Bad Monkeys and Cownt Fans

No real post tonight. Just want to say that Airborn ought to be looking over its shoulder. I just bought Matt Ruff's Bad Monkeys tonight and the first chapter is fantastic. Not sure I'm going to have the patience now to sit through much more of Airborn.

In other news, the Cownt now has a Facebook fan page thanks to Jess. If you're on the Facebook, I hope you'll add him.

Congo King vs. Vi-King

Sorry about yesterday. Got away from me.

Jo-Jo vs. the Water Warriors



The Comic Book Catacombs has another story about the World's Worst-Named Jungle Hero. Fighting Vikings!

Death is the Sailor



And Golden Age Comic Book Stories has several swell comics, one of which is about a giant squid.

Aquaman movie?



Apparently, Warner Brothers is actively looking to develop an Aquaman movie. It'll be very interesting to see what approach they take.

Also, an Adam Strange movie, which should be much easier to get right seeing how he's basically a space hero with a jetpack.

Holy Diver



I don't know what's particularly holy about him, but "giant diver" wouldn't let me make the Dio reference. I've been meaning to post this for a while now (thanks for sending me the link, Charles!). Very very cool.

Airborn: The 100-Page Check-In

For those who don't know, I have a rule for reading novels that I totally stole from Bookgasm: "If it’s not good by page 100, quit reading." I've used it four different times that I can remember and as I approached the hundredth page of Kenneth Oppel's Airborn, I honestly wasn't sure if this would be the fifth. SPOILERS BELOW (and not all from just the first 100 pages)

The book is set in an alternate reality in which airplanes were never invented and giant airships are the way people travel around the world. Matt Cruse is a cabin boy on such an airship, the Aurora. His father also sailed on Aurora before he died and Matt's dream is to work hard and eventually to rise even further in the ranks than his dad did.

Unfortunately for Matt, the owner of the shipline is displeased with the business sense of his son and has decided to punish him by putting him to work as an apprentice sailmaker on the Aurora. The very job Matt was hoping to get. One boy's punishment is Matt's missed opportunity for promotion, even though the Aurora's captain admits that he'd prefer Matt in the role.

It's hard to know what to make of Matt. He's overly perfect and that bores me. He's likable enough and not cocky, so I don't hate him, but everyone on board the airship loves him and he has precious few flaws. He also has no fear of heights, which - while a personal thing - is something that I can't relate to. He talks about being confident that if he were to fall out of an airship that the air itself would somehow lift him up. I'm not making fun of him - I see that Oppel's just trying to describe Matt's fearlessness in a way that keeps his endearing humility intact - but it's still completely foreign to me and I'm having a hard time buying Matt as a real person. I'm doing it, but with difficulty.

Matt's career is only a sub-plot though. The real story is a mystery concerning some as-yet-undiscovered air creatures. As the novel opens, Matt's on watch in the crow's nest and spots a small hot air balloon in distress. The Aurora moves in for a rescue attempt (that Matt achieves), but is too late to save the life of the balloon's elderly pilot. He dies, but not before whispering cryptically to Matt about the mysterious creatures.

A year later, the pilot's extremely wealthy, young granddaughter travels aboard the Aurora with a chaperon. Her secret reason for the trip, revealed to Matt once she learns his connection with her grandfather, is to retrace the old pilot's course and hopefully discover the creatures that obsessed him.

Though rich, granddaughter Kate is down-to-earth and kind. She's also pretty and adventure-loving. In short, she's just as perfect as Matt. Even her chaperon is perfect. Perfectly snooty anyway, as all older chaperons to pretty, young, rich girls must be in books.

And that's as far as I've got. A couple of likable, but not particularly captivating characters and a mystery that I don't especially care about either. Mysterious sky creatures? So what? The only reason I'd care about them is if I knew more about Grandpa. Why did he care about them? Why are they important? Matt's about to read the old man's journal, so maybe that'll solve the problem, but that comes after page 100. If I don't care by now, should I keep going?

Based solely on what I've read so far, the only thing that really interests me is the shipline owner's son. Rather than an arrogant, entitled jerk, he's self-deprecating and embarrassed by his father. Which makes Matt the jerk if he's going to continue to resent the other boy. I don't know that Matt will - he's already started to ease up in his animosity - but the question is the most interesting thing about Matt in a hundred pages. I suspect that Matt will forgive the boy and focus his energies elsewhere, but that's partly because I've cheated a little.

