The Week In Geek 8/5/15

-So, Secret Wars is being pushed back AGAIN so it'll now be ending in October now. Man, I like this event a lot but for fuck's sake....I'd like it a lot more if Marvel wouldn't drag it along like this. DC and Marvel sometimes have a tendency to suck with these scheduling issues. DC shit the bed last year pushing Forever Evil back so far, rest of the books in the line had moved on past the event and basically gave away the ending. Now, with SW being delayed, there's so many moving parts in Hickman's story, the tie-ins have to be careful not to give away too much story. In truth, they wouldn't have so many problems with scheduling if they'd cut events like this in half. Marvel had the right idea when SW started off biweekly. Despite being so god-awful, at least Convergence got in, told its story and got out. Then again, considering Esad Ribic's artwork, it might just be worth the wait. 

-The Strain, the FX show based on Guillermo Del Toro's vampire apocalypse series, just got renewed for its third season. And despite my liking this show, I have no idea how that happened. I get that FX is doing its damnedest to stretch out this story with a little cinematic nuance and get the most out of the basic plot points, but Christ Almighty....it's the Vampire Apocalypse and the city's reaction to it is, at best, lukewarm. People feel completely comfortable, going to groundbreaking ceremonies, meeting in dimly lit parking garages, putting up "missing" flyers and flirting with cute latin girls in Indian food restaurants. So far, the most exciting plot points this season are a). the flashbacks of Abraham Setrakian Da Gawd and b). the Vampire Black Ops Team....and they just got snuffed out in stupid ass network television fashion, so that doesn't leave us much except the vastly underused Kevin Durand and Corey Stoll, Vampire Hunter which....umm, isn't all that exciting. The major problem is that in the era of existential horror/drama/misery porn like The Walking Dead where people can make the smartest decisions possible and STILL never have a single moment of happiness, it's getting noticeably hard to sit through a show where the characters seem to consistently make such awful decisions. I'm talking about the little stuff. They just stroll right into abandoned places, hardly ever clearing the rooms or even scanning them for vampires. Even Corey Stoll, Vampire Hunter's son, Zach is getting intensely annoying. But this is also a show where the high points maybe balance out the bad points, so it always ends up doing just enough of the right something to justify its continued existence. So, the result is an hour every Sunday where you keep hoping the good will start to actually outweigh the bad instead of just cancelling it out. But probably not.   

My review of this week's Ms. Marvel issue is up and available on Black Nerd Problems for your viewing enjoyment. As usual, feel free to read, like, comment and share as you see fit. You know the drill.

Crowd Participation or Happy Free Comic Book Day

Craig "BBC" Long from Houston, TX wanted to hear my thoughts after reading the Walking Dead comics since I saw Seasons 1 and 2 first.

Well, Craig, I can say that the comic delivers better than I could have hoped. With the direction Swamp Thing and I Vampire went in, The Walking Dead is definitely one of the ONLY mainstream titles in comics that can truly lay claim to being a horror comic. One thing that is well preserved in its own way is the dichotomy of Rick and Shane. Not only do they define each other, they define the theme of the series as a whole. In the moments when it's not an epic zombie saga (easily one of the best of all time), it's essentially a morality play that constantly questions whether or not humanity is a biological or ideological state of being. Rick and Shane seem to be constantly at odds with themselves as well as each other standing on respective sides of the argument. I see where some fans take issue with the things altered in the the tv adaptation, but I think it's the aesthetically reasonable compromise network television could probably muster. No matter how iconic a comic is or how powerful a panel is, the sad truth is that there are just some things that look good in a comic that won't translate as well on television or on screen. That's why I like that geeks are actually being consulted about geek culture. Robert Kirkman works very closely alongside the production team on Walking Dead, George R. R. Martin is reportedly consulted often on the direction of Game of Thrones and Joss Whedon has more than enough nerd credit in the bank at this point to be trusted with The Avengers. At some point Hollywood decided that instead of being satisfied with the receipt for the intellectual property they bought as a stamp of approval, it might be better to actually ask the creator what they think about their work. I stand behind the "for nerds, by nerds" approach.

Johnathan Marroquin writes via Facebook: I need an honest opinion on the Amalgam universe circa 96-98. Potential or not?

For those of you who have no idea what he's talking about, in the late 90s, DC and Marvel were real fiends for cross pollinating their titles because...let's face it...nerds will never stop arguing about who would win in a fight between Superman and the Hulk ("...and then Superman threw the big green monkey into the sun and went back to work. The End."). So, they finally had a Marvel vs. DC miniseries where the best...at the time...of each company had a big slugfest because of some patchwork excuse like "the universes are colliding" (a writer's way of saying "for no good goddamned reason"). Anyway, somehow after the heroes kept the universes from colliding by beating the shit out of each other, the universes collided anyway. The result was a universe full of mashup characters. Sometimes, they made sense like how the "Challengers of the Fantastic" was a combination of the Fantastic Four and the Challengers of the Unknown....both Jack Kirby creations. Most of them, however, were shitty like putting Batman and Man-Thing together to get Bat-Thing. This was indicative of what the mid to late 90s was in the land of comics: a reason to sell cool covers instead of cool books. Assuming Johnathan's question is asking whether or not this same imprint would be a viable venture now, it's enough that DC treats their own artists like the mail room interns you steal ideas from without their knowing. It's enough that Marvel would hold their writers at gunpoint beneath a vat of battery acid and force them to write a "You Got Served" comic if they thought there was money in it. I shudder to think what the Big Two would do to each other.

Batman: No, Logan, I never would have guessed it was you under there.