Batman Zero Punt

Let's continue the Batman theme with talking about the cross over with Fortnite. I feel like I should be mad, but Fortnite has consumed so much that everything is in there now.

A rift opens in Gotham, and Batman ends up kicked it, and finds himself in the world of PUBG Fortnite, an island with an enclosing storm, with fighting that resets every 22 minutes. However, Batman can't remember who he is, but who he is in innate and he battles the best he can, even teaming up with the Cat for a while. Eventually he finds a way out, but just ends up on a bigger island with other escapees, and eventually they find their way to home, and it's all wrapped up... or is it?

I'm not mad, because this is a decent story. I don't know the complete lore of Fortnite, other than what bits they ripped off from the other game, but this seems to pretty faithfully delve into it. I don't know if the other characters are on point, but Batman, Catman and Deathstroke come across well. Harly is a rather reductive version of herself, so we can't have everything.

There is set up for a sequel... and I won't even be mad at that!

[END]

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Deadman/Batpool

[This is about the Batman/Deadpool crossover comic that's just come out, so you may want to skip this to avoid spoilers.]

We finally get a return of crossing over the big two comic universes and... some good, some bad. It's a collection of stories, with the main one being:

Batman and Deadpool: It's Batman and Joker... and Deadpool, because no-one can name a big bad of Deadpool that people would be interested in seeing? As far as Batman and Joker go, this is a pretty basic story, but I'm guessing they kept it simple as the main gimmick is inserting Deadpool. Everyone is written largely as expected, so that's good. A nice story, but nothing amazing. (They are different universes.)

Wonder Woman/Captain America: Two warriors from World War Two meet up and then continue to do so. They respect the hell out of each other, and it's a nice touch given that they do have that original connection other heroes don't really do. (It's a merged universe.)

Krypto/Jeff: Super pets having a super time!

Green Arrow/Daredevil: Fighting in Hell('s Kitchen) is bad enough, but with the League of Shadows and the Hand around it's more annoying. The Red and Green team up to deal with threats, and there's a nice touch with Matt's history. While short, this is probably my favourite story, although Green Arrow gets some weird dialogue. (Same universe.)

Green Lantern/Guardians of the Galaxy: Rocket gets a Ring and hijinx ensue!

Batman/Wolverine: It's Frank Miller. Ugh.

Lobo/Wolvering: He's called Logo, 'cos it's funny??? (This is some Amalgam rubbish!)

It's a start. Let's hope there's better to come now the gates are back open.

[END]

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Hoos of Leves

So I read the book. Or did I blue the book? I considered doing House in blue, but now can't be bothered.

As you may have heard, this is a book of layers.

Level 0: There is a movie, called the Navidson Record, about a guy documenting a strange door in his house that goes into an infinite depth of darkness and corridors. Which is definitely my shit. Indeed, I've done an RPG module based on that (although I didn't know it at the time)!

Level 1: A book about the movie, written by Zampanò. This is an indepth analysis of the movie, detailed notes, and a bajillion footnotes to academic papers. [One conceit of this book is that it is written around four years after the documentary, but there are just so many academic papers referenced that I am severly doubting that any media could generate so much discussion in such a short time frame.]

Level 2: Johnny Truant had the notes Zampanò wrote, and put it together into this book we are reading, and has added notes of his own. He is affected by the book of the documentary, adversely, and has to get it out to get it out of his head. Here the most interested aspect to me are the appendix of the mother's letters, which I will come back to a moment.

Level 3: This whole thing is a book written by the actual author of all, Mark Z. Damielewski.

This is certainly a piece of work, where Mark has put a lot of effort into it. Many of the chapters are formatted to give a sense of what the text is about, eg the labyrinth chapter is cramped and confusing (this is the chapter most people reference when pointing out what the book is doing), another chapter is spacing things out, only a few words per page, so you get the rushing sense of action as you speed through the pages. That's nice and all, but I'm not convinced it's really needed. Like if this was an actual film, you would get that naturally that translating it to text doesn't quite capture. Frankly, aside from the labyrinth chapter, this could easily be any normal book, or even an audiobook, but with that chapter...

