Happy Veterans Day

I'm outing myself here but yes I was in the Army way back when.

As you can tell from the photo I was still a gen-x geek even while in uniform as attested by such things as:

The spike Gremlin in front of the pentium computer.

The empty bag of chips on the floor

A copy of PC Gamer on the Chair

Hellraiser Puzzle box on the coffee table

and the Call of Cthulhu RPG books on the shelf


-Swinebread

Top Ten TV Cartoons (plus Three Honorable Mentions)

-Swinebread

Recent Comic Buys

Post 2

Swinebread's Vlog Post

It's so obvious it is funny!

-Swinebread

Happy Birthday Lincoln

-Swinebread

Geektastic Holidays Ahoy!

Wormer here.

Lots of geek stuff happening for me personally. In no particular order of importance---


Swiney lent me trades of the entire Preacher series because he loves it and probably because I'm such a fan of Garth Ennis' "Battlefields" series.

I've read through the first three and "Ancient History" which covers the backstory of some of the secondary characters and I have to say I love it. It's a weird combination of things that Ennis mixes into his tale but it happens to be stuff that's right up my alley: westerns, Catholic theology (I'm a reformed Catholic,) vampires and such. There's also a faint subtext of Douglas Adams in much of the dark humor mixed into the story. Great stuff.



I got rid of my comics box a couple of months ago but picked up a ton of comics for the kid's stockings as I do every year. One of the titles was "The Marvel Zombies Return."

The original Marvel Zombies is a darkly hysterical take on an alternative universe where an infected superhero comes to earth, quickly turns the Marvel Zombies into the undead and they, in turn, eat everybody on earth in a matter of hours. Unfortunately the mini-series that followed this brilliant debut didn't quite measure up in terms of creativity with the zombie Spiderman and company conquering their hunger, becoming vegetarians and essentially nerfing the harder edge that had made the title stand out.

MZR has the series back to form. The zombies have been cast to other alternative realities where they suddenly regain their hunger and go all all you can eat buffet again. The first title has Spiderman falling into his own storyline from the 70's and trying to be a hero but winding up eating each and every archvillain that ever faced him, ultimately causing the plague all over again.



In my own Christmas Stocking were copies of the Weird War 2 expansion for the Savage Worlds rpg, the "Temeraire" series of books which Peter Jackson is going to make into a television series and Left For Dead 2 for the PC which will suck up some of my time when I get a chance.



I've played video games since I was a kid with a penchant for computer games. This means I literally have decades of experience tweaking settings, loading floppies, updating drivers or whatever the hell I have to do to make a particular bit of gaming software work.

At the top of my son's Christmas list was a game called "Section 8." It's a 3-D shooter set in the future, sort of a mix of Battlefront and Halo. He was especially excited to unwrap the thing.

What followed was about three days of hell as I struggled to get this software running. It will come as no surprise that Microsoft is the publisher of this monstrosity. Much of the problem can be traced to Microsoft's DRM scheme. They require an internet connection to their Windows Live gaming network even if you're playing single player. Naturally this didn't work and the game would crash every time it tried to connect.

After searching the net I found that we weren't alone in facing this problem and that many, many people who had bought the game had struggled with the same issue. Complicating this was the fact there was no one solution but a mix of removing and reinstalling Games for Windows and removing and installing Section 8 seemed to be what resolved the problem for most people.

The only reason I can assume that this software was released in this poor of a state has to be that Microsoft really wants to kill computer gaming so everybody that games will buy an XBox. No other theory makes sense.

--Dean Wormer
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DEMOCRAT NO MORE!

Hi folks, I've been busy with the new place post move and work has been crazy but I wanted to let you know how I've been feeling. It's seems that Dean Wormer and I have come to the same conclusion at about the same time. See his excellent post here.

I didn't think we'd get all the progressive stuff we wanted, maybe 50% (and I would have taken even 25%), but to get absolutely NOTHING! It's simply just too much. All the political capital that has been wasted in the last year coddling conservatives, insurance lobbyists and the list goes on.

I'm done with 'em 'cause the Dems really don't give a crap about the folks in their own party. So maybe if I leave it they'll start paying attention. ...Yeah right.

