Read Comics

I picked up Chuck #1 on a whim…I’d been looking for something different from the usual Marvel superhero fare I’m used to. The art looked kinda cool and the pages I skimmed through looked intriguing enough. Then I read it and I had to admit, I was a little confused. There’s this guy named Chuck who daydreams at work about Gilligan’s island inhabited by his coworkers at a Best Buy knockoff that gets blown up. Apparently he’s some spy type of person in some agency that employs psychics and there’s some sort of “intersection” in his head. Whatever that means.

Admitting defeat, I sheepishly turned to the internet to find out more about this comic. That’s when I found out that this was a comic adaptation of a TV series…one I don’t watch. The comic was obviously written for fans of the show (which makes me wonder how successful they hope the comic will be? Is there a huge market for comic versions of somewhat obscure TV shows?), and was thus lost on me. I was more intrigued by what I at first thought the story was about…some poor geek at the “Buy More superstore” who dreams these fantastic situations he puts himself and his friends in…and makes this his reality. But since I’m not a fan of the show and they didn’t really make the comic that accessible to a new audience, I most likely won’t be picking up any more. Which is unfortunate, because there is some genuinely witty dialogue and storytelling here. If anyone else watches the show, though, I’d be interested in what they thought.

Chuck is Written by Peter Johnson and Zev Barow with art by Jeremy Haun and Phil Noto

Zebraman starts off as an average joe, a schoolteacher who can barely pay attention at staff meetings, and whose children don’t care for him, and whose wife is almost certainly cheating on him. He sews his costume at night, ripping it the first time he tries it on, and daring himself to go across the street for a can of soda. It’s not even an original costume — Zebraman was a failed tv show from decades before.

We watched this Japanese import with english overdub (I didn’t bother trying to figure out whether the disk had english subtitles, and it seemed like it was going to be the kind of movie where it doesn’t mater anyway).

Turns out it’s the schoolteacher’s destiny to be Zebraman. There is an army of little green aliens living in the school gymnasium (I always thought this was true at my school too), and even some secret government agents have taken notice.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this movie was that the computer graphics didn’t suck terribly to go along with everything else that sucked terribly. I guess the director was someone pretty famous, but I don’t honestly know how this movie got made. (Although I suppose mighty morphin’ power rangers also got (gets?) made, so there you go.) The best part of the movie was the first fight scene, with a man wearing a giant crab costume and whose weapons were a pair of scissors in both hands. Also fairly amusing was a dream sequence involving the “Zebra Nurse“.

Oh yeah, and the tagline of the movie: Black and White Ecstasy! Seriously. Avoid at all costs… unless, you just want a movie to laugh along with, in which case, this is pretty amusing.