Who are we to deny it in here? HIbbs on Todd: the movie

The good thing about Tim Burton's SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET is that it really works remarkably as a film -- I went in with a fair deal of trepidation over the changes I knew were coming, but virtually all of them worked pretty darn well. The cuts to the libretto that were made, were overall, pretty good -- I didn't really know if it could survive removing the (various) "Ballad(s) of Sweeney Todd", but, for the most part one didn't miss them. And while a couple of pieces were missed (I was sort of looking forward to the four-part disharmony of "Kiss Me/Ladies in Their Sensitivities"), it kicked the momentum of the story dramatically forward. I'm glad, of course, that Judge Turpin's "Johanna" ("Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa") was cut, because that's pretty much the one song even in the full version that I can live without. Other than that, most of the cuts were in Act II, with the "Wigmaker Sequence" and "The Letter" and "Parlor Songs" all excised completely.

Several other songs were pretty dramatically truncated -- "Green Finch and Linnet Bird" was maybe half of its normal length, "Pirelli's Miracle Elixir" seemed chopped down, and "The Contest" was as short as it could be (the original original version goes on and on and on, featuring BOTH a shaving contest, AND a tooth-pulling one, too!). "God That's Good" cut out all of the general public embracing the pies, as well as all of the business of bringing in the chair and "...I have another friend!" (Sweeney builds his own in this version, in songless montage), but again, they mostly got their points across fairly well. But the cut in length that probably bothered me the most was to "A Little Priest" which seemed like about 2/3rds its normal length, and THAT just seems wrong to me to cut by even a single bar.

But one things that the cuts do is basically remove all of the humor from the play entirely. To me, one of the greatest things about SWEENEY is that, yes, it is a astonishingly dark Shakespearean-level tragedy, steeped in blood and horror and madness, but it is also laugh-out-loud, slap-your-knee hysterical in places. Which, I think, is eminently necessary because murder and meat pies needs some levity to not have it be desperately bleak. But in this version, a lot of the jokes are either cut, or delivered so seriously as to dull them and render them dark, not funny.

The singing itself is pretty Eh -- everyone can carry a tune alright, but most of the actors (being actors and not singers) don't have enough depth or range in their voices to carry it off. When Depp first started singing, I went "Oh god, this is going to be a rough ride", but by the second time I started to throw away my preconception of the deep strong voice needed for the role because Depp's *acting* is so strong and nuanced.

Bonham-Carter, on the other hand, wow, she can't sing at all, sounding far too weak and whispery and "little girly" to really carry it off at all. And while Depp did hid best portrayal of Todd, Bonham-Carter seemed to me as if she was playing... well, Bonham-Carter for the most part, and I didn't get any real sense of Mrs. Lovett, as opposed to girl-who-looks-physically-right-playing-against-Depp-as-Romantic-Leads. I thought Bonham-Carter's line-readings were mostly wrong, and that she just rushed through too many of the proper shadings in "Worst Pies in London" or "A Little Priest". SHe's also (well, everyone is, really, with the sole exception of Toby) something like 10 years too young for the role. Interestingly, I thought on the few occasions when she went down an octave or two, it fit the songs and character much better, and she sounded as if she had a fuller, rounder voice. Her acting was fine though.

The orchestration was really excellent, with a much much larger orchestra than usually performs SWEENEY, though there's certainly times it swells way up to compensate for the less-than-professional singing. There's a couple of places where I swore I could also hear cuts between different takes as they tried to match Depp and Bonham-Carter up (I've read that they were in different studios to record and different times, and, I think there are 1-2 places where it seems a little obvious. There's a pretty glaring cut where Sascha Baron Cohen's Pirelli does that high note, and it didn't sound at all like his own voice (sounded like a woman's voice, honestly)

Cohen was really great as Pirelli (as I think we all expected him to be), and his singing was probably stronger than Depp's, but I think it was Alan Rickman's singing voice that surprised me the most for being stronger than I would expect for an actor-not-singer. His duet with Depp on "Pretty Women" is really very nice.

