Radiant Comics

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got five new comics:

And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

”Rasl” Issues 1-13 by Jeff Smith

“Rasl” is the latest comic book series from “Bone” cartoonist Jeff Smith. The first issue came out back in 2008 and I read the first few issues back then but then missed a couple along the way and though I still bought each issue as it came out didn’t read them until I recently managed to track down the missing ones. Now with all thirteen issues in hand I got to read them all in a row.

Rasl is the name of the lead character. He looks a little beat up and unkempt but as the story unfolds we learn he once was a clean cut scientist. I remember reading the first three issues and my main memory of them was Rasl using some sort of weird dimension traveling technology to become an art thief. Turns out that is just the beginning of the story and a little misleading.

Through flashbacks we are eventually told the story of his scientific career gone wrong and him trying to save the world, and other worlds, from the consequences of his and his partners actions. That’s what the story is basically about. Rasl trying to set things right. Except he really doesn’t know how. He’s on the run from the government agency who was funding his work and he doesn’t know how to escape them or how to put the genie of his work back into the bottle.

Smith’s artwork here is different than the classic Disney-esque bigfoot style of his work in “Bone”. Not that it isn’t “Cartoony” but there is a more realistic edge to it. He establishes that this story takes place in the real world rather than a fantasy setting. He does a nice job of it. His drawing isn’t always spectacular but his storytelling is. He can keep things flowing nicely.

I enjoyed this big chunk of “Rasl” better then when I just read the first few issues of it. Smith takes his time to tell the story and lays out the big picture well all the while throwing in lots of little picture action. Nikola Tesla, the famous scientist, plays a role in the back story as Rasl was working on some ideas that Tesla played around with a hundred years ago. Tesla is an interesting historical figure so I’m always on board with him.

Science, chase scenes, dimension hoping, art thievery, love, betray, death, faked deaths, cover-ups, and fist fights this comic has a lot happening in it. Check it out for yourself.

For absolutely no reason I’m going to write down the things I regularly eat. For no reason except I don’t think I ever have before. We all have regular things we eat and though we may note the special meals who pays attention to the everyday ones? I think I will for just a moment. After all, I like noting the everyday stuff that gets forgotten with time.

I’m a cereal person for breakfast. For the past couple of years my cereals have been Cheerios and Corn Flakes. For a decade and a half before that it was Wheaties instead of Corn Flakes but the quality of Wheaties declined to the point that I switched to the less expensive Corn Flakes. Why pay an extra two bucks a box if I liked the Corn Flakes just a well as the now lesser Wheaties? I buy the store brand Corn Flakes but the General Mills Cheerios. They still make the best Cheerios. The store brand Cheerios are not as good but the original Cheerios are as good as ever. I put 2% milk on my cereal.

For my after cycling snack I have a banana or a pear followed by a little chocolate. I used to have apples in the mix but I’ve gotten too many bad out-of-season apples. That and I’ve read too many times that apples are loaded with wax and pesticides. I haven’t read such things about pears so I’ll stick with them. I like pears ripened so I wait a few days after I get them home to eat them. I have to time it out right and buy pears before I’m out of them. I also like my bananas ripe. A few brown spots is better than green. Timing is everything.

My chocolate of choice is bags of Ghirardelli chocolate chips. I have one bag of milk chocolate chips and one bag of 60% cocoa chocolate chips. I get my chocolate in chip form because it’s the cheapest way to get it and I can eat a little bit of it at a time. Often I just want a taste of chocolate and a candy bar would be way too much. A dozen chips hits the spot just as well. Sometimes I end up eating more chips than I planned to but it’s still less than a Snickers bar.

My lunches and diners can be fairly interchangeable. I often have the same meal for both. I sometimes make a lot of something in the crock pot and then reheat it for the next week’s worth of lunches or diners. I make chili, stew, a sort of pasta casserole, or a beans and rice dish all in the crock pot. Lately it’s been beans and rice. I go through crock pot phases. Sometimes it sits idle for a month and sometimes it gets used every week for a month.

Yogurt in another thing I go through phases with. I can have it almost every day for months at a time and then lay off it for a month. I’ve put different things in my yogurt over the years but the main thing I always put in it is Grape Nuts cereal. That almost always goes in becasue I like the crunchiness it adds but there is often a third ingredient. I used to put cashews in but they’re a bit too expensive. Recently I started adding various flavors of a shredded wheat type cereal. I’ve bought different brands but recently I’ve been having Kashi Island Vanilla and Kashi Cinnamon. The first goes well with peach yogurt and the second with apple. They really go well with any flavor yogurt but I have my habits.

Sandwiches are on my menu too but I usually have small sandwiches. Some are just chicken on a biscuit. I buy some store baked biscuits slice one in half and put a chicken finger on it. That’s a small sandwich and sometimes I even have cheese instead of chicken. A sandwich that small sometimes calls for a cereal chaser. A little bowl of shredded wheat does the trick. Not a breakfast size bowl.

