Zero Killer #4 Was It Worth The Wait?

To say that it's been a while since this comic came out last would be and understatement. I have been waiting for this book for over a year. I finally got it this last week and I wanted to find out if it was worth the wait.

For those of you who don't know anything about this book, and I don't blame you since it's been on hiatus for the past year or so, here is all you need to know.

It's been 34 years since a nuclear war destroyed the world. Zero lives in New York as a "Trash Man", hunting down renegade gang members and just trying to survive the rival gangs living throughout the cities skyscrapers. Zero also dreams of building a boat and escaping the underwater city to the mythical land of Africa, which rumors say has been spared from the nuclear fires.

In this fourth installment, Zero is hired to find a briefcase which was lost in New York (remind you of the "Escape from New York" premise, yeah me too), so Zero takes the job and has to sneak into a rival gangs skyscraper and steal this briefcase. What's in the briefcase you might ask, well read the damn book and find out. I am not going to spoil everything for everyone. Bottom line is that, even after over a year, I jumped right back into this book and was sucked in like a magnet.

It's not the greatest story every told, it's not going to win any awards, but it's a fun book with some delightfully gory segments and interesting ideas. The artwork is grainy and monotone and to me symbolizes the radiation and fallout left after a nuclear storm. I think the book looks great. The writing is decent and the idea, if not fresh, is at least somewhat fresh for the comic book market. Over all I enjoyed this book. Was it worth the wait, well probably not, but I'm glad it's back.

Artwork 4.5
Story 3

It's a decent book, good luck finding the back issues on this bitch though. The print run is smaller than my high school newspaper was. But if you can find it, and find it cheap, give it try, or just wait until the trade comes out and gobble it up then.

Michael

Blair Butler: Covergirl!

Here's the most compelling reason I've seen to dump $3.99 on a comic yet. And I don't always get along with that Didio cat. He gets the nod here for having the good sense to put the industry's # 1 Smartest, Slightly Saucy, Sexiest ambassador on a cover.

Really makes me want to spend the extra four trillion dollars a month for that expanded cable package so that I can watch G4 again. I surely do miss Blair Butler...

- Ryan

Chronic Review: Frankenstein's Womb

Frankenstein's Womb
Avatar - $6.99 SRP
Script: Warren Ellis
Pencils/Inks: Marek Oleksicki



Warren Ellis is a wonderful contradiction. Inside of that crotchety, irascible, chain smoking, whisky & Red Bull pounding, blustering facade is a very wide-eyed child deeply in love with all of the planet's inexplicable mysteries.

I remember visiting the Earle Brown elementary school library as a first grader and stumbling upon my first dinosaur book. What a revelation! All of the monsters I held at bay in my imagination with a night light at bedtime used to walk the planet!

I'm a rational and deeply skeptical person at heart, but the records don't lie - a LOT of ridiculously strange shit has happened on this planet, and it continues to happen all the time.

Sometimes it rains frogs. Sometimes a guy will fall out of an airplane without a chute and walk away with a slightly fractured shin. Sometimes aliens will shoot down a meteor for us so that it just hits the Tunguska area of the Soviet Union, instead of wiping out most of civilization.

This is the unifying thread that runs through most of Warren Ellis' bibliography, most keenly realized in Planetary. If you look carefully, past the curse words and the perverse pleasure he takes in the darkest corners of the human heart, there is an awe-filled tiny boy pointing out his newly discovered improbable truth. Ellis never let go of that spark I felt when I cracked my first dinosaur book. He's dedicated his life to that spark, which I find sort of charming.

When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, Europe was caught in the grips of what meteorologists now call the "little ice age". 1816 was called "The Year Without a Summer", mostly because it was bloody goddamned cold out all the time. It snowed throughout much of that summer, and that's just plain...weird. Quintessential Ellis material.

Since volleyball, swimming, and tanning were out of the question, Mary Wollestonecraft Godwin, (later to become Mary Shelley) Percy Shelley, Clair Claremont, and George Gordon Byron decided to stay indoors by the fire and compete to see who could write the best story. That was the origin of Frankenstein, and that's verified fact.

There are legends, though, that Mary Wollestonecraft Godwin visited Castle Frankenstein on a trip through Germany to Switzerland a few months prior. This is more difficult to corroborate. In 1816, Mary Godwin did not have a Twitter account to leave a footprint of the trip.

But some say that she did enter that castle alone, and Frankenstein's Womb is the story of what happened when she did.



Ellis makes the case through Frankenstein's monster that Mary Shelley's book gave birth to the modern age. I think that might be overstating the case, but it certainly had a profound impact on horror. For the first time we saw a monster created not through godly intervention or supernatural curses, or any other forces beyond human ken. This all too human. Frankenstein's monster was born from human reason gone wild. Science, manipulated electricity, and human hubris created the beast.

You can certainly see the impact that it made on Marvel Comics. Spider-Man? Irradiated spider in a lab. Hulk? Gamma bomb. Daredevil? Chemical spill. X-Men? They got done in because of all the background radiation floating about from the atomic age. We've been telling this story for a long time, and it all began with Mary Shelley.



