Peter David's remake of The Blob

Is it petty to drop one issue of a comic? Well, maybe. But $3 for X-Factor #36--I could be persuaded to part with $1, probably, but a whole $3 feels like giving Marvel an unearned reward when I could buy a hot chocolate and a bagel instead and actually receive joy from my purchase (except that bagels in this part of the world are uniformly horrible, but that's another story). It's a pretty low day when the ad pages are more attractive than the actual comic content, yet here we are. How many times can it be said? Comics. Are. A. Visual. Medium. So even though Peter David's scripting might be the same as ever, it can't save the issue when Larry Stroman's art continues just this side of horrific, a nightmare world where objects, background, physiques all shift, puddle, move and mutate from one panel to the next; even if he does try to lighten it up by drawing random kitty cats and birds and bunnies instead of proportions and perspectives and anatomy, the color palette is dourly unappealing as well.

Although the comic is still intended as noir, it now has the same noir feel as, say, feeding the entire script to The Maltese Falcon through Babelfish--English to Finnish to English--and then re-enacting the end product with Quizno's puppets. Though it looks like next month, people go back to vaguely resembling people instead of a head I once tried to sculpt out of hamburger meat. So, who knows. Hopefully the magic will come back.

Detroit: a place where people do stuff. Maybe. It's hard to tell.

You'll have to pardon me for temporarily borrowing these scans from the Photobucket of one tw_basketcase until I can finish touching up my own, but now that X-Factor #33 is finally out? Yeah... no.

I don't think I hate Stroman's art in this issue because I'm ignorant of what art is or unable to stomach anything harder than Alan Davis--yeah, I was really into Mondrian, Magritte, Seurat, all sorts of Impressionist/Post-Impressionist and Hudson River School-type stuff when I was a kid, fairly tame as far as it goes, but I was raised on New York City art museums to be cool with everyone from Burne-Jones to Kandinsky to Pollock and beyond. And even after taking into account that art can take on just about any form, however abstract, and still possess positive, lasting qualities, I still consider Larry Stroman's work here to be hideously unsuccessful. He can draw, I must emphasize--from time to time there's a panel that actually looks perfectly decent and you wonder, well, why didn't he bother to keep doing that, then?--but for the most part, this issue looks like it was phoned in over two paper cups and a length of string.

Or maybe I just really hate this top panel. The sequences with Darwin and Longshot rapidly oscillate between "hey ho, here we are in the trackless waste" and "look, an urban street with people on it!" In the page just before this, Darwin and Longshot stepped off a Detroit street into what I guess is an abandoned lot, which here magically morphs into giant sand dunes filled with free-standing ruins and random floating animals. Two panels later on the same page, even though they haven't even moved, the background? Trees and intact houses.

(And about those animals, what the hell is that? Is that a hawk? Or just a really inept Skrull? Because it's the wrong body type to be a pigeon, starling, sparrow, chickadee, mockingbird, oh, I dunno, night warbler, whatever. It looks like a random... ground-skimming... hawk... in the middle of what is either allegedly Detroit or the protected shoreline nesting habitat of the killdeer.)

Turn this page and now they're back in the same trackless waste, except it's inexplicably filled with crowds of people. A page before, Jazinda appeared to be standing near a telephone pole on a city street. Now--is that her silhouette to the far right of the top panel? Just standing around in the desert? (Floaty Cat also reappears in silhouette in the bottom panel, for no reason.) The whole thing is like that--there's no real attempt to establish where anybody is in relation to anything else. It's just a bunch of panels that happen to be sharing a page, which is doubly unfortunate when there's no dialogue to disguise the weakness of the action sequence. Comics are a visual storytelling medium and, regardless of personal art style, if you can't convey the story in an effective, dramatic manner, it just doesn't work.

Anyway, we'll see. I do like X-Factor, for the most part. But I'm perfectly willing to jump ship and hook up with Invincible Iron Man instead of paying to watch Jamie "No Nose" Madrox and his other face-shifting buddies throw punches or randomly run back and forth through an indeterminate landscape populated by African-Americans depicted with the same bone structure as Deep Ones. (Marvel Detroit's new slogan might as well be "Dude, You'll Never Guess What We Put In The Water Here.")

AX Post-Mortem, Pt. 1

Atlus ran a Shin Megami Tensei panel at AX 2008. Cool, right? So I went, and so did some friends--the room was packed to capacity, unsurprisingly--and here's the thing: that panel was deadly. I'm not sure if marketing ever gave its seal of approval to the entire affair, but the main speaker was not really a polished public speaker (not his fault, but a moderator figure would've been a good idea) and the accompanying slideshow presentation was specifically designed to hide any or all aspects of interest. If you want a technical recap of the panel, you can find it easily enough online, but the whole affair pretty much went like this:

1. Static slide of game cover art appears on screen.
2. Yu Namba (senior project manager at Atlus) haltingly describes the game and its gameplay features, all of which you have to imagine for yourself because the AV presentation consists solely of a static slide of the game cover art.
3. Static slide of the next game's cover art appears on the screen.
4. Yu Namba haltingly describes the game and its gameplay features, all of which you have to imagine for yourself because the AV presentation consists solely of a static slide of the game cover art.
5. Ad nauseam.

