dave_littler

While not ordinarily the sort of thing that I feel the need to post about, I do feel as though the merchandise I acquired earlier today was worth commenting upon.



( More, better, larger, and more in-context photos here )
Cthulhu is just such an amazing figure. The genius of HP Lovecraft was that he was able to create this elder god of the universe without much in the way of reference of existing mythologies (I suppose that the presence of the somewhat bat-like wings being an exception) in order to do so. So many people are trapped in their familliarity to judaeo-christian mythology that they need to go there in order to craft some malign demonic entity. Lovecraft didn't need to go there. He didn't need some childish dread of bronze-age middle-eastern boogiemen. No, Lovecraft was terrified of fish and all things aquatic, and THAT was all he needed in order to design an incomprehensible primordial evil.

Or else, perhaps, he was inspired by something that he experienced somewhere out there in the deepest, most remote reaches of the ocean, where, indeed, the sea does conceal wonders and horros which neither modern science nor the evidence of our eyes can seem to discern the truth of, but which our nightmarish speculations provide ample explanation for. Certainly, if Cthulhu is real, this fact provides some support for my long-standing speculation as to the origins and motivating force behind modern Japanese culture.

At any event, the Cthulhu mythology presents us with a refreshingly simple, straightforwards and earnest apocalypse myth, which has been amply and hillariously been illustrated here. And while it lacks the "everybody wins" element which I would LIKE to see incorporated into an end-of-the-world myth (such as the onewhich I have presented here, and which I'm outraged has not yet been embraced by all the peoples of the world), at least it makes hard and fast promises which are easily tested when the time comes. This, as with so much to do with the Cthulhu mythos, pleases me greatly.

Edit: 

Cruising around the Wikipedia entry I linked-to above, I've greatly enjoyed the article on the topic of Cultural references to the Cthulhu Mythos . I just love to see all the people who have similarly felt so fascinated by the Cthulhu mythos that they've felt the need to incorporate it into their own works in some way. This sort of returns to my first point, as to the genius of Lovecraft's creation; he's created something so innovative, but which seems so authentically ancient and universal that such a large number of genuinely creative people have embraced it as an element of their own personal mythology. That, my friends, is a rare feat indeed.

And now for my American friends and readers: 

I have an unhealthy fixation upon American politics. It fascinates me. The spectacle of it. And besides which, there's a wealth of engaging and entertaining political talk radio down south of the border.

A few years past, there was a radio show called "Morning Sedition", which I listened to each and every weekday morning when I got home from work. It was a three hour block of my daily life which brought me profound pleasure and joy, not least of all because it was hosted by stand-up comedian Marc Maron. He has this sort of furious, desperate earnestness which I find pleasing on such a personal level that I cannot fully articulate fully without gesticulating about with my hands and shouting excitedly.

Well. He's got a new show.

it's available in audio or video, and when it's not live, it continuously streams reruns of recent material. I suggest that those of you who have an interest in American politics and those funny jew comedians, go have a look.

The show co-stars Sam Seder, who is also great, and though he is less completely hillarious to me, he is, it must be said, more informed and more informative. More professional, you know? A good anchor to the whirling tornado of wit and rage which is Marc Maron.

Hey, fellow Canadians. I don't have a cable connection at home, so I was unable to watch the Leaders' Debate last night, but I've heard it was really exciting stuff. I was wondering if anyone knows where I might be able to find it online? I'm finding - as the prospect of the NDP becoming the official opposition becomes more and more realistic - that I'm becoming increasingly excited about the process. Make no mistake; I was always planning on voting for Peter Julian (my local MP), but now that this is looking like it might not simply be yet another re-shuffling of the deck chairs, I'm abruptly voracious for election-related materials.

After far, far too long a delay, my latest opus is at long last complete and ready for consumption by a public no doubt shuddering with need and quivering with barely-contained anticipation.

Read and enjoy, dear friends. And do remember: This work, as with anything I ever have or ever shall present within the NewDog15 body of work, is quite spectacularly not safe for work.