All that hope... and now it's gone...

-Swinebread


PS I'm also pissed because Dean is gonna post all his pop and entertainment news on his own blog now 'cause he can't bring himself to talk politics anymore. grrrrr

Update On Swinebread

I just spoke to him on the phone.

No, he's not dead.

Nor has he suddenly been bitten by a radioactive insect, discovered his parents were actually gods or aliens, walked into the path of an atomic experiment or any other thing that would have bestowed him with superpowers. He can't have superpowers. For one thing he's not single. We all know only single people have superpowers.

Swinebread is not serving time in an intergalactic prison, banished to the Phantom Zone or trapped in a giant block of ice to be revived thousands of years in the future. Neither he nor the city he lives in have been shrunken down so they can sit on the mantle of some super schlub.

He's definitely not a zombie or any other form of undead.

On the other side of the coin he hasn't been trapped on Paradise Island to be fawned over by hundreds of 6-foot tall Amazonian women that look suspiciously like Lynda Carter. So he doesn't have that going for him.

He's simply without computer access since the move. He plans on continuing this blog and sends his love to y'all.

So Commisioner Gordon you can stop shining the Swinebread Spotlight into the sky to call him out of his Swine Cave. He'll be back to fight crime, talk comics and piss me off when he fails to agree that Joss Whedon is the second coming of Christ before you know it.

-Dean Wormer-
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Jr. No-No's

I'm thinking that playing Axis & Allies is NOT something that I should do in my household.

Little Swinebread would have to play Germany all the time so he wouldn't deveolop some sort of complex... and that, in and of itself, would make him absolutely develop one.

Can you imagine him creating an atomic bomb and using it in this game?! *shiver*

I guess I'll have to stick with Arkham Horror and Samurai Swords (formally known as Shogun).

I've had board games on the mind lately... not that I have the time or opportunity to play them...


-Swinebread

What's been going on in blurbs.

I’ve sworn off Marvel Comics… well, at least the pamphlet kind. I refuse to pay 4 bucks for a single comic book. Considering their new pricing model now, it seems like the best thing to do. I’ve found myself really tempted by Marvel’s 70th Anniversary titles and the Marvel Pets but I held firm and it feels good. On the other hand, I’m more open to picking up Marvel trades and Hardcovers. My comic shop had a big sale a while ago with either 50% off or a straight price of 10 bucks on hardcovers.

Because of this I picked up
Annihilation: Countdown Volumes One & Two. Great, well written cosmic adventures
Annihilation Classic. I just adore all these cosmic characters especially Rocket Raccoon
Marvel Monsters. A collection of old and new Kaiju-ish stories featuring creatures from Marvel’s age of monsters. The Devil Dinosaur and Fin Fang Four stories rocked.
Marvel Westerns. A collection of old and new stories featuring characters from Marvel’s Western line. The Hurricane story is probably the best Superhero,Weird Western I’ve ever read.
Marvel Visionaries: John Buscema. His early stuff, plus a random smattering of latter stories.


Speaking of cosmic characters, I really enjoyed the Annihilation stuff so much that I went out and bought Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy trades. I got most of them used at Powell’s. (My new goal is to buy mostly used and/or "on sale" comic trades as much as possible) Reading this new Nova series has been great. I’m fan of the original Nova series from way back in the 1970s, but I have been really disappointed with how he’s been depicted since. This current series finally achieves the cosmic potential that the Nova character has always had but was always ignored.


No More My New Comics?
I kinda figured what was the point since I’ve cut down to 0-2 titles a week. I guess I could do a monthly My New Comics but I’ve since fallen out of practice of doing it… It’s just not as much fun with the same few title every month.


The wife and I just watched Dororo. It’s a live-action Japanese adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s manga of the same name. It’s pretty good with all kinds of traditional Japanese monsters and sengoku period swordplay. If you’re interested in fantasy samural stories check it out.


