by John Velousis
It’s never too early to mail it in.
Part 1 – Fun with dead language
A few weeks back, just for shits and giggles, I decided to see if I could translate the Latin bits in Baltimore: The Curse Bells #2 (W: Mike Mignola & Christopher Golden, A: Ben Stenbeck.) I’ve never studied Latin, mind you, but you can sometimes figure it out if you think about English-language words with latin roots. To wit: “veri” means “truth”. If we know the meaning of the word “verissimilitude” – which means something like “accuracy as compared to reality” – we maybe can put together that the word parts are like so: “veri” = reality or actuality or truth, “simili” = like, or similar (duh!), “tude” = the act of being. Bored? Great! Anyhow, I did that and ended up with this handy-dandy translation:
So there ya go. I DID actually study German (“study” is a huge overstatement. I got straight D’s for 2 years.) That’s what the second page there is, German. Monsters speak latin, Satanists speak German. Makes sense to me.
Part 2 – Banging it out all day
Today is 24-Hour-Comic-Book Day, wherein aybody that cares to can try to write and draw a full 24-page comic in the space of one consecutive 24-hour period. I was going to try and do it myself and see if my writing speed made up for my complete inability to draw, but starting yesterday I caught a flu which is tearing the ass outta me as we speak. Maybe next year. I DID go so far as to think about what I might maybe do, subject-wise. It would DEFINITELY be a superhero comic – the limitation of genre thus imposed makes a challenge for the artist to surmount (which is why superhero comics are like Lars von Trier. Some people think superhero comics are like a real Lindsay Lohan sex tape, other people think that they’re like cynical attempts to grab hits from Google. Think what ya want, I can’t stop you – YET.) So, my superhero was to be called the Crotch Crunch Crusader. His logo would look something like this:
His thing, if you will, would be to punch bad-guys in the nuts. But, in an ironic twist, he never actually uses that move because villains are too busy protecting their junk, when he fights them, to properly protect their jaws and shins and what-not. Maybe there would be some kind of added irony where he swore not to actually use his finishing move out of respect for the vas defrens and its importance in the reproductive process; or, like, his parents were killed that way (adopted by two gay dads.) It now occurs to me that I didn’t have a plan for how he’d fight female villains – I suppose he’d delegate that to an assistant or something. Anyway, it’s all moot, not gonna do it now, but I figured, hey, why let that two minutes of thinking about it go to waste? Hence, the preceding. I hope you enjoyed it. Have a nice evening, now, and you kids actually MAKING their own 24-hour comix, lotsa luck to you. TTFN!
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Just when you thought event storylines were stale and overplayed, along came Dan Slott with “Spider-Island.” This Spidey-centric event has, along with the X-Men’s “Schism” storyline, thus far surpassed any of the past few Marvel-wide books — including the current Fear Itself.
Speaking of Venom #7, it basically details Venom’s (who, if you haven’t been keeping up, is now Flash Thompson and property of the U.S. Government) side-adventure to bring Eddie Brock AKA Anti-Venom to Reed Richards at Horizon Labs so an antidote can be extracted using the Anti-Venom symbiote. Rick Remender, who also writes the masterful Uncanny X-Force, captures Flash’s desperation to keep Venom under control as he fights the alien’s former host — even going so far as to tease fans by making it seem as though Venom is about to take over Brock again. (Damn you, Remender!) Fowler perfectly captures the fear in Eddie’s eyes as this is happening.