Elsewhere... Halloween Stuff!

It was a horror-filled week for my other online writing...

What Are You Reading?



Brief reviews of Living with Zombies and Alan Moore's The Courtyard.

 Custom Jumps



Last week's Five for Friday wasn't exactly horror-related, but I did include a couple of horror titles in my list. The assignment was to Name Five Manga Serials -- Or Works That Could Be Serialized -- That Would Be In The Japanese-Style Anthology Created Just For You. Mine were:

* Lone Wolf and Cub
* Buddha
* Anne Freaks
* Priest
* Samurai 7

Food or Comics?
 


This week's comics on a budget shopping list included Frankie Stein, Fish N' Chips, Perhapanauts, and The Anchor.

Attack of the Mini-Comics!



The most recent Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs column covered four, horror-related mini-comics.

Elsewhere on the Internets: Best of the Bronze Age

Here's what else I've been up to online lately:

Five for Friday



Last Friday's (not yesterday, but the week before) assignment from Tom Spurgeon was to Name Five Comics Or Cohesive Runs Of Comics That You Would Give To Someone That Would Encapsulate The Bronze Age And Provide A Gateway To Its Greater Pleasures.

My very Marvel/DC-centric answers were:

1. X-Men #94-143 (1975-1981)
2. Batman #232-244 (1971-1972)
3. Special Marvel Edition #15-16 (1973-1974)
4. Green Lantern #76-89 (1970-1972)
5. Tomb of Dracula #1-70 (1972-1979)

Plump Sister



We finally wrapped up the first scene of A Christmas Carol with a look at a couple of comics adaptations: Marvel's Bronze Age one and Classical Comics' more recent graphic novel version.

Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs



My first column in the new time slot finished the series I've been doing on Anne Freaks.

Another nice compliment



Fehed Said said something nice about my review of his Talking to Strangers anthology. He called it "a very thoughtful review" and added, "Truth be told, I wasn’t expecting anything less from Michael May." Thanks so much, Fehed. Such a thoughtful book deserved no less.

Connie and Anna

The last couple of Gorillas Riding Dinosaur columns have focused on some very cool Action Girls.

Connie: Captives of the Space Pirates; Master of the Jovian Moons

One of the highlights of 2009 for me was spending some time with Flash Gordon comics by both Alex Raymond and Al Williamson. Until I get my hands on Volume 3 of Checker’s Raymond reprints though, I’m done with that. Fortunately, Pacific Comics Club has been reprinting Harold and Frank Godwin’s Connie and that’s filling the void nicely.

Connie may not have a spectacular name, but the strips reprinted here are very much in the style of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. According to Don Markstein’s Toonopedia, Connie Kurridge (rhymes with Courage) began her comics career in 1929 as an adventuring aviator. Wikipedia quotes The World Encyclopedia of Comics as saying that Connie eventually went on to become a reporter and start her own detective agency. And of course, she also went to space, which is where this particular volume picks up her story.

More.

Anne Freaks, Vol. 3

“Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in.”
– Michael Corleone

I know how you feel, Godfather. I enjoyed the second volume of Anne Freaks, but it suddenly became a very different series than the one promised in Volume One. A rapid invasion of new characters took the focus off of Anna, Yuri, and Mitsuba and the psychological drama that had been developing between them. Sure, new dramas were coming into play, but I missed the tense, claustrophobic world inhabited by the main three characters. It bothered me as I was reading it, but by the end of that volume I thought I’d gotten past it. I obviously hadn’t though, because after I bought the third volume it sat on my bookshelf for a while before I finally decided to give it a try. I’d lost the excitement and figured that this might be the last one for me. But then I read it.

More.

Anne Freaks, Volume 2

This week's Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs is about the second volume of Anne Freaks:

Well, that was not at all what I expected.

Anne Freaks is the first manga that I’ve ever liked enough to buy a second volume (Akira doesn’t count because I borrowed the entire thing from a friend), so I don’t know a lot about Japanese serial storytelling. I guess I kind of figured that I’d get more of what I liked about Volume 1, but that wasn’t the case. I very much enjoyed Volume 2, but it surprised me by being a very different kind of story from the first installment. I don’t know if that’s typical of manga series or not (I suspect that - like most things - it varies from series to series), but it’s certainly welcome and exciting.

Volume 1 was so psychological. It had beautiful Anna recruiting two, tragic boys named Yuri and Mitsuba to help her take down her father and a terrorist organization. Did she orchestrate the events that led to their recruitment or is she just taking advantage of a couple of fortuitous incidents? Yuri is falling in love with her; maybe Mitsuba is too. Is that also part of her plan? Or does she actually have feelings that she’s doing a very good job of hiding? Kotegawa sucked me in with these questions and I was looking forward to spending more time with these characters and hopefully getting some answers. I’m going to have to keep waiting though.

Read the rest here.

Adventurenews: Black Widows and Green Martians

Teens Killing Terrorists



This week's Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs is about Anne Freaks, a series about two murdering teenagers being manipulated by a third murdering teenager into helping her fight some kind of secret terrorist organization. It's awesome.

Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow



It's killing me that I can't find a high res version of this photo, but any concerns I had over Scarlett Johansson's playing Black Widow in Iron Man 2 have been gently laid to rest. /Film has a nice high res image of the cover to the issue of Entertaiment Weekly that this is from, but Tony Stark's all hogging the camera.

Return of the Green Goblin Four-Armed Martian



Willem Dafoe is playing Tars Tarkas in the new John Carter of Mars movie. I think that has to be good news.