Sandman

So... this is probably the comic I took the longest to finally check out, except for maybe Watchmen. It doesn't make much sense since I'm a fan of Neil Gaiman and this is pretty much his seminal work. I think the main reason I put it off so long is that it's a dang huge story. Something like 75 issues, most of them 25 pages long. Dang is it worth it.

It still took me a long time to read it. I started out borrowing the Absolute Edition from a friend, which was entirely amazing, but he had to take it back before I got half-way through the first volume because he had to move. So I managed to get it some other way. The version I got was not the Absolute Edition, so it wasn't quite as pretty and not always very high quality either, but it was still very enjoyable. Neil Gaiman is an excellent story-teller, and in this instance he's telling stories about stories about stories. So great. The cast of core characters is just brilliant. There's a whole lot of ancient lore weaved into it, like the Norse gods and faeries and whatnot, not unlike Gaiman's American Gods novel. That makes it especially interesting.

Possibly an even cooler thing is the tie-in with the rest of the DC universe. The Sandman character is actually sort-of based on an older DC character that I don't actually know much about. A few lesser-known characters pop up, and in one panel Batman and Clark Kent make a cameo. That was a real treat.

In essence, this is really a collection of stories, not just one. There were several that really stuck out to me. The one I remember the best is the story of the Emperor of the United States of America. That one really got me emotionally involved for some reason. Some immigrant, disillusioned by the so-called opportunity, is at his wit's end and begins to fall into the clutches of Despair, who challenges Dream (the Sandman) to keep him from her. He accepts the challenge and grants the man empirical rule of the country through a dream. Of course no one really accepts this rule except for him, but it keeps him going and makes him loved by many. In the end, Despair never gets him and he helps a lot of people. The ending really almost pulled some tears from my ducts.

So, it's a great thing. Anyone who hasn't read it should. Now I have to start reading the extensive collection of spin-offs.

The Graduate

I first heard of this film in a documentary or some such about Dustin Hoffman quite a few years ago. I'm not sure why I saw it. I think it was after I saw Rain Man. I didn't think about it at all until a few days ago when it turned up in some lame list about movies where the protagonist's main goal is to get some tail, and they expend a lot of effort to get to that goal. I might include a link to that list later. I remembered that it's supposedly held in high esteem, so I checked out imdb to make sure and discovered I was right. So I watched it.

Great movie. It's really not what I expected. I knew about the MILF seductress thing, but that's about all I knew. I had no idea how much Simon & Garfunkel's music was intertwined with it all, and most of the plot was unknown to me at all. Dustin Hoffman was great; I can't really relate to a lot of it, but his performance did get across the emotional maelstrom that I'm sure most people have experienced quite well. A lot of it was funny, some profound, and a good amount pretty darn ridiculous. It's got the whole coming-of-age deal which is usually fun.

I think possibly the best part of it all was the music. It really gave me a new appreciation for Simon & Garfunkel; The Sounds of Silence is such a fantastic song. I need to listen to them more. A featured review of the film on imdb stressed the perfection of the music in the context of the characters, especially that particular song. A lot of the time Hoffman goes around oblivious to the sounds around him, seemingly shutting out all of the confusion.

I enjoyed it.

Y: The Last Man

I just spent about 4 hours going through the second half of this series instead of working on a huge project that's pretty much due in a couple days. That should give an idea of how good it is. Tomorrow's gonna suck.

The story isn't really an original one. This dude Yorick is the last dude alive on Earth; that is to say the only male. Except for his monkey Ampersand, of course. For a reason that's never fully exposed throughout the 60 issues, every mammal possessing a Y-chromosome died simultaneously, leaving the women to clean up the bodies.

What I really liked about it, aside from the somewhat gratuitous lesbianism and occasional well-drawn nudity, was the core group of characters and their relationships. I suppose that's what pretty much everything is about though. Yorick himself was great; constantly spouting off pop-culture references all the time and rarely getting a response.

I don't really have a whole lot to say at this hour, so I guess I'll stop. Maybe I'll write more later.

Now is later. So, it really was a great read. Pretty long too. I'm a fan of post-apocalypse stuff so it was right up my proverbial alley. I think I like the fact that you never really really find out what definitely killed all the guys; instead you're given a whole bunch of possibilities to choose from. Being science-fiction, a lot of these choices are pretty out there, but fun to think about.

Okay I guess I still don't have much to say. It was good. I'll leave it at that. Read it.

Procrastination Theater Part II: Semargl and Wolverine

A while ago I posted during a somewhat busy period of school in which I had no desire to do anything of substance, so I wrote a blog post about something or other. That time has come again. Well, it's not quite as busy now, but for some reason I feel like I'm putting stuff off anyway. So you get to read some lame reviews. Yay!

Semargl - Manifest

My last post was on an album that has become one of my favorite metal releases ever. This one was a favorite before that one (and still is). The Amenta hailed from Australia, these guys from the Ukraine. That's a neat thing really; extreme metal can come from pretty much anywhere. Just recently France has become something of a hotbed, producing acts like Gojira and Hacride. There are still a few holdout domains like those in the Middle East, but for the most part the black tide (not a reference to the new thrashy band that I hate for no reason) is encompassing the globe.

Anyway, this album is great. Genre-wise it's I guess what you'd call blackened-death metal, although I think it has more black qualities than death; not in any conventional sense, however. You won't find the walls of lo-fi distortion, symphonic keyboards, or raspy screeches of its roots. It mostly just retains the absolute animosity toward religion (specifically Christianity), and just an indescribable feeling of evil that is the primary tenet of black metal.

What sets this album apart from basically all other music in its genres is the extremely bouncy sound. The bass player seems to be taking lessons from Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The distortion level of pretty much everything (except the vocals) is remarkably low, and the sound is well produced. It's all just really damned enjoyable.

