It's Christmas time again, which means it's time for me to put together another holiday mix to annoy... er, amuse my brothers. Here's this year's track listing.

1. Richard Pryor, "Black Messiah"
2. Kate Rusby, "Here We Come A-Wassailing"
3. Tripod, "O Holy Night"
4. Elvis Presley, "The First Noel"
5. Pomplamoose (with Wade Johnston), "O Come, All Ye Faithful"
6. Sinead O'Connor, "Silent Night"
7. Futurama dialogue, "X-Mas Eve..."
8. Bob Rivers, "The Twisted Chipmunk Song"
9. Bob Rivers, "Chipmunks Roasting on an Open Fire"
10. Rosie Thomas, "Christmas Don't Be Late"
11. Richard Cheese, "Christmastime is Here"
12. Futurama dialogue, "Just be back by sundown..."
13. Los Straitjackets, "Here Comes Santa Claus"
14. Divide and Kreate, "Blitzkrieg Santa"
15. Nerf Herder, "Santa Has a Mullet"
16. Fountains of Wayne, "The Man in the Santa Suit"
17. Futurama dialogue, "We brought your mail...."
18. Loo and Placido, "Horny Christmas"
19. Stephen Colbert and John Legend, "Nutmeg"
20. Jeff MacDougall, "Becky, the Office Party Drunk Girl"
21. Avenue Q, "Holi-Daze"
22. The Hives and Cyndi Lauper, "A Christmas Duel"
23. Futurama dialogue, "The holiday season..."
24. Parry Gripp, "Oh No, It's Christmas"
25. Mighty Mighty Bosstones, "X-mas Time (It Sure Doesn't Feel Like It)"
26. Austin Lounge Lizards, "X-Mas Time for Visa"
27. Gary Hoey, "You're A Mean one, Mr. Grinch"
28. June Christy, "The Merriest"
29. Bing Crosby, "Mele Kalikimaka"
30. The Six Million Dollar Man, "Elves' Revolt"
31. Tracy Jordan, "It's A Jordan Christmas!"

This year's mix gets off to a slow start but it's about 50% less annoying than last year's mix. And it's got a much spiffier cover, too! There's a higher resolution of the cover art over on my DeviantArt page.

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

If you are looking for some truly awful audio to torment people with this holiday season, may I recommend Six Million Dollar Man: Hear Four Exciting Christmas Adventures? It's an old storybook record from the '70s and you haven't lived until you've heard Steve Austin lay the smack down on eco-terrorists and communist elves who've teamed up to melt the north pole. All four tracks are downloadable from Joey deVilla's blog.

I had originally intended to do another series of "What I've Been Reading" posts this weekend, but then WQED Pittsburgh decided to reassemble the original "Neighborhood of Make-Believe" set from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and open it to the general public for tours. My brother and his girlfriend were visiting from out of town and looking for something to do, so we went along. I took my camera, of course.

More images in my flickr photostream, as usual.

The first time I became aware of James Edward Raggi IV was when a friend pointed me at his wonderfully bizarre Random Esoteric Creature Generator for Classic Fantasy Role Playing Games and Their Modern Simulacra. I downloaded it immediately and spent hours rolling up bizarre monsters for D&D game. My only complaint? Not enough tables for the 30-sided die.

James also publishes Green Devil Face, a nifty little OSR fanzine that always contains something I can use in my games. A few months ago, he announced that he was taking submissions for Green Devil Face #4 — and for the first time, he was taking art submissions. So I decided to see what I could throw together.

The titular "Green Devil Face" is a reference to the classic first edition Tomb of Horrors, which featured a deadly trap disguised as an elaborate archway in the shape of, well, a green devil face. I wanted to create something that evoked the same sense of trouble and adventure. I came up with some doodles at PodCamp Pittsburgh, and after some refinements I wound up with the following image today.

(You can see a high-resolution version over on my deviantART page.)

I started off by scanning in my original sketch, blowing it up to an appropriate size, printing it out and then refining it on the lightbox. The pencils turned out nicely — too nicely to risk ruining them with a sloppy inking job, so I wound up doing the inking with on tracing paper with a brush pen.

The green color is actually a green ink wash I dashed off with a sumi brush and scanned in. The coloring and shadowing was done in Photohop, with a textured parchment overlay I purchased from iStockPhoto. The color ground is built up from my Bloodstayne brushes, and the logo is a font I purchased from Fonts.com months ago and haven't found a use for until now (Sinzano, IIRC).

This all came together rather quickly over the course of a few days and I'm pleasantly surprised by how nicely it turned out.

at the Andy Warhol Museum through January 31

Several of the pieces on display at the Warhol proudly proclaim "repetition works." Perhaps the organizers of this exhibition should have remembered a different maxim: "familiarity breeds contempt."

Let's face it, Shepard Fairey's work is slick, glib, and shallow. I don't mean this as an insult — his chosen method if dissemination makes those qualities virtues. When the goal is to attract the attention of a passing pedestrian or motorist, simple and direct is the best approach. When Fairey's art is experienced at this level repetition does work, with comprehension and appreciation setting in as individual pieces are gradually encountered over the course of days, weeks, months, years.

But these virtues can become flaws — the problem with "Supply & Demand" is that there is too much Shepard Fairey on display. Visitors are confronted with dozens of minor variations on the same shallow themes, when one or two examples might suffice. The completism on display is laudable but it does the work a disservice by constantly drawing attention to the constant repition of the same handful of motifs with little variation of the underlying message. (Fairey does occasionally try to make his work seem deeper by passing it off as a phenomenological experiment, but frankly his manifestoes read like pomo claptrap designed to impress grant committees. Or to get the culture cops on his side when he's eventually busted for vandalism.)

Fortunately, despite these flaws Shepard Fairey is an accomplished graphic artist and approaching his work from a design perspective can be extraordinarly rewarding. His current penchant for baroque orientalism is refreshing and can reward deep study. On the other hand, if you're unable to approach the work from this perspective you may find the show somewhat lacking.

"Shepard Fairey: Supply & Demand" is on display at the Andy Warhol Museum through January 31, 2010.

Marvel's "Dark Reign" storyline has a few major structural problems.

First, there's the sheer inadvisability of following up a year-long storyline about heroes possibly being replaced by evil version of themselves with another year-long storyline about heroes definitely being replaced by evil versions of themselves. Yes, it helps underscore how dire a situation Marvel's heroes have found themselves in, but it also risks boring the audience and also neutering the Skrulls and Thunderbolts by overexposing their central premises.

But the bigger problem is that "Dark Reign" has effectively neutered Marvel's supervillains. Think about it — what have the Dark Avengers done to distinguish themselves from their New and Mighty counterparts? They're still fighting (other) supervillains and saving the world week in and week out. Heck, in some ways, they're actually an improvement on their predecessors. I don't see Norman Osborn throwing American citizens into an extradimensional prison without a trial. At their worst, they seem utterly concerned about containing casualties in their battles, but they don't seem to be racking them up at an unreasonable rate either.

So if the Dark Avengers and the regular Avengers are functionally equivalent, do we really care that the fake Ms. Marvel is a manipulative slut, that Spider-Man has more pills in his system than Anna Nicole Smith, or that the fake Wolverine is a former murderer (albeit one who's killed a lot fewer people than his father)? If anything, their impure motivations make these characters more interesting to read about.

Marvel seems to have belatedly realized this and is allowing a little old school villainy to emerge outside of the core Dark Reign books — the fake Ms. Marvel, for instance, gets to be gloriously evil in her own title even if she's a team player over in Dark Avengers. They've also released several mini-series showcasing their villains at their absolute worst. I'd like to discuss two of those today.

Spoilers ahoy.

Lethal Legion #1-3

Written by Frank Tieri
Illustrated by Mateus Santolouco
Colored by Chris Sotomayor
Lettered by Chris Eliopoulos (#1) and Joe Sabino (#2-3)

Their very names make men tremble — The Grim Reaper! Nekra! The Absorbing Man! Mr. Hyde! Tiger Shark! The Grey Gargoyle! Wonder Man! Together they are the Lethal Legion!

If you are a long-time Marvel reader you've spotted a problem with this premise right away: none of these villains are terribly interesting. The Grim Reaper has a pointlessly convoluted history and is really only useful as a Wonder Man villain. Nekra has spent her entire career subordinated to either the Mandrill or the Reaper. The Absorbing Man has his moments but hasn't really been interesting since the Secret Wars. Tiger Shark and Mr. Hyde are bland, generic characters with no real motivations. The Grey Gargoyle's one shining moment was when Evan Dorkin had him break off his weiner when jerking off. And Wonder Man is a second-string hero who just isn't interesting enough to hold down his own book. Any writer trying to make these characters seem threatening has his work cut out for him.

Frank Tieri certainly gives it the old college try. His conceit is that all of these characters have been wronged by Norman Osborn and have decided that they're not going to be playing by his rules any longer. Their combined might allows them to cut a bloody swath across Manhattan, kidnap Osborn, and drive the Dark Avengers to their knees before they're stopped.

Here's the next problem: this all happenes off-screen. Lethal Legion #1 starts with the Legion behind bars, trying to figure out which one of them betrayed them to Osborn. We get occasional flashbacks to their mad rampage, but for the most part the Legion are presented as broken men prone to panic attacks and catatonic crying jags. We're constantly told these are some of the most dangerous criminals who've ever lived, but we don't actually see them doing anything particularly vile. Only Mateus Santolouco's art manages to make them seem even remotely threatening.

Lethal Legion #1, p. 19

Everything I love and hate about Santolouco's work is on display in this image. The Grim Reaper has a nice solidity to him, but he's placed on a background that's so detailed that he doesn't pop. The basic composition is simple and direct, but the execution is so haphazard that it doesn't control where your eye is being pulled across the page. The solidity of the underdrawing barely pokes through the sloppy, haphazard inking. Some of the nice tonal work in background is undercut by the choice of some chunky, distracting Photoshop brushes. And yet, there's an appealing energy just lurking below the surface — the Reaper's bugged-out eyes and hideous rictus manage to convey the menace that the rest of the picture only hints at. Santolouco clearly has some talent, and could be someone to watch if he can polish his compositional skills.

Here's the twist. It turns out the Lethal Legion was never a real threat — they're really a plot by Norman Orborn and the Grim Reaper to gather all the malcontented supervillains in one place so they can be crushed like a bug. Thematically, this is brilliant. Dramatically, it's a total misfire. You have to believe for a second that the Lethal Legion was an actual menace, and the story structure and ending completely undercut that. What you're left with is a story about losers being losers, with all of the action off-camera. Who wants to read that?

Fortunately, Zodiac is much better.

Zodiac #1-3

Written by Joe Casey
Illustrated by Nathan Fox
Colored by Jose Villarubia
Lettered by Albert Deschene

If you thought that the Lethal Legion was a group of losers and has-beens, wait until you see gang Zodiac has put together. The Clown? Manslaughter Marsdale? The Trapster? Whirlwind? At first glance, these jokers couldn't pose a threat to the Great Lakes Avengers. No, scratch that — they couldn't pose a threat to the X-Babies.

Here's what Joe Casey understands that Frank Tieri doesn't: actions speak louder than words. A ten-time loser suddenly becomes a lot more threatening if you actually see him shooting people in the face. A never-was can be terrifying if you're watching him torture an enemy to death. And while folks like the Trapster and the Whirlwind might never give the Avengers or Fantastic Four a run for their money, they can still be a terrifying menace street-level heroes and normal folks.

And the mysterious Zodiac who's put this entire crew together? He's literally a nobody, whose unmasking at the end of the first issue carries no dramtic impact. But when we first see him he's busy slaughtering 100 HAMMER agents, and over the course of the series he recruits a fanatically loyal villain army, beats the Human Torch into a coma, blows up a hospital, reduces lower Manhattan to rubble, and steals a weapon of mass destruction that has the potential to devastate the entire universe. On the cover of the third issue, we see him cavorting in a ruined skyscraper that deliberately mimics the ruins of the World Trade Center. He may be a nobody, but he's a nobody that you should be terrified of.

And this is what Zodiac remembers and Dark Reign and Lethal Legion seems to have forgotten. The villains don't have to win, but they do have to actually be villanous every once in a while. What's the point of pulling the wool over everyone's eyes if you don't get to indulge yourself? Why bother to seize power if you don't actually get to enjoy it? Why take over the system when you can be your own system?

Zodiac #2, p. 22

Nathan Fox's art is actually a large part of the book's appeal as well. Like Santolouco, he's got a lot of rough edges but a lot of energy and appeal that makes him worth watching. And like Santolouco, his primary weakness is in composition.

Fox's obvious influence would seem to be Paul Pope — especially in the looseness of his style and the haphazard way he strews details across his image. But Pope's work is deceptive, in that what seems to be random and loose is actually tightly subordinated to the overall composition. Fox doesn't seem to have grasped that yet, and the overproliferation of details on the page above makes it very hard to read even though its basic composition is very simple. The most effective part? The contrast between the very busy panel of Red Ronin wrecking New York and the very empty panel of Zodiac in his clean, crisp, suit.

Anyway, it's a great mini with good writing and art, filled with villains actually being villanous. It's probably the best thing to come out of Dark Reign. I can't wait to see more of these characters in the future. Even, God help me, the Clown.

Thing About My Baby, It Don't Matter If She's Black Or White

So, Nekra. Judging from her depiction in Lethal Legion (and the appearance of her "daughter" in Zodiac), there's no one at Marvel who remembers that she's an albino black woman and not a pale white chick. Which is amazing, because this is the only part of her origin that matters. Well, except for her parents being exposed to radiation. And teaming up with the Mandrill. But you know what I mean.

Here are two minis by cartoonist Matt Wiegle that I picked up in Toronto... god, was that really six months ago? Anyway, they're both short, 16-page comics that somehow manage to milk every last drop of humor from their simple premises. "Is It Bacon?" is a field guide to identifying bacon (which, as it turns out can be quite easily confused with a bunch of other substances). "Monsters & Condiments" is devoted to the premise that "when properly seasoned, all fiends inspire delight rather than terror."

Both comics are actually highly entertaining. The off-kilter erudition of "Is It Bacon?" and the sheer left-field absurdity of "Monsters & Condiments" are complemented by Wiegle's drawing style, which makes extensive use of hatching to help ground their high-concept underpinnings.

Is It Bacon? p. 8-9

Monsters & Condiments p. 6-7

Unfortunately, there's no denying that both minis are a bit, well, slight. They rarely stray too far from their initial premise, and while they're guaranteed to provide a few laughs they're not the sort of work that rewards serious scrutiny. They'd feel right at home in an anthology, or in a compilation of Wiegle's total works, but as individual works they can sometimes feel like a poor value for your money. Fortunately, Matt Wiegle manages to side-step the entire issue by pricing them at a mere $1.

You can get more information about Matt Wiegle at the PARTYKA web site, and order copies of the minis through the PARTYKA store (well, except for "Is It Bacon?" which is predictable sold out).

Earlier this week I noticed another Shepard Fairey mural on the side of Smokin' Joe's Saloon on the South Side. When I first went hunting for murals Rob and I ate at Smokin' Joe's and completely failed to notice the mural. In addition, my office is only two blocks away from the mural which means I've been passing it every day for two months without noticing it. Frankly, that's embarassing.

"Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand, SuperTrash & Unnatural Rubber" starts tomorrow at the Warhol Museum and continues through January 31st.

Higher-resolution versions are available in my Flickr photosteram, as usual.

This past Sunday was the annual "Walk of the Dead," where Pittsburghers of all stripes put on their best zombie finery and and march — well, shamble, really — through the Monroeville Mall (famous as setting for George Romero's landmark Dawn of the Dead). Of course, I was there to take photos of it for you at great personal risk. (Zombies can smell high-quality brains like mine from miles away.)

You can see some more photos over in my Flickr photostream and read more about the event here.

I gave a talk on "Creating Webcomics" at PodCamp Pittsburgh 4 this past weekend. (Yeah, yeah, let's make the obvious jokes about my current productivity.) If anyone's interested, you can download the presentation files by clicking the image below. I realize that this sort of presentation is practically useless without some accompanying audio. Fortunately, local startup Vivo was recording and streaming all the sessions and as soon as they're available for download I'll add a link to this post.

If you haven't been paying attention, late last year DC purchased (or maybe just licensed) Archie's entire line of superheroes, giving them unfettered use of the Comet, the Fly, the Hangman, the Jaguar, the Shield and the Web. Over the last few weeks DC has finally started releasing a series of Red Circle one-shots, with the idea that the best-selling characters get their own series and . There's just one problem though.

Who cares?

Let's be honest. There are only three reasons to use a pre-existing superhero in your comics.

1. You're incapable of creating a new character, or don't want to give away a trademarkable idea to a rapacious publisher.
2. The pre-existing superhero has a level of name recognition that will draw more readers than a completely new character. After all, "Batman vs. Al Qaeda" is going to sell a lot better than "American Power vs. Al Qaeda", right?
3. The pre-existing superhero has some unique attribute or characteristic that meshes nicely with the story you're trying to tell. If you've got a story to tell about immigrants having trouble adapting to their new home, might as well use Superman, right?
4. I suppose there's commerical concern as well — keeping a character's trademark alive and exploitable. Then again, if a character doesn't meet criteria #2 and #3 then keeping their trademark alive is just a waste of time and money.)

Red Circle: The Web p. 12

The Red Circle characters don't meet the second and third criteria, which are the important ones.

They've been trotted out five times now — created in the Golden Age, revived in the Silver Age as the "Mighty Crusaders," were reprinted during the Bronze Age, resurrected for "Red Circle Comics" in the Copper Age, and given a total revamp as "!mpact Comics" for the Modern Age — and each time they've been a resounding failure. The general public has never heard of them, and even die-hard comic fans are barely familiar with them.

They're also not particularly unique or compelling characters. They have boring, generic powers like flight, ray beams and superstrength. They have undeveloped personalities — quick, what's the Web's defining characteristic? (He's henpecked.) So there really aren't any decent hooks to hang a compelling story on.

Now, you might argue that this just means the Red Circle characters are just unformed lumps of clay waiting to be molded into new interesting shapes. But honstly, if you have to reinvent a character from scratch why not just create a completely new character? At least then you won't have any of the negatives associated with the existing characters (like the general perception that they're five-time losers). Then again, we might fall back to the first criteria — you're lazy, uncreative, or don't want to give away a good idea for free.

Frankly, there are only three Archie superheroes worth owning — Pureheart the Powerful, Captain Hero, and SuperTeen. But if DC wants to throw money down a hole so they can acquire a few more scrubs to kill off in their next overblown line-wide "crisis," who am i to judge?

Red Circle: The Web p. 21

Anyway, this is a general problem with American superhero comics that I've railed against before. They're so obssessed with playing it safe that they spend forever mining their history for ever-smaller nuggets of gold instead of taking a chance on new concepts and characters that engage with the modern world.

You know who doesn't have this problem? The Japanese. Sure, there's a lot of chances to find fault with the assembly-line market-research-driven pap that gets pumped out by Shonen Jump but give them credit — they know when a has run its course and has to end. The creators and the public are usually all too happy to move on to something new.

Most of the time.

I spotted this on the way into work this morning and snuck out on my lunch break to grab a quick photo with my point-n-shoot.

I'm not entirely sure this is officially part of Fairey's installations — it's far simpler than the others. I'd wager he just spotted a blank wall and went for it. Then again, it is right next to the Silver Eye gallery...

Graffiti/poster artist Shepard Fairey was in Pittsburgh for the Netroots Nation last week. While he was here he also pasted up several "murals" around town to promote his October show at the Andy Warhol museum. This Saturday my buddy Rob and I decided to go around and photograph as many the murals as we could find.. We eventually documented eight of them, though I've heard there may be as many as ten floating around the city. Anyone have any clues as to where the others might be hiding?

You can see some better photos of the individual murals over in my Flickr photostream.

Fairey vs. Montano

As I was processing my photos of Fairey's murals I was suddenly reminded of local artist Daniel Montano. Montano, for those of you who aren't locals, was a talented young artist who was sentenced to hard time for tagging any wall he could find. Shepard Fairey has also been arrested several times for defacing property with his "murals." So why is one of these artists fêted by the local community and the other one denounced by editorials?

My first instinct was to attribute this to Pittsburgh provincialism — Montano is a local boy who clearly can't be any good, while Fairey has national and international acclaim — but that doesn't really hold up when you thing about it. If anything, Pittsburgh has the exact opposite problem, extolling the virtues of local artists far more than is merited. (Really, folks, no one outside of the metro area remembers Donnie Iris at all. Stop treating him like a rock god.)

My next thought was that Fairey's murals are more complex and accomplished than Montano's tags, but it's not like Montano was just scribbling out garbage — his tags were true works of street art — and some of Fairey's early work really consists of nothing more than sophomoric and crude stickers. So that theory doesn't cut it either.

At the moment the best answer I've been able to come up with is that the properties "vandalized" by Fairey are hundreds of miles away, so local property owners don't have an axe to grind. Anyone have any better ideas?

In mid-April, Z. from Hipster, Please! twittered that he was looking for artists to do some album covers for him. I volunteered my services, and boy did I have no idea what I was getting into.

Turns out Z. has been planning to release a series of downloadable singles, featuring recent or upcoming works by two of his favorite artists along with a mash-up of those songs by a third artist. He wanted me to provide the art for his inaugural release, since it would have would have an East-meets-West flavor. And the artists involved would be Hidari and I Fight Dragons, whose songs would be remixed by Snake Eyes. Talk about pressure. Who wants to be the weak link in that chain?

These are the original concept sketches I wound up presenting to Z. I actually doodled about twice as many ideas as you see here, but I wound up discarding a lot of them for feeling like warmed-over Mangajin covers — ukiyo-e-style kabuki actors in sharp business suits, that sort of thing. So from left to right we have:

• the "Clash of the Titans" cover, with image fragments depicting each of the bands
• hot dog sushi
• a cowboys and a ninja teaming up like buddy cops
• a samurai and a knight teaming up to fight a two-headed Eastern/Western dragon
• a salaryman wearing a Kamen Rider-esque helmet (hey, I never said I discarded all of those warmed-over ideas)
• a dragon and a robot sharing a milkshake (Z.'s original cover idea)

Whittling these down was actually fairly easy. I think my lack of enthusiasm for the shared milkshake concept might have been obvious, the cowbys/ninja team-up didn't really set anyone's world on fire, and the samurai/knight team-up was too similar in tone to another project Z. is working on. I went back and refined the three remaining cover concepts so we could present them to the bands.

These are the refined sketches we presented to the bands. The Kamen Rider salary was almost immediately nixed for feeling like a warmed-over Mangajin cover, and the hot dog sushi felt like it was maybe a tad too sedate. On the other hand, everyone loved the "Clash of the Titans" cover. Go figure — the first idea I had turns out to be the one everyone liked. I started working that up.

Here are the rough pencils we. You can see it's more or less identical to what I presented in the last stage, though I've completely redesigned the robot. I was worried that the toy robot from the previous stages was neither particularly Japanese or particularly Hidari-esque, so I ditched it for a Mazinger-style samurai robot. Cool beans. No one had any further adjustments at this stage so it was time to start inking.