And then there is the deep reading of the text. The meaning of the various layers, why is the word house in blue, what happened that no-one apart from Zampanò is aware of the documentary, that this book itself appears in the text as a book, but... the problem is this entire book is predicated on the concept of an unreliable narrator. Every level is suffused with "are they telling the truth, or just writing down anything," with Level 2 explicitly calling out some of the times he is doing that. So... I noticed a few weird typos and such, but I can't trust "is this a key to unravelling the whole thing?" or is it just "whoops, didn't mean that?" Let alone "I wrote this because it was just what occured to me at the time" (at Level 3). I'm definitely doing to watch some video essays that deconstruct this book, but I can't trust they understand it either.

So definitely a book I read. Or, at least, turned the pages while seeing words with my eyes.

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TerrorTome!

As well as starring in a supernatural hospital drama, Garth Marenghi is also an author, and produced Garth Marenghi's TerrorTome!

This is basically three different stories, with a connected through line. The first is a pastiche of Hellraiser, then we get a classic bad 70s science fiction horror, and finally a very subtle dig at Stephen King.

Now, while this is comedy, it's comedy from a very pedantic view of very carefully and precisely stating exactly what is going on, and treating it with extreme gravity, especially when it is ludicrous. While is fine to start with... but by the third story it was really wearing quite thin.

I got the audiobook, and Gareth Marenghi himself is narrating it. It's great to hear that cadence and while I'm not saying the book reading peoples will be missing out on anything, there is a distinct way he says things that would be missing for those who can't get that voice quite right in the head.

It's amusing, but overstays it's welcome. At least with the book you can more easily take breaks between the sections as opposed to pausing the audiobook and doing something else.

Fun, but choose wisely.

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Convergance

I complained about Marvel, so I should complain about DC. The basic premise of Convergence is "What if we did a low rent Crisis at home?"

Brainiac evolves and gets Telos to gather Gothams and Metropolises from across the different timelines, and then the heroes are forced to fight each other. In the mean time, a group of hero variants that no-one cares about deals with Telos and another chap whose name I can't recall but turns out to be another villain for them to fight.

As you might be tell, I wasn't too impressed with it. It was just an excuse to bring back previous continuities of heroes that various writers liked and play with them a bit. Aside from the main story line, all the tie ins were two parters, which were usually Part One: We've been here a year, and Part Two: We fight someone else. (Somehow, for the year, all the heroes had their powers removed, unless they didn't.)

At least with Crisis, they change the way the universe goes, resetting the continuity and what not. But with this, it is just mashing things together, and since none of the universes really are impacted in any significant way, it doesn't matter in the slightest who wins and who loses. Let alone I couldn't remember half of them, and the other half weren't distinctive, that revisiting them didn't feel special.

This was aggressively advertised in comics leading up to it.. and during it, it aggressively advertised the next thing. So it was just a brief stop on some larger map for selling comics, and doesn't matter if you pay attention to it or not.

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Secret Dumpire

Secret Empire was a big Marvel comic project, where Steve Rogers/Captain America became an agent of Hydra due to a sentient cosmic cube named Kobik (don't ask: COMICS!) being swayed by the Red Skull's ideas and changing the past of Steve to always being Hydra.

This is a Big Idea(tm), where you go "what if the big good guy was in fact one of the big bad guys?" But the big problem with this idea is... everyone knows what's going on. Every other hero knows that Kobik changed Steve and he is now Stevil (this is an in-canon name for him). There are a few heroes that side with Stevil (either mercenaries, or a small handful of otherwise corrupted heroes), but it is essentially Stevil versus everyone else.

(I'm going to ignore the fact that changing the past would have changed everyone's interactions with Steve, so they wouldn't know that Kobik due it, but, again, COMICS!)

