IMCML member appears on G4TV

Our 'Top Fop' Vanzetti was caught dancing with a buxom woman in L.A. whilst at an Abney Park concert.

He can be seen for roughly ONE second on the 'G4 Underground' episode about Steampunk and Urban Spelunking. woohoo!

There he is in the glasses in the bottom, right corner:




To read Vanzetti's "Steampunk in Comics" series (SPIC for short), click his name in the right sidebar (or click here) and search through his blog posts.....I will compile them all in one place someday... I swear!

The full G4 Underground Steampunk segment can be seen here:

watchmen 2: electric boogaloo

i left in a state of bliss.
the opening credits montage came straight out of the brain of zack synder. not only does it establish the fact that this world has super heroes, it also shows how gritty and grim things can get for the people who put on a costume and fight crime. it is not a normal thing to do, even here. and there are prices to be paid. yup, there are serious consequences to superherodom.. you do not get that in spider-man the musical.

i say this film is about 92 to 95% faithful to the graphic novel. this only shows how awesome comic book films can be when they do not stray from the source material. just look at the punisher films, they got progressively better as they followed the comics more and more. i understand they had to trim things down, that means all the secondary characters have been dumbed down to the status of cameos. shame really since it takes away from the human tragedy of putting a name and a face to the victims at the climax.

want plot synopsis? in a world where superheros really exist, wear masks, always have effed up personal lives. one night, one of them gets thrown out a high rise building and it is Rorschach to put together the retired superheros together and solve the mystery. and tragedy ensues.

some real mindfuck moments come from dr. manhattan waxing poetically on quantum mechanics, time/space, and the relationship of termites to humans. hence he never wears pants. seriously, who the hell is going to tell him to put some goddamn pants on. unless they want to get exploded all over their friends' faces.  give it a second watch if it all goes over your head. when it kicks in, trust me.

now for fanboy squee momments:
Rorschach. everything scene he is in is an exercise in intensity and subtext. it takes a lot to act well and be expressive when wearing a faceless mask (see how hard ed norton rocked in kingdom of heaven). i think the reason why Rorschach is so popular  with the fans is how singleminded he is. he needs to find answers, he breaks fingers till he gets them. real simple like.  i personally thought it was cute when child rorshach beat the living hell out of the two older bullies.  even when rorschach is getting attacked by mobs of swat, he puts up the good fight.. grats to him.

laurie, aka silk specter II becomes a bigger whore as things go on. maybe Rorschach is on to something.
her mom, sally... i am so in love with her. something like a cross of bettie page and wonderwoman. but more domestic with age. but still a total flirt. awesome.

the comedian is a total asshole. really. no joke.  shooting a rioter in the back with a canister of gas was really sadistic and funny. however, i was the only one in the theather who laughed when he shot someone in vietnam.  wont spoil who it was, but it was not nice. not nice at all.

i giggled everytime i saw dr. manhattan's penis. after a while, it even got on my friends nerves. i heard a few "GAWD, frank" my work here is done. i have never seen so much cock outside of porn. it was great. american films have no problem with exploiting the female form but when it comes to full frontal male nudity, oh nose, think of the children!!! guess what, the world did not explode. i guess it is ok to show blue wang.  maybe next time, it will not be CG. fangirls can only hope.

ozymandias, aka adrian viedt, is a total dick. what do you expect from "the world's smartest man"? as he should be. honestly, every scene he was in was fierce and played a one-man ambiguous gay duo. not that there is anything wrong with that. i would not like to run into him in a dark alley. for a multitude of reason.

so if you wonder what the world would be like if superheros were real, check out watchmen.

marvel 1602: new world, SPIC 4

marvel 1602: new world greg pak/greg tocchini

while the whole 1602 series is just SLIGHTY ahead of what we would call steampunk, by a few hundred years and in colonial america, this particual book is spectacularly steampunk and it all thanks to to lord iron, this world's iron man.

col. america dragged nick furry's body into the singularity that pulled him from his time to this timeperiod and creating the age of wonders, early. that is where we left off in marvel 1602. now we have bruce banner trying to deal the fallout of being affected by the singularity, namely, what we would call the grey hulk. he tries to help some native dinosaurs; shame it takes the hulk to defend these brontosaurs from a pack of meat eaters. back in roanoke we have the budding romance of virgina dare, the first englighperson born in the new world (fact!) who is also a shapeshifter (as per legend!) with peter parquagh, former aid to bruce banner in his mission to find nick furry from king james I, but now printer's aprentice to master jameson. he is only now starting to demonstrate the powers he obtained from the spider who bit him that was affected fromt he aformentioned singularity. whew. it gets better. norman osborne is trying to buy the rest of island from the native (expect they were taught english by col. america and were told to never trust the whitemen. they will lie and break every promise they ever speak) with glass beads and james I sends lord iron, on load form spain, to bring in bruce banner who failed to bring nick furry's head.

