Loosely thumbnailing chapter two of the GN and waiting to see if there are any significant edits requested before I start drawing (on account of my monstrously slow pace since Christmas, mainly). My thumbnails are ludicrously messy and difficult to decipher for anyone but me, though I'm sure some would argue the end product doesn't improve by much. Those people I punch in the face.
Reading: 2000ad - well, Dredd's always good with John Wagner at the helm, but everything else is a mish-mash of stuff I'm not terribly enthused about these past two weeks. The drawback of the anthology format, I suppose. Judge Dredd Megazine has the distinction of featuring Tank Girl, a strip that convinced me for the first time ever that I don't need to read every part of an anthology book just because I've paid for it, a feeling that then extended to Bato Loco, a horrible strip about a Latino stereotype played for "laughs". I'll be charitable and assume I'm not the target audience. I am the target audience for the possibly certifiable Al Ewing's Tempest, however: fresh from his kung-fu battle to the death with a cyborg panda crimelord last issue, Tempest is pressganged into helping spring Stan Lee - the deadliest man alive - from Iso Block 666, and the over-all-too-quickly episode ends with some Judges jumping into robot suits and getting given a shoot to kill order, because what the most ruthless police force in creation (whose members are basically Green Berets thrown out of the army for being too rough) really need is to be given a stompy robot with huge guns and then told not to restrain themselves like they usually do.
Watching: The Good Wife - taking an oddly sinister turn of late, with an initially ludicrous conspiracy subplot making me a bit paranoid about almost every character on the show who gets a speaking part to the point I'm thinking "What is that nanny up to? Who does she work for?" Well played. CSI Miami never fails to disappoint in referencing modern pop-cultural phenomena (this week it's a singing teen starlet named after an American state who wears a horrible blonde wig onstage) , but always excels in getting across just how reactionary, right-wing and conservative its makers are, and this week also how shallow their reading of any given trend - but then what should I really have expected of a show whose commentary on a GTA analogue was "You get bonus points for raping the cashier during a bank robbery"? Castle remains enjoyable fluff, but this week featured one of the lead actresses from Charmed (one of the few fantasy shows I cannot watch no matter how hard I try and which has actually made me physically cringe while watching it on those occasions I've made the effort) and it sort of brought me down. Castle's partner is hot, though - but his daughter needs a haircut badly. Bangs with ginger hair - hard to pull off as an adult, impossible as a teen.
CSI: Miami makes me laugh with its sheer awfulness. However, I admire the sheer audacity of replacing 76% of the dialogue with exposition. This is to be applauded, I feel.
ReplyDeleteCSI: Miami is probably the better iteration of the franchise purely by dint of how terrible it is and thus enjoyable as car-crash television. CSI and CSI: New York can't really be enjoyed on that level since they have lead actors like Gary Sinise and Laurence Fishburn, who make a decent stab at their roles in comparison to David Caruso's resigned deadpan delivery and Mary-Sue martyr of a character.
ReplyDeleteCSI: Miami has also excelled itself in the current season by casting Eddie Cibrian - veteran of legendarily terrible soap Sunset Beach - as a series regular in what is clearly a deliberate effort to find someone who won't out-act Caruso, rounding out what is possibly the most wooden cast on television since Thunderbirds.