Saturday, July 19, 2008

Sad-urday Night "Fun"

If, like me, you're a pathetic nerd, then you spend some Saturday nights avoiding social interaction, talking to your cat, and waiting for your roommate to get home from work. Also, you look for clips of cancelled Saturday morning cartoon clips on YouTube.

Stumbled on this: Frank Miller and Geof Darrow's Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot. I'm not sure if this is the whole run, but there seems to be quite a few episodes uploaded. While the cartoon doesn't have the beautifully destroyed cityscapes (sorry, I couldn't find an example online) that Geof Darrow did so well in the comic, it is still pretty entertaining.

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Unknown Soldier preview via Newsarama

Newsarama has a preview of the new Unknown Soldier series from Vertigo, written by Joshua Dysart, with art by Alberto Ponticelli. Read the press release article here. Billed as an "all new interpretation," I assume this iteration of Unknown Soldier will be closer to the Unknown Soldier of the 80's (revisited a few years back by Garth Ennis) than the Unknown Soldier that was originally conceived by Joe Kubert for Star Spangled War Stories. See wikipedia article.

I am quite looking forward to this book, as I thoroughly enjoyed the cynicism and vitriol of Ennis' version of the character. The story, centering on the political strife in Uganda circa 2002, looks like it has a lot of potential.

Here is the 5 page preview.

This preview sets the stage for what could be a very ambitious, engaging story, capable of bringing a number of very important issues to light in an entertaining way. However, I do take some issue with the script. Take a look at page two, panel two, where the translator says "The child, he say he walk to look for jack fruit in the bush. He say he find rebels, but he got away." I can tell the writer was going for a modest, but dignified, type of dialogue, but the incorrect subject verb agreement gives a connotation of ignorance that doesn't do much to authenticate the setting for me. Also, shouldn't the "Doctors!" (in panel one of the same page) be to indicate that another language is being spoken? An oversight like that creates the illusion of an even wider social divide between the Doctor and the people she is helping.

Script issues, or no, I'll be taking a closer look at this series.

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