who is lord iron exactly? well first of all he is a renassiance man. he makes da vinci look like he rides the short bus to inventor school.

gotham by gaslight, SPIC part 3

gotham by gaslight by brian augustyn/mike mignola

we all know dr. thomas and martha were gunned down before their little boy bruce and he grows up living a life of wealth and privledge. then he puts on a fancy suit and becomes batman so that tragedy never happens to anyone else again. what if that happened in the late 1800s? bruce returns to gotham after a grand tour (obviously, training in combat, studing deduction, etc) and cannot wait to do some real good in the gotham's streets, as the dark knight. he does great work, twarting dynamite wielding safe crackers, muggers, the whole criminal element and the newpapers make note of the giant bat haunting the city. the one thing batman misses is jack the ripper returning to public life in 1889 gotham. the police are under tremendous public pressure to find the ripper and put him away. they find some evidence on their prime suspect, bruce wayne. while searching wayne manor they find a bloody knife, how they missed if you set the grandfather clock in the study to exactly midnight/noon the door to the batcave opens up. bruce is put to trial with the shakiest of evidence like a gin-soaked, crazy cat lady and coinsidence as evidence from D.A. harvey dent. despite console from bruce's beloved "uncle" jake bruce is convicted of being jack the ripper. the only people who belive he is innocent is his butler, alfread pennyworth, and inspector james gordon. from his cell bruce gathers what evidence and clues he can be fed from his friend gordon, newspaper clippings, "ripper" letters, photographs, whatever. all that bruce can conclude is the gotham murders are being committed by the same individual in the whitechapel murders, one year ago. in passing looking at a picture of his father's cival war medical detatchment he notices the flag for the unit has the same symbol on the murder weapon. now bruce has his own short list of suspects. he has alfread easily break him out fo jail (way to go G.C.P.D. letting your biggest convict practically walk out...). batman is on the streets and just in time to stop the ripper from murdering another "unfortunate" woman. a chase through the pooered areas of gotham ensues. watching batman chase him down, swining on ropes while avoiding hansome cabs is a real treat. nothing is more "batman" than him flying out of the mike mignola darkness. the chase ends with batman calling out jack the ripper at the cementary. the big reveal is how "uncle" jake is really the ripper. turns out he was always in love with martha, bruce's mother. when he confesses his love to her, she laughs and mocks him. the heartache breaks his mind. he grows paranoid. pychotically so. to him, thomas, his friend from the war, who helped him in getting into high society and a career. even their little brat of a son, bruce was in on the joke. so he had a theif assasinate the family. or as much of the family he could. martha's laughing never stopped. batman takes off his cowl and tells him he is not laughing. at this point, crackerjack gotham PD shows up to save the day, ie take batman and the ripper to jail. jake does not go quietly and takes out a knife and swipes at batman, hoping to take him down in a blaze of glory. gordon is there and shoots him in mid-swing, giving bruce only a flesh wound. jake dies and gordon lets batman run off to fight crime another day.

this only gets 3 brass cogs. batman DOES have his utility belt. that is worth 3 cogs, right?

bonus points for a cameo from this world's joker. 

 

steampunk in comics part 2, league of extraordinary gentlemen vol. 2

the league of extraordinary gentlemen by alan moore/kevin o'neill.

well then. last we left our party of heros there were funny lights on mars. in reality they were the muzzle flash of escape pods from mars. seems these martians (turns out there are several sorts and even 2 humans, one uses a flying carpet, seriously) got their ass handed to them in a war and are now looking for a new home. one with less resistance. hey how about earth, it is right there and such. giant bullets the size of buildings land across england so what happens? people go and gawk at the damned thing that fell from the sky. a door opens up and out slithers a slimey martian, looks like a giant brain, with tentacles, a beak, and giant black eyes. maybe the martians are bad mother fuckers, maybe they got sick of being watched like monkey at the zoo, or maybe they planned it all along; they attack. their cyclopean, heat ray weapon simpley waves past the crowd and they all catch on fire. men, women, childen, dogs. everything. the league standing a safe distance away take cover and they still get singed. hyde goes into one of his epic rages and wants nothing less than to eat the brains of the martians and shit down the hole he would make in their faces. they make a tactical retreat to the bleak house inn nearby to observe the alien invaders. that night they hunker down and watch the army engage the enemy. they are promptly fried to oblivion. and hawley griffin is revealed to have snuck out the house to parley with the martians. while they cannot see him, he communicates with them with figures drawn in the sand. a plot. to take over the world. the knave! the next morning, the martians obliterate bleak house and the league take a coach back to headquarters in london. on they way they see refugees. who ever heard of such a thing in england? they take a meeting with the new M, mycroft holmes. yes, the brother of THAT holmes. counter-attack plans are hatched. mina stays at HQ and studies everything they have on mars while the rest go back to spy on the martians. as they make idle conversation the coach stop. a martian tripod is set on them and stomps on them, like an AT-AT in star wars.

