Monday, September 26, 2005

Just a couple of quick notes:

Thanks to NBC owning Bravo and Sci-Fi, it looks like there are a couple of chances to catch Surface and My Name is Earl later in the week. (It means not seeing the Earl show in HD, but it's a sitcom, and one of the few new ones I wanted to watch, so I'll take what I can get.) Also, Supernatural appears to be part of the WB's easyview Sunday night repeat lineup, so I can still watch that, even though it's up against House and The Amazing Race in its regular timeslot.

And Everybody Hates Chris, the comedy about Chris Rock's childhood is pretty good, too.

Recommended comics: G0dland by Joe Casey and Tom Scioli, from Image Comics. It looks like a late 60s/early 70s jack Kirby cosmic adventure comic, and on the surface, that's what it is. (Only not by Jack Kirby, of course.) But there's an undercurrent of the Joe Casey weirdness that has made me a fan of his other work, like Wildcats and Automatic Kafka, and that's what sets this book apart from a mere homage/recreation. If comics were good, they'd be like this.

And Fell, by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith, from Image Comics. This is Ellis's latest format experiment: selling a comic for less than two bucks by telling a dense, packed 16 page story with four pages of text in the back. And he succeeds: there feels like there's more story here than most 22-page comic books. It's the story of detective Richard Fell, transfered to an oddball precinct where he's the most normal cop there. It's a nice twist on the familiar Ellis theme of an oddball or extreme character in a relatively normal or stable world. The solution to the crime in the first issue is both suitably weird and delightfully mundane at the same time. Considering how so many comics have trouble filling their pages, and then spill over into other comics besides (OMAC Project, I'm talking to you), the idea of a really satisfying, complete story every month for less than two dollars really appeals.

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