[variant covers is a column every tuesday that breaks down the various titles coming out that week in the world of telekinesis and titty shots]

Siege #1
Marvel isn’t wasting any time this year. They’re straight-up kicking off the first publishing week of 2010 by rocketing straight into their magnum opus, Siege. In a staggering bout of dumb-assery, Norman Osborn has decide it is time to throw down with the lords of Asgard. I’m not sure what sort of excessive hubris you have to be packing to decide you want to fuck with the Gods, but apparently the voices in Osborn’s head have it. So Obsorn, and his douchebag brigade of cronies, the DARK AVENGERS are going to stomp right into Asgard and I assume, ultimately get tore the fuck up.

I’m sold.

At its simplest, Siege is an excuse for Marvel to have Osborn battle a bunch of deities, which seems to result in the fractured core Avengers getting back together and putting a stink on the Green Goblin’s face. It’s been such a long time since Stark and Rogers and Mr. Thor got together to lay thunder and shield and repulsor ray on a common enemy. Ever since Civil War, they’ve been spread out across a multitude of realms. Steve Rogers is straight trippin’ balls after getting shot into the plot of Slaughterhouse-5, Tony Stark has reduced himself to a vegetable, and Thor? I’m not really sure what he’s been up to.

Marvel is branding it as the culmination of seven years of plotline, and I’m ready for it baby. If I had to live another year with Norman Osborn running pretty much everything, I was going to rip out asshair and fashion a stankbeard. I’m hoping that Steve Rogers, fully minted in his body again, is like, you fucking guys let Norman Obsorn weasel his way into power? Talk about dropping the fucking ball! But seriously though. From the moment the Avengers all disassembled, into Civil War, into the death of Steve Rogers, into the most Secret of Invasions, into Dark Reign, it’s been one goddamn nightmare after another for the Marvel Universe. And not only that, but the complexity and burdersome nature of intertwining every title into some sort of endless, fatiguing Super Event has left me wistfully thinking of simpler days.

It’s Brian Marvel Bendis and the gorgeous art of Olivier Coipel throwing an epic showdown in Asgard, that is promising to strip down and simplify the Marvel Universe. I’m sold.

There’s nothing really else coming out in the Marvelverse that catches my eye this week. See, I refrained from saying “nothing else that is awesome coming out”, showing my wonderful growth as a human being and open minded comic book reader. However, Marvel last week did tease this gorgeous piece of Spider-Man artwork by Pasqual Ferry. Something serious is going down with Peter Parker this year! Go fucking figure! There’s always something big going on with him. Ever since that douche traded his marriage and memories of Mary Jane to Mephisto in exchange for saving Aunt May’s decaying, disgusting, propped-up-by-pills-and-preservatives-ass, I’d been down on the Emo Arachnid. Who makes that trade? May has like three good years left, and she’s wasting them by marrying the father of J. Jonah Jameson. Good work dude, your spider-ears have to hear the groans of old Aunt May backing that ass up for the father of the guy who absolutely hates you.

Orc Stain #1

Listen. I’m a geek who plays World of Warcraft, secretly wishes he was Gimli and listens to shit like Amon Amarth. Anything called Orc Stain is going to gain my attention. I feel like I have to champion it misguidedly on principle alone. It’s about an orc (duh) named Stain who has begun to see the cracks in orc existence and the endless wars they fight. It seems like social commentary to me, featuring an orc. Now I’m really sold. It’s by writer James Stokoe, and while I don’t know him because I’m ignorant and uneducated, better people may have read his work Wonton Soup, whose premise is that one of the galaxies best chefs leaves behind galactic acclaim to become a space trucker. Bizarre. And cool.

Superman World of New Krypton #11

I have no idea what’s going on in the world of Superman. I also have no idea why this title isn’t tying into Blackest Night. Was there some sort of break-down in office memos? I mean, you need to slap the Blackest Night title on that shit! Sells more copies! Black Lanterns are canvassing the entire cosmos, but they can’t roll up onto New Krypton? Wicked weird, yo. I’m just kidding. I’m glad they’re doing their own thing, and they haven’t been assimilated into the monolith event.

