I'll be the Alien to your John Hurt

No posts all month long, but it seems my disjointed style lives on.

Holy shit, it's almost Free Comic Book Day! Go get comics tomorrow! Check out the website's comic shop locator if you need help finding your local peddler.

To keep abreast of developments at the Large Hadron Collider, I've added @CERN to my Twitter feed. Go on, take a look at that.

I started my Dragon*Con jar, so saving has begun in earnest. This seems like a good time to reiterate that all donations to the Get Erica to Dragon*Con Fund will be put to debaucherous, possibly even illegal, use. Just think, you could help me break the law! You could also help me see such exciting scheduled guests as Saul Rubinek, Michelle Forbes and Aaron Douglas. Hoping for David Hewlett and Tahmoh Penikett, but that would be too awesome so I'm not holding my breath. I've also begun thinking about costuming; lots of things sound cool and even doable, but I haven't really been drawn to anything. I'm kind of leaning toward the ridiculous, so something like a fairy from the Legend of Zelda games (a huge, glowing cottonball with wings) might be neat. That would also require some engineering (what would I make it out of? how would I make it glow?), which would be fun. I'm open to suggestions, so share your brilliant ideas... as long as no one wants me to be in the ass end of a tauntaun costume. That Alien idea might be fun, though.

Is it comix? Is it art?

This afternoon a friend and I checked out the current exhibition at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in Manhattan, which features some works by comic artist Chris Ware. Ware might be familiar to folks for his work in any number of publications, including RAW, The New York Times and The New Yorker. His work is quirky, mature, sometimes a little grim, and consistently captivating.

For me, the most interesting works were the images from the series Building Stories, which chronicles the hour-by-hour happenings in a Chicago apartment building over the course of a day. My favourite in the series, Introduction 3, shows a statistical view of the history of the building, noting the number of occurences of various elements - 11,627 lost childhood memories, 4 criminals, 61 broken dinner plates, 6 suicide notes, 617 dead plants, to name but a few.

Definitely worth a trip into the city. The exhibit runs through March 15, if you're inclined to check it out.

New Watchmen pictures up

I've been following Zack Snyder's Watchmen blog for a little while now and yesterday's post is possibly the most exciting yet. It features pictures of five of the principles, and they look pretty damn awesome. It's too early yet and I'm too skeptical to say I'm very excited about this film, but from what I've seen so far, it looks like it could kick some serious ass.

"Tales of the Black Freighter," the comic-within-a-comic, apparently will not be featured in the film, which is quite a disappointment. For me, the Black Freighter segments in Watchmen were some of the best parts of the entire comic, so knowing its story will only make it onto the DVD as an extra is a bit disheartening. Well, I guess I should be glad it'll be represented at all.

The release date for Watchmen is March 6, 2009, so we've got a year yet before it hits theaters. Here's wishing Snyder, et al., a good post-production process!

Current Reading: The Physics of Superheroes

I took Physics for Poets in college. That wasn't actually the name of the class, but I think many schools have an equivalent - hard science packaged for the literature set, the fundamentals of the field for the unscientifically inclined. That is the place from which James Kakalios brings us The Physics of Superheroes. Kakalios teaches in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the U of Minnesota, and offers a class called "Everything I Needed to Know about Physics, I Learned from Comic Books." Instead of the usual physics course fare of studying how pulleys pull and levers...leve?, Kakalios primarily uses examples from the Silver Age of comics [the 1950s & '60s] to demonstrate the principles of physics.

He promises up front that if you can grasp the equation 1/2 + 1/2 = 1, you will be able to handle the math he presents. He starts off with a couple of fundamentals: F=ma [Force equals mass times acceleration]; and, how Superman can leap tall buildings in a single bound. His explanation is clear, his math straightforward, and his forgiveness for comic book reality bountiful. The rest of the book is pretty much the same thing: each physics concept explained through some exciting action in comics history. Superman and Spider-Man help teach us about gravity and centrifugal force, respectively. From Ant-Man's escapades we learn about the structure of atoms, and torque. Magneto helps us understand - of course - magnetism. We even get an explanation for how the Hulk manages to keep his pants on when he gets angry.

