Visible Monsters II

My friend John is a little bit insane.

Thankfully it’s that cool kind of insanity that you can’t help but be a little bit jealous of. This time it’s rearing its head in the form of an idea. And a very good one:

I haven’t posted much cuz I bean busy.

I will be publishing an online magazine (PDF) devoted to pulp heroes. God, I so love these guys! It will feature new stories and original characters. We will have interviews with modern pulpers and various artist. My co-editor, Tim Gallagher, will detail his work with Alec Baldwin and what went wrong with the film “The Shadow”.

That got my attention a few weeks back. I meant to post about it and get in touch with John then, but I find that squirreling things away with Google Reader is just too easy. In the meantime John’s been moving things forward and now the mag has a name - ASTONISHING ADVENTURES - its own home and even one of those fancy new fangled MySpace pages that all the kids have these days.

The most important part right now though are the submission guidelines. If enough decent writers get a hold of those and see what John is offering them here, this could be a great, nay - astonishing - magazine.

I mean it’s great for the Internet to spit out old pulp covers, characters and stories, but wouldn’t it be great to create some new ones?

Time and commitments are against me as usual, but I have something I’d like to throw together for this. If you do too then I suspect John is waiting to hear from you.

I’m catching up with all the crap that I starred in my google reader over the last week and just wanted to drop this line in somewhere:

A decade after leading the dotcom charge, the BBC is in danger of falling into a dot coma from which it may never awake.

Dot Coma - there’s a geek-shirt waiting to happen.

It’s from this article in The Guardian (commented on here by Ben Metcalfe).

FYI I’ve also started dropping stuff of interest into my Blinklist account. I’ve been looking for a del.icio.us replacement for a while and this bad boy seems to be just what I’m after.

Because Spiderman 3 didn’t have any of this (and because the original post got lost) here is the Spideyman strip that caused Warren to call me nine kinds of wrong (in case you were wondering where that came from) :

If Raimi really does want to do Spiderman 4 I am available to consult.

It’s nice to see more love heading the way of Will Kaufman’s The Prodigy:

When an independent first feature looks this good and is this compelling, it deserves the support of its audiences. If you’re a fan of independent film, vote with your bum in the seat.

The problem there is that if your arse is situated in the UK there isn’t much chance of seeing this gem of a movie anytime soon. I’m back in contact with Will again so I’ll have a chat with him to see if it’s possible to get a small uk screening together. That may mean the DVD shoved on in my living room, but if it’s possible I’d like to get a slightly bigger venue.

Watch this space.

This is perhaps the last time that Time Out was worth buying:

Lifted from The Ephemerist who also kindly scanned the article found the article and reposted all three pages of it.

Remember when British comics kicked arse?

@Tendrel: Here’s the coffee beer explanation as promised*.

Yesterday I had my first pint of Meantime:

Whilst we wouldn’t recommend having this at breakfast with your bacon and eggs, our Coffee Beer is made with real coffee and has a caffeine hit to match. The natural flavours of the beans selected and hand roasted by our friends at the Union Coffee Roasters go well with the roast barley in the beer to give a silky-smooth drink with distinct chocolate and vanilla notes.

I was expecting this to taste just WRONG, but was surprised to find it hit the spot.

The company use fair trade coffee and also do a chocolate beer. Living in the 21st Century rocks.

* As I use Twitter more I’m finding it makes increasing sense to bring Twitter friends in off of their feeds. Yesterday I also met Rafaleaz as the Thames played host to the Götheborg, before bumping into the Brownlee clan. London gets smaller every day.

I’ve almost finished tinkering with the new template. I’ll nail it this weekend.

From next week I’ll be back to regular posting on VMII. That this blog never had a single direction was always the point, but now that I’m working on several things that kind of overlap in a fun way I’ll be able to make the next few months of blogging feed into something else.

Rob sums up some of my frustrations in a neat little post here. And I found this part particularly interesting:

Recently the ‘extra-curricular itch’ has come back and as a result I’ve been talking with an old Londonist associate about doing something fun that’s not quite as time intensive as Londonist could be. The idea is to give ourselves the opportunity to write about the things we love and try and see if we can’t carve out a little niche for ourselves in the process. Should be a good laugh.

Wonder who and what he was talking about?

*cough*

*cough*

Steve Bell:

Isn’t it about time these weapons were banned?

[youtube]youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br0HdMfM7jQ[/youtube]

There’s an interesting debate going on over at Laughing Squid regarding Scott testing out the new Amazon Associates aStore.

Check out the comments.

[Music: off]