delphan

Name: Craig Smith

Bio:


Reviews

Bryan Hitch’s cover for FF #554 doesn’t excite me at all.  It’s a bad movie poster, stiffly posed and uninspired. …

Read full review and comments
delphan's Recent Comments
January 31, 2012 2:38 am And it gets even crazier when you realise that in the condensed timeline of the Marvel Universe, everything from Avengers: Disassembled to Secret Invasion to Fear Itself and Spider Island probably happens within a year or two. The MU must be terrifying. I've been considering this a lot lately. And it doesn't just happen in "events". If I recall, an entire town of 5000 people got nuked in Thunderbolts recently (or maybe it was Hulk. It happens so often I get the catastrophic death tolls mixed up). The memorials alone would bankrupt nations. Tony Stark's position in Civil War made a lot of sense in this context.
January 14, 2012 12:14 am I returned to comics recently because of digital. The cost and the required storage space pushed me out some time ago, even though I never stopped loving the medium. I now buy singles digitally at the $AU to $US exchange rate (rather than massive import prices for paper) and then order the stories I loved in collected hard cover editions from Amazon. Best of both worlds. And no-one loses a bedroom to more longboxes. I personally think a digital alternative may bring more people like me back to comics and remove the "comic shop culture stigma" for some potential mainstream customers.
September 16, 2011 7:49 pm I can see why your handle is "Former" Poet Laureate.
August 6, 2011 10:32 am @MadMartigan  I had no idea that Miles O'Brien on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was black.  He seemed more Irish.  Go figure.
July 4, 2011 7:17 am This movie does something astounding.  It's beautiful and even amazing in places, and boring beyond belief.  I yawned several times during stunning set pieces.  It was completely souless, with no clear stakes I could relate to.  Somehow, the trailer carried more emotional weight than the actual movie.

Very short list of pluses:  Dempsey was a good villain, I thought.  Shame he was a B-plot (was there an A-plot?).  Huntington-Whitely really tried hard to give her character some heart.  She was surprisingly good, even if her character was largely pointless except as window dressing. Great to hear Nimoy's voice.  Shia was charming as usual and did more with the content than most could.  The 3D was top class.  It looked pretty.

I yawned.  A lot.

I have a soft spot for the first film, but it's charm seems to have been a fluke.   Someone please tell Michael Bay that special effects are not story.
May 5, 2011 2:40 am Opened here a week ago.  Thor is pitched somewhere between Ultimate and Marvel Universe (which kind of describes the approach on all four Marvel Studios films, I think). The trailers and shorts had me worried, but I thought the final product was excellent.  After the weak Iron Man 2, Thor has renewed my confidence in the series.
December 10, 2010 3:57 am @Zarathos81  My comics are right here.  I can hear the floor creaking under the weight.  And you do realise none of the Marvel Studios films have bombed yet.  And why wish they would fail!  And how would that get my comics back even if someone had taken them.

I'm confused.

Verily!
December 3, 2010 5:56 pm There is something I don't understand.  Between this story and the "vault" concept for older comics, how is making comics artificially difficult to find going to help attract new and non-traditional comics readers.  Silliness.

And there will be a second printing if it sells out.

And there a places were comics are still on the newsstand?  I thought that had gone away years ago.
November 16, 2010 2:54 am The end is probably not nigh. Things are just changing. I think there is just some uncertainty about how and what into.
November 15, 2010 8:08 pm

I turn 45 next year, and I've been feeling a bit like Jimski and wondering if I should still be reading comics.  Historically a Marvel guy mostly, I find myself reading a lot less books and a lot more that aren't DC and Marvel.  Stuff with there own single book universes.  Sometimes it feels like Marvel, in particular, is hanging on the edge of a cliff that leads to 90s nonsense again.

But, probably not.  Lots of books that don't last long suggests to me that Marvel is testing what works. It's what companies do when things a flat.  I'm sure they are just as unhappy about cancelling some of these books.  After all, they like the concepts enough to publish them in the first place. Seems like a transition period for the industry at the moment and everyone, including the people who make comics (who are, after all, just people like us who love comics), are doing their best to sort it out.

I'm feeling the frustration though.