Tuesday 29 January 2008

Comics Ennui

I can't be the only one feeling this - a sense of "well, what's the point" about comics. The range of current titles I'm actually interested in shrinks ever more - DC's been dead to me since the Legion rereboot and all the palaver they were doing in their core universe at the time with Green Lantern, Infinite Crisis, et al, and while Marvel's never quite reached the same stage of "I can't be bothered with this any more", they're achieving the same sort of thing through salami-slicing - OMD/BND being the latest straw to snap completely (unlike a lot of people, when I said "I won't be buying any more Spider-titles", I meant exactly that. I'm stubborn that way, which is why I haven't even looked at the Legion rereboot three years later - I knew when I said it that "I won't read or buy any new Legion comics until they reverse this" almost certainly meant in practice "I'll never read or buy any new Legion comics ever again". So?), and the X-titles are straining even if they're not quite at that point yet. Even the miniseries, like Agents of Atlas, Livewires and Scorpion: Poison Tomorrow (the last technically not a mini, but...), which gave something comics-related to look forward to even if they were guaranteed to sell like crap are drying up.

Sure, there's the odd Nova even now, but right now I'm "properly" following about six titles - Nova (mid-table ongoing), Annihilation Conquest (mini), Incredible Herc (ongoing I expect to be free-falling pretty soon), Cable/Deadpool (cancelled), New Warriors (sinking), X-Men First Class (low-selling). I may or may not go back to X-Factor post-Messiah Complex, and the books I'm "casually" following - Thor, Cap, Marvel Adventures Avengers, Terror, Inc, IDW Transformers - I'm more likely to go to "not following" than "properly following".

I feel like I haven't moved away from comics, they've moved away from me...

[PS: If anyone was reading this, I'm sure they'd be thinking "what about 'independent' comics? Fact is, I read comics for superheroes - I watch TV, read books, etc for other mediums.

Tuesday 1 January 2008

So that was 2007? Well, it can sod off for all I care.

Personally, my abiding memory of 2007 is and will always be spending seven months in agony, punctuated by various doctor and hospital trips in-between a "how the hell did THAT happen" thing caused by sitting down wrong in the first week of February, and getting sliced open under general anaesthetic in September. Followed by very nearly fainting when I tried to walk out the hospital because of the pain, turning Day Surgery into an overnight stay. Followed by a month or so in even greater agony from the surgical wounds, of course.

As for TV, I watched slightly more than in 2006, due almost entirely to my discovery (no pun intended) of MythBusters and the DVDs of [New] Battlestar Galatica, which between them formed pretty much my entire US TV watching of the year. And, after blazing through S1 in a week (and the miniseries before that in two nights) BSG tailed off so much that I still haven't made it past the S2 episode where the President magically gets her cancer cured. For "home-grown" (i.e., UK) TV, Doctor Who got steadily worse for me (except for the Blink/Utopia double bill. After which it dropped off a cliff for the last two episodes), even though the ratings suggest I'm in a minority there. With Catherine Tate coming on for the whole of S4, I'm wondering if I'll keep watching. (It's stablemate Robin Hood is now in a similar situation for me for entirely different reasons - I enjoyed Hood S2 a LOT more than Who S4, but with THAT ending, re: my last post...). Other than that, and generics like the news, I watched mostly BBC2 light entertainment shows (led by Top Gear and Oz & James) & BBC4. Which scares me, come to think of it.

As for the news, it depressed me too much to write about.

Comics, were 99.8% (not literal figure) Marvel for me this year as DC goes further and further away from what I want to see [Even if Marvel made a last minute stab at outdoing them with OMD...]. Picks: Nova, the tail-end of Annihilation (even if the power signature cheat still bugs me...), the surprise of New Warriors being half-decent - technically, I think I shouldn't like it, and the fill-in art on #7 was horrible, yet it's got Something that I can't put my finger on, but makes me like it... - Terror, Inc, Iron Man: Hypervelocity, Irredeemable Ant-Man, Planet Hulk (but not WWH) and the Jeff Parker double-bill of X-Men: First Class and Marvel Adventures: Avengers (until #17 only, in the case of the latter). Pity about Cable/Deadpool, but losing Cable appeared to have knocked the wheels off it almost completely as it skid towards cancellation for reasons entirely unrelated to the title itself.

Hoping for a less painful 2008...