The Olympics are heading to a close, which makes it a perfect time to reflect on how it all began. The opening ceremonies were - by all accounts - spectacular. It was that grandest spectacle that I, personally, have ever seen. But almost as soon as the opening ceremonies were over, journalists and bloggers started noticing the cracks in the perfect facade that the Chinese government had erected. So now we give you: The Top 5 Olympic Opening Ceremony Moments China Wants You To Forget: Read the rest of this entry »

I found this image the other day while surfing the net, then found another link to it on Digg. It’s a damn funny photo, but trying to track down its origins shows how it is possible to do the right thing and the wrong thing at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

The wife and I were at OfficeMax the other day when I spotted this gem of a camera on clearance. It’s open-box, and normally I wouldn’t take the risk, but OfficeMax slashed the price to a low $249.00, down a full $.99 from the original retail of $249.99. I whipped out my calculator to verify that this was a savings of 0.4%!

Unfortunately, we already have a nice camera so I couldn’t really take advantage of this savings bonanza, but when we stopped back by a few days later, it was still there. E-mail me if you want to get directions. I don’t know how they are managing to keep it in stock.

PART TWO: Volumes 5-8
Hellboy II got its ass handed to it thanks to The Dark Knight’s stellar debut. It’s a shame Hellboy opened only a week before Batman—it was going to be hard enough to hold market share anywhere in this summer of superheroes, but having this Batman cut into your box office after only one week is really unfortunate.

Returning to the comics: Halfway through the eight volumes of the main canon, Mike Mignola has established himself as a consummate storyteller. He has created his own bizarre pulp/Lovecraftian cosmology with a central mystery both personal and universe-shaking, and at the same time layered the books with so much fascinating and obscure folklore that the world feels surprisingly real, considering that it’s populated by vampires, giant bug things and heroic blood-red demons.

Hellboy has a simple surface: Woven with weird bits of legend and victoriana, a giant red monster dude punches other giant monsters, and sometimes he makes wisecracks. But Mignola has created a world that provides endless stories through inventive combinations of source material, stitched into a greater mythology of Mignola’s devising. He makes Hellboy and his struggles compelling without any of the usual trappings. Hellboy has no inner monologue, and virtually no outer monologue. As character designs and art styles go, Hellboy is fairly expressionless, and he is generally taciturn, rarely ruffled. He has no love interest, and by this time has abandoned what associates, if not friends, he’d had. Mignola has created a lonely character in a lonely world, trying to figure out his place in it.

It’s not an obviously universal struggle, what with all the monsters and the whole destined-to-destroy-the-world thing, but I think there is a subtle universality that makes the world compelling beyond the curiosity and charm of the various bits of folklore and legend. I think that’s why the solitary and stoic nature of the character not only works, but improves the work — we relate enough to Hellboy’s sense of isolation in a mysterious and hostile world (or is that just me?) to extract a connection to the character from what would otherwise be too little to grasp.
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PART ONE: Volumes 1-4

With a new, higher-profile Hellboy movie in theaters today, it seems like a great time to consider the series of graphic novels that inspired Guillermo Del Toro’s productions. In part one, we look at the four collecting material published before the first Hellboy film, which debuted in 2004.

Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comic has been around since the early 1990s, but unlike Superman and Wonder Woman has never been an open-ended monthly series. In what should be a template for the entire comics industry, Mignola has done Hellboy when he’s had a good story to tell, in as many pages as he needs to tell it. Eight pages in some anthology here, a two-issue miniseries there, maybe six for a longer story. Any given tale may advance the main plotline, which is Hellboy being confronted with a monstrous destiny he repeatedly rejects, or it might put interesting bits of folklore and mythology through the unique sensibilities of the very talented Mignola.
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