comics

Tuesday links

  • I’m with xkcd on this: fuck cancer.
  • The Prescription to Save Ailing Superheroes. I can’t say I agree with everything here, but it’s an interesting article, particularly the argument against having Thor and Captain America both do double-duty by setting their characters up for The Avengers.

    That said, I enjoyed both of them just fine as summer entertainment, and while I enjoyed X-Men: First Class no small amount either, I think it’s ultimately the least successful film of the three. (I haven’t seen Green Lantern.) Matthew Vaughn’s “auteur vision” seems cribbed from a few other places (like Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie, and like Mad Men), and there’s some pretty iffy racial and gender issues at work in the film as well. But maybe that just underlines Pappademas’ main argument: at least the movie has some distinctive stamp to it, however flawed. [via]

  • NY motorcyclist dies on ride protesting helmet law [via]
  • Soap operas moving online. This will bear further watching. The news, not the shows. (God no.) [via]
  • And finally, Who owns the copyright on a photo taken by a monkey? [via]

Tuesday various

  • “The body of a Massachusetts woman went unnoticed for two days in a Fall River public swimming pool, which remained open to the public and was even visited by health inspectors, generating outrage and calls for an investigation.” More here, including how such a bizarre and awful thing could actually have happened. [via]
  • I think this song by Paris Hilton is, predictably, dreadful, but I actually prefer when Hilton does stuff like this, when she’s at least doing something. The paparazzi paying attention to a lousy pop star is marginally better than its paying attention to a do-nothing heiress, right?
  • Well I for one am shocked — shocked! — that drug trials aren’t conducted realistically in the world of superhero comics!
  • Roger Ebert on Transformers: Dark of the Moon:

    I have a quaint notion that one of the purposes of editing is to make it clear why one shot follows another, or why several shots occur in the order that they do.

  • And finally, Improv Everywhere’s latest mission is just lovely:

    I used to work right around the corner from that park. (We’re now maybe 10 minutes away.) [via]

Monday various

Wednesday various

  • Human Centipede II already banned in the UK for sexual depravity. The description of the film sounds pretty horrific to me, even beyond the pale — and I’m someone who, amazingly enough, found some things to…well, not enjoy, exactly, about the first film, although I was less immediately repulsed by it than I would have expected. (Watching it over Twitter with friends may have softened the blow.)

    But the idea of censoring it, of banning it from the country, doesn’t sit entirely well with me. I tend to agree with Sarah Ditum of The Guardian on this:

    You get extremes of intelligence and stupidity as well as extremes of unpleasantness in horror, and if we’re happy to start banning stuff because of the latter, we might be losing a lot of stuff that falls into the former camp.

  • Meanwhile, the fact that there will be a G.I. Joe sequel — and that it may very well star The Rock — fills me with a weird manic delight. The original was one of the most gloriously dumb movies I have ever seen. I am so renting any sequel, as terrible as it is likely to be.
  • A lot of really interesting thoughts on X-Men: First Class. Though I liked it well enough — more than I expected to, less than I might have hoped — I’m not sure it deserves all this deep thought. But it’s all very interesting nonetheless. Spoiler warnings, of course.
  • Any story that starts with “the night a drunk John Lennon and Harry Nilsson heckled the Smothers Brothers and got in a fight with Pam Grier” has got to be good.
  • And finally, Paul Simon is simply a true class act. [via

Tuesday various