All of the kids were adequate, I guess -- the girl playing Johanna didn't seem to have any of the gothic haunted madness that I want to see in the character ("Green Finch and Linnet Bird" seemed more like "I like birds" than "Oh god, I'm trapped in this cage and I NEED TO GET OUT!", the latter being the way I like), and the boy playing Anthony seemed less than a sailor who has "sailed the seas, and seen its wonders", then someone who still had to finish their senior year in high school, but both sung well enough, and, anyway, their parts were basically shortened enough so that it didn't matter much either way. The one bit I did like was the physical staging of Johanna's near-miss at the end worked a lot better than it has in any staged version I've seen, but Anthony sort of just disappears about 10 minutes before the end of the movie and we never see him again.

Having an actual child play Toby is, I suppose, logical, but I still prefer the slightly-retarded-young-man model ala Broadway, because I think his youth really works against "Not While I'm Around" in a pretty big fashion, and it completely blows the humor of "Gentlemen, you're about to see something that rose from the dead. (woman's gasp of impropriety) On the top of my head!" when it's a 10-year old delivering the line. I also had a much harder time with Toby's finale (with 90% of it, probably wisely, being excised, really) with him being a kid, and there was a brand new bit of business involving Gin that I thought just didn't work at all either.

But even with all of my griping about the weak singing, and the casting, this still worked very very well as a movie -- without the humor, it's just a pretty terrifying thrill ride, probably darker than anything Burton has ever done before, and it zips along well as a film. Even Tzipora, who usually rolls her eyes at my love of Sweeney, and who hasn't seen it all the way through except for once 15-ish years ago on a lousy quality video cassette, was well entertained walking out of the theater, saying she enjoyed it. But she, like I, sort of has a hard time picture it doing well at the box office -- Depp fans who know him from commercial-ish stuff like PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN probably won't respond well to the gore and darkness of this; it's big-time NOT a movie that you walk-out of thinking "Merry Christmas!!"; and the studio has been, I think, both under-promoting it, as well as trying to cut trailers that underplay the fact it is a musical.

Overall, I liked it to at least call it GOOD, and maybe even VERY GOOD, but I also think the worst cut was losing its sense of humor. Having the cast all rise from the dead at the end to sing the "Ballad(s)" helped I think relieve some of the unrelenting darkness of the play that ending the movie on an image of the most blood-drenched version of The Pieta that you've ever seen just doesn't do. No, that was an arresting, disturbing image to end a powerfully made movie, but I want to see all of the corpses get up at that point and remind me that "To seek revenge may lead to hell/ but everyone does it and seldom as well"; somehow that makes it easier to bear.

Parenthetically, the single weirdest thing about the film was that before it started (but after the trailers, and the "Silence is Golden", and the THX logo) there was this 5-ish minute long thing that sort of just showed clip after clip of previous Burton/Depp collaborations. It didn't have a voice over, or a narrative and it went back and forth from film to film with no real rhyme or reason that I could see, and it felt like someone somewhere was trying to say "you liked these other films, please please don't walk out of this one". Strangest god-damn thing I've ever seen before a film in my life, and I honestly don't get it.

Either way, it's good, go see it -- then rent the DVD of the stage play (or, better still, go see the touring stage company) to compare.

What did YOU think?

-B

He Worshipped A Dark and Vengeful God: Jeff Looks At Spidey, Sweeney, and Others.