(Bonus factoid: the Muppetlike dude in the lower right-hand corner is actually based on the storm drains on the corner near my office.)

Here's the color guide. Things are pulling together nicely. If you can tell, I actually wound up shifting Snake Eyes up a smidgeon to give the cover a nice arc. I also ditched the record from the original thumbnails because I thought it was cluttering things up.

And here's the final cover with crazy color holds, overlaid textures and other assorted awesomeness. The record's back — everyone missed it so back in it went, though adjusting the logo to fit and still be legible was a real pain. Coloring the samurai robot was also a real pain, just because I got a bit nuts and filled in too many blacks at the inking stage. Coloring the barbarian and dragon, though, was serious fun.

Anyway, enough of my nattering — you were just looking at the pretty pictures anyway. The single is freely downloadable over at Hipster, Please! And do check out everything else these bands have done, because it's all awesome. I'm not kidding.

On Sunday every panel I sat in was pure gold, whether it was "All About Eurocomics!" With Emmanuel Guibert, Antoine Dode, Francois Ayroles, Jose Villarrubia, Anke Feuchtenberger and Bart Beaty; "Newspapers, Comics and the Internet" with R. Stevens, Scott McCloud, Stuart Immonen, Bendan Buford and John Martz; or the "Critics Roundtable" with Bart Beaty, Jeet Heer, Dan Nadel, Doug Wolk and Tom Kaczynski. I twittered the best quotes and most surprising insights, so check that out when you have the time. On the other hand, the $20 I had left in my pocket at the end of the show made a liar out of me, since I spent the last twenty minutes of the show buying minis so I wouldn't have to exchange it at the Duty Free shop. I even got a chance to get over into a quiet corner that I'd completely missed yesterday, where Carla Speed McNeill and Kagan McLeod and Jillian Tamaki were set up.

It's hard to single out what makes Toronto such a great show. It could be the incredible creators at the show, the bustling crowds who seem genuinely interested in a wide variety of comics, or the fantastic and insightful panels. It might be that as a biennial show TCAF has a lot more time to make sure that everything happens just right. It might just be that it's a show less interested in raking in money and more interested in ensuring that Toronto has a vibrant comics scene. Whatever the case is, the whole weekend I was giddy and excited like I was attending my very first convention. Even Jim Rugg, who went into the show feeling kind of down, left feeling energized and excited and partially in awe at the size of the sandwiches you can get at a Toronto mini-mart for $5.

Here are the highlights of what I purchased at the show and at the Beguiling on Friday. Mind you, this is only a fraction of what I purchased at the convention. There are enough comics packed into my luggage to keep this blog occupied for months, assuming I can ever get back to regular posting.

• Lamar Abrams' Remake
• Kate Beaton's Never Learn Anything From History
• Ronnie del Carmen's And There You Are
• Becky Cloonan, Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba and Vasilis Lolos's Pixu
• Robin Enrico's Controller
• Charles Forsman's Snake Oil
• John Martz's Machine Gum
• Papercutter #9
• Nate Powell's Swallow Me Whole
• Hugo Pratt and Alberto Ongaro's L'Ombre
• Jim Rugg's TNT Jackson print
• Kazmir Strzepek's The Mourning Star
• Matt Wiegle's Is It Bacon?
• Zach Worton's Conversation

But do you know what I'll remember long after these comics have yellowed and started to smell funny? The drive home to Pittsburgh, talking comics the whole way with Tom Scioli and Jim Rugg. Six hours spent discussing about important aesthetic issues like art technique and storytelling and publishing and why Batman has a better rogues gallery than the Fantastic Four (Sorry, Tom, it's true).

3:30 PM

Photos, avec commentaire, behind the cut.

"I felt a chill run up my spine at her squamous caresses..."

I always suspected the masons were behind that.

The Toronto Reference Library, apres le deluge.

Scott Pilgrim conquers every load-bearing support in sight.

You fail me again, Photomerge. Time to get a wide-angle lens.

Tom Scioli

Jim Rugg and Cecil Castellucci

The best beard in comics (seen here in motion) belongs to Alec Longstreth

11:30 AM

I'm busy rushing from panel to panel but wanted to start you off with some photos. More info when I break for lunch, and tweets when I can remember to tweet..

The Toronto Reference Library, avant le deluge

The show floor circa 9:30 AM.

1:30 PM

It's not a secret that I hate converions. The crowds, the noise, the smell, the hucksterish atmosphere, everything about them. Also, I hate being charged $20 to get inside and spend more money. So it's probably worth emphasizing that the Toronto Comics Arts Festival is an actual arts festival and feels like it. Which is probably why it's my favorite show.

I've sat in two panel discussions today: "Concept Comics" with Scott McCloud, Jason Shiga, Dash Shaw and Tom Kaczynski; and "Manga Around the World" with Deb Aoki, Brian Lee O'Malley, Becky Cloonan, Eric Ko, Jason Thomas, and Antoine Dode. They were both very entertaining and informative, though I'm not sure what the first panel was subbosed ot be about. (Neither were the participants, it seems.) Actually, truth be told, I think the parallel academic track going on sounds fascinating too but getting into those presentations looks like a big pain in the butt.

Oh, and in case you weren't sure how big this show gets, here's a comparison shot...

The show floor circa 1:30 PM.

Last time I was at the show, in 2005, I didn't bring a lot of cash and I sort of regretted that. So this time I bought a lot of cash. Turns out it still wasn't enough. Time to go out and hit the bank...

3:30 PM

I left the convention for half an hour and it went from certified to certifiable. This place is packed and hot and full of crazy energy. It's all good. But my shoulder is sore from carrying my laptop around, my wallet is running low, and my clothes are still damp from the last downpour I got caught in. The crowds are getting hard to move through and it's getting hard to remember what I have and haven't seen. On the plus side I got a sketch from Kate Beaton. So day = officially made.

I think I'm going to spend all of tomorrow attending panels. My wallet will thank me.

5:00

Photomerge = fail.

The show floor circa 4:30 PM.

This weekend I'm at the Toronto Comics Arts Festival (as a fan, not a guest). Today I drove up with Tom Scioli and Jim Rugg, and then we spent a while yesterday just hanging out before the convention. So did we go to the big Drawn and Quarterly Tatsumi/Tomine gallery opening? Nope. Did we party hearty? Nope. Did we sat around our hotel rooms drawing comics?. Nope.

Mostly we spent all afternoon waiting around for Chris Pitzer before giving up and walking down to the Beguiling. Then, after we finally did manage to hook up with Chris we spent about fifteen minutes trying to figure out if we could make a showing of new Star Trek movie or not, and then an hour or so arguing about what we should eat. (Final call: burgers and poutine.) Still, good fun.

Also, we hit Niagara Falls on the way in.

Jim Rugg ponders the promised land (Fort Erie)

Water, the source of all life

That first step's a doozy

It looks like a miniature set from an old Godzilla movie, doesn't it?

Nicola Tesla, inventor of Niagara Falls

And, because Astralagos demanded it...

The happiest place on earth

So, I've been reading through War of Kings and one of the things that struck me is that their portray of Maximus is less Maximus the (Mwa-Ha-Ha) Mad and more Maximus the Mildly Manic. He's actually helpful, likeable, and it seems like no vestiges of his former personality remain outside of the occasional sarcastically snide remark. Can anyone tell me when Maximus got this personality transplant, or is it something new for War of Kings?

War of Kings #2, p. 11

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I think Maximus's bipolar megalomaniac shtick was one-dimensional and played out, and this portrayal does have some potential for him to slide back into villainy while still remaining a sympathetic and interesting character.

Less Human Than Human

While we're at it, let's talk about the Inhumans. They're a Marvel mainstay whose appeal I've never been able to understand. Individual characters like Crystal and Black Bolt have a lot of potential, but as a group they're utterly forgettable. Actually, let me change that. As a group they're utterly reprehensible.

They have a rigid caste system that devalues those with powers they don't deem useful. They either treat one of their own royal family like a dog, or think it's hilarious to make others believe that they do. That same royal family rules with an apathetic populace, even though their internicene power struggles have almost destroyed their society several times in the last decade. They genetically engineered their own slave caste, only decided to manumit them at the point of a gun, and their idea of "freedom" was to let their slaves do the same work they'd always done for free while they slowly went extinct. Every time they do come to Earth they stand in the corner like an obnoxious non-smoker, coughing and shooting us mean glances while they mutter about pollution under their breath. Their selling point appears to be that they're just another race of generic super-people, and as I've said before that's not an inherently interesting concept.

Yeah, these are wonderful characters. About the only thing I can say about them is that they've got some nice Kirby designs.

The only take on the Inhumans I've ever been able to stomach is Paul Jenkins's Inhumans series. Jenkins implicitly understood that the Inhumans are total bastards, and much of his series involved characters who have been pushed to the outskirts of society and who are trying to force their way back in. At the end of the day, though, even that wasn't enough to make me care about the Inhumans as characters.

Can somone else explain what the appeal of the Inhumans lies?

Wow, driving into work every day has definitely killed the pace of my reading. It took me over four months to read ten books? That's just shameful.

Eric Flint, 1632. Riverdale: Baen, 2000.

A friend recommended this series a few years ago, so I finally picked up a copy of the first volume in December. Two days later I was at another friend's Christmas party and saw it on the bookshelf she'd devoted to books that weren't worth the paper they were printed on. Whoops.

You may be familiar with the premise of 1632, which is that a West Virginia mining town is sent back in time to Thuringia in the middle of the Thirty Years War. It's not exactly an original premise, but it's one with a lot of miles left in it. Will the West Virginians be able to uphold their modern American ideas in the face of hardship? How can they survive when their modern conveniences stop functioning? Will they change history, or will history change them? Unfortunately, absolutely none of these avenues are explored. In fact, there's practically no conflict in this book. Any philosophical debates the community might have engaged in are barely mentioned. They have just enough resources and know-how transported with them so they can hold out until they develop local replacements. Every political power that might stand against them is either immediately won over to their cause or powerless to act. The first time a meaningful conflict rears its head you're 50 pages away from the end of a 600 page book and you're well past the point where you'd care.

It doesn't help that large chunks of the book read like nerd porn. There's a scene where a husky RPG nerd turns out to have the soul of a hardened warrior (improbable). There's a painfully awful sequence where the aforementioned nerd bags a hot but damaged German chick who falls unreservedly in love with him despite the fact that they can't speak a common language and have only known each other for two days (impossible). A whole volume of the book is given over to showing off the author's personal knowledge of the Thirty Years War, despite the fact that almost none of what's going on impacts the plot directly (interminable).

I find it incredible that this awful book has five direct sequels and six associated books of shared world fiction. I guess there's no accounting for taste.

Lucas Conley, OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder: The Illusion of Business and the Business of Illusion. New York: PublicAffairs, 2008.

My first salaried job out of school was with a software company that had absolutely no entrepreneurial vision. Instead of marketing their existing software as the reliable workhorse it was, they kept trying to rebrand it as a "new" product (despite not changing it at all) or trying to tweak the company's tagline in a way that would allow them to break through. They wasted a fortune on letterhead revising that damn tagline four times in one year.

Lucas Conley's Obsessive Branding Disorder does a great job of showing how this attitude has become entrenched in our business and marketing culture — that it's far easier to push around paper and rebrand yourself than it is to take a chance on new ideas and new technologies. But the fact is that the way to have a strong brand is to produce a quality product; to stand for a specific value proposition that remains unchanged; to stick with your visual style for as long as humanly possible, only making minor tweaks to keep up with current design trends; to keep doing what you're doing long enough that you become entrenched in the popular consciousness. A good brand expert can help you develop new brands or slowly steer your brand in a new direction, but this is a slow process that does not produce instant results and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.

Anyway, mini-rant aside, this is a great book and I recommend everyone read it. When the "branding" industry collapses in the next year or so you'll be glad that you did.

Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future. New York: Penguin Books, 2008.

On the other hand, this book is just pure alarmism. Kids today aren't stupid. They're just as lazy, distracted and venal as they've ever been — it's just that now they have more ways of goofing off. Any perceived decline less to do with digital culture than decades of social engineering that's stratified our economic classes and turned the lower classes into mindless consumers. And also bad parenting. Let's not forget that.

John Hodgman, More Information Than You Require. New York: Dutton, 2008.

If you liked The Areas of My Expertise, you'll enjoy this. It's unfortunately similar, to the point where it includes 700 moleman names in an attempt to top the 700 hobo names from the repvious book. I do kind of wish Hodgman would try something new, because between these books and his media appearances his shtick is starting to get a little old. Not that it isn't still entertaining, but it's not as entertaining is it could be.

Then again, if the "Taxonomy of Complete World Knowledge" from the inside of the dust cover were turned into a giant poster, I'd buy it.

Minding the Store: Great Writing About Business from Tolstoy to Now. Edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge. New York: New Press, 2008.

There are some great pieces in here, including works by Kafka and Flannery O'Connor, but it's sometimes hard to see what ties them in to the overarching theme of "business writing." I suspect that it works much better as a supplemental textbook to Coles and LaFarge's lecture course.

Dave Crenshaw, The Myth of Multitasking: How "Doing It All" Gets Nothing Done. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008.

"There's just one thing I don't understand," said Sarah. "Why are so many management technique books written as fables or dialogues? Is it to disguise the fact that they contain about five paragraphs of useful advice buried in a hundred pages of large type?"

"That's part of it," said Dave, "but it's mostly because the average middle manager can only read at a first-grade level."

I picked up this book hoping that it would have some useful advice on managing my workflow, only to discover that all the salient points could have easily been summarized in a short bulleted sidebar. It doesn't help that this "advice" is presented in an obnoxious sing-songy dialogue that makes Who Moved My Cheese? look like Leaves of Grass. I'm sure Crenshaw is a much better consultant than this book would suggest, but damn, I wouldn't hire him after reading this.

Luke Sullivan, Hey Whipple, Squeeze This. (3rd ed.) Hoboken: Wiley, 2008.

An advertising/marketing classic, and I can't believe it's taken me this long to get around to reading it.

G. Xavier Robillard, Captain Freedom. New York: Harper, 2009.

I've enjoyed G. Xavier Robillard's short pieces for McSweeney's and was hoping that this novel would be more of the same. Captain Freedom gets off to a great start, with the titular hero defeating the ferocious Genghis Kong and being forced into early retirement, but it goes downhill fast. I can live with the fact that Captain Freedom doesn't experience any sort of character growth — indeed, it'd be completely out of character for the image-obsessed and shallow Captain to have any sort of insight into his own life — the real problem is that the satire is spread so thin that it rarely ever finds a target. This would have been an amusing short story but as a novel it's painful.

David Levy, Love and Sex With Robots. New York: Harper, 2007.

This is not a very good book. Even if I set aside my personal objections to strong AI, David Levy spends far too much time examining why anyone would fall in love or have sex with a robot. I think these questions have fairly obvious answers — psychology has shown that human beings have been a remarkable talent for anthropomorphization, and Loveline shows that we're perfectly willing to share our genitals with anything that's the appropriate shape.

The more interesting question from my standpoint is what loving a robot means both philosophically and culturally. If the robot is truly intelligent and free-willed, I certainly think love between man and machine is possible though it's hard to see what the robot would get out of the relationship. But what Levy envisions are robots who are programmed to never fall out of love with their owners, who devote all their clock cycles to keeping their relationship fresh and who administer secret MRIs to discover your likes and dislikes — in short, pathetic love slaves, and I think I said all I need to say about the subject almost a decade ago.

The Japanese Beetle for the week of April 16, 2001

Leslie Gornstein, The A-List Playbook. New York: SkyHorse, 2009.

I don't have any particular interest in celebrity gossip, but Leslie Gornstein (also known as E! Online's Answer Bitch) dishes it out with such style that I can't help but tune in week after week. Since I can't donate money directly to her podcast, buying her book is the best way to show my appreciation. Now if only she'd expand her book tour to include shops outside of the Greater Los Angeles area.

I recently read an online essay about "the book that will change your life!" (and if I can ever find the URL in my list of bookmarks, I'll link it up here). The essayist's key point was that most books aren't going to change your life, and especially not the ones that are marketed that way. In my case, though, there actually is a book that changed my life forever. For the worse.

Let me set the stage. It's early 2002 and The Japanese Beetle! is floundering. I've been at it now for four years with nothing to show for it except a closet full of unsold "Button Men" and a couple thousand readers who never, ever write no matter how much I beg. I'd spent the better part of several months building to a big storyline featuring the United States of America (or at least a rogue government agency) as the primary villain, but 9/11 led me to change those plans. It takes me forever to come up with a replacement storyline, as I've been short of ideas since my brother stopped co-writing the strip (mostly by not returning my calls). On top of that you can add my usual anxieties about the quality of my art and the fact that I spend six hours a day chained to the drawing table and zero hours a day going out and meeting girls.

Enter Balzac's Illusions Perdus. Or rather, Lost Illusions since I'm not fluent enough to read Balzac in the original French.

le grave du Balzac, Cimitière du Père Lachaise, Paris

For those of you not familiar with Lost Illusions, let me give you a quick summary. It's about Lucien de Rubempré (ne Chardon) egocentric doofus who, in his pursuit of art and fame, betrays all his friends and principles and destroys the lives of everyone he meets. Eventually he comes to his senses and tries to set things right, only to discover that his friends and family have already taken care of things without his assistance, comes to the realization that his life is utterly without meaning and kills himself. (Okay, he spends a few years as an apprentice grifter, but that's another story entirely.)

In short, it's about the worst novel for an artist having a crisis of conscience to read. I instantly began empathizing with Lucien and started to feel that I'd been frittering away my life on artistic folly. Within months the strip ground to a halt, and though I made a brief stab at resurrecting it the following year the spark was gone. And the spectre of that failure has preemptively squashed a good chunk of my artistic efforts since.

Which I suppose is an awfully long way to say that I'm starting a new webcomic today called Different Package. Working on it has been supremely awkward — there's so much rust to shake off that I'm not sure there's any metal left beneath it. But I hope to have fresh content up every other day, alternating with blog posts here. Hopefully this will help me pull out of the five year slump caused by that bastard Balzac.

All joking aside, Lost Illusions is still of my favorite books. It's got wonderfully fleshed-out characters, a gripping plot full of moral dilemmas, and some fantastic writing which shines through even in translation. I actually re-read it a few years ago, appropriately enough on a trip that took to Paris and Angoulême, the book's two primary settings. I highly recommend it, or anything else written by Balzac for that matter.

"He loved halflings. A lot."

Llwmrch the Wanderer

Male Elf (Gray) Wizard 6
CN Medium humanoid
Init +3; Senses Listen +4, Spot +4, low-light vision

Defense

AC 15, touch 14, flat-footed 12
hp 11 (6 HD)
Fort +4, Ref +7, Will +9 (+11 vs. enchantments)

Offense

Spd 30 ft.
Melee admantine longsword +1 +3 (1d8/19-20/x2)
Ranged longbow +6 (1d8/20/x3)
Space 5 ft.; Reach 5 ft.
Wizard Spells Prepared (CL 6th, +2 melee touch, +6 ranged touch)
3rd (3/day) - fireball, fly, major image, suggestion
2nd (4/day) - hideous laughter, invisibility, pyrotechnics, scorching ray, shatter, web
1st (5/day) - burning hands, cause fear, charm person, color spray, disguise self, endure elements, enlarge person, identify, magic missile, magic weapon, protection from evil, ray of enfeeblement, silent image
0th (4/day) - all

Statistics

Str 8, Dex 17, Con 10, Int 20, Wiz 14, Cha 10
Base Atk +3; Grp +2
Feats Point Blank Shot, Scribe Scroll, Silent Spell, Spell Focus (enchantment), Spell Focus (illusion), Still Spell
Skills Concentration +9, Craft (alchemy) +11, Decipher Script +11, Knowledge (arcana) +14, Knowledge (architecture/engineering) +8, Knowledge (geography) +6, Knowledge (history) +11, Knowledge (the planes) +8, Perform (lute) +1, Spellcraft +16
Languages Common, Draconic, Elven, Goblin, Orc, Sylvan
SQ immune to sleep effects
Combat Gear admantine longsword +1, longbow, wand of magic missiles (CL 3rd, 8 charges)
Possessions 27 gp, 5 sp, admantine longsword +1, arrows x18, arrows (silver) x2, bracers of armor +1, cloak of resistance +2, donkey, flask of acid x5, flask of alchemist's fire x3, iron rations x5, pack saddle, pen and ink, potion of cure light wounds x3, ring of protection +1, spellbook, wand of magic missiles (CL 3rd, 8 charges), wineskin

Background

Llwmrch is not from these parts. He's a true wanderer at heart, blown hither and yon by the winds of fate. He has no goals other than enjoying life as it comes, and he's game for just about anything. If someone said to him "save this village from goblins!" or "worship my insane made-up god!" he'd probably do it just to see what happened.

Personality-wise, Llmwrch might be called "sprightly." He's polite, lively, quick-witted and charming. He's also vain, not half as clever as he thinks he is, easily manipulated, and doesn't care what other people think. His good looks let him get away with an awful lot of shit (at least at first). He is constantly cracking jokes, seducing beautiful women (unsuccessfully), and playing the ukelele (badly). He also has an annoyihg habit of pushing people's buttons just to see what happens, which may have contributed to his current profession of "wanderer."

Of course, he may also be wandering just to get away from his fiancée, the enchantress Ardaea, who just scares him shitless. Maybe it's the fear of commitment, or maybe it's her habit of throwing charm spells around whenever she doesn't get her way.

Llwmrch is surprisingly tall, even for a gray elf. He's got an impishly androgynous face, large golden eyes, a disturbingly wide smile, frizzy silver hair and for some reason, what looks like three days worth of stubble (or about three decades worth for an elf). He's wearing tight leather breeches, a cream-colored pirate shirt, and very dusty hooded traveling cloak (which may be scarlet under all that road dust, but who can tell?).

When he first meets the party, he's in dire need of a bath and a haircut.

So, yeah, one of my D&D characters got ripped to shreds by a hydra last night. We were fighting on a causeway and all of the other characters made a mad dash for solid ground, forgetting that the wizard a) was standing right in front of the hydra, b) was last in the initiative order, and c) was easier to hit than a broad side of a barn. Three heads latched on and he went from 11 hp to -21 hp in one round. Ouch.

My only regret is that Llwmrch never really got a chance to do anything heroic. Which isn't to say that he didn't kill a lot of goblins, just that all that killing never really seemed to amount to anything. The highlights of his brief adventuring career:

• Casting burning hands on the undead knight that was mowing through the party, even though that also meant killing the party member that was bleeding out at his feet.

• Getting his hands on a magic black longsword (he was the only one in the party who could wield it) and pretending he was Elric for a few sessions.

• His immature little feud with the party's cleric, which ultimately escalated to the two of them refusing to use spells to help each other, and one amusing combat where they each took turns exposing the other's flank to enemies.

