Genre Character of the Week: Thor

Okay Okay, I’ll admit it, I was just talking about Thor last week and as that was the case what on Earth can I say about the guy less than a week later? Well let me tell you.

First of all – having now read the second Thor Visionaries collection, I’m beginning to feel that Thor is more a romance than an action story. Thor #357 ends with the Asgardian God being bewitched by a love potion used on him by an enchantress, and then one of my favourite teasers for the next issue I’ve come across in comics:

Is THOR becoming a ROMANCE COMIC? Has Marvel’s fabulous rock-em, sock-em book denigrated into nothing more than puerile SOAP OPERA? Will kissing become the rule rather than the exception? Is nothing sacred? Don’t hold your breath!! And don’t miss our next issue! => When Dalliance Was in Flower

Here’s the thing about Thor – the guy is a romantic at heart, he loves humans (and not as playthings) and he is as close to an innocent as I’ve come across in super-hero comics. The guy seems pretty willing to understand virtually anyone’s story, and although this makes him gullible more than a few times, his faith in humanity is kind of heart warming. Plus the guy has a pretty incredible code of ethics – more than once he lays his life on the line as a moral decision, rather than out of desperation because, you guessed it, it’s the right thing to do.

Seriously, as a hero, this guy is pretty old school, and that’s awesome.

Movie Review: Paul

Last Thursday my friends Mike and Ron managed to get a double guest pass to an advanced screening of the movie Paul, so my wife and I joined them to check it out.

Here’s my impressions of the film.

1) It was pretty darn funny

2) It is the closest thing I’ll ever see to an Alf movie (and I liked it better than Alf)

3) It has the makings for an excellent movie-lovers drinking game

4) It continues to show me that you can’t go wrong if you’re teaming up Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

5) Kristen Wiig wears the funniest shirt I’ve seen in months

If you haven’t seen the trailer yet, check it out, but basically the film follows two guys who pick up an alien hitch-hiker and spend the rest of the film on the run from shady government agents. The movie nods at tonnes of classic genre films (seriously I tried to keep count by after hitting reference #27 I just gave up and enjoyed the film) in very clever ways.

The alien (a CG creation voiced by Canadian actor Seth Rogen) is pretty incredible, making him both foul-mouthed and loveable. I think it’s fair to say that if you’re a regular reader at my blog, there will be a lot you’ll like about the film (no it doesn’t spend a month looking at Twilight, that was just me). In the end, a very fun flick.

Thing's Ive Notived: Thor circa 1983 is pretty awesome

So the movie Thor is coming out in a couple months and as I'm a guy who likes to do a little background research I decided to read some Thor comics. Rather than starting with the Stan Lee stuff from the '60s however, I decided to start with Walter Simonson's run which began in 1983 (Also it was one of the only Thor comics my library had).

Here's what I knew about Thor before cracking the cover 1) The guy is a god, 2) He has a magic hammer, 3) That little girl in Adventures in Babysitting loved him.

Three pages in and here's what I knew. 1) Thor has (had) an alter-ego named Donald Blake, 2) When Blake struck his cane against the ground he became Thor, 3) Nick Fury didn't always look like Samuel L. Jackson, 4) Nick Fury has a flying car 4) Nick Fury has a giant Floating Aircraft Carrier 5) ALIENS ARE ATTACKING!!! Here's the thing about these first 11 issues of Thor - stuff is happening all over the place, from Alien ivaders to demon invasions and even a fight with Faeries.

Thor seems to cross over into every genre possible and kicks butt wherever he goes. Simonson follows multiple characters (Thor, Odin, Loki, Beta Ray Bill, Baldur, Lorelai, etc.) to create a very dense storyline and by switching back and forth between these characters plotlines you get non-stop character development and cliffhangers. I've still got a couple Simonson collections to go, and my library does have the J. Michael Straczynski run as well, but I've got to say if the film has anything like the Simonson stuff I'm reading, it will be pretty awesome.

Genre Character of the Week: Bill Compton

As I've filled this section of my posts with girls for a while now, I think its time to get back to the boys, and one of my personal favourites in current vampire fiction, Bill Compton (pictured left), from the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris.

For those who haven't read the books or seen the series, Bill is a vampire, having been changed during the American War Between the States (or Civil War, depending on your point of view), he works to help ensure the safety of the vampires in his area, with a computer.