Another sandwich I eat is chicken on a Ciabatta roll. A local super market sells some really good Ciabatta rolls and they’re a favorite of mine. That sandwich is a little bigger than the biscuit one and I put mustard, lettuce, and cheese on it as well as some chicken. The rolls are usually toasted because they go stale within a couple of days and I don’t eat them that fast but they still make great toast. And the cheese is a sharp cheddar.

My third type of regular sandwich is the classic egg sandwich. I’ve been having them on toasted Portuguese rolls lately. I season the pan with a little butter, oregano, thyme, basil, and garlic powder and then drop the eggs in. I cook the eggs over hard. That means I break the yokes so things don’t get all runny when I bite into my sandwich. I throw some cheddar cheese on top of the eggs too. I put a little hot sauce on the toasted roll to give the thing some zing. I use mild hot sauce because I’m not a “The hotter the better” guy.

For an afternoon snack I’ve been getting back into granola bars lately. I used to always have them but then kinda gave them up for a couple of years. I stay away from the really sweet ones but, annoyingly, the more natural ones tend to be the more expensive ones. I’m not a coffee fan but a few weeks ago I decided to try a chocolate mocha granola bar. I actually liked it and so bought a couple of boxes and ate them over a few weeks time. Now for some reason I don’t like them as much. I have a box that’s been sitting on my shelf for over a week. I just can’t hang with that coffee flavor.

I sometimes get chips to satisfy that craving for something salty and crunchy but I stay away from potato chips and the more fattening types. I’ve had rice and popcorn chips lately. I like them but I don’t love them. Of course it’s a good thing that I don’t love them. I love potato chips and therefor would over-indulge in them if I actually bought them. I’ll stick to the ones that are a little more like cardboard, thank you. They do the job.

The last thing to make it into my current rotation are cookies. I’m a huge cookie fan. Mostly types of chocolate chip cookies but I’ve stayed away from them for a long while because I usually just want one cookie and you can’t buy just one. I like to buy the store baked cookies but you have to buy them in packs of twenty and either they’ll go stale if I don’t eat them or I’ll eat too many of them just because they’re hanging around. A few weeks ago I bought some of my old favorite Pepperidge Farm cookies. I put them on a high shelf and forget about them until I felt like having a cookie. Since they don’t go stale so fast there is no ticking clock making me eat them and I don’t over-indulge.

So those are my current eating habits. They’ve changed over the years but I’m not exactly sure in what way. Less pasta is definite but probably in other ways too. If only I wrote a blog about it ten years ago. Oh well, I can look back on this one ten years from now.

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got eight new comics:

And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

”Thunderbolts: Cage” by Jeff Parker and Kev Walker

Here I go with the second Thunderbolts trade I’ve read lately. This one is by the same writer, Jeff Parker, with a new artist on board, Kev Walker. I’ve been enjoying Parker’s writing as of late and that’s what prompted me to buy four trades of Thunderbolts. That and they were cheap.

This volume is a new start in the Thunderbolts story. A new team is formed withe some new faces and some old ones. The Thunderbolts are a super team made up of incarcerated super villains who are looking for a chance to turn their lives around. Or maybe just get out of prison for a few hours. In the last volume the team were lead by Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin, who is a super villain but had gained legitimate political power. Now he’s been taken down and a new man is running the Thunderbolts. Luke Cage.

Cage is an ex-con (he was framed) and a genuine hero so he’s a good choice to lead this group of super prisoners. We get a look at how the prison runs, how Cage runs the team, and the missions they go on. There is not much more to it than that. It was fun escapist entertainment and I enjoyed it.

The art was nicer than in the previous volume. It’s that modern illustrative style that we’re all familiar with theses days. Lots of modeling in the color and lots of little “Detail” that doesn’t really add up to much. I’m not much of a fan of that style but here it’s well drawn and the storytelling is solid so there is not much to complain about. Kev Walker is talented even is his work here is not totally to my taste.

Overall this was a solid super hero comic. Well crafted but not ground breaking. It you too can get it for cheap it’s worth a read.

I’ve been a teetotaler all my life. The kids these day call it “Straight Edge” but I prefer teetotaler because it’s old fashioned and sounds funny. Straight Edge might even be old fashioned by now. I first heard that as a term for someone who doesn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs back in the early 1990s but I’m told it was around in the 1980s too. I’m not sure how I missed it then since the late 80s were my college years and with all the partying going on in college I would think it should have come up. But it could have been more of a music scene phrase back then and only creeped more into the mainstream in the early 90s when it caught my ear.

As a consequence of not being in the mainstream of the world of drinking I don’t have any stories of being so drunk out of my mind that such-and-such happened. I may be out of my mind in an everyday sort of way but can’t start any tales with the phrase, “I was so wasted that…”. I certainly understand drinking and getting high in that it allows people to relax and have some fun or it allows some people to just plain escape the relentless drone of everyday life but it’s never been something I’ve enjoyed. For whatever reason I enjoy the way my mind works in its natural state.

I’ve been to plenty of parties in my lifetime and am perfectly capable of hanging out with the drinkers and having a good time but on occasion things elude me. There are sometimes I have to have certain things about the getting high world explained to me. One of them was huffing. That’s when a person inhales paint fumes or some such. I mean, seriously, paint fumes? I guess it’s mostly kids who do it since they don’t have access to alcohol or drugs but it’s not always kids. Sometimes full grown adults get addicted to huffing. That I did not get. Inhaling toxic fumes can make you die.

