hauberk

I was thinking the same thing. Ground Zero cafe no more!

Ian Gelder. Actually in quite a few things including Dr Who and Torchwood.

QFT. The delay has been long enough that I skipped over mentioning it by name. Black Magick is/was also very good, but also dragging along at a snails pace.

From the odds and ends side: Black Science - story is complete and collected. Rick Remender/Matteo Scellera. Gonzo multiverse story. Art is not mainstream but I really dig it and the color! If you’re looking for super heroes, I’ve recently started picking up trades of Radiant Black and the other Massive-Verse titles. I’ve also really enjoyed pretty much anything from Greg Rucka. He’s got one running fairly consistently now in magazine format called Forged that I’ve really been enjoying. I believe the first collected edition has recently been released. ETA: I’ve picked up a digital SiP collection but haven’t had a chance to start it yet.

So what kind of books were you interested in? I’ve pretty much completely stepped away from Marvel but still reading a good amount of DC. The recent Human Target series is now available in trade. Tom King is also doing the new Wonder Woman series.

I had a very interesting discussion about this last year at C2E2 with a comic book artist (penciller/inker) and his colorist. The artist was absolutely opposed while the colorist offered a pretty well reasoned perspective that has left me a little more sympathetic. Her position was that generative AI is an instrument just like the artists pencils and brushes. The art with generative AI is in the crafting of the inputs to get the desired results. She went on to explore the opportunities for expanded access for those that may have lost the ability to produce traditional visual art due to infirmity or other loss of function (tremors, partial paralysis…). I came away with the perspective that increased access is not a bad thing and that bad art is still bad no matter what tools make it. Walking the same con floor yesterday, I personally preferred the likely AI generated “painted” portraits of animals dressed in renaissance attire over the conventionally produced marginal (to me) quality airbrushed manga cheesecake. Ultimately, composition and execution matter more (to me) than the tools used to achieve the final product.

Whoops! I’ll confess, I don’t much like Ennis doing capes either. I get where you’re coming from there, thinking about John Oliver’s piece with Steamboat Willy.

I’d just as soon he find something that diverges from any capes. I’m incredibly tired of the ultra-cynical perspective that seems to be so prevalent in his work (that I’ve read or seen adapted). I have a fairly healthy comics blind spot due to time away/mostly away for kids but Old Man Logan (I’m a sucker for that kind of story (see also The Last Avengers Story)), Kingsmen and Red Son. Skipped Kick-Ass entirely due to the cover to cover JRJR spew. Besides, didn’t he already do a take on Superman with Homelander, or is that just the Amazon adaptation?

Just started a coordinated reread for me and first read for my daughter of The Tyrant’s Law by Daniel Abraham. I quite like this series. Abraham is someone I hold up as one of the best contemporary world builders.

I have fond memories of SCTV, though there was some crazy talent on that show. He was also terrific as the dad on Freaks and Geeks.

Best I can tell, Open Road Media, the current publishers of Wing and A Prayer, just scanned an old manuscript, used text recognition/conversion software and didn’t bother to actually review the conversion. It’s disappointingly sloppy. It’s well written and very much fleshes out the TV series. I’ll be looking for an older edition for the shelf and skipping Open Road editions in the future.

Louis Gossett Jr. has passed away at 87. Great in so many things, for me he stands out as Sgt Foley in An Officer and A Gentleman, for which he won best supporting Oscar and Golden Globe, Drac in Enemy Mine, for which he was nominated for an Oscar and Chappy in the so terrible it’s kind of fun Iron Eagle.

Scheduling issues kept us from finishing the series until last night. Overall, I’m satisfied. I do think that it would have benefitted from a couple of more episodes and a slightly bigger budget - flipping on the red tail model from earlier, the absence of B17Gs was also noted, and likely for similar reasons. I cheered when I saw the Toby jug.

Wrapped up Erikson’s Fall of Light last week. It was a super dense read, covered a bunch of stuff that felt superfluous while circling around some pretty relevant story beats while not fully touching on them. Started Harry Crosby’s A Wing and a Prayer - one of the source books for the Masters of Air. Good info and is mostly accessible but it’s not told in chronological order. It also suffers from what appears to be some aggressive copy editing. Multiple instances of his/a service .45 being described as a revolver. Very specifically when describing the runway configuration at Thorpe-Abbott being similar to a pistol it looks like someone went looking for synonyms and came up short.

I have completed Fall of Light. Overall, I think I enjoyed it but it was a dense read and his loose continuity was challenging. My high point in it was encountering a pair of characters and making the internal comparison with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to then look online and see multiple discussions comparing them. I do think that the device he used to break down the final battle sequence was a bit of a cheat and that there were other things that could have been cut if needed.