...And we're back

Well...
that went off the rails quickly.

For a flotilla of reasons that all amount to life in general taking place (a couple of surgeries for my son, new boss at work, an uptick in workload, etc.), we've been gone for oooh, about four months now.  But we're back, and ready to get at it.  We resolve to try and do better on keeping up with the blog.  Some housekeeping announcements:

• Like the blog, the grand reading experiment(s) have taken a backseat to everything else.  There has been some progress, but I've been playing around with how I read.  For the golden age material, I've stopped reading it by month, but have started reading it by title/year.  However, the silver age, I'm still reading by publication date.  I was starting to struggle with the golden age material in terms of keeping up with all of the serialized parts when a single issue would have 6-10 serials to keep track of and it might be months between reading an issue.  I tried the same with the Silver Age, but on the Westerns in particular, it was too repetitive.  I needed a monster comic in between to break-up the monotony.  I am current on Marvel and DC (maybe a week behind), and I am about 1-2 months behind on the indies.
• Format.  I feel like my posts are still way too long, so here is what I am going to attempt: An overall score for the issue (out of 5), each story or serial with writer/artist, a one sentence synopsis, if merited a a few sentences of commentary, and individual story scores
• Upcoming posts in no particular order:
• A post I saved, but never published, on New Adventure Comics #26
• A post on Action Comics #1-7 (If this becomes overly long it will get broken into multiple posts)
• A post on Gunsmoke Western from 1960 (ditto here)
• A post on recommended indie reads
• A post on my thoughts on the current 3 big events in the big 2

Finally I'd like to cover some items from the geek-sphere that have happened while I was away:

• First and foremost Doctor Who.  I love the casting choice of Peter Capaldi, though I think we may lose some of the geek-girl audience.  I did the Snoopy dance when the recovery of Enemy of the World and Web of Fear from the Troughton era was announced.  Less then 100 missing episodes now, and I hold-out hope that were recoveries will be announced.
• Movies:  The only geek-cred movies I've seen this year are Man of Steel and The End of the World.  I've already talked about Man of Steel.  I liked End of the World and not being part of the stoner generation part deux, I prefer the Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg sensibility of humor than the Judd Apatow/Seth Rogen brand.  However, I felt like this was the weakest of the Cornetto trilogy.  It took too long for the shoe to drop, the plot got very bleak in the last 10 minutes of the film, and I'm not sure how to interpret the denouement for the Gary King character.  I give it a 3 out of 5.  Being the father of a (just turned) 4 and 7 year old, most of my cinema dollars go to kids fare.  Having seen the Croods, Turbo, Planes, and Monster University this summer, the best of the lot was the Croods, the biggest surprise was Planes (I expected a snooze fest and found it quite engaging), and the biggest disappointment/worst was Monsters University.  It had humor, it had a plot that made sense, but it was lacking in charm.  It really suffered from not having a Boo equivalent character.  When it ended, while I was trying to rally my feeling of 'meh' into something positive, my son looked up at me, frowned, and said, "That wasn't a good movie, daddy.  I didn't like it."  At that point, any attempt to justify and positively view what I had just watched went right down the drain.
• Genre TV: 
• Sleepy Hollow has been relatively good so far.  I'd give it an average of 3.5 out of 5.  I don't like the heavy repetition of revelation prophecy (making the female cop the prophesied second witness opposed to someone who is a bystander swept into the horror, I think is too much), but its managed to deliver some pretty consistent chills for primetime television, especially with their use of the always out of focus horned one.
• Agents of Shield I'd give a 3 out of 5 so far, but I'm two episodes behind because of a fall-break vacation last week.  I like the characters and the setup, but I'm waiting for it to break new ground in the Marvel cinema/TV universe, and I'm not sure it's going to be allowed to.  I'm not advocating a villain of the week approach per se, but if new and interesting supers can't be introduced and everything is down to Tesseract/Chitauri/Extremis tech, and they can't play with concepts like Vibranium, Unstable Molecules, etc. for fear of limiting or contradicting with the films, I think it will wear out it's welcome with geekdom quickly.  Using names without the actual characters will only get you so far.
• Once Upon a Time has re-engaged me, and I think the decision to approach it as two mini-seasons as opposed to one long one is wise since it was the feeling of the story being drawn out last year that lost me at the end.  However, if they don't reveal why Pan wants Henry beyond a simplistic "He's the True Believer" within the next couple of episodes, they will lose me again.
• Once Upon a Time in Wonderland:  It has an OK start (3 out of 5), but the danger of spin-offs is the continuity or lack of continuity affecting the audience's appreciation of the series.  I'm not sure if Cyrus is supposed to be the genie from Aladdin, because I think that is Sydney Glass, who I'm hoping shows up here.  Also, I'm not clear on the timeline -- after the flashback to little Alice, it says Present Day, but it appears the curse in Storybrooke hasn't been broken because Cinderella and Grumpy are going by their human identities, however the Knave makes reference to the Hatter being happy and never wanting to come back to Wonderland, which happened after the spell was broken.  Then, Alice is a mortal from the 18th century who is in an asylum in the 21st century.  How?  My last fault with the pilot was the end.  I know that the Once Upon a Time series typically uses CGI for the fantastical backgrounds, but the end-sweep was awful.  I wasn't sure if the tower where Jafar had Cyrus was supposed to be miles away or feet away.  A better choice would have been to pull-back to show them arrayed on chess squares to fit the Looking Glass motif that fits the use of the Red Queen.