Friday Night Fights: Ladies Night Round 11 - Impressive, Most Impessive.

I've been lax with my Friday Night Fights lately. Would you believe I had trouble finding really good female contenders? But I got a good one tonight!

I present to you, Princess Leia Organa-Solo (nee Skywalker).

Latent Jedi powers + her father's temper + a lightsaber = somebody's gonna get his hand chopped off.

From 'The Other' by Jason Hall & John McCrea collected in Star Wars Tales vol. 4 (Dark Horse, 2004)

Tales from the Crypt: Cutting Cards

So there're this two gamblers, right? Gus Forney and Lou Crebis. They love to gamble. They live to gamble. They also hate each other. They can't stand each other. They both wish the other would just die. So one day they decided to settle the matter once and for all. They're gonna bet their lives. Winner takes all, loser dies.

They decided on Russian Roulette:

Okay, that didn't work because the bullet turned out to be a dud. No one dies. So Gus suggests a new game, Chop-Poker. What's chop-poker? Well, let the Crypt-Keeper explain it:

Now that's just messed up!

From Cutting Cards, collected in EC Archives: Tales From the Crypt vol. 3. Art by Fred Peters.

Batman Hates Apes

Especially albino apes. The SPCA be damned. Albino apes freak the hell out of Batman and when he sees one, he's gonna make sure that mother goes down.

Remember kids! Always destroy those who look, move, speak and behave differently from you.

From DC Goes Ape tradepaperback.

Superman & Batman vs Vampires

So there's gonna be a mini series featuring Batman & Superman fighting werewolves and vampires. John Byrne already did that in 1987. Well okay, it was just Superman and Batman versus one vampire and no werewolves but it only took him 38 pages to do it which is just about the right number of pages for a vampire story.

Batman is referring to his apparent death few pages earlier when he dives into quicksand and sinks. Sinking into quicksand equals death, right? Makes sense. Not necessarily, says Batman:


No you can't swim in quicksand like you do in water! The hell, Bruce? Or is he so well prepared and such a badass that he can bend the law of physics to his will? In which case...cool!

From Action Comics Annual #1 collected in Superman: The Man of Steel 6 by Byrne, Adams & Giordano

Meanwhile...

From Postsecret.com


Hey, I get turned on by Poison Ivy. That's even scarier.

Khairul H.'s Room of Geekery

Taking a cue from Maxo over at Great Caesar's Post (or to put it bluntly, totally cribbing another blogger's idea and making it your own. Shameless? You betcha!), I have taken a 360 degree look around my room and damn if I don't have a lot of Star Wars crap. Statues, mini-busts, dolls (I don't call them action figures), ships and assorted aliens. Impressive if I may so myself but I just realised I must have spent the equivalent of a small island's total GDP to acquire all these things. Ironically, I don't keep my comic books and trades in this room where I blog about them. Comics and assorted novels are kept in the next room so if I need to scan a panel or refer to something, I have to get off my butt and walk to that room and find the material there. Why didn't I keep my books here and the Star Wars stuff in the other room, you ask? To which I reply, "Shut up! Just shut up!"

Let's see:

• There's a small pile of trades on my worktable here next to the PC which I have yet to catalogue and shelf. I'll do it someday. Hey, I just found my Daredevil Companion Omnibus. So that's where it's been hiding!



• Next to those trades and still on the same table is the 1:1 scale of the AT-AT from Empire Strikes Back (with missing signature plaque), a 1:1 scale of Darth Vader's helmet from Revenge of the Sith with Hayden Christensen's signature and a small statue of kneeling Vader from that scene in ESB (see pic above).



• Seven 1:1 scale replicas of lightsaber hilts from Master Replicas. No, they don't light up or anything.



• A crapload of Force FX Lightsabers from Master Replicas. These do light up and make that "zzeeoow, zzeeoow" sound if you swing them around. Cool. Perfect for scaring kids and noisy dogs.



• My dvd collection. Hmm, maybe I should watch Y Tu Mama Tambien again.



• Next to the dvds is a 1:1 scale replica of a Stormtrooper blaster from the movies. Bought if from a fellow collector.



• My 50 inch plasma. Use it to watch Simpsons dvds and play Madden on the XBox. I know, what a waste of plasma power.



• An entire row of shelves with scale models of Star Wars ships (the falcon, Luke's X-Wing, Vader's Tie Fighter, Boba Fett's Slave I ship, the chicken walker from Return of the Jedi and that gunship from Episode II. All from the now defunct Code 3 Collectibles people.



• Some 18 inch SW statues from Sideshow: Solo, Boba Fett, Luke, Vader, Maul. Toldja I had a lot of Star Wars crap.



• And last but certainly not least, some Spidey 12-inch poseable dolls from the overpriced Japanese toymakers, Medicom. Also some Marvel and DC (mostly Batman) 7-inch figures.

And that's it. Oh, in the middle of the room there is a coffee table:



I promised myself that I will sort out all those books and put them on the shelves in the next room as soon as possible. That promise was made last year when there were only five books on the table. I'll get to it...someday. I promise.

I Know What I'll Be Reading Tonight...

Wonder Woman: The Circle HC (DC, 2008)

How to get me to pick up a Wonder Woman book? Have Gail Simone write it and have her write in a scene where the Amazon goddess fights talking gorillas. Super-intelligent talking gorillas are your go-to guys in comics. It is simply impossible to have a bad comic when it features talking gorillas. Impossible.

And to have Wonder Woman toss one of those apes over a waterfall, screaming like that Imperial officer in Return of the Jedi? Bonus!

Maybe it's my affinity to anything written by Ms. Simone but her debut in WW isn't half bad. I ignored the Allan Heinberg run (which wasn't all that bad I was told) and stayed away from the Jodi Picoult run (this one was all kinds of bad, again I was told) and simply waited for DC to collect Gail Simone's first six issues of Wonder Woman. Story: super powered neo-Nazis have invaded Themyscira for some reason (really, do you need to know their motivation? They're Nazis. They invade. That's what they do) and Diana rushes off to her island home to save her mother and fellow Amazons. Little does she know that four disgraced former bodyguards of her mother who were imprisoned for treason have escaped and are waiting for Diana to arrive and kill her. The reason they betrayed Hippolyta was because she wanted a child and in the minds of these four, that was just wrong.

The other story completing this collection sees Wonder Woman travelling to the Khund homeworld to help save them from an alien threat only to find a Green Lantern protecting the aliens. Nice two issue story which also sees Wonder Woman asking Nemesis if he wanted to go steady. Lucky comic book character bastard.

I like the Dodsons' artistic style. Anyone who doesn't draw Wonder Woman in a thong gets a thumbs up from me. She still looks like she's getting ready to play beach volleyball but at least we don't get to see her crack. Yes, it's a big deal to me. I have a 5yr old girl and I don't want her growing up thinking you have to show your butt cheeks to gain respect. The Dodsons are assisted by Ron Randall and Bernard Chang who also follow the "she-wears-shorts-not-a-thong" rule when drawing WW. Good for them.

With Gail Simone no longer writing Birds of Prey and her other book only just started so it'll probably be late 2009 before it gets collected (Secret Six? Sinister Six?), I think I'll be picking up more Simone-written Wonder Woman collections to satisfy my G.S. fix.