All I know is that Clark Kent has been framed for murder, and there’s some sort of conspiracy between Kryptonian guilds. I didn’t make that up, apparently New Krypton has been taken over by guilds, maybe because they play too much Warcraft and they’re like, we’re fucking superheroes, let’s form a guild. They sound so cool.

But seriously, who would ever believe Kal-El is a murderer? If the dude had some balls he would have punched the dumb head off of Lex Luthor eons ago. Dude definitely isn’t into Bentham and his utilitarian ethics. How many lives could you have saved, Clark, if you just mustered up one skull crush? Yeah, stand on your moral high ground. I’m sure there’s some mother whose child had their head stepped on by Metallo who probably disagrees with you and your high horse.

Just sayin’.

As anyone in the know…knows, today is Bayonetta Day! Happy fucking Bayonetta day! Much less importantly, it is my birthday. And whenever my Mom has asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I told her point blank: Bayonetta. So when I woke up this morning, I found the above awesomeness sitting on my keyboard. Thanks to a boatload of antipsychotics in my system, my Mom was able to sneak into my Dungeon Lair, and place this gently on my keyboard. She is the best Mom ever.

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Daniel Faraday’s entrance into the LOST mythos was even more fucking spoogeworthy than initially thought. I had a feeling the quirky guy with the sweet facial hair and the stringy body was awesome. I could just tell from the moment he was walking through the forest after bailing the hell out of the helicopter. But after rewatching Confirmed Dead this afternoon, something so obvious hit me that I was actually upset that I didn’t notice it.

Daniel Faraday’s initial conversation with Jack and The Whore Known As Kate was an homage to Luke fucking Skywalker. Yeah, isn’t it awesome? Faraday struts up to Kate, wrangling to get his helmet off. A little pipsqueak in an enormous, foreboding get-up. A stranger, even. After taking the helmet off, he’s asked, you know, who the fuck are you?

And dude drops, “I’m Daniel Faraday, I’m here to rescue you.”

Awesome! Usually LOST has me in a frenzied state. I’m watching it, but I am trying to pay attention to every thing on the screen. Convinced that there’s something encoded onto the tree bark or something that I’m missing. That I should be seeing. Because obviously it holds the answer to everything, from the Island to the Smoke Monster. And then I end up missing awesome homages to Star Wars and shit. It makes sense that they’d throw this sort of reference in, since Lindelof himself is a huge Star Wars geek, and wore something The Force-related to his first meeting with Abrams during his hiring process.

Anyways.

There’s a multitude of reasons that Daniel Faraday is awesome. In short order,   he had a mullet back in the day. Which obviously means he listened to sweet hair metal. Even though it was 1996 when he was a Professor, you totally know that he was pissed off about grunge and was still blaring Queensryche and wearing a leather jacket at night. And there’s also the fact that he’s a genius, and time-travels with the frequency that most of us make our daily commutes. Getting caught in the slipstream? Pfft man, I’m Daniel Faraday. I do that shit before lunch. And it’s so blase I don’t even celebrate with some fine eatery, I get a peanut butter sandwich. Grape jelly? Ha! That shit is for pussies. Straight up chunky peanut butter, no milk. I’m a bad ass, I have a mullet!

But more than anything, Faraday seemed to represent the shift into insanity that came with the beginning of Season 4. Here we had a time-traveling physicist who was sent to measure temporal cross-dimensional shifts and uh, other stuff. No, I really don’t get what he was up to. But it all sounded incredibly difficult and I knew he was the only one who could do it, because he had a Ph.D. and a mullet. If Season 4 was a shift into a time-traveling exploration of man’s own inability to save themselves, of the idea that man creates the same demons that ultimately claim him, who better than Faraday to represent that. Faraday was channeled down to the Island by the writers themselves to embody the concept of the rest of the series, and perhaps retroactively and with the entire premise in focus, the show.