The story itself is interesting enough, with the monster walking Mary through her future. This is not a mindless brute, either. The monster in this fable is true to the source, intelligent, and actually as interested in Mary's personal affairs as her social contribution. And I suppose that makes sense. She is his mother.

Marek Oleksicki's pencils are GORGEOUS. The book is in black and white, but I don't think it suffers for it. Olesicki is adept at capturing emotion in faces, and the pencils are very detailed. It reminded me a bit of Berni Wrightson, and I don't think I could give a higher complement than that.

And of course the carriage conversations are ripe with Warren's infamously fantastic dialogue. It's very difficult to make a phrase like "arse" sound clever. Warren has a gift for things like that.



I enjoyed Frankenstein's Womb, and if you like Warren Ellis, you'll like this. Unless you're in it for the gratuitous violence. Nary a punch is thrown in this one. It's a classic "what if" of the weird, equal parts horror and hope. The monster shows Mary a patient being revived with machinery and credits her with it.

And that's how Warren works - equal parts jaded bastard and wide-eyed child.

- Ryan

Behind the Scenes at Chronic Insomnia

In the last two months Ryan and I have celebrated our 2 year anniversary and our 100th episode. If you missed that show, Ryan was ten beers and two white russians intoxicated right as we started the show. It was NOT a surprise when Ryan began to vomit right on the air. I think I should explain a little how the show is created every week. Here is a behind the scenes look at how Chronic Insomnia is brought to you each week.

First thing we do during the week between shows is share information and or ideas for comedy bits. After working through them over email, we bring them to the show on Monday nights. Very rarely do Ryan and I see each other outside of the show. Ryan works a lot and when and if we see each other outside of the show, it's for roleplaying.

Then Monday night rolls around. Ryan usually gets here about 9pm and we go downstairs and setup for the night. As we do that we discuss things about the show and figure out what we want to do for the night. Honestly most of the stuff we do on the show is riffed right there during the actual recording of the show. Ryan or I might bring an outline or an idea for something, but it gets tweaked and or modified as we record it. On some occasions Ryan will bring something completely written. Then we follow the script to the letter. None of the "show" is scripted, only the bits and comedy segments are ever scripted and a lot of those are riffed on the spot.

Ryan is a very talented writer and comes in with stuff that is fully realized and ready to go. In the two years of the show, I have only come in with like three bits actually written out, and most of them needed A LOT of tweaking as we recorded them. That explains why Ryan has the Masters Degree in Creative Writing huh?

Anyways after the first 30 minutes of bullshitting around we get to recording. This is where we work on any bits or segments we want to pre-record for the show that night. It might be a song that Ryan sings, a bit he has written for the show, like the Blackest Night thing from last week. This is where we record those segments. These usually take between 1-2 hours to record. The Blackest Night thing took about an hour or a little less. We could record them quicker, but both of us are perfectionists and it takes a while to get it to what we call "perfect".

At around 11pm or midnight we start the show. At this point all of our prep is done and we power through the main segments of the show. It takes about an hour and a half to record 60 minutes of show. We do ALL of the normal bits in the show LIVE. Nothing is rewound and redone unless there is a technical issue. This is what we would sound like totally live if we streamed the show. I don't censor us at all. The only thing that happens is I will go back and clean things up, like add effects in the background and or make something louder or quieter. This can take about 30 minutes. Then we are done. It's about 2am and we are both spent. We chat for 15 minutes about what we thought of the show and Ryan stumbles out to his car to drive home and I sit down and convert the show to MP3 and upload it to Podbean.com. The show is usually up by around 3am, but sometimes I am just too tired to upload until the next morning. The show is ALWAYS up before noon on Tuesday.

There you have it. A total rundown of how we create Chronic Insomnia each week. If you have any questions on the technology we use, just give us an email at thechroniccrew@gmail.com and I will try and answer any questions you have. I pride myself in our show sounding as good or better as any podcast out there. Thank you very much.

Michael

KY? Cuz I GOTTA!

So I went to a finer store near me to pick up a vial of KY Intense so I could experimentally slather some on the Manatee junk. Wha...you thought I was joking? (See opening monologue for episode # 100 to catch up)

Unfortunately, when I got there, I couldn't help but notice that the KY Intense comes in units the size of a Chapstick and costs $23.99!!!!

Holy Chockatollees. That had better be some good shit. That shit had better make her cum so hard her grandparents feel it. I believe that plutonium is cheaper by the ounce.

So I didn't get it. Look, I'm a scientist and a trailblazer, but I didn't think I'd have to take out a second mortgage for the stuff...

Directions we found that were pretty funny.

- Ryan

Topless Robot Transformers 2 Review!

Alison Haislip pointed out the funniest review of a film I have ever read, courtesy of Toplessrobot.com.

If you haven't seen it yet and are wondering if Transformers 2 sucks...now you know.

