Amazing Spider-Man #633
Amazing Spider-Man #634
Atlas #2
Black Cat #1
Dark Wolverine #87
Darkwing Duck #1
Fables #96
New Avengers #1
New Mutants #14

This is the first week my decision to drop most of my DC books really hurts, as R.E.B.E.L.S. is on the chopping block. Everything is coming up Marvel, with the exception of BOOM’s Darkwing Duck relaunch (because who doesn’t love Darkwing Duck) and Vertigo’s Fables, which is starting to make me feel the tedium that other fans have been complaining about since the focus of the series shifted from Prince Charming and the Big Bad Wolf waging guerilla war on Gepetto to witches playing politics and goblins playing baseball. Issue #100 is starting to look like a good jumping off point.

I’m not a massive Black Cat fan – she’s a transparent attempt to give Spider-Man a Catwoman without a whole lot of depth – but I like Jen Van Meter and will toss my money in her direction, especially since I’m not reading her backup feature in JSA All-Stars.

Lastly, TWO issues of Spidey this week? You’re killing me.

[Jeff's mission to blog each day in March on the same topic has gotten handily derailed by the presence of Final Fantasy XIII in his household, but his stumble toward next week's finish line begins here.]

It’s unpopular opinion time: I love the American version of The Ring.

I’ve never been of the mindset that there is a contest between The Ring and its forbear Ringu and they are both effective, atmospheric ghost stories that are unique in their story strength and their overall quality – the truth of the matter is that J-horror, as much as or more than American horror, is a rushed, low-budget affair that often succeeds in spite of itself when it does in fact succeed (One Missed Call, Ju-On: The Grudge, Audition – and it’s no mistake that two of those films share a director).

Yes, The Ring Two is a more questionable film shaped from what feels like a phoned-in screenplay and it does not adhere to the complex and not-as-good-as-geeks-want-it-to-be mythology created by Ringu’s web of sequels and prequels.  Cut free from its context, though, The Ring continues to stand on its own by following and revivifying genre convention right up until the point where the film twists around and gives convention the finger.  I still remember the moment when it occurred – I was gathering up my discarded popcorn bag and empty ICEE cup, sure we were seeing the denouement, and then BAM – “Why would you do that?” with its delivery full of pitched terror and then you realize that you’ve only just now seen the climax, the hill at the top of the roller coaster. It is one of the only true “Wait, what?” moments in the last decade’s horror cinema and it is balanced by a masterfully parceled-out slow burn plot.

The real appeal of the film, beyond the manipulations of the director and the sense of looming dread, is the source of its horror – that we are bad parents. It is a thread that runs through the Morgans through Rachel’s sister and is carried for most of the film by Rachel herself – who is, after all, a legitimately neglectful parent who finds her television babysitter subverted to imperil her son.  That we are unfit parents – something I’ve contended about myself for years despite not having a child to test the hypothesis on – is a cultural fear, one exacerbated by working single parents, a high divorce rate and a constant litany of derision from parenting gurus who claim that too much time unsupervised in front of the TV can be dangerous, at least developmentally.  The Ring packages all of this in a horror story scenario, but at the heart of it is an absentee mother and another mother who wanted a child more than anything only to have their relationship not be the sugar and rainbows reverie that she dreamed. It is a human drama first, before there are even ghosts involved.

Another persistent element of the film, one that the short film Rings picks up on, is that the nature of the solution to the first film – that the tape is perpetually copied and circulated to forestall death – becomes the problem of the next step outward in the curse’s pathology.  Rings focuses on one small clique that is part of a larger underground online community based around the distribution and viewing of the tape – a sort of game that develops into how long one can go into the infamous 7-day death spiral before caving and making a life-saving copy of the series’ evil videotape MacGuffin.  Like Pulse (coincidentally another J-horror remake), Rings hints at a larger world that’s aware of the events that exists just outside the scope of the main story.

The Ring is nearly a decade old now, and it signaled a major change in the horror landscape – it killed the self-aware, nu-slasher as handily as the ghost resurgence of the first half of the last decade was subdued by Hostel‘s ‘torture porn’.  It helped to legitimize the remake and opened the door on foreign horror for a lot of film buffs.  It may be hip to dislike The Ring, but its influence can’t be denied.