If I was going to obey the 100-Page Rule by the letter, I'd have to put Airborn down. It's not "good" by page 100. But the next book on my reading list hasn't arrived at the bookstore yet and Airborn isn't bad either. The potential for improvement is there; it may just be slower than it needs to be in getting there.

So, I did some research; read some reviews. There are pirates coming. And a shipwreck on a deserted island. That sounds good. Maybe I'll read that far and see if I care about Matt and Kate by then.

Unfortunately, I've also learned that Matt will apparently decide to go to school to improve his chances of promotion. That's why I suspect his relationship with the shipline owner's son will become a moot point.

School costs money that he doesn't have though. If only he knew someone rich...

For every potential enticement to keep going it seems that there's something making me nervous. This is a Young Adult novel and it looks like that doesn't include All-Ages. I should put it down.

But again, I don't yet own the next couple of books on my reading list. I think I'll check on them and keep reading in the meantime. Get through the shipwreck at least. See if the journal increases my interest. See if the pirates are cool.

I'll check back in once I've done that. It's breaking the rule, but I'm not really a stickler for rules.

Music Meme: 1998

Continuing my list of favorite albums from every year I've been alive.

1998

Semisonic: Feeling Strangely Fine



Not a lot of great albums this year, but all my favorite songs were towards the Alternative end of the Pop spectrum, so I guess it was an okay year. I liked "Closing Time" enough to buy the album and ended up liking the whole thing.



Singles:
Cake: "Never There"
Fastball: "The Way"
Alanis Morissette: "Joining You"
New Radicals: "You Get What You Give"

Adventuregallery: No School Like the Old School

Class of 1934



By Randy Reynaldo (Rob Hanes Advenutures). Thanks, Comics Reporter!

The A-Z of Awesomeness



This fun series by Neill Cameron has made the blog rounds as it was in progress, but it's worth mentioning that Cameron's completed it now.

Black Canary bookmark



By Evan "Doc" Shaner.

Zatanna



By Olga Ulanova.

Caution: Draw Bridge



By Charles Addams, who did a surprising (to me) number of sea-themed cartoons. Golden Age Comic Book Stories has a buttload of them including another, even funnier pirate one, a mermaid, a sea monster, and a lonely lighthouse keeper. And of course plenty of Addams Family and other gags. Well, well worth clicking through to check out.

Island girl



By Katie Cook.

Doc Savage vs. the Feathered Octopus



Not sure who this is by. James Bama was the most famous Doc Savage artist, but this doesn't look like his version.

A Monster Gorilla Stalks!



By Howard Purcell.

The Sea Girl



Not sure who this was by and I can't read the signature. Maybe someone more knowledgable than me can identify it.

Space girl



By Craig Wilson. I forget where I found it, but at least I wrote down Craig's name.

Your Pirates of the Caribbean kind of Tarzan

Six things an independent comics fan should do at SDCC



My Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs column usually goes up on Wednesdays at Robot 6, but next Wednesday will be the first day of San Diego Comic-Con, and as Robot 6 editor JK Parkin says, trying to choose what to blog from the show will be a lot like trying to take a drink of water from a fire hose. That means that we'll be focusing the blog purely on the convention for the last half of the week, which means no GRD next week.

To make up for it though, I did an extra column this week about some of the cool things indie comics fans can do at the convention. It was surprisingly hard to pick just six.

Black Widow: Deadly Origin



Thanks I'm sure to her appearance in Iron Man 2, Black Widow will be getting a new mini-series written by Paul (Captain Britain and MI13) Cornell in November. It'll be a re-telling of her origin story.

Tarzan screenwriter has the right idea



Stuart Beattie has finished with his script for Warner Brothers' Tarzan movie and it sounds like he's got the right idea behind it:

It's your Pirates of the Caribbean kind of Tarzan. It's fun. It's how a Tarzan movie should be. It's just, because Tarzan's been done so many times, you can't just do the standard retelling of Tarzan again, because everyone knows that story. If you're going to do Tarzan, you've got to do it different than it's ever been done ... more mythological and supernatural. Mythic Africa, where the trees are two or three times the size of trees. It's that deep, deep, deep, dark, heart-of-Africa jungle that no one's ever been [to]. 1930s, period, all that kind of stuff, and really bring that world up into that kind of mythic status, where Tarzan can fly around on all these trees and do amazing acrobatics. I just had a lot of fun with it.

