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Not since he's been banging your mum, no.

That is clearly a trick question.

I had teh misfortune of taking someone to forbidden planet in the mid 90's about 5 minutes after getting in there and looking at what i was missing from my collections that month this "person" decided to laugh at the top of her voice before announcing that comics and people that read them were retarded.

Mums can be so cruel.

To be perfectly blunt, Klute, I'm surprised that 1) you didn't recognise plain rude behavior and brush it off as such, regardless of the target of scorn, and 2) that she wasn't offered a job in the store.

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Evolution in any genre comes not from emulation of past successes in that genre and that genre alone, but from recognising what works in the television medium as a whole.  With sci-fi, it's simply feeding on itself and it shows: would we be seeing bad camerawork in every sci-fi show if it hadn't been done in BSG - a sci-fi show - first?  Would we bollocks.

To put it another way: shakycam and dour faces do not hide the fact that Stargate: Universe hasn't had a single original plot.  Not one single, original thought has it brought to the table and it's hailed in some quarters as being the greatest sci-fi fantasy since ever.  That is not indicative of a genre that is evolving, that is indicative of a genre suckling on its own arse.


And as much as I like H50, there's not a question of it finding 'a place' in the schedules or market - it's a glossy, trashy, generic crime show populated with models and things explode at least once an episode.  You couldn't get a safer and more market-ready product if you tried. and the only way it could possibly fail is if it gets buggered around in the schedules.

Getting a very Roger Corman vibe from that trailer.

I know I keep accusing sci-fi of eating its own tail, but getting some Cloverfield all up in my ID4 is certainly changing my mind.  They've even used the ID4 font, bless their cotton socks.

Phil Hester is a highly underrated writer who - like Dave Gibbons - can't seem to shake the artist tag.

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Good on you, Goaty!

But I demand more.  Not next week, now.

Pfff.  I see not comedy here but an accurate historical reconstruction of events.

Also, why is Alan sitting in a puddle of his own urine?

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I'll read pretty much anything, though I do find the crime genre to be rather tired bar the odd Peter Milligan or Ed Brubaker joint.  Alongside licenced comics, Manga elicits an automatically snobbish response in me no matter how many Plutos or Yotsuba&!s there are (not many), though in my defence this is a reaction to the quality of reproduction in the west rather than the original material, especially the truly amazing amount of people who buy into the idea that not flipping the art but flipping (the reading direction of) dialogue reads makes less of an impact on the translation of a sequential work than flipping both.

Mainstream superhero comics and war stories would likely be my main area of interest, with a side order of American shouju, which is a fascinating market more than it is one that's born good comics, being as it is an idea almost insanely simple (make comics that don't alienate women), yet hamstrung by the constraints of the market that it is deliberately trying to break out of.
I tend to avoid anything with 'Vertigo' on the cover because it's usually talky guff like Ex Machina or an unending parade of stuff derived from something Neil Gaiman wrote twenty years ago about gay goblins in London or something.

Oh, and Neil Gaiman books - also brings out the snob in me.

It's only getting made because of the John Wayne version.  If it had remained merely a novel the chances of seeing this new version would be somewhat slimmer.

A remake would be different purely by dint of the Duke not being in it, though - any movie starring John Wayne is a John Wayne movie, but the novel wasn't Cogburn's story, it was Mattie's as she told us about the friendship developing between her and Cogburn through their shared bloody-mindedness ("grit") even if it loses them limbs along the way to their biblical showdown with the killer of Mattie's father.  I loved the Wayne movie, but let's be honest here - it's not going anywhere, is it?  It's not like they're going to track down every copy in existence and burn it or anything, and you can't get a safer pair of hands than the Coen boys.

Ipods and PSPs still aren't that cheap.

Hmmm, I must say that one passed me by. At our school we just settled for saying, "You Joey!" or "You Deacon!"

Different life experiences, different social circles, etc - it's not unreasonable to assume that different words end up being shorthand for the same thing across a relatively minor class divide.  'Round our way there was enough of a divide between catholic and protestant (living in the same town) to make the odd word a puzzler, compounded by relatively short distances between council estates or villages creating practically different dialects.  Language is an ever-evolving thing.

It's not the material that's the issue (because every comic that is currently released is available to download - illegally - within hours or days of its release on the stands and there are literally thousands of free webcomics out there), it's the means of reading it from a digital storage device that defines the shape of digital - or not - comics.  The Ipad is nice, but too expensive for plebs no matter how much early adopters wank over it - and ironically, it seems to have a screen made for easy cleaning should just such an occasion arise.

See a comic or a magazine?  Make an affordable reader around that size and this discussion becomes moot - until then, business as usual, with a side-order of "illegal free comics while everyone drags their heels is just encourage existing readers to think they don't need a fancy reader."

"Ming mong" sounds a bit unlikely and convoluted an explanation when the term has for decades been a disparaging remark leveled at people with Downs Syndrome - amongst us working-class scumbags at any rate.  I'm willing to accept that among middle class art school layabouts the term might not be so prevalent or seen as being as significant as something said by a fellow workshy luvvie, so it's possible that RTD is removed enough from real human beings that his explanation holds water, though only if - like me - you view the middle classes as a sort of seperate - possibly reptilian - species.

I realise, of course, that there's a bit of tongue in cheek about this- but you're making exactly the same sneering, sweeping jibe about your average football fans.

Ahem...

Any fandom has its nutters and obsessives, it's just that with smaller fandoms there's a perception that the percentage of nutbars is higher.