Former Kickstarter Junkie II: Even Formerer

Smoke/Ashes, Alex DeCampi, Tomer Hanuka

The Smoke/Ashes two-in-one limited hardcover edition was made possible through Kickstarter and conscientious perseverance. Art by Tomer Hanuka.

My copy of the new hardcover graphic novel Ashes arrived in my mailbox this week. When I first put up my money for the project, it was a sequel to a well-received IDW miniseries called Smoke. During the production process, creator Alex DeCampi announced it wouldn’t be a stretch for her to include both stories in a single volume. I’m certainly not one to turn down a value-added bonus.

This fabulous package was the result of a Kickstarter campaign that was launched in October 2011, successfully funded in December 2011, announced with a delivery date of December 2012, and plagued by setbacks too numerous to recount. Through frequent updates composed with above-and-beyond personal candor, DeCampi kept in touch throughout the process, provided backers with access to a digital version months ago, and generally gave the impression that she had every intention of fulfilling her commitments, no matter how much it would end up costing her in the long run, all without passing the budget overruns on to us. Congress should be so conscientious.

More than a few Kickstarter projects out there can’t say the same.

The following entry is a sequel to a previous entry…

“Revolution” 10/2/2013 (spoilers): Tom Neville, Undercover Patriot

Tom Neville, Giancarlo Esposito, Revolution, NBCTonight on the new episode of NBC’s Revolution, “There Will Be Blood”, the game is afoot for our hero, Tom Neville. The alleged President of the United States of America has returned to the mainland from his/her getaway in Guantanamo Bay and set up camp in Savannah, but his/her representatives are presenting themselves as the people’s rescuers through the use of big fat lies. Our hero knows the truth, believes nuclear madman Randall Flagg was working for them, and can second-guess their devious plan from a mile away: “Create the problem. Be the solution.” And Neville hates it when anyone lies but him.

Follow this week in Tom Neville news!

2013 Road Trip Photos #14: It’s Chinatown!

After spending the morning of Day Four stalled on the interstate and all afternoon in Quincy, we spent the early evening in Boston’s version of Chinatown. It’s much smaller than its counterpart we visited in Manhattan in 2011, and a little less tailored to nosy tourists (by which I mean I still haven’t gotten over how Manhattan’s Chinatown had information kiosks and a large directory in the middle), but Boston’s has its own way of doing things.

Chinatown Gate, Boston

Step beyond the gate into another realm!

“Sleepy Hollow” 9/30/2013 (spoilers): Dreams Along the Mohawk

Sandman, Ro'henkrontyes, Sleepy Hollow

The other six Endless cannot save you now!

The third episode of Fox’s runaway Monday night sensation, Sleepy Hollow, contains no Horseman, no witches, no Katrina or her Phantom Zone, no Clancy Brown flashbacks, and very little mysterious demon except in flashback. Thankfully it’s not exactly sixty minutes of dead air. “For the Triumph of Evil” is the first time Our Heroes must face a mythical creature who’s not overtly taking orders from the Big Bad. And yet…this otherworldly stalker nicknamed “the Sandman” holds connections to both Ichabod and Abbie, while appearing visually indebted to Pan’s Labyrinth and half the characters Doug Jones has ever played.

For those who missed out, my attempt to streamline the basic events follows after this courtesy spoiler alert for the sake of time-shifted viewers.

About that pale white man…

Siskel & Ricky Jay and Movie Magic

Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, Illinois

The Siskel Film Center: sincere, comfy, willing to showcase material beyond the major studios’ low-budget farm teams. Two thumbs up.

Indianapolis has exactly (1) one art-film theater, which leavens its offerings with a mixture of big studio fare presumably for the sake of ticket sales, thus minimizing the number of small films they can truly show during any given week. It doesn’t help that this theater and our house are on opposite ends of town. It’s my understanding other, larger cities have more options for moviegoers who yearn for something besides sequels, explosions, and big budgets. The advent of Video on Demand has charitably broadened our access to new limited-release fare, but there’s something I like about seeing films in their natural habitat.

