the giants have been slain

Over my lengthy (and by that I mean two week) stay in Italy, Italia as the natives may or may not call it, I got a bit of reading done. Well okay, maybe not a lot, but sizeable amount. I Kill Giants, The Umbrella Academy, Paul Jenkin’s Inhumans; all titles that I was able to tear through during my stint overseas. All fantastic little books, but I’m here today to talk about one in particular. That my friends, woul be I Kill Giants

I’ve been talking this book up for awhile, claimed it to be the Accidental Book Club book, a statement which isn’t entirely without merit. Hopefully, you’ve read, and you’re happy that you did. Hopefully, we might be able to get some lively conversation going on about this fine piece literature. But if you haven’t this article might help convince you of its awesomeness. If I’m lucky.

I think Ron Richards from iFanboy said it best. It was along the lines of “I Kill Giants is a comic book you give people to show them that comics can be really mature and developed stories”. It was something like that. And I just made IKG sound like a teenage girl. Anyways, I Kill Giants is a story about a girl, Barbara Thorson, who believes she is actually a slayer of giants. The real drive of the story is whether what she believes to be true actually is, or if there’s some deeper issue going on, specifically relating to her home life. Throughout the story, we’re lead through Barbara’s life, what happens at school and in her off time. All and all, we, the reader, get to watch Barbara grow up.

Joe Kelly, the book’s author, does a great job leading us a long through Ms. Thorson's hardships. Cause you have to understand, Barbara leads a difficult life. If you’ve grown up as “different”, it’s a story you can probably relate to. The girl who believes in giants, so everyone picks on her. You were the kid who came to school with his dragon dice everyday, you know what it feels like. Kelly also does an excellent job keeping the nature of the giants pretty ambiguous up until the end of the story. I’m not gonna lie, I’m still a little confused about the giants, but I’m sure that’s how its meant to be. I shouldn’t know.

And let us not forget the art work of JM Ken Nimura. Before I Kill Giants, I was not at all familiar with Nimura. However, I don’t think many of us were, unless you’re just really cool. Nimura drew the book in manga style, which was an interesting choice. It certainly worked for the book, but it was kind of out of the ordinary. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it; it was just unexpected, despite seeing numerous preview pages. I don’t really think I could imagine the book being told any other way though. Overall, the art confused me, but I enjoyed it.

I Kill Giants was an amazing book, and I would absolutely suggest it to anyone and everyone. I can honestly say I was sad by the end of this book. You may not think that may be a good thing, but I’d say that the fact a comic book can have that sort of emotional power, is an amazing thing. Anyone who doubts the validity of comics as a literary medium should truly read this book. And it for this reason that I give I Kill Giants the Weekly Accident stamp of approval.

Totally Michael

Do you like Captain Planet? Do you remember when “gak” was popular? Then you my friend would love Totally Michael. It’s not necessarily that they sing about any of that at all, but to me, their music oozes an odd sense of the 90s. Remembering when I was an 8-year old, watching the X-men cartoons and Pokemon, playing the original Super Smash Brother’s on my N64 and knowing that Otter Pops were the shit. It are these types of memories that Totally Michael conjures up in someone, and its for reasons completely unknown to me.

When you listen to their music, it’s like everything is alright. It’s just really fun. I don’t know if it’s the beat or the words, but there’s just something inherently happy about it. From songs like “Summertime” and "Winona" that have and upbeat feel and lyrics that go along with it, to other tunes like “Casual Satisfaction” that are just 100% ridiculous. Even just listening to the music at home, you can tell that they play their music with just lots and lots of energy. And they really enjoy it as well. There’s none of that “this is a business and that’s the only reason why I am doing it” vibe at all. Just a completely awesome, fun, energy filled album. A couple of posts ago, I threw up a promotional video for their album. It uses pieces of the song “Slow Jam”, and tell me if doesn’t look like that video was a blast to shoot.

On another note, I’d like to talk about their record label, IHeartComix. I first heard about IHC through Most People Are DJs quite awhile ago, when they actually played a remix of Winona on the show. Since then I’ve acquired quite a bit of what IHC has put out, and really, it’s all quality. From Santogold to Switchblade, lots and lots of good Pop and Dance music available. Worth your time if you are a connoisseur of quality jams. Check ‘em out.

Blood Songs - Gil Mantera's Party Dream

So music can be a little tougher to describe. There's no real pictures to refer to, only the ones in your head. That's the magic of music. People can listen to the same some song, and have a completely different picture painted, have the song move them in maybe a different way or even have varying views on the songs quality. Out of everything I enjoy to talk about on a regular basis, Music is probably the most controversial (is that the right word?) of topics that I like to talk about. Since it can be anything to anyone, nailing Music down can be a tough beast to tackle.