Here's what I like best about Bill - he's a gentleman. Bill comes across as a mainstay in supernatural romance novels - a very dangerous, but at the same time, proper gentleman. Throughout the books, Bill comes across as a guy in a very tough place who is simply trying to do the best he can for the girl he loves.

Now I've only seen season one of True Blood, but I do have to say that I'm very fond of Stephen Moyers' portrayal of the character and am definitely looking forward to season two as well as the next book in the series, Dead Reckoning.

Book Review: The City and The City

Almost a month ago I read the novel The City & The City by China Miéville but because it was a book club selection I felt I should wait until now (we finished our monthly meeting about an hour ago) to talk about the book.

First off, I'll admit bias - I really liked this book - it might be because I'm a fan of The Night Watch Series of books, or recently read a couple Kafka novels, and had read the author's first novel and loved it, but I came to this book hoping for something pretty cool and I got exactly what I was expecting.

Next, I'll admit that my BFF hated this book... he HATED it, and as usually we have pretty similar tastes in genre fiction, it surprised me how much he hated something that I liked a lot, but I do respect his opinion so I'm putting it out there.

In my mind this book works better the less you know about it. So I can't say a lot - it's a murder mystery, an intriguing look at the power of ideology and it has some of the coolest chase scenes I've ever come across.

In the end I suggest you give the book a try - if you're not a fan afterwards, okay. From my point of view however, it is a pretty awesome murder mystery set in one of the most interesting locations I've ever come across in fiction.

Things I've Noticed: Picking a book for book club can be tricky

My problem with choices has always been finding some way to narrow them down – I’m not good with having dozens of choices, I like having three – do this, do that, or do something else.

I’m pretty sure that just a few days from now I’m going to have to have a selection for my book club’s April book. The problem is that I’m not entirely sure what I want to read. I could go for a comic book series (I did that with the Greg Rucka series Queen & Country a few months back) or perhaps a new genre book I’ve been looking forward (I did that with the then new Stephen King book Under the Dome last year), or maybe I could just randomly pick a book from the dozen boxes of old Fantasy/Horror/SF paperbacks I’ve got sitting in my basement.

I already have a pretty good idea of the books I’ll be reading for the month of March – I have a little song that reminds me of my seven categories, it goes;

Horror, SF, Fantasy

Book Club, Book Club, Jeeves and Me

Which represents my tactic of reading one book from each of my favourite genres, one book for both of my book clubs, the next in the Jeeves and Wooster series by P.G. Wodehouse (3 more to go and I’m finished) and finally one book that merely tickles my fancy.

The problem is I’ve read a lot of books over the years and most of what I’m reading these days falls into the “hard to find” category, a category you specifically do not want to use for a book club selection. So now I’ve got to think about which book I would like to read that is a) available in sufficient numbers at my local library, b) of interest to the members of the club (who range from being interested in Classic Lit and Non-Fiction to Archie Comics), and c) hopefully an overlap with one of my regular monthly books so that I can double up on some genre reading.

In the end I’m leaning towards either some dark fantasy (I’ve always meant to start reading Charles de Lint, and his earlier stuff was pretty dark) or maybe one of those Young Adult books I was going on about last week.

You know, being in a book club is trickier than you think.

Genre Character of the Week: Tiffany Aching

When you talk about a writer who has books numbering in the dozens it can be tricky to find the character you feel most connected to (especially if he has more than one main character). In the case of Terry Pratchett’s discworld series of novels there are at least half a dozen characters I’m very attached to, but as this is genre character of the week not genre ensemble of the week, I have to pick favourites, and in terms of discworld, my favourite is a girl we met at age nine in the book The Wee Free Men, Tiffany Aching.

Through four incredible Young Adult novels (being, in order, The Wee Free Men, A Hatful of Sky, Wintersmith, and I Shall Wear Midnight), author Terry Pratchett has created a young girl who is both sympathetic and terrifying. Tiffany begins her journey in pursuit of a missing younger brother, ends up fighting faerie queens and the personification of Winter and eventually ends up featuring in what might be my favourite ending of a fantasy book I’ve ever come across.

At her heart, Tiffany is a young girl from a small rural community who is quite talented at making great cheese (a talent she never downplays, regardless of how formidable her witching prowess becomes), she is very focused on getting things done and has the ability to not just think about things, but to think about the way she thinks about things.

If you’ve never cracked a Discworld novel before, and don’t want to start way back at the beginning (the books are a shared world series, so with some exceptions you can read them in virtually any order) the four books featuring young Miss Aching would be a wonderful place to start exploring the series.