This weekend my wife and I journeyed once again to Chicago via reasonably priced group tour. While our fellow passengers availed themselves of the Magnificent Mile’s upscale merchandise or gallivanted around Lake Michigan on water taxis, she and I paid our first visit to the Gene Siskel Film Center to view the kind of real, live documentary that rarely plays within fifty miles of our house.

Click here for more about the theater and the documentary “Deceptive Practice”…

Empty Nest, Week 6: a Mission of Mercy and Meat

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in mid-August my son moved into his own apartment up at college, living alone for the first time. Naturally we underwent various bouts of grief, panic, pacing back and forth, imagined scenarios of endless possible disasters, and a sort of loving numbness that I wouldn’t necessarily call acceptance.

Last weekend my wife and I paid him a visit and took him out to lunch at a local joint recommended by people we trust. Thus we declared Saturday burger time at a local oxymoron named the Triple XXX Family Restaurant.

Triple XXX Family Restaurant, West Lafayette, Indiana

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Chicago Photo Tribute #9: Architecture Potpourri

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

[This coming] weekend is the fourth annual Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (that “C2E2″ thing I won’t shut up about) at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center, which my wife and I will be attending for our third time. As a tribute to this fascinating city, and an intro to C2E2 newcomers to provide ideas of what else Chicago has to offer while they’re in town, a few of this week’s posts will be dedicated to out experiences in the Windy City when we’re not gleefully clustered indoors with thousands of other comics and sci-fi fans.

That was written last April. To date we’ve visited Chicago for three C2E2s, five Wizard World Chicagos, one stopover on a previous family road trip, and one group outing with my employers. We’ve shared photos here from each of those trips in intermittent installments, either when they became relevant or when they popped into my head as a fun thing to revisit for an evening.

In this instance, my wife and I have another one-day Chicago trip planned for this weekend, so it’s at the forefront of my thoughts just now. Today’s presentation, then: parts of Chicago (and one related suburb) that were held back from previous installments for whatever reasons. The “architecture” category in the title covers the gamut well enough, including the realm of landscape architecture. Exhibit A: the flowers of Millennium Park. Look beyond them and you can see into the heart of the Loop, the Magnificent Mile’s significantly less glossy sibling.

Millennium Park flowers, Chicago

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“Revolution” 9/25/2013 (spoilers): Nevilles vs. Nukes

Tom Neville, Giancarlo Esposito, Revolution, NBC

Tom Neville is back. And this time…he’s still mad.

Revolution is back! And this time, it’s sorry if it made you unhappy and it swears it can change!

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2013 Road Trip Photos #13: Adams Family Real Estate

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: the wonderful world of John Adams and his sequel, John Quincy Adams. We saw their family burial crypt and the church it’s beneath. Lest we appear fixated on Presidential death, today we see where the Adamses lived.

To a certain extent, anyway. The Adams National Historical Park in Quincy, MA, offers guided tours of the family’s original homesteads, but allows no photos inside any of them. From a travelog perspective, I can’t help being disappointed. I’m not one for rendering artists’ sketches, and what objets d^art we saw aren’t as meaningful if I just list them by name. Hence all the exterior shots.

Adams didn’t think his places were such a big deal, of course. History mostly thinks otherwise, even if he spent much of his life as either a runner-up or a dark horse.

John Adams quote

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“Sleepy Hollow” 9/23/2013 (spoilers): Donut Hole Tax Reform NOW!

Tom Mison, Ichabod Crane, Sleepy Hollow

The gentleman doth protest his receipt. From tonight’s cute scene in which Crane learns about the pitfalls of taxation with representation.

The second episode of Fox’s new Monday night spooky-action series, Sleepy Hollow, understandably has to work with a fraction of the pilot’s budget, but scores best when it keeps the focus on our heroes, the time-displaced Ichabod Crane and present-day police Lieutenant Abbie Mills, whose chemistry compensates for this week’s villain, a dead witch who has no lines and hides in the shadows between jump-cuts. We also saw a couple of unexpected returns and a clever use of Post-It Notes as an educational tool that Memento‘s Leonard Shelby wishes he’d thought of first.

For those who missed out, my attempt to streamline the basic events follows after this courtesy spoiler alert for the sake of time-shifted viewers.

Tonight’s Sleepy Hollow was brought to you by Overtaxed Donut Holes. 8.25% government-levied, 100% delicious!

