Hello and good Monday. I checked the stats and found that the top three countries viewing the comic are the USA, Canada, and a surprise with Germany passing up the UK now. Hi, Germany! Glad to have you!

Let’s see, first I’d like to apologize for the delay of comic today - I’m still getting used to all of the functions of comic press, and as Anne mentioned in the last, there are plenty of buttons you can touch that will break things. But it’s all arights now, and the next month’s comics are all all uploaded and ready, along with the vote incentives, so we’ll cross our fingers and hope that works. On to better business.

Upon seeing the first 10 pages I realized, with some dismay, how painfully slow the story moves. They’re all important pages, as you will see later, but I think it took me seeing them in order to figure out how to make things move at their proper pacing. So I went and revised the script from page 10 on and it is a lot tighter now, but that still leaves us wading through the swamp for now. Anne and I have discussed eventually going back and redoing some of those pages, and perhaps we will. But for now, we will go ever forwards, safe in the knowledge that both the writing and the architectural perspective get better from here.

On a non-comic related note, I went to see Neil Gaiman’s Coraline last Friday and it was, in summary, wonderfully creepy. First, as far as the animation and the cinematography is concerned, the choice to go with stop motion was perfectly apropos for the story, as it gave a very doll-like quality to the characters. Things weren’t as oozy as they generally are in Gaiman stories, but it still made the movie as far as ambiance went.

As far as the story itself, though there were some things changed from the book, overall I thought they did a good job, and I understand why some things were added or altered. I’m a little surprised that Gaiman himself did not do the treatment and the screenplay, as he already proved his chops with Stardust and Beowulf, but Selick did a good job. Nothing can quite compare to the prickling sensation one gets on the back of the neck when reading Gaiman’s narratives, but I found myself jumping out of my seat plenty of times nevertheless.

So if you’re looking for something to do this weekend, Coraline. I recommend it.

See you next week,

Jen

While the title of today’s post might sound like the title of a very interesting term paper for an English Lit major, it is not. It is far less serious than that.

First, I’d like to point out that according to our statistics program, the top 3 countries that read this webcomic are the US, Canada, and the United Arab Emirates. The internet is a surprising and wonderful thing! So hello, Dubai, hope you’re enjoying!

Second, who remembers that great Sci-Fi show that ran in the ’90’s, Mystery Science Theater 3000? We all loved Joel and Mike and their zany talking robots, trapped in space and mercilessly forced to watch awful B-rated flicks that would make Ed Wood cringe in pain. Who doesn’t love a good viewing of Night of the Lepus, or Hercules Versus the Moon Men, after all? Especially with expert comedy commentary in the background.

Well, if you were a fan, you should know that Mr. Nelson and his band of merry men are far from done with their critical comical anaylsis of bad movies. They’ve started their own side program called Rifftrax, which are companion commentaries for the PC that you play overtop of a DVD. They run around $3 a piece and they are for all kinds of modern movies these days. I highly recommend any of the new Star Wars trilogy which I had the pleasure (and horror) of watching the other night. If anything, their sense of humor has only gotten better from the original show.

My next news item is for anyone who steeped in the wonderful world of H.P. Lovecraft: I found (thanks to my friend Cynthia), a musical version of Shadow Over Innsmouth. And I have had this song stuck in my head on loop for a week straight. If you don’t know what’s going on, read the story synopsis first.

Now I will stop abusing Wikipedia and bid you adieu for the week.

Jen

It’s been a while, but we’re still here.

Good morning, fellows. Especially those from Russia and the Balkans, which we seem to become very popular with this month. Privyet, good to see you.

There are a few news bits today, first of which is that you should all check out our links tab: we have a few new friends over there, a few really kickin’ comics! Give them a skim, if you have time.

Also, two of my personal favorites have status changes - Dovecote Crest has finished its first story arc and it is simply too adorable. If you haven’t read it, now is a good time as they are on guest art hiatus. Second is that Lovecraft is Missing is coming back from it’s hiatus on May 27th, be there, or be an equilateral rectangle.

