Daily Archives: April 17, 2010

Springs eternal.

Posted by Maria Diaz & Marco Sparks on

Maria Diaz: Hey, re: your post on Scott Pilgrim and the guy who does it, Bryan Lee O’Malley, you know his wife is also an awesome cartoonist, right? I’ve been following her on Twitter for a long time and had no idea they were married.

from here.

Marco Sparks: Oh, yeah, definitely. Hope Larson is amazing. Eisner award winning amazing. It always upsets me that she doesn’t get nearly the attention he does.

MD: She is indeed amazing! I read her LJ yesterday and she said that they would no longer do joint appearances, and that she would lay the smackdown on anyone who e-mailed her asking to get in touch with him. She had a super interesting post about how people have told her that she would never get a movie made, unlike her husband. SO fucked up!

from here.

Marco: hat’s a real shame because… I remember reading a blog post from her years and years ago and I want to say that in it she was talking about how she loved the doing joint appearances or at least doing the same cons and what have you together because it could be a little vacation for them. And it’s cool to see a couple in their profession, able to talk about their craft and get creative off each other, etc. The sad thing is… to me, she’s the real storyteller/artist. Scott Pilgrim is okay, but just okay. It’s so twee! I was hearing of her and good things about her long before I had ever heard of him.

Although, he did a book called Lost At Sea prior to Scott Pilgrim, which is about a teenage girl on a road trip which is just tragic and beautiful.

Also, I don’t mind adding this in: Hope Larson is also fucking gorgeous. Bryan Lee O’Malley is a lucky man in that regard. I mean, if we keep it on a purely superficial plane of attractiveness, then… yeah. I hope he remembers what a lucky man he is when he’s pimping it up with people like Michael Fucking Cera, you know?
MD: For you…
I hope he goes down on her all day, every day, thanking his lucky fucking stars!

It is a damn shame because I’m sure many people see it as just the opposite: she’s just the pretty wife, he’s the “real” talent.

Kitty Pryde, as drawn by Hope Larson, from her flickr.

Marco: My instinct here is to say: “Ugh. No. Hardly.” At least about him being more talented than her/her just being the pretty wife. I mean, I don’t want to discredit his abilities. He is good and obviously has made a connection with a lot of readers, but in my book, she’s still light years ahead of him, and more deserving of that notice and appreciation.
Also, for her sake and his, I hope he has got a mile long tongue. And super long penis powered by a nuclear reactor or something. And never ever has morning breath. And constantly showers her with affection and challengers her in a way that makes makes her better, all the while striving to be better to impress her. And does all the housework and is a great cook and opens the door for her everywhere they go and is constantly praising his amazing wife when she’s not around, stuff like that.
MD: Yeah, but i bet none of those things are true. I know, I know, I’m cynical!
Hope Larson is an amazing creator of graphic novels, and you can find her website here. There’s also Personal Ho, her website for more adult oriented art. By clicking here, you can find “Bear Creek Apartments,” her jam comic with Bryan Lee O’Malley. Her new graphic novel, Mercury, just came out and you can find her talking about it a very little here.

“Keep buggering on!”

Posted by Marco Sparks on

As promised at the end of last week’s episode, this week on Doctor Who we’re in the middle of London during the Blitz, sitting in cabinet war meetings with massive lion that is Winston Churchill and meeting with England’s new weapon against the Nazi Menace…

The humans call them “Ironsides,” thinking they’re a brand new creation, but they don’t realize just how old and deceptive and evil these metal incased creatures are, nor that they’re the Doctor’s oldest and most nefarious enemies, the Daleks.

And that’s the start of this weeks’ Doctor Who, “The Victory Of The Daleks.”

And quite a victory it is. Not to get too spoilery here for you, but the Daleks don’t have some massive plan for conquest there in the past. They can’t. After their last encounter with the Doctor (in series four’s “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End”), they’re broken, weak, unworthy of their own Nazi-ish ideals of what their master race should be. Of course they survived that encounter though. Much like the Doctor, they always survive.

I remember having a good laugh with the denouement in that two parter in the last proper series of what the Daleks and Davros’ big plan was – the utter destruction of all reality, literally the end of all creation except for themselves – because we knew that Steven Moffat was taking over and I saw it as Russell T. Davies saying to his creator, “Ha! Take that. There’s no greater evil master plan than the attempt to destroy all reality, is there?” I’m sure Moffat isn’t afraid to take the challenge, but this episode wasn’t about that. This was about rebuilding his inherited Doctor Who mythos, bringing the Daleks back in a one off episode, showing that the Doctor does have enemies, does have desires for revenge and feels fear, and then moving this particular menace to the background, only to return at some point in the future.

Not a bad episode though, just filler, it felt like, no matter how fun it was. Mark Gattis delivers strong writing and Ian McNeice is lively as a caricature of Churchill. And Amy Pond gets another opportunity to show that she’s lively and amazing. Also, we get nutty android professors and a silly but amazing looking dogfight between British spitfires and the Dalek mothership in orbit above the Earth.

Kylie apparently finds the Daleks sexy.

More importantly we get the return of the mysterious crack in time and space and a nod towards the bigger mystery than we’ve started to suspect was dangling before us: What year exactly is Amy Pond from?

Why doesn’t she remember the attack of the Daleks in “The Stolen Earth”/”Journey’s End” when she definitely should, shouldn’t she? (She’s not Donna Noble, after all.)

Next up: The return of the motherfucking Weeping Angels and the Doctor’s once and future love interest, the awesome archaeologist, River Song.