Lye of the Land

Earlier I mentioned that my first love is still superhero comics, so a natural rejoinder to the title of this post might be, “Stop reading superhero comics stupid!” Sorry, but I’m not quite ready to abandon the genre yet, but I’m more than willing to dance along its fringes. In an effort to expand my horizons this year at Comic-Con, I went thru the list of the 2009 Eisner award nominees in the hopes of uncovering a hidden gem. Unfortunately, the results were mixed and by no means conclusive. For your consideration below are the titles from my Eisner crawl and my summary judgment:

Air: Letters from Lost Countries (G. Willow Wilson/M.K. Perker)

Summary: This one’s much harder to categorize, and that’s part of its charm. Blythe is a flight attendant with a fear of heights. Her life goes sideways as she gets sucked into a romance with a mysterious traveler, who may or may not be a terrorist. The story continues to spiral into the bizarre as she finds herself visiting countries that don’t exist on any map and in the middle of a conspiracy to control the future of travel.

Judgment: The cover quote from Neil Gaiman says that Air “parachutes into Pynchon” and I’ll give him that. It’s pleasant mix of neo-mysticism that smacks of Pynchon, Castaneda and Nick Bantock’s Griffin & Sabine. I’m along for the ride, but I’ll pick it up in trades, because the storyline threads are so squirrelly.

Groo: Hell on Earth (Sergio Aragones)

Summary: Aragones’ bumbling Barbarian leads a country’s army into battle as it’s military-industrial complex gears up, and in doing so spews pollutants into the environment.

Judgment: I have a great deal of fondness for Groo and the humor of Aragones, so when I heard that there was a new series out that was Eisner-worthy  I snapped it up. However, I was sorely disappointed. This is a pretty transparent eco-fable. It’s unfortunately heavy-handed and not particularly funny or educational.

Omega The Unknown (Jonathan Lethem/Farel Dalrymple)

Summary: A complete reimagining of the original Omega the Unknown by Steve Gerber in the late 70s. Alexander is a young boy who has suddenly lost his parents in a car accident. He seems strangely unaffected by this, but finds himself pursued by mysterious robots and rescued by a mysterious mute hero.

Judgment: Overall this was an odd mix of a writer/artist team more used to literary/indie work being thrown into the superhero genre. The storytelling is layered and nuanced and touches on such themes as alienation and friendship that seem somewhat out of place in a title with killer robots and spandex-clad supermen. By far the most jarring for me was Dalrymple’s artwork, which again seems like it would be more at home in a Vertigo/Indie title than a Marvel comic book. To me this was an interesting experiment that didn’t quite hit the mark.

The Twelve (J.Michael Straczynski/Chris Weston)

Summary: The story of twelve mystery men from WWII who get caught in a Nazi trap and end up in suspended animation. They wake up in the world of today and get taken in by the US government.

Judgment: If the premise sounds just like Captain America – well it is. The “man out of time” shtick has been done before, and better. The fact that there are twelve of them does allow for some variations in storytelling, but I didn’t find anything remarkable. I only picked up Issues 1-6 of this, but nothing in those issues made me care about finding out how this story resolves.

Short Box (noun) - Cardboard storage containers that are the exact width and height for a comic book that has been bagged and boarded. The short box is 15 inches in length and often used for more modest collections.

In a recent interview at PAX, a journo asked us “Why do you make videogames?”. While I suspect he was more interested in an answer from the artists and designers (as opposed to us business types), I nevertheless felt obliged to consider a response. The answer I came up with surprised me. At the end of the day, I still believe in the heroic ideal. I grew up on a steady diet of classical mythology, arthurian legends and comics – and however outmoded and quaint, I still believe in notions of honor, courage and standing up for what you believe in. The reason I’m drawn to work in videogames, particularly fantasy RPGs, is because this is one of the few fields where such concepts are still immediately relevant – if only from a story and game design purpose. Likewise, I believe the field still attracts believers in the heroic ideal and it delights me when I come across a kindred spirit. Now what the heck does this have to do with a post about comics? Well this is my roundabout way of explaining why after all these years and the explosion of the comics genre – superhero comics, however deconstructed, are still my first love.

Speaking of deconstructed heroes, I’d have to say the title that I’m currently most enjoying on an issue-to-issue basis is Mark Waid’s Irredeemable. This is the story of a Superman-type hero named Plutonian and his fall from grace into an utterly eff’d up genocidal SOB. The story-telling is very well done and jumps back and forth between the reprehensible acts he is doing now and the little betrayals in the past, where Waid slowly reveals how Plutonian got this way. If you enjoyed Waid’s writing on Kingdom Come, and the depravity of Alan Moore’s Kid Miracleman, you might want to give this series a look.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. - Bertrand Russell

Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true. - Niels Bohr

They should draw up an equation: What level of fame do you need to achieve to keep doing what you want? Because you don't want any more than that. - Tina Fey

A strange confluence of events lead to the Green Festival, the Dalai Lama's visit and the Georgetown Art Attack to all hit the same weekend. The gorgeous weather inspired us to hit up the Green Festival at the WA State convention ctr.

