I've got a Giant-Size Man-Thing

What? What did you think I was talking about?

Now that's a f#%*ing magazine cover!

Like every decent human, the Dweller hates Fergie, but still that's one hell of a cover!

Calgary Comic And Entertainment Expo - Day Two

A better camera and many more pictures this time. Met some friends (Hi Hugh, Hi Theo, Hi Sam, Hi Courtney) bought more stuff, got some signatures.

Here's some photo moments from the day:









This was as close as I got to Leonard Nimoy. $60 for a signature and I was a few bucks short by the time I got there.

















On the other hand Aaron Douglas was $30 and I always liked Chief Tyrol. I'm a big pro-union guy so I liked his Shop Steward sequences on Battlestar Galactica.























"And that sir, is how we deal with big blue alien fuzzies in Her Majesty's Galactic Empire, by cracky!"






















A fateful encounter.





















She's a creature of the night.























The Star Trek mini-skirt makes a comeback in a big way. Practical, yet gratuitously sexy. I want to live in this future. Particularly if it includes cheesy carnival fun-houses too.

















Red Sonja, a hot Steampunk babe and a teenage anime fan whose life is having an awesomeness peak.
























Everybody get's one.






















All your miniatures are belong to Cthulhu.






UPDATE: Thanks for dropping by BEAT readers, feel free to check the rest of the site out. Lots of comics and reviews, music and art.

Calgary Comic And Entertainment Expo - Day One

Oh my God do my feet hurt.

End of Day One, I'm home now watching the new Doctor Who, and staring out the window in awe at the sudden onset polar snow-storm that appeared out of nowhere and is now in the process of burying Calgary under mountains of soggy wet snow.

I met Eric Powell, the creator of The Goon, George Freeman artist of my favorite patriotic hero Captain Canuck and attended a talk by Bruce Timm the creator of the Timm-verse DC animated universe that started with the great 90's animated Batman series.

He was limited about what new direct to DVD animated superhero movies he could announce yet. However in response to a question about animating some of the books from the Vertigo line of DC comics he said the ones that had the kind of public profile to make Warner's agree to take a chance on them like the Sandman series already had their rights tied up. The one possible exception was the Swamp Thing and there was a real possibility of doing something with him. He didn't say if it would lean more to the original Wein and Wrightson version or the Alan Moore reboot.

Lot of people there in a lot of very cool costumes, and like most conventions I spent most of my time in the huckster's hall. Bought lots of toys and comics and probably will again tomorrow.

But tomorrow is signature hunting day, which means many hours in lineups. Oh my feet.

Gone

Calgary Convention may be last chance to meet Leonard Nimoy

“We started making Star Trek pilots around 1964, I think,” Nimoy says in an interview from his Los Angeles home. “I’ve been involved with Star Trek for 44, 45 years. It’s been a wonderful ride for me and it’s been great for my family. We got to do some interesting work outside of Star Trek because of Star Trek and I’m very satisfied.”

In fact, Nimoy suspects he is probably done with acting altogether. This year may also be the last that he makes the rounds to various fan conventions. Which means his appearance this weekend at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo could be one of the last times for devotees to get up close and personal.

If you didn't have reason enough to come to it folks.

Getting my nerd on

Next weekend April 24th and 25th the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo is on and the Dweller will be there and blogging it.

Why should you care about a convention in a Canadian city many of you have never heard of? Well let's look at the lineup of guests:

We've got Malcolm McDowell, Tony Todd, Billy Dee Williams, Brent Spiner, Bruce Timm, Tamoh Penikett, Chris Claremont, Matt Wagner, Eric Powell, Len Wein, Lloyd Kaufman and Mr Spock himself Leonard Nimoy. Plus many other notables from the worlds of comics, TV SF and movies. I imagine some people of the teenage female persuasion are only going because a few of the beefcake homonculi from the Twilight movies will be there.

Factor in an enthusiastic crowd (A much larger venue was selected after the huge swarms last year.), row after row of huckster tables selling shiny nerd-bait and workshops, panels and a costume contest and you're talking about my idea of a hell of a good time.

Comment if you are going and let me know what you are looking forward to the most.

The More You Know

Sluggo denies your reality and substitutes his own.

If you love her, buy her a gun

Hulk sneers at your 'safe word'

Take it. Take it all.

Comics Review - Look at the colours edition

SPIDER-MAN: FEVER #1 (of 3)
Written by BRENDAN MCCARTHY
Pencils & Cover by BRENDAN MCCARTHY

This is the book to get if you want to see Spiderman tripping balls on magically contaminated bug-spray in Doctor Strange's bathtub.

McCarthy channels Ditko at his pop-art insanity - rather than his equally prodigious Objectivist, Ayn Rand worshiping insanity - peak. Featuring the non-linear, drug-trip dimensions of Ditko but with some P. Craig Russell gloss and a nod to Frank Brunner on the faces and torsos. It's an artistic tribute to the entire history of Doctor Strange.

Plus it goes well with mushrooms. Holy crap is this ever blatantly a druggy Spiderman and Doctor Strange Comic.

