Tuesday, March 8, 2011

GET IT WHILE YOU CAN

I'm a bit brain-fried right now as a result of spending ten hours at an airport yesterday waiting for a thirty-five minute connecting flight.  Didn't get home till one in the morning.  I hope to be back up and running—and posting—in another day or so.  Meanwhile, here's something to keep you occupied and, I hope, entertained:  my recent Sym-Bionic Titan episode, "I Am Octus."  If you'd like to watch it, do it soon:  I have no idea how long this will be available.

14 comments:

  1. Hopefully I'll get a chance to view this within the next few days. Thanks for the link.

    BTW, JMD, amazon is now soliciting a Spider-Man collection titled "The Next Chapter"--which I'm guessing collects the post-Clone Saga, pre-reboot material. So your SSM run with Ross will be in TPB (if I'm reading this correctly).

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  2. Hope you enjoy the episode, David.

    I looked at Amazon and couldn't find THE NEXT CHAPTER anywhere. Are you sure you're not experiencing literary hallucinations? :)

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  3. It's actually from amazon.ca, which sometimes solicits before its American counterpart:

    http://www.amazon.ca/Spider-Man-Next-Chapter-Howard-Mackie/dp/078515759X/ref=sr_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1299636954&sr=1-11

    And I'm never sure I'm not experiencing literary hallucinations!

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  4. From the information they have there, David, I can't figure out WHAT material of mine they're collecting.

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  5. I'm thinking it will cover that stretch between the Clone Saga and the Mackie/Byrne reboot. I could be totally wrong, but here's my thoughts:

    They're set to collect the Clone Saga in its entirety, so that'd be the next logical step. And since the end of that era came in a story titled "The Final Chapter," I guess it makes sense to call it "The Next Chapter.

    If I'm right (which is a big if), I think everything Spider-Man you've ever done will have been collected except MTU, SOUL OF THE HUNTER, your SSM run with Buscema, and the DC crossovers. I fully expect to see that Buscema run soon, and the MTU stuff will probably make it to an Essentials collection.

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  6. Guess we'll see if you're right! I'd LOVE to see the two year SPEC SPIDEY run I did with Sal collected. It's my favorite material out of all my Spider-Man work. (Well, aside from those "Maximum Carnage" chapters...)

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  7. It could be wishful thinking, but Marvel is coming at your SSM run from both sides of the 90s. There's a Micheline/McFarlane omnibus due out that covers ASM, and one more collection like that would put the Michelinie work in the same timeframe as "The Child Within." So yeah, writing's on the wall as far as I'm concerned. :)

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  8. "From your lips to God's ear," as my mother used to say.

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  9. Watched "I Am Octus" on the PC, and about three minutes in the kids (4 and 8) walked by and were glued to the screen for the rest of the episode. Great stuff. In a lot of ways, the sensibilities reminded me of THE TWILIGHT ZONE. Very atmospheric, with a philosophical punch at the end. Kids are asking for more SYM-BIONIC TITAN!

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  10. I thought they did a beautiful job of creating a TWILIGHT ZONE vibe, David; those "frozen world" sequences were amazing.

    Glad your kids enjoyed it!

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  11. I would definitely get that Spectacular Spider-Man run you did with Sal Buscema if it ever got collected... That was one of the comics that I grew up on, one of the comics that made me love comics. I remember one of the first comics I ever got was that one issue that had Vermin and it just freaked me out, and I was hooked for life.

    And then that one issue where Spidey goes to Harry's house to have a nice dinner with his family against their will. Was that the issue where Spidey had to fight a giant machine gun-wielding jack-in-the-box?

    I never had a complete run of your issues, just bits and pieces because I was a kid back then and had no idea when to expect new issues on the racks. And then when I got "older," I allowed my mom to give away my collection... Your Spectacular run was something I was never able to rebuild...

    Also, on an unrelated note, did you see this post on CBR?

    http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2011/03/08/j-m-dematteis-back-pages/

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  12. Hope I didn't warp your young, impressionable mind too much with those Vermin stories, Dru. My absolute favorite story from that run was SPEC #200 -- which featured the death of Harry Osborn. Those last few pages, with the art conveying my plot without captions or dialogue cluttering things up, are some of the best that Sal Buscema ever did. The guy's incredible.

    And, yes, I JUST saw that CBR post a few minutes ago. In the age of the internet, the past is never dead -- no matter how much we may want it to be!

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  13. Yeah, the frozen world sequences were what I had in mind. Very striking! My four year old daughter said it was "scary," which is a good response from a kid who digs Scooby Doo and things that go bump in the night.

    My two favorite Sal Buscema scenes are the aforementioned death of Harry Osborn, and the "dinner with the Osborns" sequence from SSM 189.

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  14. Sal's one of the best super hero artists ever, as far as I'm concerned, David. His storytelling is impeccable, he infuses his art with a depth of emotion, and the man can really draw.

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