• Spending three weeks seducing a halfling merchant, which actually wound up upsetting me because the DM boiled everything down to a d100 roll. I was perfectly fine with the DM deciding out of hand that all my seduction attempts were failures, but resolving something like that with a die roll rather than RP just seemed... I dunno, pointless.

Oh well. I'd say "rest in peace" except everyone knows that elves have no souls.

Thought #45

Just in case you haven't noticed, I've started twittering in the last two weeks. This will probably spell the end of "Random Thoughts" since I can now post random blather as it comes to me rather than saving it for a rainy day.

Thought #46

The primary reason I started twittering was that I was looking for something simple and fun to do from my new G1 Android phone. What's more interesting than the phone itself is how people have reacted to it, namely, "You bought a G1? You?"

Apparently I have acquired a reputation as a bit of a Luddite over the years, which is hardly fair. True, I'm hardly an early adopter, but I'm not trying to create blog entries on a linotype machine either. I pick up gadgets and software as I need them as opposed to when I want them. I only seem backwards in comparison to my friends, most of whom are the sort who queue up to buy things on release day and would network their TiVo to their iPhone just for fun.

In general, I think my approach works out for the best. Yeah, this does mean that I don't have an HDTV right now. But it also means that I'm not stuck with a huge pile of unwatchable HD-DVDs either.

Thought #47

About a week after I purchased the G1, Google finally allowed their developers to start charging for applications. And, unsurprisingly, the Google Market was immediately flooded with eight zillion rip-offs of "iFart" and "I Am Rich." You think someone would just combine the two into a farting diamond called "I Am Rich and Have No Taste." Why are people buying a $300 phone and a 99¢ program to replicate the functionality of a $2 impulse buy at Spencer's?

At the moment, most of the G1 apps aren't quite ready for prime time yet. The best POP mail client I've found has some serious issues (like always pinging the mail server for the 25 most recent messages as opposed to whatever messages have come in since the last ping), the Twitter client I'm using doesn't do direct messaging well, and a most of the other apps with interesting ideas tend to have lackluster implementations. WikiTude, for instance, uses the GPS to overlay various points of interest over the phone's camera images but is crippled by the fact that the data in their system is almost useless — a lot of obvious geographical data and not enough points of interest.

If there's one app you have to get, it's Locale. It's a program that lets you alter your phone settings for various conditions - turning off data notifications at night, or turning down the volume when the GPS sees that you're in certain locations. And even this isn't quite ready yet — it doesn't really integrate well with other programs, so I can't, say, turn off checking my work e-mail while I'm in the office.

Also worth having, if clunky: AndFTP, K-9, RingDroid, and Twidroid. Everything else? Not terribly exciting. And the in-phone browser? Urgh. Don't get me started. Clunky as hell without installing some extensions and still not all that great with them.

Thought #48

There have also been a spate of publishers offering downloadable comics for the G1 as well, and I can't figure out why.

Okay, I know why: because the publishers can charge money for them. From a consumer standpoint, though, I can't really see the advantage over a webcomic with a well-tuned mobile stylesheet. I suppose having a comic specifically formatted to the dimensions of the screen is admittedly nice but not really a spectacular selling point. Even from a development standpoint it's sort of dodgy — who wants to make different versions of a comic for print-on-demand, download, web, and several varieties of phone (or the Kindle)? Each one has unique aesthetic challenges that will have to be compensated for — figuring out the optimal size of the lettering will be a huge headache, since what looks good on a G1's tiny screen is going to be tiny on a big monitor.

I suppose there are worse ways to try and monetize digital comics. I just don't see this one catching on.

I'll also use this as a chance to say: webcomics, start working on your mobile stylesheets. The day is coming where they're going to be very important and it's best to be ahead of the curve here.

I must confess that I'd never heard of Scott Hilburn's The Argyle Sweater before this review copy arrived in my mailbox the other day. Even though it's one of the hottest new strips in the country my local paper doesn't carry it and I've never run across it online. From what I see here, I don't think I'm missing anything.

I've reproduced the cover at an extra-large size because I think that's probably the strongest gag in the book, even though it's no more than a chuckle at best. And that's the real problem with The Argyle Sweater. It not that it isn't entertaining. If you encountered it in the newspaper, or online, or lying around in a bookstore you could check it out and have a few giggles. But you wouldn't feel the need to seek out more because there's nothing edgy, extraordinary or unique about it. It's simply another single panel gag strip plumbing the same "weird humor" territory that's already been explored more effectively by The Far Side, Non Sequitur and Bizarro.

I've been racking my brains for an hour now trying to think of more to say about The Argyle Sweater but I'm drawing a complete blank. This is exactly the sort of book that seems designed to fly under the critical radar — neither good enough to deserve praise or bad enough to deserve codemnation.

A complimentary copy for this review was provided by the publisher.

This funky fella has been lurking Downtown for the last few months, and I finally got a chance to snap a few candid photos.

I can't imagine transforming into a bridge is all that useful, but I suppose it's more useful than a cassette tape

I bet getting that head to fold back in is a real bitch

I wonder if it sounds like Peter Cullen?

Pittsburgh old and new

Looking to the future (or maybe just PNC Park)

For those of you who still have no idea what you're looking at, that's a giant transforming robot composed of bits and pieces of some of Pittsburgh's famous bridges. Formally, it's an installation by Glenn Kaino called Arch, and it's located in a parking lot at the corner of Seventh and Fort Duquesne, right across from the Andy Warhol Bridge. It was installed last October as part of Pittsburgh's 250th birthday celebrations.

I think one of the reasons I like this piece is that it's open and accessible, while at the same time leaving a lot open to discussion. Does it represent that detritus of a once-proud industrial giant that's transformed itself into something new? Is there a reason that its pose is somewhere between a football player's three-point stance and Arnie's time travel position from The Terminator? Is there any significance to where he's situated? Is he a bridge to the future, a bridge to the past, or Rick Sebach's Bridge to Nowhere? Or is it just a kick-ass giant robot made of sheer awesome? There are a lot of ways to tackle it and they're all perfectly valid.

Arch is scheduled come down sometime in April. I'm hoping the city will buy it and keep it where it is, though. It's just a nice addition to the cultural landscape and I'd hate to lose it.

Don't Be A Vader Hater

After snapping my photos I jogged across the bridge to go see The Vader Project at the Andy Warhol Museum, a collection of replica Darth Vader helmets that have been modified by over 100 artists including Peter Kuper, Gary Baseman, Ron English, Joe Ledbetter, and Marc Ecko. The helmets have previously been exhibited at various Star Wars Celebration events, and given their inherent popism and potential mass appeal I'm surprised that they're only making their way to the Warhol now.

On paper this sounds like it would be right up my alley, but I found it strangely unaffecting. For every artist who re-cast their helmet in resin and buried a luminous rose-colored skull inside there's someone who just painted their helmet pink, slapped some gay pride stickers on the side, and called it "Gay Vader" — and the quality of the work on display is far closer to the latter than the former. So you get Army Helmet Vader, German Biker Helmet Vader, Kabuto Vader, Disco Vader, Blinged-Out Vader, Plush Vader, and so forth. There's even someone who's painted pictures of Bush and Cheney on the side of the helmets. The graffiti-inspired artists like Ecko come off better than the others, but I find it hard to appreciate their work as art rather than design.

What troubles me is that I can't seem to justify why I like Arch and not The Vader Project. In principle they're very similar, lurking at the intersection of high art and low culture, with a little something to appeal to everyone, so why did I enjoy Arch and hate Vader? Is it that for all its mass appeal Arch still seems to belong to a long tradition of public sculpture, while Vader seems more like a commercial project commissioned by Lucasfilm and cynically exhibited to boost museum revenues? Is it that Glenn Kaino seems to have put a lot of thought into the symbolism of his work, while the Vader artists seem to have scribbled the first thing that came to mind on their helmets? Is it because there's an ambiguity to Arch that seems to be lacking from Vader? Is the singularity of Arch more impactful than the mind-numbing repetition of Vader? Is there really that much difference between them or am I just an inconstant hypocrite trying to justify his own strange personal tastes? Can anyone help me out here?

To be fair, I did get a laugh out of Naugahyde Vader, with his jagged little Nauga smile. But there's no accounting for taste.

Just for The Record

Going out to the museum to see an exhibition of Star Wars stuff? Somewhat defensible.
Going in full Jedi regalia? Not so much.

Years ago I did a webcomic called "The Anarchy Bears!" where the gimmick was that readers would send in their plots and I would draw them. What a terrible idea that was. Almost every idea I'd received was sophomoric at best, and most of them could be boiled down to two-word sentence where the first word was "kill."

For a few months I tried to create strips that would be interesting to me while staying true to the reader's original concept, but it didn't take long before I just didn't care anymore. At first, the Anarchy Bears just started dispensing with the suggestions in single panels, but soon that evolved into openly mocking each suggestion or even doing the exact opposite of what it asked for.

Strangely, I found this adversarial approach a lot more artistically rewarding than my original idea. It was liberating, and it didn't hurt my readership at all. So I'm a bit relieved that Andrew Hussie's MS Paint Adventures seems to have settled into roughly the same approach (though he does it much better than I ever did).

For those of you who aren't familiar with MS Paint Adventures, it's a simple single-panel comic with a line of text beneath it describing what's going on. It isn't actually drawn in MS Paint, but it keeps a crude un-aliased stick figure aesthetic to help retain its homey feel. Not exactly comics according to Scott McCloud, and piss-poor comics according to Bart Beatty. Here's the fun part, though — at the bottom of each strip, readers can enter simple commands indicating where they'd like the plot to go next, as if it were an old Infocom text adventure or LucasArts SCUMM system game.

For his first serial, "Jailbreak", Hussie simply drew the first suggestion he received every day. For his second serial, "Bard Quest", he experimented with branching decision trees but things quickly spiraled out of control. In his current serial, "Problem Sleuth," he seems to be picking several of his favorite suggetsions from the current bunch, and stringing them into a sequence.

Oh, and he never passes up an oportunity to screw with the readers' heads.

The story starts off simply — you're one of the city's top Problem Sleuths, and all you have to do is get out of your office. Except your office door is locked and the only key you find doesn't fit it. And when you do manage to get it unlocked there's a bust of Ben Stiller blocking it. That telephone on your desk? Doesn't actually work. That window behind your desk? It's actually a back-lit picture of a street scene. And that safe? It's a painting of a safe hung in front of another painting.

Oh, and there are all sorts of important details hidden because you think there's only one camera angle.

It only gets worse. Characters retreat to the realm of the imagination, which it turns out can also be accessed through those window portals. Objects change from deadly weapons to useless doodads, usually just when characters need them the most, and some (like pumpkins) disappear whenever you turn to pay attention to them. Large numbers of strips are wasted posing in a hard-boiled fashion or riding objects like mechanical bulls. Puzzles become bizarrely elaborate an increasingly nonsensical until the point where an in-game cheat code machine is needed to bypass them. Bizarre concepts ripped off from JRPGs are incorporated into the story without warning, just to frustrate characters who need to fill their power honeycombs with pang nectar to perform some simple tasks.

Eventually the Problem Sleuth winds up teaming with his neighbors, Ace Dick and Pickle Inspector, to escape the building. A series of of weird events involving imaginary duplicates and an in-game cheat code machine leads to no less than three (real and imaginary) copies of some characters running around — more if you count their feminine alter egos or their foppish gentleman avatars. By the time one of the characters splits himself into seven duplicates, one of whom ascends to godhood, all real-world logic has gone completely out of the window.

Eventually all of these characters find themselves locked into a battle with the imaginary demonic Mobster Kingpin who's locked them all in their building and his real-world counterpart, who has increased his gravitational field to the point where he now has a Schwarzchild radius. Well, except for those characters who aren't locked into a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos with Death.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the nonsensical twists and turns, MS Paint Adventures is actually really compelling. If nothing else, you keep returning just to see how your commands wil be perverted into something completely different. But it doesn't hurt that Hussie also has a wicked sense of the absurd which is damn funny in its own right. It'll be interesting to see how long Hussie can keep it up, though — the problem with this sort of adversarial releationship is that the longer you string it out, the more frustrated your readers become. They can deal with a little frustration, but when it seems like you're stringing things out just to spite them they will start to abandon you in droves. There seem to be signs that the current story is approaching the end, but then, it's felt that way for almost four months now.

Still, it's a great read, and one well worth checking out if you haven't already.

Story and art by Jiro Taniguchi
Translated by Shizuka Shimoyama & Elizabeth Tiernan

Jiro Taniguchi is an artist that I find baffling. As much as I respect him as a top-rate storyteller and draftsman, his actual work frequently leaves me cold — or rather, colder than intended). Taniguchi's latest release from Fanfare/Ponent mon is no exception, filled with some wonderful examples of craft but ultimately so stoic and restrained that it borders on dull.

The Quest for the Missing Girl is actually a very apt title, in that the story is a quest in the traditional sense — less a mystery to be solved than a series of ordeals to be endured, where the prize to be won is of secondary importance to the the moral and spiritual enlightenment achieved during the journey. While our protagonist, Shiga, may be trying to locate a kidnapped child in Tokyo's seamy (but oddly sexless) underworld, the real meat of the story involves Shiga coming to grips with the guilt he feels for not accompanying his best friend on a mountaineering years ago, a jealous and cowardly refusal that may have led to his friend's untimely death. It makes for an interesting character study, but the actual plot is so simple and straightforward that it sometimes fails to hold your interest.

Quest is also a typical wilderness survival story — man vs. self (as embodied by some unconquerable aspect of nature) — with a strange and hostile city standing in for a remote wilderness environment. The substitition is made all too clear in the climax, where the Tokyo skyscraper Shiga plans to climb is likened to the Himalayan mountain that he left his friend to climb alone. It's strange choice from a storytelling perspective, because this is one of the rare moments where Taniguchi's typical understatement would be more effective than drawing our attention to the obvious parallels. It doesn't completely dull the impact of the book's final chapters, but it does blunt it quite a bit.

Anyway, for all my kvetching, Quest is still an entertaining read with some masterful storytelling, and here's one of my favorite sequences. This is from the end of chapter 3 — Shiga is relentlessly working the only lead he has when he runs afoul of some punks and is forced to resort to fisticuffs. It's an encounter that normally plays against Taniguchi's natural qualities as a draftsman, but he still manages to hit it out of the park by emphasizing his strengths as a storyteller.

The Quest for the Missing Girl p. 84-85

I really don't have much to say about these pages — I only include them because they have the first two panels of the fight scene, and because they show how Taniguchi's fight scene choreography contrasts from his usual storytelling style. Note how he's using some techniques I've discussed before, like allowing the initial and terminal panel borders to bleed off the page to create visual link to the page turn. And of course, in the lower left hand he switches from his regular right-angle panel borders to diagonal panel borders, and in any comic that can only mean one thing — it's on.

The Quest for the Missing Girl p. 86-87

Of course, the punk misses and strikes the case of beer next to Shiga. This is a weird panel, but it's a microcosm of the whole sequence. The overall composition isn't inherently exciting, the figures aren't dramatically foreshortened, and his lines are as unsparingly controlled as ever. And yet Taniguchi uses a few simple tricks — off-kilter cropping, slightly skewed camera angles, looser inking in the black areas, speed lines, and diagonal panel borders — to create the illusion of action without without wildly deviationg from his usual stiff style.

Our eyes are led through the rest of the right-hand page by a series of well-spotted black areas — Shiga's hair, tie and shoes; the leather jacket worn by one of the punks; the slight shadows under the cases of beer. Also note the way that the speed lines are kept away from Shiga's eyes in the first panel, making them the focal point as well as creating a funnel from the top tier to the tier below.

Also note that the diagonal panel borders, in addition to adding a little excitement and chaos to Taniguchi's otherwise rigid grid, also separate simultaneous or near-simultaneous moments in time. The punk missing Shiga and a wide shot of the same. Shiga swiveling around and hitting the punk in the face. The punk hitting the ground while his buddies look on in shock. Shiga's thousand-yard-stare and the gang's craven reaction to same.

And that face. This is one of the few extreme close-ups Taniguchi allows himself, as well as one of the largest (and darkest) panels in Quest. As usual, Taniguchi's restraint in using those techniques pays off in spades, giving the panel much greater dramatic weight than it would normally have because of its unusual nature. Its sheer size, its darkness, the unusual level of hatching, and even the slight inclination of Shiga's eyebrows all combine to hammer home one singular message — this is someone you don't want to f with.

And of course it works. The punks back off, their cowardice emphasized by the sloping top border of the next tier which makes the panel focusing on them actually seem slight next to the adjacent (but smaller) panel containing shiga. Body language also plays a role here, as Shiga is stoically rigid but thrust forward while the punks are loosely controlled and cringing backwards. Shiga's panel is also heavily toned and simple, allowing it to leech some of the dramatic weight from its upstairs neighbor, while the punks are bleached almost white and full of busy linework, making them seem somewhat insignificant.

It's a great scene, and one so exciting and impactful that you almost forget that takes about two seconds and only two punches are thrown.

In the spirit of the horrifying Valentine cards offered by Chris Sims and others, I proudly present...

Or perhaps, if that's too gross for you, how about some...

Love, Isshin Kurosaki Style

Bleach v22, p. 54

Story and art by Tite Kubo
Translation by Joe Yamazaki and Lance Caselman
Lettering and retouch by Evan Waldinger (#21) & Mark McMurray (#22-25)
Edited by Pancha Diaz

Okay, confession time — I really loved the first six volumes of Tite Kubo's Bleach. Don't get me wrong, I don't think they're high art or anything, but they managed to put a new spin on some tired old plotlines, with some instantly memorable characters, stupid humor and action scenes filled with crazy energy. I enjoyed reading about Ichigo and Rukia as they fought monsters, dealt with the weirdos at their school and explored the craziness lurking just under the façade of Karakura Town. Volume six was a particular favorite. Just as everything seemed to have settled into a nice status quo, we got a wonderful story from Rukia's perspective that ended with her kidnapping at the hands of various corrupt elements of the Soul Society, memory of her very existence wiped from the minds of everyone in town. And Ichigo wasn't happy about that.

Wow, I thought. Now things are gonna get interesting.

Twelve volumes I found myself wondering what the hell went wrong. Ichigo and his friends had spent more volumes trying to rescue Rukia than they had spent getting to know her in the first place. New developments happened not to advance the plot, but to move it sideways and extend it. Uninspired fight scenes were streched out for no particular reason. New characters were being introduced not because they played an important role in the story, but because they could be used to round out the rosters of fighting games. The second time Ichigo was forced into an arduous bout of special training, I said to hell with it — I'll follow this story to the end and then I'm done with this series. Oh, and what a horrible ending it was. The bad guy, after setting up an insanely complex plan, just does something he could have easily done twelve volumes ago and escapes. Kubo managed to hit all of the right emotional notes, but everything else was just a huge mess. But at leat I was done with Bleach forever.

But life is funny sometimes. A few months ago I found myself in the South Hills Borders, trying to find something to pad out my order so I could take advantage of a "buy 2, get 1 free" sale, and volume 21 of Bleach was right there. I figured it couldn't hurt to confirm my prejeudices, right? And now I find myself five volumes back into Bleach again, and enjoying it tremendously.

But I don't think it can last.

Bleach v25, p. 75

Don't get me wrong, these volumes get off to a great start. Ichigo and his allies return to Karakura Town, and are reunited with their wonderfully wacky family and friends. Hints are dropped that there are afoot, funky new characters lurking in the wings, old characters are developing strange new powers, and Ichigo and his pals may no longer be capable of being satisfied by ordinary life. There are a lot of hooks here that you could hang a compelling story on.

But I can also see this new status quo disintegrating faster than the old one. To some extent, it's a variation of Even A Monkey Can Draw Manga's "Strong-Opponent Inflation" — after the dramatic highs and earth-shaking events of the last story, who can take going back to fighting small monsters in a small town? But there are other troubling signs. Karakura Town's resident weirdos and their mysteries are already being pushed to the side by characters from the Soul Society (and not even the interesting characters from the Soul Society, for that matter). A fight sequence with the arrancars has already been stretched out to multiple volumes. We're introduced to eight of the Visored, but six of them don't have anything meaningful to add to the story right now. Ichigo's already been suckered into a volume long fight sequence that doubles as special training.

It's frustrating, because I can see how with a little work Bleach could be turned into something more than a fight-of-the-volume comic. It's not like there isn't a market for fantasy comics set in the modern world, or action-comedies, or comics with relatively short plot arcs. You could work those elements into the current set-up and create something just as marketable but infinitely more interesting in the long run. Instead, I can't help but feeling that we're heading down the Dragonball Z path, where the comic eventually starts catering to a series of die-hard fans while paring away anything that might interest a larger audience. As much as you might try to suck fans back in with a new beginning, as soon as you start sliding back into your bad old habits that audience will disappear.

I think I'll give it about ten volumes this time.

Ignore me, I'm just brainstorming different ways to telegraph flashback sequences.

Different storytelling style. Like the obsessive moment-to-moment transitions of the origin sequence in The Dark Knight Returns. Definitely not a one-size-fits-all technique, and best used sparingly.

Different background color. You see this a lot in manga, where flashback pages will have a black page background and current pages will have a regular white page background. You don't see this much in Western comics because it used to be that full bleed used to be an extravagant expense, and then we flipped and nowadays every comic has all-black backgrounds. It's an effective signifier but also robs you of the aesthetic possibilities of altering the background color for other reasons.

Different coloring/toning style. You used to see this in old Marvel comics, where flashbacks would be in garish monocromatic schemes (usually pink or light blue). Occasionally you'll see this in manga, where flashback sequences might not be as heavily toned. On the extreme end, you'll get something like Supreme with the faux-distressed halftoned coloring in the flashback sequences. A big disadvantage is that this technique definitely calls attention to itself.

Different line quality. Stan Sakai uses this a lot in Usagi Yojimbo, where flashbacks are inked in a looser style with relatively few areas of solid black. Makes it nice and obvious that something is different without hammering it home, but you'd better be able to ink your work in two significantly different styles. Works best in black and white.

Different art style. Usually the result of two different artists working on the book, as in Supreme where you alternate between Rob Liefeld clones and Rick Veitch doing his best Wayne Boring impression. On the other hand, I've also seen books where the flashbacks had a painted/washed style and the current sequences were more traditionally done. Another technique that calls attention to itself, and one which may be detrimental to the overal aesthetic unity of the comic.

Different lettering style. You see this a lot in manga, where flashbacks will have a lighter or more scriptic font. This works best with fonts that aren't trying to imitate hand lettering, which is why you don't see it a lot in Western comics.

Different panel borders. An oldie but a goodie — replacing the panel borders with thought balloon shapes (or at least just the intro and outro panel edges). Classic, but maybe too retro for some, and there could be an issue differentiating between flashbacks and fantasies if you use this technique. Alternatively, you could eschew panel borders entirely.

Different margins. Paul Grist uses this in technique in Kane — the "six months ago" sequences have wider margins than the "current day" sequences. It's a bit subtle and may be missed by a casual reader, which isn't heped by the fact that the first use of the technique comes after a page turn. As the flashbacks start occurring mid-page their significance becomes more obvious. Then again, it's entirely possible Grist wanted those sequences to be confusing on first read.