The next piece of news, following my penchant for geek culture movie reviews,  is that I went and saw the Wolverine movie (I have yet to see Star Trek, that is next, don’t worry).

What can I say about this movie? It was… pretty gosh darn terrible. It had halfway done cinematography, no story continuity with the comic, too many random cameos that did not make any sense, and a script so bad I could have knocked a can of alphabet soup off the table and had a better finished draft written on my floor. But you know what? It was definitely watchable. One does not approach this type of thing with high expectations: I went to see Hugh Jackmanangst about his past and blow up half the Canadian landscape, and that is what I got. So if you’re into that kind of thing, go to see it. Just don’t get angry over what they did to Deadpool.

Alright onto happier topics: What ho! Did Neil Gaiman and Craig Russell make a graphic novel out of Coraline? Why yes, they did. How fantastic! Let’s all go see what that’s about.

Oh, and the last bit, check out the credits on this week’s page - two of our designers made cameos, and they will pop up again. See if you can find them a couple of pages from now.

That’s all, see you next week.

- Jen

Good morning fair fellows. I would like to make my apologies for not updating sooner, but while I had every eager intention of reviewing a few movies and posting some comic related updates, real life had other ideas for me. But as they say, better late than never, and at least the pages are still on time!

Finally, my update for the Star Trek movie.

** SPOILERS AHEAD **

Overall, I loved the movie. Talk about character acting - the cast did an excellent job of studying the original actors and really pushing the envelopes of their team roles. I was quite impressed, especially by New Spock. (On a tangential note, people keep telling me they think New Spock is hot, and I can’t reconcile this in my mind. It’s Spock.)

The cinematography was great, it looked sleek and modern while at the same time maintaining that old air of 60’s sci-fi with all kinds of lights and dials that do nothing in specific. As Scott Kurtz delicately put it, it looks as though Apple Computers threw up all over the bridge of the new Enterprise, in the best possible way. And, they kept the original door opening noise. Can’t go wrong with that.

There were some well written and perfect homages to the old show, as well: Kirk makes it with a hot green chick, they detonate the charges to get out of a dire situation, the red shirt dies - and fantastically so. Immolation from a thurster is a good way to go, if you have to. They did everything short of reverse polarity of the neutron flow. It was glorious.

Now, on the side of criticisms, there were a few plotholes that you could drive a Mack truck through, most of them having to do with incredibly bad science. We all know that sci-fi isn’t supposed to have good science, but some of this was downright non-sensical and not just a suspension of disbelief. Concepts such as “going through a black hole” putting you fifty years back in time: look, black holes aren’t Stargates, but alright, we can deal with this. In theory there is a wormhole concept that might explain how this could happen, even though in the most likely reality, you cannot go through a blackhole, as there is nothing to go through, and all of your particles will become disassembled and crushed. However, this is a staple of sci-fi, it’s legitimate to use the stretch.

However, there are much less reasonable plot devices such as the main point of the entire movie: if the Romulan homeworld was going to be destroyed, because of a supernova, why did anyone think it was a good idea to replace it with a black hole? First of all, the problem here is that the sun is exploding.  Good luck getting near it. Second of all, a black hole and explosion do not cancel each other out. If you do somehow manage to create a singularity, you might contain the explosion but there still won’t be a sun and now there will be a black hole.

There are other indiscrepencies (such as how did Kirk exactly think that his beaming technology was going to work while Nemo’s ship was halfway through that black hole? “Hey guys, need help over there in your black hole? We can do that!” No you can’t. Or the fact that Nemo had 25 years to tool around in the past before Spock followed him through the time singularity and instead of, oh, I dont know, saving his planet or at least evacuating his people, he decided to WAIT for Spock for 25 years instead. Or the fact that there were no railings whatsoever on the bridge of his mining ship. I suppose he thought they weren’t the aesthetic he wanted.) But they are silly and laughable, and do not spoil the movie. They just make you pause and scratch your head. But then, it’s still not as bad as The Core.

Nothing is as bad as The Core.

- Jen