Ryan McKern

• Iron Man is an excel­lent comic book movie (which makes it a pretty good movie over­all). It feels very much like a faith­ful attempt to com­press 20 years of sto­ry­lines (the ori­gin, the Armor Wars, Pep­per Potts, and the ces­sa­tion of arma­ments man­u­fac­tur­ing by Star Indus­tries) into a sin­gle sto­ry­line with a strong influ­ence from the Ulti­mate Mar­vel universe.

  I believe it is the Mar­vel equiv­a­lent to Bat­man Begins, and it sets a pretty high bar for "faith­ful to the orig­i­nal" and "a work all its own". I can­not say enough about Robert Downey Jr. totally nail­ing what Tony Stark should be. I wish the char­ac­ter was this well writ­ten and cohe­sive in the comic books, because for 15 years Mar­vel edi­to­r­ial has had him writ­ten like he's still an anti-communist busi­ness­man (read: defunct in the mod­ern world).

  It feels like a love let­ter from John Favreau to the days when nerdery was some­thing to shun.

  Assum­ing none of this means any­thing to you, that means "go see it tonight".

• DC Uni­verse #0 makes me both excited and wary of the loom­ing Final Cri­sis. I am not imme­di­ately offended by the idea of Barry Allen com­ing back dur­ing a Cri­sis, but at the same time I don't give a fly­ing fuck about "Super­man" Prime form­ing an anti-Legion. Beyond the recent run in Action Comics, the Legion bores me to death. At the same time though, the idea of Evil (cap­i­tal E on that one) win­ning the "eter­nal bat­tle" seems like it could be a fun ride (in the hands of a com­pe­tent writer, which Mor­ri­son is).

• After Blue Bee­tle #25 the cre­ative team switched around, and Jai Nitz took over from John Rogers and I won­dered if things could pos­si­bly come together the way they had for the last 10 issues or so.

  After read­ing the spe­cial spanish-language edi­tion issue #26 I have to say I am suit­ably impressed enough not to drop this book. Their take on a latino fam­ily reunion mir­rored almost every sin­gle pater­nal fam­ily reunion I've been to form the point of view of both Jaime (JAI, not JAMI, blanco nino!) and Traci Thir­teen. High marks all over for what could have essen­tially been noth­ing what­so­ever more than a throw-away issue.

• Sap­poro brand bagged or cup ramen noo­dles are a deli­cious three-minute snack that only leaves you feel­ing a lit­tle gross after­wards (as opposed to Nis­san or Maruchan, which leaves you feel­ing very gross afterwards).

• Muse's 10 or 15 min­utes on Live From Abbey Road was an excel­lent exam­ple of how a lit­tle bit of after-the-fact mas­ter­ing and mix­ing can pro­duce great results from live per­for­mances. The live takes on "Knights of Cydo­nia" and "Starlight" were excellent.

• There is a new arrival in our drive way.

  

  She doesn't have a name yet (though she does have her skull sticker and 600 miles from 3 days of dri­ving already) but she is the most sen­si­ble shade of red I've ever seen on an auto­mo­bile. Also, I am fairly cer­tain it is not a Skrull.

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Ryan McKern: i need to find a name for my new car.
Jon Yu: you name your cars?
Ryan McKern: you don't name yours?
Jon Yu: why would i name my car?
Jon Yu: it's called "my car"