The only thing I don't really care for is the supposed subject matter (I don't think they released the lyrics). The band is openly anti-Christian, and this album itself is a manifest of war against the religion, ergo the title. The words printed in the booklet are not the lyrics; instead they are the manifest itself, it seems. I haven't actually spent any time reading them since I don't think it's worth my time, but a brief glance made it look pretty serious. Anwhow, I just like the way the album sounds.

Here're some video samples.

Wolverine: Origin

I found this randomly and remembered that I had been wanting to read it. So I did.

It's really good.

It's not what I expected; I didn't think they'd start with his childhood; I don't know why. I think it's great how they make you expect one kid to turn into Wolverine and then make it some other kid instead. I haven't actually read any X-Men comic books, at least I don't think I have, but this seems like it's a lot better than I would expect from such things. There's a lot of emotion and drama. Kinda bleak really.

One thing I'm not entirely clear about is whether his claws were initially meant to be physically part of him or whether they were implanted with the adamantium; I had always assumed the latter, leaving his healing factor to be his only real mutation. It's cool this way anyhow.

The Amenta - Occasus

I haven't posted about music in a while, mainly because I just listen to too much of it. I guess I'll just write when something hits me in a profound-ish way. This album does that. I've had a digital copy for quite a while now, maybe a year or so, but just got a physical version the other day while browsing through the used CDs at StereoShop. That was the first time I've been there, and I was impressed by the number of good albums I found there. I'll probably be heading back at some point; maybe when I get a car.

Anyway; Occasus can be pretty well defined as an industrial death metal album. There are also bits of black metal going on, but not strongly enough to merit inclusion in the genre labeling. The Amenta is one of those bands that likes to make themselves sound really serious and evil, not unlike Semargl, another favorite of mine of which I just ordered a record today. I'm pretty sure their main schtick is nihilism, i.e. the belief that nothing actually exists and that reality is a projection of our own minds. My introduction to nihilism was The Big Lebowski, so I don't really know a whole lot about it. Their lyrics don't seem to consentrate much on nihilism itself, although they do touch on it (especially on the track 'Nihil'). Most of the time they're just painting a big bleak picture of some sort of doom or something. References to gods or demons and whatnot all over the place. I don't really care all that much about the subject matter, and I didn't even know a single line from the lyrics until I bought the album.

The music is what's important. It's primarily a wall-of-sound deal with jackhammer drums and heavily distorted guitars, interspersed with creepy computer screeches and hums, and of course the vocalists deep grunt-growls all over the place. This album took quite a while to grow on me, probably because of the vocals really. They aren't all that great, but I think they fit the music nicely. This guy seems to have left the band though and their next album, n0n, is going to have a big ol' collection of established vocalists. You can hear one track from the album, 'Slave', on their myspace. Anyway I'm rambling.

It isn't all just in-your-face metal. There are several ambient passages, some in between songs and others in the middle of songs. I think they're really what make it special. Going from systematic pummeling to more randomly flowing apocolyptic noises really create an atmosphere that brings me back again and again. I think you can really call this a work of art; not something you can say for a lot of metal albums.

Earth X

I actually haven't read many Marvel comics, but I've watched some X-Men and Spider-Man animated stuff and seen most of the movies. I have a pretty good grasp of a large number of the characters. This book makes me feel like I know nothing at all. I knew the Marvel universe was big, I just didn't know how massive and complicated it was. The complexity is due to many years of new ideas and recycled old ones. Earth X is an attempt to bring all of those crazy stories under one roof and give them a cohesive purpose; it largely succeeds.

Starring primarily Captain America, Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic, the elastic man), and a character I'd not heard of called Machine Man or X-51, Earth X is about a time somewhere in the future when all the characters we know are old. For some reason every person on the planet has become a super-being/mutant/whatever. Most of the book is spend trying to figure out why this happened. In the course of events we find out why such beings and humans in general exist, and also that everyone is doomed. Of course this is averted for the time being but new developments arrive leaving a shadow of foreboding over the ending. This is the first of three books so it's there for a reason.

A lot of the time it all seemed pretty silly to me, just because the Marvel universe is not a cohesive thing; there's all sorts of crazy crap going on all the time and so many different things happen for different reasons. They sort of explained the reason for the variation but it seemed forced. However, in the end it all made a sort of sense, and had something close to the feel of the revelation at the end of Watchmen. I enjoyed it and I'll probably check out the other two at some point.

Star Wars: Clone Wars (TV Series)

I had heard that this was good, but I avoided it because it's part of Lucass' prequel story which I loathe. However, it turns out that it is quite a bit better than those three steaming piles of dung.

It's set between Episodes II and III. As such, it deals with the a bunch of battles between the droid army and the clone army (hence the title). Of course the primary characters are Anakin and Obi-Wan. I think the best part of it all is how Anakin is less of a whiner and more of a bad-ass. In fact, everyone is more bad-ass; especially Mace Windu, who trashes battle droids with his fists. Overall, it just does a good job of reclaiming some of the spirit of the original films, as well as tapping into a little of the extended universe.

Being a cartoon it was a little cheesy, but the focus was hardly on humor. I'd say there was less humor in it than in any of the live-action films. Some parts got pretty darn dark. The dialogue was quite sparse most of the time, which I think is a good thing. They did tend to favor the use of old Star Wars catch-phrases a lot, i.e. "I've got a bad feeling about this." I think that one reared it's head at least three times.

The art style was a little bit too stylized for me to be completely happy with it, but I wouldn't say it made it any worse.

I've heard that the CGI continuation that's coming out soon follows in the footsteps of the prequels in that it is also crammed with feces. Too bad.