Filed Under sea adventures, treasure hunters
Anyone see this cross between Waterworld and Indiana Jones? I can’t imagine its being very good, but I’m wondering if its worth TiVoing next time its on or sticking in my Netflix queue.
Filed Under bioshock, deep sea divers, pirates, sea adventures, submarines, the phantom
Pirates Dinner Adventure
Pirate-themed, interactive dinner theater. Sure beats watching The Music Man while you eat.
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
Christopher Mills has the review. Makes me want to see how Netflix is stocked on that, Man from Atlantis, and SeaQuest. (Pretty well, it turns out, except for Man from Atlantis.)
What other underwater shows do I need to revisit? Don’t say Flipper.
Bioshock movie
While looking over Hollywood’s slate of upcoming steampunk movies, i09 ranks the Bioshock one pretty high on the excitement meter, mentioning a Jules Verne influence and an underwater city.
Because I’d do nothing else if I played video games, I try to stay away from them, so I don’t know much about Bioshock except that I’m tired of hearing ignorant fans cry “rip off” every time they a deep sea diving suit somewhere else. But “Verne” and “underwater city” certainly get my attention.
New Phantom TV show
Daniel Knauf (Carnivale) and his son Charles have pitched a four-hour Phantom TV movie to the Sci Fi Channel in hopes that it’ll eventually become a TV series. A Phantom TV show from the creator of Carnivale sounds pretty good to me in concept, but I’m skeptical about their decision to update the character.
They sound like they’re keeping enough of my favorite elements (the skull rings, the guns, the Jungle Patrol) that I don’t entirely dispair. But making him an orphan who discovers his Phantom lineage and turning the Singh Brotherhood into corporate bad guys conjures up bad memories of Sci Fi’s horrible Flash Gordon series. And with no mention in the article of the horse or the wolf… well, I’m nervous.
Filed Under creature from the black lagoon, merfolk, sea adventures, sea monsters
Mermaid
By Chris Crumley (who does a lot of cool underwater photography, by the way).
Another mermaid
Not really sure who the artist is, but I found it here.
Merman
By Captain America artist Steve Epting.
Creature from the Black Lagoon
By Schiani Ledo.
Sea Monster!
By Basil Wolverton.
Filed Under blog, sea adventures, women in fiction
I’m narrowing the focus of the blog. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I think it’s the right thing to do for four reasons:
1. You don’t need another Star Wars blog.
Seriously, I keep seeing the same information and news all over the Internet and very often it pops up here too just because I think it’s cool or whatever. You don’t need me to tell you that John Favreau has been signed to direct Iron Man 2 or to link to Clone Wars and Spirit trailers or to say that Fringe looks exciting. There are a ton of sites that do that so much better than I do.
In fact, the only reason I’ve been doing it as long as I have is because I know there are some friends of mine who read my blog, but don’t read the major entertainment news blogs. But the rest of you don’t need that and besides, I just can’t keep up with it anymore. Which leads me to my second reason.
2. I just can’t keep up with it anymore.
Reading and filtering through a couple of hundred blog posts everyday is fun, but it’s way time-consuming. I don’t plan on dropping any of my reading, but not having to share every little tidbit that I find interesting is going to save me a lot of time that I could use writing my novel, following up on comics projects, or even just improving the content here. Narrowing my focus will limit the amount of link-blogging I do, and I think that’s a good thing.
3. Less link-blogging means better content.
I hope it does anyway. I’ve got a folder full of ideas for honest-to-goodness articles I’ve been wanting to post, but keeping up with the links has been distracting me from that. And recently I read a couple of things from other Internet writers that have made that clear to me.
At the end of June, Tom Spurgeon questioned his own site-strategy and the amount of link-blogging he was doing. He was just thinking out loud and repented of it the next day, but while mulling it over he said something that hit home to me:
…I feel that link-blogging is becoming less and less valuable, more a way for people to fake content than provide a service.
While I’d never presume to tell Tom Spurgeon how to run his incredibly successful blog, he got me thinking about my own blogging and whether or not I’m “faking content.” I certainly don’t thing that all link-blogging is useless. My day isn’t complete without going through both Tom’s blog and Dirk Deppey’s with a fine-toothed comb. But I don’t think it’s what I want Adventureblog to be.
And while I was considering that, Warren Ellis sent out one of his email newsletters that reminded me about this post with the following thoughts in it.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could stand up now and say, okay, these are the post-curation years? The world does not need another linkblog. What is required, frankly, is what we’re supposed to call “content” these days. When I were a lad, back in the age of steam, we called this “original material.” Put another way: we like it when Cory and Xeni are the copy/paste editors for the internet, but we like it better when Cory writes a book and Xeni makes an episode of BoingBoingTV.…And, frankly, no-one’s going to do a better job of being the internet’s copy/paste editors than the BB crew anyway. They have the time, they have the money, they have the setup, they have the audience and they have the momentum of nearly a decade in the job. Nobody needs another linkblog like that. There are already thousands of them. The job of curation is being taken care of. Look ahead.
