Huh, you're right — Perez does the first half and Lim the second. It looks like Perez may have done the layouts for issue #4, with Lim finishing.. That explains some of my disappointment with the artwork, for sure. I like Lim just fine, but he lacks the grandeur I was expecting.

I read The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner in the days between Christmas and New Years. The start and end are pretty fantastic, but drags in the middle (which is unfortunate, since so much of the book is about velocity). Some of the scenes in the New York art scene are quite grating.

Hey, there's no need to fight about it. I'm sure we can handle this situation maturely, just like the responsible adults we are. Isn't that right, Mr… Poopy Pants!?

Lew Zealand: "I brought the paper towels!"

Very well put. I resisted this show for such a long time because I like Ollie when he's bearded, bull-headed, and wearing a turtleneck, but the show really has captured the character's essence. Plus, the show's love of the DCU makes it feel like a live-action version of Brave and the Bold.

I only follow hockey, so others might not be that interested in this, but I really love the Puck Podcast. The hosts hit just that right balance of fan enthusiasm without veering into sports-talk radio territory (despite the fact that both of them work in sports broadcasting). Plus, the show is based in California,…

The NYTimes review mentioned the "creaky and noisy hydraulics" of The Lowland (or something like that), which also seems like an apt description of The Namesake.  The prose and detail was gorgeous, but the whole thing would grind to a stop whenever it was time to advance the plot.  Characters stopped acting like…

I tend to agree with the objections others have raised in this thread — do we really think someone like, say, Updike is a better writer because he occasionally strayed from the white middle-class male perspective he did so well, or that Faulkner is a lesser writer because he kept writing about mopey Southern men?…

I may have worded that wrong.  I like Spike, even though I think it's uneven, and I like some songs off of When I Was Cruel.

Boy,this review is spot-on for me.  I was hoping that we'd get something more akin to Get Happy, but instead this album, at its best, reminds me of Spike and, at its worst, of When I Was Cruel. The Roots are non-existent, and the whole thing just feels like another half-hearted Costello genre exercise. 
The re-working…

It's actually more serious than the Stewart's comments suggest.  That isn't to say that it isn't ridiculous in places, just that it doesn't play these bits for laughs. Tonally, it's closer to Gordon's "Dreams in the Witch House" episode of Masters of Horror.

I'm right there with you.  A lot of my friends absolutely love them, but I find them unbearably precious. The girl is okay, but the guy makes the worst "I'm so sensitive I cry after sex" face.  I keep waiting for the ghost of Elliott Smith to break up their cover of "Between the Bars" and say "Geez, lighten up…

Reading Take Me Out, a play by Richard Greenberg about a Derek Jeter type coming out of the closet.  It's pretty great, and I'm thinking it is going to sneak its way onto my syllabus for next semester.

Thematically, Locke and Key is quite different — it's more straight horror than the mundane unease in Black Hole — but it is very creepy.  Some of Daniel Clowes's stuff — David Boring and Death Ray, in particular — have that same sense of dread in the everyday.

Maus AND Blood Meridian? That's a heapin' helpin' of unhappiness right there.

That's a bummer — that one was creeping up my "to read" list.

Yeah, that was a great episode.  I know that doing relatively recent movies is part of what distinguishes the Flophouse from HDTGM and WHM, but I wouldn't mind hearing them do some more older movies.  Between Stuart and Dan's love of cheese and Elliott's knowledge of film, I think they can take a different approach…

They did write about him in Gamelogical Society.  But after learning (on the memorial Bombcast released last week) that Ryan was a big fan of the AV Club, I was kind of hoping that their show would get a mention in podmass.

I love this episode for two reasons:

When I saw them a year ago, the show had a 10-minute section where the band just played backing as Joey Santiago "played" his guitar with various objects — even putting it back in the stand and whipping the strings with a guitar. It was done very much as a parlor trick, complete with applause after each feat and…