Shatterstar's Blog Posts

This post relates to: Arthur, Who would you consider to be the best sidekick?

Without a doubt Arthur is the greatest sidekick in comic book history. Batman should be so lucky. He's comic relief, he's pudgy, he's utterly dependent on the hero to save the day, he's got his own apartment, he can do your taxes, and he has that intangible quality of being impossible to kill regardless of the absurd danger you put him in. Ultimately what does a hero want in a sidekick? Someone that makes the hero look godlike in comparison. Bonus points for having a couch to crash on.

Arthur > *

This post relates to: Ripclaw, Cyblade, Vogue, Troll, Impact, Badrock, Diehard, Shaft, Image, Witchblade, Jim Valentino, Shadowhawk, Erik Larsen, Marc Silvestri, Todd Mcfarlane, Fortress, Whilce Portacio, The Darkness, Cyberforce, Youngblood, Rob Liefeld, Spawn, Savage Dragon, Robert Kirkman

This is the stuff that fanboy's dreams are made of. Six issues written by Robert Kirkman, penciled by Todd McFarlane, Marc Silvestri, Rob Liefeld, Jim Valentino, Erik Larsen, and While Portacio all at once. Starring Spawn, Cyberforce, Witchblade, Youngblood, ShadowHawk(s) I & II, Savage Dragon, and Portacio's newest creation - Fortress. Plus guest appearances galore by Spawn's villains, The Darkness, etc.  I can't explain it any better than Kirkman did here:

 "Each artist is going to do the layouts for one issue," Kirkman explained. "Those guys will get the script for the issue and they'll be the one breaking it down into pages. Then once the story's laid out, they're going to be mailed all over the country, and everybody's going to be drawing their characters onto the pages. This is the future. It's going to be a lot of work, and I don't know -- maybe we'll have to give FedEx a credit in the book. But this just shows that anything can be done. "

I'm pretty sure nothing like this has been attempted before, from the couple pages I've seen (below), it looks pretty seamless. Its easily the biggest crossover/superhero event in a long, long time for Image. The thing that gets me even more excited is the possible reestablishment of the Image universe as one world (minus Jim Lee's creations and WetWorks obviously) where the characters interract with each other on a more regular basis than crossoverissues. Who knows maybe Chapel will get re-retconned into being the murderer of Al Simmons?

This post relates to: What did you think of The Dark Knight?

So... first of all I'm never letting someone else buy a ticket again. Friend of mine was supposed to buy tickets online for the Saturday evening show, somehow managed to get tickets for the Sunday show, which we didn't learn until we were sitting in our seats 10 minutes before the Saturday show was supposed to start. Anyways... after the ticket buyer was sacked, a crazy 12 hour beach party, and Hancock later, I finally got to see Dark Knight.

My opinion:
Dark Knight surpassed Batman Begins, best comic book movie ever. Best action movie I've seen in a long long long time, its easily at the highest echelon of action movies i've ever seen. I saw Hancock to kill time earlier in the day and there's just no comparison. Spectacular pace despite being 2.5 hours it doesn't lag at all, just huge amazing visuals, unpredictable plot, and Heath Ledger WAS the Joker. Disturbing, funny, repugnant, chaotic, he was the perfect foil for Batman. Totally stole the movie although Two-Face was intense when he showed up.

This movie raises the bar way the hell up for any future comic movie. Any action movie too. Oscar? Sure. At least for Ledger. That performance was on par with Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, DeNiro in Cape Fear, etc. Best movie I've seen this year by far. Chris Nolan deserves some form of recognition for what he's done here.

Dark Knight shows the difference that a quality director with respect for his audience, for the source material and pride in making the characters and actors look good rather than trying to show how clever they can be as a director. Its not about selling the soundtrack, slurpees, and action figures. Its just a damn good movie. My hope is that directors of talent take notice and feel eager to work on comic movies, producers get inspired to shoot comic movies for quality over making an easy buck off the name, and the comic companies themselves keep it going with the quality movies they're turning out.  They don't need a mindless "fun  summer popcorn" flick  (this phrase makes me want to impale myself) to put butts in seats.

This post relates to: What's the first comic you remember buying?

First comic I remember getting for myself was this one at a 7/11. I'm not sure if I used allowance money or lunch money or something but the art, action, cool looking characters sucked me in. I had absolutely no idea what was going on in this issue. The Reavers get slaughtered, the Hellions all die, Iceman apparently dies, Fitzroy shows up with a bunch of super sentinels & wupps the White Queen, Archangel is angsty and apparently has venetian blinds for wings, I had no idea what was going on with Jean Grey or Storm's powers. Colossus and Iceman I remembered from the original X-Men & Spider-Man cartoon series, were immediately my favorite characters. I probably read it a dozen times before I got another comic. I loved Portacio's art, he's still one of my favorite superhero artists.



I had a handful of books before this one that my cousin got for me- couple early issues of Darkhawk, Deathlok, Spider-Man, Ghost Rider. He turned me onto the idea of collecting comics like you do baseball cards, save them & make money off them when you're old... sounded right at the time...

This post relates to: Do you listen to (or watch) any podcasts? If so, which ones? If not, why not?

I subscribe to the Onion's radio & video feed. Not really a podcast I guess. Other than that, I really don't have time to listen to podcasts on a regular basis. Once in a while I'll put one on that sounds interesting from Itunes on in the background but there's nothing out there that I MUST listen to/watch.