( Read on, dear readers, read on! The bringer of jolity demands it! )

Have you heard of the newly-released Megaman 9? Capcom has made an awesome decision, I feel.

See, people have for years now been requesting a new Megaman game... and a game in the ORIGINAL series; not Megaman X, not Megaman Battle Network, not Megaman Legends. Now, Capcom has looked at these requests and tried to understand them. All of these newer series have been basically the same, but with various improvements, you know? So why are people demanding a new instalment in the original and inferior series?

They eventually decided that what people were looking and asking for was basically "Give us more of our childhood experience again!" And so Capcom decided to do exactly that: They made the brand-new Megaman 9 in 8 Bit style, using the engine for Megaman 2, with the same style of graphics and music and everything.

I applaud their insight and just sheer balls in making this decision. Japan, I take back, like, 30% of every bad thing I've ever said about you.

I've made no secret of my love of the original Megaman games. As I've said before, Megaman 2 was the first Nintendo game I ever owned, and I played it obsessively for months after I got it. The idea of this sort of return to form is extremely enticing to me. I've been planning on getting a Playstation 3 for some time now, and when I do (and how hillarious is it that I should need a BETTER, NEWER system than the Playstation 2 I still have in order to play this?), this is going on my first-purchase list.

Unlike last time I posted on the topic of music, this time I have music which is actually good and not just personally validating to me.

I've been turned on to a site called 8BitPeoples, which seems to be a showcase of different albums made in the style of those great old tunes from 1980s-era video games, but which are entirely unique and original in composition. It hits your nostolgia button pretty hard (or at least it does if you're of my generation and roughly my demographic, I guess), while also providing an entirely fresh experience.

I have by no means had a chance to listen to all - or even a small fraction - of what's here, but of what I have listened to, my favourites are from this group: 



And in particular, this tune, http://www.8bitpeoples.com/mp3/get/543/8bp087-04-paza-teen_hipster.mp3 , which had my head bobing about rythmically, and which I've listened to about eight times since.

On an only slightly related note, there's some more music I've lately enjoyed enough for me to be willing to pay money for it.

Francine Poitras, who is apparently best-known as a singer for Cirque du Soleil, put out a solo album a while back, and among the songs on it was a cover of Hijo De La Luna, which is a song which has been covered by at least a dozen other artists already, but somehow I found her rendition to be the most hauntingly beautiful I'd ever heard. I encountered it when I was listening to Radio Canada (which is entirely French, and which thus works for me, since I don't tend to enjoy music with lyrics I can understand), and when I dicovered there was nowhere online I could download it for free (so to speak), I broke down and ordered her CD. I do not regret this; I find her stuff to be about 90% great, and worth checking out.

(sadly, her site is all flash-based, which makes direct linking to the content in quesion difficult, so just go here http://www.francinepoitras.com/ , click 'english", then "music excerpts" and finally "hijo de la luna" for a sample of the song which so entranced me)

Yesterday, I went down to the Superior Court, answering a summons for Jury Duty. It was an interesting experience, but one which was somewhat futile and frustrating in that I spent about eight hours there and didn't actually get selected for any of the three trials they had me attend the Jury panels for.

This is kind of disappointing; I had actually gotten kind of excited about it. It seemed like an exciting change of pace from my actual job (and would pay slightly better, once the trial hit the 50 day mark). Especially disappointing (and potentially interesting0 was the third one.

This third one started very strangely. The Jury Panel I was with (about 100 people who had also been summoned on the same day) were all brought into a large, strange courtroom with all this super-high-tech equipment (I would later learn there's more than 3 kilometers of electronic cables in that one room), bullet-proof barricades, and about a half-dozen desks within the court.



We were then asked if any of us felt like taking part in a nine-month trial. If not, we were free to leave immediately. All but twelve of us did, and I was one of the few to hang around. I thought to myself, "Hey, it'll be a great story to tell once the trial is over, it'll be meaningful work, and I get to call my bosses and tell them 'Hey, guess what? I need nine or ten months off. Yeah, no. You're legally required to give it to me and keep my job available to me for when I get back".