What would have been more interesting is that if Kobik changed other heroes to also be on the side of Hydra. Make it an actual battle where several heroes do believe in the ideals of Hydra that Stevil espouses, so there is an actual discussion of ideas.

But that way lies the concept of Civil War (of which there are two). Only this one would have a better reason for happening and a clearer view of which side is actually right (and there actually being a right side). BOOM! Civil War roasted!

As it stands: One person, who is essentially an obvious villain, versus all the heroes. It wasn't really going to be that exciting to play out, was it?

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Expansive

It took a while, and it was all via audio books, but... I have now heard all of The Expanse. Yes, there was a TV series, and that covers books 1-6, leaving 7-9 as all new. [Fortunately, there is a gap between 6 and 7 so they easily could end up making the later books and cast the same actors.]

Hardly surprising... yes, this is a great series. It's largely hard sci-fi, the main gimme being the "Epstein Drive" that allows travel in the solar system to be days/week rather than years, with communication still at light speed. We get aliens (of a sort), intergalactic travel, and other sci-fi elements, but all grounded and well thought out about the impact this actually has. (Which isn't to say we get physics lessons, but you can definitely believe it's not just a magic wand in disguise.)

This follows a core group of people too. I lost track a little in the tv series, but this works well (it helps to mainline the entire series at once). Unfortunately, not everyone gets through unscathed, but this series isn't gratuitous when it comes to people dying, it is structured well, either because of well understood characterisation, or simply age.

There are also a number of side novellas. Most are just filling in background details, but I can see why one of them was incorporated into the main tv series, it definitely has a long term impact. But you can skip them without any real worry.

And after all this, what's next? Well, it's not like my To Read list is actually any smaller...

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Troll Bridge

This was a LONG time in the making. So much so that I'm in the backers list twice! Still, very good!

#GNUTERRYPRATCHETT

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Oregen

So, the latest Dan Brown, let's talk about it.

It starts off with a Prologue that announces that Science has disproved all religions. Oh, so that's going to go down well. And we spend the entire of the book teasing what that revelation is (because that's how Dan Brown works). But here's the thing... it's not that exciting. The revelations aren't going to surprise anyone, and it certainly isn't worth the build up of the book to get there.

Although there isn't much build up either. Langdon spends time wandering around trying to find the next set piece. And there isn't much treat from the villain of the piece either. Instead we get tons of flashbacks to how he got there, but not really much in the way of credible danger.

Frankly, this is, as Dan Brown books go, this is one of the most boring/worst.

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He is MY Doctor

Strangely enough, in a way that's not strange at all, I read Doctor Who biographies. So of course I would read Peter Davison's Is There Life Outside the Box?

This has moments of his past year while he is acting and writing the book and is used as segues back into the past to get into his history. We get the standard chapter about his parents and then onto his life. While we do get a lot of his acting career, we don't get everything (do we really need it?), and for Doctor Who... there is a chapter on it, but it's treated lightly. As Peter points out, he's been interviewed about it so much, and there's all the DVD commentaries, etc., there's nothing more he can really say that hasn't already been covered. From there we go on to his death... I mean this year, with him being affable and just present in his families lives... but he is still acting!

This is an easy read, in that the pages flowed by seamlessly as I was reading. I enjoyed all of it. Of course, I could have had more Doctor Who reminisces, but I can understand and agree with his reasoning. Also I did want to read about All Creatures and his other work. I should get around to watching that some time, as well as Campion (which I'm slowly listening to).

However, he is only 50, so there might be another volume? (Perhaps with more DW to fill the gaps?)

[END]

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Snowpiercer V.4

I've already talked about the movie, but now I can talk about the movie in the presence of the graphic novels. When this movie came out, vol 3 (as recently discussed) wasn't written, so it's mainly vols 1 and 2 that inspire the story.

Oh, by the way, spoilers for the movie and the comics.

