Monthly Archive: May 2009
The new Kindle DX: Closer to comic ready, but…
Amazon has released the Kindle DX, the 2.0 version of their e-book reader. And you already know if it works for books, but we know the really important question– is it the holy grail for reading comics?
Well, the screen’s bigger. It’s bigger than the average tankoubon manga page (5 x 7.5 inches) but smaller than the average US comic page. The screen auto-rotates when you rotate it, so it zooms nicely. And miracle of miracles, it has native PDF support. It holds over twice as much data as the original Kindle.
But. It’s still not color, it’s 16 gray levels. It still has all of the Digital Rights Management that allows Amazon to turn your machine into a paperweight if it so decides. There aren’t a lot of comic books available for it yet. And at $489 for the device alone, that’s a few months of comics buying right there.
So I’m torn. It might be the perfect manga reader, but I’m not sure it’s there yet for most of the books in America. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it to give it a full test, but I still don’t think I’m giving up my MacBook Pro and ComicBookLover yet.
I still think Joy Of Tech has the best take on it so far…
Review: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. III: Century #1
: “1910”
By Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
Top Shelf, April 2009, $7.95
The usual rule in comics is that nothing with two or more colons in its title – not to mention two or more separate numbering schemes – is nothing but rubbishy hackwork, and should be avoided. In this, as in so much else, Alan Moore is the Great Exception, as his newest miniseries comes with a jaw-breaker of a title that sounds like a piece of summer crossover from a stranger and much more literary world than our own.
This volume begins the third major “[[[League of Extraordinary Gentlemen]]]” story – last year’s [[[Black Dossier]]] doesn’t quite count, for complicated Moorian reasons – and it continues with the survivors of the team from the first two stories (Mina Harker and a rejuvenated Alan Quatermain posing as his own son), augmented by several more fictional characters (Orlando, Raffles, Carnacki) to continue their work preserving England from obscure horrors, reporting in to the secret group headed by Mycroft Holmes.
There will be two more volumes in this story – each set in, and titled after, a different and widely spaced year in the last century – so 1910 is mostly set-up. Moore re-introduces the League and sets them to squabbling, since superteams must always fight among themselves. The battling is less ominous this time around: none of the team are as immediately dangerous as Mr. Hyde, nor as sneakily obnoxious as the invisible Mr.Griffin. (So we get Raffles’s sniffing attempts to maintain his requisite stiff upper lip in circumstances he never expected and Orlando engaging in high-quality mincing whenever the slightest opportunity arises, along with Mina’s usual Serious Girl act and very little from the increasingly colorless Alan.)
‘Star Trek’ reviewed by ONN
It seems in line with what I’ve been hearing… see for yourself.
Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As ‘Fun, Watchable’
Hat tip: Eric Avedissian.
Watch: The Mercury Men!
The neat things that come in your inbox… with all the feel of a pulp version of the Outer Limits episode “Demon With A Glass Hand” combined with a little bit of Flash Gordon and The Day The Earth Stood Still, we present to you The Mercury Men:
Survey: How much of a discount are you getting for your comics?
This question was prompted by:
- Free Comic Book Day, where a whole lot of comics were handed out at a 100% discount, and;
- this comment from Vinnie Bartilucci about a firm being “the last chain in the history of the world to try and get list price for almost their entire catalog. I despise them.”
So it got us to thinking– what are people actually paying for comics nowaday? Not how much are they consuming, we have decent numbers about that– but at what discount? That may give us a better idea as to what sort of margin stores are working on nowadays, and how comic readers are behaving.
So please, take a minute and
click here to take the survey
. We’ll post the results shortly.
Texas Bill Might Require Sex Offenders To Register Online IDs
From G4: A bill that passed the Texas Senate today would change sex offender
registration regulations in the state so convicted sex offenders would
have to provide law enforcement with each “alias, assumed name,
nickname, or pseudonym, including a screen name, used by the person.”
Presumably, the law includes gamer tags, twitter user names, MySpace
names, and other public online identifiers– including IDs on ComicMix.
The additional information would not be made public but would be
available to law enforcement and social-networking sites, and
presumably, video game companies. This gives companies the ability
reject people from joining based on their inclusion on the list. The
bill, introduced by Sen. Florence Shapiro, is headed to a vote by the
Texas House… and should it pass, the governor’s desk.
Chicago attorney and video gamer Wesley Johnson said, “It appears
this law would apply to gamer tags, although the final definition of
what’s covered in the law is up to the Texas Department of Criminal
Justice.” Here’s the Full Text of the Bill.
Like Mike Diana hasn’t had enough grief in his life.
Hat tip: Frank Meyer.
‘Confessions of a Superhero’ free online
Here’s a film you may enjoy: Morgan Spurlock, the documentary maker behind Super Size Me and 30 Days and the upcoming Freakonomics is the distributor of Confessions of a Superhero, a feature length documentary that chronicles the lives of three mortal
men and one mortal woman who make their living working as superhero
characters on Hollywood Boulevard. The Hulk sold his Super Nintendo
for a bus ticket to Los Angeles; Wonder Woman was a mid-western homecoming
queen; Batman struggles with his anger (what a shock) while Superman’s psyche is
consumed by the Man of Steel. This deeply personal view into their
daily routines reveals their hardships and triumphs as they pursue and
achieve their own kind of fame and glory.
It’s all available for free, thanks to the good folks at SnagFilms and Hulu. Enjoy.
The Point – May 4th, 2009
WOLVERINE hits theaters with IRON MAN impact, while TRANSFORMERS has a cool new trailer on line and we talk to the creator of BATTLE FOR TERRA on how he chose Evan Rachel Wood for his lead. There’s a new Pull List of great things in the comic shops and just three days until STAR TREK. Thank God it’s Monday!
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‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ debuts with $87 million opening weekend
It takes more than swine flu and Internet piracy to keep our boy down.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine clawed (sorry) its way to an $87 million opening weekend, despite being widely available online a full month before its release, lukewarm reviews and Vice President Joe Biden to avoid confined and crowded spaces. The movie opening numbers beat the first two X-Men installments (although not the third) and it’s looking like Logan’s run (sorry again) in theaters is going to be pretty strong this summer.
So, does this kill the “Internet piracy is bad for you” meme once and for all? Yeah, I didn’t think so either.
