From a conversation with the staff at the wonderful Austin Books & Comics earlier today..

"Mice With Swords are the new Zombies.."

Remember folks, you read it here first.

Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special #1
DC Comics (52pages / $4.99)

Writer: Geoff Johns
Artist: Ethan Van Sciver

The only time I read any Green Lantern series for anything like an extended period (i.e. for more than four issues) was during the first iteration of the Green Lantern Corps. I never took to any of the various Lanterns we ended up with patroling Sector 2814, Jordan, Stewart, Gardner and Raynor were all one note characters as far as I was concerned, (with the exception of the animated JL/JLU version of Jon Stewart – now that was how to write a Green Lantern); but Kilowog and the rest of the corps were a fun, intersting set of ring wielders.

I recently tried the new GL Corps book but quickly found myself lost in the convoluted mess that is the current DC Universe continuity. So perhaps I should have known better than to pick this up. The stunning art work of Ethan Van Sciver passed the flick test, and even since finishing the book I’ve flicked it open again just to pour over some of the panels, catching new details and missed nuances of body language and story telling. But pretty pictures do not a story make, and this is no story. It’s another bout of DCU navel gazing that plays to only the most die-hard fanboy. Heck I’ve been reading the DCU books for over twenty years and I still wasn’t exactly sure who was who, or what was what. Too many unnecessary characters doing too many unrelated things, too much violence for violence’s sake and too much reliance on spectacle and shock. Given the current over indulgence on “shock and awe” in various DCU books, the big “twist” at the end hit with the impact of a wet sponge.

(On reading this through again before I posted it, it worries me a little that I actually knew which space sector the Earth was in without looking it up!)

(In case you’re wondering where the other 41 reviews went, I decided to continue the review numbering from the old LiveJournal vesrion of this blog)

James Cameron’s "scriptment" for his aborted 1992 SPIDER-MAN movie has been posted online along with a sampling of story-board style illustrations by artist Daniele Tomasi.

Over at CNN.com this morning they ran an item on the funeral of Captain America.

Seriously. I mean can’t they find enough real events to report on, but before I go off on a rampage about the state of the modern media… what really caught my eye was the fact that the story was headed by the following note.

Editor’s Note: The following Associated Press story reveals events in the Marvel Comics comic-book world concerning Captain America. If you’d rather not know, stop reading now.

News articles with SPOILER WARNINGS !! – The line between reality and fiction blurs just a little bit more.

Over on his blog writer and comics historian Mark Evanier has posted details about the first of two upcoming books about JACK KIRBY.

He describes "Kirby: King Of Comics" as follows:
224 pages in a 9" by 12" hardcover format, published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. which is arguably the leading publisher of art-type books in the United States and maybe anywhere. The book is filled with illustrations from Jack’s life, ranging from things he did as a kid (signed with his real name, Kurtzberg) to work as an adult. Many of the items have been seen before, though never with this quality of printing. Many have never been published. I have, for instance, a couple of unused Marvel covers from the sixties, one still in pencil, and a number of pencil commissions he did for people late in life. We’re printing Jack’s autobiographical story, "Street Code," right off the original negatives. We’re printing a Fighting American story right off the original art. We have some of Jack’s famous collages and a couple of pages where he took the art to some comic he’d done and hand-colored the original art. There are some amazing pieces.

Evanier also posted an update on his long in development Kirby biography: " (there is )no firm publication date or plans at present, is an exhaustive, long, trivia-laden, full-of-hitherto-undisclosed info biography. I’m still working intermittently on that one. Don’t ask me when it’ll be done. I don’t know."

The cover for this year’s ComicCon International souvenir book was released online over the weekend. Not surprisingly as one of the themes for this years nerd-prom is the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, the cover features the real stars of the franchise.

No whiny teenagers here…

The image by Adam Hughes is a visual homage to the classic trilogy with each character wearing a costume from each of the movies.

Does the internet really need yet another Comics Blog? The place seems overrun with the things. The truth is this isn’t another new comics blog, it’s just a new home for a blog that was a blog before there were such things as blogs.

Pull up a chair while I explain. Way back in the far mists of time when there was only one X-Men book and Batman actually smiled, I ran a small comics retail operation called FOREST COMICS. We sold comics via mail-order and at local conventions (we called them Comic Marts) in the south west of England. Why Forest Comics? Simply because we lived in the Royal Forest of Dean.

For various reasons, that I may go into in some future posts, the retail business morphed into self-publishing a quarterly comics interview/feature/reviews magazine called FCQ(Forest Comics Quarterly – another case of using the bleeding obvious).. FCQ’s only real claim to fame was one of the first in-depth interviews with an up and coming English writer called Warren Ellis, and as far as I’m aware it was the first place that any artwork from the “missing” Miracleman issue #25,saw print.

As part of FCQ I started a review column called… yes you guessed it…”can’t see the forest.” With the demise of FCQ and my move across the Atlantic the review column idea morphed into other formats and the “can’t see the forest” name was used on several comic book stores’ websites, on the Compuserve Comics Forum, in the Comicopia APA and eventually here on RevSF, where it’s run on over 70 review columns.

So what’s this got to do with blogs? During my time on Compuserve and as part of the Comicopia APA one of the most popular items I wrote was a series called “Comic Encounters” – The idea grew out of a comment a friend of mine made that I seem to see comics connections in something almost every day. So I started taking a note of them, writing them down and posting them on CompuServe, and in the APA, as a sort of on-line comics diary. (Sounds like a blog to me.)

When blogging technology eventually caught up with my inspired idea, I decided to move the Comic Encounters idea over to Live Journal, but that ended up being more of a personal blog. So I tried again and set up an LJ blog under the “can’t see the forest” title with the idea of combining the reviews and the odd comics encounter story. And there it has sat for the last 3 years.

After the arrival of the RevSF blogs, it seemed wasteful to be writing reviews and notes on my own blog, and then collecting them for columns to be posted here. Why not do the obvious thing and move my comics blog over here. So here it is.

This latest incarnation of “Can’t See The Forest” will include:
* Reviews (hopefully at least one a week)
* Comic Encounters
* Thoughts and Observations on comics in general
* And a couple of series I have in mind.

Come along for the stroll and I hope you will enjoy the view in this particular forest of four color fun.