Neither of the comics are set in the tail section, and at best we get a glimpse in vol 1. But the movie starts, and most of it is, in the tail section. It takes a while to break out into the rest of the train, whereas we start in basically the guard section in the comic. Then is the prison section, and yes, people are put in lockers. There is no Yaketami Bridge, but then there isn't a huge fight sequence either. In the first part of the train, there isn't a school in the comics, but there is a song (not this one, as Wilford was entirely invented for the movie).

So, yeah, a big plot point is that they are out of bullets, never a problem in the comic. And because we aren't in the tail section, we don't get protein bars either. The flash back we get of the tail section seems a lot more crowded than what we see in the film.

Anyway, yes there is an agriculture section, a fish section, rather decadent sections (with sex more on the menu than we don't see in the movie). The front of the train is just one engineer, but he isn't a dick like Wilford. However, he does want Proloff (the character Chris Evan is 'based on') to take over the train, and it feels like the train is a living thing. In the comic, Proloff agrees.

As for the explorers of volume two, the closest you get is the Revolt of the Seven, and at the end as the kids escape. And the discussion of a bear (polar in the film, not typed in the comic) is given as a great moment of being outside. And that's about one of the happier endings of the Snowpiercer adventures too.

[END]

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Snowpiercer V.3

With a different team again, we have volume 3: Terminus.

This follows on from the end of the last book. There's power here, so where is it? Investigation leads to an underground city which welcomes them all with open arms... surely that can never be bad, can it? Of course, not everything is as it seems, and the ones at the top have some very strange ideas. And there are those on the train who are more than happy to side with them. Is this the end, or can what remains of humanity as represented by the train people survive without them?

This doesn't give any answers for the wider narrative, but at least explains its own presence. And, unlike the previous books, doesn't end in complete bleakness (not *complete* bleakness).

As we get away from the train, can this be a proper Snowpiercer story? It does feel like a story in the same universe, but separate from what we've had before, even with having the same characters. The team definitely wanted to continue (it was in the end notes that I found out this was a different writer), but I can't help but feel there was another way to continue this.

It's still a decent story, and there isn't any reason for a fourth volume, so I guess we are left with that one last image of possible hopefulness.

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Snowpiercer V.2

Volume 2 takes a turn I wasn't expecting. This is The Explorers.

We are with the Icebreaker, which is the second Snowpiercer train. Yep, this is the second. Every now and then they have "break tests", which is actually when people, Explorers, go out into the frozen wasteland to pick up items from civilisation. One Explorer gets ideas above his station, so again we end up taking a trip through the train, until finally he forces their hand to take him on. Then they get a signal from somewhere out there, and the train has to break off from where it's going to find out what's at the source.

This is building off the world, and finding out that there's another train is definitely a step up. The characters are, however, similar to those in the first volume, and again there's going through the train and such, until we get to the second story which is moving on a beat. But again we are having a bleak ending, because this is not a happy world.

So now I'm really looking forward to the next volume.

[END]

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Snowpiercer V.1

While I liked the movie, I found out there was a set of graphic novels! So yeah, I'm in there. The first one is Escape.

The train is going endlessly through the snow, and someone turns up from the tail section. A second class passenger claims he should be let free, but guards taken them both and lead them to the front of the train to explain themselves. And so we get a mini form of travelogue as we see various cars of the train. By the end, we get some backstory, where "something" happened and the train took off with people barely able to get on board. And it was an accident... wasn't it?

The ending is rather bleak, with no real winners. The only real escape is the chap from the end of the train, but otherwise no-one else is escaping usefully. This feels like a world-setting up story, so I can only assume we expand on the work from there...

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Preacher

I know there is a tv series by this name, which is why I spent some time reading the comics.

