Nearly as Many Movies as Books

489. Shade the Changing Man, vol. 1: The American Scream by Peter Milligan & Chris Bachalo.
     
490. Shade the Changing Man, vol. 2: Edge of Vision by Peter Milligan & Chris Bachalo. Nice that DC/Vertigo is finally getting around to reprinting more of this series, just 6 years after they first collected volume one (and something like 15 years after the comics were first published).
     
491. Scalped, vol. 5: High Lonesome by Jason Aaron, R.M. Guera, et al. I have to assume Aaron has an end point in mind, because if you drag a noir story out too long it loses its impact. But we're nowhere near that point yet with this story. (Checked out of the library.)
     
492. Ball Peen Hammer by Adam Rupp & George O'Connor. I didn't like this. It smacked too much of a play by someone trying for significance and depth but just achieving pretension. (Library.)
     
493. Essential Hulk, vol. 1 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, et al. The stories here are too similar to really stand out. They blend into one another. But it is still interesting to see the early Hulk stories.
     
494. Stephen King's The Stand: American Nightmares adapted by Robert Aguirre-Sacasa & Mike Perkins. I have no idea how many more volumes of this adaptation there will be, but given how big the original novel, I suspect it's going to be a lot.
     
495. Artesia Afire: The Third Book of Dooms by Mark Smylie. I really enjoy this series. Smylie has done a fantastic job of world-building (although I must confess that the huge number of unfamiliar names {people, places, gods, etc} can be a little off-putting). I recently bought the role-playing game set in this world. Once I read it, I may see if the guys in my gaming group are interested in playing.

While down at my grandmother's for Christmas, we watched a lot of movies.

• Muppet Christmas Carol.
  
• It's a Wonderful Life. The fourth of the Christmas movies we watch every year. We unfortunately forgot our DVD, so we ended up watching it on broadcast TV, and with commercials it lasted forever.
  
• Up. Such a fantastic movie. It rivals The Incredibles for my favorite Pixar film.
  
• G-Force. It did not choose to watch this. One of my relatives received it as a gift, and she wanted to watch it. She enjoyed it. I did not.
  
• The Dark Knight. Very good movie, but very dark, and very long.
  
• Doctor Who: Horror of Fang Rock. Somehow I had got it into my head that this was just a two-part story, rather than the four-parts it actually is. And I thought that the monster was just a guy in a garbage bag. Really, the monster is pretty good-looking (although I suspect it is a good thing that the script doesn't call for it to do much more than climb some stairs).