Deadline closing in

Getting very close to deadline for "Himmelskibet" issue 21. I know that I'll be contributing with a few reviews. It'll all be in danish, since no english publication have discovered my incredible talents yet :) probably just as well, since I'm quite busy with work and the arrangements for Fantasticon (more info at www.fantasticon.dk).

One review that probably won't make it into issue 21 is the "Showcase presents" reprint of "The Phantom Stranger". I got that one because of the cover which promised a bit of horror element to the stories. I seem to recall The Phantom Stranger appearing in Swamp Thing and Books of Magic, but I'd never read the original series, so I thought I'd give it at go.

Most interesting was actually not the supernatural content, but the inclusion of Doctor 13, a debunker who tries to expose supernatural phenomena and apply logic and reasoning to everything he sees. I thought that was a very novel idea in a comic book, which so often requires a certain suspension of disbelief.

Originally I was going to save the horror related purchases for my autumn reading, but since Doctor 13 got me hooked I'm reading it on the train to and from work. I may write more on it a some point on www.tegneseriesiden.dk, I should have contributed some stuff a long time ago, but work kept taking most of my energy, so now I'm way behind if I want to reach the number of contributions I had in mind when I started the year.

That's more or less it for now. Updates are not guaranteed until Fantasticon is over, but some of my reviews from Himmelskibet are going to become available at Tegneseriesiden. Have fun until then, enjoy summer with a cold beer and a comic book.

This is becoming ridiculous

But anyway, I'm still alive, still writing still trying to live my life.

Not much has been updated here, but we actually did manage to win an award for best Danish web based comic related site. Thanks to all who voted for www.tegneseriesiden.dk.

In the meantime I'm busy arranging the Fantasticon in Denmark, writing some superhero reviews for Himmelskibet and writing a bit of fan fiction as well as this comic book script I just got an idea for.

Updates may very well continue to be sparse, check me out on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter if you need something more frequent.

Soon to be in print again

Haven't updated this in quite a while but I'm still moving ahead on various fronts.

In the non-comic world I got a new job at the airport (www.cph.dk) as an IT Consultant. Still finding my way around the place, but it's really awesome to be back into doing some hardcore development.

Writing at Tegneseriesiden and ComicWiki is still moving along, though changing jobs has meant that I don't get to write as much as I would like.

One of the last projects I finished before that was a couple of articles for a publication named "Himmelskibet" (eng.: The Sky-ship or Heavenly ship). Their upcomming issue has a superhero theme and with luck we'll publish the articles at Tegneseriesiden as well.

So - 2008 seems to be pretty cool already if one looks back at what happened. Time to lay big plans for next year :-)

My first time in actual print

At least writing about comic books. Danish X-Men 148 marks my debut as a writer about comics with an article about Jean Grey and Phoenix.

Of course I had to cut back a lot to fit onto one page - part of like asking Frasier Crane to make a brief statement about himself :) but the editor at Egmont who publishes Marvel here in Denmark allowed us to put the full text of the article up on Tegneseriesiden, so if you read danish here you go

http://tegneseriesiden.dk/baggrund/hvorfor-skulle-phoenix-og-jean-grey-doe.html

of course this means that I will have to raise the bar in the future. At some point I'll have to get my act together and write a book or something, but tonight I'll just raise a glass of good belgian beer and toast to having reached this far.

First time in print

Sounds weird, but it's true. After writing about comic books for more than two years I'm finally seeing myself in print instead of online.

Issue 148 of the danish X-Men features an article by me on Jean Grey, Phoenix and why they both had to die. This has been a very interesting process, especially learning to be brief and to the point to fit on the page I'd been allotted. Luckily I've also been allowed to publish an extended version online with some of the background and quotes that were cut during editing. This will be available at www.tegneseriesiden.dk shortly (only danish text available).

Comming to you from the world of Mac

I've now traveled to an alternate universe where the world is not ruled by the evil empire of Microsoft, in the future I'll be posting across the time-space continuum to you ...

Nah, seriously I've just bought a new laptop, and chosen to use a MacBook Pro instead of an Intel based laptop running Linux which was one of my original plans. It's still Unix in a way, since the foundation is BSD Unix, which has this cute little devil as its mascot (got the plush version last year at ApacheCon) so I should feel right at home.

There are differences though and some of the will take time to learn I'm sure, but I'm determined to go through with it.

Now I need to get the same determination to complete my stack of unread comic books, which is growing by the month. I've often said that one can never have too many comic books, but it almost feels that way right now. I'm sure it'll pass though :-)

One book I'm reading at the moment is the third in the series of hardcover versions of the Avengers with George Perez as the artist. Again one thing strikes me about Perez as an artist, and it's not his ability to do these huge pictures which seem to have every person from the Marvel universe in them.

The thing is, that he seems to have a knack of making female heroes that I don't find particularily attractive look in a way that suddenly makes them so. First time I noticed this was with his version of Donna Troy in Teen Titans, she's not my type of girl as a person, but there was something about her when Perez drew her that made her attractive. This might have been a fluke, but then I got hold of his version of Wonder Woman, and again I found that even though she's never really been attractive for me she suddenly was.

The lastest example is Scarlet Witch who looked ok, but she was never up there with Storm or Batgirl on my list, but again Perez did the job by putting a bit more emphasis on her gypsy background and applying whatever magic it is that he does.

So, whatever it is you do George, please keep up the good work ... on second thought, perhaps not, that would only lead to more must-have female heroes and an even bigger pile of comic books to read. Oh well, I've heard of worse fates :-)

Third place is ok - but we'll be looking for better :-)

which is not a bad result at all. SJ themselves didn't even win, which was extremely funny since a few of the regular contributers on their forum had already started talking about what price they should give to those poor sods who ended up in second place. Well, they did - and decided not to award themselves anything .. perhaps a slice of humble pie? :-)

So www.tegneserisiden.dk was third thanks to all you guys who went out there and voted for me, thanks a lot for that. I really appreciate it and promise that we will try to put out some quality stuff in 2008 as well.

Sadly ComicWiki didn't get many votes - I suspect that they were a victim of their own succes i.e. they attract a lot of people to write for them who are already affiliated with other sites, so when the time comes to vote a get friends and family to help out they go back to their primary site.
But even though they didn't get many votes I think a total of almost 5000 pages now is something they should be proud of given the short time the site has been around.

In other news, I've been contacted by a danish publisher about writing an article for a danish comic book. I'll have more on that when the publication date is set.