SCI FI Wire takes him literally on the word "fly" and spends most of their post scratching their heads and obsessing over it, but Beattie's thoughts sound about perfect to me.

What doesn't sound perfect is that Warner Brothers is still considering Stephen Sommers as the director. I guess Uwe Boll and Michael Bay weren't available.

July Theatrical Releases

Ummm... yeah. This is a little late. Sorry about that.

July 1

Public Enemies: Already seen it. The more I think about it, the less I like it. It probably deserves one less star than I gave it.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs: Seen this one too. Liked it a lot more than I expected to. It's certainly the best of the Ice Age movies so far. Spinning Sid off into his own storyline was a good idea. Adding dinosaurs and an eye-patched, swashbuckling weasel voiced by Simon Pegg was an excellent idea. It's a fun, Hollow Earth adventure story with a low-key moral about the joy of family. Recommended, even if you don't like the first two Ice Age movies. (The squirrel plot requires some patience, but it pays off.)

July 15

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: Speaking of patience, I'm exercising an extreme amount of it and holding off on seeing this until Diane and I finish re-watching the first five. We got done with Chamber of Secrets last night, so it's not going very quickly. Still, I'm loving revisiting the world and these characters and am savoring the experience, not rushing it.

July 24

G-Force: Ooh, I can't decide if this looks horrible or wonderful. Part of me is curling up in a ball and trying to forget there was ever such a thing as any incarnation of Alvin and the Chipmunks. The other part of me is going, "Spies! And Bill Nighy!" Plus, I laughed a couple of times in the trailer.

The Ugly Truth: Confession time: I have a huge mancrush on Gerard Butler. And Katherine Heigl ain't that shabby either. More importantly: this looks fun. Someone on IMDB made a funny that they "liked it better when it was called Someone Like You," but that's just crazy talk. There's no way anyone liked Someone Like You better than anything. Yes, the plots sound almost exactly the same, but as much as I enjoyed the first 80 minutes of Someone Like You, it completely falls apart in the last ten. I'm hoping The Ugly Truth has a much better ending.

The Answer Man: This really doesn't look that good, but it's got Lauren Graham in it, so it's worth at least a Netflix viewing.

Shrink: (limited release) This really doesn't look that good, but it's got Lauren Graham Keke Palmer in it, so it's worth at least a Netflix viewing.

July 31

Funny People: I can't tell if the trailer spoils the whole movie or not, but it looks very good. I never saw Punch Drunk Love, so I need to see Adam Sandler do drama. And I need to see another Judd Apatow comedy.

The Collector: The Saw pedigree concerns me, but otherwise this looks pretty good. I like the idea of a house-burglar accidentally interrupting the work of a psychopathic killer and being forced to try to save the day.

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.

Adventurenews: Number One Super Guy

Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters



I took a pass on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, because zombies are boring. Sea monsters, on the other hand, are totally cool. And lets face it, Jane Austen always could've used more pirates and giant, rampaging, mutant lobsters.

The Flock



Giant Monsters Attack has the scoop on Warner Brothers' development of a movie about modern-day descendents of prehistoric terror birds. Incidentally, I've long thought that "terror bird" is the coolest pairing of words in the English language.

John Rozum's Hangman



There aren't a lot of details in this interview with John Rozum about his upcoming revival of the old Hangman character for DC, but I have to link to it because I'm just so excited that Rozum's writing a supernatural hero comic again. If you've read Xombi and/or Midnight, Mass, you know what I mean.

Hong Kong Phooey movie



I know two things about this movie.

1) It will not be very good.

2) Unless it has Will Farrell in it, I will be there opening night.

My first lunchbox was a Hong Kong Phooey one. Big fan here.

Because every bovine nosferatu needs an arch-nemesis in hot-pants...

Oh, wait. I do have one more thing for you. Jess sent me this the other day.



This is Penny. She hunts vampire cows.



That's right, Cownt. You'd better be afraid.

Writing is Hard: Website Advice

It's been a busy day and I'm under deadline tonight, so this is all I got. Sorry.

It's good advice for writers though about the elements that need to go into an effective website. And the kick in the pants I need to get me working on my own site again.