Welcome to Buy These Stinkin’ Comics!, the far too irregular/theoretically weekly comic book column. When this rotting husk of a column manifests, its intended use is to share the various comic titles that we are all interested in on a given week. Audience participation is requested – nay – required to make this monster’s heart beat. Should you not see a comic listed that you’re interested in (and you will, my taste generally is lacking), share it in the comments section. Let’s do this.

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Hello friends. Nuzzle your bunghole close to the center of your leather seat here aboard the Mothership, and grab a beverage. This here is Monday Morning Commute, the therapy session where we all discuss the various arts, crafts, beverages, and bloat-inducing burgers that are helping us through this thing called Existence. Oh me? I’m just wallowing away here on break from work. My days have slide into nights, vampire weekends into a vampire existence. I’ve broken the noon wake-up call a couple of times, and my self-loathing is spiking. You’re all beautiful.

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Hello friends! The White Guy Interpretation of the Mayan Apocalypse has passed. Christmas is over. Your wallet is bleeding all over your crotch, and no matter how many styptic pencils you apply nothing avails. Give into your vaporized bank account and snag one of our new t-shirts. You know you want to. You don’t know? Well shit, do it for me. I have gauze on my groin, and I could use the financial help. Hit the jump to check them out, then if you’re inclined buy them in the OL Store.

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Game shows have radically changed over my life time.  When I was a kid, daytime TV was littered with them.  Today game shows have been replaced with “reality” shows that give away money to people who are willing to whore for the camera.

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Bask in the glory of Dave Mustaine’s melting face. It runs down his skull, slowly dripping onto his kevvy metal t-shirt. Despairingly, he rips the t-shirt off before it stains his perpetual undergarment. He forever wears a “Kill Em All!” tee that he stole back in 1983. Every night before he goes to bed, he rubs its fabric between his fingers. Praying to both Alex Jones and Whatever God He Believes In That Year, he utters one phrase over and over. “Please call me, Jimmy Hetfield. Please call me.” The sheer repetition of the hours-long nightly prayer dims into a dull drone, people throughout his underground bunker (the End is Coming) wishing that either Hetfield would call him, or he would go to sleep. They care not which, and they can’t express either. You see, throughout the compound Davey’s prayer is blared through loudspeakers on every wall. These same loudspeakers are live microphones. The peons must follow their Saviour (or employer, okay) in his prayers. Over and over again, they pray. Hoping to channel their extended energy in a way that has never, ever worked. The answering of a prayer through sheer mass of plea.

Uh, what? Anyways, this is MONDAY MORNING COMMUTE. Where we talk about the arts we’re enjoying this week. Guys and gals, let us party.

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[WEEKEND OPEN BAR: The one-stop ramble-about-anything weekend post at OL. Comment on the topic at hand. Tell us how drunk you are. Describe a comic you bought. This is your chance to bring the party.]

I want you to consider the following premises, keepin’ an eye peeled for similarities.

When a West Philadelphia-born prince ascended his Californian throne, he sang a little ditty. That time when the boxer prepared to avenge his friend’s death and defend America’s honor? You bet your ass he was jammin’ to some butt-rock. And when the world was ushered into the era of Y2J, it was greeted by the dulcet tones of a computerized countdown and processed vocals.

The conclusion: theme songs kick ass.

Hell, if you think about your favorite movie, TV show, or video game, chances are that it features some sort of soundtrack. Moreover, it’s also a solid bet that there’re clear-as-day, identifiable-as-hell themes woven throughout said soundtrack. While you’re experiencing this bit of entertainment, themes amplify the emotion at hand, whether it happens to be jubilation or intrigue or suspense. So affective, in fact, are theme songs that hearing them out of context can still teleport our consciousnesses to the space-time junctions of entertainment-inebriation.

Fighting Sephiroth.
Being devoured by a Great White.
Swoonin’ over a man with a license to kill.

If you count yourself amongst the OL faithful, then some of your life’s most consequential moments have probably been accompanied by a soundtrack. As such, I encourage you to respond to one or both of this weekend’s OPEN BAR prompts:

[What is a theme song you dig?][What would you choose for your own theme song?]

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Not trying to be insipid about this, but as I recollect the past year in my life, 2012 wasn’t very earth-shattering for me. It more or less amounted to another 366 days with some minor flourishes thrown in to keep it interesting (leap years are always cool, though). Several non-decisions on my part, no doubt, contributed to this, since I didn’t go out of my way to change it up too much, but things mainly worked out in a rather predicable fashion regardless. This subtle development, of course, has its own positives and negatives, neither of which is worth complaining about to any great extent because things were OK to begin with. And, similarly, since life is all about taking the good with the bad, when neither of which occurs to any major degree, the only thing to do is to take it as a slight lull in life’s symphony, artfully set to enhance its ambience when needed (as it will). I am sure, as time goes on and I keep on keepin’ on, moments from this past year will swell back up from the background and take on more significance until these mere moments become momentous. So seen this way, my new year isn’t merely about completing what’s left unfinished, but discovering what I didn’t even know was there—as I obviously don’t right now—because I couldn’t see that these moments will indeed be integral once they fit in perfectly with my forthcoming experiences. And that, my friends, is what I hope 2013 has in store for me: not simply making the future vibrant, but making the past more memorable when my dotted life connects. We shall see how it works out. Time, as it can only do, will tell.

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I know the gang Omega did our Year’s Best articles, and 2013 anticipations were one of the categories.  Well I have a busy week, so I’m going to use this High to both expand on that idea, and save time by not having to pick a category to write about.  So here are the things I’m early awaiting for the upcoming year.

P.S. I know I said Star Trek was something I’m eagerly awaiting, and I am, but it didn’t even make the list.

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Boom! Look at this asshole right here. After dragging everyone out of retirement, I’m on my serious grind trying to puke out my own glory hole before the clock strikes. I am most definitely in a hotel room in Montreal, working on my girlfriend’s iPad and some bullshit snap-on keyboard. My long, penetrative phalanges cannot make sense of this absurd key spacing, and WordPress shits thoroughly on the iPad. Thick, unrelenting, heaping steamers of ill compatibility. What can you do? Let’s do this, friends.

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It’s with a tearful eye and a hyper-extended thumbs-up that I bid farewell to 2012.

The last twelve months have been some of the finest of my entire life. And I’m not exaggerating. Unlike those saccharine slobs who always clamor about the present hour being their finest and the preceding moments nothing more than the bliss-steps to their existence plateaus, I have no illusions about the fact that I’ve chalked up some miserable years. I’ve anguished through entire calendars, burnin’ `em up with fuel of the most incendiary sort.

Self-doubt! Resentment! Apathy! Vitriol! Cynicism! Sally forth towards the mire!

But 2012 was a whole different beast. Sure, there definitely some moments when my nostrils were assailed by the wispy vapors of the aforementioned propellants. But repugnance was ultimately cast aside, overpowered by the surfeit of wonder! It’s almost as though entertainment and art and love formed a giant sword-wieldin’, monster-destroyin’ mech, and I got to pilot the son-of-a-bitch!

If only!

Anyways, it looks as though every crew member of Spaceship OL is delivering their year-end highlights, so I’m going to join the party. But since I’ve garnered a reputation as being the erratic, currently-undiagnosed-but-we’re-working-on-it, hack-writin’ resident of the crew, I’m going to switch things up a bit. Each of my highlights will be paired with an Ultra-Dimensional Portal! By clicking on any UDP, a hole will be punched in space-time, and your consciousness will be projected astrally.

Got it? Okay, here’s one last look at 2012!

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