This book came close to changing my mind. So, so close.
(Yes, that’s me front-loading the piece with an unwieldy headline and a nearly irrelevant disclaimer. If I were a film director, I clearly wouldn’t be the breed that insists Act 1, Scene 1 must be all about exploding cars. Between those and this bonus meta-parenthetical, I hereby declare the tone Properly Set.)
Every empty marquee tells a story:
Once upon a time, there was a community gathering place where citizens and neighbors shared adventure, laughter, heartbreak, tension, jingoism, victory, sorrow, dreams, and amazement in a cozy, rarefied atmosphere bereft of stereo sound, digital imagery, comfortable upholstery, or ads teaching you baseline smartphone manners. Many a childhood memory was born there, many a relationship begun there, many a care in the world set aside for two hours inside a temporary escape hatch offering inspiration or respite.
Something something something, and then it closed forever and now it’s an eyesore, and did you hear about the acrimonious lawsuits raging behind closed doors as we speak, but hey, at least we have a Redbox kiosk on every other corner. And they all lived in isolation ever after.
The name of the town changes like a Mad Libs answer. Sometimes the part about the lawsuits is redacted because no one cares enough to sue anyone else over its demise. But the rest of the story is frequently the same.
After an opening montage of moments from the first nineteen episodes set to the tune of “Can’t Find My Way Home”, at long last begins the Revolution season-one finale, “The Dark Tower” (not the first time they’ve referenced Stephen King). When last we left, Monroe Republic President Sebastian “Bass” Monroe and former best friend Miles Matheson were facing off inside the tower with coilguns at twenty paces. Will this be the duel to end all duels? Here in the first minute of the episode?
Hardly an award-winning pic, is it?
When I attended the “Marvel: From NOW! to Infinity” panel at C2E2 last April, I arrived late from another panel and found myself in the back row. I thought covering the panel from an amateur perspective might be a fun lark for one segment of the MCC readership. Unfortunately I back-burnered that part of my C2E2 experience because (a) pro comics-news sites had the panel’s announcements posted online days before I would’ve gotten around to them; and (b) my photos were rubbish.
I’d rather not imagine a world in which I might’ve had a chance of selling this reject for real American money. I enjoy seeing the work of skillful eyes and hands that justly shame me in this area. I doubt few dream of a world in which our news sites and newspapers drop several degrees in visual competence and settle for publishing any available photos to accompany their articles regardless of quality, offering whatever they can scrounge up from overworked reporters or untrained bystanders.
The Powers That Be at the Chicago Sun-Times believe so deeply in this alternate future that they’ve decided to push our timeline forward in that direction. Last week numerous sources reported the venerable institution dismissed all 28 of its staff photographers (including one Pulitzer winner) as a cost-cutting measure and announced plans to offer smartphone photography lessons to its staff reporters, who clearly had too much time on their hands and needed extra busywork to keep them from turning into total goof-offs.
The trailers for Now You See Me telegraph up front that you should expect a twist along the way. You’re teased and beguiled by the possibility of having the wool pulled over your eyes, and taunted for daring to look too closely. Sooner or later, this movie swears it will fool you.
It’s no spoiler, then, to reveal that yes, the movie does eventually have a twist. Despite the fancy stage-magician trappings, its base template is the heist-film genre, in which the viewer’s homework assignment is trying to guess which character will be revealed as a mole or a double-crosser by the end. In that sense, the genre expectations are fulfilled here, including the part where that big revelation turns several previous scenes into utter nonsense if you retrace your steps and rethink them too deeply.
Comics! Anime! Video Games! T-shirt vendors! Whovians! Uglydoll! This never-before-shared file photo from C2E2 2011 has it all! (Unlike Indianapolis. For now.)
Several theoretical names have floated fancily through my head over the decades, ever since the erstwhile Comics Buyer’s Guide taught me about the magical world of comic book conventions when I subscribed to them in 1986. I’ve always wondered if Indianapolis would ever be respectable enough to merit a large-scale comic-con of its own. We had little comic book shows on the east side a few time a year that occasionally drew one or two special guests. Circa 1989 or 1990 someone threw a shindig in Indy called HoosierCon 1, but I had to work the entire weekend and missed it. I never heard a peep about it after the fact, sequels never manifested, and Google tells me no one in world history has ever rhapsodized about it online. I presume plans went awry.
This week the Indianapolis Star reported that someone out there wants to make my pipe dream a reality. A young Florida-based company called Action3 Events and Promotions has scheduled a comics convention for March 14-16, 2014, in our very own Indiana Convention Center. It’s as yet unnamed and not yet listed on their official site, but official enough that they’re proclaiming its proposed existence in public interviews. That much alone is a positive sign.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 