I did see Star Trek but never did a review. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I loved how the film brought back some of the humor of TOS. There were a few story problems especially a bunch of coinkydink stuff that I noticed after I left the theater, but all and all, a very fun film. The only thing I straight up just hated were the engine rooms… that stuff looked just like something out of MST3K. My fears for this film and the Star Trek Universe were unfounded. I’m glad I was wrong. Now Paramount, DO NOT PUT KHAN IN THE NEXT FILM. Try something new please.


Several months ago, YouTube pulled my Devo, Beautiful World, video. It lasted a little over a year.


I’ve been watching Showtime’s new show Nurse Jackie…. It’s very entertaining and Edie Falco’s character here is much more interesting than Carmella Soprano ever was. Some nurses have problems with the show but what’s getting me down is the tiredness I have for ER/hospital shows… couldn’t we have a program about park rangers or Travel agents or science fiction writers… basically the networks and cable stations are Lazy because it’s easy to find the drama in cop, law, and hospital shows.


I happened to see Vol 1 and 2 of the 1990s animated X-men show last month, so I snapped these DVDs right up. Despite the fact that we've got Gambit and Jubilee, instead of Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Shadowcat (Kitty Pryde) on the regular team, this is as close as we are ever gonna get to good adaptions of the comics. No extra features but that's OK because all the room on the disks went to ensuring the episodes are top quality.


But most of all I've been spending my time taking care of Swinebread Jr. Wow! It's been almost a year since he was born.


-Swinebread

Miyazaki And Zombies and Scooby, Oh My!

Lots of geek stuff bouncing around my head today. Probably because I got to talk to Swinebread for a while yesterday and that always gets me thinking about this stuff.

The English language version of the trailer of Hayao Miyazaki's new film Ponyo surfaced yesterday. I had the pleasure of springing on my Miyazaki nut daughter leading to her watching the thing at least five times.

In the course of reading up on that flick she saw the rumor that Miyazaki may be making a rare public appearance at Comicon. Now I have her working on me to take a trip to San Diego. Sigh.



Even though I'm a fan of the Marvel Zombies (the first books were works of sick genius in my opinion) the stories have really petered out, predictably as the zombies got "cuddly." With that in mind the announcement that Marvel was bringing on some heavy duty zombie writers for the next iteration of the series raised my interest.

In particular David Wellington's "Monster" series of zombie books were all sorts of scary, so I can't wait to see what he does with the zombified Marvel heroes.



Even though I'm late to this party I have to say that Left 4 Dead is one of the best shooters I've ever played. I got the thing for Father's Day and it's bloody awesome. There's not a lot to the game other than trying to survive zombie attacks while you work your way through a city/ sewers/ base but what it does, it does really well.



Thanks to the library we're working our way through almost every animated version of Batman they have on hand. In the last week we've watched "Batman: Gotham Knight," "Batman: The Brave and the Bold Season One" and "Scooby Doo Meets Batman." Not surprisingly my kid's favorite was that last title. Even though they're older they do love them some Scooby.



I finished reading Brian K. Vaughan's "Pride of Baghdad" last week and you'll have to color me unimpressed. It's disappointing because I loved the concept of pride of lions escaping an Iraqi zoo during the initial U.S. attack in 2002.

I enjoyed the symbolism, heavy-handed as it might be but couldn't by into one of the book's central conceipts- Vaughan and his artist Niko Henrichon specifically riff off of the animation of Disney and the Disney practice of animorphism. Essentially they draw the lions very Disneyesque but then involve the characters in very adult situations. Call me a prude if you will but I found this off-putting.

--Dean Wormer
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Happy Father's Day

I so glad there is something wondeful to focus on this Sunday. Today is my first Father's Day! Little Swinebread Jr. is almost eleven months now and is absolutely into all kinds of mischief. Me and the misses have to watch him like a hawk.


-Swinebread

Today I'm The Walking Dead

I was overjoyed to discover this week that the local library has quite a large collection of graphic novels (not to mention manga.) As I poured through the shelves the first thing I decided to check out was a copy of the first volume of Robert Kirkman's "The Waking Dead." I believe Swinebread has been reading these books in comic and trade form, so they've been on my mental "to read" list for a while.