I'd planned for a longer intro but, wow, work is busting my ass today. Anyway, here's some reviews of comics and not-comics with love from me to you:  

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #544: Is it just me, or does Joe Quesada's art here have a deeply strange nose fixation? Check out that first panel of page three where Peter's well-detailed schnoz utterly throws off the visual line of the storytelling, for example. In fact, the most dramatic page in the story--Peter's webbing of Iron Man--is notable for being the only page except for the first without a nose. Surely that's no accident? The other odd thing about the issue is the cover: between it and the preview of next issue's on the very last page, it's clear the storyline is being positioned as in the grand old tradition of enjoyably melodramatic Spidey stories straight from the Stan Lee mold (check out that "Attention, True Believer! If you should read but one comic this decade, this one's it!" on the last page). And yet, Quesada is doing a very, very bad job of it. It took me a while to realize this issue's cover should have that classic Gil Kane "giant heads o' drama!" look, but because of the arrangement and the garish lettering, it's more like Spidey is so horrified by being web-hentai'd he's pooped the story title on Peter Parker's head. Pretty EH, particularly for the price, but let's see where it goes.

HALLOWEEN: If you couldn't quite figure out how Rob Zombie was going to bring his southern culture on the skids style to his remake of John Carpenter's ur-slasher pic, Halloween, you weren't alone: turns out Zombie couldn't quite figure it out, either. Here, he chops the movie in twain, with the first half recounting Michael Myers' childhood with all the hard luck ugliness you'd expect from watching The Devil's Rejects, and the second half being what Ian Brill rightly calls "the Cliff's Notes version of Carpenter's movie." It's not a bad solution although Carpenter's original, a masterpiece of low-budget moviemaking, touches on the mythic by giving the viewer more questions than answers, while Zombie's solution strips the mythic right out--it's impossible to think of Myers as the possible embodiment of an abstract eternal evil after watching William Forsythe's brilliantly awful white trash boyfriend call him "a fag boy" at the breakfast table. But even with all the additional disquieting trash talking and animal mutilating, Zombie either can't or won't bother to answer some of the really interesting questions: considering the movie shows the initial sessions between Samuel Loomis and Myers, I was disappointed we didn't get some Watchmen-esque scene that would explain why Loomis, a psychiatrist, spends most of the movie talking like a renegade priest. But in the second half of the movie, Loomis and everyone act the way they do pretty much because the original (or established canon) dictates that they do, and the movie's no more or less edifying. It's just longer and gorier.

Despite all that, it's not terrible, and Zombie makes some good choices to cover for his bad ones: although no longer an eerily graceful killer, Michael Myers as played by Tyler Mane is so physically huge and imposing, he's terrifying to look at. And I was impressed that the second half of the film had a very different, less gritty vibe (at least until the killings start)--I can't tell if Zombie was trying to make a point about the sterile safety of modern culture or just decided he couldn't make the movie work as a remake without aping the lovely stillness of Carpenter's original, but I found it heartening Zombie could convincingly create a different tone: everything else I've seen by him has been in a single trash-talk-and-unwashed-underwear mode. And since most of the actors in the second half have very little to work with, it's surprising they create as much sympathy as they do: Scout Taylor-Compton's Laurie Strode has none of Jamie Lee Curtis' teen awkwardness, and probably a tenth the lines, but she's still compelling, and you still feel for her. The original Halloween worked for me in part because Debra Hill did a great job recreating the way teen girls talked and bickered and teased and I could almost believe that was true here, despite them hopping up and down like kids swept away on a sugar high. This version of Halloween isn't going to replace the original--but then, did anyone really think it would?--but I'd say this was at least highly OK. It was certainly a more satisfying remake than that Texas Chainsaw Massacre from a few years back.

JOJO'S BIZARRE ADVENTURE, VOL. 4: So there's 67 pages of fighting largely done in the reflection of people's eyeballs, an incredibly creepy fight between a man and a tumor on his arm, and then there's a cliffhanger (literally, of course) with a malevolent, sentient automobile. Pretty much puts the awe back in awesome, in other words. Quite GOOD, if you like high weirdness manga.

