The Family.

That is a Very Stupid Hat.

Went to see X-Men: First Class the other day, finally. Actually really frick-damn good. Amazing, considering X-Men 1-3 were a parade of suck and Wolverine was like being slapped in the face with a sack of pennies. Technically it’s a prequel, detailing the origins of the MUTANT PROBLEM, Professor X’s school for gifted freaks and Magneto’s merry band of second string bad guys.

Something was distracting me though… something… shiny.

It’s just… so, SO stupid looking. It looks like a free toy. And it would have been fine if it was just a quick homage to the comics, but it was a MAJOR PLOT POINT. It was there the whole time. There’s no way I can take a super-powered mutant madman seriously when he’s wearing a plastic bucket on his head. Magneto’s magical dome nearly ruined the whole movie single-handedly – and it was a good movie!

Head-can aside, Magneto is clearly the motherfucking boss of town. Strutting around being all that and a bag of chips. Also, he’s totally right about mutants being more awesome and having to defend themselves. Plus he kills Nazis while wearing stylish turtlenecks.

Also, a girl whose main powers are fairy wings and spit is pretty lame. Otherwise it was all good. I’m looking forward to seeing more movies in this universe, and more of Emma Frost’s diamond boobs.

Hello, is it me you’re looking for.

I’m wearing a striped t-shirt over the top of a striped long-sleeved shirt today. I am the Inception of shirts.

Been fondling my website recently, so now a few more little details work the way they should. The WORDS page has a bunch of writing samples that show off my amazing talents, and you can learn about me and my work on the ABOUT page. Incidentally, if you want to email me about work you can do that here.

I also made a gallery page which has all the bits and pieces of art I could find floating around the internet. I have a boatload more of course, but it’s mostly scraps of paper and scanning is hard. A man is not a machine. Sort of on that front: I have been working on Error/Mistake a lot recently and I am slowly nutting out the details. It becomes increasingly clear that I will need to find an artist with ACTUAL TALENT, however.

This site needs a new header. Suggestions? Something cool and stuff and things.

P.S. BUY MY WIFE’S BOOK. BUY IT NOW. It’s about the internet and virtual reality and murder and it has lasers and gothic lolitas and STUFF. Buy it and love it.

A Simple Mistake.

I almost forgot I had a website.

Anyway, things are slowly fixing themselves. I managed to make the menu look less broken, even though it is still totally broken. Also now you can see what I’ve been doing on TWITTER down the side there. Woop woop.

One of the two comic projects I am working on is going well and is up to the scriptwriting stage. Otherwise known as The Point Where My Brain Gives Up. FINGERS CROSSED. It’s my pet superhero project though and I’m rather proud of it, so I don’t anticipate letting it go. Look forward to reading Mistake in the future.

Heartpunch is just waiting for me to start it…

And family are visiting this weekend, all the way from Australia to New Zealand. I hope they can handle all the niceness people ooze over here. Mother, mother-in-law, father-in-law and brother-in-law. The latter is staying with Rachel and I, so anticipate her telling us to quit playing damn video games and go to (damn) bed. Damn.

Justice League: The New Frontier.

I picked this up for $5 at the shop down on the corner. What follows is an account of my experience. You’re welcome!

The time is Cold War Time. The place is PARANOIA TIME. New Frontier is set in the 1950s and 1960s in a world where superheroes are still making names for themselves. And the names they are making are DIRTY COMMUNIST NAMES. Not really, but if you object to that conclusion jump YOU ARE A COMMUNIST. This is why the cold war era is fun. Anyway that isn’t actually what the film is about because that would be too interesting, it’s actually about punching a giant monster. More on that later.

The movie opens with a rapid-fire set of scenes detailing who is who and what is what. Hal Jordan (Green Lantern) is not Green Lantern yet, he’s still a pilot. He crashes and has to shoot a guy in the face to convince him the war is over. It works. Martian Manhunter has accidentally been teleported to Earth by a scientist. Flash is saving Las Vegas from one of his lame villains, because the Flash has the dumbest villains ever. Look out Flash, he’s got a gun that makes ice! Good thing you’re the fastest man alive, making that fucking useless.

Superman is off looking for Wonder Woman because she is his only friend. He finds her in some Korean jungle where she has freed a bunch of women who were raped and tortured and had their families murdered in front of them and then got raped again. Wonder Woman basically let them out to go nuts on their captors and, because you don’t mess with women, they kill the shit out of them. So you see, Cold War Wonder Woman is a badass. She even wears an actual skirt instead of wunderpants. That’s because she looks like Xena, and is voiced by Xena, and is basically Xena. If they really want to make a Wonder Woman movie, they should just dress Lucy Lawless in a Wonder Woman costume and have her act out any three randomly selected Xena episodes. I would watch the hell out of that.