First-person narrative captions. A staple of old-school comic storytelling, but perhaps a bit too old-school for modern tastes. For that matter, it may not be as distinctive as it used to be now that the narrative caption has replaced the thought balloon. Probably works best with combined with one of the other techniques. It might also help if the narrative captions are the only text/dialogue in the panels.

Artsy-fartsy techniques. Montages. Trippy collages. The whole sequence takes place inside a giant silhouette of the protagonist's head. Maybe combined with one of the above techniques. Just make sure you have the artistic chops to pull off anything that's ambitious.

Don't do anything, just let the audience puzzle it out later. Also known as the Pulp Fiction approach. A good way to confuse the hell out of everyone and make a lot of people angry. The story you're telling had better be damn compelling if you're going to pull this one off.

Stop pretending you're an artiste and just tell the damn story chronologically. Where's the fun in that?

Last week I finally managed to track down some copies of Nana v13-14. And while I was reading them, it struck me that Ai Yazawa has a very limited number of facial types. This has always been a minor issue with her work, but it's only become noticeable with the proliferation of new characters in the last few volumes.

An assortment of similar faces from Nana v.12-14. A shiny PayPal dollar to the first commenter who can correctly identify them all!

In Yazawa's defense, a couple of points. I have, of course, deliberately picked faces that bear a strong resemblance to each other, and further enhanced the resmblance by erasing the ears and foreheads (there were just too many piercings to touch up). And it's not like this is an uncommon problem — even some highly-acclaimed artists have only a limited number of facial types. Creating a hfully-realized human face from scratch is very hard work, and it's not surprising that artists tend to resort to either shortcuts or other ways of distinguishing characters from each other. So what other ways are there to distinguish characters? The most obvious methods are hair and clothing, body type, and body language. Yazawa only has a limited number of body types, but in the other two categories does an incredible job of differentiating the characters.

Hair and clothing are tricky because they're very changeable. What a character really needs is an overall sense of style that enables you to identify who they are regardless of what they're currently wearing. Or else you lock the character into the same outfits forever, which works in some comics but not others — great if it's a gag strip or set in an office in the 1950's, but not so great for a contemporary strip set in the "real world." Yazawa does a great job of creating a unique style for her characters that allows them to be identified at a glancewhether it's Nana O. in her designer Vivienne Westwood outfits, Nana K. in the simple lines of her retro clothing, Misato in her gothic lolita get-ups, Takumi with his open collars and untucked shirts, or even just Yasu in his heavily-starched suits. The amount of thought she puts into characters' little stylistic choices really pays off, to the point where you can identify a crowd of them from the rear.

The other way she differentiates the characters is by creating a unique posture and body language for them. Nana K. is touchy-feely, Nana O. always looks like she's ready to leap across the room and punch you in the face (and even when she's calm she looks nervous), Takumi is stiff and cold, Yasu is stiff and warm, Ren is languid and slouched (or stoned, if you prefer), Yuri is even more touchy-feely than Hachi (though in a fake, deliberately exaggerated way), and Miu is so reserved and shy she can't even look people in the eye. She does such a good job of creating distinctive body language for characters that when when "Mai Tsuzuki" shows up in volume 14, I was immediately able to guess her real identity ultra-polite mannerisms and posture. (The handful of accessories she couldn't bring herself to get rid of didn't hurt either.)

I suppose the point of this is that we deride artists all the time for not being able to draw different faces, but the real goal is not to create different faces but to be able to create memorable and distinguishable character designs, of which the face is only one element. As long as you can tell the characters apart at a glance, who cares if they have the same face?

I Am the Biggest Doofus in the World

I've just now realized that Nana's covers actually tell a continuous story of the two Nanas having a day on the town. It has taken me over two years to notice this because I am apparently hideously unobservant. I guess I can put that next to "prone to accidental self-mutilation" on my resume.

Today's Moment of Enlightenment

Nana v.13, p.179

For someone who's widely regarded as an airhead, Nana Komatsu sure manages to dispense a lot of wisdom...

Thought #41

Earlier tonight I managed to screw up my pinky pretty badly by forgetting everything I ever learned about knife safety in Boy Scouts. The sad thing is, my first thought after getting home from the emergency room was "Hey, let's iron these bloody paper towels flat, scan them, and turn them into some splatter/grunge brushes in Photoshop!" So here. Photoshop CS2+, 5.4 MB ZIP file. Individually, the brushes aren't much, but they layer nicely.

"Rob Liefeld's Bloodstayne" is a great name for a character. Especially if Rob Liefeld has absolutely nothing to dowith his creation. I imagine him as being like Rorschach, except not as restrained. Come to think of it, "Blood" + [misspelled noun] almost always winds up sounding like a second-string Youngblood character. Bloodgodd. Bloodfizt. Bloodphart. Bloodklot. I could do this all day.

Thought #42

The wires on the black JVC Gumi earbuds I'd been using since November somehow managed to get stripped, so I'm already on set number two for the year. Between the finger, my car battery dying on me, and this, the year is off to a swell start. I should just thank my lucky stars that my love life can't possibly get any worse.

Thought #44

On the plus side, the doctor gave me a sticker for not crying during any of the shots or stitches (because they were all out of lollipops). That just about made my day.

Thought #44

For almost two whole years I haven't had a television. Well, okay, I have a TV set but I'm not paying for cable and I don't get any broadcast signals in my apartment. It's not a matter of principle or anything — after my last move I just thought my wallet might appreciate a slight reduction in my expenses, and I've never bothered to get the cable turned on since. For the first few months I went over to a friend's house to watch the programs I was interested in, but I haven't done that in quite a while, and there are a few shows I'm following on DVD.

You think not watching TV all the time has made me more productive. Not so — I spend just as much time goofing off except now I'm reading, surfing the 'net, or playing video games instead of being plopped in front of the TV. If anything, it's made me less productive, since I usually spent a lot of time watching TV and doing something else. All of my replacement activities require my full attention, and consequently I'm getting a lot less done.

Story by Riichiro Inagaki
Art by Yusuke Murata
Translation by Craig Kingsley & Hime Kingsley (#22-23) & Nich Maragos (#24)
Lettering and retouch by James Gaubatz
Edited by Kit Fox (#19-21)

Hey, it's Super Bowl time again (GO STEELERS!) so let's check in once again with Eyeshield 21! It was nice of Viz to ship volume 24 a week ahead of schedule so I could review three volumes at once — it's almost as if they wanted to have some fresh football-related product on the shelves during the one week the whole country goes football crazy. Go figure.

The last time I reviewed Eyeshield 21 the Devil Bats were locked in a tight contest with the Shinryuji Nagas and were down by 14 points with 8 minutes to go in the game. But they'd started to turn the tide with some trick plays and a few surprising performances from key players, and with that momentum they keep plowing forward and manage to pull off a last-second upset to unseat the top team in the tournament.

Unfortunately, it's not a very satisfying victory. Agon Kongo, Shinryuji's ace, has been built up as the series #1 villain for almost a dozen volumes now. He's been portrayed as an amoral, contemptuous, sociopathic superman with no regard for anyone else, even his own brother. A simple defeat isn't nearly enough of a comeuppance to satisfy the audience. Couldn't he have broken an arm or something? He doesn't even show any sign that he's learned any lessons from his defeat — his immediate reponse is to berate everyone around him for not giving their all, without acknowledging that the only person on the field guilty of that infraction is him. Here's hoping that this defeat keeps him out of the manga for a long, long time.

Anyway, after the Shinryuji game there are some nice comedic interludes involving the other tournament games, a rest day where everyone has to fight through super-sore muscles, and a quick trip to Ojo's cultural festival. And then it's back to the tournament for the first volume of the hotly anticipated Deimon/Ojo rematch. And this one should be a killer — we've been waiting for it for almost twenty volumes. The question is, how will Riichiro Inagaki manage to top the last game? It doesn't seem possible.

As usual, Inagaki manages to keep things light and breezy, countering the melodrama on the field with humorous antics off it. But the real reason I read Eyeshield 21 is for Yusuke Murata's art. Here's a nice sequence from volume 22 where Monta, Deimon's top receiver, and Ikkyu, his Shinryuji nemesis, battle it out in the air...

Eyeshield 21 v22, p. 14-17,20-23

First, let's ignore the fact that this sequence takes place in some sort of crazy decompressed "Spider-Man" time, where two receivers can have a nice, long converstion in the fraction of a second it takes for a play to unfold. (It's worse than you think — I actually clipped two flashback pages from here because I wanted to focus on the physical action.)

The overall storytelling in this sequence is actually . Monta and Ikkyu's relative positions remain relatively constant throughout the scene, with Monta initially positioned in the lower left and Ikkyu in the upper right. The points of view also exaggerate Ikkyu's size and position above Monta to create the impression that he will be dominant in this exchange, at one point even pushing Monta almost entirely out of frame. Heck, the the Ikkyu-centric panels are even physically larger than the Monta-centric panels. But then Monta strikes back, with only his hand shooting into the frame from off-panel, exaggerating the unlikely nature of his comeback. As their struggle for the ball intensifies their relative positions start to shift along with the balance of power, with Ikkyu starting to float to the left and Monta to the right. Their sizes begit to equalize, with Monta and Ikkyu now seeming to be the same size. And when Monta finally wins their struggle he seizes the center of the panel and the foreground while pushing Ikku down and into the background. It's an interesting way of introducing an equilibrium and then tinkering with it to increase the drama.

Note that the inset implying simultaneous (or near-simultaneous) action tend to be clustered together with tiny gutters, and these groups of simultaneous actions are then separated by large gutters to differentiate them from actions happening concurrently. Additionally, each page has a three-tiered structure with two larger blocks on the top and bottom, which helps give a unifying rhythm to sequence as a whole (as well as increasing your emotional reaction when the rhythm is finally broken).

This sequence also contains some of Yusuke Murata's trademark exaggerations and extreme foreshortening. If nothing else, I'm always amazed by the way he's able to incorporate them into his style without having them look forced or awkward, though I suspect having a naturally cartoony style makes integration a bit easier. In particular, the giant hands in the first panel of the first page are just fantastic, seeming utterly solid despite being wholly disproportionate. It helps that their positioned over the characters arms, which are one of the biggest problem areas when you're doing this sort of foreshortening.

Also apparent in these panels is what Scott McCloud referred to as "the masking effect," though it's incorporated into the character designs rather than split between characters and their environment. The sports equipment is drawn with an almost fetishized level of detail — you can see every lace on the football, the stitches on the gloves, even every spike on the cleats — but the character themselves are cartoonish exaggerations with huge eyes, undifferentiated teeth, and weird hair. McCloud theorized that the masking effect was used to encourage a level of projection on the undifferentiated characters, which a level of specificity might have discouraged. I'm not so sure that's what it's being used for here. In fact, I almost think it's being used in the exact opposite way, with the detail level of the acessories being used to emphasize the reality of the scene in a way that the cartoonishly meloodramatic faces cannot.

Ten Important Lessons I Have Learned From Reading Sports Manga

Never start playing a sport to impress a girl. Either you'll discover that you like sports more than girls, or you'll be too busy playing eight-volume long basketball games to score.

Sports are so simple that you can learn the rules on the fly. A newbie can start playing a sport and have all of the rules and most of the basic techniques mastered in, oh, about a week. Never mind that the rules of football are so complex that even players, coaches and referees frequently get the wrong.

All forms of pride are shameful. And any expression of that pride will usually result in you being defeated as ironically as possible. All sins are forgiven, though, if you shift your boasts to the future tense. So "I'm the best receiver in Japan" is prideful but "I'll show you that I'm the best receiver in Japan" is not.

90% of Americans are from Texas. Apparently, it is every bit as big as Texans claim.

What happens on the field stays on the field. No matter how intense your rivalry on the field may be, all that pent-up hostility disappears once that final whistle blows. Off the field, rivals frequently trade training secrets, go to social functions together, and have sleepovers where they braid each others' hair.

Special training is always preferable to regular training, and the more special it is the better. Who cares if you've been working on your conditioning every day for ten years? I spent three weeks pulling a dump truck with my teeth while wearing a chicken suit. You can't win.

Guts are the only thing that matter. Natural ability, special training, genius-level strategy — none of these things can stand up to sheer determination. In fact, Japan's ants have so much guts that no rubber tree plant in the country is safe.

Once you get into the playoffs, the amount of space needed to depict a game increases geometrically. So if the Devil Bats defeated Bando in two volumes and Shinruji in four volumes, it will take them eight volumes to defeat Ojo. At this rate, Hakushu will take longer to defeat than Majin Buu.

Japanese high school students are the greatest athletes in the world. They've got it all — moonsaulting tennis players, baseball players with rocket arms, and ten foot tall football players. Since none of these athletes ever seem to make it to the Japanese Olympic team or any professional leagues, I also suspect Japan high schools have the best-organized doping program in the world.

Japanese athletes don't have soccer moms or baseball dads. In fact, most of them don't appear to have parents at all, from what I can tell. Maybe they're decanted in some lab, which would explain the extraordinary athleticism noted above.

The covers of Rick Veitch's recently concluded Army@Love: The Art of War featured appropriations of famous works of art, updated to include figures in military dress and war-torn landscapes. At first I thought it was an cute, eye-catching gimmick but as I studied the covers I realized that each one was actually carefully chosen to reflect on the themes Veitch explores in his work. Here's an infodump for those of you who aren't into art.

Issue #1 is obviously Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. The original Mona Lisa is, of course, famous for her enigmatic half-smile, and here that smile is used to emphasize the central dichotomies of Army@Love. Is she happy, melancholic, or just keeping up appearances? Is she thinking about the war or distrated by thoughts of something else? What's up with that "Hot Zone" patch on her shoulderpads? What the hell is she even doing there in the first place? The dream-like landscape of the original has been replaced by the bleak, depressing landscape of Afbaghistan, dragging the central figure from the world of the sublime to bleak, depressing Afbhagistan.

Any appropriation of the Mona Lisa calls to mind Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q, in which he scribbed a moustache and goatée on the central figure. L.H.O.O.Q. was one of the opening salvos of the Dada movement, which both abhored and reveled in the nonsensical nihilism of early 20th-century culture, much as Army@Love is both laughing with and at its self-obsessed no-perspective army. Even the title of Duchamp's work plays into Veitch's sexual themes, since when "L.H.O.O.Q." is pronounced quickly in French it sounds like "she's got a hot ass."

Issue #2 is a repurposing of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. The themes of Hoppers' original are alienation and isolation, and Veitch's rendition explores these themes further. The soldiers are seemingly unaware (or indifferent to) the suffering of the tortured counterman, the war-torn world around them, or even each other. In Nighthawks, this alienation is merely depressing, but in Army@Love it becomes practically monstrous.

Issue #3 may be a bit more obscure than the others, but any art history lover will instantly recognize it as Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe. Manet's original caused quite a scandal for numerous reasons, including its frank depiction of a modern nude (as opposed to an acceptable historical or mythological nude) and for the way in which it called attention to the way in which it was painted. Like Manet, Veitch is depicting an uncomfortably modern scene (a war satire set in WWII or Vietnam would be perfectly acceptable, but one set in Iraq isn't?), and while he may not be deliberately drawing attention to his own technique he's definitely drawing attention to the way in which the war is being conducted.

I'm also impressed that Veitch managed to convince DC to publish a cover with two naked figures on it, when the same company freaks out over the mere possibility that Superman might enjoy an occasional adult beverage.

You may think that issue #4 is an appropriation of Whistler's Mother but you're wrong. It is, in fact, an appropriation of James McNeill Whistler's Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1 (A Portrait of the Artist's Mother). (Hey, let me be pedantic, it's all that I've got.) The original is a masterful piece of tonal arrangement, but here its tranquil yin-yang composition is ruined by bullet holes and dead bodies, which really speaks for itself, doesn't it? It hasn't interrupted Mrs. Whistler's routine, however, as she displays a callous obliviousness to the carnage that she's wrought about her. One of the things Whistler is also famous for is asserting that is paintings were nothing more than paintings — artful arrangements of form, line and color. Is Veitch implying that our current war is about nothing more than war itself?.

This is Gilbert Stuart's unfinished portrait of George Washington, which is famous for being, well, unfinished. Or, if you prefer, finished but then damaged by bloodthirsty pirate Hans Sprungfeld shortly before his mysterious disappearance. This could be a subtle dig at either DC editorial (or even the audience) for not fully backing Army@Love. Perhaps replacing Washington's serene expression with a look of impatience is a dig at our impatient modern commanders-in-chief. Or maybe he's just disgusted at how America has ignored every warning he made in his farewell address.

This last one isn't a painting at all — it's one of the Abu Ghraib torture photos, with the perspective altered so that we can see the photographer, and turned into a paint-by-number. With this simple shift Veitch has turned us all from passive observers into active enablers complicit in torture and atrocity. He may also be making a point about inevitability because, after all, paint-by-numbers always turn out the same way. Unless, of course, you color outside the lines...

Savage Dragon #144, p. 7

"Brappa-lortch" is easily one of the most disgusting sound effects I've ever seen.

This lovely image is from the Savage Dragon #144, which has an unusual conceit: the whole issue takes place over the course of about six months, and each panel represents a different day during that period. Each panel contains no more than a few seconds of a larger story, but your mind is able to weave the disparate fragments seamlessly into the ebb and flow of daily life. It's a great example of the sort of story that only comics can do — can you imagine the a film or prose story constructed using the same technique? It also allows Erik Larsen to get away with some tricks that just wouldn't be possible in a more fluid narrative, like throwing a stream of one-joke villains and other one-dimensional characters at the Dragon.

It's also a nice reminder of why I'm still reading Savage Dragon — Larsen is one of the few mainstream creators of his generation who continues to evolve. Here's a guy who's constantly tinkering with his drawing style, trying out experimental storytelling techniques, and doing everything he can to keep comics as fresh and interesting for him as they are for his audience. You may love or hate the results, but you have to admire his devotion to his craft.

Disturbing Panel of the Week (Runner-Up)

Savage Dragon #144, p. 17

After a surprisingly long delay, issue #100 of Gold Digger v3 is finally here, featuring 48 all-new pages, no ads, and surprisingly, the same price point as a regular issue! So was it worth the wait? Worth three years of build-up and anticipation?

Gold Digger v3 #100, p. 17

First off, anyone expecting a resolution to the cataclysmic conflicts that have been hinted at since issue #60 will be sorely disappointed. Dreadwing does not make his final strike, Gothwrain doesn't break free of his thralldom, Gina isn't forced to save the universe from the return of the previous universe. There's not much in the way of exploration, either. The true nature of quasi-space isn't revealed, the secret history of the Nomad Artificers isn't discovered, and the mysteries of the Dynasty aren't solved.

Instead, we get a big fight with Kia, a Dynasty fortress ship that has been abandoned in quasi-space and is trying to find its way back to its former masters. Kia has been built up as a real threat over the last five or six issues of the series, and is presented with a backstory that plays nicely off of the family abandonment issues and martyr complexes of some of the main characters, but it's still a bit disappointing to see an anniversary issue which doesn't feature any of the series' established villains (or establish a new villain to menace them).

Practially speaking, I can see why Fred Perry chose to go this route. After all, Dreadwing is the only established villain remaining and if he's defeated, almost every long-running plot thread will have been wrapped up, giving the issue a sense of finality that might backfire. There are no other threats waiting in the wings for their turn in the spotlight. And hey, it is one hell of a fight scene, featuring giant robots, awesome kung fu, clever diversions, and planets used as grenades.

The art is a bit disappointing as well. Fred's character designs and overall drawing style are still appealing, but since the mid-70s of volume 3 Fred has been experimenting with a looser style with sketchier pencils that allow him to spend more time on elaborate coloring. When it works, it's appropriately dramatic and atmospheric. Often, though, the sketchiness of the original pencils highlight the lack of structure in his underdrawing and his poor page composition skills, while the coloring starts to feel like a flashy way of overcompensating for the spare backgrounds and minimal compositions.

Honestly, though, the success of this issue really only hinges on one fact. Does it feature the poignant and tearful reunion of a missing cast member with her family after almost four years of real-world time?

Gold Digger v3 #100, p. 48

Yes. Yes it does.

Before we get to issue #100, let's take a look at some of the various minis and one-shots that have come out in the last few years. I tend to avoid the fan-created holiday specials, as well as the minis that aren't illustrated by Fred because, well, they tend to be horrible. That leaves us with the following minis and one-shots to look at: Tangent, Peebo Tales, the Gold Digger Sourcebook and Dreadwing's Mymior.

For those of who who aren't going to click through the cuts, here's a quick summary: high price tags, very little value.

Gold Digger Tangent #1-4
Gold Digger: Peebo Tales #1-4

Gold Digger Tangent started in mid-2006, and reprints the Ayane and Northern Edge comics that Fred had been experimenting with online. Gold Digger: Peebo Tales started in mid-2007 and features self-contained, cutesy stories starring Brianna's self-aware "Peebo" A.I. mines. Both series feature simplified, sketchier art and largely continuity-free stories with established characters.

More importantly, new issues of these series seem to be come out when they can provide thrills that are missing from the main title. Tangent features romantic subplots, martial arts action and adventures set in Jade, and tends to come out when the main title is fixated on Earth-based adventures which leave no room for love. Peebo Tales is heavy on the humor and tends to come out when the main title is deadly serious.

Together, they're a nice way to cater to fans who may only be tolerating the current direction of the main title until it returns to something more to their liking. On the down side, both series are fairly skippable (i.e., nothing's going to tie back into the main title) and they tend to be quick reads that provide very little content for your money.

Official Handbook of the Gold Digger Sourcebook Universe #1-22

Every long-running series eventually spawns a sourcebook of some sort, and Gold Digger is no exception. I'm impressed by the thoroughness of the write-ups — heck, there's a two-page biography of the world's meanest tuna, complete with issue references and a write-up of its powers. (Powers!) I'm just surprised that in this day and age the sourcebook isn't a wiki, though I suppose it's awfully hard to sell individual issues of wiki for $3.95 a pop.

That's the real problem with the Sourcebook — it's an awful lot of money for relatively little value. The write-ups don't contain a lot of information that can't be gleaned from the individual issues, and in the age of the trade paperback it isn't as if those issues are hard to get a hold of. To add insult to injury, the type is almost large-print book sized the individual entries are heavily illustrated, which will end up doubling or tripling the length of the series.

I do enjoy being reminded of some of the weirder characters running around the universe, like this guy...

Tell me you don't want to know this guy's story. (Short version: he claims to be the Secret Emperor of Jade, and while everyone thinks he's a lunatic he appears to have the abilty to travel to Earth, where he moonlights as a TV commentator for a pro wrestling federation.)

Also, you've gotta love that half-assed logo. It looks like the series was originally entitled The Official Handbook of the Gold Digger Universe until they realized that that title and logo treatment might get them sued by Marvel. So they changed the title to Gold Digger Sourcebook in the indicia, but the only change they made to the logo was to slap a "sourcebook" in the only blank space available, resulting in that godawful mess of a title. It's little touches like this that let you know you're dealing with consummate amateurs.

