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Today, Let Us Speak Only Of Good Things
Feb. 26th, 2007 07:42 pmYou may have seen an article or 20 about how The Wire is the best TV show ever. Four episodes in to the first series, I can't honestly disagree. I perhaps wouldn't go as far as outright best (there's an unaccountable lack of Time Lords, for starters)...so let's say 'best drama set in what is generally believed to the real world', and leave it at that. It's funny, it's terrifying, it's a state of the nation piece, it doesn't have a single character who isn't instantly and compellingly believable, it's perfectly pitched and it never fails to hold the attention. It has also managed to put Baltimore straight to the top of my list of 'places never, ever to visit', but no matter. It took me a little while to acclimatise to the cast - there are an awful lot of alumni of fellow HBO masterpiece Oz, and one in particular is playing a narcotics cop again which sets my brain off on one of its little crossover trails. And, in what I imagine is a rarer overlap, it's less than a week since I saw Dominic West as a Czech student in Rock'n'Roll, and now here he is as an American cop. Though in some ways Jan and McNulty have an awful lot in common; they're both determined to do what they believe is right, and they both tend to piss people off in the process.
(In other happy HBO news, they've optioned A Song of Ice & Fire)
It pains me to say this, but some of you may be living your lives in darkness, unaware of the wonder that is Beta Ray Bill. In brief: Beta Ray Bill is Marvel's version of the Norse god Thor, reimagined as a skull-faced bionic alien space horse (a technique I would like to see applied to several other religious figures, incidentally. What could possibly go wrong?). Stormbreaker: The Saga Of Beta Ray Bill is written by someone I know better as an artist - Michael Avon Oeming - but he turns out to be one of those happy few who can jump the counter and not make a mess of things. Writing huge cosmic stories is not easy - if you're basically using exploding planets as punctuation then all too soon it becomes about as exciting as using commas (see Infinite Crisis or much of its lead-in, for examples). But here, when those planets explode (well, the inhabited ones, anyway), you feel it as EXPLODING PLANETS OMG. It helps that Oeming is unafraid to go as unutterably OTT as this sort of story needs ("Soon all the universes, multiverses and megaverses will be mine!"), but is also capable of reining it in for more 'human' moments without collapsing into distracting mundanity or schmaltz. Cosmic comics are much like Superman comics; they're almost always awful, but when they work, they're one of the high points of the medium. This cosmic comic works.
And now I really, really want a Beta Ray Bill icon.
The new Idlewild single, 'No Emotion', is rather fine. Which comes as a pleasant surprise given what a dreary, dull experience their last album was. Turns out they haven't reached the 'will this do?' phase of their career just yet, they were merely having an off year - now they're back to being spiky and yearning and generally Idlewildish, and it makes me happy.
And this deduction as to what the Hell DC and Marvel have been playing at recently may or may not be correct, but is certainly inspired.
(In other happy HBO news, they've optioned A Song of Ice & Fire)
It pains me to say this, but some of you may be living your lives in darkness, unaware of the wonder that is Beta Ray Bill. In brief: Beta Ray Bill is Marvel's version of the Norse god Thor, reimagined as a skull-faced bionic alien space horse (a technique I would like to see applied to several other religious figures, incidentally. What could possibly go wrong?). Stormbreaker: The Saga Of Beta Ray Bill is written by someone I know better as an artist - Michael Avon Oeming - but he turns out to be one of those happy few who can jump the counter and not make a mess of things. Writing huge cosmic stories is not easy - if you're basically using exploding planets as punctuation then all too soon it becomes about as exciting as using commas (see Infinite Crisis or much of its lead-in, for examples). But here, when those planets explode (well, the inhabited ones, anyway), you feel it as EXPLODING PLANETS OMG. It helps that Oeming is unafraid to go as unutterably OTT as this sort of story needs ("Soon all the universes, multiverses and megaverses will be mine!"), but is also capable of reining it in for more 'human' moments without collapsing into distracting mundanity or schmaltz. Cosmic comics are much like Superman comics; they're almost always awful, but when they work, they're one of the high points of the medium. This cosmic comic works.
And now I really, really want a Beta Ray Bill icon.
The new Idlewild single, 'No Emotion', is rather fine. Which comes as a pleasant surprise given what a dreary, dull experience their last album was. Turns out they haven't reached the 'will this do?' phase of their career just yet, they were merely having an off year - now they're back to being spiky and yearning and generally Idlewildish, and it makes me happy.
And this deduction as to what the Hell DC and Marvel have been playing at recently may or may not be correct, but is certainly inspired.
