that ring of confidence

A tale of two Nick Furys

for those comic fans like me the arrival of Samuel L. Jackson at the end of this summer's Iron Man movie was nerd-tastic [jks]. Jackson was face of Ultimate Nick Fury when Marvel relaunched the Avengers in the Ultimate Universe. Which is geek speak, but as long as you know that having Samuel L. Jackson show up wearing the eye patch was very cool you'll be alright.

When Marvel redesigned Nick Fury for their new Ultimate line they wanted someone who was the height of cool, and in the early 2000s that was Samuel L. Jackson. Nick Fury though has traditionally been a white guy with greying hair. Originally he was one of Marvel's war characters that were created during the Second World War to fight the Nazis in comics while the soldiers were fighting the Nazis in Europe. With the end of one war and the start of a Cold War he became a James Bond like spy and sort of the super cop for the Marvel Universe.

Though he's had his own book, he's mostly a supporting characater showing up in other people's books, so the fact that there had never been a movie about him did not surprise me. One would not expect there to be a Robin movie, nor an Alfred the Butler movie no matter how popular Batman got.

However there was in fact a movie in 1998, written by David Goyer whose most well known for writing Batman Begins and Batman: The Dark Knight. The most likely filmed in Toronto or Vancouver made-for-TV movie is based on the original Nick Fury and not the more recent revamp and it stars... wait for it.... wait for it... David Hasselhoff [wp]. Aren't you glad you waited for it. The two clips below are a study of the different movie Nick Furys. And boy am I glad Hasselhoff wasn't cast in Iron Man.

Stephen Colbert meets Spider-Man and I think I still work at Elfsar

if you watch enough of The Colbert Report you might know that host Stephen Colbert is a big fan of comic books. Not only does he have his own comic series, based on Tek Jansen the science fiction character he developed based on his TV personality and one assumes William Shatner crossed with James Bond, but he's had Marvel's Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada on the show several times. Most notable was the episode where Quesada gave Colbert Captain America's shield following the character's death. The shield still hangs on the wall of the show's set and can be regularly seen during the interview portions of the show.

Since Colbert's aborted attempt to run for President earlier this year Marvel has been putting Colbert '08 ads in their comics, just as throw away background gags on billboards or car bumper stickers, showing that at least in the Marvel Universe Colbert's still running. Now he's about to be guest staring in an issue of Amazing Spider-Man. What's America's favorite right-wing parody pundit going to be doing with Spider-Man? I have no idea, but I suppose I'll find out when the issue comes out.

Speaking of comics I haven't had a shift at the comic book store since July, and I keep feeling like I should ask if I even work there when I go in. I'm still getting the staff discount, so I guess I can't complain too much but a shift or two would be nice. It feels like that year or so that I worked part-time at The Capitol Theatre in Westbank, I'd work a shift every month or so and enjoy the free movies. Of course before that I'd put in a good five or six years of hard labour under the same manager at Kelowna's Uptown and Paramount Theatres, so it wasn't like this where I'd only had a few one off shifts.

Story found via Newsarama:

Marvel has announced that Stephen Colbert will join with Spider-Man in Amazing Spider-Man #573 by Slott, Wait, Romita and Oliffe [From Stephen Colbert Joins Spider-Man in Amazing #573]

Don't buy an iPhone buy my book

the end of the...

A collection of th...

By Jeffery Simpson

Book Preview

So you've got a lot of money laying around your place. Maybe you won a beauty contest, or maybe you passed Go a few times and collected your $200 stipend. I don't care how you've got that money burning a hole in your pocket, I just want you to know that you can spend it by buying my book.  That's right, my book.

Granted it's self-published from the online vanity press Blurb, but it's an actual book.  It's hardcover and bound, collecting my published newspaper writings from 1996-2006 that have appeared in the Phoenix, The Kelowna Daily Courier and eVent! magazine.  You also get some pretty awesome photographs, and a dust cover.  That's right, a real dust cover.

It's a sizeable book, with 168 pages of content.  I'm so confident that this book will be the greatest thing you've ever spent your money on that you can even see a preview of the book here [blb].

Okay, now I know what you're going to say.  You're going to say, "Jeff this is amazing, however your book is more expensive than this new Stephen King novel at Chapters.  Why is that?"

See the thing about these so called "professional" authors is that when they sell books they sell upwards of one hundred at a time to bookstore chains.  With that kind of volume they get discounts in printing, so they can keep their costs down.  Plus it's well known that Stephen King lives in the van that hit him years ago, so he's hardly got any overhead.

This is a book I made two years ago for a Christmas gift to my parents, that now I'm offering for sale via Blurb.

I'm blogging as Pierre Trudeau

Am I the only one who finds it weird that there was a new James Bond novel published in May written by novelist Sebastian Faulks writing as James Bond creator Ian Fleming? There's something really wrong about that, isn't there?

Not wrong in continuing to write novels about James Bond. As a comic reader I have to accept that often characters live well beyond the point where their creators stop writing them. Spider-Man will outlive Stan Lee and it's been decades since Lee has had a direct hand in the character's fate anyway. But nobody is writing Spider-Man comics as Stan Lee, and nobody is drawing them as Steve Ditko. If Dan Slot writes an issue of Amazing Spider-Man it's Dan Slot writing it, not Dan Slot pretending to be Stan Lee.