We're all then taken aside again and told that all but one space on the jury has already been taken up, and they need just one more, of which one of the twelve of us is going to be chosen. We were led, shortly later, back into the courtroom, where we listened to a lengthy, lengthy list of charges. Twenty-three counts, involving extortion, death threats, conspiracy, possession of massive, massive piles of grenades, pistols, automatic rifles and the like. The defendants?

Four members of the Hells Angels. 

We were taken out of the courtroom again, and told we  would be led into the courtroom in a random order, and questioned by the judge to see how qualified we might be for this position. I got picked second. My heart was racing. Though I realized that there was an element of personal risk involved in a trial involving a heavily-armed organized crime ring such as this, I also realized that, rationally speaking, very few jurors in such cases ever actually face personal harm as a consequence of their roll. I was all for it. This was going to be an adventure.

The judge asked me about my personal biases and such, and I was able to truthfully answer that while I was of course aware of the Hell's Angels, I was never interested in them enough to read enough to personally bias me. Finally, the various lawyers involved, one after another, said "No objections", "We find this one acceptable", etc. , until finally we came to the one accused who had bizarrely decided to represent himself. "Challenge, your honour", he said. This is essentially court-speak for "I don't want this guy on my jury". It was the final hurdle for me to overcome, and unfortunately, I did not clear it. I was on my way home.

In perfect honesty, I can't say I resent the outing too much. It certainly was an interesting and enlightening experience, and I had never actually been inside of the courthouse before, which was a grand sight to behold. All the same, I do wish I hadn't walked away disappointed. I was all for it. Ah. well.

When you're a wee tot, your memory is often faulty and unreliable. I remember all sorts of business from my very early childhood which I know must have been either dreams or childhood fancies which don't accurately reflect any actual event. This having been said, there is one memory which I have retained for some twenty-five years or so which I have repeatedly wondered about, just because it was so specifically bizarre that it seemed unlikely my five-year-old mind would have had the ability to conjure such images.

Two days ago, I finally found proof that what I was recalling did indeed take place, and was every bit as bizarre as I remember it having been: 



This is Mummenschanz. Apparently it's a group of surrealist performace artists who were pretty big in the 1970s. My recollection had me at a live performance by these oddities by my mother and father - one of my very, very few memories of anything I did with both of my parents as a child - and just viewing this performance as the single most exciting and fascinating thing I had ever seen in all of my four or five years of life. It's things like this make me wish my parents had stayed together beyond my sixth year of life; if they were taking me to see awesome stuff like this as a wee kid (and assuredly my mother did not, after my dad was gone), then I can't help but think I would have had a far more pleasant and interesting childhood entertainment life if they'd remained together.

(though there were excellent and compelling reasons for them to split up which had nothing to do with tastes in entertainment and which I don't begrudge my mother at all, as far as that goes)

Anyways, I felt like I ought to share this joy with you, the readers, since it seems to stand to reason to me that if I have gone 25 or 26 years without any exposure to them, many of you will have never seen anything of them at all.

 

In one specific regard, it seems my memory did fail me, though: I had falsely believed the act to have involved black lights, which I can't now find evidence that it did. I believe that - like the image up top there - they were simply wearing black leotards (as they apparently tended to) and performed against a black backdrop with brightly-coloured act-specific costume pieces which were highlighted with regular lights.

(there is more of their material on Youtube here: http://ca.youtube.com/results?search_query=Mummenschanz+&search_type=&aq=-1&oq= , and their personal webpage is to be found here: http://www.mummenschanz.com/ )

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For as long as I've lived in my current place, there have been silverfish here. This has never been a large concern to me; they're unobtrusive, they live off of garbage, they breed at around the same rate at which I can smoosh them anyways, so it's never been able to get out of control. Besides which, my neighbors report that they have these little vermin as well, so even if I were to take the trouble to destroy their population, their friends and relatives next door could just come scurrying on over to fill the ecological niche in no time at all anyways.

That battle is lost.

