Sunday, June 20, 2010
Revelation: KFC Double Down
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Secret Invasion #4
So like I was saying, 4 issues in, the "story" has not advanced since issue #1. AT ALL. Avengers still in the Savage land fighting each other, Skrulls running amuck in New York, and was it just me or were big reveals promised a bunch of shit? So there were like, what, 6 "big" skrull reveals? Whoopty-fucking doo. And if you're not reading New and Mighty Avengers give it up. You are not going to know anything about who's who. And don't get me started on Marvel and Bendis' charity broject aka Brian Reed. He can't even be bothered to line up his crap with this shit. And hell, even Bendis can't line his crap up IN THE BOOKS HE HIMSELF writes.
If I had paid to read this I would kill myself, but standing and checking it out in my LCS was bad enough. That's 3 minutes I'll never get back. Yes, 3 minutes, there were FAR too many 2-page spreads. A quick read thankfuly.
Was there anything good about this shit? Well yeah two things; 1) It ended, and 2) Yu's art was actually pretty good, give this fool an inker ALL the time.
Final rating: The biggest WTF? I can issue. Maybe WTFF? I gotta stop before my head hurts.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
WTF? For reals?
To clear out old business, Allen obviously declined to comment on the Gurumonkeys post. Why? Well I assume it's because it was all true and he couldn't argue with it. All I got was an angry e-mail thanking me for airing "dirty laundry". Oh well, even tho he's a flake, he's a talented flake. Check out his stuff here.
I also recently sat down and read all the Spider-Man: Brand New Day stuff, and although it's pretty good (Title averages a Huh? over all), I can't get past the tinkering that got us here. One More Day, will hang like a dark cloud over the Spider-Man mythos for quite some time. And I'm not the only one I guess, as sales have dropped to lower than pre-OMD sales levels. Oh well.
And is it just me or do the BND writers seem like they are drugged or being held hostage in interviews? They are all very defensive about OMD, and will talk in crazy circles to avoid it. "Never mind OMD, look we're writing Spider-Man!. Do not look at the captor, uh I mean man behind the curtain." I feel sorry for those boys as some of them are quite talented.
And as for Final Crisis and Secret Invasion? What do I think of them? Well, lets just say there's a reason I've been reading more classic stuff...
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
The sad tale of the Gurumonkeys!
What the hell is a Gurumonkey?
Where the hell have I been for the last month?
All those questions (Well, except for the last one) are finally ready to be answered!
It all started right here...
www.gurumonkeys.com
This was to be an all-around entertainment site focusing on comics, video, games, and what have you. I was to be the main writer/editor, and my friend Allen Freeman was to do the web design and upkeep on the site.
Some of you might know Allen as the Editor of long running small press anthology Slam Bang. Allen and I have, in the past, worked on comic book projects. I even wrote an issue of his title Morgana X back in the '90's. Don't bother looking it up, it was definitely a "WTF?"
Now after what happened with Morgana X (This was no fault of Allen's), and other projects I have attempted to launch, I quite simply cannot bring myself to write comic book scripts anymore. I have a severe block and no real desire to do anything about it.
Every so often Allen and I get back in touch and eventually Allen starts talking projects. So I begged off the new Morgana X (Which is a good thing, as new writer Christopher Moshier is doing great things with the character. Order his novel here), as well as some other stuff. But I like Allen and wanted to do something fun. But what?
Now I don't know if any of you noticed but a lot of websites are pretty damn crappy anymore. They are either ran by raving fanboys, or greedy fucks who will completely sell their integrity for a buck or thousand. *Cough* anititcoolnews *Cough* newsarama *Cough*
For those of you who don't know me, I am quite opinionated. Some might say to a fault. So I thought (partially inspired by The Savage Critic.) Why not do a brutally honest review site, but not just for comics but for anything we could lay our fool hands on? Hell, we couldn't do any worse than most.
I threw the idea at Allen and he seemed to love it! We brainstormed on the name, but couldn't settle on one, so we just went to a domain search engine and came up with gurumonkeys. This was July.
In August, Allen lost a member of his family, so i backed off for a month to give him time. In September we began again, I started hitting publishers for stuff to review. Allen showed me a rough of the site. Everything was sailing right? Wrong! Allen kept disappearing off and on. He claimed he was interested, i bought the domain name, and that still didn't get him moving.
October came and went, we went into November, books were in, people were upset about the lack of reviews. Then after weeks of silence, Allen e-mails me out of the blue and claims I stole the reviews I wrote. No explanation just raving. I e-mailed him back , very upset, to no response. i called him, he kept dogging me. I finally got him to pick up the phone and he hung up on me! It would seem Allen flaked or changed his mind I don't know. Many more calls and e-mails were fired off to no response.
