Serial cereal blogging

Today, I opened the first of 30, count 'em 30, little boxes of cereal I got a Sam's Club. They came packaged together in one big box.

Now, it will be at least a month before I get sick of one kind of cereal. But, maybe at the end of the month, I'll be simultaneously sick of eight kinds. I guess we'll see.

By the way, that's not what my actual box looks like. I am too lazy to take an actual picture and upload it. But, it does feature the same brands of cereal. Or close enough.

Those Pollyanna creeps are ruining the economy

This article says the economy may be worse than we think, thanks to a culmination of adjustments made over the last few decades to the way we measure various economic indicators.

"Pollyanna creep" is the term applied to the cumulative effect.

(To be consistent with the intellectual tone of the article to which I have linked, I used a lot of big words in this post to make it seem scholarly.)

DHP again

I am a little late linking to this, but here's a new issue of "Dark Horse Presents," with a "Milk and Cheese" strip. There's nothing quite like two full pages of dairy products abusing people dressed as animals.

(Note: "Milk and Cheese," while quite funny, is not for all ages.)

No matter what, you'll always be close to my ... stomach?

Girl's twin is found inside her stomach
ATHENS, Greece - A 9-year-old girl who went to the hospital in central Greece suffering from stomach pains was found to be carrying her embryonic twin, doctors said Thursday.

Vince Colletta: Threat or menace?

(There's that "Daily Bugle" headline again.)

Vince Colletta is one of the most reviled figures in comic art history. He was an inker who worked in the industry who many people feel often ruined the work of the men who's pencil art he was entrusted to ink.

A Colletta sample is included on the left at the top of this entry. Its' easy to see that every character looks lumpy, some of the lines are so scratchy they didn't reproduce on the page and almost all of the style of the penciller, Jack Kirby, is covered up or just plain destroyed.

Kirby was notorious for drawing complete pencils that didn't need much work by the inker to look good. Here, variations in line width look to be completely ignored, making it hard to determine what the viewer is supposed to focus on. A heavier line for the closer figures would add to the drawing's sense of depth. Further, the black areas don't do much to draw the reader's eye around the panel, nor do they help frame the most important part of the drawing.

I imagine this is not how Kirby's pencil art looked, and is not how he intended the finished product to look.

Most fans prefer Joe Sinnott's work on Kirby. Note the stronger and cleaner linework and much better sense of depth.

Why all this comment? Here's a link to a new column by Erik Larson that sort of defends Colletta.

Here's another link to a column by Mark Evanier taking completely the opposite approach, saying "... almost all the top illustrators whose work was inked by Colletta are on record as saying they thought he was terrible."

Evanier also links to a Colletta defender, comics artist Eddie Campbell.

I tend to agree with Evanier, though. I have a whole bunch of Lee-Kirby issues of "Thor," that should be wonderful treats, but I can't read them. I can't get past Colletta's ruining of Kirby's pencil art. There's a good example of Colletta eliminating detail work from Kirby's art in Evanier's column.

Colletta erased parts of the original drawings, often had a horrible sense of line work, and generally made every artist's faces look like Colletta faces. It is true that every once in a while, something he inked would look really good. But, most of the time, it didn't.

I guess I am a little behind

So sorry. I'll come up with something interesting soon. I promise. Till then, here's a very interesting article about the presidential race that tells us how far we haven't come in terms of racism in this country.

Ultimate Fantastic Four isn't as good as it used to be

Here's a review I completely agree with.

Here's a couple of key points:

1. It doesn't help that artists Tyler Kirkham and Sal Regla overwhelm each panel with oppressive detail. Nothing in this issue has room to breathe, as each moment is cluttered with heavily inked detritus.

I think the art suffered from clutter as well as muddy coloring, which has plagued this book for a long time. As a Fantastic Four reader since 1978, I can honestly say that the art hasn't really suited the book for a long time.
I grew up looking at Joe Sinnott's clean lines and consistent look and the more I look at anything he inks, I am convinced that he is an absolutely superior artist. I wish the FF had been the beneficiary of an artist who could draw well and give the book a consistent sense of identity that he could.
Oddly enough, one of my favorite FF art teams in recent years was Paul Ryan and Danny Bulandi, who were unfortunately burdened with some truly awful writing by Tom deFalco. They were different than Joe Sinnott, but had a clean style in which the characters were all on model.

2. Ultimate Fantastic Four" #53 reads less like a Fantastic Four story than like a late-period Chris Claremont X-Men tale. It's overburdened with insignificant detail and lacks the human moments that would make it worth reading. For all of Mike Carey's cleverness (and there are a couple of clever twists in the plot), there's just not much of a Fantastic Four story here. The essence of the main characters remains, but their struggle feels as artificial as it looks.

Ouch. Here, the reviewer hits the nail on the head. The characters who make up the Fantastic Four have disappeared in recent issues, giving way to cosmic battles and universe-destroying villains. It's important to remember that the FF should be a character driven book, despite the science fiction type adventures that have. Carey is placing all his focus on plot to the deletion of character. I have to admit, the segment with The Thing and Thanos' daughter in the previous issue was pretty interesting, but even that gave way to action action action.

At any rate, I have read every issue of this book so far, and maybe two years ago, it was always on top of my list. Now, I am reading it more on inertia than anything else.

Just for the record, "She Hulk" is the same way. As much as admire Peter David as a writer, Dan Slott's run on the book was much more charming and fun. And, the artists since David took over as writer have been one step below awful. Shawn Moll. Bleah. Bad anatomy, poor storytelling; there's almost nothing in his work on this book to like.