Using a pseudonym isn't anything new, especially in the world of fiction. Steven King for example is rather famous for writing a number of books as other people, and while it's kind of odd it's nothing really controversial. What's odd is publishing a book about a character made famous by someone whose dead, and writing as that someone. Ian Felming is dead, he died a long time ago and I don't quite see what the point is pretending otherwise.

Unless the entire thing is some sort of meta-fiction exercise in which case it's just annoying.

For the rest of the week maybe I'll start blogging as dead people. Today I'll be posting as Pierre Trudeau, tomorrow Anthony Hopkins. Wait, what? Oh... Hopkins is still alive, so much for that idea.

The epic poem of my life

I'm trying very hard to come up with something to blog at this point.  Following the Mr. Rawson school of forced free writing never ends up with anything readable, and certainly nothing that you want to submit to a(n) (potential) audiance of millions.  In fact during the ten minutes of free writing every class I tended to just fill my workbook with the phrase, "I am free.  I am being forced to write."  It was meant to be ironic, in that way that we can achieve irony at 17.

I suppose to make this a better blog I need some drama or adventure in my life.  Another trip, for example, to compete with last year's travel to Europe.  Something quite facinating and new so I can dazzle you with photographs and tales of eating weird food in dodgey resturants.  Instead I have pictures of the inside of the Skytrain, as I commute to and from Metrotown every day.

Which is not to say that life is boring, or dull.  I watched Bee Movie last night and it was pretty good.  However the fact that you're reading about me watching Bee Movie is a sign that perhaps I'm not leading the sort of heroic life that is worthy of great study.  Perhaps I should join Jason and search after the Golden Fleece [wp].  I'm sure such a journey would provide many chances for good pictures and many meals of weird food in dodgey resturants.  At the very least Mysia should be interesting.

Photo credit

• Photo by: Jeffery Simpson
• What: Arc de Triomphe, Paris France
• Date Taken: May 15th, 2007
• Camera: Sony Ericsson K790i

The Emerald City Comic Convention Day

Today was the first day of the Emerald City Comic Convention in Seattle. I left Jeff's apartment about noon and went to QWest Field where the con is being held. First thing I had to do was wait in a long line for the ATM machine. Then I got in and waited in a long line to meet Brian Michael Bendis, a long long line. I had about five or six books for him to sign, since he is by far my favorite writer right now, but what took so long was that some people had boxes of comics for him to sign. I'm all for artists signing more than one book, but when you bring two copies of every book someone has ever written and expect to get them signed that's fucking annoying.

Bendis was a good sport and seemed to sign pretty much everything people gave him, but to have to wait in the line while some guy got fifty books autographed was really annoying. The fact that I was once again behind that guy in the line for Mark Bagley drove me insane. I had one book for Bagley to sign but I got to watch him do about fifteen minutes of signing for one guy. Things worked out better for Mark Waid and Greg Rucka where I ended up the second person in line when they returned from lunch, thus avoiding a long wait.

Everyone that I got autographs from seemed really friendly, even if they didn't really have time to do much other than say hello and nod. Rucka was nice enough to actually personalize my autograph which I think more people should do to cut down on eBay sellers. Tomorrow I'll look around the vendors booths a bit more. I wanted to buy a sketch from Alex Maleev, and I still might, but he's sort of European and scary. I'm sure he's not really scary, but still. I'll try tomorrow.

A late night and an early morning

Marvel Civil War, originally uploaded by ZacharyTirrell.

After a day off double feature (Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth) with Lydia I went home late last night. I was anxious to get home from about three o'clock on because when we stopped by Golden Age so that I could get my weekly comics I saw that Civil War 7 had arrived and after like a million months I wanted to find out what happened and how it all wrapped up.

Getting home about ten in the evening I read all of my books and then went to bed. I've been up since 5:30 am so that I could write my article for the magazine before work. I'm tired and now once I've posted this I'm going to do the math to see how much time I can spend in bed.

Let's see if it takes half an hour to walk to work, add to that the forty minutes it takes to get ready....

No fall, just a more violent summer

I downloaded Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell. Vowell is probably now most famous for being a voice in The Incredibles. Since grabbing it from iTunes I've listened to about 2 and a half hours of it.

In it Vowell essentially travels around America visiting historical sites related to Presidential assasinations. So far, about a third of the way into the audiobook, it's been really good. Funny and informative it's the sort of historical trainspotting that I recomend.

HEY, NOSTRADAMUS! The New Novel by Douglas Coupland

HEY, NOSTRADAMUS! The New Novel by Douglas Coupland

I bought a book while waiting for the train to go initially from London to Paris. Of course it was a Canadian book, set in Vancouver. It was the new book by Douglas Coupland which came out about a year ago but was expensive and hardcover.

Now it was expensive and soft cover, being that all books are a bit pricey here. Still it was worth it since it gave me something to read on the train both ways.