Lea Hernandez has less than 48 hours to go in the campaign to raise money for her project The Garlicks on Indiegogo.
Images © 2012 and characters TM Lea Hernandez.
So yeah, I’m putting up this post kind-of late, but that’s no reflection on my enthusiasm; I also figured, maybe wrongly, that promoting the project towards the end rather than towards the beginning might be better. Anyway...
The Garlicks is the tale of young Pandora Garlick and her family. Pan’s mom is a human who runs a butcher shop. Pan’s dad is a vampire barista. Pan’s baby sister, Ham, turns into a fishbat — that’s right: a fishbat — while Pan can’t turn into anything at all. But she can and does make comics inspired by her crazy life.
The other day, I spied a lone DVD combo pack of Angel Seasons 1 & 2 at Target
for $19.99, which suggests that if the retail geography is kind either still or again you should be able to pick up the first four seasons of the series for less than ten bucks apiece like I did last year; Season 5 will have to be purchased singly.
Meanwhile, The Vampire Diaries kicked off its summer repeats this week with Season 2’s premiere, and if you haven’t hit your exsanguination saturation point on the genre with the Great Buffy Rewatch — or you want to play a fun game of compare/
contrast in terms of approach between Diaries and either its predecessor Buffy or its contemporary rivals Twilight and True Blood — I highly recommend grabbing DVDs of Season 1 while recording Season 2 of this sudsy, escapist treat; I’m sorry that I didn’t get to warn you before it aired, because you really want to watch the series in full from the start and Season 2 won’t be out on home video until the fall.
Related: My Buffy Summer • Vampire Weekend • We Got a
Live One Here • Red Letter • The Vampire Slayer Diaries
As I noted last week, I’ve taken a fresh look at Buffy the Vampire Slayer — the original film. My impetus was Nikki Stafford’s rewatch, now underway, of the WB/UPN TV series that the movie spawned. (I suppose what actually spawned the series was the movie’s script, but we’ll get back to that.)
The bloody good news is that I was house-sitting this past week and caught up with
the current season of True Blood via HBO On Demand.
I’d just recently finished Season Two on DVD, and I was really bummed about having
to wait for a whole year to see where things went in Season Three (dodging spoilers all the while). As I’ve mentioned here before, True Blood is a pulpy kick.
I watched the premiere of The Gates last Sunday, and caught up with the off-season repeats of The Vampire Diaries as well.
The Gates, which airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on ABC, barely kept me locked in. As a guilty pleasure to screen on a hot, lazy night, well, it’s more guilty than pleasure — not quite the melodramatic mash-up of Twilight and Desperate Housewives those making it might have hoped for, but probably engaging enough to keep anyone who enjoyed Eastwick coming back for its limited run.
A few weeks gone by, Nikki Stafford declared June to be Vampire Month on her blog, Nik at Nite. The primary topic of conversation — a TV show which I’m observing a moratorium on speaking about — had begun to eat itself, and Nikki had fangdom on the brain for at least two good reasons: (1) ECW Press, where she’s an editor and which publishes her Finding [censored] books, has a True Blood companion coming out. (2) She was preparing to attend Slayage — an academic conference devoted to the work of Joss Whedon in general and Buffy the Vampire Slayer in particular. I think there was also something to do with The Vampire Diaries in there.
I was surprisingly late getting into the adventures of Buffy Summers.
So a little while back I finished reading Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, over 300 pages of prose with chapter-break illustrations from Dave McKean. It was released last year by HarperCollins in the US.
The high-concept pitch for the novel would probably be “What if Harry Potter were raised by ghosts in an English graveyard?”
And it would be silly for a number of reasons, the least of which are that the book’s central character, Bod, isn’t a wizard, and that the book was awarded the 2009 John Newbery Medal for the Most Distinguished Contribution to American Literature for Children, which to some is recommendation enough.
