My son Coleman has been buying and digging DC’s latest
extravaganza, Blackest Night, and he was kind enough to lend it to me so that I
could check in on the company’s latest twists and turns in continuity. Lately
he’s been one of my windows into the DC Universe (along with Batman and Robin
and the disappointing New Krypton franchise); thanks to him, I have a better
idea of what’s now happening to the Green Lanterns and the various other
“colored” Lanterns of the DCU, the reds, the yellows, and so on, who together
comprise Geoff Johns' so-called emotional spectrum. This “spectrum,” in effect
a prismatic retcon of the Green Lantern mythos, strikes me as one of the more interesting
gimmicks with which the DCU mythos has been retrofitted in recent years.
Unfortunately, no offense to Coleman, I haven’t found
much to enjoy in Blackest Night. Not my cuppa tea, and all that.
Disney’s The Princess and the Frog? Finally I’ve seen it.
I’m an animation buff, after all. For that reason I’m glad to have seen it (so
I can say that I have only one more movie to go to finish the Oscars’ 2009
animated feature list, that being the import The Secret of Kells). Another
animated film I can check off.
[Update: My family and I at last saw The Secret of Kells on Saturday, April 17, which was a birthday celebration for me. See my separate post on Kells.]
There was a time
when -- and my sons can attest to this -- I promised myself I would go see every
animated feature that made it to the theaters. That seemed like a good thing
for an animation buff to do in this era of renewed interest in the art. Briefly
seemed, that is.
I’m fresh back from the 25th Annual conference of the
International Society for the Study of Narrative, in Cleveland (in fact I
drafted most of this on a plane with an incredible view of snow-frosted
mountains far, far below). There Craig and I presented a paper from our
recently launched project about the work of Eddie Campbell. Balloonists
assemble!
The presentation
went well and the conference was excellent and encouraging; the general level
of interest in comics was high. I came away with plenty to think about. In the
meantime, all this traveling has reminded me of something else, something I’d
file under the “Unlooked-for”:
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