Sunday, August 29, 2010

Adventures in Telemarketing: Real Jobs

For those not in the know I work at a call center. I am employed by Leger Marketing to conduct market research, which means I call people and businesses in attempts to collect supposedly valuable information (most of the time it seems entirely inane).

While doing this job I encounter a ludicrous ammount of grief from the populace at large. I understand annoyance at someone calling and trying to sell you something while you're eating your most precious supper, but the ammount of pure vile and venom I encounter is absolutely absurd. I'm not selling anything, i'm not trying to wrestle your last few dollars from your superbly iron grip; I'm simply and very politely asking for a few moments of your time to answer some harmless questions, any of which you can refuse to answer.

I routinely get sworn at, yelled at, hung up on and fucked around with... but that's to be expected, even Canadians can be assholes. however there is something that  really sours my mood: being told to get a "Real Job".

There are so many things wrong with that statement that I almost don't know where to begin, so I'll start with the most obvious choice: What exactly is a "Real Job" and why in sweet holy hell do I need one?

Let's look at what my job gives me:
- Full time (35 to 40 hours per week) if I want it
- A flexible schedule
- Pays higher than Minimum Wage
- An hour long lunch break

That sounds like a decent job to me. It's nothing terrific but it will keep you fed, clothed, under a roof and not piss poor.

Now, how about it being "real"? I'll skip the existentialist debate on whether or not anything we do, perceive or believe is real and get right to the "reality" of things: Every two weeks money gets deposited in my bank account in direct relation to the amount of hours I spent working for that pay period and that pay is treated as legal tender when I pay bills and buy food.

That, my good friends, is real enough for me!

Now the next question is "What do these people consider to be Real Jobs and what right do they have to demean mine?"

To do that, let's examine two cases:

The first was when I was calling Halifax for a corporate project (so, that means I am calling businesses). A file pops up and a lady answers, the business listed on the file is "Christie's 30s and 40s Escort Service". So right off the bat we know things arent exactly going to be normal here.

I begin my intro. "Hi, my name is James, I'm calling on behalf of yada yada" when suddenly she cuts me off and starts laying into me. First she swears at me and asks me how I can sleep at night when I call people and disturb them all day, to which i reply "Fine, thank you very much", ignoring my occasional bouts of insomnia, and let her ramble on. She then insinuates that my family must be ashamed of me because of my job. A ridiculous assumption, because my Mum, grandparents, cousins and aunts and uncles all care for me very much and are supportive of me taking my life into my own hands. she then proceeds to tell me to "get a Real Job"...

I pause...
I'm in shock!
Did a 40 year old hooker just tell me to get a better job? I hung up on her and, in short order, start laughing. When I tell my colleagues why I'm laughing I send one of them into near-hysterics.

In what backwards world is hooking into your 50s considered more respectable than putting yourself through the tail-end of your education doing market research? In that world Spock has a goatee and Megatron leads the Heroic Decepticons. In that world I fall up and burn books while dressed in Nazi regalia and a bright pink tutu. It is a silly world.

The second instance we will discuss is one of significantly less hilarity. This one is more recent and of a more infuriating nature.

I was calling people in Toronto to do a study on air travel in Canada. Innocuous, harmless stuff. On my first call this kid answers the phone, he sounds at most 19 and I go into my pitch, ask him if he is 18 or older. "Yes" he says. Has he flown in Canada in the last year? Another "Yes". How many times? "Left". Excuse me? "Right" he says, his satisfaction with himself reeking through his voice. Little shit thinks he's terribly clever. I call him out on his bullshit and call him "ridiculous", he says "at least I don't work in a call center" and tells me to "get a real job". I tell him to "get a life" and insinuate that someone of his obvious intellectual aptitude would go far in life, maybe even be assistant manager at a McDonald's in 30 or 40 years.

