X-Men: First Class, I hope ya not too cool fa school.

To say I am an obsessive compulsive X-Men fan is not wrong and my the obsession continues today. I love the comics, the cartoons and all three movies. Before I go on I just need to quiet the naysayers on the quality and form of Last Stand. Yes correct, it was not the best movie, of the three, or of any other superhero movies, but I saw it (like the other movies) as a live action what-if? X-Men movie. I wasn't looking for exactness or what was in the comics (I get my comics for that), I just wanted to see some live action X-Men coolness. And that is what we got. Beast was awesome, Shadowcat was delightfully splendid and Iceman finally rocked his ice form and gave Pyro a good thrashing. These three things made Last Stand worth it. I also loved the whole "last stand" act of the movie.

Interesting aside: the first night after finishing my two-year LDS mission I watched the first X-Men movie and then sat up till almost 4 a.m. devouring the comics my mum had collected while I'd been gone.

The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall and Rise of The New Mutants

Here’s my heartfelt thanks and gratitude to Secret Wars II. You sucked…but you featured the The New Mutants. It was fascination at first sight.  Before Secret Wars, I was a collector of British comics, Get Along Gang and Masters of the Universe comics. I feel it was with The New Mutants that I graduated. Who was this small band of kids that the Beyonder used to take on the whole Marvel Universe. A few years later I picked up the X-Men: New Mutants graphic novel and the first issue of the X-Men: Mutant Massacre arc and was instantly hooked.

The Rise

Cannonball, Wolfsbane, Karma, Psyche and Sunspot were the original team, but it was only after Magma, Cypher Magik and Self-friend Warlock had appeared that I had started reading so there was a lot to catch up on in between that first New Mutants graphic novel and the issue I had picked up. I lapped up everything I could, the Demon bear and Nova Roma sagas, the wonderful, wonderful Legion, and the Hellions. I loved the New Mutants. I loved the youthful natures of the characters. I was in the same age group as most of them and just loved (and was a bit jealous) that they got into the adventures they did.  These were my New Mutants. I particularly liked Cannonball, Psyche, Cypher, Warlock and Magik. I was rapt by everything they did.

Puppies

Puppies is the last story featured in my anthology, "Alterran Tales." It has been interesting completing this story as I never expected that I would be drawing or illustrating it in anyway. I knew I had a view of how I wanted my Villain and my hero to look but apart from that anything was possible.

When it looked like I would be taking over on art duties I got very scared. I needed something very different from all the other art styles in the graphic novel and I didn't know if I could actually pull that off. Well below are some process pieces to a story that isn't anywhere near finished but it's been fun doing it. 

So hopefully "Puppies" will be finished this next week and I'll be able to input it into InDesign. Yeah! I am so close to finishing with academic life I can taste it.

My Heroes

So It's roughly a month away from Pilots season for T.V. Quite exciting and me being the T.V junky I am, I am waiting for the new shows and the season premieres of old favourites.

At this time, Leverage and Burn Notice have both been on the screens in their summer spots, but it really is the Fall/Spring shows that I am excited for. Heroes and Lie To Me, being two of my returning favourites. Lie to me comes back to us on a monday this season and is hands down one of the most intelligent, fantastic entertaining pieces of art in a long time. And then theres Heroes.

Heroes is my popcorn superpowered Lover who enticed me with just what I wanted and said, it's okay your wife can watch too. Ever since seeing the pilot a couple of weeks before it was shown on television I was enraptured. This was the show for me. Several superpowered characters integrated in to real life situations with a super powered serial killed thrown in for good measure. It's like they spied on my dreams and said, "okay, Serialised Television show catered just for Loz Cook coming through." Of course I lapped it all up. And so, it seemed, did everyone else. Heroes became the geeky media darling loved by fans and critics alike. Then the writers strike happened (And thank the heavens this didn't extend to comics or... well, bad things might have happened). Heroes gave us a great season 2 that was cut short because of the strike. Now I loved Season 2, despite the ultra annoying Maya, who should have died instead of her brother, but still did not ruin my enjoyment of the show. The New Orleans crowd had me hooked. Season three also gave me what I wanted. More interaction and battle between the super powered characters. The Villains and other characters hooked me and kept me fascinated in almost the same way the X-Men had(and still do) to this day. But there was a problem. The fanboys.

Okay I confess, I'm a comics geek (note I said Geek, NOT NERD, NOT FANBOY, Geek. There is a difference). This isn't a surprise, but I love my comics, and I can be quite obsessed sometimes. It's not even the collectors bug. It's not that I have to have so many issues and collectors items, because I don't. But I do have a substantial collection, most of which reside In about 15 packing boxes in the attic at home. "Oh that I had them here in the USA." Anyway what I'm saying is, Im a plot and story whore. I need my fix of characterisation, plot, story, suspense, intrigue and cliffhangers. Oh the cliffhangers. That feeling after reading the last page of a comic book and painfully, but also excitedly knowing that you have to wait for another month until you find out WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? It's all part of the fun and entertainment.

Anyway I digress, Comics are alot like T.V in this respect, and the reason I bring up Heroes and comics together is that on an message board or fan site, you will always get fanboy perspectives and holier than thou opinions. Heroes took a nose dive in popularity. It's almost as though it's cool and intelligent to say that this show is just not as good as it was in the first season and that it's headed for cancellation. Everyone seems like they want a shred of poor torn old heroes. I have to disagree. I've enjoyed Heroes as much this last season as I did the 2nd and the 1st. As I explained, Im a story, plot whore. So what is behind all this discomfort? Let me give you my opinion, like so many other fans.

The thing with T.V shows, and Comics for that matter, is, The longer a show is produced, the more, over zealous fans think they know and should decide what makes it good and what will keep it good. We all think we're owed the exact television we're subjected to and we all think that we have a right to make those desci. Let me explain a bit more.

I think that with a medium we have no control over, you have to just wait for it and see what comes. If you don't like it, you can choose not to subject yourself to it again or wait for the next juicy morsel to entertain you. It's that simple. But to continue to bitch about about it not giving you what YOU want, is just a bit silly. What's stupider still, is to continue to watch it and still complain.

Well just to end this little portion of writing, heres Garth Ennis on comics publishing.


"What we're talking about here, I think, is conventional wisdom, which by its very nature is soundbite-driven and often highly reflexive. I used to handle the letter column during Preacher's monthly run, and I saw a pattern of criticism develop there in what I soon realized was a very predictable way - year two's not as good as year one, year two was wonderful but year three's lost it, this is just a lot of violence and swearing, all he's trying to do is get noticed - repeated ad infinitum. It's one of the reasons I don't bother with message boards and reviews and things, which I believe are largely a distraction.

What I look at instead are the sales figures, which answer the most important question of all: Can I keep writing the story I want to write?"

Here here Garth.