Sunday Spotlight: Chris Sprouse

See more of Chris Sprouse's wonderful art at http://www.sprousenet.blogspot.com/ .

Friday Night Fights: Brotherly Love

It's Friday, it's five to five, it's Cracker... erm, Friday Night Fights! So, in response to Spacebooger's One Panel of Pain challenge, here's tonight's.

This time it's synthezoid versus ionic being as Vision fights Wonder Man for Wanda's affections. Vizh hits so hard he almost punches Simon out of the panel and into our faces. Looks like Wonder Man's been eating Kirby Krackle for breakfast again.

This face whacking panel is from the Avengers vol 3, issue #23 by Kurt Busiek (writer), George Perez (pencils) and Al Vey (inks).

The Devil You Know (by Mike Carey)

Firstly, I thought I'd point out that this Devil You Know is the starting volume of the Felix Castor series of books by Mike Carey and should not be confused with other Devil You Know books - there's a lot with that title!

Anyway, sometime ago, I was looking through my local library for Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden books, couldn't find any, and so had a look at this. I know Mike Carey's name from the Vertigo and X-Men comic books and the write-up on the back sounded interesting. And after the first few pages, I was hooked.

This is a great book and is easily in my top ten. In a similar vein to Dresden, the main character of this book - Felix Castor - is a freelance exorcist who is hired to remove a ghost from a London archive. Felix is like a modern day, English Marlowe; he's more of a wisecracking, tough psychic private detective than a priestly exorcist. The best bit about the book though is the way Carey mixes ghosts, zombies and were-creatures into modern-day Britain. These creatures definitely exist in this world, many people have seen them or know about them, and they are even recognized by the government - which, of course, causes a shed-load of legal issues.

This mystery/whodunnit/thriller/horror/urban fantasy novel seems to zip along and is very easy to read. Perhaps it helps that Carey is British (born in the Northwest but now in London) and writes with an English voice? The only slight criticism I'd have is that near the end there's a bit too much of an info dump as a lot of what's gone on before gets explained - a bit like the end of every Scooby Doo show. But that's a minor quibble; I'd certainly recommend this book, as it's one of the best I've read in a long time.

His second book in the series - Vicious Circle - is just as good as well and an excellent continuation of this Felix Castor series. I also just ordered the third book - Dead Men's Boots - from my library, so expect a review of that in the near future. There's also a fourth book (Thicker than Water) out and a fifth (The Naming of the Beasts) is on its way.

If you like urban fantasy books like the aforementioned "Harry Dresden" novels or Simon R Green's "Nightshade" series, then you'll definitely like this. Grade: Near Mint.

Mr Manhattan

See "moore" of this wonderful set of Mr Men meets the Watchmen images (plus other Mr Men movie characters) by a guy called Seven Hundred over on Flickr.

Smallville: Legion (s8 ep11)

Well, that's more like it. After last week's disappointing episode, this week's - starring the three founding members of the Legion of Superheroes - was much more welcome.

There was action. There were guest appearances from other DC characters. There was not so much soppiness. And the only two problems I had were that (a) we didn't see enough of the Persuader (in fact I didn't see him at all because I missed the beginning couple of minutes) and (b) the whole "Brainiac downloading memories/information from people" thing was a bit silly. 

This episode, written by Geoff Johns (one of my favourite comic book writers at the moment), re-enforced Clark's future legacy and his standing as the foremost superhero. There were lots of little bits about Clark becoming Superman ("Where's your cape?" and "Why don't you fly?") without actually mentioning Superman or Superboy. And, perhaps surprisingly for Johns, the main theme of this episode concerned Clark's heroic stance on not killing others even if it means saving many more.

Unlike Heroes, this had a done-in-one story that also had a background pieces that linked to ongoing threads throughout this season (Brainiac coming back, Davis turning into Doomsday, etc). I much prefer Smallville's format to that of Heroes.

So, a great episode for a fan-boy like me. And great to see Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl. Grade: Fine.

Heroes: Exposed (vol 4 ep 5)

Ho hum. I think Heroes has lost its way somehow. Volume 4 started off well but since the first episode things have gone downhill, evidenced by the fact that I didn't even bother to "review" last week's episode. It's not terrible - far from it - but it is slow, due to the fact that they're spreading a single continuing story line over 13 episodes, rather than having 13 individual stories but linking them together by an overarching plot (like, say, Smallville).

As well as the glacial pacing, I think part of the problem is due to the various threads that were in this week's episode. The main plot concerned Matt and Peter getting some info from Rebel about where Daphne was supposedly held and heading into the bad guys' lair. They didn't find Matt's missus but they did find some incriminating video that they could use to blackmail Nathan and his Hunter.

That main plot was fine, if a little slow, but it didn't help by breaking up with Sylar's B plot and Claire's C plot. Just as things got interesting in the main thread, they switched to Sylar still looking for his dad or Claire hiding some guy who can breathe underwater. Really, I'm not interested in Claire and her love-life, especially not when it means losing the momentum in the main plot. And I just wish Sylar would find his dad already and get that over with.

These various threads - together with the Hiro & Ando one over in India - really have nothing to do with one another.

Still, an episode of Heroes is better than nothing. I'm still interested in finding out what happens to these guys, how they stop the hounding, who Rebel is and so on. But only just. Grade: Very Good.

Spotify

I've just found out about Spotify - a wonderful (newish) music streaming application.

You download a little application to your PC, which then allows you to search for songs hosted within Spotify, create playlists of these tracks and listen to them from your PC. It's sort of like good quality internet radio where you get to choose all of the tracks.

There's three ways of accessing Spotify. You can either pay £10 a month, pay 99p to listen for one day (24 hours), or use it free of charge. The only downside with the free version is that ads appear on the application (which, for most of the time, you'll just have minimized anyway so you won't see them) and audio ads appear roughly every 20 minutes between tracks. These audio ads are quite short - about 30 seconds long - and occur reasonably infrequently so they're not intrusive. In fact, they're nothing like as annoying as those on commercial radio stations.

To be honest, I'm not sure why someone would pay a tenner a month for this when the free version is almost as good.

There's quite a selection of tracks and albums listed on Spotify, although obviously I haven't done anything like a thorough search. I did notice that Pretty Hate Machine by Nine Inch Nails and Octopus by The Human League weren't listed but everything else I had a look for, including recent albums like Lily Allen's It's Not Me It's You, was.

Okay, the downside of this is that you need to download and run a little app and be constantly connected to the internet in order to stream the music. You don't download the music files to your machine, which means you can't transfer them to a blank CD or to your MP3 player.

Still, you do get to listen to the music you want for free!

Sunday Spotlight: Bryan Hitch

What can I say about Bryan Hitch? His work is phenomenal.

I first saw his work on Uncanny X-Men, where he was pretty much an Alan Davis imitator (and, yes, I plan to spotlight Alan Davis sometime in the future). Even then his work was good but since then he's become much better - his art becoming more 'realistic'. Of course, he's best known for his 'widescreen' work on the Authority and the Ultimates, both of which were excellent.

More of his work can be seen all over the web but have a look here, here and here for some great Hitchy pictures.