Huffing always seemed like a really bizarre way to get high to me but a friend of mine explained it to me once as, “There can sometimes be a really fine line between being sick and being high”. I must say that I found that explanation strange and could never quite understand it until now. No, I haven’t started huffing or getting high but I did just get over being sick.

It wasn’t a dread disease or any long illness but it was some sort of cold, flu, or sinus infection that knocked me off my feet for a few days. It took me over a full week to recover and I rarely get sick like that so it was significant to me. Oddly enough the last time I was that sick was the week after the Giants won the Super Bowl back in February 2008. I think the game made me so tense and nervous that something snuck in under my immune system. With the memory of that I tried to stay calmer as the Giants won the Super Bowl this past February and managed not to repeat the events of 2008 but something got me anyway these couple of months later.

My main symptoms were fatigue and dizziness. My head was stuffy and my throat a bit sore but I’ve had worse in both those areas. It was when I stood up that things spun around and I just plain wanted to sit down again. Lay down again would be more accurate. Thursday I was still up and working a little bit but Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I was flat on my back. I was mostly on my couch sleeping the day away. Sometimes I’d have the TV on. For some reason I like to nap to documentaries and even though I wasn’t technically napping since I was sick I put the docs on anyway. They soothe me somehow. I had seen them all before and was barely awake for them but they added a small bit of something pleasant to my sick days.

For some reason I also got up at my regular 7 AM wake up time every morning. Despite fatigue being my main symptom and my not setting my alarm I still woke up at my regular time, got out of bed, and showered after which I immediately lay down on the couch for the day. A couple of those mornings I questioned my sanity for being up and showering as normal but in the end it did make me feel better. The thought of not getting up and showering brought me down.

So here is the part where I tie this all in to getting high and it wasn’t because of any cold medicine I was on. That stuff can make me sleepy or wired but not high. At least the over-the-counter stuff that I get. This part of the story takes place on Saturday morning. That was my second out of three days flat on my back. I had just gotten out of the shower, dressed, and had eaten breakfast. After that I lay down on the couch at about 7:30 AM. I didn’t turn the TV on and was lying there in the quiet of the morning.

As the time passed I drifted in and out of a dream-like state. I wasn’t really asleep but I wasn’t awake either. Being that I was sick I had a water bottle next to me to drink from to keep hydrated. I knew I was thirsty because I would dream/imagine I was drinking from the bottle. That’s when I’d reach down and drink from it for real. It was weird to see myself drink once in my mind and then in reality. I stayed on the couch until about 10 AM when I sat up to watch TV.

The dream-like time from 7:30-10 AM passed fairly quickly. The next hour of TV time seemed to drag on for twice as long. I looked back on my morning on the couch as pleasant. That’s when I realized I was experiencing the fine line that, “There can sometimes be a really fine line between being sick and being high” was describing. I’m not saying I was high but for the first time ever I could see the fine line.

Of course that was two hours out of a week of being sick the rest of which was in no way pleasant or like being high but it is the first time I can actually understand that statement. Now I wonder the percentage of time that huffing actually makes a person sick as compared to high. I gotta figure at best it’s 50/50. I mean they’re poisonous fumes! Alright, I still don’t get huffing. It’s seems crazy to me.

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got five new comics:

And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

”The Champions” #s 11-15 by Bill Mantlo and John Byrne

I wasn’t planning on reading these issues but I pulled them down off the shelf to lend to someone so I thought I’d give them a read first. I probably haven’t read them since my high school days in the early 80s but these issues are from around 1977. I used to have the complete run of “The Champions” from issue one until this final issue fifteen but I got rid of the others years ago. I don’t remember them being very good.

I kept these ones because of the John Byrne art. Back in those days his art could lift even a mediocre story into the category of good story. I usually liked Bill Mantlo’s writing back in the day and it’s okay here but the art is the real treat. The Champions were a weird team, Angel, Iceman, Hercules, The Black Widow, and Ghost Rider, and the writers on the book never had a good handle on what to do with them. These issues were a cut above the rest of the series but still not anywhere near memorable. Except for the villain, Swarm, who is made out of bees I didn’t remember anything of these issues.

They have the hallmarks of 1970s Marvel comics. A near omniscient third person narrator, thought balloons, and lots of action. The writing might seem old fashioned to some but it’s well crafted. There are even cliffhangers within the book as they change scenes. Since we live in a world of decompressed storytelling I haven’t seen that in a while. It was fun to read.

Even as a kid I thought “The Champions” should have been a better book than it was. I liked all the characters and wanted it all to work but somehow it never did. Even way back when it was a forgotten book soon after it was cancelled. These Byrne drawn issues were certainly the strongest of the lot and solid comics but even they missed the mark a little bit. Still the strongest story was the last one, the two parter with Swarm, so maybe Mantlo and Byrne could have pulled it together if they had a few more issues to work with. But they didn’t. If you’re in the mood for a little late 70s Marvel nostalgia these aren’t bad books to pick up.