Now, I've talked about Gil Mantera's Party Dream (GMPD) before. There a super awesome band that I found through the podcast Most People Are DJs, which everyone should check out if they have a minute. I've played maybe one or two of their songs on the Accidental Mixtape, which you can get by simply emailing me (seeing how the podcast feed has been changed).

GMPD comes from that super zany school of dancish, poppy funkytastic electronica that we all know any love. If you take Deastro (Our Brother The Megazord) and kinda changed the voice to kind of a normal sounding guy, with occasionally bursts of that robot-ish T Pain voice, you'd have something close to GMPD. Now strike me down now for mentioning T Pain in the same sentence as GMPD. For the record, they are nothing a like.

Blood Songs, as far as I know, was the first album they put out. They recently came out with a new record, Dreamscape, which is definitely worth your time. Blood Songs is an awesome mix of that pounding kind of electronic dance beat, understandable vocals most of the time and the occasional burst of uncomprehensible high energy computron voices. All of these aspects combine together to form a a super awesome album of high octane fun. Alright. maybe not high octane, but definitely fun. Some songs that come to mind are, Buffalo Tears, the first song of the album, Bunz Therapy and Elmo's Wish. Elmo's Wish may be the song that the album is most known for. I've played it for a few people, and it sounds a little like Hellogoodbye. Bunz Therapy is 100% robot and 200% awesome. One of the only lines said in the song is "I'm having fun on waterslide". How can you beat that? And Buffalo Tears, well, it's just a really amazing song. It's exactly the kind of song I was talking about before, conjuring different images and feelings for different people.

In short, Blood Songs is definitely worth your time, and you would be doing yourself a disservice by not checking it out.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

You know, you may not know, but arcades were hot shit in the days gone by. You'd go there with friends, bring a pocket full of quaters. Maybe challenge eachother, see who could get the higher score in a game. Now being as old as I am, I was not able to completely indulge in the arcade experience. I would however play the ocassional arcade style game, with the big machines and joysticks, maybe at the local pizza shop or what have you, only occasionally making it to the gaming Meccas that are/were arcades. I', sure many of you readers out there have similar experiences invloving Metal Slug and Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. I know you're there.

King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters is a look into the aracde culture that is still present in the world today. The docuementary is focused on the world of competitive retro arade gaming, centerin mainly around two characters.

The first character we meet is Billy Mitchell set a high score in the arcade game Donkey Kong back in 1982. He now (from what I could tell in the film) runs a chain of successfull hot wing restauraunts. The other character we meet, and who's journey we follow throughout the movie is Steve Wiebe, a teacher at high school in Washington who sets out ona journey to break Mitchell's high score.

The film starts off giving some backstory on Mitchell and the competitive gaming scene as a whole. The arbiters of the who retro game shindig is an organization known as Twin Galaxies. They say whether or not a high in a game is legit or not. If it isn't registered with Galaxies, then your score is useless.  From here we meet Wiebe, and learn about his "interesting" past and what exacly motivates him.

The rest of the film follows Wiebe through out his journey into retro-game stardom. His triumphs and his failures. The good times and bad. His wife and kids. Playing Kong for ours on end while his son yells at him about the fact he needs to poop. Ahhh, good times.

This documentary is by far one of the best I've seen. It's interesting, it's original, it's funny, it's just outright wacky. What really gets me though, is the story. Though this is a documentary, you could easily market it as just a normal movie, and I would be totally cool with that. Most documentaryies, like the recenetly seen Helvetica, focus so much on information about the subject that it's almost more like a text book that just happens to have a video component. Now, I know that's just the nature of the beast when it comes to documentaries, but Fistful of Quarters is different. It has story. It has characters that we can not only relate to, but by the end of the film, feel for. It doesn't shove facts about this culture of yester-year down our throats, rather presenting them smoothly in a manner that gels with the over-arching story. The way the film handles what it is, is extraordinary. You have a movie about 40 something year old nerds who spend most of their time playing video games that rest of the word seems to have forgotten about. Tell me that doesn't sound like a topic that could be easily be made fun of. The movie in no way, shape or form seems to be poking fun at the people who truly love the retro games. It's their passion. Who are we to make fun of it.

The story, sensibility and overall eccentricity have landed high on my list of must see movies. If you haven't had the good fortune to see it yet, this movie is worth your time.

I give it a:

15/17