Comics and TV

I finished the second Sandman: Mystery Theater TPB yesterday. Beautiful stuff. While the art isn't Guy Davis (which is dissapointing, Davis' earlier stuff was a bit rough but still nice), it really fit quite nicley together, and there's a nice reconciling of Welsey Dodds' appearence. You can really see how his face would have evolved into the man that Jack Knight met in the Starman arc "Sand and Stars". The first story "The Face" was a nice, classic 30s crime story set in New York's Chinatown, complete with ridiculous prejudices on the parts of most of the characters. "The Brute" was a lot more...well brutal. There were a lot of plot twists, some nice, some not. I disliked the way one of the characters, who seemed initially quite nice and pure hearted, turned into the absolute lowest of scum...but that plot twist did what it was supposed to do, I was uncomfortable with it and didn't feel it was nessecary to the story.

Also finished the fourth Fables TPB a few days ago. Fables is a series that never ceases to amaze me. Whenever I think the writers have hit the top of how weird they can get with modern fairy tales and how cool the stories can be, they go one step further and just leave me gaping. I mean, considering that the first book is a murder mystery being investigated by the Big Bad Wolf, the second involves Goldilocks as a 1960s-70s era Californian Communist grad student, the third had conspiracy galore...and the fourth involves war with puppets. It sounds all so weird, which is initially what made me not buy the books in the first place, but once you get back the rather odd plot blurbs on the back, the books...gah. The art is fantastic, the plots are brilliant, the characterization is stunning, and it all just blends together so well that you're just taken aback by the genius of it all.

Additionally, I picked up the large, hardcover copy of Neil Gaiman's 1602 today. I haven't seen anything written by Gaiman, aside from the Death TPBs in years. I'm sure he's still been writing it, I just haven't been seeing it. I haven't had much of a chance to read the book yet, but the art's quite nice and the story is just amusing. I mean...Nick Fury as an agent of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I? Beautiful!

Lesse...movies. Well, I picked up the two Batman: Beyond DVDs last week ("Dissapearing Inque/Tech Wars" and "School Dayz/Spellbinder"). They had, collectivly, some of my favourite episodes on them (namely "Shriek" and "Splicers", though "Spellbinder" is good to), though the "School Dayz" story-arc is already included on the "Batman: Beyond, The Movie" disc. So I've been watching, and re-watching them, which has also caused me to rewatch my Batman: The Animated Series DVD collection, and my Justice League discs.