Faraday was a gentleman hurdling through time set on a course to be killed by his own creation. Literally. All of the characters of LOST are sent through the cosmos, destined to create in the past the same things that will lead to their own suffering in the future. It happens on both a micro and a macro level; for they seem not only responsible for the events on the Island that lead to the Incident, but they also wrangle with the idea that all their past actions and inactions are resultant in them being on the Island in the first place.

Jesus Christ, the Diet Mountain Dew is rocketing through me, and I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about anymore. You know what would be crazy? A hydra, but instead of heads, it just has like sixteen dongs, and every time you cut off a dong, two more spawn.

And then, Faraday is killed by that which created him. It was a goddamn tragic moment. I pretend to sneeze and fart at the same time so my friends wouldn’t realize I was trembling with tears. My friends looked at me, and I was like “Sneeze and fart! One of the most deadly combinations ever known! I’m lucky I didn’t die! I’m just shaking and covered in snot and remorse! Now look away, LOOK AWAY!”

Eloise shoots down her own son, and lives with the tragedy throughout her entire life. Eloise Hawking is condemned by the situation which she created – her own son. Faraday is not only a stud, a phyicist and the lead singer in a Maiden cover band, he’s the essence of the show. People suffering over and over again as the sum of their actions. I could be completely wrong. It’s hard to make any certain conjecture without having seen the end of the show; maybe all the plight can be avoided, maybe there are variables or constants that can be relied upon to change situations. But Faraday, the time-traveling maestro of pure sex and intelligence seems to embody where the show was going.

Oh shit! I think I say “Oh shit!” so much that it has lost any impact on the reader. Sort of like all the other vulgarity I trot out these days. Sigh, I’m so derivative. Really, a pale-imitation of whatever true Ian hangs out in the Realm of Ideas with Socrates and Plato. Whatever, whatever! Tomorrow is my fucking birthday! And that means a few things. Firstly, I’m old as fuck. When I told The Girl Confused Enough to Date Me that I was weirded out at turning 27 back during the summer, she couldn’t contain her smile. She was laughing at my old, wrinkly balls. Yeah well, you’re stuck with them!

But more importantly, Bayonetta comes out tomorrow. I’m ready to climax! I’ve been plugging this thing forever. I was talking to Pepsibones, and I told him I had absolutely no idea what product I was going to champion to get fanboy and fangirl perverts from all over the internet to come to this watering hole. I’ll figure it out.

Monday Morning Commute. Every Monday I’m going to detail the various things I’m either currently or will be watching, reading, playing, and listening to in the next seven days. It’s Monday. You’ve got a long week of school, work, or compulsive masturbation to get through. Tell me the arts that you’re indulging in, to stave off suicide.

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[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

I have a soft spot for tortured Jack Shephard. Why, you ask? Well, I find a bearded, miserable, pill-popping mess to be an eminently relatable character in my life. I should probably be sticking to more fringe ideas this early into my month-long extravaganza. But I was driving around today in my car, and I was like, you know what totally sold me on LOST? Bearded Jack at the end of Season 3, screaming “We have to go back!”

It blew my god damn mind. Up until that point, LOST was a pretty cool show, but it never succeeded in blowing my mind. The hatch kicked my ass, but episodes covering them setting up mini-golf courses and shit had me snoring.

In fact, I had zoned out during the middle of Season 2, leaving it behind while the gang scavenged around the island and spent entire episodes walking from Point A to Point B interwoven with character back story. However, at the behest of a couple of friends, I caught up, and watched Season 3 enjoying myself. I mean, there were polar bear cages, and we got to see Locke get shoved out of a building by his own father. All of this was pretty awesome.