Now, I hold myself to a code of generally being nice to people and trying hard to not judge them right away, but if the world of "Real Jobs" is filled with old hookers and prospectless douchebags, why exactly do I need a "Real Job"? To associate myself with the lower tier of the intellectual spectrum? I fear that wanting a "Real Job" in this world has just become tantamount to wanting an STD and an IQ of less than half my age. If Hookers and Wiseass McDonalds employees are the best the world of "Real Jobs" has to offer, I'll stick with my "Illusory Job" and keep my self-respect and ability to treat other human being with dignity. Telemarketing is a shitty job, for sure, but in the end at least I know I'm a better person for not having demeaned some random individual for trying to survive. No, I'll just demean them for being stupid and jackasses.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Technical Difficulties

Okay, so, this week I finally managed to get ahold of my friend's external harddrive to try and fix my computer, but the problem is that while transfering files my computer slows down to a snail's pace. Combine that with a stressful week at work and with inter-personal relations and you get me missing my update dates.

I have a lot of stuff to write about, so I figure the two people reading this won't mind if I break my schedule for a while and just update as I see fit over the next while.

Wish me luck fixing my poor busted laptop!

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Anticipating an AFternoon with Fred Van Lente

For the 3 people who actually read this, I promise you I will actually review some comics here eventually. It's been slow goings in monthlies coming out, and I haven't had the opportunity to grab any trades lately (it is so much easier to shell out 3 bucks at one time than 18)... but that's not to say I don't have a large list of things to buy.

As I have been informed, by a variety of sources, namely facebook and the targeted ads on this blog, a West Island comic shop known as The 4th Wall will be hosting Marvel scribe Fred Van Lente for an afternoon of hanging out and signing books.

I, personally, have only read one of Van Lente's works, The Incredible Hercules, and if everything goes as planned I intend on having him sign as much of my run as possible. It is an excellently written and drawn, fun and witty series. Unfortunately, this isn't going to be a review of the series as, at the current moment, my copies of the series are all in storage at my mothers place (if I didn't have her being amazingly kind enough to let me leave the majority of my collected goods at home I would have had to liquidate a vast majority of my collection).

No, what this is going to be is a brief extolling of the growth of conventions and guest appearances in the area. I've been a lifelong fan of comics, but it wasn't until later in my life when I started travelling outside of my hometown for school that I ever had access to comic shops. These shops varied in size and classiness, and still do, but never did I hear of any of them having actual recognized names in for signings and it wasn't until 2008 that the Montreal Comic-Con came into existence.In the two years since then, things have actually started to take off. The convention has grown in size with each iteration and Cosmix, on the most recent FCBD, had a recognizable name in for a signing (of course I can't remember it now). Now The 4th Wall, which has been around for barely a year or so, has Mr. Van Lente appearing.

This, to me, shows that Montreal is growing. Toronto has the massive Fan Expo, after 15 or so years of growth it has become quite epic, and Calgary has their giant comic con. If things keep going the way they have been, I expect that in the next 5 or so years Montreal very well might be the next big Canadian convention location, and that might very well benefit the plethora of upstart young creators like myself who want to break into the industry but really cant afford the trek to places like San Diego or Chicago and need to rely on homegrown possibilities. The more there are, the more opportunities to get noticed any one individual has... and that, I dare say, is a grand thing.

I hope you weren't too offput by my very local musings, and I hope youll join me next time when I ponder what to do with my large collection of single issues and my newfound preferences for collecting most titles as Trades...

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Propogating the Industry I Love

Today I experienced something that made me feel better about my geekdom than ever before: I got to help someone bring comics to children.

It is a simple but meaningful story, and I'd like to share it with you.

This morning I got a call from Oscar, one of the organizers of the Montreal Comic-Con, to confirm my ability to volunteer for the three days of Convention activity (Friday isn't a day of attendance, but I will be there to set up before the Saturday start). Later in the day, while running errands in the city, I swung by 1000000 Comix to talk to Alex, the other Convention organizer and one of the owners of 1000000, about what I'll be doing at the Con as a volunteer. When I got to the store it was relatively busy, so I do my usual browse the racks thing and I notice an out-of-place mid-to-late 30 year old lady dealing with a pile of singles and trades, looking perplexed, while her very young son nearby reading an issue of Marvel Knights Black Panther 2099 (I seriously didn't even know this book EXISTED until today).