However, of late, there has been a new addition to my home which is significantly less welcome, and which I am much less apt to cede victory to. I speak of that blight which is bedbugs.

For those fortunate enough to be blisfully ignorant of the habits of these creatures, I offer the following primer: They are around the size and shape of a period on a printed page when born, and about five times that size as adults. They lurk in and around your bed during the day, and during the night, they scurry out, crawl about your body and drink your blood. And ONLY your blood. That is the entirety of their diet. Human blood. This is conceptually horrifying to me for reasons I will discuss below. When well-fed, they breed quickly; they can lay about five eggs per day, and eggs take around seven days to hatch.

Astute readers will have realized by now that I have a significant advantage in this struggle: I work at night and sleep during the day. As such, they are habitually malnourished and thus they breed nowhere near as prolifically as they otherwise do. This has the ancilary benefit of meaning I get bitten very seldom; no small thing, this, as their bites itch such as you cannot imagine. However, there will be those few of them who are brave, adventurous, and/or ravenous enough for my blood to come out during the day.

As is my wont, I have perhaps devoted too much thought to the nature of the parasitic relationship these things enjoy with me. This having been said, here's the way I view it: They feed exclusively on my blood, and this means any bedbug in my home after the second generation is made entirely OF my blood. These are literally bits of my body now running around independant of my will and acting against my interests. This is somewhat like a Frankenstein-style monster coming to assault me during the night, stealing my hand, and then sewing it onto the wrist of a second creature. This second creature comes the next night, holding me down with my own hand so that my arm can be cut off. This arm is added to a third creature, which then comes and elbows me in the face the next night so that my other hand can be stolen...

Another concept suggests itself, which is somewhat more upsetting still: A tumour is a lump of your own cells which have gone "wrong" in one way or another, multiplying at its own rate without regard for the well-being of the rest of your body. Bedbugs are made of the cells of your body, and do the same thing. They are like an externalized tumour which hides from you during the day.

I have spent the last month and more struggling with these creatures, and have spent hundreds of dollars in this fight. I have come to enjoy, in a perverse way, the act of hunting them down to their lair during the day and destroying them. Especially when they're bloated with my blood, I adore the act of smooshing them and seeing their - MY - blood gush and geyser out of them. It is satisfying in a way which is somewhere between the way that popping a zit is satisfying and the way that delivering the final blow in a fistfight is satisfying. Nevertheless, I have long since come to the point where my skills as an amateur bedbug extermination enthusiast have yielded as many results as they can; though I can kill them as fast as they can breed, their eggs remain difficult to destroy before they can hatch. Every time I go three or four days without a bite and without a sighting, I allow myself a momentary delusion that perhaps I've got all of them. And then I see a new hatchling, kill it, and allow myself a momentary delusion that perhaps it was the last one, and I killed it before it could breed. But I know this is absurd.

I've already had exterminator over once, and the difference is quite noteworthy, but the battle does not seem to definitevely have been won just yet. Yet I am loathe to spend an additional $180 for their reccommended second visit, and 90 day guarantee be damned.

Sadly, this cohabitation - which I think I can at least say has never reached the point of "infestation" - has prevented me from having many guests over to my place for long in the past month and more, and this defeat is perhaps the most stinging and most telling for me. Steps must be taken.

So I've lately been playing a stupid, fun little online game called Reset Generation. It's sort of difficult to describe. It's a little bit Tetris, a little Rampart, a little Super Mario, a little Bomberman, a little Tomb Raider, and a little bit of a whole lot of other things. It's a sort of anarchic, chaotic mess of video game references and homages, and I find I kind of dig it. 

It's free. If you're fond of enjoyment and such, you might want to give it a shot. If you happen to see "god_king" in the online multiplayer mode, know that this is me, and I'm about to dominate your ass with my viciously cold and logical play-style and randomly-chosen characters. 

I've been humming and hawing about whether or not to post about this for some months now (in part because I know there are some people, like my mother, who read this journal and who really, really wouldn't "get" what I'm doing here), but my need to share the bizarre fruits of my genius is such that I cannot in all good conscience keep it to myself  any longer(if one uses the phrase "in all good conscience" interchangeably with "stand the lack of attention derived in the event that I"). 

