The Middle of the Dark

You may or may not have heard there was a Star Wars movie in theaters.  What continues to amaze me is the level of discourse Star Wars in general and Episode I - The Phantom Menace in particular gets, among fans.  Honestly, we never stopped talking about it.  The conversation now centers on the merits of the film, out of the glare of the blinding hype that accompanied its release.  Most people tend to agree now it was not as bad as we first thought.  It's not even the worst Star Wars film. A lot of the conversation that takes place around TPM and the prequels centers on the 'what if;' what if Jar Jar hadn't existed, what if this or that.  If I had a nickel for every conversation I have had with Ben, Sugu or any of my friends on this subject, I'd be able to finance my own version of the movie.  And I admit - I have, off and on, been writing a screenplay of a revised Episode I for a long time.  It serves primarly as a mental exercise....

Community returns 3/15!   Streets ahead!

I had commented a while back about my concerns in general with the direction the Buffy comics have taken since about the last third of Season 8.  The characters seemed a bit aimless, and the overall story left a lot of people dazed and confused.  Out of that confusion has come a very sober wake up call in the form of Buffy's unexpected pregnancy.  It could be the aimlessness was intentional, though I maintain it didn't really work (the writing is good but not great this season) and it revisited episodes Buffy has already gone through.   The character simply needs to grow and now, certainly, she must. Typically Buffy has always presented common teenage/young adult fears via mystical/magical guises.  The pregnancy does not seem right now to be anything than what it's presented to be, which is the result of a drunken one night stand.  There's a lot to be said for this.  This is a comic book after all.  But this is also Buffy, ...

Ben wrote about the announcement that DC is going forward with an ambitious slate of prequels to Watchmen.  Alan Moore and fandom at large collectively dug graves just so they could spin in them.  Like Ben, I've thought about it quite a bit and here's my thoughts. First things first: it's a money grab.  The scale of the project speaks to that.  The reason it's happening now, and not a few years ago when the movie hit and something like this would have made sense (from a purely marketing point of view) is that the comic book industry has reached its financial and creative end .  A great deal was made of DC's decision just a few months ago to completely scrap its line and relaunch with a digital slate; the underlying thinking there was that the print aspect of the comics industry is in free fall.  Print in general is, and comic books are not the only victims . I see Before Watchmen as a last ditch attempt to both breathe life into and draw lif...