It’s been a hot second since I've posted here. Wow. Well, hello everyone and welcome to my Substack. This is going to be another review style type post in the same vein as the one I did on John Carpenter's the Thing a couple months back. If you haven’t read it and are interested in doing so, I’ll be providing the link down at the end of this post! Life has sometimes a funny way of sucking the time out from underneath you, and before you know it gray hairs start showing up unannounced just like that wacky uncle you never invite to Christmas parties. But I'm told that those gray hairs make you “sexier” and more “distinguished” Other people's words. Not mine. But there's a lot to talk about today. Seven whole things in fact! I know, not eighty four. I lied….sorry. A nice mixture of movies, shows, comics and novels that i’ve consumed over these past few months. It’s been nice escaping our seemingly bleak and willfully bland reality in favor of places usually equally as bleak, but way more interesting to explore. The things that I'll be covering today along with mini summations and final thoughts are as follows.
Stray for PS4/PS5
Little Bird(Comic) By Darcy Van Poelgeest and Ian Bertram
Strange Adventures(Comic) By Tom King, Mitch Gerads and Doc Shaner
Dune(Novel) By Frank Herbert
Tender is the Flesh(Novel) By Agustina Bazterrica
Barbarian(2022 Film) Written and Directed by Zach Cregger
Avatar the Last Airbender(TV Show) By Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko
So there we have it! If any of those things interest you, or all of those things interest you, read on! If not, Well, my book Eye Candy is nearing half way done and will ideally be out by Summer of next year. So feel free to ignore this entire post and see you later when I spam your email boxes with more nonsense again in the coming weeks instead.
First up we have Stray for the Playstation systems as well as PC.
Stray begins with a rough and tough gang of house cats living in the woods on the outskirts of an apocalypse. Stuff happens on their routine zoomies and you’re separated from your family. You fall down a pit and find yourself in a city completely overrun by machines, some friendly and some not so friendly. You eventually run into a tiny robot that attaches itself to your back to help translate all the robots throughout your adventures. The gameplay is decently standard fare with puzzles and platforming that basically do it all for you. The games bread and catnip are in the story it’s telling. It’s a tale of loss, love, growth, and curiosity. It’s a game that can very realistically be finished in a single sitting. So it doesn’t overstay its welcome. But it now lives rent free in my head. If you love cats you’ve probably already played it and don’t need my recommendation, and if you don’t like video games even please don’t let it stop you from trying it. It’ll worm its way into your heart the same way your cat likely weasels its way into the bathroom in the morning when you’re getting ready for work.
4/5
Second is the comic Little Bird
Little Bird is a comic book that takes place in the rundown futuristic world of Northern Alberta Canada where a new breed of religious zealots are bent on destroying any kind of free thought or difference in culture in the word and name of God. The comic opens up with Little Bird's home and entire family getting slaughtered. What follows is her quest for revenge and the search for her Mother. Who was taken right before all of the genocide went down. There’s obvious parallels to how Canadians have treated indigenous lives throughout history, and I think it conveys Little Birds' plight with a ton of respect and nuance. But at other points the villains are almost comically sinister, and not comically in the sense that they’re in fact IN a comic book. Obviously you can parallel devout christians through crusades as evidence that they’ve done a lot worse than what’s projected and created for this story even here. It just feels like they’re constantly trying to build a world outside reality but are held down to the reality of the alternate future it’s trying to tell. I think it could’ve worked more as a metaphorical connection to reality rather than a literal one. It’s a book that has a very strong unflinching opinion and it’s very heavily researched way more than anyone i’ve ever seen do to tell a science fiction narrative. But with the incredible visual design of Ian Bertram and incredibly tight narrative structure of Darcy Van Poelgeest it’s hard not to root for Little Bird and her fight for the good and just. She’s flawed, badass, resourceful, and most of all completely and utterly believable as a human. Even in such a fantastical and inhuman world. It doesn’t hurt that she has a pet owl either.
4/5
Oh damn, thirdly is Strange Adventures!
Strange Adventures is a book of two narratives, three I suppose if you get down to the nitty gritty. It stars Adam Strange, a man of two worlds that teleports back and forth between the two. Serving the people of earth and waging a never ending war on the planet Rann. It also features the third smartest man on earth, Mister Terrific. It opens with Adam at a book signing, he had written his autobiography on his time fighting the war on Rann. A man comes up to him and confronts him on war crimes then suspiciously the man winds up dead the following evening. Dedicated to due process Adam seeks out the Justice League to fully investigate everything from his time on Rann, to his innocence in the strange coincidence that after someone comes questioning they end up dead. King is often a writer that is best known for humanizing the superheroes people idolize on a daily basis. It always brings me back to Grant Morrison's famous quote on Superman. “American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he’s too powerful; you can’t give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman’s relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it’s still a story about your relatives visiting.” One of the most interesting aspects of Strange Adventures to me is that at their core, they are just people. People doing right, wrong, and everything in between. It’s got its timely references to North American politics and how people's opinions can be swayed over social media and fear mongering. But at its core it’s about a man who thought he was doing the right thing. But was he, though? I know Mister Terrific doesn’t seem to think so.
4/5
Dune
I love Dune, I’m just going to preface this out of the gate. Dune is one of the biggest reasons I've ever been interested in science fiction. It’s one of the books that have given me my utter and complete love of reading growing up. It’s dense, dry and rich with detail. Arrakis is a world that many have gotten lost in for hundreds of hours and countless re-reads over the years since its inception in 1965. It’s a book that asks you to question your leaders and belief systems, it’s a book that basically created modern science fiction as we know it. It’s a book that almost anyone who’s pursuing art or grew up with some favorite show, comic or otherwise owes a lot too. Its legacy is rock solid and will outlive us all, and despite all of that, I still think it’s remarkably underrated. If I had to lay one criticism to Dune is that it’s almost too dense for its own good, that it gets in the way of the actual enjoyability of reading it. It's like Lord of the Rings before it though, if you’re basically the first. You get a pass in my opinion. It’s about as relevant today as it was back then, and it reminds you that not everything is as it seems. A must read for literally anyone who can read it and once you start, you’ll get hooked on the spice. Trust me.
