Johanna’s review of The Awakening got me to pick this one up again and try to formulate my thoughts on it.

Overall, The Tomb is a standard haunted house story. If this were a movie it probably were in production at Black Castle (though the script would be far better than anything Black Castle has done previously), it’s that kind of basic horror plot. There’s nothing particularly innovative in the plot (go read Skinwalker for that, by the same writing team) but it’s well executed and a solid horror story.
One part of The Tomb that I liked was how the characters were handled. Good horror, for me, asks how characters change in extreme circumstances and makes us wonder about ourselves. In bad horror, the characters are all victims with different trappings but writing team Nunzio DeFilipis and Christina Weir bring together a group of characters that could have made an interesting story in a different genre. You get the feeling that they’re interested in these characters beyond how far they can move the plot. The character interactions take this from Black Castle territory to something above it.

The premise itself is a blend of pulp-era Egyptology and a haunted house story. It’s just different enough to avoid feeling trite with a few slight twists to the mythology mixed in.
Overall Christopher Mitten’s art serves the story nicely. His lines look a little off to me and there’s a level of depth that seems missing, but the characters stay consistent and recognizable and he captures the mood of the story. The later two are more important qualities.

I almost didn’t include this one in my San Diego purchases because of the cover, which made this title seemed more Tomb Raider than it turned out to be. The Tomb is instead a basic horror story well told.

Manhunter #4: Oh, David Welsh does a better job singing this book’s praises than I would so read what he has to say. It’s been bubbling under for the first three issues but this one breaks though and makes a worthy title. This is the issue where the series starts to remind me of the undersold Chase, with a similar focus on a "common" person’s view of the DC Universe. This will be interesting for as long as it lasts.

Wonder Woman #210: I guess this can be an example of how jaded I am with superhero comics. Going into this issue I knew there was some big deal but I had to go back and reread the whole issue to find it. Meh. Diana blinds herself to battle Medusa. (I know I’m spelling it wrong, meh to that too.) I know she’ll get better, so the whole thing seems like a silly little bit of fake drama. Oooooh, how extreme. That’s so intense. Yawn. Overall it was an interesting battle scene, one that didn’t really need the blinding of Diana for drama — I thought there was enough drama with Circe broadcasting the fight across the world, except that bit of tension didn’t get used.

Captain America #1: I decided to give Brubaker a chance with this one… even with near-total unfamiliarity with the concept. (Okay maybe I’m not that clueless, but I certainly wasn’t aware that the Red Skull has been chasing that Cosmic Cube thingy for ages.) It was okay; I’m left willing to give the title another chance. Once avian, however, I was completely underwhelmed by the big shocking plot point — doesn’t the current house writing style at Marvel say that big, shocking plot points like this should eventually be undone in another big, shocking plot point?

Catwoman #37: This ending was rather, bleah. It was one of those sentimental wrap-ups that expressed the writer’s fondness for the supporting cast well enough, but after trying to work around a big crossover (War Games) much of my sentiment for these characters has been drained, making this a rather ho-hum goodbye.

JLA #107: Okay, here we get a lesson in bad comic book marketing. The cover announces The Crime Syndicate, which got my attention. Then I read this issue and find out that the Crime Syndicate are the big surprise on the last page of the issue. So. Not only did the cover spoil the ending for me but it momentarily ruined a pretty decent story as my initial reaction to the issue was annoyance for not getting the story the cover led me to expect. In hindsight, Busiek gives us a pretty interesting story that, references a Chase story that I remember well from the series’ short run, but I forgot that in my initial annoyance with the cover.

Ultimate X-Men #53: I can’t find who said it, but I realized why the ending of this story arch didn’t work for me —
we’ve got different characters suddenly playing out old roles and it doesn’t seem right. Taking another look with this in mind and the last few pages feel like NBC’s Coupling where the characters were different but the scripts were the same and the final result seems off.

I learned this weekend that my favorite sparking wine label was sold to Maisons Marques & Domaines USA. Pacific Echo will be relaunched under the Scharffenberger Cellars brand it originally sold under. Pacific Echo was one of the first sparking wines I tried and liked, but after trying several labels, it remained my favorite. Part of that was because it tasted better than a good number of the other labels I tried, but the best part that it was much, much cheaper than those labels I liked less. The value equasion (at least for a Nor Cal resident) was amazing as a price/quality ratio.
The Scharffenberger name has a strong quality perception attached to it (Scharffenberger chocolates are known as an amazing local chocolatier) so I expect the value won’t be as strong as Pacific Echo. Hopefully, it’ll still be miles ahead of the others.

Woo-hoo! Sean McKeever says that Mary Jane returns in March 2005! (Registration required, you may also find the announcement here, for as long as it’s "recent".) I enjoyed McKeever’s alternate perspective on the Spider-Man mythos and I’m looking forward to its return.