I’m challenged by that. And while I doubt that reviews are exactly what Ellis had in mind, I’m not going to be able to improve by continuing to let linking eat up most of my time.
4. I’ll be able to get out more.
Right now, when I read something nifty on someone else’s blog, my initial instinct isn’t to comment on it. It’s to save the link so I can write about it later. I think it would be nicer to provide feedback directly on other people’s blogs, so I’m going to try to do that more.
So, what’s the focus going to be?
Like I said, I’m cutting out all the Star Wars and Star Trek stuff. In fact, I’m cutting out most of the scifi stuff altogether. There are a ton of great scifi blogs already covering that. I’ll probably still geek out on some new TV show or movie enough that I’ll want to talk about it, but I’ll try to keep that to my Off Topic blog when that’s the case.
What I want to keep talking about here are two things. One is sea adventure. That includes pirates, fish-people, Atlantis, mad scientists in submarines, sea monsters, all that stuff. I said earlier that I’ve really been drawn to that lately, but it’s not just lately. Anyone who knows me knows what a sucker I am for this stuff and always have been. Especially pirates.
It also includes jungle islands filled with loin-cloth wearing heroes (male and female), lost cities, giant gorillas, and dinosaurs. That may not be what most people think of when they hear “sea adventure,” but it’s what I think about. So I’ll keep talking about all that too.
The other thing I’m going to keep talking about could go by the hoity toity label “women in heroic fiction,” but I prefer to call them Action Girls. Meaning nothing disrespectful by the use of the word “girl;” it just flows better and I don’t think it’s really a diminutive term anyway. Anyway, I’m far too fascinated by strong, heroic women to quit talking about them, so you’ll still be hearing much more about Wonder Woman and Black Canary and the others than you want to.
(A third topic that’s being grandfathered in is giant monsters and giant robots because Jason and I are still hard at work on Kill All Monsters! and it’s a subject of interest. But I’m going to be more exclusive about which monster/robot links I post.)
Not that I’m cutting out the link-blogging cold turkey, you understand. As they relate to the topics of Sea Adventure and Action Girls, I’ll still be sharing plenty of links (and art and videos). It’s just that in cutting out everything else, I hope to be able to write more “original material” about those topics, in the form of both blog essays and my novel.
So, hopefully everyone’s down with the new direction. I really think it’s going to make this place more fun.
Filed Under mermaids, sea adventures, sea monsters
The title of this one is from Moby Dick: “When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it…”
I’ll explain why later, but I’m really into sea adventure lately.
Giant Squid 1955
From Tom Simpson’s collection of vintage Disneyland photos.
Capt. Hailborne at St. Johns, Newfoundland
By Ludwig Gottfried.
A Mermaid
By John Waterhouse.
Goth mermaid
By Michelle Steele.
Malaga Cove Plaza fountain
I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help but love it.
Filed Under man from atlantis, sea adventures
Apologies to SF Signal who had the idea first.
Filed Under alpha flight, aquaman, charlotte doyle, fish war, marrina, pirates, sea adventures, sea monsters, westerns
Galveston
Boom! Studios sent me a press release about their upcoming pirate/cowboy mini-series. It’s based on actual events from Jean Lafitte’s days in Galveston, Texas where he knew and worked with future Alamo-hero Jim Bowie. Boom! calls it “an over the top thriller of blood, guts, and revenge.” I wonder if they’re going to mention that Lafitte and Bowie knew each other because the frontiersman helped the pirate smuggle in slaves and launder the profits.
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle
I gotta start reading more Young Adult books. That’s where all the action is. Avi’s The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, for example, is the story of a prim and proper nineteenth-century schoolgirl who crosses the Atlantic to rejoin her family after studying in England. But on the trip she gets involved in mutiny and murder and is transformed into a swashbuckling heroine.
I thoroughly enjoyed Avi’s medieval tale Crispin, so I’m going to have to read this too. But maybe I’ll wait until after the movie (starring Morgan Freeman and Pierce Brosnan).
Marrina Mini-Bust
Bowen Designs has a new mini-bust featuring one of my favorite Alpha Flight characters. I hate what happened to her in the comics, but the tragic aspect of her story is probably what I like most about her. That and just that she’s really, really well-designed.
Man, I miss John Byrne’s Alpha Flight.
Did you know Aquaman has a theme song?
Sea monster wallet
Designed by Mike DiPetrillo.
Tetrapod Zoology’s Sea Monster Week
Featuring the Amazing Hook Island Sea Monster, Professor Sharpe’s Mysterious Sea Serpent, the Tecolutla monster, sea monster corpses, and two posts on Moore’s Beach Monster.
Soon we will all live on giant, floating, lilypad cities.
At least, I certainly hope so.
Fish War
If only it weren’t from the people who brought us Dragon Wars. Still, the concept is awesome enough that one has hope.
Filed Under mermaids, sea adventures, sea monsters
“Witches’ Tide”
By Frazetta.
Sea Monster
Also by Frazetta.
