Archive for the ‘Reading’ Category

If the DVDs and  soundtrack isn't enough – and it isn't – go check out the free Dr. Horrible comics at Dark Horse Presents. First up is "Captain Hammer: Be Like Me," written by Zack Whedon, drawn by Eric Canete and colored by Dave Stewart. Excellent look at Captain Hammer's life before the events of the show, and hilarious all by itself. Read it here.

Then there's "Moist: Humidity Rising," Dr. Horrible's sidekick's awesome origin! Well, kind of awesome. Well, not really. I wasn't as impressed with this one, even though Zack penned it as well (art by Farel Dalrymple and Dan Jackson). It hits all the points – got his powers, met Billy, dreamed henchmen dreams – without any memorable lines or interesting twists or much plot at all. It's just… there. Which, come to think of it, also describes Moist, so maybe it works after all. Read it here.

And out this week, "Penny: Keep Your Head Up," by Zack Whedon and Jim Rugg, a sweet tale of her activist beginnings.

Showtime may have figured out how to advertise a TV show on the Kindle.

Give everybody the first script for free.

Right now, and until August 31, you can download the script to the pilot episode of their new show "Nurse Jackie," starring former "Sopranos" star Edie Falco, to your Kindle e-book reader. You'll also get (free!) schedule information and nags to watch the show when it premieres on Monday, June 8th.

It's not a bad way to build some buzz, and I'd love to get scripts for other shows the same way (Dr. Horrible? The Guild? Are you listening?) Look for more Kindle-based promotions to come along, as long as its still the latest sexy thing.

"Save Hiatus" remains on — sigh — hiatus while Adam and I both deal with the parts of our lives that demand money, there's still places to get your whacky space fun on. I highly recommend "The Good Ship Chronicles," by Tauhid Bondia. It's the story of the ongoing reality show based on the Starcorp Delivery/Transport ship, the SS Gossamer. Captained by Hap Manning, the ship is the last stop for less-0than-stellar crewmen who have been transferred from other ships. Manning takes that as a challenge.

The various in and outs of daily starship life, combined with the regular holovision diary entries of the crew and the occasional event as someone else screws with them for ratings, leads to a hilarious webcomic. You got your overbearing and mildly delusional captain, your competent and long-suffering first officer, your openly racist and sexist counselor, your skilled doctor banished for haviung more integrity than sense, your feisty, sexy head of security, your overweight and wheelchair-bound engineer, your too-cool-for-starschool alien rep, your brimming-with too-much-information pilot, your intern who was killed in a tragic rescuing, and more.  The artwork's as good as any webcomic I've seen and the humor rocks. Go check it out.

Just come back when we're ready, OK?

Self-sufficiency. Courage. Honor. Doing what's right. Male friendship. Tough men who quote literature. Funny dialogue. Characters who don't know how to act like a man and will therefore always lose. The one true love. And the lack of any real threat.

In the last two days I read two of Robert B. Parker's recent books, "Chasing the Bear" (a young Spenser novel) and "Resolution," the second in his Everett Hitch western series. Guess what the themes were?

I love his books. I reread the Spenser series every couple of years, love the Jesse Stone series. Never got into the Sunny Randall books. Like the westerns. I tend to get his stuff in hardback soon after they come out because I know they'll be passed around the household.

But…

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TFAW.com has added another great deal for Whedon fans: the Whedonverse Grab Bag.

We've got a bunch of great Whedon-inspired back issue comic books from publishers like Dark Horse and IDW, and now you can bring 'em home. We've put together 10 different Whedon comics for each bundle–that's only $.50 apiece!

When ordering Grab Bag comics we cannot take requests for specific titles or series. Besides, half the fun is the mystery of what you're going to get! Some of these comics may be warehouse finds, and may have minor dings, scratches, etc.

Want to get a friend hooked on your favorite Whedon-based comics? Or maybe you just like grab bags…

Just head here for more details.

You may not recognize Len Wein's name, but you may recognize some of the things he's done. He co-created Swamp Thing, Wolverine and some other X-Men like Nightcrawler, Storm, and Colossus. He was the editor on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons'
epic story Watchmen. He wrote for just about every major character in mainstream comics: Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Hulk, etc. And he lost his house.

OK, you might not know that last part, but it's true. On April 6 he lost his home, belongings and beloved dog to a house fire. Now friends and admirers are working to help him rebuild his comic collection. Not the ones he owned, but the ones he worked on. And you can help.

Go to the Len Wein Project and check out the latest list of needed comics to see if you have any you can provide. Then e-mail comix4len@povonline.com to let them know, and you'll get instructions on what to do next.

Len has provided many of us with many happy memories over the years. Let's give a few back.

If you had to pick a word to describe Ben Templesmith's body of work, it would be…

Well, you wouldn't, actually, because trying to boil it down to a single word would probably do nasty things to your brainmeat. But then again, so does his work. It might be easier to describe the sorts of things this Australian commercial-artist-turned-comics-superstar does, and let you draw your own conclusions.

