Stump the Doominator, Week of March 15

Mar152009March 15, 2009March 15, 20093Commentsby Doominator

Stump the Doominator, Week of March 15

Posted in reviews, stump the doominator by

… is not happening. Sorry! No one sent me questions. Shame, shame. If you want to send some for next week, send them on to doominator_at_doomkopf_dot_com.

So instead, I just want to disagree with most people on the board and say I liked the Watchmen movie. For me, it highlighted something important: the inherent ridiculousness of wearing a costume and fighting crime. In the movie, we see how seriously they take themselves – and, as highlighted by Dr. Manhattan, how ultimately futile it is. Sure, the book did the same thing, but it took seeing it on screen to know first hand.
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Mar102009March 10, 2009March 9, 20093Commentsby Doominator

Movie Review: Coraline

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One year for Christmas, I got my niece the book “Coraline” by Neil Gaiman, in an attempt to turn her into a total dork. It paid off, and quickly, she was enamored with Neil Gaiman, so I gave her a Sandman volume and my copy of Neverwhere. Not sure if she ever read those, but “A Game of You” isn’t the lightest of reading when you’re in high school.

It was only fair that I read the book too, and I ended up loving it as well. Compared to the pages-and-pages of Boxcar Children books I mis-spent my childhood on, the world of Coraline was alive with rich detail, creating an imaginative modern day fairytale … sort of like most of Gaiman’s other work.

So when the movie was announced, we joked that I’d fly home to the land of the other Doomkopfers just to see it. Instead, I dragged a friend along with me so I wasn’t a creepy, bearded 25-year-old spending a Sunday afternoon alone in a children’s movie.

So, a few weeks after the release, my review:
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Mar102009March 10, 2009March 9, 20091Commentby Doominator

Q&A: Julia Wertz

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Since 2005, Julia Wertz has been writing the autobiographical, misanthropic strip known as The Fart Party. But recently, she released I Saw You …, an anthology of comics based on real life missed connections from Craigslist and other sources. Funny, sad, creepy and just weird, the anthology assembles works by knowns and unknowns, including the very known Peter Bagge and the somewhat-known Jeffrey Brown.

Now that the book is out, Wertz seems not so sure of what she’s unleashed on the world, apologizing for the negative tone some of her answers took. But maybe she’s just sick of all the interviews. Regardless, the answers are, in the least, funny and crass … sort of like Fart Party.
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Mar082009March 8, 2009March 8, 20095Commentsby Doominator

Stump the Doominator, week of March 8, 2009

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Welcome one and all to this week’s edition of Stump the Doominator, brought to you this week by a nasty Yuengling hangover and a sinking feeling inside me.

Remember the fun of it all – you ask me a question, and in varying degrees of accuracy and a solid state of flipancy, I try to solve them in one sentence.

Nate Winchester of Hunting Muses asks:

Explain Zero Hour

Christ. Here goes:
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Mar062009March 6, 2009March 6, 2009NoCommentby Doominator

“Watchmen” opens today

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Of course you knew that, you’re a total nerd.

So we’ll see whose right … is it Jim Doom or Alan Moore, a la this cartoon, found at The Ephemerist?

Alan Moore wins

We’ll see. Do I smell a roundtable or Podcast of Doom?


Mar042009March 4, 2009March 4, 20091Commentby Doominator

Swamp Thing, Alan Moore and radicalism

Posted in rants & nostalgia by

Salon had an interesting piece today on Swamp Thing and Alan Moore’s politics in the midst of so much Reagan. It can be found here.

While nothing staggeringly ground breaking, it does make a lot of connections to attempted counter-culture movements of the time:

It’s been said that Moore was ahead of his time by infusing a holistic, ecological perspective into comics in 1984, and that his anti-authoritarian politics, sometimes bordering on anarchism, were unusual and daring amid the so-called Reagan revolution. But that overlooks the fact that the radical environmental movement was rapidly gaining steam among the American left — Earth First! had been founded in 1979 — and in a climate of deepening economic recession and widespread youth unemployment (hello!), the summer of 1984 would see large, anarchist-influenced “punk protests” at the Democratic convention in San Francisco.

Moore was right on time and right on message for a specific micro-generation of young people who were disillusioned and disgusted by Reaganism, and had lost any sense of connection to the American dream. Our consciousness had been shaped — as Moore’s clearly was — by Joe Strummer and Johnny Rotten (Moore had actually written a screenplay for Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren), by Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon, by campus organizing against apartheid and the U.S. proxy war in El Salvador. With his near-total divorce from human ethics balanced by his planetary consciousness, Swamp Thing became perhaps the first postmodern comic-book hero.

and finishes with:

He gave a generation of suburban nihilists, fueled by black coffee and loud guitars and soulless temp jobs, a creature from the swamp who seemed to embody their desire to destroy and their urge to create. It was something to believe in, at last.

