Mike Sterling's Progressive RuinWhere legends live since 1969

Things to do in Oxnard when you’re feeling yucky.

§ May 12th, 2014 § Filed under does mike ever shut up § 6 Comments

I apologize for the extended outage…flu and / or flu-like symptoms struck down your pal Mike after I had seemingly worked them out of my system over the Free Comic Book Day weekend. Alas, they came back in full force early last week and I spent most of the week in bed reading comics, watching television, or (mostly) sleeping.

WHAT I READ:

I reread all of William Messner-Loebs’ series starring his 19th century woodsman Wolverine MacAlistaire, Journey. Originally, when the series was coming out, it took a normalman crossover issue to get me to try it. I liked Loebs’ work so much, however, I ended up continuing with the series and picking up the back issues. The follow-up mini-series Wardrums was never completed, sadly, though we did get a short story in the Many Happy Returns one-shot.

I also reread all of Grant Morrison’s Batman saga, beginning back in Batman #655 from (urgh) 2006, which was about eight years ago, and not the “just the other day” I had been clinging to out of desperation to push away the yawning grave. Overall it holds together pretty well, despite the occasional artistic…misstep, I suppose, and it somehow manages to maintain its overall story threads during the whole New 52 switchover. Mostly by ignoring it, it seems like, which was probably just as well. I’d have to dip back into the Batman boxes from the Vast Mikester Archives for the occasional tie-in one-shot or mini I’d forgotten (“oh, right, Batman: The Return“), and I was bemused by being reminded I’d only bought the Morrison parts of that Ra’s al Ghul crossover and didn’t bother with the rest (sorry, whoever worked on those other parts of the story).

WHAT I WATCHED:

I saw that Son of Batman animated movie, which is what kind of inspired my reread of the Morrison Bat-comics since the film was based on, oh, one or two issues of those comics. It was fine, I guess, with nicely animated fight scenes and some funny dialogue, but frustrating since this is all of the overall story arc we’ll ever see adapted, I’m just going to assume. Not that I’m expecting Final Crisis: The Animated Movie or anything, but there’s enough stuff in Morrison’s run to fill a couple of TV seasons of an ongoing Batman cartoon, and it’s all so much fun craziness that only doing a adaptation of what is essentially the prologue seems like a lost opportunity. Points, however, for being the first Batman cartoon I’m aware of to discuss birth control.

However, I balanced this out by watching most of the third season of Batman: Brave and the Bold on Netflix, which is every crazy thing you’ve ever read in a Batman comic, animated and made completely amazing. On one hand, it’s a damn shame there were only three seasons of this. On the other hand, three seasons of this was far more than this fallen world deserves.

I also finally got a copy of this on DVD after having the soundtrack CD for nearly 25 years. And the DVD comes with…a copy of the soundtrack on CD. Well, sure.

WHAT I DIDN’T READ:

I didn’t read most of the new comics I picked up last week. That’s weird. I will note that Marvel’s prepping you folks for the upcoming EXPLICIT BIRTH SCENES in Miracleman by starting to polybag the comics now, which also totally coincidentally hides the return of the black and white “classic” reprints nobody wants filling space in these issues. Sigh. Everything else in these Miracleman reprints is pretty great, though, so don’t let that dissuade you.

Anyway, how’re you doing?