Seeing as the one-man-staff of the store is moderately busy elsewhere I wind up, after a brief while, heading over to see what the mess of comics splayed out in front of her was about. As it turns out she is a teacher and, during the summer, she runs a camp for at risk students (those who are most likely to drop out of school either because of family situations or because they have trouble for one reason or another keeping up with where they should be academically (reading levels etc.)), and the theme of their camp is Comic Books (at least this year and the last). They use comic books to help get these children interested in reading and to help cover various ideas, such as seeing how representations of characters differ depending on the era they were written in etc.

She had requirements she needed to meet with the material she was getting, such as needing to have black superheroes (which her son was adorably trying to help her with by handing her Black Cat and Spider-Man: Back in Black trades) and needing to have differeing levels of difficulty in her material. she had a decent variety of reading levels in front of her, but the metric tonne of singles she was going through did not equal up to any one story getting told in sequence. First I helped her with the fact that she had no continuity to the books she had, which is something she herself just didn't have any awareness of before this shopping excursion (her experience with comics in the past having been Archie as a child and collected volumes of Bone for the previous year), and this wasn't just the geek in me saying "Egad, how do you expect them to read issue 3 and then jump to 15 without the twelve issues between them?", because, as she explained it to me, the idea is that if a child reads part one of a story they are more likely to want to keep reading if the next relevant chapter is nearby and just as easily mentally digested (well, clearly those are my words, but that is the meaning she conveyed).

Following that (I really wanted to use Pursuant, but the definition just doesn't match up) I acted on the Black Hero requirement and reccomended War Machine to her, for two reasons: 1) He is bad ass and covered in guns and 2) he was in Iron Man 2 and would draw in recognition credibility from the kiddies. I scoured through the back issues and found a small 5 issue run of the classic 1990s War Machine comics, which I figured would be much more kid friendly than his newer run which, from all I have read of it (not much), is more realistic and therefore more violent.

Alex wound up sort of working out a deal with her for how she could affordably bring the entire camp to the Montreal Comic-Con, and then she bought a big stack of books and headed out.

I was left feeling very satisfied and accomplished, knowing that I had just helped somone (who thanked me profusely throughout the entire event) bring both reading and comic books to children. It was very fulfilling to know that I could very well have helped to spread the love of this medium on to another generation... and I can only think of one thing that would be more satisfying than that...

Thursday, August 5, 2010

My 3 Monthlies: Power Girl, Haunt and Savage Dragon

A while ago I was forced, due to circumstances that were eventually beneficial, to cut down my monthly comic buying habits a drastic amount. Now I was never the guy you see leaving the comic shop with every DC and Marvel book released that week tucked under his arm, and maybe every independant book too, but I was very much into reading the books I loved monthly and I was happy with it that way. Then reality and cash flow issues slapped me in the face and I realized just how much more expensive it is to collect a comic as a monthly title. To alleviate the financial stress I dropped most of my monthly titles and decided I could always catch up on them as trades (which, since then, has yet to occur) and I carefully selected 3 titles that I would continue to read as single issues. These are what I chose and why i chose them.

The only title published by one of The Big 2 (for the uninitiated, which I expect there to be very few of reading this, those would be Marvel and DC) that i read monthly. Choosing this title seemed like an odd choice at first for me, but I knew it would be a perfect fit for my reading habits instantly. Power Girl as a character has, over the last five or so years, been growing on me. Aesthetically it is clear what her purpose is, but she has evolved beyond someone who I just saw on covers or in pages as a fan service character. The writers and artists who worked on her imbued her with a certain sense of humour, an acknowledgement of her assets and wardrobe issues that, even though I wasnt reading the JSA or other books she was appearing in, it came across and made me want to get to know the character better... and then I saw the preview art for the series. I had seen Amanda Conner's art before in the Terra mini-series that I (retardedly) passed up on and thought it was brilliant. In short her art is the most expressive (facial, body language, energy, posture etc.) and fun I have likely ever encountered and it strides a really nice line between cartoony and realish that grabs me the same way Humberto Ramos's art did the first time I saw it. There are no specific aesthetic prerequisites for catching my eye this way, as many artists of many differing specific artistic leanings have done this to me, all I know is that some people's art just feels appropriate for comic books and sometimes, no matter how talented an artist is, they can also just not work in a comic medium.

