Category: 1

We haven’t done a general Q&A thread in a while. Feel free to ask about any upcoming projects, general comics questions, etc. One question per person, please.

PAD

I’ve become used to the typical reasons that hostility is aimed at me. The guys who assail me because I have different political beliefs from them (including those who actually write to Marvel trying to get me fired because they didn’t like something I wrote on this blog). Or the guys who love to weigh in on any positive BBS thread about my work and try and lob crap at it because they feel I was mean to them three years ago, or they’re frustrated writers who believe that my success is as undeserved as their failure, and since they can’t do anything about the latter, they’ll try and tear down the former.

But the message I received recently was just on a different level.

Continue Reading “This is a new one on me” →

When someone points out to him that a new video game later this year, “Spider-Man: Edge of Time” features a future Spider-Man who is ALSO half Latino. I wonder if he’ll try to hang that on either the Obamas or some evil liberal mindset. One can only guess what the reception to Miguel O’Hara would have been if guys like Beck had had the sorts of audiences they have now back in the early 90s.

You remember Miguel. The guy who had organic webshooters a decade before fans started screaming that organic webshooters in the then-upcoming movie version was the most stupid thing they’d ever heard of.

PAD

Two questions come to mind when considering that the President has hit the big half century mark:

1) Obama can look forward to that joyful procedure that everyone who lives that long gets to endure: his very first colonoscopy. Will that be appreciably different from dealing with Congress?

2) Based on what is now known, or at least widely believed, about JFK and Marilyn Monroe, can we infer that Obama is having an affair with Jennifer Hudson since she sang “Happy Birthday?”

PAD

So I went to see C&A last night. What fascinated me was the response of the handful of people in the audience–and I mean four, maybe five people–as they sauntered out while the credits rolled.

“That sucked.” “What a waste of money.”

I don’t get it. It was a perfectly entertaining two hour diversion. It’s not like they pulled a switch and had the Dallas Cowboys squaring off against Mexicans entering the country illegally. It gave us exactly what it promised. It had Daniel Craig acting surly. It had Harrison Ford acting even surlier. It had cowboys. It had aliens. It had cowboys fighting aliens. What the hëll were they expecting? “Unforgiven” meets “E.T.”?

It’s a perfectly fine film, well made and well acted, with surprising depths given to its lead characters and all the classic cowboy tropes. It had a great supporting cast including Clancy Brown, Sam Rockwell and Keith Carridine. I’m really not sure what people are bìŧçhìņg about. I mean, okay, yeah, it was no “Oblivion,” but not everything can be.

PAD

I’d see pictures of her and there was just something about her that I could swear I’ve seen before. And it’s finally come to me.

I’ve seen a number of productions of “Man of La Mancha” (not counting the ones I’ve actually been in). And one year I saw it at Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut. And there’s a line in the show where Cervantes describes his knight as a man with “eyes that burn with the fire of inner vision.” Then when the actor “became” Quixote and began to sing, “I, Don Quixote,” for the first and only time in all the times I’ve seen the show, he did exactly that. He did SOMEthing with his eyes and suddenly there was just this burning intensity in his eyes, the flame of the zealot, the fire of inner vision. And it was incredibly scary (I even heard someone near me mutter, “Whoa”) because in a way that was never done in previous productions, it was driven home to you that this guy was nuts. Just stark-staring bonkers.

That’s why Bachmann looks familiar to me. Hers are eyes that burn with the fire of inner vision, just like that day at Goodspeed when the audience and I were in the presence of a madman, a fanatic, a zealot believing that God has sent him on a quest.

The only difference is, he was acting.

PAD

When I first saw “Cowboys and Aliens” being advertised, I thought, “Been there, done that.” Specifically in “Oblivion” and its sequel for Full Moon.

Apparently Shout!Factory agreed; they re-released the original on DVD with a redesigned cover. I knew nothing about it until Kath pointed it out to me in the latest copy of “Entertainment Weekly.”

Continue Reading ““Oblivion”” →