Musically speaking, I can't imagine better news than the imminent arrival of a new Deftones record, in just barely a month, at that. Even the way the band announced Ohms - out September 25th - is a work of art. Apparently, the Deftones put coordinates on their twitter feed, and one fan drove to those coordinates and saw a roadside billboard add for the album. Pretty cool, no? Normally, I hold off on listening to single songs more than once before an album this important to me drops, but I just mainlined this one about five times in a row and it has me rabid for the entire album. Pre-order Ohms HERE.
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I ended up making it into the comic shop yesterday to pick up my books, and let me tell you, I had quite a haul. I've barely even cracked into the stack, however, of the two books I have read, one gave me ultimate happiness. This is going to be something only diehard fans of the old Marvel Comics Transformers series will be able to understand, but in Simon Furman and Guido Guidi's Transformers '84: Secrets and Lies issue 2 - which serves as a prequel to the Marvel series and thus, put events before the Ark's fateful crash landing into prehistoric Earth, we had a hell of a call back to the original series. Furman and Guidi show us Lord Straxus moving into Darkmount for the first time and discovering his newly appointed Decepticon outpost has its own Smelting Pool. This draws on one of my favorite comics EVER - the seminal Transformers #17, written by original Transformers scribe Bob Budiansky, with art by Don Perlin and Keith Willaims, published by Marvel Comics in 1986.
Issue 17 was such an eye-opener for me. I'd originally preferred the Transformers cartoon continuity to the Marvel comic, which I did not buy every month and which often seemed to run contrary to some of the big, cosmic ideas the show went for after the 1984 theatrical movie. That was until I read issues 17 and 18, which showed us what was going on back on Cybertron, and what was happening was Lord Straxus feeding Autobots to his smelting pool! These issues were populated with characters that were not in the cartoon or toy line, and this really fed my imagination, to the point that I tried to make a Lord Straxus and some of the other characters out of Legos so I could incorporate them into my own ongoing continuity which I had devised in my play sessions with the figures.
Transformers '84 has been full of nods to the original Marvel series, which Furman took over from Budiansky about halfway through the original run and really made his own up until it ended somewhat unexpectedly with issue 80 in 1991. Several years ago, Furman and Guidi came back for a new series that continued the original continuity, Transformers: Regeneration One, which was one of the books I could not stop talking about during its two-year run. '84 is definitely a worthy successor (or predecessor, being that it's a prequel).
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Playlist:
The Cure - Standing on the Beach
Thou - Summit
Thou - Heathen
Santogold - Eponymous
Low Cut Connie - Hi Honey
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Card:
More Disks, which makes perfect sense, as K and I have begun hatching a plan that involves a large sum of money.