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An Old Man’s Poor Little Scorecard for the 2013 Emmys

Emmy Awards

It’s a major award! To some!

I’ve never watched a complete Emmy Awards ceremony. I follow several different TV shows each season, but I don’t watch nearly enough of the “right” shows to have a sizable stake in the proceedings. It’s with good reason that I don’t write about television seven days a week.

The preceding paragraph was copied-‘n’-pasted from last year’s Emmys entry. Not much has changed, so why reinvent the butter knife?

Back then, I thought it would be fun to sort through all the Emmy nominations just to see how many would actually matter to me. I’d committed to that night’s writing topic before I analyzed the list. My conclusion: it wasn’t fun after all.

This year I altered my approach. Instead of painstakingly scrutinizing every last nominee, I decided to wait until the ceremonies were finished and the results were posted online, then check off only the winners, disregarding any of my shows that were nominated but beaten down.

The results were slightly surprising…

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Obligatory “Freshly Pressed” Follow-Up Thank-You Ramble

WordPress "Freshly Pressed" badgeIs it okay if I feel proud and sheepish at the same time?

The gracious editors at WordPress liked a post of mine from last week well enough to showcase it as “Freshly Pressed”, meaning a temporary spotlight in the WordPress commons area where thousands of other writers might give it and other folks’ recent “Freshly Pressed” posts a look. It’s extremely kind of them and thoroughly unexpected.

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The Curse of the “Follow” Button

Follow Button Nightmare

Just so we’re clear, this haunting illustration is not intended as a superliminal message.

The Followers list of the average WordPress user is comprised largely of other WordPress users. The community is extremely supportive that way. On occasion I’ve even dug a little deeper into those notifications and discovered usernames popping in from Blogger, Tumblr, DeviantArt, YouTube, and other creative sites. If readers are attracted from outside the blogosphere altogether, that’s worth an elaborate victory dance in my book.

Some of that support is provisional, though — offered in hopeful accordance with the implied adage of “I’ll follow you if you follow me!” I’m not sure how many online communities this largely unspoken expectation pervades. When MCC first launched, I kept this guideline in mind, especially in the early era of single-digit daily traffic when any sort of response, human or otherwise, was a welcome change of pace from spending quality time with the Void.

The longer my resulting reading list grew from everyone I Followed in turn, the less I wanted to keep observing that adage. And yes, I mean “reading list”. I tried keeping up with all of them/you, even if the subject matter didn’t interest me in the slightest. It seemed the most honest response. I still read many, many blogs in any given day, but I’ve had to perform some serious triage for the sake of my free time and sanity. I’m unclear on when the “Follow” button became less a simple, literal statement for some users and more of a token to be swapped with passing strangers like marbles or pogs.

For some of my oldest followers…I think using the “Follow” button jinxed them.

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The Fun of Buying Two (and Only Two) Parts of a 90-Part Publishing Event

Emi Lenox, Slub, Dial E, Forever Evil, DC Comics

The underordered Dial E one-shot will become a hot item once Slub locks in a WB movie deal. (Art by Emi Lenox.)

This year at DC Comics, the villains are taking over! (No, not the editors. Wrong verb tense.) Now in progress at comic shops nationwide, Forever Evil is the first major crossover event to march like General Sherman through the entire DC Universe since the New 52 initiative launched two years ago. The core is a seven-part miniseries buoyed by three months’ worth of tie-ins across five ongoing series, one issue apiece of two other series, three different six-part miniseries coming in October, and — last I heard — fifty-two different one-shots replacing most of DC’s ongoing series this month, all starring villains instead of heroes, all available with fancy 3-D covers for an added one-dollar upcharge. (All figures assume DC announces no surprise additions to the lineup, or any abrupt cancellations due to overextending themselves.)

For enraptured fans of DC’s New 52, it’s a veritable grand tapestry of drama. In a world where many of our rebooted heroes are presumed dead, all the rebooted villains have united and threaten to ruin everything everywhere for all time.

Or something like that. I think. I don’t really care.

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2013 Road Trip Photos #12: the Adams Family Church

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: our highlight of Day Four was time spent in the family crypt of the second and sixth Presidents of the United States, John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams, along with their respective wives. I’d mentioned their crypt was in the basement of the United First Parish Church in Quincy, MA.