The combination of brilliant art with the writing of Palmiotti and Grey, which captures a certain lighthearted attitude which endears me to comics as well as a sense of humour that just hits me right where it matters. They play just the right amount to my geeky need for in-jokes, such as the cast of The Big Bang Theory being in the theatre, with Wolowitz even hitting on PG, or the epicness of the repetative Zardoz references that begin very early in the series (now, this is just dredging up a character that had been lost to obscurity for ages and re-used better than he probably ever was before, but the way a writer can alter a character for the ages has been made evident by many pre-existing cases and I have to give these two credit for me enjoying the hell out of Vartox).

The stories this team weaved were amazingly enjoyable and, annoyingly, I felt that many little plot points were left unfinished when the title switched to the new creative team at issue 13 to better coincide with the Generation Lost storyline. I can't give a fair review to how well the new creative team is doing yet, as too few issues have been released to date, but I can say I like the art, and it seems like some notes have been handed off by the old writing team to the new one to patch up those plot holes. the first collected volume of this series

A New Beginning is available now and the second volume is already up for pre-order as well. I can guarantee that both volumes read well as collected works, cuz I've gone back and read them again in that manner. If you are looking for a very fun comic, without the need to get into a tonne of backstory or too much seriousness, grab yourself at least the first trade and see where it takes you from there. The whole first run can be easily enjoyed without continuing on to the next creative team, but things are looking to be fun with team two (I just wish that the new bad guy had stayed looking like a Space Jam meetz DBZ refugee).









Haunt 
Haunt was a comic specifically tailored to make me need to read it. Since I was a little kid I have idolized, probably to a blasphemous level, Todd McFarlane for how talented and ingenious he was in constructing his empire and marketing his creations. He is, in my opinion, to comics what Gene Simmons and KISS are to music. Hell, all Todd needs to do is form a Hard Rock band and I think he'd have covered all the bases KISS have. Combine him with Robert Kirkman, who writes overall the best comics today and has sucked me headfirst into Invincible (the best superhero comic you probably aren't reading), Ryan Ottley, artist on Invincible, and Greg Capullo, art god, and you have me by the proverbial balls.

Haunt reads like a comic from the 1990s, but in all the good ways. The nineties got a lot of flack from the comic fandom once they had hit the 2000s and much of it is deserved, especially from a marketing and variant cover perspective, but I really never found it to be a bad era for artists, designs or fun and exciting stories. Sure, it somewhat appeals to nostalgia, but Haunt has a well constructed, dark but not overbearing plot, is filled with characters who have been fleshed out beyond just their clear cookie-cutter cliche basis, which allows the reader to quickly identify what type of character they are and look for how they will begin to break the mould. Kirkman, for me, has never shown me any sign of not knowing what he is doing and when Haunt caught a lot of early flak for how much it read like a comic from the 90s, I knew it was because Kirkman wanted it to be that way and thet he would easily bring the series beyond just being a 90s homage into something that is worth following along, and so far he has done it with spades.

The art is a perfect blend of modern and retro 90s in the first arc of the story. This is very clearly due to the nature of the creative process employed on those issues, with Capullo doing layouts, Ottley doing pencils and Mcfarlane inking the whole shebang. It resulted in a wondrous energy being present in the art an d I could, upon careful inspection, even point out and identify each artist's contributions to the overall aesthetic of the pages.

The first volume, in trades, really just deals with a solid origin story that doesnt really reveal everything. The best comparison I can think of while writing this (which i am doing mostly late at night, couple of days in a row, in preparation for Thursday) is to the opening act of a good superhero  movie, with two more acts to come before the storyline is mostly wrapped up and we expect to be left with an ending that hints at a sequel... so, kind of like the first Iron man film, except with a little less origin to rest of plot ratio.

