Category Archives: comix

comix, movies

Rory’s First Kiss Update!

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There is a gargantuan old US Post Office building off of Van Buren Avenue in downtown Chicago that, to my knowledge, has sat dormant for at least 10 or so years.

A week or two ago I noticed some people building this wooden “gateway” at the service entrance of this building. I was curious as to what its intent was. The fact that it was just a wood frame made me think there wasn’t anything permanent about it.

Later, the facade was painted to match the stone of the post office building. It matched surprisingly well, I thought, but still, what the hell were these people doing?

Last week, I had lunch with a friend who knew someone in the “Industry” who said they were building a set for the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight.

Sure enough, this is true…

Latest on The Dark Knight Filming
Dark Knight Set Pics

To not stir up the comic book geeks, they have all the Production signs referring to the film as Rory’s First Kiss. Of course, by having all these ‘RFK’ signs everywhere, they don’t even realize the amount of buzz they are creating for fans of the Kennedy family, a far more rabid group of people than your average comic book gaggle.

Seeing this cool set in person (I walk by it every day to get to work) reminded me of the time I was walking downtown when I saw a parking lot full of police cars that said “Gotham” on them during the time they were filming Batman Begins in Chicago. I was only mildly interested, due to the fact that the Batman movie franchise up until then was absolute garbage (yes, even the Tim Burton ones). I figured, oh wonderful, they are making another crappy Batman movie.

Now with the realization that Batman Begins was such a good film (up there with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, even), it’s fun to be excited about Rory’s First Kiss.

Go Rory!

comix, geek, stuff-you-may-have-missed

If You Needed Another Reason To Like The Watchmen

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Occasionally, I’ll get a minor epiphany, where I’ll realize a cool facet about something (usually music/movies/pop culture stuff) that to my knowledge has not been remarked on by someone. So, here’s a first post trying to convey my geeky excitement about one of these occasions. Hopefully you get at least 1/3 the pleasure from it as I did.

First of all, if you haven’t read the Watchmen, read it.

Okay, now that we have that out of the way, a little background. I used to be big with the comic book collecting and reading, mostly of the superhero variety. I was more into Marvel stuff, Spider-Man mostly.

I stopped collecting comix in the mid-80’s. The last comics I bought were a DC mini-series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons called the Watchmen, which pretty made every other superhero comic look like a big pile of superpoo. The comic is incredibly dense, with many, many references, puns, intricate storylines, all that stuff. It’s an impressive piece of work.

Anyways, I had a hankering to reread it again recently, and didn’t have the original comics on hand. I was able to obtain a digital copy of it (basically a zipped-up file of jpegs) and in quickly flipping through the images suddenly realized something I had never noticed when I was reading the actual comic.

There is this part where Dr. Manhattan, a very powerful superhero, has his sense of time all messed up, and he starts acting a little goofy as if he is not in complete control of his own actions. So, by flipping through the digitized images of the comic I noticed that in two consecutive pages the artwork is completely different except for two images of Dr. Manhattan, which remain completely still…

This is something I doubt I would never have noticed had I not viewed the comic digitally. For God’s Sakes, look at Dr. Manhattan’s word balloons in the second detail. Even those are in the same position!

Once again I geekily bow to the feet of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.