Wow. This story is absolutely brutal. It's some of the darkest narrative I've ever come across, unrelenting in it's abuse of every single character contained within it's pages. There are some to the most disturbing scenes I've ever seen imagined, much less illustrated, in these books.

And it's all positively addictive.

I just finished the 4th volume last night and let me start by saying that any incoherence you detect in this post can be directly attributed to some of the stuff that happened in this novel. These comics are filled with scenes of torture, decapitations, amputations, rape, stabbings, suicides and all of that paled in comparison to some of the final panels in this volume. There were a couple of deaths of protagonists that literally caused me to lose sleep last night they were so disturbing. So I apologize in advance for the fact I'm not typing this on a full tank of gas.

Ostensibly this is a story about officer Rick Grimes who wakes up from a coma to find himself smack in the middle of a zombie apocalypse with his family nowhere to be found. It follows Rick as he searches for, and finds his wife and son and joins a group of survivors who eventually make a "safe" home in an abandoned prison. For the first three volumes I kept thinking how closely the story followed one of my favorite childhood novels: "Watership Down."

This story is not about zombies. The zombies are an ever present menace, but they're never the most frightening thing in this story. The real monsters are the surviving humans. All the zombies want to do is devour the living. That evil pales in comparison to the horrible things these humans do to each other and themselves. We are the monsters here.

Obviously, this sort of thing isn't for everybody. I'm not the strictest parent in the world but these were books I kept out of the hands of my mature kids. But if you have the fortitude to make it through these books I think you'll be rewarded for it. There's a lot of food for thought about the human condition and even the nature of evil in "The Walking Dead." It was well worth the read, and the lack of a good night's sleep.

- Dean Wormer

Hello true believers!

It was so very cool of Swinebread to ask me to contribute to his blog. While we don't always agree on everything (*cough* JJ Abrams' Star Trek *cough*) we most certainly share a love of comics, cartoons, movies and pop culture. I love Swinebread's Atomic Romance and am happy to be a small part of it.

Just a bit on my geek creds so you know where I'm coming from. As a boy my imagination was consumed with all things fantasy and science fiction. I read Tolkein, Moorcock, Asimov, Lovecraft and Adams. I played Dungeons and Dragons, Gamma World and Traveller. I spent many a sleepless night on our old Commodore 64 computer adventuring my way through Richard Garrett's Ultima series. I watched Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers (mmm Wilma) and Space 1999 religiously.

On my 9th birthday my parents rented a van and took most of my grade school class to see Star Wars on the big screen. It was a wonderful, out-of-body experience. I lost complete track of the theater and the other people sitting around us munching popcorn. I was IN that movie. I've spent the last 32 years of being a film fan trying to replicate that experience.

When I was growing up comics were a reward. I have wonderful memories of serving as an alter boy and having my dad stop on the way home at 7-11 to get me a coke flavored Slurpee and a copy of "House of Mystery" or "Haunted Tank" as a thank you to me for working through a boring mass. I've expanded this idea tenfold with my own kids by the way. They got comics in their comics on Christmas morning, in their baskets on Easter and to cheer them up when they were home sick from school.

I'll say this outright- Swinebread is a genius when it comes to comics. I have nowhere near the encyclopedic knowledge he has of artists, authors, titles, etc. that he has. I don't subscribe to the previews. I don't always know what's going on in the comics industry. I do have a box at the local comics store. I subscribe to whatever titles interest me when I walk in the door.

I am not a comic "collector" I'm a comic "reader." To the extent I bag and store my comics it's not so I can sell them at a profit 10 years down the line. It's so I can get them out and rediscover them 10 years down the line when I've forgotten the stories. When I think about the CGC company and what they do with comics it makes me sad. Sure, they're putting aside a Picasso for forever but put aside the value of that particular comic and they're also removing forever the chance that some kid will open up that old comic and have their imagination exploded.

So, with Swinebread's blessing I'm going to post stuff here about comics from a layman's perspective. At the same time I'll also be posting stuff that isn't necessarily comics related but will always be geek-centric. I still occasionally play rpgs, computer games and will always be on the hunt for that Star Wars out-of-body fix at the movies. All of that is fodder.

Until next time guys,

Dean