Dreadwing's Mymior

I like the concept of Dreadwing's Mymior — a recap of a villain's revealed history, organized into chronological order, and presented from his point of view rather than the hero's. It's a nice refresher, and a great way to get a feel for what the villain is really about.

The problem is, there's nothing new here that you couldn't glean from a quick glance through your back issue collection. There are no revelations that shed new light on Dreadwing's goals or motivations, no gap-fillers to close up the holes in Dreadwing's backstory, no new developments that tie back into the main title (at least, not yet). And it's all presented in hard-to-read display type over some very sketchy drawings.

As much as I like the concept, there are a lot better ways to spend your $2.99.

Gold Digger v3 #85, p. 13

This story picks up right where the last major arc left off — Cheetah is stranded in quasi-space, and as she tries to make her way home with Crescens and Ancient Gina, young Gina and Penny try to open a gate for her from our dimension. Of course, there are plenty of obstacles in their way, like a rogue Dynasty ship that sees Cheetah and Crescens as raw material for their soul furnace, an ancient Saurian weapon that needs to be permanently deactivated before Gina and Penny can activate their gigantic Beta Key, and the fusion of Dreadwing and Professor Peachbody, who sees his chance to rid himself of young Gina once and for all.

But gosh, think about it. This is one continuous story which starts when the Lich-King transports Cheetah and Tiffany to Oblivion in Gold Digger v3 #60. Or wait, maybe it starts earlier than that, when the Lich-King is accidentally summoned to the Diggers family smackdown of Tanya in v3 #38, and realizes Tiffany could potentially serve as his vessel. Or maybe it starts back in v2 #41, when Gothwrain starts laying the groundwork for his escape to Myth Arcadia. Or maybe it starts back in Ninja High School v2 #57, when Professor Peachbody is exiled to the Precambrian Eon, where he eventually merges with the time-displaced corpse of Dreadwing. Or maybe it starts way back in the Mangazine v2 #11, when Gina and Brittany first encounter Dreadwing and defeat him.

No matter how you look at it, this is one long story — at least three years long, and up to seventeen years long if you're feeling generous. So how do you keep that fresh? How do you keep readers reminded of everything that's gone before? How do you stop readers from feeling that you're pointless dragging a story out so you can resolve it in a milestone issue?

Admittedly, it's not easy, and there's been times when Fred Perry has failed. For a while in the mid-70s I was totally lost — the individual issues were so dense and elliptical that close reading was required to follow even the simplest plot thread, and the delays between issues made it hard to keep the story fresh in your mind. But for the most part he's done an excellent job of moving the story forward at a pace that keeps you enthralled without forcing you to look at the big picture and realize how slowly things are moving.

For the most part, all Fred does is simply break each story down in to a series of arcs from two to four issues in length (with the occasional major arc lasting up to six issues). He tries to alternate light stories with heavy stories, stories that focus on the past with stories that focus on the present, and stories based in other dimensions with stories set on Earth. If a character is going to be important in the near future, he tries to make sure that they get a small supporting role a few months before they seize the spotlight.

For instance, a breakdown of these twenty-five issues would result in the following nine arcs:

• Issues #74-78: A break from the main story as the Jade-based characters all fight over some strange politicking, though the main purpose is to remind us that Dreadwing is still out there collecting weapons to use against Gina.

• Issues #79-80: Single-issue stories reminding us what Penny is doing on Earth, and what Cheetah is doing back in quasi-space.

• Issues #81-83: Gina and Brianna break the law to acquire a power source for their rescue efforts, but are caught and forced to deal with the psychological, moral, and legal reprecussions.

• Issue #84: A light-hearted continuity-free story that serves as a nice break from the heavy drama of the issues surrounding it.

• Issues #85-87: While everyone else works on opening a gateway to quasi-space, Julia and Debra try to take revenge on Zero for smacking them around during the last major arc. Zero's origins are revealed, and Dreadwing finally reveals himself to the rest of the cast.

• Issues #88-90: The Explorers' Society descends into an underground labyrinth to try and deactivate Gigliathon, the Saurian weapon that keeps threatening their rescue effrots.

• Issue #91: Madrid escapes from her lunar prison only to wind up in the clutches of Fauntleroy's wives. This is another momentary interlude, but also one intended to keep some characters fresh in our mind so that they can be involved in major revelations later.

• Issues #92-4: The Explorers finally reach Gigliathon and learn some surprising facts about draconian history. Dreadwing sets a trap that strands Gina in quasi-space and causes the Explorers to waste their time on Zero while he steals Gigliathon. Ancient Gina is finally revealed to be a reformed Madrid in disguise (though there may be more than one "Ancient Gina" running around).

• Issues #95-100: Reunited in quasi-space, Gina and Cheetah must battle through a Dynasty armada to return home.

Most importantly, the majority of these story arcs have satisfying, definite ends that reinforce the perception that things are humming along. You don't run into a situation like the mid-teens of Bleach, where lots of things happen but the plot doesn't move forward, or the lastest Marvel mega-events, where the plot keeps moving forward but nothing actually seems to happen. Even the arcs that don't have a definite resolution plot-wise tend to end in important emotional resolutions. For instance, while the Explorers only manage to eke out a temporary victory in issue #90, the real thrust of the issue is Brianna finally recovering from the emotional issues she's been dealing with since issue #73.

I can see why Marvel and DC don't have similar structures for their titles — the individual issues are a big mess that don't break down nicely into trade paperbacks (or at least, not into the slim 6-8 issue paperbacks that Marvel and DC like). On the other hand, the simple structure and rules Fred follow allows for a lot of improvisation and variety that makes for a gripping month-to-month reading experience.

Your Gratiutous Pop Culture Reference for the Day

I'm pretty sure this is someone's fetish, and I'm also very glad that I don't know that someone personally.

Gold Digger v3 #82, p. 3

These thirteen issues are packed full of action. The Lich-King abucts Cheetah and Tiffany to a dimension trapped in between life and death, where they're forced to battle against an army of aeons-old archers. The Diggers clan fights their way into a were-rat stronghold to try and rescue Cheetah from her dimensional prison. Gar battles some were-rat assassins to the death. Julia meets her match in the undead Zero. (There's even a short interlude where Gina fights leprechaun pirate ninjas.)

All of these conflicts (well, except for the leprechauns) have been orchestrated by the sinister Gothwrain, the were-rat archmage who is Gold Digger's most memorable villain. Over 150 issues, Gina and her friends have done battle with million year-old dragons, time-travelers capable of reshaping the universe to their will, and aliens capable of devastating entire galaxies. So why is this relatively weak opponent one of their greatest foes? I thought it might be good to examine him and see what made him tick, and what lessons could be learned from that. Here's what I came up with.

A good villain has a compelling history. Gothrwrain has a surprisingly convoluted history — hundreds of years before becoming a were-rat, he was the human wizard who created lycanthropy. He was eventually toppled by his greatest creation (and lover), infected, and bound to her will. So here's a villain who's been transformed into one of his own creations, forced to submit to a woman he once dominated, whom he loves and hates in equal measure. If that's not compelling, I don't know what is.

Gold Digger v3 #68, p. 3

A good villain might have turned out differently. At this point in his life, all Gothwrain really wants is to be left alone. True to his nature, he's chosen a convluted, devious, and needlessly antagonistic method of achieving his goals. If only he were slightly less cynical and sinister, he could have achieved them peacefully, but the easy path never even occured to him.

A good villain has staying power. By the time of his defeat, Gothwrain has been menacing the Diggers for over 100 issues. As soon as you've forgetten about him, he pops up to remind you that he's still out there, orchestrating events from behind the scenes.

A good villain gets others to do his dirty work. Gothwrain rarely steps out of the shadows. Instead, he has proxies to do his bidding — Kyle, Brendan, Zero, the "mall rats", Lowtor, even relative heavy-hitters like Gyphon and the Lich-King. Some of those folks don't even know that they're dancing to Gothwrain's tune. In fact, we never see Gothwrain casting spells until his final battle makes it necessary.

Gold Digger v3 #60, p. 18

A good villain always takes the long-term view. Gothwrain has been overtly manipulating the Diggers ever since Gold Digger v2 #41, conditioning them to react to his provocations in particular ways, but he's been subtly influencing them for far longer. He was responsible for the massacre of the were-cheetahs, for creating the Lich-King, and may have even been manipulating Tirant and Array for his own purposes. He's been planning his ultimate victory for over twenty years of Gold Digger time, and he's not afraid to take longer if it means getting what he wants.

A good villain is adaptable. While Gothwrain may always achieve his primary objectives — gaining access to the gold of the Leprechaun Kingdom, stealing scrolls from Dr. Diggers's library, or getting rid of Cheetah — he rarely achieves total victory. His pawns are taken off the chessboard, long-held assets and cover identities have to be abandoned, or his victory is tainted (say, Cheetah is only banished, not slain). But that never bothers him. He always finds a way to adapt and move forward.

A good villain never takes it personally. Truth be told, Gothwrain really doesn't have anything against the Diggers' except for their habit of interfering with his plans. He may need Dr. Diggers's incredible power reserves to bring his escape plan to fruition, but any other large power source would have worked just as well. It doesn't hurt Dr. Diggers is powerful enough to pose a threat to Gothwrain, while being moral enough that he won't raze all of Dark Home over a personal vendetta.

Gold Digger v3 #69, p. 24-5

A good villain makes you take it personally. Let's admire Gothwrain's sense of timing here. He's tormented the Diggers for years, stolen their prize posessions, turned Theodore's father into a demented lich, nearly killed Julia's prize pupil, banished their adopted daughter to another dimension, and is on the verge of killing them outright. So now is obviously the perfect time to throw fuel on the fire by killing Theodore's mother. How can you not hate that?

Gold Digger v3 #69, p. 29

A good villain always gets what he wants. No matter what the Diggers do, Gothwrain always finds a way to come out on top. All their strength, skill, and strategy comes to naught. In the end, Gothwrain is still calling all the shotes, and while his victory isn't as clean as he might have hoped, it's still a victory nonetheless.

A good villain never wins. Of course, what the villain wants is rarely what he really needs. That, and the hero is always one step behind him, ready to make him pay for all of his ill-gotten gains. Or maybe, just maybe, he discovers that he's played right into the hands of someone much, much worse...

Gold Digger v3 #69, p. 32

Story by Charles & Daniel Knauf
Art by Daniel Acuña
Letters by Todd Klein

I decided to stick with Eternals until the end of its initial storyline, despite being singularly uninpressed by the first three issues. My mistake. Charles and Daniel Knauf continue to spin an Eternals story as pedestrian as it is predictable.

I don't know why it's so hard to grasp the fact that the Eternals are not interesting in and of themselves. On their own, they're just a generic group of super-people, without much in the way of personality and motivation, and the Knaufs don't seem inclined to provide either. If these were the only six issues of Eternals you'd ever read, you would have no idea who these characters are. There's not much that distinguishes Thena from Ikaris or Sersi other than the role dictated for them by the plot.

Consider Phastos. One of the major subplots of the first six issues is that the Antarctic Eternals are competing with the Vorozhekhian Eternals to find and awaken new Eternals. But it's never explained why the Eternals are hidden, or why we should prefer Thena and Ikaris to Druig. Thena spends several issues trying to reawaken Phastos, but we're never told who Phastos is, other than a guy with a big hammer. Worse, when he's finally awakened, he proves to be next to useless, unable to use his expertise to help his fellow Eternals out of the jam that they're in. In short, an awful lot of space is spent exploring a sub-plot that doesn't go anywhere.

In a more general sense, selling the Eternals as straight superheros is a losing proposition. Despite the current popularity of superhero movies, the general public really has no interest in straight-up superheroes — very few of them have ever really broken through to the mainstream.¹ To sell a superhero you need to have a twist that makes the comic about more than about big beefo people beating the crap out of each other for no discernible reason — people can get that from any random issue of Youngblood from the mid-'90s, or from any other aspect of our culture for that matter. Eternals tries to hint at something more, at a forthcoming alien horde that may devour the planet, but is unable to sell that as just another alien invasion plot (and it's hard to get excited about another alien invasion in the wake of the one that the Marvel universe has just had).

Eternals #5, p. 17

Once again, I'm surprised with how quickly I've become bored with Daniel Acuña's art. In two years he hasn't bothered to show us anything new, and his flaws are now readily apparent. Consider the above page — it's got an appealing high-gloss look, but could it be any less energetic? I mean, a man is geting his back broken, but the storytelling is plodding, the composition uninspired, and the poses strangely devoid of any action. All the shiny textures in the world can't save this page from itself.

In short, Eternals is a total misfire of a series, bland and uninspiring, that tries to cover up its flaws with some shiny new paint. It's just not worth your time to check it out.

1. In order of conception: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, the Justice League, Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, Wolverine, and Spawn (maybe). Those are the superheroes that a random person on the street can name off the top of his head. Which isn't to say the general public hasn't heard of other heroes, but they'll be damned if they can tell you anything other than their names.

Okay, it's time for me to clear up some unfinished business from last year. First up, a review of the final two issues of Mark Millar and Tommy Lee Edward's 1985.

Story by Mark Millar
Art by Tommy Lee Edwards
Lettered by John Workman

When we last left Toby, he'd ventured into the Marvel Universe to find the only people capable of saving his universe from a rampaging army of supervillains — the Marvel Superheroes. But what Toby doesn't realize is that he's only suppressing the symptoms, and while he's off recruiting the Avengers and the Fantastic Four his father tries to cure the disease by placating poor, brain-damaged Clyde Wyncham. Will he succeed, or will the Marvel Universe wind up destroying the real world?

Obviously, the answer is no. And that does rob the issue of a lot of its dramatic power — there's never really any sense that anything is at stake, that the world is ever really in danger of being destroyed or that the victims of the supervillain rampage are anything more than meaningless cannon fodder.

Maybe, then, there's some compelling character development. Nope. Clyde Wyncham is a brain-damaged weirdo at the beginning of the series, and is still a brain-damaged weirdo at the end of the series. Toby doesn't really seem to learn anything from the experience — maybe he learns to admire his biological father more than fictional heroes, but he never really seemed to have any conflicts with his father in the first place. And while we're told that we'll eventually be surprised by what Toby's dad can do, that turns out to be scraping together an ounce of courage, driving an ice cream truck through a war zone, and delivering some comics to a drooling vegetable. Admirably heroic, but not exactly compelling reading.

How about thematically? Well, I'm not sure there are any themes that are explored in depth. The comic doesn't have much to say about 1985 as a turning point for the Marvel Universe or comics in general. It doesn't have much to say about the intersection of comics and reality. Is the point maybe that Toby ultimately chooses reality over comics? Maybe, but he's never really shown disconnecting from reality in a meaningful way, and ultimately he winds up dropping out of college to write comic books. The one thing that I really take away from 1985 is that the true villain is an over-entitled fanboy who's throwing a hissy fit because his old comics have been taken away, not realizing that he's helping to destroy the one thing that's sustained him for years. Which isn't exactly a novel sentiment anymore, and one that's hard to take from Mark Millar.

In short, this is really just a gimmicky origin for the underwhelming character of Clyde Wyncham. Unless you're a Marvel zombie there's not really any reason to pick it up.

Well, except maybe for Tommy Lee Edwards's art. Then again, that's a bit problematic too. At the end of issue #4, Toby had jumped to the Marvel Universe and I was worried that he hadn't done enough to differentiate it from the "real world." Were my fears unjustified?

1985 #5, p. 2

If you compare this to Edwards's artwork from previous issues you can easily see the tricks he's using to distinguish the Marvel Universe from the "real world": the Marvel Universe sequences have a slightly cartoonier style; executed purely with linework and no hatching; a brighter, washed-out color palette; and larger gutters and page borders. But it isn't different enough — the underdrawing and the general approach to the coloring are still the same, and so the transition isn't jarring enough.¹

This whole sequence would have had more "oomph" if they'd gone with Millar's original plan of having the real world characters and environments done up as photo comics, while the. On the other hand, I can't imagine that approach ever being cost-effective, even if they were using something similar to the "Rotoshopping" technique from Waking Life. Sure, digital photography makes it a lot cheaper than it used to be, but you're still talking about incurring expenses — hiring actors, digging up period clothes and props, building or renting sets. Possible, but unless this comic starts selling Secret Wars quantities it'd be hard for Marvel to recoup their costs. It'd be signficantly cheaper to just have a cartoonist draw the whole thing from his imagination.

I'm not sure how you'd salvage these sequences, though. You could have someone like Marie Severin do the coloring and separations 1985-style, with big ol' Benday Dots and seriously limited palette, but that would clash with Edwards' linework. You could turn them over to an old bullpen hand like Al Milgrom or Sal Buscema or even John Byrne, but that approach is practically clichéd. these days.

This major failing aside, though, Edwards' art is still gorgeous to look at — striking in its holistic approach, remarkable in the way that he suggests the inner life of his characters, and quite unlike anything else Marvel is putting out. If nothing else, 1985 has reminded me that he's an artist worth watching in the future, and that alone makes it a mild success.

1. Another nitpick specific to this image: none of the background characters in this image are acting properly. First off, they're not actually "reacting" as much as they are "posing" — perhaps understandable if they were rubbernecking at an accident but Toby just fell out of the sky not thirty seconds ago. And second, their sightlines are all off - they're not looking at Toby or the Trapster, but at a point about twenty feet in front of Toby (like, say, a camera). They're very well drawn and surprisingly individualized, but they're not really selling the reality of this panel at all.

Kris Straub's Starslip Crisis has been working towards a big storyline for weeks now as the crew of the Fuselli has been working with their arch-enemy, the time-dictator Katarkis, to disarm a "temporal bomb" that would wipe out their entire timeline. Recently, though, they realized Katarkis was just using them and abandoned him to explore an alternate way of escaping their universe. Katarkis then betrayed them to Deep Time, which pushed up the detonation of their bomb by several months. Thursday's strip ended with the Fuselli preparing to make an emergency starslip just as the bomb exploded, and visitors to the site on Friday were greeted with the following image...

Starslip Crisis 1/10/2009

That's a nice image — the Fuselli's starslip has broken the bonds of our reality as well as the bonds of its fictive reality, shattering the site structure and navigation. (The shattered "most recent strip" button, reflecting the total decimiation of the old timeline, is a nice touch.) Breaking free from the strip presentation to the infinite canvas really drives home that this is a breaking point, a major change for the strip.

It strikes me that this is probably one of the best, most effective ways to approach the infinite canvas — as an occasional break from the norm. (Another great Kevin Huizenga's big gatefold from Super Monster #14, presented in different format in Or Else #2.) I find most comics that whole-heartedly embrace the infinite canvas are a real chore to read - that they spend so much time exploring the canvas that reading them becomes a puzzling chore with diminishing rewards. I mean, if
every one
of my blog posts
was formatted
like an
Ogden Nash
poem
no one
would be
reading them.

To me, this is one of the great conceptual failures of the infinite canvas concept. Using it for a short, experimental piece or a one-off shock to the system tends to work well. But the artists who've whole-heartedly embraced the infinite canvas tend fall into two camps: folks who eschew any sort of structure, and folks who build an alternative, insanely complicated structure. Any sort of long-form work needs a minimum of structure. Perhaps not a lot, but at least a little structure that can be intuitively grasped by readers at a glance, like in Boswash or Rabbithead. The first crowd typically neglets to consider the structure at all, and the second tends to build a structure that's not worth the effort to decode.

I'm not opposed to formal experimentation or even alternative storytelling structures, but I think the finite canvas is here to stay for quite some time. After all, a man who contemplates infinity too much only has two choices: he can become enlightened, or he can go mad. And most people fall into the latter category.

Thought #37

No matter what franchise you order it at, what time of day you're eating, or who's manning the register, Taco Bell will always forget the nachos that come with your Grilled Stuffed Burrito combo. At first I thought this was one of life's great mysteries, and now I think it's one of life's reassuring little constants.

Thought #38

I've whined about Allegheny County's drink tax before, but there have been some interesting twists in the story lately. The tax has been wildly successful, raising millions more than anticipated, and the County Council figured it should go ahead and spend that extra revenue on shoring up our crumbling infrastructure. A great idea, but there's one problem — the legislation which authorizes the council levy a drink tax stipulates that the money so raised by the tax must be spent on public transportation. So when the budget was released drink tax opponents sued, and not surprisingly a judge agreed with them and forced the county to change its budget.

The response from the County Council has been downright predictable. A few hours after the ruling I heard Council President Rich Fitzgerald on the radio arguing that the decision was "judicial activism" and that the only alternative was to increase property taxes. I find this darkly amusing for several reasons:

1. It shows a complete disregard for the letter of the law that's unbecoming in an elected official.

2. It underscores that "judicial activism" only applies to decision you don't like. There's no activism here that I can see — the statute is fairly unambiguous Note that Onorato has decided not to appeal the ruling, which means that he knows that he doesn't have a leg to stand on.

3. It highlights that the only way the Council responds to adversity is to fall back to knee-jerk property tax fearmongering. I'd love to put a moratorium on council members talking about property taxes — maybe then they'd stop throwing temper tantrums when things don't go their way and actually get around to doing their job.

Thought #39

Went to a friend's wedding the other day and thought it might be a good time to break out my LensBaby and see if I could get some nifty shots...

Dan and Kasia kill some zombies

It's way out of focus, but I kinda like it

The altar at the Immaculate Heart of Mary, all decked out for Christmas

More christmas decor

Jim gets all sparkly

Mmm, cake

Thought #40

Went to see The Spirit with Tom Scioli today. It's not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination — but it's not the steaming piece of crap that most sites are making it out to be. Don't get me wrong, it's still a train wreck — but it's an entertaining train wreck, filled with all sorts of WTF? moments that are alternatively amusing and horrifying. It definitely makes it clear that Frank Miller is all about style rather than substance, though, and I don't think his reputation may ever recover.

Last year I made a resolution to read fifty new books — and I wound up reading fifty-six (plus another 24 books I was re-reading). The pace of my reading has slowed dramatically over the last several months, though, and I know why — I stopped taking the bus when the price of gas dropped to the point where a bus pass wasn't a good value. While driving to work is definitely faster, it's also wasted time — I can't do anything while driving other than focus on the road. Taking the bus gave me plenty of time to sleep, think, play video games, and especially read. I doubt I'll ever read at this pace for a while, unless the price of gas skyrockets (possible), or the price of a bus pass drops (extremely unlikely).

This year my resolution is to take all the time I spent reading and channel it into something creative.

Allegra Stratton, Muhajababes. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2008.

Jeffrey Kluger, Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple). New York: Hyperion, 2008.

Joshua Knelman and Rosalind Porter (eds.), Four Letter Word: Invented Correspondence from the Edge of Modern Romance. New York: Free Press, 2007.

Wow. It's been so long since I read these books that I can't recall what either of them is about except in the most general terms. That does not speak well for either book.

Ecology.Design.Synergy: Behnisch Architekten + Transsolar ClimateEngineering.. Berlin: Aedes, 2006.