First some background: There is a country which we call Japan. Japan is strange and bad. Their pornography is in particular an assault upon the functions of the human mind. I've often said that anything which comes out of Japan must - in addition to whatever other function a given product or service may serve - work to erode the concept of human dignity. Japanese shoes? They must encase your feet and erode human dignity. Japanese cars? They must drive you from place to place and erode human dignity. Japanese toothpaste? It must clean your teeth and erode human dignity. Their pornography? Well, you get the idea. Orgasms and degradation, you know. 

And then there's the North American fan community for these things. There is a large community of people who dedicate themselves to the task of accurately and faithfully translating this Japanese pornography for consumption by an english-speaking audiences. Additionally, there is a community of "re-writers" whose skill in the english language is only slightly greater than their entirely nonexistent skills in Japanese. They provide "re-writes" of these pornographic works which are entirely unconcerned with the original text or story of the works they're plastering their appalling english text over-top of. Most notorious and prolific of these is a fellow known as "OldDog51". 

A few months ago, I decided I would begin to create my own parody re-writes; making mockery of both the original content AND of the terrible re-writes of them, crafting an online identity as "NewDog15", and going out and about to seed the internet with this business. The reactions have been nearly uniformally positive; I have not shown these to one person who has not found them to be hilarious. This having been said... they remain, at their core, Japanese pornography. So while they're to be read as comedy and not as masturbatory aids, there will be those more sensitive among my readers who might find the content a trifle uncomfortable (and indeed, depending upon where you live, possibly even illegal) to view. So you know. Fair warning. 

http://img.7chan.org/h/res/9177.html

(hilariously, 7Chan has instituted a policy whereby any post which begins a thread with a post with no text will helpfully have the text "I suck dicks" as a placeholder; a policy I learned about while posting this thread)

http://www.mediafire.com/?oyuurdpc3cg

http://rapidshare.com/files/111276185/freezer_full_of_dreams__comedy_rewrite_by_newdog15_.rar.html

Haven't posted in a while, mostly because I've been busy with far too many things. I realized this morning that I made a great post in a community a couple of months ago which some of you might be interested in, and so I post it here. Somebody had been asking about "true horror" in Werewolf: The Apocalypse games, and so I told this story about what I consider among the most horrific scenes I had ever crafed in my game. Read more about it...

Incidentally, if anyone in the greater Vancouver area is interested in joining up with this game, we're getting a little slim on players at the moment with Adam Paysen moving to Saskatchewan and my dear friend Colin moving to Italy. We play on Saturday afternoons near Edmonds station...

 

If you're on my friends list or I'm on yours, then doors are open, people. All my nearest and dearest are already going to be there, but I would not at all mind this being an opportunity to expand the social circle a bit. There's I-don't-know-how-many of you in or around the Vancouver area who I seldom or never interact with directly. So, hey. Come on over. Shitty little blue thing there. 

There shall be a gathering of like minds, a movie or two. I'll be cooking a number of my most popular and appreciated of dishes to share with those who are wise and well-informed enough to attend. 

It's going to be a more-or-less all-day affair, so if you have the time and intention, do let me know, and we can talk directions and such.

 Okay, I've been giving this Flyclops thing some thought for some days now. I think I've finally come up with a design concept which covers basically all of the bases and deals with all of the problems of all of the other designs.

I call it THE CRIMSON CROWN CONFIGURATION. 

Like the very early Flyclops designs, this one employs a visor array with multiple openings which can be opened independantly. Unlike the original design, which would have an optic blast ineffectually blasting the ground behind his feet, this one has eight small openings atop his head in a crown-like arrangement, from which this design derives its name. These openings point upwards in eight different directions, each of them directed into a large adamantium bowl which is itself affixed to his visor array.