We were overwhelmed by the number of vendors in the exhibit area, over 300 is what we read somewhere. Here are the highlights:

Computer Reuse & Recycling - What to do w/ all the extra hardware we computer geeks accumulate? Really the best thing to do is to find a needy relative or friend who needs to upgrade their rig. Reuse>Recycling. If you do opt to recycle, in the age of identity theft, you need to be careful who gets your old hard-drives. InterConnection provides lots of options including drop-off, pick-up or mail-in and better yet - all data is securely wiped from hard drives for free using DoD standards.

• Get your Chocolate On! - ZOMG the assortment of organic chocolate on display was mind-boggling, and it was goooood. If you're reading this before the show ends on 4/13 and you love your chocolate - RUN do not walk - to that show-floor and gorge yourself on free samples. We particularly enjoyed the 3400 Phinney Chocolate Factory's Hazelnut Crunch and NiB Brittle.

Travel with an Edge - Do you love travel,  adventures AND have a social conscience? You might want to check out Reality Tours. They offer a variety of educational, socially responsible tour programs that address political, economic, environmental, social and cultural issues around the world.

Kwytza Chopstick Art - These guys recycle chopsticks and turn them into great looking accessories. We picked up a large folding basket for the fruit in our kitchen.

Green Design - We wished we'd been able to come to this show before we started the home remodeling. Turns out that there are some new outfits that combine modern/contemporary design with green/sustainable materials. Sara blogged about them.

Funny Stuff we didn't try - Ever have the urge to give a notepad full of paper made from recycled elephant poop? No neither did we - but it's a cool idea. Likewise the eco-friendly "martial aids" from Good Clean Love. I will say the woman working the booth got a little uptight when I just wanted to take a picture of the booth sign so I could remember the name of the company - relax lady, you're in the love business!

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - George Bernard Shaw

Many of us interested in marketing and social networks have read Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. It posits that a handful of “key influencers” are responsible for  establishing and disseminating trends through society.

In the most recent Fast Company, a social scientist at Yahoo claims he has run simulations around social influence that demonstrate that the process is a lot more democratic than that described by Gladwell. The quote below summarizes his argument:

If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an "accidental Influential."

A good read for anyone interested in social influence:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html

The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority. - Ralph W. Sockman

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves. - Francois de La Rochefoucauld

So it's been a while since I posted on the ol' Blog. Part of that was product ship, but the other part is that I'm diving into the world of Facebook.  Who knows how long I'll be sticking around, but for now I'll be hanging and posting there, so if you want to check it out please swing on by.

The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good. - Bertrand Russell

I've been a regular Con attendee since 1999 and at the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon - it ain't what it used to be. For myself and many of the gang that I go with Con was about seeing the cool new projects, hearing the intimate details from creators, and finding out about the stuff that you wouldn't otherwise. This dynamic has changed dramatically in recent years and the attendee population has gone thru the roof (120K+ by some reports).

Hooray for Hollywood? - For better or worse, Hollywood has fully embraced Con as the go-to place to launch and drive buzz for their TV shows and action blockbusters. This has caused an explosion in Movie and TV fans who are quite content to wait in line several hours for the chance to catch a brief glimpse of their favorite celebrity from Heroes or the next Star Trek movie. I'll happily admit that I managed to jump in line ahead of people who'd probably been waiting several hours to see the Bionic Woman premiere and Battlestar Galactica panel. Yeah I felt a little dirty, but part of me felt like screaming "screw you johnny-come-lately's - GTFO of my Con!"

Con & Web 2.0 - The feeling that you're getting the inside track or seeing something exclusive is greatly diminished these days. People knew that the actor who plays Sylar on Heroes is the new Mr. Spock within seconds of it being announced at Con - people were live-blogging and text messaging the whole time. With a little effort you can find badly captured shakey-cam versions of the "exclusive" trailers that were previewed at Con. Even the smaller panels weren't really that "small" and just seemed to lack the intimacy and sense of dialogue that past sessions had.

So what now? Damned if I know. I was pretty down on Con this year. Everything seemed like "hurry up and get in line" everywhere we went. I'll probably still go for work, since it is an excellent venue now for video-games but I'm afraid that the wide-eyed wonder with which I used to approach Con is gone. Growing up sucks. 

Truly one of the coolest things about the Internet is to recall a random toy or TV show from your childhood, google it - and find that others have already devoted entire web-sites to it.

Growing up in Hong Kong in the 70s, I got exposed to a lot of Japanese anime and tokusatsu (live-action) TV shows. One of my favorites was Kamen Rider V3 (aka Masked Rider). These guys are essentially insect-themed cyborg super-heroes with a thing for motor-cycles. A pre-cursor to the much more kiddified and colorful Power Rangers.

Anyways, it turns out just like in the US, there's a trend for reviving old franchises from the 70s and 80s and turning them into movies. I'm happy to learn that releasing this October is a re-make of Kamen Rider V3 called Kamen Rider - The Next.

Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own. - Sidney J. Harris

I don't believe I've ever done this... but I've been close. And I definitely saw a lot of this at Microsoft.

Of all the games I've worked on, this was probably the trailer I've been most involved in and I have to say it looks awesome. For once the fans seem united in agreement on its kick-assedness!

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg

Wow this speaks to me ... because I was born in Winnipeg!

(via Boing Boing)

Mark Frauenfelder: Porno Pizza in Winnipeg delivers pornography and pizza. Paul says: "What I love about this is that if you order from them, all your neighbours will know, as they have illuminated car top boxes." Link