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Saturday, June 27, 2009 ( 6/27/2009 09:26:00 AM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PET PIC: Kyan Pup gets shaved for the Arizona summer: hadn't realized how pudgy he'd gotten over the winter until we got all that long hair off. Halfsies on the Kibble, Ky!  THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | Friday, June 26, 2009 ( 6/26/2009 09:07:00 AM ) Bill S. AT LEAST WE GOT A FREE TRIP TO THE OBSERVATORY OUT OF THE DEAL. It's definitely been a bi-polar kinda month. On the up side, wife Becky and I have had the publication of Measure By Measure, an event we've been working toward for several years now. Did an interview for Blogcritics Radio about the book this week and had a grand ol' time. But the universe has a way of smacking down too many feelings of self-satisfaction. I continue to look for full-time work, and the day before we did our interview, we learned that the weekly newspaper which had been providing us both free-lance assignments is already closing its doors. Ten issues published, and I've writing steadily for it ever since ish #three. Even stood in for the editor two days when she was out of town for a family wedding. Now it's over. Both Becky and I are feeling disappointed (and more than a little pissed about the way it was abruptly handled), though we probably shouldn't have been surprised. When longstanding big city papers are folding, what chance does a small community freebie like the SW Express News have in this economic climate? Still, a growing ad revenue stream seemed to coming in, and the paper itself had been receiving good feedback from area readers. It really seemed like the paper had a chance to sustain itself over the long haul. We weren't getting a lotta money out of the deal, but we would've happily continued doing a weekly feature for as long as the paper wanted us. We enjoyed going out on these mini-adventures together. Too bad it all was cut so short. # | Thursday, June 25, 2009 ( 6/25/2009 06:46:00 AM ) Bill S. "I DO NOT WISH TO BE AWAKENED BY THE LIKES OF YOU." Say what you will about Stan Lee: the man knows how to ride the tail of the zeitgeist. Manly cable teevee the thing? There's Stan with the Stripperella cartoon series. Crappy reality game shows still big? How about Who Wants to Be A Superhero? Manga holding onto its readership? Here's the Man collaborating with Shonen Jump favorite, Hiroyuki Takei. As co-creator and biggest living name attached to Marvel Comics, the guy's gotta be doing okay for himself, yet still he continues to plug away with new projects. If some of these -- like his painful reworking of DC comics heroes in the Just Imagine series -- have proved more embarrassing than entertaining, those of us who grew up with Lee continue to hold onto a dim hope that something fresh will come from this once unstoppable comics writer/editor. And so it was that I approached the July 2009 issue of Shonen Jump, which continues the first official chapter of the serialization of Lee & Takei's "Ultimo." (An earlier trial prologue appeared in the September '08 issue, but, judging from what's on display here, it doesn't hurt to have missed it.) As with all of SJ's features, the first chapter features a hefty dose of comics -- sixty pages worth -- so even if you're not into the other ongoing features (Bleach, Naruto, Yu-Gi-Oh! et al), the $4.99 price is competitive with what current mainstream comics are going for these days. The series concerns two living puppets, Ultimo and Vice, who have been created by a mysterious figure named Dunstan. Dunstan, who shows up in 12th century Kyoto, Japan, wearing eyeglasses that are decidedly not a part of the period, has created these two mechanical boys as fighting embodiments of Ultimate Good and Ultimate Evil. "The sole reason I made them," he tells a Robin Hoodish bandit named Yamato, "was to know which is stronger, Good or Evil." He seems blithely unconcerned about the devastation that will arise from this ultimate battle. Dunstan, as we're reminded more than once, is drawn by Takei as a manga-sized version of Lee himself. If we wanted to get all meta about it, we could look at Ultimo as the writer's attempt at delving into the motivations behind creating and reading superhero fiction. (There's a lot of dialog about whether different secondary characters represent Good or Evil in the first chapter.) At least we could if we knew just how much involvement the comics legend actually had in the series: SJ's credits read "Original Concept by Stan Lee; Story & Art by Hiroyuki Takei," which leads this reader to believe that "Ultimo" is like one of those second class paperback series with a big-name author above the title (Tom Clancy's Ultimo Force, say) and a lesser known writer doing the actual storytelling. This is not to imply that Takei is a second-stringer -- his Shaman King remains an entertaining boy's actioner on its own merits -- but it does make one question just how much of Lee's actual involvement in the series goes beyond slipping an "Excelsior!" into the introductory note. All that noted, the first full chapter of "Ultimo" remains an entertaining quick read. The series' living manikins -- pointy eared with the pre-requisite flyaway hair and giant metal claws for hands -- are visually enjoyable, even if their character delineation is pretty broad. ("You anger me," Vice tells the bandits just before he ices six of 'em. "For that, you die!") In battle, the two demonstrate the ability to transform into dragonish or leonine creatures, which Takei and his assistants illustrate with full-throated glee. I can see these fight scenes shoring up a suitably noisy anime adaptation. More intriguing as characters are the amoral Dunstan and the heroic bandit, Yamato. The latter, in particular, has a decent amount of flair, but before we get to know him or any of his Merrye Men too well, the two manikins vanish mid-fight, and the story suddenly shifts to 21st Century West Tokyo. There, we meet a teenaged schoolboy named Yamato who pals with a young longhaired boy who's a dead ringer for one of the other bandits. Are they eternal champions or reincarnations of the 12th century figures? Lee & Takei aren't giving that particular plot point away in the first chapter. I'm invested enough to want to check out the first Ultimo paperback collection when it comes out, though more for Takei's work at this point than Lee's. Still, the fanboy in me continues to hold out hope that Stan the Man will produce something surprising. Perhaps I need an intervention? Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Wednesday, June 24, 2009 ( 6/24/2009 09:43:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: Was happily thinking of Alison Moyet the other day; hence this video: Would've love to've seen her and Vince Clarke in their Yazoo reunion concerts. # | Tuesday, June 23, 2009 ( 6/23/2009 10:53:00 AM ) Bill S. "LIFE GETS BETTER, YEAH, WHENEVER I'M IN YOUR ARMS." Hard to believe, but today is the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of this guy and his lovely wife-&-collaborator, Rebecca. Pretty mind-boggling.  # | ( 6/23/2009 06:25:00 AM ) Bill S. SCOPES: Spent last Friday with my photog/other half on a tour of the Mount Graham International Observatory. We'd been wanting to see these huge telescopes (including the world's biggest Large Binocular Telescope) ever since we'd moved to the area, so when my editor at Southwest Express News asked us to think of some possible features for the paper, one of the first that came to mind was a piece on the twice weekly observatory tour. Put on by Eastern Arizona College's Discovery Museum, the excursion is one of the few ways lay folk like us are even allowed on the grounds. Costs forty bucks per to go on the tour, so we were more than happy to be able to do it as a story. Takes 1-1/2 hours to get from Discovery Park Museum to the observatory on a good day. Friday took longer since the little restaurant that was supplying our lunches thought we were coming up on Saturday. Our group was comprised of ten visitors – retiree geezers, mostly, though we also had two pre-teens who were visiting with their grandmother -- a guide and a van driver. Among the group, talk quickly turned to politics, but I worked to keep out of it. Didn't want to compromise myself as a "reporter." The road up the 10,000-plus foot mountain can be pretty scary to the uninitiated: full of switchbacks, rail-free turns and threatening scenic looks downward. But it was clear that Claude, our driver, knew what he was doing, for which we were thankful. Along the way, we passed a turn named Cadillac Point: so named for a couple who got confused by a road sign and drove their Caddy off the mountain. Yeeps! The drive was slow, but I wasn't complaining. At one point we passed a charred area left by a fire the day before: someone's camper overheated on its way up to Coronado State Park campgrounds and its engine burst into flames. Our driver reassured us that the van we were in received regular maintenance check-ups, but he also couldn't help noting that the brakes were a little harder than he liked. The last six miles to the observatory were on unpaved road: chained off as private property with regular signage indicating that "This Camp Is A Weapons Free Zone." In addition to the expensive international monitoring equipment, the upper of the mountain is home to a subspecies of red squirrel that's on the endangered list. Apparently, when astronomers first worked to get the large binocular telescope building erected, they ran into opposition from environmental activists concerned about the creatures. Court fights kept the observatory from being completed for years, and as a result of this battle, there's a separate group of scientists on the mountain monitoring the little rascals. We tried to spy some of the squirrels while we were in the van, but the only four-footed wildlife we saw were mule deer. MGIO has three telescopes, each housed in their own building: the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (which used to be housed outside Rome until light pollution spoiled the site), a Submillimeter Radio Telescope, and the Large Binocular Telescope. It's the LBT that's the big crowd pleaser: the largest of its kind, it utilizes two 332-inch mirrors to get the job done, giving it an acuity that's ten times that of the Hubble Space Telescope. The whole upper half of the building can rotate to aim the LBT; try as she might Becky was unable to get the whole instrument in her camera. The damn thing's sixteen stories high and, as such, was featured on Discovery Channel's Really Big Things show. Also worth noting in the Really Big Things Dept.: the really big bug zappers that are planted throughout the buildings. Mt. Graham has a lot of moths that are attracted to the buildings. Wouldn't want some stargazer thinking that they were catching Mothra in their sites. We started with the LBT first, though, typically that's the telescope saved for last. The restrooms at the ranger station where we stopped to picnic were locked up, so tour guide Carol wanted to take to get us to the building with the biggest restrooms. Most of the staff who work with the telescopes were asleep during the tour, of course; the buildings also contain small dorms with signs advising visitors not to slam any doors. All three 'scopes were built through international consortiums, and, as such, time using 'em is very carefully parceled between each member of the group. Get your two-week shift and you really hope that the weather's gonna cooperate, coz otherwise it's Wait 'til Next Year. This June has had a lot of uncharacteristically overcast days, we were told: bad news for the folks who were sleeping while we toured. We rode down the mountain at four, and, once again, the discussion turned to politics. (Basic message: our president is ruining our future by trying to fix our disastrous present.) Again, I stayed out of it and not just to keep from compromising my role as a fly-on-the-wall reporter. I'd much rather think about the stars. . . Labels: local color # | |
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