Mermaid
By Gene Gonzalez. Mermaids sometimes get a bad rap for being about as hip as rainbows and unicorns, but when they’re done right, they’re sexy, scary, and really cool.
“The Little Mermaid”
The Hollywood Animation Archive has a lot of great Edmund Dulac illustrations of Hans Christian Anderson tales, but his Little Mermaid ones are easily my favorites.
Speaking of…
From this guy’s photos of the 2008 Anime Expo.
Filed Under batgirl, creature from the black lagoon, dinosaurs, giant robots, incredibles, nazis, sea adventures
Paul Allan Ballard
I met artist Paul Allan Ballard at Wizard World. He’s pals with Jess and Grant and those guys, so we ran into each other off and on the whole weekend. At one point Paul mentioned that he thought he knew me from somewhere else, but couldn’t remember where. Turns out, he reads this blog for the pulp covers. Check out his stuff, he’s got a lot of cool work, including designs for that unmade Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls film I keep talking about.
The Drums of Tapajos
Speaking of pulp covers…
By Leo Morey.
Creature from the Black Lagoon
By Tom Whalen. (Thanks, Slashfilm!)
Mr. Incredible vs. the Omnidroid!
By Eric Tan. (Thanks to Slashfilm for this one too!)
Batgirl
I liked Michele Legendre’s Wonder Woman piece so much I went looking for more.
Filed Under aliens, burn notice, conventions, john carter of mars, lost boys, sea adventures, sherlock holmes, skulduggery pleasant, vampires, zatanna
Mermaid Island
There aren’t enough mermaid movies featuring giant sea monsters, if you ask me. Too bad the Catwoman director has to be the one making it.
Zatanna ongoing?
Captain Carrot and the Final Ark was definitely an entertaining little series. Any plans to pick up on it’s mysterious ending? Didio hopes so, “Did we ever announce the Zatanna book?” The panel became confused. Did they just slip up? It was said something with Paul Dini and Zatanna was a possibility during the NY Comic Con panel but no, nothing had actually been announced. Didio needed to go hypothetical again, “If Zatanna had her own book, you might see something along those lines somewhere down the road. Just saying if.”
“You could be happy here. I could take care of you. I wouldn’t let anybody hurt… AAAH! NO, ET! NO!” *SPLURCH!*
Pixar’s John Carter of Mars movie confirmed
According to The Pixar Blog:
The disclosure came at the end of the short, but extremely enjoyable, discussion (excerpts of which will be published here soon), when a writer from Suite101.com asked about [writer/director Andrew Stanton's (Finding Nemo, WALL-E)'s] next project, to which Stanton mentioned (not too loudly) ‘John Carter of Mars‘.Doubting what I’m hearing, I interject, “What is that?” “John Carter of Mars“, Stanton replies. “You’re confirming John Carter? Are you serious?” At this point, I turn my tape recorder back on, “…say that on tape!”, I tell him. Stanton: “I am writing John Carter of Mars right now.” “Oh man, you just doubled my page views!“, I say. Everybody laughs.
Cannot wait.
Skulduggery Pleasant
There’s always room on my bookshelf for a skull-faced detective.
The future’s getting closer all the time
I’ve been wanting an excuse to finally visit Disneyland and Vegas. A 300 mph levitating train ought to do the trick nicely.
Burn Notice novels
I’m a big freaking Burn Notice geek, so I’m way tempted by the idea of continuing Michael Westen’s adventures via novels. These things are rarely as satisfying as watching the show, but I suspect that my curiosity may make me find out for myself this time. (Thanks to Double O Section for the heads up.)
Wizard World Chicago
I’ll be heading to WWChicago in another week. If my vacationing luck holds up like it has so far this year, I expect aliens to take over the convention center and hold us all hostage. But at least I’ll have Warren Ellis to keep me company. He’s making a rare convention appearance there this year.
Via his email newsletter:
I’m at the Chicago con next week, and I’ll be doing one of my marathon Q&A talks on the Friday night. Details:The talk is actually at the convention center. We don’t have a room number — they’re actually going to be removing walls from adjoining rooms to make a monster hall that’ll seat 1500.
The room will open at 9PM. There will be a bar in this room, so people can get good and drunk before I go on.
I go on at 9.30PM. And we will just bullshit until they throw us out.
This is NOT a ticketed event. No-one is on the door, I’m told. First come, first seated.
Lord help me; I sorta want to see Lost Boys 2 now
I don’t really know why and I can’t defend it, but seeing pictures of the older Frog Bros. and their new vampire enemies has me kind of curious.
Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes
Guy Ritchie will be directing a Holmes movie for Warner Bros. who’re comparing it to Batman Begins in tone. They say it’ll focus more on Holmes’ adventurous, swashbuckling side. I think that’s a valid approach, so now the question is, who to play Holmes?
As soon as I heard Ritchie’s name, my mind went to Jason Statham, whom I love, but think would be pretty awful for the role. Hugh Laurie would be a great – if obvious – choice though. What do you think?