One particular wince-point: as Digital Devil Saga VA Yuri Lowenthal talked about his experiences voicing the game, he mentioned seeing some of the cutscenes and being amazed that the game was actually being released in the U.S. Somewhere... somewhere in all of this would have been a swell opportunity to play a cutscene from the game, or at least a clip showing the man doing his damn job. Instead, Atlus provided... a static slide of the game cover art. The only way anyone could have put any less effort into this panel would be if they just shut off the projector entirely and let Namba mutter for an hour.

Now, I love Atlus, I love Persona and the Shin Megami Tensei series, but I'd been working all day and this was a flagrant waste of time. The panel didn't even attempt to excite any newcomers in the crowd: hey! Play this game! It comes with a cover and there is a picture on that cover! Wait, where are you going?

Swag or no swag, I pulled the ripcord and bailed. Didn't regret a thing. Wasn't even the first to leave.

My companions did stay for the duration--because one of them had a game device to ease the tedium until the Persona 4 announcement. Later on they came by to show me the swag: somewhat unexciting bright yellow shirts, which only came in gamer size (L) and were thus pretty much useless for small females anyway. Plus, bright yellow. (Who is that color supposed to flatter?)

"Ebay," they said.

"Ebay," I nodded.

Breaking new ground since... never

Another delightful female character description, courtesy of PvP:

Jade Fontaine
Certainly there is more to Jade than just a chick who’s into games, comics and the Lord of the Rings movies. But, hey… who cares really? She’s a hot chick who’s into geek culture. That’s all we, as men, really need to know. Right?

Well, that's pretty much all you really need to know about the mindset of the author, in any case. ("But wait! I was being ironic! Yeah, ironic...")

Anyway. Fellas, if you think the world really needs one more comic about the hee-lar-ious adventures of yet another slacker gamer fanboy who may or may not bear a surprising resemblance to you (in your mind), or you already have a comic about the amazing exploits of said generic white dude and the people who inexplicably put up with his wastage, I strongly suggest that you not embrace the mindset of the Parents' Basement. You have every right to give every impression that you and your kind are socially retarded man-children--adverse to ambition, exercise, and fresh salads, content to see women as breasticular fantasies instead of actual people--but I wouldn't really advise you do so. (If nothing else, it doesn't hurt to differentiate your work from the horde of guys out there peddling the exact same tired wares.) It may take effort and/or talent to rise above its mephitic depths, but the Basement is not your friend.

Also, it floods whenever it rains. So, there's that.

Guys! Don't know how to be funny? Go for the tit punch every time!

Hey hey, kids! Did you want to know more about Otakon's mascots? No? Tough. There's a spec sheet out on the Otakon website with all the vital information you didn't give a damn about, such as:


Hiroko-chan
Age: 22
Height: 5'9" (175 cm)
Weight: 145 lbs (66 kg)
Build: Busty (C Cup)

There. Aren't you glad they took the time to give her a bra size? After all, women are their breasts. (For the record, her "brother" Hiroshi-kun has a build that's "Skinny/Wiry Muscle.")

For another example of the principle in action, let's take a trip through otakudom via the Sketched Out Life webcomic, where when it comes to humor, women are
Nothing...
But...
Their...
Breasts.

Breasts... that are crazy! Like the nameless main female character!

(Soon to be named main female character) She's all that geeks want in a woman. Yes all other comics have this type of girl, but this one is special. She's the embodiment of all Sketch's experiences with girls... so basically she's nuts!

Woh-ho! Females have boobs and they're wacko? What a way to really distinguish this faceless fantasy object from, y'know, every other stereotype of the female gender. Then again, she is allegedly based on real girls the author has met, all of whom apparently possessed no notable personality traits aside from mammaries and insanity.

To be fair, some people are perfectly happy to just play titties or bust for the rest of their natural, and if that's all someone is aiming for, they have every right to do so. (And let's face it, there will always be people happily ensuring that the stench of the proverbial parents' basement clings to fandom until sometime shortly after the sun goes supernova.) Doesn't mean they still shouldn't get called out for it, though.

What to Expect When You're Expecting... to Be Shot At

So issue #5 of Cable came out last week, in which Cable continues his adventures with the baby-who-I-thought-was-Rachel-Summers-for-a-second-and-then-I-remembered-that-Rachel-is-flying-off-in-space-with-Shi'ar-Cloud-so-I-guess-it's-supposed-to-be-baby-Jean-Grey. Le sigh. I liked Cable/Deadpool.

So, whatever, right? Except I saw the cover on the shelf, and my god, is that what I think it is?



