New Years Adventure

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Wolverina

2012 has been busy for me so far. I’ve been to more parties in two weeks than I normally would in two months (including several lots of two parties in a single night). I’ve driven home and back. I’ve read lots, I’ve discovered I’m moving house, caught up with awesome friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, and much more farting about that seems to have drained all my time. I’ve been working on several projects at once, which has meant that despite working my arse off on them, nothing seems to have happened. I’m working on fixing that, but for now I am absolutely buggered.

I’m much too tired to give a proper review, so here’s a screencap of a recent Twitter thread. This is where I accidentally seem to have set up a project for Eliza Fyre to work with Warren Ellis after I had been looking through the artwork on her website. Okay, so I just put the idea in people’s heads, but still! I can totally brag about this!

Twitter is amazing sometimes.

Amusingly my Kickstarter copy of Regalia arrived the next morning. It is beautiful and deserves a review of its own but I will save it for another time, preferably after you’ve all gone either to her store or Amazon page to buy it. Seriously, go do that, you will not regret it.

Also, the postcards she has for sale are so creepy and beautiful I wants them.

Podcast Nine now live

Posted on November 13, 2011 by Wolverina

The benefits of recording on a weekend begin to show as we manage to get the podcast recorded and edited within 24 hours!

Join us as we discuss the latest comic and nerdy happenings, what we’ve been reading and a variety of group titles as we analyse the dynamics and variations that occur in various JLA-style analogues. These titles include The Authority, The Boys, The Pro and Supreme Power.

Shownotes have made their return. As usual starting with our news we discuss

Comic Book Comics #6 – Fred van Lente, Ryan Dunlavey
Zoe gave a talk at the final ALTC viral conference for the year and discusses her first experience with public speaking.
Alisa Krasnostein from Twelfth Planet Press and Galactic Surburbia (and supporter of wolverina.net and How I Got My Boyfriend to Read Comics) won a World Fantasy Award. Congrats!
Comikaze Expo ran for the first time, lots of big names, seems to have been mostly successful. The highlight was the Red Lantern ragecat Dex-Starr cosplay.
Batman: Brave and the Bold #13 – has ALL the Robins!
CG Green Lantern series debuts on Cartoon Network (via CBR).
Post-Flashboot direct market sales are good. We still don’t really care. (via Warren Ellis)
DC Women Kicking Ass brought up the changing use of Dick Grayson’s name.
Topless Robot created a minor drama, pissed Zoe off about body hair, and made a crappy apology.

Comics for the week, chosen by Chris, are a discussion on the theme of Metacomics. They include:
Supreme Power – J. Michael Strasczynski
The Authority – Warren Ellis & Bryan Hitch, Dan Abnett
The Boys – Garth Ennis, Darick Robertson

… And finally, we love feedback and news tips! To give us your opinions, feel free to leave us a comment, either on this blog or our facebook page. You can twit to @thewolverina or email thewolverina@gmail.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, leave a comment on our itunes page for us to gain greater exposure. You can also receive notifications for all our podcast updates via all these options.

Holiday Comic Reading, Part One

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Wolverina

I read a lot while I was visiting my sister. We spent a lot of time drinking tea and sitting on the back verandah doing not-a-lot else and, well, I couldn’t help myself. Most of what I read was pretty old, but then I’m usually several steps behind the main trends anyway. I’ve split this into three posts to try and keep them short.

Stormwatch

Ellis is still my favourite author. I love Transmetropolitan. I love The Authority. I love his various grumpy-old-drunken-men series. More on that later, but suffice to say, I find his style of cynical humor with some crudity thrown in wonderful. But yes, The Authority is the entire reason I bought and read the first four GN’s of his run and probably the reason I will keep them. Don’t get me wrong, Ellis’ Stormwatch run is excellent comics and good writing… I didn’t think anything could make me love Jenny Sparks any more, but this series has managed it. Saying all that though, it feels like something’s missing. The stories never really feel like they’re building up to anything, and it feels kinda scattered. The books feel irritate,d I guess, like the author is annoyed and couldn’t stand many of the characters… and I guess he did kill most of them off and start again, so I can’t be that far off.

Still, it gave some context to The Authority, I definitely laughed and enjoyed it enough for my money’s worth.

Wildstorm's seriously wicked old skool wonder StormWatch.

Fell (Vol. 1): Feral City

The cover looks amazing IRL, shit online.

Ellis doing what he does best: a story about a grumpy man being angry at people and saving the world. The art is appropriately horrific, yet works to convey surprisingly beautiful imagery of one hell of a fucked-up city. Definitely worth it for the snark and artwork alone, but on top of that I’m such a sucker for stories that use cityscapes themselves as a character in the story. The combination of all this makes this amazing.

Can’t wait to find more from this series, I NEED to keep reading this. Totally hooked.

The All New Atom Vol 2: Future/Past

I don’t really know how I feel about this series. Something doesn’t quite work for me. Maybe because the US college system freaks me out? Maybe because I’ve never given a shit about Ray Palmer or Ryan Choi before? Maybe because the Atoms’ power has just always seemed really freaking stupid? Not Simone’s best, in my opinion, it feels more like something where she is playing with concepts and styles. I did like the little dialogue boxes with various quotes of varying degrees of seriousness throughout the piece, but I suspect they broke the reading flow a little too much and, for me at least, took a lot away from the larger story.