This, then, is that church. The body proper dates back to 1639, but the current building was erected in 1828, funded by President Adams himself.

United First Parish Church, Quincy, Massachusetts

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“Sleepy Hollow” 9/16/2013 (spoilers): Death Wields a Mean Shotgun

Nicole Beharie, Tom Mison, Sleepy Hollow

She’s a medium-town sheriff with FBI dreams. He’s a 250-year-old Minuteman. They fight crime!

With a swing of the axe and a shotgun blast into the air, Fox brazenly kicked off the 2013-2014 fall TV season Monday night with our first new series, Sleepy Hollow. From the early ads its simple but silly premise — Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horsemen, ripped from Washington Irving’s short story and transported to the World of Tomorrow (i.e., today) — felt to me like another uninspired Hollywood reboot, scraping the bottom of the public-domain intellectual-property barrel.

If you don’t mind the occasional hour of loony, far-fetched “popcorn TV”, you can do plenty of fun things with barrel scrapings.

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The Last Stand of the Drive-In Theater: Upgrade or Perish

Tibbs Drive-In, Indianapolis

The drive-in nearest our house is the Tibbs, still standing after 46 years. For now. (Photo from our 2008 personal archives. To date I’ve seen only two of these timeless non-classics…)

In my early childhood years, I had only two options for seeing movies: squinting at them on my family’s thirteen-inch black-‘n’-white TV (and I was rarely allowed to choose what channels we watched); or seeing them writ large on the giant-sized, outdoor screen down at the drive-in theater. In a world where limited technology narrowed our choices, this competition was a no-brainer to me.

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2013 Road Trip Photos #11: Inside the Adams Family Crypt

Once we were safely and successfully on the road again after the morning’s mechanical failure, our Day Four officially commenced due south of Boston in the town of Quincy. (Official blending-in tip for outsiders: it’s pronounced “Quinzy” by the locals, because that’s how the eponymous family pronounced it.) In the basement of the United First Parish Church lies a very special room open to any and all visitors, though they do suggest a donation, and — based on the bizarre, unexplained incident we witnessed — will turn you away at the door if you prove yourself a local, recurring, foul-mouthed nuisance.

Inside that bunker-esque room lies the final resting places of four noteworthy historical figures: John Adams, second President of the United States; his wife/First Lady, Abigail; his son, John Quincy Adams, our sixth President; and his wife/First Lady, Louisa.

John Adams presidential crypt

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The Experiment

This year for my birthday, my wife and I visited the Indianapolis Museum of Art because I wanted to see the traveling Ai Weiwei exhibit while it was in town. Fascinating collection of provocative, disturbing, convicting works and images.

My wife captured this thought, one of several typeset on the museum walls for the occasion.

Study questions:

If the artist works hard but doesn’t change any aspect of the world, not even a minute tweak, is the result still art? How many tries should they be allowed?

If the artist has no definitive aspiration, can they still effect change? What sort of deadline should we give them?

(Mood: contemplative. Music: Bob Mould, Black Sheets of Rain.)

My Super Awesome Blockbuster Reboot of “E.T.”

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

Those eyes are pretty in the right light, but the rest of this will have to go.

February 2014 will see The Killing‘s Joel Kinnaman taking over for Peter Weller as the new Robocop. This fall Ironside returns to TV with Blair Underwood somehow replacing Raymond Burr. Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, the Lone Ranger, and the Green Hornet are but a few of the myriad characters to return from pop-culture limbo in overhauled guises. And this is the sentence I had set aside for DC Comics if I could narrow the possible examples down to less than four hundred.

At the rate our entertainment recyclers are plowing through their back catalogs, every intellectual property from the last fifty years will have been remade and/or rebooted before I’m fifty. Even if 90% of them flop, every producer, editor, or writer will convince themselves their attempt will be different from all the rest because they truly believe in themselves, if not their work. Maybe 10% of them will hit the jackpot, reap the rewards, and retire at forty.

Sounds like a sweet deal to me, even though I’m running dozens of laps behind the competition. If I’m to win, I need to move now. That’s why I’m calling dibs on E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial. It’s not taken, right? Excellent.

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