- Artist and co-creator with Steve Niles of "30 Days of Night" (and many spinoffs), about a vampire gang living in Alaska. Became a movie with Josh Hartnett, Melissa George and Danny Huston. Nominated for an Eisner Award, comics' highest honor. Won the Spike TV Scream Award for Best Comic.
- Creator of "Wormword: Gentleman Corpse," about an extra-dimensional sentient maggot that embodies corpses in order to drink Guinness and, occasionally, save the world. Hardback collection made the New York Times Bestseller list.
- Artist for "Fell," written by Warren Ellis, about an honorable detective in a city gone feral. Nominated for an Eisner Award three years running.
- Creator of "Welcome to Hosford," where a prison run by Russian werewolves gets a new inmate/hunt victim named Ray Delgado, who turns out to be just the right kind of delusional murderer to fight back.
- Artist for "Groom Lake," written by Chris Ryall, about the day-to-day job of keeping UFOs secret.

Templesmith will be attending the FX convention in Orlando this weekend, and took a moment to talk to me about it.

Vampires, werewolves, corpses, inexplicable Nixon-mask-wearing nuns… Is the inside of your head a safe place to be?

Absolutely. It's the guys that draw cutesy crap, the Mickey Mouse guys, who you need to worry about. They internalize everything, until it all boils over. Me? I get it all out onto the page, so I'm honestly a nice guy if you were to meet me face to face. Well, except for my small baby eating habit.

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Updated, see the end for Amazon's response

So, last week two historical books — "Transgressions" by Erastes and "False Colors" by Alex Beecroft — quietly dropped off Amazon's bestseller lists.

Not because they stopped selling, mind you, because Amazon apparently instituted a new policy of removing the sales rankings from books with "adult" content. De-ranking a book doesn't remove it from Amazon, but it does keep it from showing up in Amazon's bestseller lists (cutting way down on sales derived from browsing) and there are reports that de-ranked books aren't showing up in regular searches with any consistency.

More newly stripped books followed, lots of them. When asked about this by various puzzled authors, Amazon's rep said this: "In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature."

Defensible. Annoying, but defensible. Only… there's still an awful lot of adult material on Amazon with sales rankings. Most of their adult material is still ranked. Nude photography books, explicit romances, everything by Chuck Palahniuk. In fact, judging by what has been deranked, it seems that someone at Amazon is defining "adult" as "gay."

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And now that I have your attention…

On April 10, for some reason, the Amazon sales rankings for two highly-promoted books disappeared. Those books were False Colors by Alex Beecroft and Transgressions by Erastes. They're both historical romances: One is about high seas adventure in the 1700s and the other is a sprawling epic occurring during the English Civil War.

Oh, and they're both homosexual romances. Which, apparently, freaked out someone at Amazon. Or possibly someone Amazon is listening to.

Over the next few days many more authors found themselves stripped of their rankings. Mark Probst, author of The Filly, asked about this and received this response:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Well, huzzah for Amazon and their excellent protection of the children, even for those of us who want no such protection and are actively angered that it exists.  Because we are not being protected from adult content, you see, all the usual sex-soaked bestsellers and romance novels are fully ranked. (So are vibrators.)

Amazon is protecting us from adult gay content. All of the books being unranked (MetaWriter is keeping an updated list here) are  written for and by the GLBT community, even those books with absolutely no explicit sex involved. James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, all stripped.

The Well of Loneliness, written in the 1920s, is considered the first openly lesbian-themed book in the English language. The disgusting, anti-children, filthy sex part? Exactly one line: ""And that night they were not divided." My god, how did the country survive?

Award winners. Books on health and lifestyle. Books on homophobia and lesbian parenting and the military gay ban. Books on Harvey Milk. Young Adult books on coping and understanding. All of them being blocked from Amazon's bestseller lists because there weren't enough pairs of in and out plugs involved.

Well, Amazon, I'm not going to join the rapidly growing wave of outraged people complaining about this apparently homophobic filtering. No, no, no! I applaud your new moral code! I only ask that you be even handed in its application. Clearly all "adult" works should be removed from your bestseller lists.

I demand you remove the Twilight series from your top ten bestseller list.

Hey, that's five of your top ten books cleared out right there, leaving room for more wholesome fare. But how can you filter tender, non-explicit books of male romance but condone brutal necrophiliac sex that leaves the girl bruised, battered and ultimately dead? (That's in Book #4, Breaking Dawn, by the way, currently #2 in total sales ranking.)

Sure, you could just create an opt-in filter, the way Google does for image searches, so children can search uninfected by reality and Amazon's formerly excellent service can continue unimpeded for the grownups. But no, I demand that you remove the sales ranking for any book that includes the slightest hint of interpersonal relationships no matter what the context or writing quality, leaving the bestseller lists for safer things, like cookbooks.

Anyone agreeing with my "Block Twilight" idea should write connect-help@amazon.com or Jeffrey Bezos at 1200 12th Avenue South, Seattle, Washington 98144-2734, 206-266-1000.  Let's get this bestselling necrophiliac smut out of our faces!

Oh, and Harry Potter, too. Rowling has said that Dumbledore was gay, so let's get those highly profitable books tagged properly so Amazon can do the right thing.

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