Back in the olden blogging days the annual holiday songs from the good folks behind The Venture Bros was always a treat, and I was delighted last night to see that this year we got a brand new installment. There’s also a YouTube playlist of all of the Venture Bros Holiday Songs to date, and all of the songs can be downloaded from Ken Plume’s Patreon.
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Forgotten Lives
An issue of Hellboy & The B.P.R.D. that I worked on, “Forgotten Lives” with art by Stephen Green, has appeared on Multiversity Comics list of the Best Single Issues of 2022. Here’s a bit of what reviewer Ryan Fitzmartin has to say about it:
“Mignola and Roberson use the story of a ghost in a mass grave in the Bronx as an entry point to explore death and legacy. Hellboy and Trever Bruttenholm are investigating a ghost, but their heads are really occupied by the thoughts of recently departed friends. It’s an elegiac, sad story, with great dialogue that really understands how people cope. The overarching narrative, of the death of a forgotten comic-book writer, feels in some ways as if Mignola and Roberson are wondering about what they’ll leave behind when they depart.
“The art in ‘Forgotten Lives’ likewise is somber, and constrained, lending gravity and weight to a heavy issue. Many artists have drawn Hellboy over the past two decades, but Stephen Green’s pencils manage to do a standout job. Hellboy’s face is expressive and deeply emotive. Green does great work with his eyes, which speak as much as the words do. Dave Stewarts’s coloring is of course completely on point, albeit a little more muted than normal, perhaps to allow the dialogue to take more weight.”
Another of Mignola’s titles, Koschei in Hell, appears higher up on the list, along with one of my absolute favorite single issues of the year, Nightwing #87, so we’re in pretty good company!
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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
I’ve written before on many occasions about my longtime obsession with Indiana Jones. I first saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in the theater the summer I turned 11 years old, and was there for each of the three sequels on the opening weekend. A trip to Disney World a few years ago got me on a serious Indiana Jones kick and in the span of a few months I rewatched all of the movies, all of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, read all of the Marvel and Dark Horse comics and a huge pile of Rob MacGregor novels. I found that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was much better than I remembered from my one viewing on opening weekend, and that The Last Crusade was even better than I remembered and I remembered it being awesome, and that the original Raiders film is pretty much without a single flaw.
But when there were the first rumblings that Harrison Ford would be reprising the role in a fifth feature film, I was skeptical. Ford is still a fantastic actor, but he’s a little long in the tooth to be an action star. Admittedly, James Mangold’s Logan made it clear he knew how to handle the story of an aging adventurer, but I remained unconvinced. Willing to be convinced, but skeptical.
Then I saw the trailer yesterday, and all of my doubts evaporated. I have no idea what’s happening here, or what this has to do with what appears to be the Antikythera mechanism. Is Phoebe Waller-Bridge playing Marcus Brody’s daughter, or granddaughter? Or is she one of Sallah’s kids who went off to school in the UK? Are those Nazis who got recruited in Operation Paperclip who are up to no good years later? I don’t know, and at the moment, I don’t care. Because that’s Indiana Jones, dammit. I’m sold. That’s the GUY.
I went into the trailer skeptical, but by the end I was grinning from ear to ear. And I’ll be there on opening day to see what happens, just like I’ve been doing for the last four decades.