Superman and Wonder Woman have a conversation in which he is a whining nancy boy who is worried the government will turn on them. To which Wonder Woman is all ‘OF COURSE THEY WOULD, TYPICAL MEN’ and then she downs three tankards of Korean moonshine.

Sounds absolutely compelling, but these opening scenes are a filthy lie. This is almost all you really get from the whole “superheroes are dangerous for AMERICA” plotline. There are a few spots here and there – Batman is apparently a fugitive from justice even though he is the one who is just a guy in a bat suit – but overall it’s a bunch of boring scenes that eventually lead to a battle with mutant dinosaurs and a big floating lump of generic laser fist. The sequence of events that leads to the climax is so intensely haphazard and pointless that I had forgotten both the original Cold War storyline AND the real monster plot about three quarters of the way through.

The art is very nice though. Darwyn Cooke (the artist behind the graphic novel behind the film) has that very amiable retro style that reminds you of the 1950s when everything was totally fine, men wore hats and women cooked while having babies. It’s basically perfect for the movie this should have been, but wasn’t. You know, the movie where the real-world concept of Cold War paranoia was played into the idea of superheroes as both a dangerous ‘other’ and living weapons of mass destruction. Not the movie about a blob blowing up everyone with yellow and trilobites.

The only problem I have with the art is that when Martian Manhunter changes his form to be more “acceptable” to humans, he has a terrifying HUMAN FACE pasted onto his green alien suspenders-with-underpants body. It looks like someone on the internet photoshopped a piece of my deepest nightmare onto his bald Martian head. I still hear the screams.

A few random notes. Hal Jordan is a skin-tearingly boring man. I know he’s the Green Lantern in most people’s minds, but he’s not interesting. He’s a guy. He does stuff. The most interesting thing he ever does is HAVE A MAGIC RING and even that doesn’t get used until the very end of the movie. New Frontier is very focused on Jordan and his journey to become a space cop, and it is exactly as exciting as you’d expect watching a handsome, white, male American become a handsome, white male American in space.

New Frontier does carry on one grand DC tradition, which is that you always need the Flash. No matter what the situation, the only way to save the universe will be if someone can run really, really fast.

Good bits: the aforementioned bitch version of Wonder Woman (who is just a sad woman in an invisible plane who needs a man by the end), when Batman threatens to kill both Superman and Martian Manhunter in one sentence because he can, Manhunter watching TV and shapeshifting into Bugs Bunny. Martian Manhunter. There should be a show that is just him being totally awesome. His only weakness is terminal sadness.

Bad bits: mostly everything else, except the parts I can’t remember because I fell asleep and dreamed I was watching a better film.

EMERGENCY PANIC.

We had an earthquake here today while I was at work. It’s not a big deal, since I live in Wellington, New Zealand – the shakiest place ever to be called Wellington, New Zealand. If you’re not a local, you may know it from a few weeks ago when Christchurch FELL OVER.

They had a massive one that shook us here too, all the way over on a separate island. Rachel woke up because it was actually rocking our entire apartment building. I slept through it. In fact, I’ve missed every single quake that we’ve had since we moved here a couple of years ago, so this one was pretty exciting.

Even though all I thought at first was that some human pustule was shaking my desk and I was going to kill them with a water bottle.

Tonight we are going to TABLETOP ROLEPLAY. WITH DICE. Usually we would be going on an adventure in the 60s for all the characters to solve the mystery of the giant messed-up bird demon, except for my character, Gus, who adventures into the pants of every female in town. But we’re missing one of our group so something else will be happening which hopefully involves cake and explosions.

Things I can’t tell you: I’ll be getting an as-yet-unreleased video game to review in a couple of days. Oh yes, suck my time travel.

Introductions in Space.

Oh, hello. Welcome to the Dead Geek Circus, a place for all my various bits and ends to come home and roost.

My name is Andy Astruc. I live in Wellington, New Zealand. My wife Rachel also lives here. We live here together, it’s a thing we do. I am a writer, an artist, a nerd, a gamer, a reader of books and comics (but mostly comics), an average cook, a snappy dresser and a robot wizard. If you want to know more about me then you’re free to check the ABOUT page.

DGS is a hub and dumping ground for all my writing work, comics, art, random thoughts about life and general paraphernalia. Expect to see a whole bunch of awesome stuff doing that stuff that stuff does.

I know, I love you too.