Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

Okay, time to come out of my post Christmas hibernation. So, we'll kick things off with the comic that I finished on Christmas Eve: I'll be honest, I find it very difficult to get into a lot of the mainstream comics, I read just about nothing that takes place in either the main Marvel or DC universes. The amount of backstory that one must swallow down to get into the character is almost as staggering as the constant crossover events. Deadpool seems to be the exception, I think the reason behind that is that he's just so over the top silly that it allows him to poke fun at all of the ridiculous meth addicted soap opera crap that's going on in the world. Enough griping about comics in general, we're here to talk about Seven Soldiers. Seven Soldiers is an epic storyline by Grant Morrison about a race called that come to Earth during the height of each civilization, and then wipe out the human race to the point of a few thousand people living in mud huts. It se

So, if you've been following, I watched the original BBC Prisoner series from the 60's, and absolutely loved it, although I was quite confused and overwhelmed by the ending. Then I watched the 2009 AMC remake, and I was bored to tears. What's a guy in the market for a little more Prisoner action to do? Track down a copy of the Prisoner comic mini-series that was published by DC in the late 80's. Shattered Visage takes place 20 years after the ending of the Prisoner, it offers up a more definitive interpretation of the events in the last episode of the series, as well as a new story involving the island, that still manages to capture the feel of the original series. In other words: It's good! The story deals with number Six, who has been alone on the island since it was evacuated 20 years ago. The interpretation of the final episode is that when Number Six assumed the role of Number 1, it finally broke him down, due to his conviction that he was not any number.

Those are words that you'll read over and over again in Warren Ellis's Global Frequency comic. It's about a privately owned and funded organization with agents all over the world with every skill set you might conceivably need, all united for the single purpose of saving the world. Every issue is a more or less unconnected story, with only two characters being consistently in each book. Miranda Zero is the head of th GF, and Aleph is the punk girl that monitors the frequency and runs all of their communications. Basically, there are enough people on the Frequency, with enough access and knowledge, that they can keep an eye on most of the world for bad things about to happen. When they come across something, they tap field agents with the necessary skills, and get them all together in order to neutralize the threat. The first issue deals with a Russian sleeper agent left over from the cold war, with an implat in his head that will teleport a nuclear bomb directly on

Is Gerard Butler the new Jason Statham? This is the second role he's been in that seems like it was made for Statham, the first being One Two in RocknRolla, which would have been played by Statham if he wasn't busy doing War with Jet Li. This movie is made by the same guys who did both of the Crank movies, and features the same sort of gratuitous brutality and human depravity (not so extreme as Crank 2, but still pretty out there). This is not meant to be a jab at Mr. Butler at all, indeed I think very highly of his work, I like Statham too. You have to admit that there are a few similarities, namely that they both look good with their shirts off, and they've both got exotic (by American standards) accents, two things which are bound to make wives and girlfriends more amicable to seeing movies with lots of violence, blood and death with their significant others. Okay, onto the review of the actual movie: Gamer takes place in the near future, where someone has figure out a w

One of the main reasons I started this blog was to have a consistent place to save all of my toy reviews, so I guess it's about time I got to it. My first review is of the toy of Aquarion, unfortunately I know almost nothing about the cartoon. This particular version of the Aquarion toy, is supposed to be the "military" version, while the standard one comes with swords and and bow and arrow, the military version uses more conventional weaponry, namely guns, big ones. The only difference between the two toys, aside from the accessories, is the paint scheme, as far as I know. The original Aquarion is more brightly colored, with lots of red, and emerald green. Judging from the box it would seem that this is part of the Soul Of Chogokin line from Bandai, however despite having a lot of the same design aesthetics, Bandai chose not to actually brand it as part of the SOC line. Styrofoam's always nice to see in a toy box for some reason, but even more interesting is that

Not having seen any trailers for this movie, I wasn't really sure what to expect. Obviously from looking at the cover, one can intuit that this is a science fiction show, likely animated. Terra is of course latin for Earth, and it's very common in science fiction to use it as a name for our planet in place of Earth. So, maybe some kind of alien invasion movie? This fit very well with the very menacing skeletal object in space that we see during the opening, approaching a lush blue planet, but I was surprised to find that the inhabitants of the planet are actually pseudo mermaids, who float around through the atmosphere, and live in harmony with their beautiful world where plants grow hundreds of yards tall, and homes can be fashioned in their arms. Really from what we can see of Terra, it looks more like the upper atmosphere of a gas giant more than an Earth analog. But it is very beatiful, and most importantly, alien. Not all is hunky dory though, there are marked off

Coraline is a stop motion animation movie based on a story written by Neil Gaiman, another of my favorite authors. The story starts off with Coraline, (pronounced similar to Caroline, with the last syllable pronounced like "clothes line") moving to the "Pink Palace" with her parents, who are trying to make a living writing a seed catalog, yet apparently hate the concept of gardening. I find it funny that the parents seldom work in the same room together, and while mom works on the kitchen table using a moderin-ish laptop, dad works upstairs in a "study" with mountains of papers, while tapping on an ancient beige desktop computer using a monochrome green monitor display. Coraline is your typical little girl, in that she is charming, incorrigible, and has no patience. Add onto that the fact that she's been moved to this new place, with no friends, and nothing's yet unpacked. She soon makes the acquaintance of Wybie, the grandson of the landlord

I've been sick as a dog, which means I haven't been writing, but I have been watching a lot of movies. Rather than review any of the things that I've been watching though, I'm going to address a question that was posed to me. "Is World of Warcraft basically the same thing as Dungeons and Dragons?" Of course the short answer, if you've played both, is no, but if you haven't played either, then it might be closer to yes. So, to start off with, WoW: Even with all of it's success, rabid fanbase, and staggeringly large number of players that are wander the world with you, it is still a computer game. You pick a race (elf), and a class (rogue), and then you're pretty much dumped into the world with no ceremony, and no guidance, other than seeing symbols above peoples heads saying that they might be worth talking to. Talking to certain people, gets you quests, which usually involves tracking something down and killing it, then returning to the quest g