THE LAST FANTASTIC FOUR STORY: I love how Stan Lee apparently believes the best Fantastic Four stories are ones where giants in skirts appear so everyone in Manhattan can look up and see ginormous genitalia threatening to blot out their existence. (And maybe he's not wrong?) Also, check out the first two pages where Stan tries his hand at decompressed storytelling by dragging out one sentence for an entire page--to me it underlined that Stan is a bit of an anachronism, out of place in a world he made. And it's kind of sad he has the Fantastic Four retire not because the world is safe (or even rid of Doctor Doom, because he's still there) but because "we can never top what we've already done." (Oh, Stan! Can't you see what your subconscious is clearly trying to tell you?) On the other hand, it's certainly better than what I read of the Jeph Loeb Wolverine arc. Again, for the price, it's barely EH.

SWEENEY TODD: Not a comic, but if you're in San Francisco and thinking of catching this production, make sure you're familiar with how the play is traditionally staged. As you've probably read, this production makes the cast members responsible for the orchestration as well as singing and acting their parts: people will hop from instrument to instrument, some taking over for others in mid-part so the liberated person can step forward and sing their part. Technically, it's astonishing, and it does a great job of bringing back the Brecht/Weill vibe with which the musical was conceived (Really, when you see Mrs. Lovett shake her big old caboose while playing the tuba, you will think of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill), but it makes it, I think, impossible to understand the story if you're a Sweeney newb. And, sadly, some scenes in the new staging make almost no sense whatsover--Sweeney and Lovett's challenge of Pirelli is just a jumble, and the opening to Act II is also badly marred.

The biggest problem with the production, though, is Sweeney himself: although the local critics have raved about his performance, I found David Hess' portrayal of Sweeney to be hugely disappointing. I mean, I know that the role is tricky--you either have to have Sweeney be an insane fiery zealot from word one, or you have to show him as a little man grown powerful in his madness in which case you don't have a lot of text on which to build your arc--but Hess seems small and lost on the stage, his acting maybe better suited for a screen portrayal (what reads to me as awkwardness on the stage may be a mesmerizing stillness on screen), his voice unremarkable (the guy playing Anthony actually blows him away in their later scenes together), and since he's given the least to do of all the cast--I'm not sure but I think he's the only member in the cast who isn't also playing an instrument--he's the least technically impressive overall.

And yet, after two paragraphs of bitching, I fully recommend this production if you're a fan of the musical: not only is Judy Kaye as Mrs. Lovett really fantastic (and I prefer Lauren Molina's Johanna to the original) but the orchestration of the music is superb--it brings out a suppleness to Sondheim's score I had no idea existed. Even now, almost a week later, I've got the music stuck in my head. If you're a fan of Sondheim and Sweeney Todd, you'll find this production worth your time and (considerable) coin.

Y THE LAST MAN #58: I should get some bonus points for calling the Yorick/355 love thing. On the other hand, WOW, did I not see that final turn of events coming. Clearly, a lot depends on how Vaughan and Guerra use their last two issues so I can't give you a firm rating. In terms of cliffhanger alone, VERY GOOD--but as I said it all depends. Without the cliffhanger and the next two issues, I'd give it a high OK: a lot of the scenes (particularly the Yorick/355 scenes) felt rushed.

Only in New York!

Airplane writing on the Alpha-Smart, here (with later editing/linking now that I’m home) I just got back from the NY con (well, the trade show, more accurately – I left back for home on Saturday morning), about which more later.

First though, let me tell you my “Only In New York” story….

I got into town on Wednesday, and went to the current restaging of Sweeney Todd that night. To be honest, I generally hate musicals, but I really really like Sweeney. Perhaps it is the dark story, which ends in horror and insanity, without a single bit of redemption – that’s not what musicals are, right?