Lots of Burroughsian demonic spiders speaking in cut up poetry while Spiderman has tub seizures and Doctor Strange monologues about Aleister Crowley Albion Crawley.

Trippiness level: Hangin' with the Machine Elves.


Doctor Who
Classics Series 3
Issue #2
Steve Parkhouse & John Ridgeway

Colorizing and reprinting 25 year old black and white stories from the Doctor Who magazine, from the fraught sixth Doctor era no less, traveling with a talking penguin as his companion.

I know it doesn't sound promising but this is a grand mal 70's disco science fiction concept album of a comic book flip out. There's a plot in there about rogue Time Lords and a highly symbolic lighthouse tower that may be a Tardis.

It's part three of a story about mysterious black ships on metaphoric oceans, Cthulian monstrosities from the deep and running about energetically in the classic Doctor Who style. It really doesn't matter though, just roll with it and let the story come up without worrying about anything so prosaic as whats or whys.

Trippiness Level: Altered States, breaking into the monkey cage at the zoo.



Philip K. Dick's Electric Ant
Written by David Mack
Art by Pascal Alixe
Cover by Paul Pope

Philip K. Dick used to throat cheap speed like cheerios and write for twenty hours straight churning out dozens of novels in the course of a few paranoid twitchy years.

The signature Dick style of a glassy speed freak existential paranoia about the nature of consciousness and reality has become standard fare in movies, cyberpunk SF, and video-games post Matrix, it's all the fruit of the Philip K. Dick tree.

Electric Ant successfully captures the jittery amphetamine dread of Dick, but it's not bugs under the skin its nuts and bolts. Garrison Poole wakes up in a hospital to discover his blissful life as a corporate prince is an illusion. He's actually an android programmed not to realize he's an android. Hilarity and existential crisis ensue.

Trippiness Level: The tinfoil protects me from the rays.

E-Sheep Reborn

Here's your opportunity to directly support some kick ass comics by an enormously talented artist.

Patrick Farley was one of the early innovators of the web-comic scene, producing under the E-Sheep brand intricate fascinating, hilarious and disturbing web-comics. Some were traditional pen and ink scanned and posted, later he produced spectacularly beautiful computer illustrated chiaroscuro like branching stories that took advantage of the virtual space of the web. And then there was the retelling of the Book of Revelation of St John the Divine in the style of Pokemon.

He did it part time for awhile, made a couple abortive attempts to make it pay enough to do full time and is trying again with an innovative audience support scheme utilizing Kickstarter.com and the 'thousand true fans' business model.

Think about supporting this. If you need any convincing I recommend a nice artgasm wallow in his archives page.

Comics Reviews - March 3

MW
Osamu Tezuka
Vertical

It's difficult to get across to western readers the importance of Manga 'god' Osamu Tezuka. Cross Walt Disney, Jack Kirby and Will Eisner and you begin to understand the extent of his innovation and influence on Japanese comics and animation. Westerners know him best for Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion and its...cough... 'homage' by Disney The Lion King.

But by 1976 his position was being challenged by a new generation of Manga artists working in a more mature and dramatic style called Gekiga (dramatic pictures) Tezuka was rapidly becoming yesterday's man with his cute Disney cartoonish style (The big eyes and little mouth Manga is known for was actually Tezuka imitating Disney) and light approach to story-telling. All of that changed when Tezuka decided to challenge the new bloods at their own game and produced a perverse and swirling melodrama full of themes and scenes that are shocking even today.

There is fairly explicit homosexuality, pedophilia, rape, even hints of bestiality all illustrated in Tezuka's incongruously Disney cute style.

MW tells the story of Michio, an amoral sociopath, a beautiful young man rising high in the ranks of a bank office while at night he engages in a series of savage kidnapping murders and Father Garai, the despairing compromised priest who tries to save Michio's soul while being unable to control his lust for his body. As the story unfolds we learn of their history together and of MW, a deadly nerve gas that killed an entire island full of people and may be responsible for Michio's psychopathy.

The story is elaborate, almost byzantine, and some of the story elements work and some of them don't but the book still remains compulsively readable for it's almost 600 pages.

Warlord #12
DC

With this issue Mike Grell completes a story begun almost 25 years ago in the first run of the series, bringing decades old story elements full circle. There are fierce battles, secret identities revealed, arch villains getting their comeuppance and an elegiac farewell.

The art is beautiful and in the slightly strained story Grell is clearly trying to bring a new maturity to a series that historically was always rather formulaic. In the original series Travis Morgan was an air force pilot who found a lost civilization in the center of the earth - or possibly another dimension.

Every issue Morgan would jump to conclusions, try to save an innocent from a monster - and usually discovers that it's the innocent who's the monster and vice versa.

He was always a flawed hero and in the most recent iteration of the series Grell is trying to reconcile the responsibilities of leadership that the title Warlord implies with the rip-roaring adventure readers expect from a sword and sorcery comic. The jury is still out if the series can sustain such pressures.

Earthquake