Interesting, but didn’t really work for me. Probably won’t worry about getting much more.

Nightwing: Year One

The Disco-wing edition

I love Nightwing. I really like Dixon’s Nightwing most of the time. I even like the way his relationship with Bruce is now often portrayed as strained. I get why the story of their breakup needed retelling, even. Just… this smelt an awful lot like a bunch of WAHWAHWAHWAH MY PARENTS ARE DEAD AND MY FOSTER DADDY DOESN’T LOVE ME ANYMORE, and not a lot else. I don’t know. I’m probably just at the point in life where hot 20-something boys doing their whole coming-of-age and finding themselves isn’t interesting anymore. Call me when he’s secure in himself and having actual fun adventures or personal growth or something entertaining.

So basically, I enjoyed Nightwing #2 from the recent reset a HELL of a lot more. Check that out instead, or the earlier Dixon trades, if you have Nightwing urges.

Reading Comics in Public Day

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Wolverina

First off, apologies for the lack of blog and podcast updates. I haven’t been well and my partner has been hell busy. I have the latest podcast episode on my hard drive (and have done for about three weeks now) but editing it is a royal pain, so I haven’t gotten far. We recorded it in a different place and way to usual, so a lot of background noise and interruptions occurred. I’ll get it up eventually.

A few days ago it was International Read Comics in Public Day. In celebration of this, the amazing lady behind dcwomenkickingass created the Women Read Comic in Public too! tumblr account to share photos of us ladies reading in public (and getting an awesome logo from Sarah Winifred).

My friends and I decided to join in the fun by meeting up in a park near the centre of our city and have a reading comics in public picnic event. A friend that couldn’t make it in person (due to flying to Europe) came along via a picture taken earlier of her reading comics. Another friend unable to make the picnic found time to take a quick picture of herself reading a comic outside the front of her house.

We had quite a fun time, and there was a pretty large variety of stuff there comics-wise. Interestingly, I was the only one who brought along any work by either of the big two (DC). Plenty of manga, indie stuff and Vertigo though. We will definitely be doing it again next year. The biggest hit of the afternoon definitely seemed to be The Walking Dead, though my copy of Secret Six also made a huge impression. People brought their own GN’s to read, or ones they had borrowed from the library or other friends, which was a pretty big relief to me, as I was a little worried about saying I’d providing my own for everyone.

Comics I took to my reading comics in public event

Freak Angels, JLA: World Without Grownups, Gotham Central: Half a Life, Catwoman: Wild Ride, Secret Six: Unhinged, Terra, Birds of Prey: The Battle Within

On the way to the park I found a discount book store with a little comics corner . I may have visited them, right before heading home with double the number of comics I left with.

The Aftershot: Terrible evening photography.

Not a bad score of things I’ve been meaning to get. Amusingly the pile of The Boys trades was sitting right next to a whole pile of Tiny Titans, which made an amusing contrast. Particularly happy with finding a Rucka book and a JLU trade.

But back to the event. You can see all of the pictures I took of our little event on my flickr page. I submitted a few to the tumblr account too. As I’m really happy with how some turned out, I’m even putting some of my favourites behind the cut.

Continue reading →

Kickstarter is magic

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Wolverina

Ages ago, I posted about how I’m willing to pour money into anything even vaguely Transmetropolitan related.
So I was pretty happy to have to have this to arrive:

Transmetropolitan: All Around the World artbook.

All Around The World... but mostly in cyberpunk The City everything is fucked Ellis-land.

It’s pretty awesome, basically amounting to a whole pile of sketches, photos, and brief fiction, kinda like a book of a livejournal fan community, only professional and really fucking cool. The book itself and its cover are beautiful and as usual my terrible photography has not captured this. It did get a little dented in one corner in the mail, but I’ve had stuff arrive from the US in much worse condition, so I’m not at all worried about it.

Okay I have to rave about some stuff in it now: I love the text by Matt Sturges on page 29, I want to sleep with the female Spider on pg 78 and I can’t describe how happy page 119 makes me. I was going to stop there, but then I remembered the page where a vibrator got shot into Spider’s laptop on 108 and I needed to mention this, alongside how I really want a huge poster of pg 132 hanging above my bed. Never have I wanted a poster so much as this, since I discovered a Nicola Scott drawing of Nightwing’s arse.

Fuck, it’s all pretty amazing actually. Those are just the high points for me and no, I don’t fucking care except for those that had the brains to buy the book can understand what I’m talking about.

*coughs* Er, sorry for the raving pile of vomit there. Ellis’s worlds have that effect on me.

So if you were wondering, what I’m posting to say is this: Na-na-na-naa… you wish you were me right now.

Transmet Art Book

Posted on January 30, 2011 by Wolverina

A transmet artbook, if it receives enough funds, will be published to raise money for Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and the Hero Initiative.

Cover of Transmetropolitan Vol 2 Lust For Life

transmet, remember that?

I was going to embed the video clip for this, but wordpress is more cunning than I am and has prevented it. Or has until I come across a youtube version anyway. Have a link to the kickstarter site instead.

Rather than pretend I’m more charitable than I actually am, I really loved the Transmetropolitan series, and will buy nearly anything that even vaguely relates to Warren Ellis so I’m craving this like woah. So I think people should pledge for this for entirely altruistic reasons. Really.

COMING SOON: A rant about a terrible Huntress graphic novel.