I’ve actually seen Sweeney before on Broadway – when I was…. Hm, 10, 11 maybe, I was taken to the original production with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou

That original production was mesmerizing to me, especially because of how the sets worked. Effectively, the set was a giant cube on wheels, with one face of the cube being Mrs. Lovett’s Pie Shop, one being a street scene, and so forth, and as the action in the play moved from place to place, the extras, or sometimes the principles, would turn the cube on its wheels, creating an illusion of distance or speed or volume that a single set couldn’t possibly achieve.

Thanks to Jeff Lester doing a recent search, after I leant him my very very worn out video tape of the Great Performances telecast, I now know that the Lansbury/Hearn version is back in print on DVD. I strongly urge you to seek out that performance, just to see the masterful way they approached the technical challenges.

Anyway, back in 2006. THIS version of Sweeney has a whole ‘nother set of technical challenges to face. See, the play, as originally mounted has ten “speaking” (and/or singing) roles, easily an equal number of extras providing chorus, and of course, a full orchestra doing the score. The current version only has the 10 principals – so that the principals have to not only being their own stage hands and chorus, which would be kind of insane enough, but they top that by being their own orchestra as well.

I mean that literally – they’re carrying their instruments around the stage, each taking turns playing parts! Some fun can be had in playing “Watch how they hand off piano duties as the various actors are needed upstage”

Understand how complex this is – not only does the crew have to act and sing, but they also have to tackle a pretty damn complicated score, while also being their own stage hands. That is, frankly, insane! There’s almost always someone or something moving on stage. And while it is a very minimalist stage and dressing (Pretty much two chairs represent 50% of the physical objects in the production – set that way to be a boat, this way to be a couch, and so on), there’s a kineticism on display that I’ve never seen before.

These are pretty astonishing performances, as well – Patti LuPone, for example, brings a wickedness and sensuality to her interpretation of Mrs. Lovett… and she does it while carrying a tuba around the set! Just…. Wow! Is all you can think.

On The Savage Critic scale, I’d give the strongest possible VERY GOOD, just a gnat’s breadth from “Excellent”, which is quintessentially unfair to this cast and production, because my qualms pretty much all come down to “Huh, why’d they make THAT choice?” or “Well, that’ not what I’d do” kind of things. For example, there’s lots and lots of instances where the cast is looking at the audience, and not each other. This can be jarring when Anthony sings “Oh, look at me, look at me miss, please look at me!” to Joanna, while HE is turned away from her. The problem was, I couldn’t see a consistent pattern of when they did or did not engage each other – sometimes characters WOULD make eye contact, sometimes they wouldn’t, and I couldn’t see the rhyme or reason.

Much of the staging truly worked – even when you thought it couldn’t. How on earth could “God, That’s Good!” or “City on Fire!” work without extras?! Yet, work it did, exceptionally well. On the other hand, I KNOW the play, and I know exactly what everyone is supposed to be doing and motivations, etc. So the minimalism worked just fine for me. I do wonder if a viewer just seeing Sweeney for the very first time would think the same thing?

I was also happy that the somewhat simpler score allowed some bits -- “Quartet” might be the best example -- to fully appreciate all four vocal lines of the song. In the fully orchestrated version, the orchestra tends to utterly overwhelm the performers, but with never more than 6 instruments at any one moment, everything was much clearer.

I thought the performances were very strong, especially Lauren Molina who portrayed Joanna, and Manoel Felciano who was Tobias. Both do a lot of “background” bits and action, that really add to the mounting insanity of the story. One of the conceits of the show is that the set and setup is reminiscent of an insane asylum, where the inmates are putting on this play – rather than it being that *we’re* watching the story of Sweeney, himself, it is more that we’re watching lunatics act out the story of Sweeney, which at once makes the play more immediate and horrifying (if that were possible), and yet also slightly distancing. So, Molina and Felciano really did a lot of “selling” this conceit -- Tobias creeping around the stage, or perching up on chairs observing the action, looking bug-fuck nuts, Joanna quivering her lip in mad, nervous panic when scary actions she isn’t involved in happen cross stage. Also of note is Donna Lynne Champlin who plays Pirelli (and interestingly, the didn’t change any gender references whatsoever, so she says “…when I was just a lad”, and things like that.) starts off the play as one of the keepers of the asylum, so there are several occasions where as the violence of the play escalates, Champlin steps closer in as if to be saying “Huh, if they take it too far, I need to be able to step in and stop it.” It’s a very effective device, really.