But the moment where I realized, and let’s be honest, you too realized, that the writers of LOST had given up sanity for awesomeness is when this show kicked it up another notch. There are moments in television when I run around my room screaming, too excited for my big squishy to handle. And when it was made known that not only Jack gotten off the island, but also that he wanted to go back on it? Fucking extreme, man! Extreme!

It was a game changer, because it completely demolished the existing structure of the show. The show was enjoyable, but it seemed rather static. They’re marching around an island they don’t know shit about, trying to escape. There’s a pile of smoke chasing them, and some old bastard named Ben Linus has a weird voice and spends episodes reading The Brothers Karamzov. But after that episode?

I had to ask myself, what the fuck was going on? Let me get this straight, they…got off the island? And they’re off, but where and when are they? And who died? And wha..what? Jesus lord, hold me. And they want to go back? And how did they get off? And my nose is bleeding from awesomeness, or the thirteen Diet Mountain Dews I drank during it, or maybe a combination of both?

Also, it marked a rather curious shift away from the Jack we had known and loved. Sure, the dude had his demons, and he had clashed in an epic throwdown between him sporting…Lockeian Empricism versus Locke’s Unwavering Faith. But here was the dude laid low, unraveling before the viewer’s eyes. He’d come along way from being total Maverick from Top Gun being able to sew up his own gashes and shit.

And since then? They’ve seemed to shift away from Jack. He’s been edged out by the Helicopter Brigade, and Richard Alpert, and a bunch of other bullshit afoot. Not in a bad way, mind you. But I still think the dude has something left to give the show, and ever the optimist, I can’t help but feel he’ll be the hero of the show. This is while acknowledging of course, that this type of show probably won’t have the archetypal hero. All of their characters coming packing a minimum amount of loathsome. Perhaps I’m putting too much significance to how central he was to the early portions of the show, and perhaps I just love the guy too much to have some correct perspective in the house.

But what I do know, is that when Jack: Sexy Bearded Hobo edition warbled to Kate that they had to return to the Island, I began to worship at the altar of Damon Lindelof. I began speaking with Pepsibones yesterday after kicking off this crap, and we talked about how brilliantly the show unfolded.

You see, even though I’m convinced the writers were directionless and flailing in the night at first, the show’s slow boil into time-traveling madness made it all the better. If they had shoved the show into some mind-warping merry-go-round right from the start, it wouldn’t have developed the world and the characters. And sure, there were times where I yawned and probably tugged the pud in the middle of S2 and S3, but the laborious groundwork they laid through the first three seasons have resulted in S4 and S5 being the best damn television I’ve ever watched.

And it all changed when snot-covered, oxy-snorting Jack asked that whore Kate to come back with him.

Ah, Search Engine Terms! Welcome back, fuckers! And guys, we have a cause for concern. You see, someone in this world needs buttcheeks. Who is the darkened and unkind god that has given someone life without providing them with some bum bubbles? Seriously!

Yep, someone searched “I need buttcheeks”, and Omega Level came up. Oh yeah, they also typed:

Bayonetta Fuck

Lightning Naked FF13

And!

Measuring Cock

Perhaps someone needs buttcheeks, to measure a cock? It seems the only logical conclusion, and way to measure a cock. Someone out there in Omega Land, help this poor guy or gal out.

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

LOST starts one month today. One month until my favorite show on television begins its final run. I fucking love LOST. It isn’t my favorite show of all time – Billy Adama and the Space Cadets hold that award. But I can also acknowledge that LOST is roughly four-million times better in the areas of plot, and smoke monsters, and other shit.

So let’s start at the fucking beginning. Look at the god damn promotional picture for season one. It’s almost hilarious in its simplicity, and for what has occurred since then. You know, just a bunch of people foraging for food and trying to survive on an island. I was sold on that premise alone! I mean, there was like a monster and shit! And that guy from Party of Five, and a fucking hobbit!

How could I not be sold?