This was the catalog for an exhibition at the Heinz Architectural Center last year, though that description is somewhat disingenous. The book and the exhibition featured the exact same content — word for word, letter for letter. The only difference is that the book is a neat little package the exhibition featured lots of awkward-to-read placards covered with tiny type. Given the choice between a $15 museum ticket and a $10 book that have the exact same content, I choose the book.

Ecology.Design.Synergy has some interesting things to say about green architecture, but the structure isn't doing it any favors. It's written like an architect's proposal or a PowerPoint presentation — random bullet points with only the most tenuous of links. This works for a proposal because 90% of the real work is done in face-to-face meetings where the architect can fill in the gaps. It doesn't really work for a book.

John McPhee, Oranges. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967.

Oranges was mentioned in a recent Step article about the color orange, and it sounded interesting enough to check out of the library. I'm glad I did. It's a breezy but memorable read filled with fun facts about the biology, history, sociology and industry of oranges (and citrus fruit in general).

Here's my favorite anecdote from the book, one that's really stuck with me. There are some researchers who are trying to create a virus-resistant strain of Persian limes. To do this, they need to grow some lime trees, but no one actually grows lime trees — lime buds are just grafted onto hardier rootstock. So they need to start from seeds, which means cutting up limes. But Persian limes have been bred for seedlessness, and the researchers go through a few thousand limes without finding a single seed. So go to a plant that makes frozen limeade concentrate, sifted through two dump trucks of leftover sludge, which nets them a mere 250 seeds. But citrus fruits are weird — they can produce seeds of just about anything that's ever been grafted to the rootstock they're growing on. Out of those 250 seeds, just two wound up being lime seeds. Their colleagues are shocked — they didn't think they'd get any lime seeds.

The first time I read that I thought that there was a metaphor for something in there. And then I realized that there's a metaphor for everything in there.

Michel Gondry, You'll Like This Film Because You're In It: The Be Kind Rewind Protocol. Brooklyn: PictureBox, 2008.

After the filming of Be Kind Rewind, Michel Gondry decided to take the same idea to the next level, setting up a soundstage in a New York art gallery and allowing groups go through and create videos with a number of sets and props. The resulting videos were then placed in the front of the gallery where they could be rented for free. Most of the movies sound simultaneously dreadful and appealing but Gondry loves them all, less for their artistry and more for what they reveal about the folks making them.

Sarah Manguso, Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Everything Sarah Manguso writes is great, and this memoir of her battle witha rare autoimmune disease is no exception.

George MacDonald Fraser, The Reavers. New York: Random House, 2008.

I've heard generally positive things about Fraser's "Flashman" novels, so I was surprised that this book is an unreadable mess — badly plotted with idiotic cardboard characters and an overblown writing style that somehow managed to stretch a 50 page short story into a 200+ page book. Are all of Fraser's novels this bad or is The Reavers just an exception?

Paul Gravett & Peter Stanbury, Holy Sh*t!: The World's Weirdest Comic Books. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008.

I dunno what's worse: that I actually own copies of several of the comics referenced within, or that I own a few that are weirder.

Mario Acevado, X-Rated Bloodsuckers. New York: Eos, 2007.

A mediocre murder mystery where some of the characters happen to be vampires. From the title I was expecting at least some mild titillation but the action here is so extra-mild that it doesn't even qualify as softcore. Note to authors and editors: if your title promises x-rated vampires you'd better deliver!

Hey. Sorry for being totally incommunicado for the last two months. My laptop died at the beginning of November and it took me a week or two to get it back into order, and then I got sucked into all sorts of holiday madness at home and at the office. Regular posting resumes January 2nd.

My 2008 Christmas card

"Mele Kalikimaka" is the thing to say
On a bright Hawaiian Christmas day
That's the island greeting that we send to you
From the land where palm trees sway
Here we know that Christmas will be green and bright
The sun will shine by day and all the stars at night
"Mele Kalikimaka" is Hawaii's way to say
"Merry Christmas to you"

I have become aware that my brother has expressed his mild displeasure with the thoughtful holiday mixtape that I put together this year. You spend hours carefully assembling a well-thoughout holiday mix, and I guess this is the thanks you get. Here's the track listing, so you can decide for yourself. (Some of these songs were suggested by Musical Fruitcake though to be fair I've had a lot of the more annoying novelty songs from that site for years.)

1. Eddie Lawrence, "The Merry Old Philosopher" #1
2. Barry Gordon, "Zoomah the Santa Claus from Mars"
3. Elvis Presley, "Santa Claus is Back in Town"
4. Everclear, "Santa Baby"
5. Patsy Raye and the Beatniks, "Beatnik's Wish"
6. Kay Martin & Her Body Guards, "Come On Santa, Let's Have a Ball"
7. Bon Jovi, "Back Door Santa"
8. Barnes & Barnes, "I Had Sex With Santa"
9. Dance Hall Crashers, "I Did It for the Toys"
10. Sarah Silverman, "Give the Jew Girl Toys"
11. Insane Clown Posse, "Santa's a Fat Bitch"
12. Lock, Shock & Barrel, "Kidnap the Sandy Claws"
13. The Western Caravan featuring Thirsty Dave, "Psycho"
14. Eddie Lawrence, "The Merry Old Philosopher" #2
15. The Ramones, "Merry Christmas (I Don't Want to Fight Tonight)"
16. Gary Hoey, "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"
17. Los Straitjackets, "The Christmas Song"
18. John Denver & Rowlf the Dog, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"
19. The Tempatations, "Someday at Christmas"
20. Eric Cartman, "O Holy Night"
21. Copeland, "Do You Hear What I Hear?"
22. Richard Cheese, "Silent Night"
23. The Butties, "Joy to the World"
24. Tripod, "I Was the Only Shepherd"
25. Stan Kenton, "We Three Kings of Orient Are"
26. Bing Crosby, "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day"
27. Eddie Lawrence, "The Merry Old Philosopher" #3

That's not so bad, is it? Seventy minutes of listening pleasure. It's even got some swell cover art, so you can quickly glance at it and say "God, no way am I listening to that again" and dig out a different CD.

So, Chris. Don't like the mix? Well, the way to get back is to get even, my friend. Make a mix that foists your musical tastes on me. I dare you. And I dirty double-dog dare you not to put your face on the cover.

Gender Equality

While the subject is fresh in your mind, why are there a million songs where horny girl wants to sex up Santa, but no songs where a horny guy wants to sex up Mrs. Claus? I mean, she's not my idea of a GILF either, but come on — the old workaholic coops her up at a secluded location 364 days of the year and then leaves her completely alone on the 365th. She's gotta have all sort of pent up perversions she needs to let out. I'm thinking it's probably a 24 hour marathon of elf-and-reindeer debauchery.

Wow, that was one hell of a bender. Who won the election? I can't seem to find results anywhere.

When you vote today, remember...

Only one candidate has a true record of reform with results. Only one candidate has unparalleled experience as a community organizer, mobilizing the largest segment of our population. Only one candidate has a comprehensive platform that will simultaneously solve our impending unemployment, healthcare, and retirement crises. Only one candidate can confront America's enemies with our greatest weapon — the boundless enthusiasm of youth.

Only one candidate has the strength of will to herd everyone over the age of 30 into concentration camps and make America great again.

Frost/LeRoy 2008

Youth: America's Secret Weapon

There's a new sun risin' up angry in the sky
And there's a new voice sayin' "we're not afraid to die"
Let the old world make believe it's blind and deaf and dumb
But nothing can change the shape of things to come

There are changes lyin' ahead in every road
And there are new thoughts ready and waiting to explode
When tomorrow is today the bells may toll for some
But nothing can change the shape of things to come

The future's comin' in, now sweet and strong
Ain't no-one gonna hold it back for long

There are new dreams crowdin' out old realities
There's revolution sweepin' in like a fresh new breeze
Let the old world make believe it's blind and deaf and dumb
Nothing can change the shape of things to come

I'm Max Frost and I approve this message.

Thought #33

For a while now, I've been trying to figure out what I've learned from PodCamp, and the answer is: nothing. That isn't all that surprising — a social media conference isn't really going to have much to teach someone who is wired into the internet 24/7 for his job.

Even though I didn't learn anything, I still think PodCamp offered a lot of benefits from a pscyhological standpoint. Every once in a while I start panicking because I think that if god forbid something did happen to my job there's nowhere else in Pittsburgh that would employ me, or that I'm the only person in town who occupies this crazy little niche. Sitting in a big room with dozens of other people in the same situation goes a long way towards alleviating those anxieties.

Thought #34

Currently on my sixth set of headphones for the year. Oh my.

The fourth set were actually great headphones — except that they had these thin little rubber wraps that acted as a cushion around the speaker and those popped off way too easily. They were easy enough to put back on, but eventually one rolled away and disappeared for good. The headphones were still producing some great sound but were now too painful to wear.

Fed up, I decided to go with some super-cheap headphones for the fifth set. Unfortunately, it was a case of getting what you paid for — even with the volume cranked to the max the loudest song I had was easily drowned out by background noise. I figured a little pain was good for the soul and went back to the fourth set, until I stumbled out of bed at three in the morning and stepped on one of the earbuds. Ouch, and also whoops.

Fortunately, the sixth set is working out just fine — they're my preferred model, the JVC Gumi earbuds, and for once I've been able to find them in a nice, manly color that doesn't make me feel like a twelve year-old girl.

Thought #35

It's interesting how certain pop culture references get stuck in your head. The other day I was driving home after a Dead Milkmen concert and along the way I drove through one of first real snowstorms of the year. And, just like every year in late October when the first unseasonal flakes begin to fall, this was the first thing that ran through my mind...

It happens during that first snowstorm every year. And I wasn't even born when this strip first ran.

Thought #36

My family carves some weird pumpkins

Sister Noélle gets ready to lay the smack down

"Blacker than a moonless night, hotter and more bitter than Hell itself..."

Here's a challenge my buddy Mike set for me a while ago — to write about the comics of Jack Chick from an aesthetic perspective without talking about their religious content. It took me a while to come up with an aesthetic angle I could write about meaningfully, and I still have to talk about their religious content- but only in the ways that it impacts their chief aesthetic decision.

Anyone who's read more than a handful of Chick tracts know that they come in two distinct varieties — some of them are drawn in a stilted photorealistic style, and others in a stilted gag strip style. But what determines which tract is drawn in which style? The answer is simple but also shows a mildly sophisticated grasp of the medium.

excerpt from The Fool

Here's the Chick "gag" style, as seen in tracts like Flight 144 No Fear, and The Fool. These primary purpose of these tracts is evangelical — they're trying to convince you to accept Christ into your life — and the primary way they do that is by encouringing a small amount of projection onto the characters. Chick wants you put yourself in the place of the plane passenger who doesn't believe in God, the depressed kid who wants to commit suicide, or the king who hasn't prepared for the end. By using cartoonish, iconic figures he makes this self-identification easier — there are no details or specifics to get hung up on. That's cool media 101.

excerpt from The Visitors

Here's the Chick "photorealistic" style, as seen in tracts Dark Dungeons and The Visitors, or in his full-sized Crusaders comics. The primary purpose of these tracts is cautionary — they're trying to convince you that Catholics or Mormons aren't real Christians, that Black Muslims are really gangsters, that Dungeons and Dragons is a front for satanism, etc. The goal of the art, therefore, is not to encourage you to identify with the characters, but to convince you that they're real and pose an actual threat to your spiritual well-being. A cartoony style might lead you to associate with the characters and think that you aren't at risk, or even make you think that the threats are exaggerated and overblown. Thus, a more studied realistic style is more likely to convince you that these threats are very real.

So there you have it — a simple aesthetic choice that shows Jack Chick's surprisingly effective grasp of the medium of comics.

At the end of the day Friday, my co-worker Ben pops his head over the partition between our work spaces and says "Hey, Franklin McMahon is next door right now. Want to go and grab a drink with him?"

For those of you who aren't familiar with Franklin, he once had an awesome podcast called "Media Artist Secrets" that Ben and I loved (recently he's been working on other people's podcasts). It turns out Franklin is in town for PodCamp Pittsburgh, and he's over at Fat Head's having a drink with Chris Brogan, Jim Russell of Burgh Diaspora and a few others. He sent out a Tweet about it, Ben saw it, and well, meeting him in person was too cool to pass up. Anyway, Franklin is totally cool and, gregarious fellow that he is, invites us to crash the PodCamp Meet-n-Greet down the street at AlphaLab. It takes a bit of prodding to convince Ben to go but eventually we agree to meet at the party later that evening.

First, though, I have to go home, change, and sober up. (Turns out drinking two high ABV beers on an empty stomach is a bad idea — who knew?) A long T ride and half a loaf of bread later, I'm still not sober enough to drive, so I have to take the T back to the South Side instead of driving. As a result I wind up missing the little speech AlphaLab gives about their current projects, but Ben and Franklin tell me to go check out Chogger, which they describe as a webcomic creation tool.

Chogger is a very basic attempt to graft a simple comics creation tool onto a social media image-sharing site. You can build a comic, tag it, collect comments and feedback on it — if you've ever used Flickr it'll all seem very familiar. There's no real content management system you can use to trickle out updates — heck, at the moment you can't even generate an RSS feed of your comics. That's fine, though. What I'm more interested in is the comic creation tool. Here's the default view you get when creating a new strip in Chogger.

The basic unit in Chogger is the panel. You can import images from your hard drive, create drawings, or type out word ballons, and when you're done you place them into a panel. Once you've placed an item in a panel, that's it — you can't drag, or even copy and paste it into another panel. There are ways to make the image bleed over the edge of the panel but they're not intuitive.

You start off with three square panels, but you can add new panels by clicking the "plus panel" button in the lower left hand corner of an existing panel, delete an existing panel by clicking the x button in the upper left hand corner, or resize any panels by grabbing the drag handle in the lower right hand corner, and reorganize panels by dragging them around. Interestingly, you can't create a new tier by dragging a panel beneath its brethren — you actually have to click the "new tier" button at the bottom of the screen. Once you have multiple tiers, though, you can drag panels between them with impunity.

Here's what Chogger's drawing tool looks like.

The immediate annoyance is that the drawing tool uses a separate view from the panel arrangement tool, which makes it hard to figure out how your drawing will fit with the existing elements in your panel. You can always scale your drawing later, but that doesn't always work out so well.

The basic drawing tools boil down to a pencil, a line tool, and a filled shape tool (with oval and rectangle variants). You can change the line width and color, and the fill color. There's no marquee or lasso selection tool, paint bucket, or eraser. Once you lift the mouse button, your new element is fixed — there's no way to move or change it other than undoing your changes or scribbling over them with white.

Also, those buttons at the bottom, which look like they're for rotating your drawing? They're the "undo" and "redo" buttons. It took me forever to figure that out.

Once you're done with your drawing, you can rotate it, shift it up and down in relation to the other elements you've placed into the panel. That's it.

This is not a great drawing tool. In fact, it's downright annoying, and is in some ways inferior even mediocre tools like MS Paint. Some other odd quirks:

• It can be tricky to figure out how to edit the word balloons — you just have to double click on them, but I kept expecting an insertion point icon to come up. I also can't find a way to deliberately change the size or shape of the balloons. They automatically grow taller as you type, but there's apparently no way to change their width, change the font, or even scale the text size.

• Resizing a panel with content in it actually crops it instead of scaling the content down.

• Panels can't span tiers — if you have an extra tall panel it just pushes down the tier beneath it rather than bridging the two tiers. Panels always have fixed-width black borders. The gutters are always the same size and can't be changed.

• The Chogger interface is Flash-based, but your final strips are PNG files. It might be nice to leave the strips as Flash so you can take advantage of the inherent scalability, or at least give you some options with regards to the file format you want to use.

• Once you've created a comic, you can't go back to edit it or even delete it from the system.

• You have to agree to the Chogger terms of service when creating an account, but at the moment their terms consist of a bare-bones skeleton with a clause allowing them to unilaterally change the terms on you.

So far, Chogger looks like a great little tool for just goofing around, but I don't think it'll be setting the webcomics world on fire anytime soon. In all fairness, I don't think it's supposed to — I think it's supposed to be a tech demo for the drawing tool, and on that level it's a mild success.

David Peace, Tokyo Year Zero. New York: Knopf, 2007.

Tokyo, 1946. A police detective investigates a series of rapes and murders (based on the case of Yoshio Kodaira, which is covered in more detail in Mark Schrieber's Shocking Crimes of Postwar Japan). Along the way he discovers the ugly truths lurking beneath the surface of occupied Japan — and the ugly truths about him self.

This is a very confused book. It's not a police procedural, and in fact most of the key moments in the murder investigation take place between the lines. It's not a character study, since the protagonist is trying very hard not to reveal anything about his character. It's suffused with some obnoxiously stylistic tics that can make it very hard to follow, and it's about twice as long as it really needs to be. It does prevent an excellent portrait of postwar Japan and the psychological difficulties experienced by Japanese soldiers mustering out of the Imperial army, though.

It strikes me that Tokyo Year Zero would've made a great nouvelle vague movie — most of the weaknesses of the book could be eliminated by compressing the timeframe, accentuating the key themes, and getting some great actors to play up the psychological conflicts. I'm thinking Joe Shishido would've been great in the role.

Noah Charney, The Art Thief. New York: Atria, 2008.

This is a terrible, terrible book — possibly the worst book I've read all year, and that's saying something. Too many poorly fleshed-out characters, a plot that takes forever to get moving, and an intricately-plotted but strangely uninteresting quadruple cross that relies to heavily on everything working out just so. I mean, for God's sake, it involves a pair of comically Frensh detectives chasing a master criminal who hides his loot behind a cunning magic square number puzzle — what the heck is this, Myst? Avoid at all costs.

Vernor Vinge, The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge. New York: Orb, 2001.

I prefer Vinge's novels, but these short stories are still pretty entertaining. He does have an unfortunate habit of trying to cram too much into a single story — most short stories can really only support one big change or outlandish idea, but Vinge keeps getting involved in fiddly details that don't actually make much of a difference plot-wise.

Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi. Translated by Barbara Wright. New York: New Directions, 1961.

This is a difficult play to read. Not because of content or style, mind you — it's hard to read because the text is set in a font that resembles crabbed handwriting and is frequently overlapped by crude sketches by Pierre Bonnard. It's worth the effort, though — Père Ubu is a fascinating character, simultaneously everyman and monster, and Jarry's Absurdist humor holds up well and still manages to be somewhat shocking. I wonder if it'd even be possible to present a new work like this today — I suspect that there's just too much hostile indifference to overcome.

Dan Raviv, Comic Wars. New York: Broadway, 2002.

I suppose the lesson to take away from Comic Wars is that if you're going to run a company, you should at least have a few people in management who actually give a rat's ass about its primary business.

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody. New York: Penguin, 2008.

I think a problem with most books about the Internet is that by the time they make it into print most of their observations are either trite or irrelevant. Here Comes Everybody falls into the "trite" column, never really providing any unique insights that might make it worth reading.

Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol. New York: Gotham, 2008.

This is a lot less thorough than Gately's last book, a cultural history of tobacco, but then it has about twenty times as much material to cover. It's fascinating to discover that Aristotle invested a form of distillation but went at it backwards (he was trying to turn wine into weak grape juice). Or that it took until the eighteenth century for people to realize that beer, wine, and distilled spirits all derived their kick from the same substance (and at the same moment they were realizing that excessive consumption of distilled spirits could kill you). Or to see how diferent drinking customs develop around the world. Drink may leave you craving more detail, but it's a great read.

It was odd to read Clay Shirky's essay "Gin, Television and Social Surplus" around the same time I was finishing up Drink. Gately's provides a much more convincing rationale for the role of gin in society, and why we stopped drinking it wholesale — and it has less to do with a spontaneous cultural awakening and more to do with World War I.

Sven A. Kirsten, Tiki Modern and the Wild World of Witco. Köln: Taschen, 2007.

I read way too many of these damn Taschen books, but it's almost like they're catering to my own weird little hang-ups. This one is a cut above average, with some excellently-written essays and some inspiring photos. There's some restaurant interiors from Ohio, of all places, that will just blow your mind. And if nothing else it's given me the titles of a few more Les Baxter albums to hunt down.

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006.

John McCain and Mark Salter, Worth The Fighting For: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2002

I was more interested in reading The Audacity of Hope but I figured it couldn't hurt to give McCain equal time. It's not really fair to compare the two books — one is a manifesto written by someone trying to position themselves as a presidential candidate, while the other is a mass-market memoir written by someone whose presidential aspirations seemed to be dead at the time. But I'm going to do it anyway.

McCain's book is definitely the weaker of the two. In 2002 McCain's presidential aspirations have been shot to hell by 9/11 but he's still looking forward to a long career in the Senate, so he's trying not to step on any toes or alienate potential allies. The result is a fairly toothless memoir of McCain's Congressional career, punctuated with occasional portraits of "mavericks I have known."

McCain's Congressional career turns out to be full of unintentional revelations. He discusses several high-profile incidents, but only from a political viewpoint — he seems totally uninterested in the underlying issues of the Tower nomination or the Keating Five scandal. He forces his way onto committees but never actually seems to do anything on them. And he keeps breaking out POW references to try and cut off debate. It's strange to see the "new" conventional wisdom on McCain emerge from a softball autobiography, and seems to imply that for eight years we've been in deep denial about his true nature.

The "portraits in maverickness" are likewise disturbing, as McCain appears drawn to individuals for their iconoclasm but doesn't appear to have learned anything else from their life stories. For instance, McCain professes a great love for Billy Mitchell and Ted Williams — but never seems to recognize that Mitchell's unabashed arrogance wound up crippling his career and stalling the development of the air force, or that Williams's perfectionism made him and everyone around him miserable.

I'll give McCain this, though — the chapter on the POW-MIA hearings is great, filled with genuine emotion and pathos. Pick up the book, read that one chapter, and put it back on the shelf.

The Audacity of Hope is a similarly lightweight book, but it really does manage to present an effective portrait of Obama and where he stands on the issues. I may not agree with him 100% of the time, but he comes off as thoughtful and careful, and those strike me as exactly the qualities I'm looking for in a presidential contender. As with McCain it's easy to draw an unbroken line from the Obama of Audacity to the Obama we have today — suggesting that much of the crushing disappointment expressed by far-left Democrats in the middle portion of the campaign has more to do with an unhealthy level of projection by special interest groups looking for a new messiah rather than any cynical triangulation by Obama himself.

There's something missing from color comics these days — the color white. It's a popular color for clothing, cars, walls, appliances, and yet it occurs in comics with far less regularity than it does in real life. Flip through the average superhero comic and the only white you're likely to see are the word balloons, and maybe teeth and eyes. It's even been banished from the panel borders of many comics.

I can understand the reticience to use white. It's a very powerful color that taxes the eyes even in small amounts. Pure white can draw the eyes to unwanted areas, just like pure, highly saturated areas of any other color. Its very presence can throw off your perception of other colors, darkening or lightening them through the magic of simultaneous contrast. Large areas of pure white somehow feel less "realistic" (though that doesn't explain why even cartoony coloring jobs exchew it). As the underlying color of the paper stock, large white areas can make the coloring feel rushed or incomplete.