I have a lot of friends who at least try to participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month – this month, the month of November), and I have to tell you, I respect the hell out of anybody that actually makes the effort. My personal experience with the exercise has been a bit like playing Super Smash Brothers, getting knocked over the edge and being just out of range of the platform. Like, there’s just enough hope that I’ll embarrass myself trying to get back to solid ground, but I know the whole time that I’m just going to float gently down, down, down until I lose a life.

The goal of NaNoWriMo is to pen a 50,000 word text in 30 days (the exact number of days that November hath) or, as I call it, are you &$^%@!(# kidding me? I don’t write that fast. This post you’re reading right now? I started it in September. When faced with that kind of deadline, I sit in front of a blank screen for four hours and then open a beer. I repeat this process as needed. And then, a few days in, I realize I’m in a hole I can’t get myself out of in terms of meeting the word count and I go, “Hey, it was a good effort; maybe next year.”

It is not that I lack a creative impulse; it is, rather, that my creative impulse has long been the place where I’ve hidden when I have other shit to do. Which is a habit I know I need to break myself of.

The plan, friends, was to make it happen this year. To go for it.  I had resolved that I would finally write my long-planned space werewolf romance.  I was committed and vigorous and champing at the bit.

I’m gonna call time of death on the effort right now.

Total output – 248 words.  13 words a day, for the math-savvy.  Fewer words than this post.

Hey, it was a good effort; maybe next year.

Warning: It’s been awhile since I’ve blogged about comics here.  Reading this post over, it sounds ridiculous and maybe makes no sense, which is emblematic of the hobby as a whole, really.  Read at your own risk.

Because comics, both as an industry and as a hobby, is an all-devouring and self-consuming nostalgia engine, it is not shocking that 2009 saw the launch of a revival of a niche book from the mid-90s in the form of Tony Bedard’s R.E.B.E.L.S.

Bedard, who is one of those really capable comics scribes who people don’t notice (despite his excellent work for CrossGen before becoming DC’s resident fill-in/random miniseries  guy), manages to make R.E.B.E.L.S. work as both a reinvigoration of the cosmic side of DC’s universe (something that started with Andy Diggle’s awesome Adam Strange series a few years back but then got shunted off to Jim Starlin, whose work has felt dated and a bit phoned in of late) and as a continuation of the story established by Keith Giffen and Tom Peyer in the franchise’s various iterations (the book started as L.E.G.I.O.N. and switched titles when the title organization got co-opted by Brainiac II’s malevolent super-genius son and B-dub et al became, well, rebels).  The roster has enough returning characters to make it familiar, enough new characters to make it interesting, and actual ties to the Legion of Superheroes (via a clever and amusing time travel contrivance) instead of the winking “hey, this is like a 20th century version of the LSH, huh?” thing the previous version of the series did.

As a relaunch of a concept that isn’t necessarily old enough to have the right level of nostalgia, the book has been critically lauded but shaky sales-wise, which means it’s basically the next book that DC is going to cancel and then replace with Magog Team-Up or Zatanna’s Pajama Party.  This is especially likely because DC editorial is very vocal about their support of the book.

I’m guilty here, too, because I’d ignored R.E.B.E.L.S. for most of the year, even though my comics guy kept telling me it was his favorite DC book, ie the only DC book he read.  But a few weeks ago, I picked up the whole series to date on a whim because it was a light Wednesday.  The praise the title receives? Totally justified, but it’s definitely, as I said above, aimed at a certain type of fan. With a pair of Blackest Night tie ins coming up, it might be a good jumping-on point.

For some reason, this reminds me that my pull list today looks drastically different than it did a year ago. Maybe a post on that later.

Living in the dark ages as I have for nearly the past year, I’ve finally made a few upgrades that should satisfy my techno-urges at least somewhat.

NEW Toshiba laptop.  My iBook has slept the sleep of the just for nigh on two months by now and I’ve quickly learned that I am unable to function without a laptop.  At 16 widescreeny inches, it’s a good deal bigger than my tiny, tiny iBook was, but that’s a concession I can live with as long as it’s still portable (which it is).

NEW 32 gig iPod Touch to replace a 4G iPod that has been consistently inconsistent of late.  I am enamored with it in unwholesome ways, and it makes me wish I had an iPhone so I could unlock the limitless potential of the thing.

NEW Xbox 360 – Between this and the computer, I’m finally gaming again.  I spent my free time over the weekend immersed in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and it is awesome in the same way that Star Wars: The Force Unleashed or Prototype is awesome.  That you unlock an achievement for finding a hidden room with a cake in it is kind of amazing.