It's a physics book, so it's not exactly entertainment, though it is entertaining if you get off on physics. Which I do. I'm sure it's still more entertaining if you get off on comic books as well. Kakalios cracks a lot of bad jokes & painful puns, which kind of reminds me of actually being in a physics class. That's okay, though - nice, in fact. The occasional groaner keeps his plain, straightforward writing style from being dry and textbookish. To sum up, The Physics of Superheroes is a good read, and I really want to take this guy's course.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes

Who watches the watchmen?

So here's another facet of my geek nature - I really get off on the very particular thrill derived from encountering source material. For instance, aside from just being an amazing movie, Fritz Lang's Metropolis [1927] ushered scifi into an extraordinary era. This is where the movies I love today began, and 80 years later the genre continues to reflect the unique stamp of this seminal work. It's the same with fantasy; while it isn't a genre I'm all that hot for, reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time was quite an experience. There are so many things I love about the story, but a concurrent thrill while reading it was the enjoyment of recognizing it as the template for so much fantasy written in the past half dozen decades.

All this is tangential prelude to a little chatter about my recent re-reading of Watchmen, by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, and a few thoughts about the impending live-action movie. It's hard to talk about the modern age of comics without referring to Watchmen's influence. While I'm not inclined to delve too deeply into that arena - it's a thesis unto itself - I must stop and appreciate it.

So, I'm not going to try for any kind of in-depth analysis & critique of Watchmen; rather, I just want to talk about a handful of the many things I enjoyed about it.

I love the very broken nature of all these characters, how sincerely, deeply damaged they all are. Dr. Manhattan, the only character with extraordinary powers, doesn't even know what it's like to be human anymore. Of their romantic entanglements, even the healthier ones seem tinged with desperation. They're heroes, but very much at the whims of their humanity.

If I would level any real criticism as far as characters go, it's a comment on the imbalance caused by the strength of Rorschach's presence, which probably has a lot more to do with my reading of it than with the story itself. I read Watchmen as Rorschach's story, and somehow everyone else's situations pale in comparison. Maybe I'm just impressed by what a powerful character he is.

The parallel story in the comic being read by the young guy loitering at the newsstand makes me squirm. Like so much of Watchmen, it's laden with beautiful, grotesque irony. That sequence also contains some of the coolest artwork in Watchmen, wonderfully blending the subtly disturbing with the graphically horrific.

In a previous post, I mentioned enjoying some of the themes shared by Watchmen and Heroes, and talked specifically about the generational parallels. What originally brought any similarities between the two to my attention was a reference somewhere to the "blowing up half of new york to bring the world together" storylines. Linderman is Ozymandias without the costume; I wonder if Tim Kring [Heroes' creator] knew he was giving Linderman so many of Ozymandias' qualities, including his motivation. Unfortunately, I liked the ending of Watchmen so much better than the Heroes season finale. So, so much.

I have a few dozen other random thoughts, but I've spewed just about enough for the moment. At this point, there's not much to say about the upcoming movie. There have been lots of rumours, very little confirmation of anything, and innumerable fan exhortations not to fuck it up. It's being directed by Zack Snyder, the same guy who directed Dawn of the Dead a few years ago, as well as 300. This hurts to even repeat, but I am sickly driven - IMDB lists Keanu Reeves as rumoured to play Dr. Manhattan. Once I stopped laughing, I got a little sad. Frankly, it boggles the mind.

On that note, I'll bring this to a close with a quote from Alan Moore, responding in an interview a couple years ago to questions about the film adaptation: "I shan't be going to see it. My book is a comic book. Not a movie, not a novel. A comic book. It's been made in a certain way, and designed to be read a certain way: in an armchair, nice and cozy next to a fire, with a steaming cup of coffee."

Free stuff!

I'm certainly not of the consumerist ilk, but if you're in New York and you're celebrating Free Comic Book Day tomorrow, I recommend getting your free comics from Forbidden Planet, at 13th & Broadway, and maybe spend some money while you're there. This store is awesome. I, otoh, am going to take this excellent opportunity to check out my friendly neighbourhood comics shop right around the corner. You do the same wherever you are - Get free comics! Support your local comics shop!

Happy Free Comic Book Day!