's first appearance in "New Adventure Comics" circa 1937. His stories appeared in 6-page installments in DC anthology comics through 1941, when his creator, Ed "Win" Winiarski, left DC for Timely (the predecessor of Marvel Comics).
More to come.
FP
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