I've heard a little about the comic, that the basic premise was that there was a man who could speak with the word of god and make people do whatever he says. That is not at all what this is about. The preacher, Jesse, gets fused with a being from heaven and indeed has that power. But instead what he's trying to do is find god (who's left heaven) and get some answers as to why god has done what he has. Along the way, he gets back together with an old girlfriend (they have sex a lot) and a vampire (who does drugs a lot). The main villains of the piece are the Grail, basically headed up by Herr Starr...

And while Garth Ennis has a definite plot in mind around god, he has more interest in the characters and does a lot of character based plot, which is about the characters in and of themselves than actual story. For me, this is epitomised with Arseface, whom either Garth really likes, or thinks we really like, and wastes a lot of pages on his story. And failed to engage me with any of them.

That said, I did enjoy most of this, although there was a little too much plot convenience theatre for my liking.

With that done, I can now see what they did on tv.

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Fragments of Horror

I love me some Junji Ito, so of course I want to get his latest compilation.

And this is a compilation, there are eight stories, each with a different take on some horror moment. I can't say that I was shocked by any of them, because I am jaded, but I did often pause at the moment of the great revelation to really take in each picture. Ito often has one particular image per story that is the full display of the impact of the horror, either showing the demon or unveiling the wrongness, and that's all here with these stories. And they are really well done.

The opening story, Futon, is a good strong one, and Ito actually sort of gives a reason for the supernatural element. Wooden Spirit gets nice and creepy (I like mysterious houses), and Gentle Goodbye is rather sweet, especially odd coming from him.

And now I need to make sure I've read all his work. There's a cat manga of his? And other artists have inspired him? I should check those out.

Lastly the cover is a wraparound dust cover with images from the stories... and another later of oddness over the top of that. How apt.

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Pepper & Carrot

This is something that I nearly Kickstartered... but didn't for reasons I will get into in a moment.

Pepper is a witch, and Carrot is her companion cat. She goes through several adventures, and usually comes out all right... or, at least, not terribly. Even Carrot gets more than a few things to do that show him off as being better than the average cat. The art style is evocative of a more painting style, and it's a nice easy read...

Which makes it a shame that someone tried to take credit for it. They claimed to be responsible for publishing his book, whereas they had no connection at all with the author. I pulled out of that, and wasn't the only one. Indeed, last I saw, it got shut down.

But, hey, it's definitely worth getting, and the first thirteen episodes are available to grab in a PDF, but they are all available for free on his website. Definitely to check out.

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Chief O'Brien at Work

This was another Kickstartered comic... based on a collection of webcomics (although I believe there was a special one or two added).

This is a set of comics featuring, as you might be able to infer from the title, Chief O'Brien at work. Work, in this case, being the transporter room. And so we get lots of shots of him standing there... not doing much... and his work basically being pushing a button.

It's a nice comic about quiet desperation. One comic is just him standing there, close up on him blinking, then back to standing. That's it. There are also a fair few comics of Riker banging Keiko, so there's also that.

It's a good read, if rather bleak, but that's where the humour lies. Worth checking out.

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White Storm

This is the third book in the Gemini Force series, White Storm.

We start with a plane crashing into a train tunnel, and Ben sees some horrific things. And then, the story goes over to Davos where there is a group of high and powerful types meeting. They get trapped, but before he can get involved, Ben gets kidnapped himself.

There was supposed to be three books, and this is the third, so we wrap up some points. The nature of Gemini Force itself, and the role Ben plays in it. And in this book... Ben is far less annoying than the previous book. He's less whiny and gets on with it more. However, he is also less involved with the action, meaning new action sequences need to be invented just to give him something to do that is on the side of the plot.

From the end... while there is no other books planned that I am aware of, I wouldn't be against them.

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Want an Aardvark?

Previously there was a Kickstarter to turn Cerebus comics into good quality reproductions and "movies". Where movies are Dave Sim reading the text, doing pretty spot on voices it has to be said.

Well, now you can see what some of that it like, and see if you want more.

There is the complete High Society volume (which is what was Kickstartered), and five issues are converted into a movie.

Check it out.

And they are slowly converting all books into high resolution.

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