Like Harrison, I'm afraid that I'm often too busy or tired to update this blog. Unlike Boots, that is not a good enough reason for me to quit; Bizarro World is going to remain intact despite erratic updates. Anyway, 2008 is coming to a close, and many magazines like dedicating issues to remembering important events from the previous year. Henceforth I will share with you things that happened in 2008 that I thought were important, and things that I've learned.
Let it be known that 2008 was the year...
-Bizarro World started: Yes, the first year of this blog is drawing to a close. I started it the day finals were finished, after many of my friends had started blogs in the wake of Mr. Maffey creating a blog for his English Honors class.
-I discovered surrealism: Interesting to note that a post from earlier this year was entitled "No Boots, I've Never Seen the Painting 'Son of Man' Before" (because Boots had been bugging me about it all day). The statement was quite true; at that point, I had never seen the aforementioned painting, or any other painting by Renee Magritte. However, this year we studied impressionism and surrealism in French class, which led me to look up Magritte's paintings online, which led me to develop a fanatic love for them, which led to me putting one of Magritte's painitngs as the header pic on this blog.
-I read many new comics: I got caught up on Bill Willingham's Fables series and read three-fourths of Grant Morrison's epic Seven Soldiers, both of which I highly recommend. I also started Preacher and 100 Bullets; while I enjoy both of those, they are both genre comics (western and urban noir, respectively), and you have to be able to stomach excessive swearing and gratuitous violence. I'll talk about them in depth another time.
-Batman became cool: Before 2008, it was impossible to have someone make a Two-Face reference in Chemistry class and have everyone else not only get it, but laugh (this happened in my class, though I wasn't the one that made the reference). "The Dark Knight" was one of the most successful films of recent years, and almost everyone at my school loved it. References are made to that film almost daily
Things I Learned in 2008:
-Satire is not always funny: Although Voltaire's masterpiece Candide, a satire of almost everything, is one of the funniest things I've ever read, satire does not always have to be funny. Exhibit A: George Orwell's Animal Farm, a satire of the Russian Revolution that is downright scary. Not scary in the vein of Saw, but haunting.
2008 in comics:
-Marvel's Secret Invasion, which saw a Marvel Universe overcome by invading Skrull shapeshifters, came and went. It was nothing short of disappointing; the replaced heroes were discovered to be a-okay, and the Skrulls never really posed a threat. The lead-up to Secret Invasion was far more intriguing than the actual miniseries. On the bright side, the "Dark Reign" storyline, involving Norman Osborn's takeover of SHIELD, came from it, and promises to be interesting.
-DC's Final Crisis began, and is now halfway finished. Although I had my doubts on my first readthrough, a few subsequent rereads of the first four issues have made me a devoted fan of the series, which is truly living up to Grant Morrison's claim to be the "Lord of the Rings" for the DCU. I hope it ends well.
That's all for now!