After running all around during Messiah Complex dodging the Marauders (and Bishop) with this fragile, newborn infant strapped to his chest... right over his center of mass... with no head support (I'm sure the world's most powerful telepath/telekinetic can withstand a little Shaken Baby Syndrome)... he finally buys the world's most bad-ass Baby Björn. Or cobbles one together in some warehouse somewhere. Look at those sturdy pipes! Air tubes? Poop tubes in case she needs a change in the middle of a firefight?

I guess it's something, though I fully expect that hole in the middle to fire psionic beams at some point.

"You got reality in my fantasy!"

So here we are at Anime Expo's new venue, the Los Angeles Convention Center. When the move to the LACC was first announced, there was trepidation from certain quarters about the local neighborhood. In practice, the local area is largely devoid of life but otherwise quite tame, with several pricey buildings either leasing units or under construction. And here's a hint: if there's a California Pizza Kitchen around? You're not exactly in peril.

Sure, there are a few homeless people in the area, as generally happens in, oh, what d'you call those places again... cities. In fact, one recurring homeless fellow was quite happily licking the underthighs of his jeans clean in the middle of the plaza outside West Hall, surrounded by tons of cosplayers and looking fairly pleased to have the company. It was almost touching, in its way, and he would've fit right in except that the convention-goers were less likely to have a change cup. Don't believe me? Then let's play:

HOMELESS OR ATTENDEE?

Homeless: spends a lot of time sleeping on the street or sitting against a wall
Attendee: spends a lot of time sleeping on any available carpeted floor or sitting against a wall... or in front of an elevator... or in front of doorways... or, as witnessed earlier today, lying head-down and on their side in the middle of a flight of concrete stairs, playing with toys

Homeless: sometimes shouts at people on the street; occasionally provoked into committing acts of battery
Attendee: sometimes stands in hallways, stairways, elevators, etc. and shouts for everyone to raise their hands if they want to be touched in special ways; often, upon seeing a/other cosplayer(s), rushes to commit an act of battery

Homeless: has a sign saying "HOMELESS, PLEASE HELP"
Attendee: has a sign saying "WILL YURI FOR POCKY/HUGS/MONEY"

Homeless: relies on donations for income
Attendee: relies on parental donations for income

Homeless: sometimes trailed by an unpleasant odor
Attendee: sometimes trailed by an unpleasant odor

It Came From the Gamma Quadrant

So the previews for X-Factor #33 are looking pretty awesome. Peter David throws a real curveball into the Skrull invasion storyline--turns out the Skrulls aren't the only shapeshifters in town! Yep, X-Factor and the greater Detroit metro area (or wherever) have been infiltrated by blunt-faced changelings from DS9. A time-displaced Odo has taken over as Jamie's changeling replacement but, given his inability to replicate a human face, he isn't fooling anyone; still, looks like Guido and Val will play along for now.

What happens next in the epic clash between Skrulls, changelings, and mutants? Why did Val Cooper spend the past five months eating steroids for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Stay tuned to find out!

Finally, a comic for people who failed Basic Cultural Sensitivity 101

So the next X-Men story arc is, er, X-Men: Manifest Destiny, which suggests the title was conceived by people who have no idea what, exactly, Manifest Destiny entailed. Now, if the underlying theme was that Cyclops' fisty, fisty concept of "leadership" ("let's send people to beat the crap out of everyone until we are all perfectly safe--do we still have any disposable teenagers left?") is moronic and should be humored by no-one, then hey, you might manage to justify the title with a strained analogy. But that could be asking a lot from the folks who thought X-Force: Needs More Clawz, Rawr!! was a good idea.

Speaking of people who have no idea what Manifest Destiny actually involved, Newsarama poses a question to Axel Alonso:

Newsarama: The term Manifest Destiny beares a significant amount of weight in the history of the U.S. and the expansion of civilization to the Western shores of North America--how does this metaphor apply to the X-Men beyond the obvious move to San Francisco?

Axel Alonso: The X-Men’s move to San Francisco is more than just a change in scenery – it’s a change in strategy. It’s a large part of Cyclops' vision for what the X-Men should be – and one thing they should not be is sitting ducks in a hostile world.

The expansion of civilization, eh? Well, gee. Thanks for the blankets, white man.

We're the Princes of the [Democratic Process]

This week's Time cover:

Hmmm, let's see...

Obama: Edwards' blade did not cut deeply enough. He was right about you. You're slime.
Clinton: Edwards was an effete snob! He died on his knees. I took his head and raped his woman before his blood was even cold.
[Obama looks at her in fury]
Clinton: Ah, I see. Edwards lied. She was not his woman. She was *your* woman. And she never told you. I wonder why. Perhaps I gave her something you never could, and secretly she yearned for my return.

Don't take this as an endorsement, either. Because remember, if McLeod wins, then we end up spending a Saturday night watching Highlander: The Source. And that, my friends, is a battle no one wins.