So I made a deal with the devil (much like Spider-Man and Mephisto) I got a site I used to write for (See: raving fanboys) to post the reviews. I left the site under less than good circumstances that were partially my fault honestly. I felt awful, but I felt like I owed these people that trusted me. SO the reviews were posted. All was "good".
After having fun on the Savage Critic I, as a joke, started this blog. And what about Allen? I finally heard from him again. I got a nice joke forwarded to me. A joke. When i contacted Allen, via e-mail, he claimed he never got any calls or e-mails. Even though he acknowledged me and hung up on me that one time. Sheesh! But what can you do? Well, how about I take this blog seriously?
The scale is as follows; "Woah!" is good to great, "Huh?" is fair to I don't understand, and "WTF?" is What the fuck did I just read? Why did I waste time and money on this?
So if anyone out there in the world is reading this stuff, leave a comment and let me know you're out there.
Oh, and for the record, the reviews posted were from gurumonkeys. I wote over 2 dozen. These were the comic book ones. That is why the format was different.
Allen Freeman has been sent a link to this so he can respond equally.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
The Best of the Harveyville Fun Times
The Best of the Harveyville Fun Times
By Mark Arnold and Various
Review by Dennis Feeback
The Scoop: A sampling of the best material from the long-running "Harveyville Fun Times!" fanzine featuring articles about various Harvey Comics characters such as Casper, Richie Rich, Hot Stuff and Sad Sack.
The Package: What we have is a nice thick BIG book. The front and back covers are nice especially the back cover by Ernie Colon. Like the fanzines it reprints the typeface is literally all over the place, but this was a conscious decision by the editor to faithfully reprint the ‘zines in their original form.
Also of note, this was book was printed by Lulu.com and I must say they do fine work.
Final Thoughts: After reviewing the Harvey Comics Classics volumes from Dark Horse, I was definitely in a Harvey frame of mind. I happened upon Mark’s site, http://thft.home.att.net/ , and was overwhelmed with all the info on Harvey Comics. Mark was kind enough to send me a copy of this fine book.
And I am so glad he did.
This is such a wonderful resource for Harvey characters and history. As this is a reprint volumes of various issues of marks ‘zine, there is a lot of material between these covers, and all of it is informative and entertaining. I learned all kinds of facts I never know about the company that shaped my childhood. There are issue guides, character profiles, company history, and MUCH more. If you sre any kind of Harvey fan, you NEED this book. My HIGHEST possible recommendation.
Final Rating: A+, Invaluable if you’re a Harvey fan. Interesting if you’re just interested in comics history. Impressive.
Harbinger:The Beginning HC
Harbinger-The Beginning
By Jim Shooter, David Lapham, and Bob Hall
Review by Dennis Feeback
The Scoop: This 192-page deluxe hardcover edition collects the full Harbinger origin story from Harbinger issues 0-7 digitally recolored and remastered, and also features an all-new "Origin of Harada" story written by comics legend JIM SHOOTER and illustrated by BOB HALL (Shadowman). This "Origin of Harada" story includes its own original cover and features the first appearance of a new character in the Valiant Universe! Valiant's goal is to make this deluxe hardcover edition something special for Valiant fans and a great introduction to the Harbinger saga for new Valiant fans. The book retails for $24.95.
The Package: The book has a really nice dust jacket featuring artwork of the main character and the main villain. Back cover has a description of the contents. The books cover is black with the Harbinger logo embossed on the front with the new Valiant logo on the back.
The book its self is pretty nice, it contains Harbinger #’s 0-7 completely recolored with the newest technology. This is the part I was most worried about before seeing the book, as I thought the colors on the original books were just fine and really unique for the time. However, I had nothing to worry about. It is recolored with more detail added; it is VERY faithful to what came before.
Now what didn’t I like? Not much. The only problem I had with the book at all was some of the pages were awfully rough. It felt like they didn’t have good materials to scan from. Issue 5 seemed to be the worst example of this. For a book that’s only about 15 years old, this just seems like the book was rushed. But really, this is just me nit picking.
Final Thoughts: I don’t think there was a bigger Valiant fan back in the 90’s than me. I loved and lived this stuff. I even went crazy and bought all the variants and gold covers. I was all about Valiant until Jim Shooter was canned.
Harbinger was one of my faves at the time, so it was nice to revisit the book again. It would be really nice to see more of these collections but due to the legal wrangling between two factions of Valiant this may never happen. This collection contains story lines that pretty much kick off the entire valiant cross continuity, so hopefully this can be followed up on.
As for the new 8 pager? Well, it was pretty good. In some ways it was like Big Jim Shooter never left. It certainly felt like a classic Valiant story. Jim slipped right back into writing Harada. But will this new character ever be seen again? Will Big Jim return for new Valiant comics? The answers to all these questions are unknown.
Final Rating: B. One letter grade was removed for the poorly scanned pages from the later issues.