The Chronic Rift Network: Finding the Culture in Pop Culture!

Just bumping this topic to the top of the forums list.  Please let us know what you think of it.

And best of all, Keith managed to not make it about himself as he did in the last interview. I have my copy of I Remember the Future on order and am looking forward to reading it. I was going to enter the contest, but I like to support artists rather than take advantage of their generosity.

So, John, was that you whacking off the bit about Wildstorm, or was that me showing some actual sense? I can't remember...good that it's gone though.

Funnily enough, the Wildstoem debacle does tie in to what Orenthal was saying about the fiduciary responsibility of publishers to their shareholders or owners, in that the decision to pretty much trash the entire Wildstorm universe (and they even did a trial run for this with a Captain Atom crossover that resulted in the Wildstorm universe being destroyed and rebuilt) and reboot all of the Wildstorm books as post-catastrophe titles (meaning the nth reboot of The Authority, which hadn't even completed the reboot being done by Grant Morrison.)  The net result of this seems to have been sales leaping into the abyss.  The idea was to somehow revitalize the WS universe; instead they pretty much killed it stone dead.

Marvel's doing pretty much the same thing with the Ultimate line, with, god help us, Jeph Loeb leading the charge.  Magneto's gone utterly whacky-doodle and is now killing millions and Everything Will Change. Again.  This includes the name of the line -- it'll be Ultimate Cmics now.  I remember when the Marvel Ultimate line was intended to tell straightforward stories uncluttered by continuity.  The one title that's more or less stuck to that is Ultimate Spider-Man -- which is itself taking it on the chin thanks to Ultimatum...the book's being canceled and restarted, apparently with a new Spider-person (which might well be Peter's female clone.)

Final Crisis...I do know what Morrison was trying to do there, I just don't think it worked overall.  I was amused by the meta-commentary of having the monitors told to stop screwing around with the universe and trying to over-control them -- pretty much telling editors to abck off and let the stories work themselves out, possibly in new and exciting ways; this is offset a bit by the news that the Batman page at the end was an editorial request, on the principle that unless it was made utterly explicit, the big dumb ol' audience wouldn't get what happened.

Gah.  I could go on for hours and hours about this stuff and where it goes wrong (I think there's a week's worth of writing in breaking down where Countdown went wrong...)

Which was quite frankly surprising because we had such a small group of hosts. I'm still looking forward to the episode that that is free of technical glitches -- the ones you guys hear, plus all the ones we have to fix or work around before we successfully record, plus the ones that John fixes before he posts the episode. And on a related note, John didn't sound that much quieter than Orenthal and me while we were talking. And while I was talking about episode 2 of Dollhouse, I *DID* mention the "3 months earlier" caption. My words were swallowed up into yet another audio black hole, but I did say them. Really.

On the other hand, any episode in which I'm identified as a very amusing person is by default a great episode :)

I'm at school now.  They have firewalls up the whazoo to stop students from streaming media and I'm getting the show on my computer in the video club's room.