Is It Wednesday Yet?

Things have been really weird on the personal side lately and I haven't been reading a lot of comics. Half my pull from last week is still piled up on my desk unread. These things happen. I'm sure I'll get back into it soon.

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I have two unfinished posts in my drafts folder and I'm beginning to think they may never see the light of day. One is about the lack of strong female characters in Thor (the movie) and the other is about the consternatingly bad Alpha Flight #0.5, a comic that takes place in Canada on election day but has nothing to do with the recent Canadian elections. Hopefully I'll get around to finishing that post sometime this week. I think I've more or less given up on the one about Thor, though. The movie gets less and less relevant as we move into summer and the theatres are about to get flooded with a bunch of other super-hero movies. All of which, by the way, I intend to see. So maybe I'll revisit the idea for the post later this summer as a comparison with the other big movies.

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DC Women Kicking Ass has a post about what improvements DC have made in diversity since they announced a commitment to it five years ago. I haven't read it yet, because I'm afraid it's going to be too depressing. I didn't even know DC had made this commitment and as far as I can tell there is little to no evidence that they've made any real efforts in that department.

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I'm going through one of my phases where my blogs seem to multiply faster than my readers do. Right now I could 6 active ones and 3 dormant ones. I won't mention all of them here, but here are a few that might be of interest to you:

• I Have Thoughts and Feelings: Where I write about music. There is only one post so far and it's a detailed song-by-song review of Nirvana's In Utero. It was originally going to be "a blog about Phil Collins and Queen," as the header says. I know that seems inexplicably random and weird, and that was sort of the point. I was about halfway through a very long rambling introduction explaining the concept, but I decided to trash it and just review whatever. I'm sure I'll get to Phil Collins and Queen eventually.
• Melt Into Whiteness: A Tumblr where I dump YouTube videos of songs I like. There's no concept here. Just a straightforward (though very eclectic) collection of music.
• I Understand and I Wish to Continue: This is going to be my "personal" blog where I write about anything that isn't music or comics. Some of it is likely to be very personal and not all that interesting for anyone else but me, but I also plan to use it to dump ideas and rants about issues like social justice, feminism, queer politics, etc.

As an added bonus, I will also link to my Flick photostream, only because I just bought a new digital camera and I hope to get back into the habit of posting pictures regularly. It'll probably mostly be boring pictures of myself and my cat, since I don't have anything else to take pictures of.

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New comics this week!

Flashpoint kicks into full speed this week with not only the second issue of the main series but also the first batch of minis:

• Flashpoint #2 (of 5) 
• Flashpoint: Abin Sur: The Green Lantern #1 (of 3)
• Flashpoint: Batman: Knight of Vengeance #1 (of 3)
• Flashpoint: Secret Seven #1 (of 3)
• Flashpoint: The World of Flashpoint #1 (of 3)

You'll find previews for each of those on DC's The Source. For now, I'm going to stick to my plan of only buying the main series, although I will admit that both the Batman and Secret Seven ones look better than I anticipated. As a blogger/reviewer, I really wish I could afford to cover all of Flashpoint. But as a fan/consumer, it's pretty hard to justify spending that much money on it.

Other stuff on my pull list:

• Hellboy: The Fury #1 (of 3) (Dark Horse)
• Static Shock Special (one-shot) (DC)
• Superboy #8 (DC)
• Sweet Tooth #22 (Vertigo)
• Amazing Spider-Man #663 (Marvel)
• 50 Girls 50 #1 (Image)