Chris Braak's Blog, page 42
February 7, 2011
Against Canon
I'm a recent reader of TQ, and I've been extremely impressed by the consistent quality and clarity of both Mr. Braak's and Mr. Holland's writing. The piece "Against Purity" particularly spoke to me, and thought I'd write up a response of sorts. - Elliott Harwell http://combat-archaeology.net/ Reading the opening lines of Chris Braak's "Against Purity," [...]
February 4, 2011
Screw 'The Cape,' Let's Pick on the 'Wonder Woman' Pilot
Here's where the news of the NBC-greenlit "Wonder Woman" pilot gets interesting – and by interesting I mean fairly depressing. It's the description of the show: Wonder Woman — aka Diana Prince — is a vigilante crime fighter in L.A. but also a successful corporate executive and a modern woman trying to balance all of [...]
February 3, 2011
Adventures in False Advertising: The Robot Brains
My name is Ryan Crutchfield and I am a system architect and application programmer with a master's degree in archaeology that I never get to use. I am a regular contributor at weirdthings.com and my twitter stream (@rc6750) will more than likely bore you to tears. I am a huge fan of robots. I have [...]
February 2, 2011
Some Thoughts On Style
I was looking back at the Jezebel repost of my "Problems With Representations of Women in (Mostly) Superhero Comics". This was for the reason of reminding the editors at Jezebel that they and I actually have a pretty good relationship, and so they should host the livecast of my newest play, which is about Emma [...]
February 1, 2011
How to Watch 'The Cape'
By way of explaining what may be the only reasonable way to watch "The Cape," let me share with you a formative Holland-moment from my youth: the day I took a cleat to the crotch and learned to love "The Flash." It was little league soccer, the autumn of 1990, when I, a feisty young [...]
January 31, 2011
DCU Online
I have started playing DCU Online, which is a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game that takes place in the DC comics universe. So, you make a superhero or a supervillain, and you fly around and start punching people. It's pretty cool, but there are some caveats. The fact that it's in the DC Universe adds a [...]
January 27, 2011
Against Purity
Purity is pretty good for water and I suspect metallurgy, but I'm starting to think that it's a waste of time when it comes to everything else. Kurt Busiek recently Twittered (not recently, this essay is from a while ago -ed.), in a conversation with Colleen Coover: A story that readers hate but is in [...]
Superman: Earth One (Or: 'You Will Believe a Writer Can Miss the Point This Badly')
A couple months ago, DC released the first in what will be a series of standalone Superman graphic novels designed for audiences that aren't steeped in decades of DC continuity or beholden to previous reboots. They titled this series "Superman: Earth One." Because when you're trying to start with a clean slate, it's best to [...]
January 24, 2011
Noir and Supernatural Detective Fiction
Amazon.com has declared that Richard Kadrey's Kill the Dead is one of the ten best SF/Fantasy books of the year. Pursuant to that, I decided to finally sit down and read Sandman Slim, the precursor to the aforementioned Kill the Dead, and see how it is. Sandman Slim is fairly good; in case by some [...]
January 21, 2011
Lesser-Known Superhero Mottos
One of the more baffling ideas in "The Cape" – the one that makes everyone assume the creators have probably not read a comic ever – is that the hero of the fictional comic has a motto: "One man, one fight, one right."Which doesn't actually mean anything, but…hey, "The Cape," everybody. I sat on the [...]
