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Whats everyone reading?

Started by Paul faplad Finch, 30 March, 2009, 10:04:36 PM

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Colin YNWA

Man folks are reading good stuff at the moment. Locke and Key is another favourite of mine.

Rately

Quote from: Colin YNWA on 16 April, 2019, 11:47:09 AM
Man folks are reading good stuff at the moment. Locke and Key is another favourite of mine.

It really is! And I'm intrigued to see the Netflix Adaptation.

Dandontdare

Ooh, I didn't know about that - should be perfect for TV adaption, although it seems to have had a troubled development - an original pilot for Fox was made in 2011, then it was going to be a trilogy of movies, and finally after a flirtation with Hulu, it's now going to be with Netflix.

Link Prime

Quote from: Dandontdare on 16 April, 2019, 02:28:16 PM
it seems to have had a troubled development - an original pilot for Fox was made in 2011, then it was going to be a trilogy of movies, and finally after a flirtation with Hulu, it's now going to be with Netflix.

Development Hell as we called it in the pre-internet / SFX Magazine days.
I really hope that they do it justice, it's such a good premise.

Anyone know if the unaired pilot from 2011 ever made it out to the inter-webs?
Looked for it a few times before.

JOE SOAP

#6499
Quote from: Link Prime on 16 April, 2019, 03:06:25 PM
Anyone know if the unaired pilot from 2011 ever made it out to the inter-webs?


There are 2 pilots:


Dreamworks/FOX (2011)

"Mark Romanek directed the hell out of it. It had a $10 million budget."

http://collider.com/locke-and-key-movie-update-joe-hill/


IDW/HULU (2018)

"IDW self-financed a Locke & Key pilot for Hulu at a cost of $13.6m"

https://www.newsarama.com/43359-idw-borrows-28m-from-its-chairman-for-tv-movie-projects.html

https://deadline.com/2018/03/locke-key-pilot-dead-not-going-to-series-hulu-pauses-pilot-orders-shopped-1202354352/

https://www.dreadcentral.com/news/270813/joe-hill-calls-andy-muschiettis-recently-dumped-locke-key-pilot-fcking-awesome/


Netflix aren't using the HULU pilot.

Greg M.

Quote from: Colin YNWA on 16 April, 2019, 06:08:23 AM
I'm delighted to see there's a special / one shot coming out soon(ish) by Milligan and Allred.

Allred won't be drawn (pun not intended) on whether there might be more beyond Giant Size X-Statix, so maybe it won't just be a one-shot. Based on the cover, I was worried Milligan might be bringing Edie back - hers is a death that needs to stick, as it's all the more powerful for it - but the book will apparently feature a new U-Go Girl. Her daughter, now grown-up, maybe?

Keef Monkey

Decided to dive into the Star Wars new canon novels so just finished the first one, New Dawn. Enjoyed it a lot, and it really put me in the mood to finally watch the last couple of seasons of Clone Wars that have been on the TODO list for a while!

Next up reading the Judges novellas, still got the last two to go.

TordelBack

Quote from: Keef Monkey on 17 April, 2019, 03:22:32 PM
Decided to dive into the Star Wars new canon novels so just finished the first one, New Dawn.

Of the 'new canon' stuff, I've only read Bloodline, the pre-TFA Leia novel, and Cobalt Squadron, the pre-TLJ Rose & Paige novel.  The former was genuinely very enjoyable, the latter a bit weaker and suffering from its YA ambience, but still interesting. Meaning to tackle JJM's New Dawn and the Wendig ones, at some point.




Professor Bear

After the one thousand page snooze fest that was SevenEves, it was nice to dip back into vintage UK comics territory for the Rebellion trade collection of the entire run of Fran Of The Floods, a daffy and episodic adventure romp through an England struck by a waterpocalypse which inexplicably has a name that I am 100 per cent convinced was the writer deliberately thinking of a euphemism for lady troubles and then seeing if he could get paid for it - which sounds unlikely until you remember that Alan Grant and John Wagner basically invented British comics as we currently know them by shouting things they thought were funny at each other in the pub and then seeing if they could get someone to publish it.
The first bunch of episodes are the best, as everyone turns on each other while the environment collapses and the world goes to Hell with everyone apprehensive about the end definitely coming any day now - basically, Alan Davidson predicted the current state of affairs with uncanny accuracy.
A lot of the panels are very meme-friendly because of the dated melodrama of it all ("I'm the king of Glasgow!"), but what I found welcome was the uncritical use of faith in some of the final episodes.  God is seen as a good thing despite the terrible destruction he's just wreaked upon the world, but that's not dwelt upon, faith is a thing that people are allowed to indulge in order to cope with what's happened and they're allowed to do so in a way that more cynical comics wouldn't have countenanced.  OTOH the characters are also menaced by a shark (seriously, Glasgow is one really shitty city) and then saved by a passing dolphin, so...
Maybe goes off the boil a bit after the first half - there's a whole arc about a death village whose central conceit is that the doctor is so terrible at his job he doesn't know what scurvy is - but the opening third and the last leg are very enjoyable.  Phil Gascoine plays a blinder on the art throughout.

The Adventurer

Oh, you didn't care for Seveneves? I found it rather gripping, or at least the first two thirds of it (that 3rd arcs was kind of a left turn). But I really like the kind of chunky hard science it was going for.

THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Professor Bear

I thought it was alright, but the technical manual/storytelling ratio put it into Tom Clancy territory for me.

Theblazeuk

I read The Haunting of Tram Car 15 by P Djeli Clark, a rather good little novella set in an alternate Cairo where Djinn and other supernatural creatures have become commonplace since some point in the late 19th Century. I'm not a huge fan of 'urban fantasy' or 'ministry of magic' type stuff, as usually it comes off pretty hackneyed to me. But this was pretty brilliant with some compelling characters and I'd love to read more of this - I'll be reading it, A Dead Djinn in Cairo, on the train on the way home (available for free on Tor at this link).

Other than that I've been plowing through all the Laundry Files RPG books to mine for some stuff I'm putting together for the Delta Green RPG. Basically trying to do some material for the UK based PISCES agency, who are a kind of successful MK Ultra type programme but one that's been heavily compromised by aliens, unbeknownst to most of its agents. Some great stuff in The Laundry , might have to read them all again - kind of lost track around the Apocalypse Codex. One thing that leaps out in a difference of tone is that magic in the Laundry series is very commonplace for those in the know, far more than I really remembered.

Tjm86

Stress has shifted focus with the last couple of laundry novels and widened his circle of characters.  Makes for an interesting turn of events as it is not all 'Bob Howard the Hero' ....

My personal Stephen King binge is continuing with The Stand.  It's been quite literally decades since I read it and it does stand up well.  Interesting the bits I recall.  Next on my list is Firestarter then I need to track down a copy of Dead Zone (both of which count as the only two decent film adaptations of books I've ever come across - no I haven't seen the Shining, and yes I do appreciate how great a lapse that is!).  The game plan is to round out the early novels (including actually reading Cujo and Christine which I never did back in the day) before moving on to some of his more recent work (okay, stuff he has written in the last 25 years).

Oh, and A R Luria's Cognitive Development: It's cultural and social foundations.  A fascinating study of cognition amongst natives of Uzbekistan in early Soviet Russia.

Professor Bear

Misty Volume 3: Wolf Girl and other stories - as ever, the art's fantastic, but this is probably the least of the Misty volumes released thus far, as the sudden climax to the main story just as it's getting interesting may be a great reminder of what a relentless meat grinder UK comics were in terms of content, but it's also terribly unsatisfying for someone who's reading the collected edition of the story in the here and now.*  The lead character just seems melodramatic and it's almost like she has some kind of what we would now recognise as Asbergers, consciously and compulsively acting out subconscious knowledge of her past (as a babby, she is reared briefly in the wild by a recently-bereaved she-wolf) to a ludicrous degree, and the wilderness survival chapters and the episodes where she's going crackers and none of her mates can understand feel too much like two entirely different stories that I find equally interesting separately, but together just don't pay off.
The rest of the book is made up of a bunch of werewolf or werewolf-adjacent short stories of variable quality, and (seamless segway) speaking of variable quality, this has to be some of the shoddiest reproduction I've seen in any of these books to date.  The colour pages are absolutely dreadful, for some reason reproduced entirely rather than the linework lifted and the colours reapplied digitally, which clearly isn't beyond the technical skills of the repro team as they do just that with an image from one of the worst pages in the book and then use it in cleaned-up form as a framing/credits page for one of the stories.  What really grates is that they haven't even cleaned up the lettering, which can be blurry and borderline-unreadable in places.
Probably the first missable entry in this series for me, though it had odd moments of enjoyable silliness.


* As a counterpoint, I read Kids Rule OK online years ago and the sudden ending - while hilarious - was somehow absolutely spot-on.  I just couldn't conceive of a more apt wrap-up than the one that I read and which I did not even need explaining with any real-world context.

Professor Bear

Jinty: The Land of No Tears and The Human Zoo.
Land of No Tears' arsehole lead character is an instant classic, being born with a gammy leg and milking it for all it's worth until the day she's given corrective surgery and does a Buck Rogers, waking up in a nightmarish future world where girls who are less than perfect for any reason - overweight, wearing glasses, having a bald spot - have to live like the house elves in Harry Potter, waiting on "the alpha girls" hand and foot.  I gather these kinds of stories where young heroes lost all agency and were trapped in oppressive systems were pretty popular with readers of girls' UK comics, but I just kept wondering why the lead character didn't put broken glass in the mean girl's food, or stab her while she was asleep.  The hysterics and melodrama are very entertaining while they last, though the wrap-up - if not terribly rushed - still feels a bit unsatisfying, and the story's attitude towards physical disability is really strange.
While I have seen the Human Zoo's promise of a story "where they treat girls like animals!" many times before, I have to say the videos on Pornhub were way off on how this scenario might play out.  I am not sure the science in this holds up to scrutiny, and I'm a bit confused how an alien race that uses computers to store and access information doesn't know how a written language works, but the story is fun while it lasts and some of the alien dad's comments about "human" animals were funny.  At this stage, a satisfying ending would be a break from tradition, but stories have to wrap up at some point.
The reproduction is really patchy, but there's nothing as egregious as the Misty Vol. 3 colour pages, it's just the odd page isn't as crisp as it could be.  The book weighs in at over 100 pages of strip, so there's plenty of reading in it, but it might be best for younger readers.