Monthly Archives: August 2015

We Bare Bears

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This isn’t really a webcomic recommendation, but rather an encouragement to check out an adaptation. (It’s been a couple of years since I last did that.) We Bare Bears is the latest original series from Cartoon Network, and they did a bang-up job with the limited material they had in the first place.

The reason I’m not discussing its webcomic first is because there’s a reason I stated “limited material”–there isn’t much to discuss regarding the webcomic itself. The Three Bare Bears was a very short-lived webcomic created by Daniel Chong. You can read the archive here. The comic is about three bears who get into silly antics, and…that’s it. There’s not much to talk about because of how short the archive is–there were barely a dozen strips before Chong decided to pursue his career in animation. He worked with Pixar and Illumination Entertainment (Despicable Me franchise) for a while, then eventually decided to adapt his characters into an animated short, which won him an award at the KLIK! Animation Festival in Amersterdam. This impressed Cartoon Network enough to pick it up for a full series, and what I’ve seen for the first few weeks of premieres can proudly sit alongside CN’s other stellar hits from the past five years.

We Bare Bears centers around the three same characters from the comic: Grizz, an outgoing grizzly bear who desires fame and friends; Panda, an introverted panda bear who browses the Internet and is awkward with social connection; and Ice Bear, a deadpan, no-nonsense polar bear who speaks in the third person and has impressive fighting and cooking skills. The bears try to blend into human society at the San Francisco Bay Area and hijinks ensue. The premise is simple and basic, yet the writers have gotten a lot of mileage out of this setting. The characters bounce off each other very well, and it leads to hilarious, and at times, heartwarming moments. (Check out the episode “Burrito,” the most famous episode in the season thus far.)

This series was already recently greenlit for a second season, despite being relatively new, and that’s an indication of the show’s quality: there’s no reason not to check this series out. We Bare Bears premieres every Thursday at 6:30PM on Cartoon Network, and you can watch previous episodes on Cartoon Network’s website.

Hawkeye: My life as a weapon

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How do you make something lame cool?

Hawkeye is lame. The world knows it. There are whole tropes about his lameness. No one should be surprised by this. Originally conceived as Marvel’s version of Green Arrow, poor Clint didn’t really have a chance.

Enter Matt Fraction and his take on Hawkeye. In this story, Clint is an experienced hero, a man struggling to find his place in a world where whe he is a second string hero on a team of superheroes. He lives in the poor section of town, in an attempt not to be recognized.

The first story of the collection sets up Clint as a man who, like the Green Arrow before him, looks out for the little guy. In his attempt to deal with a corrupt landlord, Clint ends up rescuing a dog and buying an apartment building. The next story show us how Clint knows he’s lame, with Kate Bishop ribbing Clint about trick arrows. This merges beautifully with a fight later on in the story.

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The third story focuses on Clint’s past as an operative. The final story is a Kate Bishop story from the Young Avengers book where Clint is a secondary character.

Fraction clearly knows his main character is perceived as lame and has injected his stories with a good dose of humour to deal with this. And for the most part, it works.

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Clint knows he’s a second tier hero and is doing his best with it. Stories are fast paced, full of fights, action sequences, quips and solid characterization. Through most of the book, Clint is a mentor to Kate and that lends a nice bit of back and forth between the two, growing both characters.

Solid outing. Enough to bring me back for more.

RevBlog analytics reports going out tomorrow

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I’ve put together recurring analytics report emails for two of the blogs on this site. Why two? Because I could quickly come up with the email addresses of those two.

If you want one of your own (they’re in PDF and have more information than you probably want) and you don’t get one on Monday, then drop me a line and I’ll set you up.

Polish edition of STEAMPUNK inspires national pride

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While doing my weekly search for online mentions of Tachyon books, I ran across a review of the Polish edition of Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s Steampunk. While reviewer Anna Siemomysła at Ziarno Myśli, czyli wynurzenia Siemomysły didn’t care much for the book (“an anthology of ‘Steampunk’ is a good compendium of the mainstream, but in my opinion, unfortunately this is not a collection of good literature”), she made special mention of my contribution.

After twelve texts we receive are two articles (by Rick Klaw and Bill Baker), from which we can learn about the fact that steampunk is not just literature. Such pop compendium of knowledge about what and how and where to look. Rick Klaw recalls, for example, about our native Retrostacji what I personally introduced a state of national pride;)

(All translations courtesy of Google.)

For those that don’t have their copy of Steampunk handy (or *gasp* don’t own a copy), here’s the mention that got Siemomysła excited.

The English language version of the Polish site Retrostacji, Steampunkopedia (steampunk.republika.pl) offers the most comprehensive steampunk works chronological bibliography available on the web along with numerous links to steampunk-inspired videos. Sadly, the site stopped updating in February, 2007.

 

While the Polish edition sports a great cover, obviously inspired by Joe R. Lansdale’s contribution “The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down,” Joe is not mentioned on the cover. Weird.