Last weekend was a pretty amazing one for geeks. Friday was May the Fourth Be With You, The Avengers was released and smashed box office records, and Saturday brought Free Comic Book Day. The annual event takes place on the first Saturday of May, and it’s been going strong for ten years. Impressive, huh? Especially considering that free actually means free. It’s a day for comic book shops to dress to impress and attract new customers, a day when comic book creators are even bigger rock stars, and a day to introduce your non-comic book reading friends to the fun that is comics.
I visited three spots for the geek holiday this year, and as I expected, each location handled the day a little differently. I go to more than one store mostly because I’m curious to see what they all do to celebrate, and I don’t mind getting a variety of the available free comics. Speaking of that, I picked up seven free comics (including Archaia’s free hardcover) in my travels, and I devoured the stack as soon as I could.
Read about my experience along with a run-down of the stand-outs among the comics I picked up after the break.
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Welcome to the 74th Hunger Games.
Who else is ready to see the games on screen in just over a week? The Hunger Games trilogy captured my heart from the first few chapters, and I’m not alone. The series about a futuristic, dystopian society where the government pits its children against each other in a brutal battle to the death grabbed millions of readers. The heroine of the story, Katniss Everdeen, wormed her way inside our heads. The story begs to be examined, and The Girl Who Was on Fire: Hunger Games Anthology provides pages and pages of just that treatment.
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I previously mentioned that I got the DVD of the 15th anniversary of the Neverwhere miniseries that aired on BBC. I’ve gotten some interesting comments from some of you folks and, I’ll be honest, some of you guys don’t remember it too fondly.
But I’m gonna give you my thoughts and maybe it’ll change your mind and encourage you to give it another look.
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Being a painter myself, I have a deep love for art—especially in the classical sense. I also have a huge library of art books, but the one that I’m going to leave on my coffee table is definitely Drew Struzan’s Oeuvre.
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I’m a huge Walking Dead fan—which is why I jumped at the chance to review The audiobook version of The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor from Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga. I figured that it would help tide me over until the second season premiere.
The question is, does the The Walking Dead storyline work as novel?
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Book #13 of the Dresen Files entitled Ghost Story has just hit the shelves. If you’ve read all of the books in the series so far, see if Butcher’s latest effort is up to snuff after the break. If you are unfamiliar with the world’s one-and-only wizard P.I., we’ll explain why you’ll need to clear your reading schedule and get caught up.
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I did what any red-blooded American did over our holiday weekend. That’s right, I went to see a movie. This was after consuming roughly my own body weight in hamburgers and hot dogs while hanging out with friends all afternoon. I almost didn’t go to see Transformers: Dark of the Moon because it was getting a love it/hate it response from people and I was desperately afraid I’d fall into the hate it camp. There’s nothing as disappointing as walking in to a movie thinking it will be fantastic, but wandering out a few hours later wishing you could get a refund. [Minor spoilers ahead]
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My wife and I have a few areas where we are wildly different. Most notably, I’m a gadget freak while she would probably still be using one of those old-timey candlestick phones if I hadn’t begun an effort to drag her into the 21st century. That having been said, I’ve been trying to convince here to upgrade to a smartphone—particularly a pre-paid version because, in her case, we simply don’t need to spend another fortune on cutting edge features and plans.
So, when I got a chance to test out the LG Optimus V, I thought it would be a good opportunity to see if an affordable prepaid Android phone would be up to snuff. After spending several weeks with it, I can say that the Optimus V will probably be her next phone.
Check out the full review on CubicleBot…
The first alien invasion story I ever saw was The War of the Worlds. Not the new one with Tom Cruise, but the original 1953 version. I couldn’t have been more than seven when I watched it on TV one sunny Saturday afternoon. Do you know why I’ve never seen the remake? Because the original scared me half to death.
There’s a scene where an alien camera-thing sort of sneaks up behind a woman. It looks like a head with three glowing eyes and it slinks down from the ceiling on a long tube of a neck. When she finally notices this monstrosity she lets out an impressive blood-curdling scream before the hero lops off the offending head with an axe. The neck then zips back up through the ceiling and into the ship hovering above them in the sky. I may have screamed.
And what do these humans do after inflicting bodily harm on the alien camera-head thingy? They grab the head to take back to their lab for study and get the heck out of Dodge because there are giant killer aliens with laser beams in the sky and all the humans have is an axe. See, smart humans. The humans in Falling Skies, however, are from the shallow end of the gene pool since rather than doing smart things, these guys excel at Stupid Human Tricks that surely have the aliens laughing as they destroy the planet. [Spoilers ahead]
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The first season of Game of Thrones has been a wild ride. Ten episodes were packed with exciting characters, plots, and some beautiful visual effects. I went into the show a veteran. I’ve been a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series the show is based on, since I picked them up many years ago. It was a thrill to see the story brought to life so faithfully. Many viewers had no background though. They jumped into the television show after seeing trailers or having friends who continuously nagged them and told them the show would be wonderful (I might have done that). For some, it was enough that it aired on HBO. Now that the season has come to a dramatic and fiery end, it’s time to look back and evaluate.
Spoilers after the jump.
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