5/5
Tender is the Flesh
I’m always looking for good horror stories, it doesn’t really matter what type of medium I have to venture into to do so. Horror movie, hell yeah. Video games, yes please. Haunted house that someones putting on for halloween? Sign me up. A few years back I read a book called The Troop by Canadian Novelist Nick Cutter and it was a book that grossed me out more than almost any other piece of fiction has ever done. I didn’t really know that type of emotion was able to be brought out in me anymore. Apart from True Crime, nothing made me feel sick to my stomach like The Troop. So, as one does in the modern age. You check reddit to see if people have had the same experiences with the thing you have had. It led me down a rabbit hole to find things that would give me that feeling again. The top consensus amongst people who are as sick minded as me were The Troop, Tender is the Flesh and The Fisherman By John Langan(Which I have yet to read, but will in the coming months I imagine. So stay tuned for that) Now to get to the meat and potatoes of Tender is the Flesh. It’s a book about the meat industry and how toxic it is for everyone and everything involved. It’s a post apocalyptic world where animals carry a deadly disease so they’re no longer suitable food sources for all of humanity. What do people do? I hear you asking yourself while reading this. Well they all become vegans and save the planet. Bam. Pow. Great happy ending.
50000/5
……………………………………………………actually. Gotcha. That’s actually not what happens. What happens is humanity starts breeding humans for slaughter instead, and everyone on earth becomes cannibals. It’s obviously a critique on the meat industry and how they treat their animals as a result for the perfect steak or ribeye or whatever. But it’s a book that goes so much deeper than that. The main character it follows is a man who works through these factories, and through an unlikely turn of events. Ends up “adopting” a cattle for himself in the form of a young woman. I’m sure your mind can make up some scenarios in which this could all potentially be detailed, but I can assure you that you’ll likely be wrong. It left me grossed out, unsettled and kind of bummed out. Which is the hallmark of good art. As long as it can make you feel something at all.
Rating kind of still stands, honestly. It’s a perfect little book that does everything it sets out to accomplish.
5/5
Barbarian
Oh wow, speaking of good art makes you feel bad. We come to Barbarian. Now I'll be the first to admit. The trailer for this movie did its job maybe a little too well. It felt like a pretty standard spooky isolation house style thriller. You know whenever you get a horror movie with Bill Skarsgård you’re going to get some weird shit, but apart from two bed and breakfast renters accidentally staying at the same B&B I didn’t really have an incredible urge to go see it. I felt like the trope was kind of done to death and that there’s very little that could surprise me anymore. Back to what I said about the advertising working all too well, it gives you literally no idea what the movie is actually about, and spoiling it in any way here isn’t something I'm going to do. But the movie I was least expecting anything out of this year ended up surprising me the most and it's absolutely my favorite horror movie I've seen all year, and might end up cracking my top 5 when all of my rewatches are said and done. Don’t sleep on Barbarian at all, it’s out now on Disney plus and hopefully soon on Blu-ray. I can’t wait till it’s on my shelf.
5/5
Last in more ways than one, is Avatar the Last Airbender
For as long as I can remember animation has been my favorite medium to consume. When a studio has a harmony together they can basically accomplish anything in their imaginations. Music ebbs and flows with the frame by frame action or subtle emotional cues given to characters. If a tear falls, in traditional animation someone had to draw each frame it fell down the characters cheek. It’s the absolute epitome of movie magic to me and would often find myself as a kid pausing frame by frame at times just to see any differences I could or to just hold onto a scene a little longer. Now as I'm typing this I'm realizing that this could pertain to all animations and not just Avatar. Which I just so happened to watch for the first time recently with my amazing girlfriend Jennie. But when I was a kid it was primarily Pokemon, DBZ, Batman the Animated series(and every single other show that came from it. Expect a whole other thing on that one day) Digimon, basically anything but Avatar. I don’t know what it was, but it never fully resonated with me. I remember not liking Aang's voice. I thought bending in general was silly and I didn’t find any kind of connections with any of the characters. Looking back at how much I was wrong I kind of feel like it was a blessing in disguise. Avatar is a show that’s so rich with its world that it’s spawned dozens of books, comics and a whole other sequel show in The Legend of Korra(which is also great I'd say) but I just kind of think I wasn’t really ready to sit down with such a journey. It’s essentially 3 seasons of one giant narrative that bobs and weaves within itself. The characters capture the wonder and magic of being a kid again, the world is beautiful, the soundtrack is outstanding, the characters are believable, the villain is menacing(how can you go wrong with Mark Hamill honestly). Front to back it’s one of the most engrossing and tightly woven narratives in all of fiction. I can’t believe I slept on it for so long, but I get it now. It’s without a doubt one of the best cartoons of all time, and even above that, it’s one of the best pieces of fiction of all time.
5/5
Well there you have it, Seven reviews for what feels like the seven months I haven’t posted on here. I’ve got a ton more reviews in the can. So if you liked this, be prepared for the upcoming reviews of Terrifier 2, The Black Paradox by Junji Ito and the entirety of The Witcher Saga. As always, thanks for the love and support, I'll talk to you all soon.
Oh and i'll leave my The Thing write up for you guys on the bottom here. DON’T FORGET TO SMASH THAT SUSSCRIBE BUTTON!!!!!!1!!1!
Good shit homie