Ian comes out of Thanksgiving holiday with a really sharp commentary. He mostly sums up my feelings for the industry. I don’t need a constant re-invention of the wheel, but the "mainstream" books keep giving me that old "we’ve been down this road already" feeling, especially when they try to be "daring and different".

Just to have more than two links, Oni announces volume 2 of Love in a Foreign Language comes out in February. I just read volume 1 and hope to finish jotting down my reaction soon. There’s a lot of potential in this series, but we only saw a glimpse of it in volume 1.

(Okay, one more.) I found Johanna’s reaction to Jane’s World interesting. She sums it up when she says "It’s gay Cathy with better art." I liked that aspect about it, I still found it humorous in the right spots, but Braddock’s pacing is what got me to give up on the title. Last I read Jane’s World it had a strange start/stop quality. A storyline would move slowly, letting time for the quiet moments to happen and then boom it was suddenly over. It often feels like Braddock is interested in observational humor that can be found in little details, but then gets bored with the storyline and ends it before it really gets moving. Too bad, since Braddock seemed pretty interesting at the last Gays in Comics: Crossfire panel at San Diego.

CNN reports that Howl’s Moving Castle has broken Japan’s opening weekend box office record.
My reaction? "I wonder how badly Disney will screw up this film."
Some depressing stats:
Princess Mononoke
Worldwide Box Office: $150 million
US Box Office: $2.4 million

Spirited Away
Worldwide Box Office: $261 million
US Box Office: $10 million

Peter David reprints a column from 1992 on the outing of Northstar. The history of the story is an interesting one (and coincides with Rich Johnson taking Mark Millar to task for repeated articles incorrectly stating that Millar created the world’s first gay superheroes in The Authority) especially when PAD looks at the state of the industry at the time. However it gets most interesting at the end:

The question of Northstar’s coming out ultimately, then, boils down to this: What next?

It could easily be argued that this was a simple step in Northstar’s development, and that the enlightened approach would be not to dwell on it any more than finding out that a casual acquaintance is gay.

However, we do not live in an enlightened society when it comes to homosexuality (witness Marvel’s own reaction). Besides, casual acquaintances don’t call press conferences announcing their sexuality, offering it up as a way of countering homophobia. No, now that Northstar’s made the declaration with a stated agenda, it would be unrealistic not to examine the fallout…

Northstar is a media figure, and sure to become even more so. Will lovers of his who may not want to risk being high profile now shun him? For that matter, let’s say you’re a friend of his who’s straight. How will you feel if your picture is snapped with him in a restaurant and run in a newspaper with the caption, "Northstar and his latest paramour?" Will you take it in stride, laugh it off? Or will you resent the intrusion…perhaps even resent Northstar? …Possibilities, all sorts of possibilities, which it would almost criminal to ignore.

Wow, that’s pretty depressing in hindsight. Unfortunately, Northstar’s not the only gay character who’s potential gets ignored. I remember being all excited about how Warren Ellis handled Apollo and Midnighter. Ellis didn’t write them as gay characters, just two men in a loving relationship. Ellis handled the two characters so deftly that it left readers in a guessing game of "are they or aren’t they?" By just being close and supportive of each other, readers were confused if they were partners or just close friends. When Millar took over, Apollo and Midnighter went from being equal members of The Authority to being the gay members of The Authority. Apollo was raped and Midnighter got revenge in the end by introducing the rapist to a large and extremely phallic-looking weapon. (What Midnighter did with the weapon was left off-panel.) In a single storyline the two went from being equal members to team tokens.

Looking around the superhero universes, Northstar remains the most prominent gay hero and he gets put in storage almost as quickly as he gets dusted off and brought into use. There are good LGBT characters out there but most of them are supporting characters, like Holly over in Catwoman. Sigh.

Okay, I liked the latest Ultimate X-Men, but for some reason I kept getting distracted by the ads…

• Okay, first off, posters with a Marvel character and a motivational saying? I thought those Successories posters were cheesy… and Magneto? Why put a character who is considered a fanatic in his universe on a motivational poster?
• That John Romita tribute litho by Alex Ross does look pretty cool. I was surprised to see Lyra the Femizon appear so prominently… staring at the page in disbelief surprised.
• Oh, and Runaways gets a house ad:
  

  "Until then catch up with Runaways digests 1 and 2, ON SALE NOW"

  Is this the big marketing push? I’ve yet to be able to find volume 2 in the stores and wasn’t Marvel originally promising to release the third digest before restarting the series? The ad should at least say "Digest 3 on sale in January!"

Now that’s truth in advertising. Coming from the director of the Ringu films, Hideo Nakata, Chaos opens with a couple eating lunch together in a fancy restaurant, they part and the husband returns to the office. At the office, the husband gets a call letting him know his wife has been kidnapped. It takes on a typical path from there… for about fifteen minutes.  Then comes the first plot twist, which takes some time to settle in… then another one comes. The next few plot twists don’t allow much more than for the previous one to settle in before turning the story around once again.