As his optic blasts are directed up into the bowl, the force of his blasts pushes the bowl upwards, and as individual openings are opened and closed individually, he is able to fine-tune his movements forwards, backwards, left, right, and degrees between these. The optic blasts then ricochet off of the inside of the bowl, and here we see one of the primary innovations of the Crimson Crown Configuration; a large ruby-quartz ball suspended from the roof of the bowl, which intercepts all ricocheting optic blasts and thus negates them. In this way, the Crimson Crown negates one of the primary faults of earlier Flyclops designs; no stray optic blasts spraying all over the place and raining death down upon team-mates and innocent bystanders.

As the bowl is lifted upwards, a sturdy chin-strap and a second strap around the back of his skull prevents the visor array from flying off the top of his head. As such, he is carried upwards into the air along with the bowl, allowing him - as is common to all Flyclops concepts - to fly. In that this design would see his entire body weight supported by his neck, an additional feature is included: adjustable hand-grips on the two grips on either side of his head, allowing him to hold on while in flight and thus support much of his body weight with his arms.

Landings are of course a problem in that he would not be able to look downwards while descending, since he would need to manage his descent with short, controlled bursts in much the same manner as a hot air balloon operator. However, this design presents the significant advantage that if he should wish to accelerate in any direction (other than downwards) quickly, all he needs to do is tilt his head in the direction he wants to go and open all eight points of his crown at once.

On an aesthetic level, this design has the added advantage of not only providing him an imposing and distinctive silhouette, it also resembles a crown closely enough that it makes the bold visual statement that "I am Flyclops. King of all mutants. Bow down before me and pay me your tribute", which is appropriate for such a magnificent individual.

I posted this earlier today on 4Chan. The idea was warmly embraced, and the following art was produced in response: 



It pleased me as you can never know.

It's a funny thing. I read about fourty comic books a month, I have thirteen huge boxes of them stacked up in my bedroom, I can and do speak passionately and at length on the topic in my day-to-day life, and yet I've barely ever spoken of this abiding and decades-long passion here in my journal. I've decided this needs to change. 

Each and every friend I have reads comic books. This is not so much because I seek out comic-readers as friends as that I have sparked in every friend of mine and interest in the form. They don't all read the same things, either; there's enough variety in the material I read that I'm confident I can find something for everyone and anyone. So far, my judgement has been pretty much 100% on that count. I'm going to see if I can replicate this in my journal here. 

And so I begin a semi-ongoing feature : Comics You Should be Buying. Every few days or so, I'll feature a comic book series which is currently ongoing which I enjoy, and explain why you might enjoy it as well. I'll include a few select pages to help illustrate my case, and a link where - if you should feel so motivated - you can procure for your own collection some of said series. 

So, let us begin, shall we? I think a fine series to start with is Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson's The Boys.

I've never used one of these writer's block deals before, so let's see how this works.

If I were to create my own breakfast cereal, it would be called 'Bloaties'. The box illustration would feature a great, fat cartoon mouse in colourful and fanciful swimming trunks, with a diving mask and snorkel, lounging in an inner tube floating in a giant bowl of milk. Maybe a rubber duckie would be pictured floating next to him.

The cereal contained inside of the box would cosist of a single drowned, bloated rat, swollen with gas and eyes bulging, sightlessly and hidously in its skull amidst palid and decomposing skin.

There would be a free prize in every box. Like a pack of stickers of the mascot, Bloaty the Mouse, boating, windsurfing or scuba-diving, sealed inside of a water-tight plastic sleeve.

So, this morning I saw posted in one of the many communities I'm a member of a link to a goofy christian site: 

http://www.goodpersontest.com/

It's pretty familliar material; I've seen it enough times before, in only very slightly different forms (such as in this extremely grating video by the human embodiment of the concept of smarminess; VenomFangX). I've long found it to be pretty vacuous stuff, and I've long considered writing up my response to it, but I knew that doing so would be a lengthy and not particularly rewarding experience. Fortunately, the medium of audioblogging provides me an alternative! 

Listen, enjoy, comment at will. 