Gold Digger v3 #52 p. 24

But when used effectively, white can be your friend. The above page uses it beautifully. Here it's an unstoppable force, suffusing everything over the page, blurring over the edges of objects and enveloping them of in an imitation of film effects. This page would not be nearly as effective with a a different base color, such as a paler blue or a subtle cream.

Other comics also use white effectively. Walt Simonson memorably used large white expanses to suggest an eerie nothingness during his Fantastic Four run. Greg Wright used pure white areas to depict blinding, crackling energy when he was coloring Thor. Silver age comics often use it effectively, though of course they have an entirely different design and color aesthetic.

It just strikes me as odd that mainsream colorists have removed white from their palette. It strikes me as mildly defeatist and short-sighted as well. Why would any designer constrain themselves in that way?

Story and art by Ai Morinaga
Translation by Athena and Alethea Nibley
Lettering and retouch by North Market Street Graphics

It's been a while, but lazy glutton Hana Suzuki and the worthless layabouts of the Grand Hockey Club are back and doing what they do best. Which does not include hockey. No, Hana and company are too busy cramming for midterms, matching wits with chickens, running haunted houses, hunting yeti, saving farms from bankruptcy, and dealing with unwanted intrusions from Lolitas, ghosts, and dojin artists. They also pick up a new "faculty advisor," Yukio François Saint-Martin, whose monstrous egomania winds up dragging them into some strange and dangerous situations.

Oh, and along the way they do actually manage to play about half of a hockey game against some old-school pirates.

My favorite story has to be one from early in volume 4, where Hana has to infiltrate an all-girl's school only to discover that it's like a bad shojo manga from the '70s...

My Heavenly Hockey Club v4 p. 70

The design work on that tennis player is fascinating. Her general proportions and character designs are definitely pure Morinaga, but the shape of her mouth and the detailing on her ears, nose and lips all combine to make her look like she's walked out of the '70s. The overwrought rose background helps too.

I found these volumes of My Heavenly Hockey Club to be somewhat disappointing. The stories tend revolve around wacky hijinks rather than solid character-based humor, which I find a lot less interesting. The introduction of Martin in volume 6 is particularly jarring since there are still several unexplored character combinations, and Martin's outsized personality overwhelms the junior members of the hockey club. Most of the stories are entertaining, though, and the best of them are simply hilarious.

What I really want to talk about, though, is Morinaga's design for Hana, which I've been admiring for some time.

Hana's character design is a great example of how to suggest a character possesses certain attributes without slipping into stereotypes or conflating appearance with personality. Everything about her screams "laziness" without overemphasizing the point.

The shape of her eyes suggests a degree or fatigue — the upper lids droop precipitously downward while the lower lids sag slightly at the outer corners, and they're usually half-lidded as well. The detailing on her pupils typically over-uses the "shimmer" effect, making it seem like they're trembling from exhaustion. Her eyebrows are typically level regardless of her overall attitude, which makes her seem bored. Her mouth is placed low on her face with turned-down corners, making her appear relaxed at best and slack-jawed at worst. Her neck is tiny compared to that of the male characters, which gives her head feel like it's lazily bobbling about. Her hairstyle is as simple and possible, short and straight and easy to maintain. It's a sort of hairstyle that looks more appropriate for an elementary school student, which also suggests Hana's essential immaturity. Even her mode of dress underscores her essential laziness — when she's not wearing her school uniform she usually wears pullover shirts and jeans rather than skirts or more elaborate outfits.

At the same time, these elements aren't over-emphasized to a degree where they become obvious. The effect is purely subliminal. It's a real triumph of design.

Story and art by Yoshiki Nishimura
Translated by Tomo Kimura
Lettering and retouch by Sabrina Heep

Old Business

It's been a while since I last checked in with In the comments to my last Skip-Beat! post, Miki wrote:

Ex: You call Kyoko and her character design, "wild and unpredictable but very conventional at the same time."

That's the main problem with Skip-Beat! right there. It sounds like it's twisting a cliché into something different, (and I do agree it uses its cliche and makes them enjoyable) but even though it seems to strive to be different, it is still SO conventional. Wants revenge. It devilish but good inside. Falls in love with another more deserving but at first unlikable guy. Kyoko has more quirks than that, and makes it more interesting, but it's still very conventional. Her character comes off as flat for me too.

Another aspect that you seem to enjoy and I don't is the physical comedy. I like humor that's witty and sharp, done with clever images or great dialogue that makes me laugh out loud. The totally obvious ones don't work for me. I think "that's suppose to be funny" instead of laughing.

I don't disagree with most of Miki's assessments. Kyoko really is a very conventional character beneath a veneer of edginess, but I would argue that's part of her appeal. It's like Mean Girls — we get a brief frisson when a good girl turns bad, but what we're really looking for is that moment when she comes to her senses and gets back on the right track. We're not rooting for Kyoko to destroy Sho, we're wating for the tiny moments when she's able to rebuild her life. In some ways, that's very unconventional. A lot of romance manga are filled with girls who escape from the normal world into unusual or fantastic situation. Here's a manga where the character is surrounded by celebrities and dreams of nothing more than being able to go to high school and ice cream with her BFF.

It's also true that Kyoko is more caricature than character in the early volumes. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing for a character in a comedy. Half of the fun is watching her careen from violent emotion to violent emotion, wholeheartedly embracing whatever mood she's in whether fair or foul. (On the other hand, as the book becomes less of a madcap comedy and more of a romantic comedy, a toned down version of Kyoko that emerges that is a lot less compelling.)

A two-faced Kyoko turns on a dime (Skip-Beat v7, p. 121)

As for the physical humor and low comedy, we're just going to have to agree to disagree. Don't get me wrong, I love sophisticated humor and clever with as much as the next guy — heck, my favorite author is Balzac — but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy Man Getting Hit By Football too.

New Business

When we last left Kyoko, she'd manage to claw her way up from cleaning floors to dressing up in a chicken suit on a variety show and starring in a television commercial. In the process, she's managed to win a new friend, discover a vocation that she actually enjoys, and pass her high school entrance exams. Of course, she's also managed to antagonize Ren Tsuruga, the most popular movie star in Japan — though maybe they don't hate each other as much as they think. Ah, to be young, and in love, and also an emotional cripple.

In these volumes, she's offered a role that could give a tremendous boost her career — a starring role in a music video for, you guessed it, Sho Fuwa. It takes a bit of convincing, but she eventually accepts with the idea that she'll sabotage Sho's video by standing out more than he does. Of course, to pull that off, she'll have to work side by side with Sho without revealing her true identity...

Just smile! You can do it! (Skip-Beat! v7, p. 98)

You've gotta love those grudge Kyokos — it's like they've been scientifically proportioned for maximum cuteness, and the sheer incongruity of all that saccharine cuteness and the overly-sinister shading is really amusing. I'm actually kind of curious to see what sort of voice they've given them in the anime adaptation (I'm imagining a sort of Talky Tina voice, myself).

Of course, Kyoko's plan completely backfires. Sho sees through her act and her revenge is denied. It's an interesting step backwards for the character, but one that seems entirely appropriate, and it's to Nishimura's credit that Kyoko's backsliding takes the book into new directions rather than just forcing the series to cover the same ground over and over again. In this case, her thwarted desire to one-up Sho actually winds up deepening her appreciation for the art of acting.

In these volumes Kyoko also has to deal with a jealous classmate, a bratty child star trying to destroy her career, and the craziness of her co-worker Moko's private life. Plenty of comedy to be had. Volume nine ends with Kyoko getting an offer for a role that might make her an instant superstar (as well as eat up at least the next five volumes of the book).

Unfortunately, there are a lot fewer visual metaphors in these volumes than in the previous six. Fortunately, there's enough wackiness from the grudge Kyokos to make up for it.

Kyoko gets ready to open a can of whup-ass on Sho (Skip-Beat! v8 p. 124)

So more great stuff from Yoshiki Nishimura. Unfortunately, the next couple of volumes almost wind up bringing things to a screenching halt...

Here's a quick revision of the character sketch I first shared about a month ago. I decided to un-flatten the character's jaw a bit and tone down the two-tone hair but other than that it's largely unchanged.

I'm not quite happy with the character's wardrobe, though. The effect I'm trying to go for is someone who's thrown out a huge wardrobe of t-shirts and is trying to dress more respectably but doesn't quite know how to pull that off. Does anyone have any suggestions for possible outfits that would look awkward and slightly age-inappropriate without looking totally ludicrous?

Random Thoughts

Thought #29

It's sort of sad that when I see the headline "Bodack hired by city sewer authority" the first thought that comes to mind is, "Gee, they must have great Fortitude saves over at the PWSA."

Thought #30

Up the street from me, South Hills Optical is advertising it's "hot, sexy Sarah Palin frames." I wish this was a joke but apparently it isn't. There's nothing wrong with being attractive but this seems like an undignified way to treat someone running for a national political office. Even if she is hot (but politically repugnant).

Thought #31

CARE

Thought #32

My current apartment has a screened-in porch, so this year I thought I might put out some pots and grow some vegetables. (It turns out the suburban nesting instict runs much deeper than I'd thought.) The cold Spring meant that I got a late start, but as of today my hard work has finally paid off.

Behold nature's glorious bounty!

Dinky little things, ain't they? The largest one is about 2" in diameter. I was thinking of making the world's smallest BLT, but the Sonoma Grille has apparently beat me to it.

Obviously my porch does not get enough sunlight for growing tomatoes. Oh well. The good news is that the peppers turned out just fine, so next year I think I'll be growing a lot more.

Here's a pleasant surprise — Andrews McMeel sent me review copies of Stephan Pastis's two new Pearls Before Swine books in the mail.

Macho Macho Animals

Macho Macho Animals is the sixth Pearls Before Swine collection, reprinting strips for late 2006 and early 2007, including some of my favorite PBS strips, the ones where the newly unemployed FoxTrot characters drop by for a visit. (The collection also features a series of strips with some disturbingly grownup Family Circus characters.)

Macho Macho Animals p. 94

I think these strips tend to highlight one of the appeals of Pearls Before Swine — the effortless way in which Pastis is able to break the fourth wall. Metatextual humor like this is very, very hard to pull off. Frequently, cartoonists substitute it for actual humor, or because they think it somehow makes them "transgressive" or "edgy" (never mind the fact that the wall-breaking has been around since the days of the ancient Athens).

And yet, Pastis makes it look effortless. Perhaps one of the reasons is that he rarely draws attention to the mechanisms of comic production — characters don't break out of their panels, trip over copyright notices or stab each other to death with word balloons. When characters wander in from other comic strips, or Rat and Pig heckle Pastis at his drawing table, it feels natural rather and organic rather than constructed and artificial.

So, more fun stuff from Stephan Pastis, and a collection well worth adding to your strip library next to The Crass Menagerie.

Da Crockydile Book o' Frendsheep

I've never been a big fan of the "gift book" format.¹ The content is usualliy repurposed from existing sources, there's rarely enough content to satisfy an avid reader, and for the same price you can usually get a much more substantive "regular" book o' the same material.

Apparently Stephan Pastis is not quite sold on the gift book format either. Da Crockydile Book o' Frendsheep is almost presented as a parody of gift books. The introduction positions the book as a blatant cash grab by the crocodiles of Zeeba Zeeba Eta. The strips included in the book frequently have nothing to do with the theme of friendship except for a new caption scrawled beneath the punchline panel. And, of course, you couldn't ask for a bigger mismatch between theme and character — the crocodiles are ruthless, cunning, and so viciously self-absorbed that the mere concept of "frendsheep" is beyond their understanding.

The format is interesting, though — the first two panels of each strip run on the left-hand page, and the punchline runs at a larger size on the right-hand page. A caption is added under the punchline that ostensibly ties back into the theme of friendship.

It's an interesting attempt to repurpose the existing material, but it doesn't quite work. The punchline panels don't quite work as single panels, and the increased size just seems to make the punchline feel more obvious.

Overall, Da Crockydile Book o' Frendsheep collection is a cut above the average gift book but still eminently ignorable.

Complimentary copies for these reviews were provided by the publisher.

1. An exception: Comic Book Guy's Book of Pop Culture. Now there's a fun gift book.

Tragic Relief is a Xeric Grant-winning wordless comic by Colleen Frakes, a graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies. It's the story of a man, his mother, the women that come between them, and the tragedies that result.

There's a lot to discuss here. The protagonist's first three relationships are with mythological creatures — they may represent a yearning to be free rather than actual relationships. His potential paramours keep running afoul of his ancient mother who, with her dark glasses and shriveled lips, resembles nothing more than a grinning skeleton — the eternal clash of eros and thanatos. Our protagonist clearly realizes that his relationship with his mother is killing any chance of having a relationship with another woman — and I'm not quite sure whether that indicates that he's too nice for his own good, or just a wuss. For that matter, when he finally gets that nice girl, she winds up filling the void left by his mother in a rather creepy way — and I'm not sure whether that says something disturbing about him, or her. Or even me.

What I really want to discuss, though, is Frakes' effectively minimal drawings. Here's a page from the end of the first chapter, after our protagonist has loved (and lost) a mermaid...

Tragic Relief p. 20

The magic of comics — on their own, each of these drawings is just a bit too simple, too pared down to represent anything concrete or moving. But together, and in context, they make a terribly affecting sequence.

The initial drawings of the boat, of course, are almost childishly simple — we can recognize the sea, and the boat, and a small man standing on the deck. The only stab at particularizing the proceedings are some strange details in the ship's sail. But that's okay — what's important here is the contours of the storm-tossed sea, mimicking the contours of the protagonist's life, being briefly lifted and then plunged into despair. The contour of the sea help ties the three panels together — you can easily connect them by continuing the terminal arc of each panel — while the semi-random positioning of the boat and the and off-center placement of the third panel prevent the page from feeling overdesigned. All that turmoil is contrasted with a hunched figure, which at first seems still but which is actually coiled into knots of despair in a way that's visually effective, if physically impossible. There's not a single line on his body which doesn't seem misplaced or awkward, which only enhances the dynamic tension of the figure. And then there's the overpowering white space, which effectively isolates the character from the world, slows the pace of our reading, and effectively brings the chapter to a stop.

I've rarely seen such an excellent graphic depiction of soul-crushing loneliness. This is great stuff, folks, go get it.

Tragic Relief can be purchased at fine comic shops everywhere (I got mine at Copacetic). More of Colleen's work can be viewed on-line at CowboyOrange.com.

So yesterday, Bayani, Kate and I went down to the Pittsburgh Renaissance Faire in West Newton. Had a great time — the weather was wonderful, the performers were excellent, and Bayani even one second prize in the "Men in Kilts" competition. On the down side, Bayani totally kicked my butt in the axe throwing competition. I suspect he's been practicing in the back yard, so Kate, watch out.

Of course, I haven't been to a Renaissance faire in about twenty years, so I'm probably being a lot less jaded than usual. Let's see if I can dig down and find some of that cynicism you all know and love...

Petrarch must be rolling over in his grave

Ah. There we go. Much better.

A highlander and his wench

Tilting at the lists

If you want Pittsburghers to boo the Black Knight, maybe you should choose an accent color other than gold

Ye olde Green Knight with ye olde PA system

"Would you care to sample my boot?"
"Would you care to sample my fist?"

Orf with her 'ead!

Pirates vs. Astros

Another depressing end to another depressing season. The only real highlight was Jack Wilson getting a standing ovation for what might be his last at bat in Pittsburgh as a Pirate.

I picked up the latest issue of Shojo Beat on my last trip to the comic store, and I was struck by the beauty of this page:

"Honey and Clover" in the October 2008 Shojo Beat, p. 99

A series of gently tilting panels from right to left, from dark to light, suggesting a progressive revelation of tremendous beauty. Then, a switch from the vertical to the horizontal, from the perceiver to the perceived — though the vertical momentum of the page is maintained by presenting just enough detail in the door jamb. And of course, a change from a medium shot, from emotions worn on the sleeve but observed at a distance, to a close-up, to an intimate view of an inscrutable expression on a motionless face. This is also one of the moments where Chica Umino's sketchy style is remarkably effective, with broken lines suggesting dazzling sunlight and just enough detail to help us particularize otherwise generic items. Interestingly Yamada presented in a strangely complementary that are both contrasted and complementary — Yamada's wearing a light jacket over a dark shirt and standing in the light, with nothing to hide, while Nomiya's wearing a dark jacket over a light shirt and standing in the shadow.

If there's any criticism to be made, it's that the lines of the door jamb in the lower tier are a bit too close to similar lines in the upper tier — specifically, the edge of Mayama's jacket and the first panel border — which creates an unintentional tangent that has the potential to make the page feel too structured and design-y.

(Does anyone else think it's significant that many of Yamada's most emotional moments come in front of windows? It's an interesting way to suggest that she's easy to read.)

• Free outfield reserve tickets, courtesy of my season ticket plan.
• Last night was dollar dog night, and Bayani and I took advantage of it. Ultimately Bayani defeated me, eight hot dogs to six. I shouldn't have had that jalapeño dog — it just killed my appetite.
• Wow. Fifteen runs off of fifteen hits. That's efficient. I don't think I've ever seen the Pirates bat around before. I've seen their opponents do it plenty of times, though.
• We all know Adam Laroche starts off cold every year. I just wish he'd warm up before the third week of September.
• Wow, Joe Beimel? I haven't seen him play in years.
• Every time I see Manny Ramirez with his hat off I can't shake the feeling that Dave Lister is playing left field.

Postscript (9/18)

Apparently eating a half dozen greasy, undercooked pork sausages is not good for your stomach. Who knew.

In Sengoku-era Japan, a local daimyo makes a hellish bargain with 48 demons — he'll trade them 48 body parts from his unborn son if they will allow him to rule Japan. The resulting child is horribly deformed — little more than a torso with a vestigial head — and is set adrift in a basin. The abandoned child is taken in by a kindly doctor, who builds him a prosthetic body filled with secret weapons, names him Hyakkimaru ("hundred demon boy"), and sends him off to slay the 48 demons and win back his body parts. He soon finds himself teamed with an unlikely partner — a young thief named Dororo — and the two of them stumble through war-torn Japan looking for demons and treasure.

That's the beginning of Dororo, part of Vertical's line of Osamu Tezuka's translations, and it's a great set-up with lots of potential for conflict. There are supernatural plot hooks in addition to the usual Sengoku-era plot hook. Hyakkimaru and Dororo don't always see eye-to-eye. As Hyakkimaru slays demons he becomes more human, but the loss of his prosthetic weapons also makes him weaker and less likely to succeed in his quest. Additionally, each demon he slays weakens the kingdom of his biological father, who is torn between his megalomania and a small vestige of paternal feeling.

So it's a bit disappointing that Dororo turns out to be one of Tezuka's lesser works, fun to read but hardly innovative or essential. None of the plot threads ever really pay off or build to anything, the characters are poorly-developed stock personalities, and the ending abrupt and unsatisfying. It's purely an episodic adventure manga, pitting Hyakkimaru and Dororo against the monster-of-the week Tezuka's reputation is all this comic really has going for it. But he's nicknamed the "God of Manga" for a reason — a disappointing Tezuka comic is still better than 50% of the manga out there.

Thumbs in the middle for this one — an intriguing premise, and some fun chapters, but ultimately it doesn't really make much of a lasting impression.

Simplicity

I've always maintained thought that simple drawings were every bit as hard to pull off as detailed drawings, but with a greater potential upside. That's one of the reasons I admire Tezuka — he is a master of simplicity.

Dororo v2, p. 139

One advantage of simplicity is that you can achieve tremendous variety without actually changing all that much. For instance, the story "The Fair Fudo" features a demon who can change her face to lure in prey. Over the course of the story she alternates between two faces, but the only significant difference between her "motherly" and "malevolent" faces is that her pupils are different — round and dark for the former, skinny and open for the latter.

Other women in Tezuka stories get the same treatment — structurally, their faces and bodies are all similar, but Tezuka is able to make them feel different by altering tiny details. An off-the-shoulder kimono? She's slutty if it's artfully arranged, simple if it's haphazard. Dirty cheeks? She's poor. Long hair? Womanly. Short hair? Tomboyish. Wavy hair? Lower-class. Straight hair? Upper-class. Poofy hair? Beautiful. Big dark eyes? Innocent. Eyes flattened on one side? Sinister.

To some extent, Tezuka's "star system"¹ is taking advantage of this simplicity by consolidating specific personality traits into a single character design. That way, he can throw a character right into the middle of the action without having to spend a lot of time establishing their personality or motivation.

Dororo v1, p. 104-5

Simplicity also allows Tezuka to incorporate more adult elements without shocking or scandalizing his audience. By any measure the above sequence is horrendously violent — men are getting chopped into pieces in every panel. But the general lack of detail keeps the reader from focusing on the shattered bones, spurting blood and jumbled innards such a scene would feature in real life. It's a great way to incorporate some terrible, violent action while still keeping it clean for the kiddies.^2,3

Dororo v1, p. 210

Of course, the downside of simplicity is that when something is off, it looks really off. Dororo's mother (pictured above) is a great example — she goes from being a stereotypical Tezuka-esque woman to weasel-faced weirdo, just because he made her face a bit too long and her nose a bit to seere.

Cultural Notes

Unga

The 48 demon status from the opening chapter are purportedly the work of Unga, one of the sons of the famous Kamakura-era sculptor Unkei. Unkei and his sons are best known for throwing out the standard canon of proprtions that had dominated for two centuries and striving for both realism and dynamism in their work.

Unga is a great choice for an obscure historical reference — none of his work has survived to the present day, though he may have assisted Unkei in sculpting the statuary at Kokufuji Temple in Nara.

Hiruko

At the beginning of Dororo, the deformed infant Hyakkimaru is put into a basin and set adrift on a river. Most Western readers are instantly going to be thinking of Moses — but the Japanese will be thinking of someone very different — Hiruko.

In Japanese mythology, Hiruko ("leech-child") is the first-born child of the creator deities Izanagi and Izanami. However, because of some "improprieties" surrounding his conception⁴ he was born deformed — either boneless or limbless, depending on the source. His parents eventually put him in a boat of reeds and set him adrift in the sea, and then went on to create everything else.

In some versions of the myth, Hiruko washes up on the shores of Hokkaido, regenerates his missing body parts, and grows up to become Ebisu, one of the Seven Gods of Fortune (the fat one with big earlobes carrying a fishing rod). Years later, he one-ups his parents by becoming the first kami to get his own brand of premium lager.

Blood Will Tell

Blood Will Tell is a 2004 Playstation 2 game based on Dororo, with character designs by Hiroaki Samura of Blade of the Immortal fame. I only mention this because I can't thank of any other way to point you to the scanlation of Samura's disturbing "Bradherly's Coach" over at Kotonoha. Go read now.

And now you know... the rest of the story.

