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Earlier this year I started a comic podcast over at www.professorsexinthetoiletwiththelawnmower.com. I got a couple episodes out but the time it took to produce and the fact it was no fun doing it alone, I kinda stepped back from it until I can devote the time and resources needed. Right now the site is being used as a starting ground for stuff I would want to do in the future but thats about.

In the meantime, to satisfy my comic blog itch, I’ve signed on to be a regular contributor over at www.comicspoilers.net. I have 5 posts up already and plan on at least 1 new post a week but most likely more depending on the given week.

Digital comic files come in two flavors, CBZ and CBR. They are just renamed ZIP and RAR files containing JPG files. While Quicklook can look at JPG files, it cannot look into a compressed file for them. Over on the arstechnica forums, a user named gheritt has whipped up a Quicklook plugin that allows you to view CBZ files. It displays them inline similar to a PDF file. Only CBZ files work right now. There is no built-in support for RAR compression in OS X 10.5 so CBR files will not work, yet.

Download the file directly from here and install into /Library/Quicklook.

I recently went to go see 30 Days of Night. 30 Days of Night is based off a Steve Niles comic of the same name. My exposure to Steve Niles has been minimal at best. I recently picked up his Simon Dark #1 and enjoyed it but that’s about as much as I’ve read. I picked up the 30 Days of Night TPB a few months ago but never got around to reading it. With the movie coming out, I decided to sit down and read it beforehand.

30 Days of Night’s concept is genius. Vampires invade a town in Alaska that is in darkness for 30 days straight. Simple but brilliant. Unfortunately, the graphic novel fails to execute the idea with success. The store is plagued with pacing and other issues. The art is beautiful but at times its so abstract, its hard to follow what’s actually going on. There is also this odd subplot of a guy from New Orleans going to the town to get proof that Vampires exist. He gets there and dies in one panel. It did nothing to further the plot and I still have no idea why this was in there. The biggest problem with the book is its pacing. When I finished the book, the first words out of my mouth was “That’s it?â€?. The book left more like 30 Hours of Night. There is no sense of time and everything that happens feels like it happens in a very short amount of time. I didn’t hate the book but with everything you hear about it, I expected it to be at least good.

The movie adaption is based on the book’s plot for the most part. As with any book to movie adaption, parts are changed to fit the movie medium. I went to see the movie opening night with my girlfriend who’s into horror movies and she loved it. Me, not so much. I thought the movie was boring. I couldn’t wait for the movie to just get to the end. Like the graphic novel, I didn’t hate it but I didn’t like it. Plagued by the same pacing issues of the book and the lack of suspense, the movie was just a gory snoozefest. There were also a few plot changes from the book that made no sense. The first is they broke up Eben and Stella. Ok, that in itself doesn’t bother me but they never mention why they are broken up. If they had been together still, the movie would not have changed a single bit. Thankful they removed the New Orleans vampire hunter storyline as it was useless in the graphic novel and would have certainly been even more useless here. My biggest problem was again the pacing. They made it seem like the vampires sat on the roofs for 29 days in the freezing cold just waiting while the survivors moved from place to place every week or so. I didn’t care about the survivors, they were mostly nameless extras waiting to get mauled by a vampire and that’s what happened most of the time. There was one guy, Vampire Hunter Hadgid, that you actually felt a connection to but his anti-climatic death was just a kick in the balls.

Not everything in the movie was bad though. I loved the art direction of the movie. There were some great scene in the movie and it really felt cold and dark the whole time. They movie was actually gory enough to make be cringe at a few scenes too. It’s too bad the story and pacing made it fall short. There were just too many WTF moments in the movie for me. Um, little girl shows up after 29 days like its time for Dora the Explorer and lunch? What?! or how about Eben basically committing suicide for no reason. He went to save Stella from a fiery death and the truck never blows up. All he needed to do was wait 10 more minutes for the sun to come up. Huh?

Comic Collector Live, the Windows only database program for comic books has finally launched their Live Market. Live Market sets out to be eBay for comics. This is the one feature I have been waiting for as I have a lot of comics I would like to sell. As soon as I got the email, I booted up Vista via Boot Camp and installed the new version of Comic Collector Live. From there it took no more than 10mins to setup a sellers account. Right now they have two different packages - a $14.95 all you can eat plan and a $0.25 pay per listing plan. If you’re going to sell any more than a handful of comics, the $14.95 seems the better deal as it is only $0.01 to sell and the listing doesn’t expire. Otherwise, its a standard 7 day listing. Selling comics is easy if you have already entered the comic into the program, just click sell and then rate your comics condition. You can rate individual comics or as a group. Also, you can sell individually or as a lot.

