The Nitpicker #28.

DISCLAIMER (angry creators, please read)

[[WARNING! THIS COLUMN MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS!]]

Welcome to issue #28 of the Nitpicker! Let’s give a warm welcome to our new readers at Comic-Scans.net, and a big thanks to all the crew there, especially Brecht, who heeded my cries for attention and accepted the column on the site.

This week, we have all the nits I found on last week’s releases, and some from books from weeks past that I hadn’t gotten yet. Also, as you’ll notice at the end of the column (if you’re reading this outside the Nitpicker’s home site), I’ve decided to centralize the comments for each column on the comments section of each post at the home site, so I can keep better track of them. I please beg of you that you comment through that link, or comment at the site where you read this, and copy paste the comment at the link.

Before moving to this week’s nits, let me show you something that made me happy. What you see here is two panels from this week’s Superman V1 663, where Kurt Busiek does something that almost moved me to tears: he wrote a completely correct dialogue which is partly in Spanish!

(more…)

Some parents just need beaten with hammers.

Look, I’m a dad, and I know that kids freaking out in a restaurant can be a) mortifying, and b) totally annoying to the other customers. Fortunately, my kids have historically been really, really good in public. Connor is usually quite content to play with a toy or color, and he’s a great eater. Kyle at this point pretty much just kicks back in the car seat and chews on things.

There was one time that Connor lost it. We were at Applebee’s, and our server was the slowest human I think I’ve ever encountered. He was hungry, he was antsy, and he melted. He recovered about two minutes later when something he could eat finally arrived, but that was a very looooooong two minutes. I know it can be irritating.

But still. To descend to the level of abject cruelty described in the article . . . those people already have issues. It reminds me of the wise statement from “Parenthood”, delivered by Keanu Reeves; paraphrased, it runs, “They’ll make you get a license to drive a car or catch a fish, but they’ll let anybody have a kid.”

Well, that’s what WWE.com would have us think. Apparently the climax to the months and months of idiotic feuds with Shawn Michaels, Donald Trump, and Bobby Lashley was Vince McMahon going nuts over the past week-and-a-half talking to himself and others like he was trying out for Mercedes McCambridge’s part in The Exorcist. Top that off with McMahon getting into an uncustomary white limousine (he generally rides in black) and people lining up to watch him ride off into the sunset, you could tell that something bad was about to happen. I mean, does he think he’s Albert Finney at the end of Big Fish or something?

(more…)

I just edited #27 to show the image of the Legion rings that was missing. By the way, the column will now be featured weekly at #Comic-Scans, thanks to Brecht and the resto of the crew over there.

I put up some WWE and TNA news updates on my blog last week. One of them involved a fairly racist gimmick for Sonjay Dutt where they play up his Indian ancestry. As he remarked, maybe they’ll have him drive a cab as part of the gimmick as well. Well, if that’s not the job they all have, then maybe they should have him as a tech support operator named “Larry” instead.

Whenever you listen to one of the old timers talk wrestling, you kind of wonder if they’re still working you or not. For the guys whose carny backgrounds demanded that they pay homage to kayfabe, their livelihoods and their health depended on it. After all, you didn’t want to be the guy caught smartening up the marks, because they would tell all their friends it was fake, then they wouldn’t come, and then your co-workers would break your legs.

On the other hand, it seems like these guys had the most amazing experiences, and that’s what you pick up out of Classy Freddie Blassie’s book Listen, You Pencil Neck Geeks. The road stories, the crazy fan stories, the lifestyle stories, the in-ring stories… this book has them all. It’s a very entertaining read and well worth your time.

One nice thing about this book is that Blassie doesn’t pull punches with himself or others. He’ll tell you how much money he made in one sentence, and then in the next sentence admit that he was a lousy father and a serial fornicator. Such honesty is refreshing, as the only comparable book that I’ve read is Ric Flair’s. Most of the other books out there tend to sweep such infidelities under the rug.

I honestly didn’t know as I was reading the book that Blassie passed away in the same year as this was published. It became a bit depressing to me then that I would never get to meet the man or hear him use that trademark catchphrase of his. Above all, he seemed to be a guy that made himself better and tried to do better for himself and his financially.

To say that the Mick Foley books and the Ric Flair book were some of the greatest wrestling books ever written are really unimaginative picks. This one deserves any accolades it gets, simply because it is one of the more understated offerings from WWE Books. Blassie’s career spanned seven decades, and he’s worked with and known all the great ones. This is an excellent book, and it’s a great history lesson of the who’s who of the wrestling business. In the end, I think Blassie got all the credit and stability he was searching for in wrestling when he started, and isn’t that all that really matters?

I wasn’t sure of what to make out of HBO’s newest series, John from Cincinnati, when it premiered after the final episode of The Sopranos. However, by the end of the episode, I had all but forgotten about the really great sense of closure The Sopranos left me with–instead, ‘John from Cincinnati’ ripped my senses wide open.

Set in and around the Imperial Beach area of California, ‘John from Cincinnati’ is about the mysterious John Monad (Austin Nichols) and his interaction with the Yost family–a dysfunctional family with three generations of professional surfers. The family patriarch, Mitch (Bruce Greenwood), retired before his prime due to an injury, has become a purist surfer–having totally withdrawn from the professional eye. His son, Butchie (Brian Van Holt), possesses his father’s surfing prowess but has fallen prey to the lifestyle of a successful pro-surfer and become an addict holed up in a run down motel. Butchie’s son, Shaun (Greyson Fletcher), may be the most gifted surfer of the three generations of Yosts but neither his father nor his grandfather want him to fall peril to the rigors of being sponsored as a professional surfer. Enter matriarch Cissy Yost (Rebecca De Mornay), disappointed wife and mother, who seeks to help her grandson gain access to the wealth and prestige that both her husband and son lost.