And now I look at that shit, and I just shake my head. How the hell did we get from crashing planes, to hypertextual mind-warping, time-traveling madness? I thought the biggest problem Jack Shephard was going to have was getting his weiner into Kate’s love nest. Turns out that oh yeah, she’s a filthy whore with linebacker shoulders (this will all be gone into within the month, I’m sure) and he is seeing his dead dad and rocketing through the space time continuum.

The dudes from LOST knew what they were doing, even when they didn’t know what they were doing. How so? I’ll explain it to you, chuckles! Even if they didn’t know how they were going to connect all the dots of the series, they threw us enough hooks that we had to keep watching. I mean, when that fat dude from Heroes, Parkman, gets eaten out of the cockpit of the airplane? Yeah, I had to keep watching. And then there’s some mysterious hatch or something?

Yeah, dope as hell.

Somehow LOST has managed to tell me absolutely nothing for like five and a half years, and I’m still hooked.

Remember though, when the fucking plane crashed? Of course you do, it was the start of the show. What a hell of a way to kick off the pilot though. I’d like to spin the Island’s wheel, travel through time, and masturbate JJ Abrams for his ballin’ pilot. It was god damn madness. Dudes were getting sucked into still firing engines, Jack was like totally stitching himself off, and the hobbit was a god damn heroin addict.

I distinctly remember sitting in my friend Dave’s room, watching it. It was one of the first shows to show off the thunderous erection that we take for granted now: HD television. Maybe I’m imagining it, and I’m definitely not putting much thought into proving myself wrong, but LOST seems like it was one of the shows that kicked off television as spectacle. It was in HD, it was in 5.1, and you definitely got a bigger bang for your buck. I sat there, thinking to myself, I need a fucking HDTV!

I had no idea what I was getting myself into at the time. It is something of a cultural phenomenon within the geek circles, and even branching out into other walks of life. The average asshole has no idea that they’re getting a lesson in utilitarian ethics, rocking out with Jeremy Bentham, or the delicious irony that John Locke the philosopher was   the ultimate empiricist, while the character they named him after seems to be a man of faith and blind belief.

Other nerdy shit like that. Viral marketing, altered reality games, clues wrapped within websites, insanity. Other television shows and movies do that now, but I feel like LOST was the first one to do it, or at least that I recognized.

Anyways, intro over. Let’s party until the party really starts.

It’s Friday! Wait…shit, Friday? Already? Damn. With time off from the teaching gig and a couple of holidays in the mix, I’ve been hanging out with my friends beer and relaxation whenever I damn well please. It’s been a good stretch, but on Monday I’ll have to return to The Man’s regularly scheduled programming.

So let’s try to enjoy ourselves for one final weekend. And what better way to start this off than a brew review? (Well, probably winning the lottery, hanging out with friends, watching a sick sporting event, et cetera).

Anyways, I went to the liquor store only to find they were closing in ten minutes — a solid four hours early in honor of New Year’s Day. I felt a bit rushed, not wanting to prevent the noble shopkeeper who helps me get lifted every week from getting home to her loving husband. So I threw caution to the wind and grabbed the first set of anti-inhibition potions that appeared even vaguely trustworthy.

The loot of the week — Allagash White.

Now to be honest, the reason I snatched up a four pack of this ale is because the label bragged about being born in Portland, Maine. “Hey, I take a ferry from Portland to Nova Scotia every summer…if they brew beer as well as they  transport folks to a foreign land, this should be great!”

But as I was driving home, I really started to think about it. “Hold on. Maine…Why is it that I only go there to catch a ferry somewhere else? Oh yeah…I forgot…They’re kind of like the hicks of the North!” But with the store closed, there was no going back to exchange the product of Maine’s finest for something more reliable.

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Ah, thank goodness it is the end of 2009. What a shitty year! Oh my god! Yeah, it was rough. Naw, it was pretty cool. For a second straight year, my girlfriend didn’t dump me. My sophomore year of sexual intercourse went flowingly. There’s probably a pun there. I graduated from college. Pepsibones Krueger then was like, hey, you graduated college, I’ll do it too. With a 4.0. He’s a braggart and a show-off. I began writing for Mishka Bloglin. God love them, they let me fill them with my waste. And then I was like, hey, Pepsibones, let’s get going on our blog. We need money for caffeine and firearms.