So, about four years ago, my friend Billy and I sat down and wrote a script for a short film. He came up with the core concept, and wrote about the first seven lines of dialogue (one of which I would later re-write), before I came on and it became a great little exersise in back-and-forth. There are a couple of jokes I didn't and don't really care for (see the cephalopod flag as an example), but that's the nature of collaborations; you need to include a certain amount of stuff from the other guy even when you don't like it. 

Anyways. Billy and I have drifted apart, in spite of my best efforts. He's a pathological narcissist and requires that he be surrounded by people who see him as a superior being, and I respected and admired him as an equal. His ego could never endure it. It's a shame, but there's no hard feelings. If he were to call me up tomorrow, I'd happily spend four hours shooting the shit with him. This having been said, it seems to me that nothing is ever going to come of this script; no film of this will ever be shot. 

Still, it bugs me that nobody can ever enjoy this work. I've been meaning to post this forever, just so people can read it, laugh at it, and imagine the film which - in some parallel universe - could have been. 

As anyone who pays attention to such things knows, the recent (and still-in-theatres) movie Iron Man is magnificent. It honestly stands comfortably shoulder-to-shoulder with such Super-Hero movies as X-Men 1 & 2, Spider-Man 2 & 2, and Batman Begins. It is a nearly flawless execution, not only standing on its own merits as a film, but (and herein lies a difficult feat for a film which aspires to the former accomplishment) is perfectly true to everything which is awesome about the comics upon which it is based. 

Needless to say, there are a certain number of fans fresh out of the theatre, checking out the comic book stores for the first time, eager to experience more Iron Man adventures in their original form. Marvel has been doing an excellent job this past year or so of making that easy for people; printing and collecting into convenient trade paperbacks (henceforth referred to as "TPBs) a number of diverse Iron Man stories. Anyone who enjoyed the film can walk into a comic book shop, plunk down $15 or so and pick up any one of a number of fine collected and complete stories to take home with them.  

Sadly, as hard as Marvel has been working there are other who are working against this endeavour. Just earlier today, I read this amazing post on a comic-book-related mesage board I frequent: 

I hate all the new Iron Man retards who come in to my store and are like, "huurrr, give me some AWEsome Iron Man coimcs, like the movie, you know?"

They don't even realize Tony is a Nazi, and I have to spend hours explaining to them all the differences between the comic and the movie just so they can get it.

Unless I want to sell them Ultimates. Chyeah right.

I was immediately appalled, and decided to post a rejoinded to him which I now repeat here (with links and such!) 

Okay, here's how a non-retarded clerk handles this first-time customer fresh out of the theatre loving Iron Man.

I ask them, "What did you like about the movie?"

If they tell me "I liked Tony. He was a charming bastard", then I'm going to point out Ultimates Volume 1 (in hardcover or softcover), extolling the virtues of the delightful scumbag Tony was throughout this story and how delightfully fun he was. 



If they tell me "I loved the scenes where he was flying around and stuff. That was so cool", I'm going to tell them to check out Iron Man: Hypervelocity; an entirely self-contained story recently collected in one compact volume, which was all about aerial dogfighting, fast planes and super-speed technology. 



They tell me "I loved all the high-tech sci-fi stuff", I'm going to reccommend to them Either Iron Man: Extremis, or Ultimate Human, both by Warren Ellis, both collected in handsome volumes, both very readable on their own as isolated stories or as a part of a larger tapestry, and both dealing with Iron Man as a scientist, trying to build and develop new technologies to deal with problems which are beyond his ability to punch out (though both have excellent action sequences as well). 



They tell me "Hurr, I liked it when he was blowing up them terrorists", then I'll point them in the direction of Iron Man : Director of S.H.I.E.l.D., which takes place after he becomes the head of a huge international anti-terrorist task force. 



In short, I find out what they like, and point them towards comics which contain that, and if they like it, then maybe I've got a new regular customer. Then, THEN I might have conversations with them about what's good and bad. I certainly don't crush their enthusiasm and drive them out of the store disappointed.

Incidentally, dear reader, I would reccommend any of these to you, both from personal experience and on the basis of any enjoyment of the film that you may have experienced.