WWVMD?

[alexsarll]

Anyone know how to find the Search toolbar in Mediaplayer? I didn't even know there was one, but having seen it in action I want it, yet am experiencing IT Fail in finding it. Hurrah for pressing random buttons.

I was unaware until I happened past it on Tuesday, but there's a new Book & Comic Exchange branch in Soho, just up from the MVE on Berwick Street. Which isn't quite so bursting-at-the-seams as Notting Hill yet, but I still got a pretty good haul - the Spider-Man's Tangled Web collection with the Garth Ennis/John McCrea and Peter Milligan/Duncan Fegredo stories for £3, the one issue I was missing from the Morrison/Millar Flash run (a rather lovely Jay Garrick one-shot, 'Still Life In The Fast Lane'), and an issue of Warren Ellis' Doctor Strange run. Except it turns out he only did plot, not script, and what's the point of a Warren Ellis comic without inventive insults? The whole thing is a bit of a mess, though, even with some of the art coming from Mark Buckingham; it was part of the Marvel Edge line, which was Marvel's attempt to get some of that Vertigo action, which is here represented by such cringeworthy details as Strange's cloak being replaced with an Overcoat of Levitation...
I was in that neck of the woods because I'd been invited to lunch at a health food place in Covent Garden. Accepting which, and then being off the sauce all day, was clearly foolishness, because last night I was quite as ill as I've been in years. I choose to believe that I was not in fact vomiting blood, and that it was just the strawberry jam I'd had on toast for tea and/or the pomegranate juice I had with lunch. But still, even the fleeting possibility is not what you want to see, is it? And of course, when your time's your own then sick days lack even the compensatory charms they hold for workers.
Before this kicked in, though, I also had chance to make my first visit to the Wallace Collection, which I think maybe made a better home than it makes a museum. The stuff they have is generally the sort of stuff which makes for a good background, rather than something I wish to stand and contemplate - although the gender balance amuses me, rooms of arms and armour balanced by all that froofy Rococo stuff.

Won the pub quiz jackpot on Monday, but only just - we were exactly as far off the tie-break as one other team, and then in the tie-break tie-break, which was essentially guessing a random date, we were only one day closer than them. Perhaps it was the tension of that which undid me last night? Nah, I'm still blaming the so-called healthy living.

edit: More comics news just in - DC Announces 'After Watchmen - What's Next?' Program? And it has been amazing me how the Watchmen trade is now *everywhere*, although that is a mainly happy amazement as opposed to some people's reaction, so this is a smart move. So what comics are DC suggesting as the next step?

• SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING #21 SPECIAL EDITION

Well, that's the first US comics saw of Alan Moore's ability to dismantle and then retool superhero comics, so yes, fair choice.

• TRANSMETROPOLITAN #1 SPECIAL EDITION

Bearded Brit offers a witty, scabrous vision of the collapse of the American Dream? Sure. Though if they persevere they will, like many before them, realise that Transmet falls apart halfway through.

• PLANETARY #1 SPECIAL EDITION

Hmmmm. Watchmen is mired in comics past, but in such a way that if you don't know that, it doesn't matter. I'm not sure if the same can be said of Planetary. Also, is it wise to get people reading a comic where we don't even know whether it's finished or not?

• PREACHER #1 SPECIAL

Bloody good series, if a little puerile for the sake of it at times. I would have said Sandman might be a better Vertigo option, but this isn't a bad one.

• IDENTITY CRISIS #1 SPECIAL

A comic rooted in decades of DC Universe continuity, and which centres on the rape and murder of superheroes' wives. I don't think it deserved *all* of the stick it got, but is this seriously meant to get anyone dabbling their toes in the water into reading comics? Whenever I think DC might be regaining some small fragment of the plot, they pull a stunt like this.

Comments

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I possibly cry more at comics than at any other artform, for reasons I have never really been able to articulate.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

This is true, but since the gays and the geeks won, what of it?