He nodded, and was like, awesome.

There were a shitload of good movies and comic books and video games. All of which I cannot remember well. I think 2009 may go down as the year that my brain decay began to accelerate at warp-drive like speeds. Without researching, and under the acknowledgment that most of what I like is the same pop-medium bullshit that I spend most of my time deriding.

I dug the hell out of the various things across a squad of mediums, and I’m sure I’m going to willfully forget and not name some: The new albums by Dredg, Baroness, Mastodon, Between the Buried and Me, Lamb of God, Kid Cudi, Jay-Z, MC Esoteric, Every Time I Die, Wale, Mos Def, Devin Townsend, Skeletonwitch, and other shitty pop.

I played the shit out of Arkham Asylum, Uncharted 2, Modern Warfare 2, a belated playthrough of 2008’s Dead Space, Borderlands, Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time, Assassin’s Creed II, New Super Mario Bros. II, Resident Evil 5, another belated playthrough in Fallout 3, and of course too many hours of World of Warcraft.

Doing rough math, and under-estimating by a ton, and not counting dinners and lunches out, I probably consumed a shit load of Diet Mountain Dew. Let’s say I drink six cans of 12 oz a piece daily. This is way understimating. And two 20 oz bottles. 6 x 12 = 72. 2 x 20 = 40. 40 + 72 = 112. 112 x 365 = 40, 880. And again, I’m under appreciating how much I drink. 40,880 ounces of soda. Jesus Christ. And I wonder why I can’t remember…I can’t remember what I can’t…Remember?

Comic books! Alright, just the nerdy, capes and lasers kind! Fuck yes! If you didn’t read Old Man Logan, Captain America: Reborn, Brubaker’s run on Daredevil and Captain America, Millar’s run on Fantastic Four, Diggle’s run on Daredevil, Morrison’s run on Batman and Robin, pretty much anything Geoff Johns wrote, Ellis’ ending of Planetary, and his Ignition City and like, one issue of Doktor Sleepless, Hickman’s Fantastic Four, Fraction’s Invincible Iron Man, and again, a ton of shit I am forgetting, check them out!

I saw a ton of movies, and also missed a ton. A big fuck you! to me for missing: Up, The Hurt Locker, Moon, A Single Man, An Education, Food Inc, and Where the Wild Things Are. I suck, and any attempt at a list of best movies of year by yours truly would be retarded. But these are the movies I enjoyed! First and foremost, Inglourious Basterds. Fave shit I’ve seen. Then there’s Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, Crank 2, Gamer – yes, both of those. Retarded, hyperreality mindfucks, okay?! Avatar, I Love You Man, Adventure Land, Zombieland, Drag Me to Hell, Paranormal Activity, Bruno, G.I Joe: Rise of Cobra, no seriously, get drunk and or use your drug of choice and laugh at it with a friend, District 9 and uh, I think that may be it.

That’s a lot of fucking movie money.

Big-Ups to Texas Roadhouse for giving away free peanuts, to everyone who came to my graduation party. A double high-five to the New York Comicon, site of drunken watertower climbing and expensive bottles of wine.

Concerts by people I should remember but can’t like uh, Opeth, Dream Theater, two servings of Mastodon, Between the Buried and Me, In Flames, and Queensryche – it was like watching the cool kids from 1986 dry-hump.

I finally finished The Brothers Karamzov, I finally finished the finger-painting of Ronald McDonald I’d been working on, and I’d finally failed, yet again, at actually eating healthy. Peanut Butter sandwiches at 2 am are awesome, but even moreso if you’ve just finished an entire bag of Tostitos and salsa. Don’t judge me.

Here’s to another year of mindrot and skullfuck.