Thursday, December 11, 2008

Nextwave thoughts

I've been reading lots of comics recently--more than I have within the past few months, anyway--and I decided to give Nextwave another try. I read the first five issues or so, and my reaction was pretty much exactly the same as it was when I first tried it out: so what? I mean, yes, Nextwave has lots of crazy, fun ideas...but that's it. There's no depth or logic to the crazy ideas, rarely a rationale for the crazy ideas, and only the barest minimum plot to link one crazy idea to the next.

Maybe it's just me, but I read for the stories, not for the concepts. I had similar problems with 30 Days of Night and Full Moon Fever--books that read more like pitches than stories. Nextwave reads like a bulleted list of wacky concepts. I'm all for wacky concepts--whether it's Nikola Tesla fighting Thomas Edison's Lovecraftian demons with a giant steampunk mecha-suit or giant frog gods with reality-altering tongues or Skrulls trying to steal magic from faeries--but there has to be some kind of follow-through. Just throwing the idea out there in isolation is all right occasionally (for example, the crazy background or cameo characters in "Invincible" or the Star Wars flicks), but doing so repeatedly doesn't make for a story. It just makes for a bunch of throwaway gags or unelaborated ideas. The majority of the fun is in that elaboration, in the examination of the consequences of those crazy ideas, and nothing in those first few issues of Nextwave seemed to provide that follow-through.

I may go ahead and look at the rest of the series, but this experience hasn't made me interested at all. Where's the brilliance that people saw in this series?

Sunday, December 07, 2008

Thursday, December 04, 2008

A Question of Tremendous Importance

I love The Who, but I'm not too keen on the "Best of The Who" pack for Rock Band. The included version of "My Generation" is awful, and I really only know "Eminence Front," "Amazing Journey," "Baba O'Riley," "Behind Blue Eyes," "Going Mobile," and "Who Are You." I feel no particular yearning for a live cover of "Summertime Blues," and I'm just kind of ignorant about the other tracks.

So, should I drop the 1600 Points on the full pack, or should I just spend 800 on the ones I want?

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

A Holiday Question

Which comic book character, hero or villain, would you most like to see playing replacement Santa?