steampunk in comics, part 1 League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

welcome to steampunk in comics week! what the hell is steampunk you might ask? somesort of really angry punk rocker with steam coming out of his ears. not at all. technically i would call it a sub-genre of science-fiction that is a reaction to cyberpunk, another sub-genre of science-fiction that has a setting of neo-victorian, retro-futurism. basically, what if the computer age started 100 years before the creation of the silicon transistor. there are difference engines (mechanical computers) in every office building, your next door nieghbor is an inventor of steam-powered cars and you travel across long distances in airships. and everyone wears goggles. how i got into steampunk were a few comics 5 or 6 years ago; only now am i realizing steampunk is more than just a litterary movement, but now involves an underground music scene and its own fashion. now that is out of the way, let me start at the begining. at least for me.

the league of extraordinary gentlemen by alan moore & kevin o'neill.

i love victorian literature. there is everything from the best deductive detectives, vampires, flesh golems, white rabbits, invisble men, amoral dandies, and submarines. what if they all met? had adventures? and used clockwork machine pistols? sign me up! from the first page you know this is a fantastical place. a wide shot of a bridge from dover, england to end in france. looks every bit the typical superhighway construction project of today, except these cranes are powered by steam. so we start with wilhelmina murray, last seen fighting count dracula in transylvania, set by a government agent to put together a special team to resolve a special problem. god save the queen! next stop, egypt. mina ends up in a shitty, dive opium den to find allan quartermain. man is this going to be bad. he is too old, past his prime and sucking too well on the devil's dick. however he still has that killer instict and shoots some of the crazed mob intent on raping our dear, poor mina. the outrage! the tragedy! the escape to the docks where they get re-enforcements from captain nemo. no, not the disney version. this is the sikh, british hating, science pirate. did i mention he has a nuclear powered submarine? so he takes out an automatic harpoon gun and watses the mob chasing our heros. now for a quick trip under the sea to paris. something about murders in the rue morgue. not again :(

punisher: war zone review

i was rather concerned with this new punisher: war zone movie. i am still traumatized from watching the dolf rungren film in the 80s (as an 80s action film it was perfectly fine, but to call it "the punisher" fucking FAIL). the last punisher film with thomas jane made up for that abortion of a film. sure it deviated from the comics a greta deal but did a great job of keeping the spirit of the thing. the trailers for war zone looked full of grade A cheese and i was not looking forward to this. till i got the call that a reliable source saw it and it was good. i had to see it for myself.

i love it when movies start off in the middle of things. the punisher has already been out for a bit and everyone knows he kills criminals dead. that's all he does. like the terminator. sure the police "offically" are trying to catch him, but deep down inside, they love him. he can do the things they cant do. paying the price they wont. he even takes sick glee in the creation of jigsaw (slight comic deviation, but acceptable). jigsaw at the plastic surgeon smacks of the joker in tim burton's batman. let this be a lesson to all plastic surgeons, if you ever have to operate on an insane and deformed criminal, just save time and inject that needle full of air into your arm ASAP. i also do not remember jigsaw having A)  a brother and B) said brother being a cross of hannibal lector and the joker.

at least they did a great job of making all these evil doers rememberable and with a unique reason for you to hate them and cheer ol' frank castle on as he puts out their lights. everyone from the stereotypical mobster with his fuck up, emo, coke-head son (oh do not get me started on him. i think it is a him. cannot be too certain with emos) to the carribean parkour catburlars. the sheer amount of gore and vicera flying in the air is on a new scale of awesome. the only place to see more human gibblet pieces in an a B grade horror movie. heads were exploding every other minute. it was great. this was blooder than every other marvel studios movies, combined.

some weak spots i found were the expressedly cheesy parts. hanging from the chandlier, spinning and shooting mobsters by the roomful in slow motion has been done to death. no more, i beg of you. jigsaw's pimp walk with patton-esque speach. and frank's little talk with a priest at what looks to be limelight in new york city (party monster, yeah!). all that i could do without, but what do you expect in a balls out action flick? wherehas i know why punisher has microchip and understand that dynamic, it leaves the non-comic book fan a little in the dark. they are left wondering why he is helping punisher so directly.

personally, i felt the climax of the film was not in the last 15 minutes, but in the first 30. you see, punisher is not out there to punish the bad guys. he is so guilt ridden from his family's death he really punishing himself by fighting a war that will never end, hoping that one day either some street punk gets lucky or a good guy is there the day he fucks up. he is only human.

 

i give it a bloody thumbs up on account i sliced my thumb open on accident shortly after watching it.

 

ps fanboy momment of the year is the brad street hotel. if you know, you know.