martin_wisse

For some reason I stopped reading comix back in 2000; don't know why, just stopped completely from one day to the next. Burned out. Before then I must've been dropping anywhere from $500 to $1000 a month on the hobby; now I'm happy to have a couple of bucks left over each month to buy some secondhand book, let alone any comics.

Yet I have started reading comics again, but only very modestly. It started with Warren Ellis' Nextwave, an incredibly brilliant pisstake on regular superhero comics which is still a good superhero comic in its own right, just with the silliness turned to eleven.

That lead me to Agents of Atlas, a six issue miniseries starring te socalled 1950ties Avengers, one of those retrofitted groups of heroes dregded up by Roy Thomas back in the seventies for an issue of What if. One of those concepts that's quite naff on its own merits, but with the glimmer of something interesting, if only the right writer could unlock it.
Jeff Parker is that writer.

However, both these series have now ended or will end soon, so I've looked for a replacement and I think I found it in NewUniversal, Warren Ellis' re-imaginering of that old Marvel embarassement, the New Universe, a mid-eighties attempt to create a new line of more "realistic" superhero titles, supposedly set in "the world outside your window". For the modern version Ellis has sort of taken the opposite approach, setting it in a world without superheroes, but quite clearly not our own either. It works well enough to keep me reading.

So ummm, notice a trend there? Yep, they're all sort of reworkings of not that good concepts I still liked quite a lot back in the days...

They're busying stripping the carpet and equalising the floor in the office today to prepare for laying new carpet. The guy using the equalising machine, which makes a hellish din, is wearing ear protection.

Us? Us not so much.

Oww.

Are the icons. Any serious discussion with all those twee, often animated cute little things on the side just becomes so much harder.

Also annoying: the threading on comments: too many and you get subthreads you cannot see until you click on them! Bah!