Usually, this sort of film gets muddled in its ambition to keep the audience in a state of shock and confusion, scrambling to figure out where its all headed. The plot twists eventually feel like they’re there for the sake of having plot twists, like any season of Melrose Place after the second one. (It all peaked with Kimberly’s elaborate scheme to kill Michael.) A few films attempt and succeed in the attempt, Memento is a notable example and Chaos also succeeds, though not to the heights that Memento achieves. In the end, the whole plot seems a bit overdone, but the ride is fun and the whole scheme doesn’t seem overly elaborate until after the credits have finished rolling.

We’ll yesterday was comic book day and my load was a little heavier than I expected, purchases included Captain America #1, Catwoman #37, Fables #31, Human Target #16, JLA #107, Manhunter #4, Plastic Man #12, Ultimate Spider-Man #69, Ultimate X-Men #53, Wonder Woman #210

Captain America and JLA were impulse pickups. I was curious if Brubaker could make Captain America interesting to me while the JLA won me over by mentioning the Crime Syndicate on the cover.

Meanwhile, I’ve yet to comment on my last set of purchases:

• Hellblazer #201: Mike Carey proves once again that it’s possible to do a truly creepy horror comic if your name’s not Junji Ito. Carey’s stories so far hasn’t managed to stick with me the way Ito’s do, but I do get that feeling of dread, even when the victims are as unlikable as this trio.
• Ultimate Spider-Man #68: Cute story, this issue reminded me why I’ve been enjoying this title. Bendis is good at writing teens and it’s interesting to see Peter Parker written with an emphasis on his life as a high school kid.
• City of Heroes #6: The first two story arcs were mostly about seeing Paragon City villains doing the sequential art duty, but this story arc has been pretty interesting, if only for hinging on the bits of hero culture that make Paragon City unique to other superhero universes.
• Wonder Woman #209: Okay, I feel like I’m alone in this but I’m still enjoying this title. It’s the most interesting take on Diana I’ve seen in a while; I’m not sure if that says anything about the last few writers or not. I usually don’t go for it when writers throw a random death into the story to make the villain seem more threatening or to up the emotional ante, but Rucka got me this time. That might be just me, tho, because the Medusa always gave me the shivers as a kid.
• Strangers in Paradise #69: After a while all I could think of was the time Greg Hyland’s parody of T&A in comics. Lethargic Lad villain Lady Bad Girl talks about the roles of women in comics in a series of swipes of absurd bad girl poses. His last is Lady Bad Girl posed in the bath, wearing a leather jacket that barely covers her nipples. "I’m smart," she smirks, "so this is feminist!" This was pretty much a whole issue of that panel — lots of T&A with some examination of women’s roles to make it seem less exploitative.
• Swamp Thing #9: New writer starts in this issue and I’m feeling nonplussed about this title again. My first impression is that this is starting to feel more like a DC Universe comic than a Vertigo one, especially since the surprise at the end is the typical bit of superhero schlock. I do like the character introduced at the beginning, but so far it
• The Witching #5: An interesting story, I’m not sure if Felix the Cat’s going to manage to now look sinister after this story. This title has quickly become a favorite of my pull list. Right now the only Vertigo Universe title I’m enjoying more is Hellblazer, which has a couple years’ head start advantage.looks like she only exists as a catalyst for the story. Hopefully, we’ll see more of her.
• The  Question #1: This didn’t work for me, largely because of my concept of the character. I expect The Question to be preachy, for me that’s the character. He’s even more in character if he were spouting off Ayn Rand inspired philosophy. There’s some interesting concepts being attempted here, but it just left me bored, like I had seen this done before and better and (maybe even done better by the same guy).
• Trigger Preview: Yikes, I remember looking forward to the art, what’s happened between San Diego and now?

Also read and enjoyed (but have no comment on) Ultimate Electra #3 and Hard Time #10 and Y: The Last Man #28

A preview of City of Heroes Update 3 is up on the test server and I couldn’t resist the preview.

Among the cool, new stuff are the zone events which seem to be new monsters. Over in Kings’ Row, a bunch of clocks gather to build a giant robot, Paladin.

Meanwhile, dock workers refuse to work because the appearance of a giant squid, Lusca, makes it too dangerous.

A ghost ship is also reported, but I haven’t seen it so far.

One annoying problem with the update comes from changes to the character creation tool. From what I’m hearing, the range of body types has been expanded but the changes have screwed up the meshes for existing heroes. Hopefully this gets fixed soon because if I wanted a barrel-chested illusionist, I would have done it myself.

The Fifth Column is notably absent in the new game — they seem to have been replaced by another group, which seems to match all the "shakeup" hype we’ve been hearing about.

Two new features I’ve heard about but haven’t tried yet. I hear there’s a new control that lets you color your chat bubbles. No more binds for chatting. I also hear that the Epic Archetype is open while it’s on the test server… so I’m off to make myself a Kheldian.

Update: Okay, it turns out that opening up the Kheldians to anyone on the Test Server (to get maximum input) is just an idea they’ve floated. Sigh.