Jay Busbee . com Sports. Novels. Comics. Poker. Beer.

Ah, the good old days, when life was black-and-white and moms could hurl knives at their kids

This is a thing of beauty -- a newsreel from the 1950s or so with a mother who has a unique method of teaching her kids to stand STILL, dammit ...

And here's the thing -- if she's good enough to miss 'em by that close, she's good enough to hit 'em if she so desires, too. Better come in from playing when Mommy tells you to, kiddies, or it's a Bowie knife to the thigh for you!

(Hat tip: @OpieRadio and Free Range Kids)

The next great summer blockbuster: Colonial Ninja!

Inspired by W&M's early-game play against UNC tonight. This movie is going to kick some revolutionary ass.

Colonial Ninja Copyright and TM Jay Busbee. Steal him, and I'll have him come for you.

A political movement we can all get behind

I don’t usually write about politics; it’s a great way to piss off a huge chunk of your readership. During the times I’ve toe-dipped into it, I’ve been called both a baby-killing right-wing fascist and a limp-wristed wussbag liberal. (Both of which, ironically, are correct.) But here’s a movement I think we can all agree on:

Amen, brother! (Swiped from the site of one of my favorite contemporary sportswriters, Jeff Pearlman, who has no compunctions whatsoever about writing on politics.) And if you don’t know what the story is on the late, lamented TV show Arrested Development, by all means, go here and catch up.

Hey, awesome!

I just accidentally deleted all my posts! Aw, that's just great!

I'll be recovering everything...if I can. Dammit.

Marvel 1985 #1: Letting loose the inner geek

Ah, 1985. A watershed year in comics, a year in which the last of the old innocent Silver Age comics died out and the first of the grim-n-gritty comics slouched onto the main stage. A time when The New Teen Titans and the Uncanny X-Men ruled the world, when Crisis on Infinite Earths and Secret Wars revamped all of comicdom. John Byrne's depowered Superman and Frank Miller's dehumanized Batman were still a year in the future.

In short, it was a damn good time to be a young comics geek.

Now, Marvel has produced "Marvel 1985," a six-issue series set in that year, but in this world. It's like a mainline jolt of nostalgia, so fierce and sharp I feel like I ought to be listening to Rush and pretending like I don't hear Mom calling me to dinner. The plot is pretty simple: villains from the Marvel Universe cross over into ours, and hell breaks loose.

Or not; this issue was all setup and very little action. Written by Mark Millar, who's always had an air of calculated cool to his work that veers between kick-ass and contrived, 1985 looks like it's going to be a hell of a good series that knows it's going to be a hell of a good series. Make sense? No? Well, hell with it, then. Here's my favorite two-panel sequence from the book, when the young protagonist goes to visit the strange visitors who have moved into the previously abandoned house in his neighborhood:

That's the Red Skull there leering out of an upstairs window, and that right there is badass creepy. Dunno if 1985 can sustain the skin-crawling strangeness it's set up -- I'd much prefer that to an all-out battle -- but yeah, I'm on board.

Lost Season 4 Finale: Give a little, get a little

So after a five-hour-long swim meet -- at which my kids swam for a total of about four minutes -- I came home last night, collapsed on the couch and cued up the Lost season finale. I'm no Lost maniac -- I only occasionally scan one of the many Lost websites, and I've never played any of the games or whatever on the site -- but I'm fairly knowledgeable about the show. I'm also a big fan of several of the writers/exec producers, comics guys like Brian K. Vaughan and Jeph Loeb.

I don't think I'm exactly breaking new ground here by saying that this season was the finest since One. This one answered more questions than it asked, and the mysteries it posed were all in the context of previously established storylines. (No more four-toed statue feet.) Having the end zone in sight has definitely allowed the writers to flourish and drop clues that will certainly pay off.

Some thoughts here, and SPOILERS may be present. What I dig about the series is the way it can constantly recontextualize itself -- after last night, the show's present is now "our" present, 2008, and it's done this pretty much seamlessly. There are still gaps to be filled in -- what happened to the rest of the Castaways on the island? What went on during the three years between the rescue of the Oceanic Six and the death of Jeremy Bentham? -- but what's clear is that now we're looking at moving forward in time WITH the cast, which for some indefinable reason is infinitely cooler than the perpetual flashback that the series had become. Plus, the reimagining of familiar faces -- led by Sayid as a James Bondian hitman -- is satisfying on both a storytelling and an entertainment level.

ET has its usual great wrapup of the series finale right here. Well worth a read. While Lost hasn't yet approached the greatness that is the Wire, it's still probably among the top five TV shows ever, in my humble opinion. Lost still has a couple storylines that just don't interest me as much -- the Others in the woods have never done it for me, and neither did Claire and her "bay-bay" until she got all dead and creepy -- whereas every scene in The Wire was riveting. But hey, 99 percent is good enough for me. Just sucks that we have to wait until January for the next round.

The Greatest Collection Of Bass Players In The Known Universe

So this is one of those wandering posts, where it starts out being about something and ends up being about something else. I was going to riff on the news that Stonehenge has been a burial site for centuries, and then bounce from there into a video of Spinal Tap's "Stonehenge" (where the demons dwell!) So then I went YouTube trolling, and found this -- the greatest collection of bass players in human history:

Sweet. I love bass that sounds like it's pulling your guts out through your big ... toe.

RIPPED cover art, with the promise of more goodness inside

This right here is some sweetness -- the cover to RIPPED, the original graphic novel (or OGN, as the kids say) by myself and Jason Flowers. (Premise: time travel/conspiracy.) Not bad, eh? The promotional push is starting soon, but for now, art:

Comics art: Once again, I have chosen the right friends

Here's some extraordinarily cool artwork from a couple of upcoming projects I'm writing. First, from Kade: Rising Sun #1, a samurai epic from Arcana Studio: