Thursday, February 14, 2008

Your obligatory Valentine's Day romance comic cover post:





Boy, I had a pretty good little posting streak going there for a while, didn't I? Unfortunately, I've been very busy at work and at home so I haven't had much time or energy to post the piddling stuff I do post. But here's something, at least!

Anyway, the song above is your Valentine's Day present- one of the most romantic, yearning, beautiful songs in (fairly) recent memory IN MY OPINION OF COURSE. It's from the one-shot album James singer Tim Booth did with David Lynch's music collaborator Angelo Badiamenti, titled Booth and the Bad Angel, and it's called "Fall in Love with Me". You're welcome. Please forgive the little burst of guitar noise at the beginning, left over from the preceding song- I didn't rip that mp3.

I still plan on putting the Jack Kirby Fourth World Omnibus Vols. I & II post up eventually, but I haven't had a lot of time to buckle down and write, thanks to meatworld concerns. But that doesn't mean I can't lay some linkage on you, and hopefully at least one of them will be new to you.

The real skinny on Valentine's Day, via GoodShit.

Still feeling a bit sad about Steve Gerber's passing; here's a tribute post by fellow traveler Don McGregor on his MySpace blog.

Alan David Doane has a poll going on, in which he asks you a bunch of questions about your comics shop experience(s). You should respond! I'm working on mine, but a lot of the questions don't apply to me anymore since I buy mine online.

One thing I will be getting at my former comics shop (I still like that shop, but now it's less convenient for me to stop in since I don't work in that town anymore) is FANTASTIC FOUR: THE LOST ADVENTURE #1, that reclamation project in which they took an unfinished Kirby FF story, done just before he bailed for DC, and completed it. By clicking on the link, you can see the first few pages; I like the subtle humor in that scene between the Thing and that Janus character, in which the latter disturbs Ben in a bank vault while he's checking out his safe deposit box- by showing the Thing in a fairly annoyed, passive stance in the face of the blustering villain who's bothering him, it points out how well Kirby could do the nuanced as well as the aggressive...and explains to me, or at least from my viewpoint, why just about every successive attempt at drawing the character by a host of different artists has fallen flat.

A new-to-me blog called Uncle Ernie's Creature Ink posted a complete John Severin story from Creepy magazine the other day; if you want to see great work by an artist in his prime go check it out. Damn, if I could find those old coverless Eerie and Creepys I have, I'd scan and post a Jerry Grandenetti story one of these days... I'm mulling over getting those Creepy Archives hardcovers; I love those old magazines and it would be great to have them collected like that. Oh well, as always it's price which gives me pause.

He's so lucky...he's a star...

Aw, you remember, the Britney song, before she went batshit insane? Anyway, I'm referring to Paul Pope, who recently posted a really cool short story called, wait for it, that's right...you guessed it- LUCKY. You should peep it, if you haven't already. Hey, I can talk that jive!

The great Roy Wood recently received a honorary degree, making him a Doctor of Music, from England's Derby University. You can go here to get the scoop, including links to a video of the ceremony!

A movie that I seem to have been watching a lot lately is Smokin' Aces a flawed, but diverting, little slice of shoot 'em up cinema. The director, "Smokin" Joe Carnahan, has a blog.

Here's a Flickr set of illustrations by advertising and children's book artist Barbara Bradley, found via another new-to-me blog called Today's Inspiration. The last few days' worth of posts have been devoted to her art and observations.

New comics Friday! This is what I should be getting:

DIANA PRINCE WONDER WOMAN TP VOL 01
FABLES #69
AMERICAN VIRGIN #23
IRON MAN: ENTER THE MANDARIN #5
ABE SAPIEN: THE DROWNING #1
NORTHLANDERS #3
BPRD: 1946 #2
100 BULLETS #88
JACK STAFF #14

Looking forward to that Diana Prince... collection; I'm sure it's dated badly but I haven't read many of those stories. Sorry to see the last issue of American Virgin, which I almost dropped at least twice but it got better towards the end. I'm disappointed there hasn't been more buzz about that Iron Man book- guess Marvel's really made fans sick of the character. That BPRD series, 1946, got off to a good start; hope they can sustain. Finally, a new Jack Staff, only two weeks after that Special! It's like having Christmas and a birthday back to back!

OK, that's it for now. More later, maybe.

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