I was less impressed with Benjamin Magnuson who played Anthony, and Alexander Gemignani who plays the Beadle. In the former case, it may simply be that my brain is far too locked in on the DVD ’82 performance of Cris Groenendaal in the role. THAT Anthony is essentially Dudley Do-Right – a big, strapping, utterly earnest, and thoroughly clueless person who has his entire life turn to shit thanks to Todd. So, my brain has a hard time accepting a much weedier guy, who looks more like an NY intellectual than a young and vital sailor, in the role. His actual performance was good, but not, I thought, fully up to the level of his cast mates. Still, this is the difference between “really good” and “really really good”, so perhaps I’m being unfair.

As for Gemignani as the Beadle, the choice was made to deliver most of his dialogue in a monotone. You can practically hear the periods between. Each. And. Every. Word. I don’t know if it was the actor’s choice, or the director’s, but I thought it was a really poor choice. Other than that he was fine – the Beadle has some really difficult lines to sing, and he acquitted them very well.

Patti Lapone was really terrific as Mrs. Lovett, bringing, as I said, a real raw sexuality to the character that once certainly never get from the Lansbury version. I was pretty iffy on some of her readings and interpretations in the SF Symphony production of the play that she participated in 2001 (also on DVD), but in the intervening years, she’s really claimed the part.

Michael Cerveris as Sweeney was a revelation. While he’s not really old enough in appearance to be convincing physically, he absolutely psychically takes upon the mantle of Todd, and sells it 100%. It’s a very challenging role, and Cerveris sticks the landing (to mix a metaphor badly)

Bottom line: this is an astounding and audacious production of a play that was always a masterpiece of its own. If you’re in the New York area, I whole-heartedly recommend you see this production if/while you can.

Anyway, back to the “Only in New York” portion of the story… So, I really like Sweeney as a play, and I know the libretto backwards and forwards. It’s pretty disturbing on my part, actually.

So, I’m… well, I’m not actually SINGING along, because, y’know, you can’t actually DO that at a play, but I’m “mouthing” along with the music, if you see what I mean. My hands are also moving in my lap with the different musical lines. In short, I’m Really Fucking Into It, and It Shows, right?

2 seats over from me (which reminds me, I owe Mark Evanier a big wet kiss for advising me that I was better to sit in the 7th row than the first or second – I had my pick of the theatre when I booked the tix, and I ended up with superb seats thanks to ME’s advice), was sitting Michael Imperioli, who was Chris on the Sopranos, right? He was with a fairly large party of people, and they, in turn, had a friendship with an artist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was doing a “live sketch” of the performance, during it. “Capturing the energy” or something.

Anyway, during the intermission, some of the women in this party start up a conversation with me, “Who are you? How do you know all the words? Where are you from?” that kind of thing. We chat all pleasantly, and the second act begins and that’s that, right?

Well, we’re getting up to leave, and I say my goodbyes, and one of the women (Eva, I think?) says, “Look, we’re going backstage, how’d you like to come along?”

Obviously, I told them to fuck off. Er…. No wait, the other way, “What? Are you nuts, of COURSE I’d like to go.” So I got to go backstage, meet most of the cast, ask several questions on the staging, and wander around the set, and examine the props and dressing close up! Totally awesome!

As they say, it was a truly magical night. There was even an after party that I could have gone to, but I thought it better to not be “a leech” and know when to leave on my own. That makes it at least a little more likely that they’ll continue to be kind and inviting to absolute stranger in the future, y’know?