Right now I only have up the first 15 issues of Venom as I was playing around but in the next week or so I plan on going through my books and selling anything I don’t wait. From the stats on the homepage, it doesn’t look promising. As of this writing there are 1095 items for sales and only 33 sold. The site did just launch so hopefully over the next few days, the user base will increase. I’m going to give the service a month to see how I make out. Its too bad this is a Windows only, it would be made a great Web app.

No, thats not the answer after a drunken night of co-ed naked Clue, its the name of my new website and podcast covering the weekly comic books. As you may know from some of my blog posts, I recently got back to into comics a few months ago and now I’ll be producing a weekly podcast covering my view of the weeks comics from the eyes of a new comic reader. Bare with me as I try to get everything working smoothly. I hope to polish my public speaking skills, get more comfortable working in Garageband, and get on a solid release schedule, but the first episode is up and you subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or just stream it from the webpage.

Over at Flickr, Ape Lad has issued a challenge, Re-Ink Jack Kirby’s Mighty Thor pencil’s better than Vince Colletta. Page 144 of Lee/Kirby’s Might Thor has been posted and it up to you to re-ink the page yourself then upload your work to the Flickr pool. You can do the whole page or just a panel, its up to you. Since my artistic talent ends at stick figures and coloring books, I’m just going to enjoy everyone else’s submissions.

Like everyone else, I went to see Spider-Man 3 this weekend. Any regular readers of my blog know I’m a big comic fan and have really gotten back into comics in the last 6 month. I loved Spider-Man 1 and even more so Spider-Man 2. This was also the first Spider-man I’ve seen in the theater.

I’ll get right to it and say I’m not sure if I liked it. I didn’t love it but I didn’t hate it either. The two things that ruined it for me were the campy parts and Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane. This felt like more of Sam Raimi doing a Spider-Man movie than a Spider-Man movie directed by Sam Raimi. Anyone who has seen a Sam Raimi movie knows what I’m talking about.

The Good
I loved the Sandman in this. Thomas Haden Church did a brilliant job as the Sandman. He did a great job of bringing emotion to the character. The CGI effects that brought the Sandman to life were mind blowing. These were some of the best effects I’ve ever seen in a movie before.

Eric Forman as Venom?! That was my first reaction but I got to give it to him, he nailed it. I loved Topher Grace as Eddie Brock, tho it was weird hearing him speak as Venom.

Bruce Campbell. Nuff’ Said.

I loved Gwen Stacy in this movie. I one of those people that think Peter Parker would be better off in a world with Gwen Stacy than Mary Jane. My feelings are just amplified in Spider-Man 3. They should have killed off Mary Jane in the beginning and had Peter hook up with Gwen. Much better movie by 10 fold if that happened for me.

The Bad
I hated Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane in this. Didn’t care for her in the first one, was much better in the 2nd and I downright want her dead in 3. I could not see why they would be together in this movie. She cheats on him, she lies to him, doesn’t trust him, is jealous of him. Why they were in a relationship at all is a mystery. The Gwen Stacy scenes were so must better and would have loved to see a lot more Gwen and a hell of a lot less Mary Jane. I really hope shes off the next movie.

This movie is really weird in its comedic aspect. It was a lot of cheese and not a lot of wit. Spider-Man is all about the witty, smart-ass one liners and those are devoid in the movie. Instead we get a campy look at Spider-Man via Sam Raimi. Its one redeeming quality is that the campiness is felt throughout the movie and doesn’t veer from the path. I have to say Spider-Man 3 is what it is. For me in a movie with the emotional look at the Sandman and a terrifying look at revenge and hatred in Venom, the campy backdrop just feels out of place.

Unfortunately it seems that Marvel falls apart at number 3 with their franchises. First with X-Men 3 and now with Spider-Man 3. I don’t think either are bad movies, just missed potential. I think Spider-Man just fell into doing a lot of things OK instead of doing one thing good.