[TV] Killjoys: Season 1

Canada continues to kick some serious science fiction television butt with the release of Killjoys, and I'm not just saying that because it's a show about bounty hunters. Beyond that, it's just nice to see someone is trying to come up with decent genre entertainment and you have the likes of SyFy offering to co-produce shows like this since they recognize good ideas when they see them.

And while shows like Killjoys and Dark Matter aren't necessarily the most amazing or universally appealing shows on the planet, they're still good fun and they definitely have an audience. And we rather expect channels like SyFy and Space to help foster such shows and ensure that we continue to get decent science fiction entertainment.

And this show isn't too shabby and it has a charm of its own. It's still a little rough around the edges, but what show isn't during its first season, right? And the point of networks like SyFy should be to give these shows more of a chance than standard networks would in order to see things through and allow them to grow. And we all know how things tend to get even better as you get deeper into a show.

[Movies] Gerontophilia (2013)

It's interesting when new LGBT movies come along that genuinely try to explore new aspects of the community. It's easy to focus on the usual stuff like coming out films and tales of the circuit scene. Heck, even stories about struggling with AIDS and such are also becoming a little old hat by now. So when something new comes along, it feels like we should at least invest a decent amount of time and effort to hearing their story.

Gerontophilia is one such movie that rather surprised me given its subject matter. As liberal as I try to be, I don't think I was fully prepared to embrace a story about a young man who develops a bit of an interest in much older men. I suppose the closest I ever got to this was that one side-plot from the US version of Queer as Folk when Emmet got involved with an older gentleman.

The story of this movie was put together in a rather respectful way that didn't cheapen things on either side of the fence. Admittedly I appreciated how they went about things, although naturally a few twists and turns here felt a little off still. But on the whole it was a fairly good story.

[Comics] Scott Pilgrim & The Infinite Sadness (Vol. 3)

In your traditional comic book, each issue is a snippet of the world that the characters are involved in. And you really don't have that much time to cover a whole lot of the story within the limited pages of your standard comic book issue, but that's how the system works.

In a more limited series run, each issue becomes a heck of a lot more precious. And the big comic book companies capitalize on this by having very lengthy limited runs ranging from 6 issues all the way to 52 issues (we're looking at you DC Comics!). This gives them enough mileage to tell the kind of story that they want to tell while still brandishing the whole "limited" banner. It gets kind of cheesy, I know, but that's life in the comic book world now.

But then you get the truly limited runs that end up bloating each issue size beyond normal (and when I say bloat, I don't mean this in an overly negative way) but the end result is still fun. Thus you get the fulfillment of a rich story and something that is truly limited in scope. Personally, I'll always feel that six issues is the limit in terms of things. You get longer than that and it starts to become kind of cheesy.

[Comics] Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (Vol. 2)

For an independent comic book creator, what is the biggest goal for them? Seriously, have you ever thought about why these guys spend so much of their own hard-earned money of a gamble of sorts just to get a concept out there in the public eye? Is it for the money? The fame? Or are they paying off a debt to the Dark Lord in exchange for their artistic talents?

Frankly, there's no universal answer, as is the same for most things in life outside perhaps basic arithmetic. But I'm sure each creator with a story to tell has a reason he or she wants to tell it. And if anything, perhaps one of the more fundamental goals is to get that story out there and to have other people enjoy what you've created.

Of course reach tends to involve money and fame somewhere down the line, so those are certainly tangential bonuses. And when your story becomes a movie, I can only imagine the kind of fulfillment that gets you. This is but another part of what eventually became a movie with the same name this year, but it's pretty good all the way.

[Comics] Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life (Vol. 1)

Venturing outside the big name comic book brands is always quite an adventure. Sure, the likes of Marvel and DC Comics have done a stellar job of nurturing and developing (and even exploiting) some of the world's most beloved characters and they're a pretty good set of comic books to fall back on.

But the world of the independent comic book and all the other smaller brands out there is still a heck of a lot of fun too. There are a lot of wonderful and unique stories to be told out there and you can't just stick to the big boys in order to find them.

Of course adventuring into such territories can be a mixed bag at best. It means dealing with limited supply, sometimes rushed issues, poor print quality and a whole host of other problems. But I'm pretty sure I'm in the right when I say that it's definitely worth all the hassle, no matter what other people say. Because you're going to find some pretty awesome comics out there that no one else might have gotten a chance to because they stuck to the largely familiar.