(Having a reasonable amount of contact with the comics talent, and watching as people sometimes have inappropriate fangasms sometimes, I’ve largely learned to restrain myself in my own encounters with celebrities)

Anyway, how cool is that? A great night at the theater, topped off with a backstage visit just from being excited about the work. Only in New York City though, right?

Garth Ennis and Ruth Cole were gracious enough to offer to let me stay at their place during the con, not only saving me a big wad of money from the hotel, but allowing me to spend some real quality time with one of my dearest mates, and turning my experience from just “going to a con”. I don’t think I would have heard about the Paul Pope/John Cassaday party at the Slipper Room, for example, without Garth – which ended up not only being a tremendous amount of fun, but being very productive in setting up a few things in the future.

I went out to NY for 2 specific reasons: 1) Marvel, in the original plan, was gong to have a “retailer day” of some kind, which got turned into “just” a cocktail party (We were there 4-5 hours, actually) after I booked the trip. But I thought it was REALLY important to go out and support Marvel working with retailers (especially as the guy who sued them, y’know?), because Marvel is getting better and better in working with us each month, and it is good to have a closer relationship. I met Dan Buckley, and Joe Quesada and I have buried the hatchet (If there was a hatchet to begin with, really) – we did it in email a few months back, but I wanted to do it face-to-face as well. Plus ay opportunity to tell more people what a godsend David Gabriel has become to Marvel and the retail community is always welcome.

I also went out to NY because 2) the first day of the con was a trade show. We need more trade shows in this business, especially ones that aren’t directly controlled by Diamond comics. I was, I think, the only retailer from west of the Rockies to show, but I thought it was very important to support the thing.

Of course, the trade-only *day* turned into “4 hours” (noon to 4) until they started letting the fans in, so it “wasn’t much” of a trade show this year, but still, a man has to do what a man has to do, right?

The con itself was pretty impressive for a first show – attendance seemed pretty huge to me. Even during the trade show portion, there were times it wasn’t possible to move in the aisles. Once they started letting in the fans it became a real madhouse. When I finally left the Javits ~6 pm, there were STILL a couple hundred people standing in line to get badges.

I suspect Saturday is going to get ugly, and I’d lay coin that the fire marshall shuts it down at least once during the day. The aisles aren’t nearly wide enough to accommodate the NY comics community – they need to be twice what they are, really. Really really glad I’m going home and not staying for the con, proper, because it will be a madhouse.

Also on the trip, I visited Rocketship in Brooklyn, which is a fab looking store for only being open 6 months. They looked like they were doing well, and I’m really proud that I’ve been able to help them succeed.

I also spent some time up with DC at their offices on Thursday– had Lunch with Dan Didio, and an afternoon meeting with the Vertigo editors, offering up a retailer’s brain to pick. All part of the service, ma’am.

Anyway, so that’s my little travelogue. I’ve really not read much this week – ASTONISHING X-MEN #13, which I’d rate an EXCELLENT, GREEN LANTERN #9 (I think? Comics are packed away right now), which I thought was a solid GOOD, and CATWOMAN #?? Which I’d say the same. That’s all I’ve read so far, despite 11 hours of flight time in the last 96 hours! (slept a lot of those plane hours, really) So, uh, PICK OF THE WEEK is ASTONISHING X-MEN #13, PICK OF THE WEAK is “I have no idea, hurray!”, and TRADE OF THE WEEK is…”your guess is as good as mine, I have no internet 30k miles in the air here I am, and I don’t recall what shipped this week.”

I am gong to be SOOOOOO happy to see Ben when I get home, though. I REALLY missed the little guy. Tzipora, too, but it is different with the 2 year old – four days away is…what? One half of one percent of his entire life?

Suck ass part is I have to do the weekly reorders, this months ORDER FORM (haven’t even cracked it yet), and the March subscriber setups all before Tuesday. That’s gonnnnnnna suck! So If you hear noting from me next week, that’s the reason why.

-B