If you have seen it and couldn't quite put into words how and why it sucked...they did it for you.

- Ryan

Longbox Is Coming to Change Your World Forever!

After three years of development and negotiations, Rantz Hoseley made his first official announcements about "Longbox" at HeroesCon. Longbox purports to be an Itunes-style platform where comic book fans can download titles for a nominal fee.

This is very sneaky-important news, because Hoseley is a hair's breadth from changing the way comic books are produced and enjoyed forever. Let's do a little Longbox Q&A, shall we?

What the heck IS Longbox?
Think ITunes for comic books. You go to the Longbox website, and waiting for you is basically an online rack of new comics from a host of companies in a virtual comic shop. You choose which titles and which issues you'd like to try, pay a small fee, and bang - you've got your digital comic book to do with as you choose.

Just how small is that fee, exactly?
Longbox is recommending that publisher's charge 99 cents per issue. But it's a recommendation, not law. Publishers are free to charge what they like for their comics.

There are plans for block and subscription pricing, but no terms or prices have been announced.

So I can download my new books on Wednesday when the floppies come out?
Again, this is completely up to the publishers. It's possible the digital comics will be released simultaneously or even before the print books hit shelves. It's probably more likely that companies will delay their digital distribution in a vain attempt to save the monthly pamphlet.

Which Comic Publishers have signed on with Longbox?
At this point, the only confirmed publishers are BOOM! and Top Cow.

WHAT??? No Marvel? No D.C.?
At the moment, no. The thing to keep in mind, however, is that Hoseley has been developing this project for three years, and has wisely kept very quiet about it until it was ready to materialize. He's strongly hinted that Marvel is basically on board.

When the idea of Longbox was spawned three years ago, none of the publishers would even speak with Hoseley. Now the worm has turned and everyone is in negotiations, trying to determine if Hoseley has an app that will work to bridge comics fully into the 21st Century.

So is Longbox that killer app?
Well, we really only have Hoseley's say in the matter, but the evidence looks good. What he's done is partner with Quicksilver and created a way to convert what publisher's already use in their current printing process (Adobe InDesign and Quark)into Longbox files.

Basically, that means two very important things. 1)Longbox isn't asking anybody to sink extra costs into developing software to integrate. Longbox integrated into them. 2) There's no proprietary software favoring one publisher over another. They can absorb comics equally easily from anybody.

So how do the comics actually look and read with Longbox? Again, we have only Hoseley to vouch for that. But he's a legitimate comic book fan (editor on Tori Amos's "Comic Book Tattoo") and a software designer. He thinks they work pretty darned well, and apparently so do Mark Waid and Mark Silvestri, or they wouldn't have signed on.

Can I download comics to my IPhone?
Not yet you can't. As of this moment, Longbox is compatible with your Mac, PC, or Linux. But there are plans right now to expand Longbox into the Kindle, IPhone, WiiWare, and X-Box Live.

Hoseley has read comics on his big screen TV with his X-Box, and says it's pretty damned awesome. The tech is easy - the tough part is getting them to use Longbox without making users pay extra for the privilege. Hoseley is committed to everybody paying the same price.

Anything Longbox comics can do that floppies can't?
Damn Skippy. Digital comics open up a host of creative possibilities. Early ideas are "behind the scenes" info and commentary from creators, a la extras on your DVDs.

Being that comics creators are some of the most interactive artists on the planet, I think you can count on someday reading an issue of Anna Mercury while listening to a less than sober Warren Ellis explaining why he hates you so much. Let's see your pamphlet do that!

Don't look for motion, comics, though. Hoseley....is not a fan of the motion comics.

Sounds good, but when can I start downloading these comics?
There is no solid launch date yet, but all signs point to Longbox going live some time in 2009. To keep up to date, check out Comic Book Resources. They've decided to partner with CBR to act as a kind of official mouthpiece.

How will this affect the comic book industry?
Of course that depends. If Marvel and DC don't sign on, probably not much at all. If Marvel and DC do partner with Longbox, you can tell the fat lady to pick up the pace singing about the end of the monthly pamphlet.

There is something satisfying about holding a comic in your hands, it's true. But nobody really wants to store the damn things, and nobody is really interested in the speculator market, which is the other main reason to want a physical artifact.

I think that many people will still continue to enjoy comics in book form. And they will use Longbox to make decisions about which stories are special enough to deserve that. In fact, I think it's very likely that Longbox would increase book sales.

Think about it- how many trades would you get sucked into if you could test drive more books? At a dollar per issue or with a subscription, even a limited budget could sample far more comics and develop an informed taste about them.

Your average local comic shop tends not to order much past the Big Two. Longbox will almost certainly offer a more extensive catalog than most shops currently do. And it's all a click away. That means more people seeing more comics, and that really ought to mean more profit for the publishers.

This will also punish a lot of comic book shops. They will be forced to become a hub for buying trades or find some way other than floppies to earn their living. Because that dinosaur is about to breathe its last.

- Ryan