Showing posts with label JH Williams III. Show all posts
Showing posts with label JH Williams III. Show all posts

Friday, September 4, 2026

If This and Yes, Onslaught


From My Bloody Valentine's 2013 album, m b v, which I cracked out yesterday and realized isn't quite as pointless as I'd considered it for the last 13 years or so. 




Watch:

Adam Wingard earned a place on my watchlist with You're Next. Since, I've not liked or seen most of what he's done, but he's still on that list. That's how much I dig You're Next. His new flick Onslaught hit theaters last night and K and I hit our local Regal for the mayhem.


Fantastic flick. Doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it's got a gnarly score that runs a gamut from 80s Carpenter vibes to Industrial, with a soundtrack that backs that up (Godflesh!). Co-written with Wingard's regular writing partner Simon Barrett, and as with their other flicks, aka The Guest, You're Next, etc, Onslaught makes some very interesting choices insofar as the way it tells its story, and I very much appreciated the fresh beats in a scenario we've definitely seen before. 




Read:

Prompted by reading the first issue of Sean Murphy's new series, The Last Driver, which is laid out in landscape orientation instead of the typical comic book portrait, I dug out the two issues of JH Williams III and W. Haden Blackman's Echolands that I picked up back in 2021 shortly before I left LA. 


Probably because of the move, I never picked up issues 3-6 of Echolands and just kind of forgot about the series altogether. It's very easy to lose two issues of a comic in all the short boxes I have. Find them I did, however, and very quickly sought out the remaining issues on eBay. They arrived this week, and I had a chance to sit down and read the series to date (there's more coming!) over the course of Wednesday night/Thursday morning. I could not be more pleased I finally hunted these down!


Williams art is, as always, beyond belief. This rivals even Promethea, which still ranks as possibly the greatest visual storytelling I've ever seen. This? If for no other reason than how Williams incorporates the landscape format, might take the crown. The page directly above is an example of an issue where he tells two parallel stories simultaneously. It's just unreal. 



Playlist:

The Besnard Lakes - Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO 
Joseph Bishara - Malignant OST
John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter & Daniel Davies - Cathedral
Carlos Rafael Rivera - They Will Kill You OST
My Bloody Valentine - m b v
Roughly Enforcing Nostalgia - Front Door Doxologies
Pigface - Fook
Holy Fawn - Dimensional Bleed




Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Eldritch Lace Tarot, which you can buy HERE.


• Ten of Wands
• Three of Cups
* Ace of Pentacles

Use a new idea to get around blockage and save some time and frustration. Total writing nod. Love it. 

Tuesday, April 15, 2025

Subcutaneous Phat


Recently, I was back in Chicago for my good friend and Horor Vision cohost Professor John Trafton's Moving Histories Panel at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (CSMS) conference hosted at the Freemont Hotel in downtown Chicago. The panel was on Saturday, so I drove in solo on Friday, and my sister Kim and I met John for pizza and beers at Piece Brewery/Pizzaria. Great food, great beer. 

After dinner, Kim and I took John to one of the few Wickerpark legends that remains from back in the day - Estelle's. The 5:00 AM on the weekend lounge still has great ambience, a killer jukebox, and an all-around air of history to it. In service of my second point, QOTSA-project Desert Sessions track Subcutaneous Phat came on. I couldn't place it at first, but as soon as I did, I knew I'd be digging out my CD copy of Desert Sessions Vol. 9 & 10 upon returning home.

Absolutely killer track!!!




Watch:

How did I miss that Ari Aster's fourth film, a contemporary Western set during the recent pandemic, is on the horizon? Here's the teaser trailer, the only thing I'll be watching in the run-up to this film's eventual release, which has yet to be announced:


Also, check out this poster. This has to be my favorite film poster in years:


Can't wait for this one to hit theatres. I know Aster's third film, Beau's Not Afraid, did not get the kind of love his first two films, Hereditary and Midsommar, did, but I loved it and, while I'd love to have Aster back in the Horror genre, I'm there for anything the man does at this point.

Read more about this on Bloody Disgusting HERE.




Read:

Somehow, I forgot to post about this back when I received it from K for my birthday and promptly read it the next day. Warren Ellis and JH Williams III blew my mind back in 2005 with their six-issue Desolation Jones book (the series continued for two issues beyond this with a new arc artistically helmed by José Villarrubia, but it only went two issues before Warren Ellis' infamous Hard Drive crash that led to the end of most if not all of the series he was writing at the time (Doktor Sleepless, New Universal, Fell, etc). Recently, however, Williams spearheaded the release of a remastered, oversized hardcover, and K gave me a copy for my birthday. It is fucking GLORIOUS!


I had not read this since it was monthly, and although I remembered it being just as good if not better than most of Ellis' work, I'llbedamned if this isn't one of my favorite arcs the man wrote. Maybe it's Williams' art, but the concept and execution are thrilling, kind of a Hellblazer-meets-the-spy-genre-meets-weird-fiction. 




Playlist:

Earth - Primitive and Deadly
Desert Sessions Vol. 9/10
PJ Harvey - Uh Huh Her
Toast - Clincher
Ghost - Meliora
Type O Negative - Dead Again
Preoccupations - Arrangements
Type O Negative - October Rust




Saturday, November 2, 2013

Sandman Overture

image courtesy of vertigocomics.com
This is so much better than I thought it could be - and I had pretty damn high hopes to begin with! Read my take in this week's Thee Comic Column on Joup!