There is an assortment of other odd characters like Meyer Dickinson (Willie Garson), a local lawyer and surf enthusiast; Ramon (Luis Guzman), who runs the motel Butchie “resides” in; and Bill (Ed O’Neill), a local retired policeman and senile friend of the Yost family. Luke Perry plays ‘Linc’–he’s a scout looking to sponsor Shaun. I’m sure his role will increase in later issues.

This episode is basically a back drop for the characters, their status quo, and a display of all the interconnected relationships and conflicts. John establishes contact with all the primary players. The Yosts struggle with Shaun’s gift and his impending desire to compete and seek out sponsors.

Granted, the title character is merely a background character that ties a number of the scenes together this episode but the family dynamic is an absolute hook for this series. Cissy Yost is that foxy blond surfer groupie 15 years past her expiration date–De Mornay is a great foil for Greenwood’s Mitch. Honestly, Van Holt as Butchie and O’Neill as Bill locked everything into place for me. Both of these guys are chaotic cogs in this bizarre, well oiled machine.

I couldn’t begin to classify this dense program. Here goes: Trippy Dysfunctional Zen-Surfing Melodramatic Magical Realism with a touch of Sci-Fi–try to catch this first episode if you can. It’s mind boggling, serious, and funny all at the same time.

I’m totally hooked. This show is totally capable of replacing The Sopranos.

From the comments of Write Paris, a Blogger site set up to allow people to write letters to She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named during her second stint in the slammer:

Dear Paris,

You will be like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill after this. Ugly.

Some of the other comments are pretty hilarious as well, such as this gem, a little further down:

the_entire_human_population said…
Pwned!

Yes, I can fully accept the fact that I’m sad and pathetic, but YOU try working a customer service job on a slow Saturday.

DISCLAIMER

[[WARNING! THIS COLUMN MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS!]]

As the random bit of information/rant I include in each column’s intro, have you seen these so-called “Ultimate Guides” on Superman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man that a publisher called DK is putting out? I’ve only skimmed over the Wonder Woman and the Superman ones, but for being released now, they are wildly out of date, and contain a lot of omissions and mistakes.

For example, the Superman one shows Byrne designed Krypton (although some parts of the book show early 2000s designs), instead of Birthright Krypton. They show Jimmy as giant Turtle Boy, but not as Elastic Lad, and when they show Superboy (Kon-El) in his second or third uniform, you see him wearing the earphones and goggles that gave him hearing and vision powers, but the caption says “the shades are just cosmetic” or something like that.

I’m not going to actually read these things and catalog each and every single nit, since I believe they would put Civil War: Battle Damage Report to shame, and it would take me to long. Plus, they’re written as if for idiots. However, I did learn one thing: who’s Darkseid’s worst enemy? Superman, perhaps? The High Father, maybe? Jimmy Olsen?

No, it’s paparazzi

Also, on Countdown #48, it’s confirmed that Mary Marvel and Black Adam are in the “Consulate of the Great Nation of Kahndaq”, which validates last week’s nit by Mike Marts. Anyway, let’s get started with last week’s nits, shall we?

(more…)

May 4, 2007. Friday morning. event day. I awake and miss the team breakfast at IHOP, but I am not worried about it because I slept in, and let me tell you, for someone who has severe sleeping disorders, sleeping in was great. No, it was better then great, it can only be described by using a word that has not yet been created, so I will create it now. Sleeping in was Supawesomlypendous.

(more…)

You remember in 4th grade when you learned all the cuss words? You probably felt like a big-shot dropping F-bombs out on the playground, showing off how cool you were and how you sounded like an adult. Well, this book reminds me of that, both figuratively and literally. World Wrestling Insanity by James Guttman covers WWE’s missteps between 2001 and 2005 and discusses ad nauseum all the follies of the company’s poor decision making. Instead, it only succeeds in driving away wrestling fans out of boredom and non-fans in confusion.

(more…)

The Shadow is back in a new series of officially licensed, pulp-sized trade paperbacks.  These re-print editions featuring unabridged text and the original illustrations are the result of a partnership between Sanctum Productions and Nostalgia Ventures. Each volume reprints two original stories from The Shadow Magazine as well as complementary articles.  Volume six of the series features “The Shadow’s Justice” from April 15, 1933, and “The Broken Napoleons” from July 15, 1936.

“The Shadow’s Justice” is a tale straight out of 1930’s crime noir thrillers.  A wealthy, but dying old man named Houston Bostwick has arranged for his estate to either go to his son, Carter, who is returning home after a ten year absence, or to his ne’er-do-well nephew Drew Westling, should anything happen to Carter.  Just one catch, the bulk of Bostwick’s money has been carefully hidden and he’s left clues for his son or nephew to find it, if they are worthy. Westling has gotten himself into debt with a racketeer named Hub Rowley.  Hub intends to make sure that Carter never makes it home and the money passes to Westling, whom he intends to extort as much of the wealth as he can.  He sends one of his men down to Cuba to hire local thugs to kill Carter before he can get on the ship home.   Only the timely intervention of the Shadow, with the twin .45’s blazing, saves Carter.

(more…)

Results from Gerweck.net

Sorry there was no PPV preview last week, but I was on vacation, and I forgot to delegate it before I left. Anyway, I can’t imagine there are many out there that were waiting on pins and needles to see this show that was pretty irrelevant considering there was another PPV two week ago. Of course, I’m sure that the half a million that watched Saturday Night’s Main Event burned up the phone lines afterwards calling their cable company, but whatever…

(more…)

Paris Hilton to be housed in “special needs section” of jail.

Three words on this revelation:
No.
Fucking.
Shit.