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by Rick Norwood
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| What to watch in December: | |
Not TV, but don't miss Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, on sale in comics shops everywhere Dec 5.
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Rick Norwood is a mathematician and writer whose small press publishing house, Manuscript Press, has published books by Hal Clement, R.A. Lafferty, and Hal Foster. He is also the editor of Comics Revue Monthly, which publishes such classic comic strips as Flash Gordon, Sky Masters, Modesty Blaise, Tarzan, Odd Bodkins, Casey Ruggles, The Phantom, Gasoline Alley, Krazy Kat, Alley Oop, Little Orphan Annie, Barnaby, Buz Sawyer, and Steve Canyon. |
Enterprise is all reruns, and so the only thing I can really recommend in December, never a
good month for television, is the three new X-Files episodes, plus A Charlie Brown Christmas,
of course. If you've skipped a couple of years (which is a good thing) you may have forgotten just how great this
first Peanuts special is, especially since the later Charlie Brown specials ran a good idea into the ground. But
the original is still one of the two best half-hour TV specials of all time, the other being the
Doonesbury special, which for some reason is never rerun. Also, the three-hour
Walking with Prehistoric Beasts on the Discovery Channel might be worth a look.
Sunday, Dec 2
And, in January, we have J. Michael Straczinski's The Legends of the Rangers to look forward
to. Rangers begins two and a half years after the end of Babylon 5. And if it gets picked
up as a series, Straczinski promises us that two and a half years after that, we will finally get the conclusion of
Crusade (which began five years after the end of Babylon 5). That kind of intricate plotting is exactly the
opposite of the haphazard, self-indulgent, self-contradictory plotting that is spoiling The X-Files.
 
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