If you have enjoyed the work of Kirman or McFarlane over the years, or you are a fan of 90s comics who is looking for something to recapture that nostalgic buzz and not drop the ball on it, then you should give Haunt a chance (and for what Amazon is charging, I can honestly say I've spent more money on worse trades *coughWantedcough*

 
Savage Dragon
As I had mentioned before I have long loved and intended on seriously following Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon. I have a bunch of random issues from my childhood, but it wasn't until he released that FCBD book that I really found a good jumping on point (and, being who I am, I also intend on back-tracking and collecting the entire series as singles). Now that I have jumped on board I am exceedingly happy to have done so.

Talking about Larsen as an artist and as a writer is a difficult thing. Not because it is hard to describe, but because I don't want to come off as trashing him. His art is still fun, still Larsen, still channeling Jack Kirby... but when I compare it to earlier issues in the series it has gotten less tight and detailed and more sketchy and bold stroked. It isn't my favourite change, but it doesn't hamper the storytelling at all. In some cases it may even benefit it, especially in some of the more hectic and violent fight scenes, where the sketchiness and the thick black lines really serve to heighten the impact of a frantic, hectic fight....and sometimes I think he's just being lazy.

His writing is rife with riffs on other comics and storylines, it pokes fun at the Big 2 constantly and still manages to have its own worthwhile story to tell. It might not always be the most original storylines, but Larsen injects it with enough Larsenocity that it becomes fun and absurd and, yet, I don't dislike it the way I dislike the absurdity that is most of Deadpool's appearances.

Larsen's Savage Dragon is both safe and unexpected. I know that the art and writing team isn't going anywhere and that I will always enjoy what happens because, for all the flaws the art has developped and the campiness of the writing this book is still fun (which is something that can't be said for many books drawn technically better and written more seriously etc.). It is harder to reccomend this book than the other two, as I don't have as solid reasoning for why it is good as I do with them. But, trust me, it is good and it is fun and I look forward to it every month probably more than the other two because I never fear that it will dissapoint me (as i do with the creative team change on Power Girl) or bitch and moan about it not coming out regularly (which Haunt is developing as a bad habit). Hell, just grab some back issues or something and check it out for yourself. Have some fun: Have some Savage Dragon!

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

The best Global news I have heard in a while...

Those of you who do know me have probably heard me spewing vitriol and and making angry (empty) threats towards British Petrol ever since they massively fucked over our entire global eco-system by hiring a bunch of unqualified workers to man that oil rig down in the Gulf.

Today seems to be the start of some good news coming from those BP asshats. Seems things have finally been settled, seems being the operative word. Now this isnt really going to do much to repair BPs image, but at least the environment won't in all likeliness be getting any worse from this. I'm no expert, but everything I have heard says that the damage done already is irreversible. It breaks my heart knowing that I might never get to swim with sharks like I wanted to, the way some experts are talking.

The well that was spewing toxic oil into the gulf which resulted in BP using toxic dispersants to hide how bad it was, well, it has been capped and looks to be over and done with, Good Job (for once) BP.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

It Liiiiiiiives~!

Honestly, it is hard to know where to start with serious necromancy like this. I never intended to let my blog dissapear into near oblivion, but I was hit with a series of weird life changes which I couldn't quite stay on top of when they were happening and I just didnt know how to manage my time effectively (admitedly still an area of life I struggle with).

I once promised a review of Bret Hart's autobiography but, well, considering how long ago it is that I read it I feel any serious review would be impossible. It wouldn't do justice to the book to review it without reading it over again, so I wont even try. I'll just say this: It is a phenomenal read that really gives you some impressive insight into the world of pro-wrestling from the beginning of a career to the end of it. If you like pro-wrestling at all you owe yourself this read.

I have some serious plans for this blog, something to stay on-top of on a twice or thrice weekly basis, but some of the things I need to figure out how to do are, well, eluding me. If anyone knows how to make blogger let me post more than one picture per blog update it'd be swell if you would let me know about it.

So, for now, stay fit and have fun (I wonder how many of you will get that reference?) and I'll see you soon.