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Mar032009March 3, 2009March 16, 20092Commentsby Doominator

Stump the Doominator, Week of March 1, 2009

Posted in rants & nostalgia, stump the doominator by

Well, it seems that despite my own superpowers, my car is not invincible, and Sunday when I should have written this, I was stuck in a snow storm in Aberdeen, MD waiting to see if I could get a serpentine belt for my car. Wouldn’t you know, you can’t find those on a Sunday night in the middle of nowhere, and in real life, I don’t have any powers to conjure those out of my ass or the ass of the patient mechanic witnessing my desperate pleas to any and all friends who live or know somebody who lives in the Baltimore metropolitan area.

So here’s your stumpening for the week. Remember the rules. You throw me a storyarch, origin or trivia item, and I have to try my best to sum it up in one sentence. It’s like a Cliff Notes of nerdery.

As is cumpolsory, seemingly, at least one member of the Legion of Doom threw a question my way. This week it was Doom Fritter. He asks:

Since you’re an X-Fan, I’m going to throw you a curve ball and ask for the summary of the first twenty-five issues of X-Men 2099.
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Feb272009February 27, 2009February 27, 20097Commentsby Doominator

Marvel is stuck in the mid-90s again

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As a child, I feared for my livelihood. Marvel Comics, the only thing I had to live for as a lad of 10, was going bankrupt. There was talks DC might buy them. There were talks that they’d go under. There were talks talks talks.

Then they just axed a bunch of titles and resorted themselves and came back.

The problem was too many titles, too many gimmicks, too many crossovers and not enough new series that actually sustained themselves with an audience.

Well, with the seeming barrage of all of these things, it shows Marvel never learns. The April solicits just confirm that. Read on … (more…)


Feb222009February 22, 2009February 23, 2009NoCommentby Doominator

Stump the Doominator, Week of Feb. 22, 2009

Posted in rants & nostalgia, stump the doominator by

This feature – where I try to sum up a complicated storyline or storylife in one sentence – is still fairly new. But Stump the Doominator submissions this week were … scant. Really scant. In fact, three of these are Doom DeLuise questions. We’ll start with those:

Explain Hypertime.

Hypertime is Mark Waid being an excessively lazy turd and finding a way for DC to not have to do jack about continuity by saying that if a story is told, it happens and its canon which puts “Smallville” on the same level as “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” and puts the Wonder Twins as actually having been Justice League members.

What the flippity-do (no, he didn’t use that word) is Mojo, and what is he all about?

Mojo is an alien from a race of spineless, violent beings who controls his own little corner of Hell called Mojoworld that’s all about ramping up television ratings for other evil beings on this plane of existence by having people die a lot, and in order to do this he clones dudes with three fingers and makes babies out of superheroes.

Who are all the known members of the Summers family (including ones from alternate realities, like Marvel Girl 3)? (more…)


Feb212009February 21, 2009February 23, 20092Commentsby Doominator

Book of Doom: Johnny Monster #1

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So, I learned something very important. Don’t try new things. Ever. You’ll get burnt and disappointed, and your friends will think less of you. That is, at least, what I surmised from the reactions to Johnny Monster #1.

In my own views, the issue was certainly not good. It was kind of fun – you know, fighting monsters is right up there on career tracts with astronaut in the level of awesome. But this “fun” belied juvenile pacing resulting in a rushed plot placing getting from Point A to Point B ahead of figuring out how. This leaves it a good comic for someone who is, say, six-years-old who sits in rapt attention of the plot of a Mario Brothers game, but for connoisseurs of nerd books like the Doomkopf crew, it’s left sorely lacking.

Plot? Johnny Monster is a monster hunter, the only humane one. He traps the monsters, as opposed to the rival monster poachers. But something seems fishy to a name-forgotten-or-not-said reporter, who realizes that Johnny speaks monster. It’s because Johnny lives in a valley with the monsters and listens to outdated music with them. The reporter found this out by following him, and finding out that Johnny was raised by one of these monsters.

That’s a Disney Channel premise right there, complete with so-so monster design. For its audience, there are fun parts to the book. But outside of that audience, yawns follow.

A couple people reserved more hatred for it, so let’s start off with Jim Doom: (more…)