1. Where he reuses character designs to give someone an instantaneous characterization. For instance, Ham Egg — the guy who looks like an extra from a Betty Boop cartoon — makes an appearance as "Itachi" in Dororo. Of course, the star system occasionally backfires taking you out of the story when you go "Hey look, it's Acetylene Lamp!"
2. Though whether that's advisable is a matter for debate.
3. Tezuka is sanitizing his work in other ways as well. Hyakkimaru's first love insists that she's "not pure" because she does horrible debasing things for soliders in order to feed the children she cares for. It sounds pretty edgy for a children's comic but this "debasement" turns out to involve getting slapped by soldiers and splattered with tomatoes. Which is debasing, I suppose, but weird. It makes you wonder why Tezuka even brought it up.
4. The "impropriety" is that his mother was the sexual aggressor. It's probably one of the most pointlessly sexist myths I've ever seen.

Here's a quick character sketch I've been working on for [unnamed webcomic project]. The character is supposed to be nerdy, sardonic, and on the wrong side of 25. She's also one of those total geniuses who's a complete moron when it comes to everday stuff. I'm thinking that I need do something to make her look older, but I wanted to see if anyone had any other thoughts.

Two quick notes.

First, I find that I'm quickly running out of new things to say about Gold Digger. It's not that there aren't things that need to be said, but that there's so damn of the series left to cover — after I finish this post, I still have another 50 issues of the regular series and a handful of miniseries to discuss. I'd rather not reduce these posts to simple recitations of plot points, Fred Perry's art doesn't change all that much over the next four years, and I haven't made much progress analyzing why the series appeals to me. So I'll be turning these into general posts about comics, with a Gold Digger influence.

Second, headline aside, I do read superhero comics. My currently-published favorites include Gødland, Invincible, and Savage Dragon. And the latest issue of Love & Rockets, for that matter. But I hardly read any superhero comics from DC and Marvel. I'm down to just two titles from both publishers — Blue Beetle (which is ending soon, from what I hear) and Nova (which I'm dropping after the current issue). Ten years ago, I had so many superhero titles on my pull list that I qualified for my comic store's top discount bracket. Today, five.

How did that happen?

Quality Control

Gold Digger v3 #45, p. 8

Back in college my buddies and I would go out every Friday to see whatever crappy action movie had been released that week. At first, it was great fun — finally, I had a whole pile of nerd friends willing to do nerd things with me — but eventually I started to get bored. I saw some entertaining movies — Iron Monkey II and the original Mortal Kombat spring to mind — but I also saw a lot of crap. I remember standing in line for an hour and a half to see Judge Dredd and thinking that there was no way that the movie was going to be worth it. The day Eraser was released I decided that I'd had enough, and told my friends I was through with action movies.

I wasn't, of course. I've seen plenty of them in the decade since then, but I became much pickier about what I was going to see. Underground? No. Ultraviolet? No. Crank? Sure.¹ I've seen a lot fewer action films — but the ones I've seen I've enjoyed a lot more.

Something similar happened with superhero comics. There was a point where I was reading five different Spider-Man comics, and not liking any of them. So I dropped them all except for Peter Parker, Spider-Man, which was being illustrated by John Romita Jr. at the time.² The total number of superhero comics I was reading went down, but my average enjoyment went way up.

Superhero comics fill two basic needs as far as I'm concerned — my need for comics, and my need for action. There are plenty of comics out there that aren't superhero comics, and if I'm looking for action, I can that from Gold Digger or Eyeshield 21, or even from movies or video games.³ Essentially, I've reached the point where any specific superhero jones I have can be met by a handful of titles.

Overcoming Inertia

Gold Digger v3 #39, p. 10

Most people are creatures of habit, and once something becomes a habit it's awfully hard to change.

For years I had a sentimental attachment to Marvel comics, because that's what I read when I was kid.⁴ As an adult that somehow translated into subscribing to a pile of Spider-Man and X-Men titles that I never particularly liked. That works for manga, too — once I'd purchased volume 13 of Bleach I figured I might as well get volume 14.

But eventually inertia gives way to friction. Sure, you've might stick with Spider-Man through a rough patch — but when that rough patch is three years long you should probably re-examine your priorities. When you realize Bleach has spent the last four volumes introducing new characters without advancing the plot, it's time to stop reading Bleach. When something that used to be your favorite comic can be safely disposed of in about 5 minutes, it's time to move on.

Of course, looking at your budget and realizing you've spent way too much of your discretionary income on comic books helps too.

Gold Digger hasn't had any rough patches, and Fred's continually changing and improving so that it never gets stale. So it's still got some inertia going.

Moving Away From The Comic Store

When you only visit the comic store once a month instead of once a week, it becomes a lot easier to be shocked by the size of your pull list.

I Don't Give A Rat's Ass About Your Damn Universe

Gold Digger v3 #41

Over the last few years, DC and Marvel have been emphasizing their "universes" rather than individual characters titles. But here's the thing — the "universe" is only a garnish, not the main course. Having one is nice, but I only care to the extent that it affects the characters who live in that universe.

There are very few superhero titles that can't function without a universe. Daredevil can function just fine in a world without Spider-Man or Dr. Strange or the Fantastic Four (in fact, in some ways he functions better). Jamie Reyes may have some legacy ties to the DC Universe, but the basic concept — responsible Mexican-American teenager gets super-powers from an alien race that turns out to be not-so-benevolent — doesn't depend on those elements at all. Even a title like Infinity Inc. could be re-worked in a way that preserves the essential themes without having any specific ties to the DC Universe. It's only when you get to team-up books like Avengers or Justice League that these concepts even begin to matter.

Marvel and DC want you to be a fan of their universes, because then you feel obligated to buy everything they release. But you know what? An issue of Guardians of the Galaxy isn't the same thing as an issue of Nova no matter how much they want you to think otherwise. The Jamie Reyes Blue Beetle is not a substitute for the Ted Kord Blue Beetle — it's a complete different title (and one I happen to like, but that's besides the point).

Sure, comics like Gold Digger have their own universes. In fact, most of Gold Digger's latest storylines have been about discovering the secret origins of that universe. But enjoying that universe doesn't require anything extra on my part. I don't have to waste any effort trying to figure out where Legacy or Sky Sharks or Pirates vs. Ninjas fits into the Gold Digger universe. I don't have to worry about an issue of Ninja High School revealing key plot points because Gold Digger slipped a month. I can enjoy each series, on its own, the way it's supposed to be.

A Difference of Opinion

Gold Digger v3 #44, p. 13

Finally, the fact of the matter is that the people who run DC and Marvel have a a vastly different opinion of what makes for an interesting comic book. They're looking for exploitable media properties, and they could care less about creativity. I'm more interested in an artist's idiosyncratic expression, whether that's marketable or not.

Manga publishers have a much healthier way of doing business. Sure, they'll milk hot properties like Naruto for every last drop of revenue they can grab, but at the same time they're always introducing new titles and properties. Most of them fail to catch on, but every new Naruto makes it all worth it. It's a much less stable business model that actually requires the publisher to take some real chances — but the rewards are exponentially greater.

By becoming licensing companies, Marvel and DC have trapped themselves. They'd forgotten how to create new properties, or even how to market their existing properties they have to a new audience. DC has sunk so far that they're even acquiring the Archie heroes, because they're incapable of creating or marketing something new. And that's just sad, because no one has ever liked the Archie heroes.⁵ It's a project that's already doomed to failure.

By any measure Marvel and DC's approach is a short-sighted one. There's no character or property that has ever remained popular for decades on end. Even Shakespeare's plays have gone in and out of fashion. No one reads the adventures of the Shadow or the Lone Ranger any more. Eventually Superman and Spider-Man will join them on the dustbin of history or, if they're lucky, they'll experience periods of resurgence like Sherlock Holmes.

Wow, that was rambling and incoherent. Maybe I shouldn't type these under the influence of coffee.

1. Laugh if you want, but if you're going to watch a big dumb action movie, why not watch the biggest, dumbest action movie you can find?
2. Then JMS starting writing Spider-Man and managed to drive me away in less than a year.
3. And frankly, superhero comics don't even have all that much action in them anymore.
4. In suburban Philadelphia, all the kids read Marvel. DC was for babies. Except for Batman. Batman was still cool, mostly because of to Adam West.
5. With the possible exceptions of Pureheart the Powerful and Captain Hero, who you'll note DC isn't getting.

I've been updating my webcomic bookmarks, adding some new series and getting rid of some old ones, and I figured it couldn't hurt to share some quick thoughts...

My Favorites

Bob the Angry Flower: I really loved the two recent cartoons featuring the Empty Set.

Cat and Girl: Because how many comics make jokes about Joseph Beuys?

Dr. McNinja: I'm not sure color adds anything to the experience, other than not driving off people who hate black-and-white.

Galaxion: I loved Galaxion when it was a minicomic and was overjoyed when it was resurrected on the web.

Kate Beaton: Everyone's reading Kate Beaton these days and who am I to diagree?

Les Petits Riens: A regular dose of Lewis Trondheim is always worthwhile, and it gives me a chance to practice my French.

Nobody Scores!: Now that Muertitos is on hiatus, this is probably the funniest comic on the web. There's a whole post on this one coming later.

Princess Planet: A fun little diversion of pleasantly high quality, with enough variety to prevent things from becoming stale.

Scary-Go-Round: I've been reading John Allison's cartoons for so long that it's hard to imagine not reading them.

Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki: The little 1GB USB drive collection that they're selling is pretty sweet. Sure, $35 is a bit steep for 1GB these days, but it's a deluxe package and the premium is really for the comics, anyway.

Skin Horse: It's an entire office building filled with crazy Narbonic-style mad scientists (or their equally mad creations). What's not to like?

Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic: At first it looked like the premise of this comic was going to be "monsters are people too" but it's also never forgotten that those people are also evil, evil monsters. That tension helps give the comic a bit of an edge. Also, Rich draws some sexy harpies.

On the Threshold

Bear and Kitten: It sort of lost me when Bear traveled through time to stop Kitten from going to Japan (it was the best thing that ever happened to Kitten, but the worst thing that ever happened to Bear). It was petty and mean-spirited, and not in a particularly amusing way. It's colored my perception of every strip since.

Erfworld: I was intrigued enough by the Webcomic Overlook review to check this one out. The premise is interesting — real-world gamer gets sucked into a tactical RPG which seems to be based on some sick child's fantasy. It's not afraid to play to the crowd, but there are enough unsettling elements that you really want to learn what's going on under the surface. I'm mildly annoyed that there's no way to bookmark the main page and go right to the latest comic.

Flaky Pastry: I really like the premise of this strip — it's got fun art, and some neat characters — but it just doesn't update frequently enough.

Gorgeous Princess Creamy Beamy: S. Sakurai's other comic, which starts off as a parody of magical girl anime and gets progressively weirder from there. I like it, but it's not nearly as out there or tightly plotted as Muertitos and the current storyline has gone on for way too long.

Kawaii Not: Kawaii Not is the webcomic version of Frank and Ernest — dependable but nothing to get really excited about. But I'm in a good mood today so it stays.

Kiskaloo: A fun little comic from Chris Sanders, best known as the character designer from Lilo and Stitch, but I'm not entirely convinced that he can provide updates on a regular basis.

The Non-Adventures of Wonderella: It's Wonder Woman, if she was one of those vacuous twenty-somethings I can't seem to escape from. It's pretty damn funny but I can't help feel like the joke has played out.

Octopus Pie: It had a really awkward beginning, but the characters really to grow on you. The latest story — a reimagining of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight set at a Rennaisance faire — was great, though, and guarantees that this one is staying on my list.

Questionable Content: Every time I think about dropping QC because nothing's happening, Jeph manages to post another strip that makes me laugh out loud. This one's probably.

Rob and Elliot: Entertaining, but does't quite post frequently enough.

Shortpacked: I like the toy jokes (I'm not a toy collector myself, but my best friend is) but I want to punch every one of the characters in the face. Well, maybe not the lesbian.

Skadi: I liked the look of the first batch of strips, but Kricfalusi-esque grossout humor doesn't do anything for me and that's all the last several weeks have consisted of.

Starslip Crisis: I like it when it's doing bad jokes about fine art, and can't stand it when it's a giant space opera. I think I might just give up on the main strip and switch over to the continuity-free Starslip Extra instead.

Wondermark!: I'm not a big fan of clip art comics, but Wondermark! does manage to amuse every now and then.

XKCD: XKCD hasn't worn out its welcome with me yet, probably because it isn't character-based.

Dropped

Anders Loves Maria: I don't get it. Can someone explain the appeal to me?

Beaver and Steve: A funny series put on indefinite hiatus. It'd been coasting somewhat since this strip and updating irregularly though, so it's not a huge loss.

Dominic Deeghan: I only started reading this to see if it was as bad as John Solomon said it was, and you know what, it wasn't all that bad (but it wasn't any good either). But once you've read several hundred pages of something it's kind of hard to stop.

Dresden Codak: Dropped partly because it doesn't update frequently enough, and partly because it's gone from funny jokes to meaningless babble about the technological singularity. It's been weird to see the trajectory for this comic — it started super-hot and just dropped as it became popular.

+EV: It just doesn't update frequently enough, and when it does it's either an obscure poker joke or some vile character-based humor that doesn't work because the characters are paper-thin.

Evil Inc.: As much as I like the basic concept, this comic's never been more than an "eh" that's been kept on my list by sheer momentup.

La Muse: Ended, and should make for a fun print comic.

Lackadaisy: Doesn't update frequently enough, and it's getting hard to tell what's going on.

Marry Me: Ended, though I think the print version will probably compound its pacing problems..

Minus: I'll really miss Minus because it was charming and funny in a way that the internet usually isn't, though think I'd rather see it end now at the peak of its quality than watch it drag on for another couple of years. Maybe if we're lucky Ryan will put a book version. I'd buy two.

Much the Miller's Son: This would make for an incredible print comic, but it's just not paced for the web and doesn't udpate frequently enough.

Muertitos: Wait, how did Muertitos go from being my favorite webcomic to being on the drop list? Simple — it's been put on indefinite hiatus because S. was feeling tapped out. Of all the series I've dropped, this is one of the ones I'll miss the most.

PAWN: Doesn't update frequently enough, and the "progress updates" are just infuriating. If you've got enough time to update about playing MGS4, maybe you should spend some of that time drawing.

Perry Bible Fellowship: Ended, but you knew that already.

Linkdump

Afganisu-tan: Everyone's probably seen this one already, but I still think it's charming. It's a basic (and extremely unreliable) history of Afghanistan, where each country is represented by a cute little chibi character. Just don't use it as a basis for your term paper on foreign policy.

Story by Riichiro Inagaki
Art by Yusuke Murata
Translation by Craig Kingsley & Hime Kingsley
Lettering and retouch by James Gaubatz
Edited by Urian Brown (#19) & Kit Fox (#19-21)

Hey — it's football season, so let's check in with everyone's favorite football manga, Eyeshield 21!¹

When we last checked in with the Deimon Devil Bats, they were in the middle of the 3rd place game of the Tokyo tournament, trailing behind to the Bando Spiders at halftime. I think you can all guess how that ends (this ain't Slam Dunk). Once they've secured a spot in the Kanto tournament, they get the worst possible bracketing — a first-round match-up against the ten-time defending championship Shinryuji Nagas.

Here's where the series runs into a bit of a problem. As anyone who's been reading since v1 knows, Shinryuji is the team to beat, nearly unstoppable. But over the last 20 volumes, the Devil Bats and their foes have become nearly superhuman. We've seen running backs as fast as Olympic-class sprinters, linemen larger than dump trucks, quarterbacks playing at a pro level. They've managed to add some variety by giving players their own unique techniques — Sena has unbeatable bursts of speed but very little endurance, Panther is super-fast but has leaves the ball vulnerable, Riku has an unconventional stride that makes it hard to predict his movements, and so forth. But this is the big one. How can they possibly make the Nagas seem more fearsome than these other foes?

Turns out they can't.

So rather than making the Nagas seem tougher than every other team the Devil Bats have played, they instead focus on making them the team you have to hate. Or rather, they focus on making Agon the player you have to hate. Agon is vicious, unmotivated, egotistical, lecherous, and rude. It's a weird combination of personality traits and it they don't quite gel. He's an asshole to everyone, even his own brother, and they all put up with it — even his coaches and teachers. Oh, and when it comes to football technique he's a better QB than the Kid, a better defensive back than Shin, a better tactician than Hiruma.

It works, but not quite the way you'd think. Rather than "heel heat", Agon winds up with "X-Pac heat." You do want Agon him to get his comeuppance — not because he deserves it, but because it means you won't have to see him ever again. Fortunately, it looks like we'll get that shortly. Hopefully it'll end with his brother ripping him a new orifice.

This isn't a good sign, though. If the Devil Bats beat the Nagas, there are still another two teams to go. How can they possible make those teams more threatening than the Nagas?

Eyeshield 21 v21 p. 50-51

One of the reasons I keep reading Eyeshield 21 is that it's one of the most visually exciting manga out there. You can quibble with Yusuke Murata's aesthetic choices, but you can't deny that he puts more effort into making every scene as dynamic and exciting as possible. It's hard to think of another comic with the crazy forced perspective, extreme foreshortening, and bizarre distortions that Eyeshield 21 delivers up in every chapter.

There's a bit of a decline in his on-field choreography in the latest volumes, though. We get fewer and fewer wide shots of the field, and more tight close-ups which are emotionally exciting but make it hard to follow how plays are developing.

But it's an encouraging sign that Eyeshield 21 is only starting to slip after 21 volumes. Most series have exhausted their momentum long before this point, and there's got to be another three to five volumes here before the premise is totally exhausted.

1. Okay, the season technically started on Thursday, but I don't care until the Steelers have their first game.

Steve Martin, Born Standing Up. New York: Scribner, 2007.

I'd heard a lot of good things about Born Standing Up so I was a bit disappointed to see at heart it was just another celebrity autobiography devoid of anything other than the most superficial insights. A pleasant enough diversion but not much more.

Simone de Beauvoir, She Came To Stay. New York: W.W. Norton, 1954.

It's usually an insult when you can say that you've read an entire novel and the characters are still mysteries to you after three hundred pages. Here, though, that's the whole point of the novel. Other than that, I don't think I have anything to add to 50 years of literary criticism.

Warren Murphy and James Mullaney. The New Destroyer: Dead Reckoning. New York: Tor, 2008.
Warren Murphy and James Mullaney. The New Destroyer: Killer Ratings. New York: Tor, 2008.

I was about halfway through Dead Reckoning when I realized that The Destroyer series had become a crazed right-wing fantasy, where liberals really do hate America, where the president is a stoic hero, where Iraq financed 9//11 and possessed weapons of mass destruction, where Sunni and Shia Muslims work together without problems, where the prisoners on Gitmo are coddled like babies. A quick search on-line turned up this this three-year-old article where Warren Murphy laments that the Destroyer series had become too liberal and neededreturn to its conservative "glory days."^1,2

Which strikes me as absolutely moronic. Part of the appeal of The Destroyer was that everyone was an idiot. Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, Americans, Russians, Mexicans, capitalists, communists, whites, blacks, cops, criminals — every last one of them a blithering moron unable to see past their own petty needs and dragging the world to ruin. Maybe the overall thrust was conservative but it wasn't conservatism with blinders on.

Didn't stop me from finishing Dead Reckoning or Killer Ratings, though. But that's it — I'm done with the series.

Sergei Golynets, Ivan Bilibin. Translated by Glenys Ann Kozlov. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981.

I became interested in Bilibin's work after oohing over Mark Buckingham's appropriation of it in Fables. This book is an excellent overview of Bilibin's life and work — though it is a bit light on Bilibin's fairytale illustrations, which were what interested me the most.

Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. New York: Twelve, 2008.

Ms. Lee doesn't really have a central thesis about chinese food — this is really just a collection of magazine articles chop suey, General Tso, and the quest for the greatest Chinese restaurant in the world (with a special guest appearance by Chen Kenichi). It's worth reading if only for the chapters devoted to uncovering the secret birthplace of the fortune cookie.³

Benjamin Wallace, The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine. New York: Crown, 2008.

This is a fascinating tale, full of history, fraud, and intrigue. It's got a fascinating cast of characters — stop-at-no-costs collector Christopher Forbes, ultra-competitive auctioneer Michael Broadbent, wine connoisseur (and likely con man) Hardy Rodenstock. It all starts when Rodenstock sells a bottle of wine owned by Thomas Jefferson through Broadbent to Forbes, and starts to heat up when a decade of mounting suspicions and convenient coincidences causes the provenance of Rodenstock's wines to come into doubt. Things look like they're about to come to a head when new forms of testing emerge that can be used to accurately date old wines, and potential evidence of fraud emerges at one of Rodenstock's former residences.

And then it just ends.

A duped oenophile files a lawsuit against Rodenstock, and wins by default because Rodenstock announces his intention not to appear in court. I realize that this is non-fiction book about events that are still unfolding, but it's still a bit jarring. Still, it's an engrossing read, and I'll be lining up to read the inevitable expanded version that comes out in a few years.

Joe Haldeman, The Forever War. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974.

I can't believe it's taken me this long to read The Forever War (the comics don't count).

Alan Sokol, Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

This is a collection of essays by Sokol about his infamous Social Text hoax and the ensuing "Science Wars." Interesting material, dull execution — the same anecdotes and incidents are constantly repeated, the same ground endlessly recovered. Interestingly, I mentioned the book to one of my buddies and he was genuinely surprised that the Science Wars were still going on. He was of the opinion that the scientists had won.

I was also reminded of something Don Simpson had said after attending a conference on postmodernism at the University of Pittsburgh — he said that he couldn't shake the feeling that the speakers were veiling their sentences with allusions and jargon to cover for the fact that they weren't actually saying anything. He thought it was some colossal joke. But then Don's cynical that way.

Richard Florida, Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy is Making WHere to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

Richard Florida has always struck me as someone who makes a living by repeating the obvious. The big obvious message of Who's Your City? is that if you want to get a job in the movies you probably should move to Hollywood. I suppose there's some value in establishing that the world is not flat, and that Internet hasn't made geography completely irrelevant yet. But I don't see why saying these things makes Florida some sort of visionary genius.

My problem is that Florida is perfectly content to observe — he hasn't developed anything resembling a predictive model. He can tell you that Portland is full of indie-rock hipsters, that areas with high concentrations of gay people and artists are on the forefront of gentrification, but he can't tell me how or why either of these things came to be. Which means that his books makes for some interesting reading if you're looking to buy a house in an area with lots of singles, and absolutely useless if you're trying to build an area that will attract a lot of singles.

1. In a blatant conflict of interest the author info notes that James Mullaney is the author of "22 pseudonymous novels" but neglects to mention that they were Destroyer novels. So essentially the National Review Online ran a puff piece advertorial written by its subject. I wish I could say I was surprised.
2. I also notice Murphy was didn't object to the "liberalization" of his creation until sales started to dip.
3. Kyoto, Japan. And now you know... the rest of the story.

So Google is apparently launching a new web browser today, and it turns out that they're getting the word out through a webcomic. It's not a very good webcomic, though. It's structured like a print comic for some reason, it's overly talky, and I can't help the feeling that it's talking down to the digerati and too technical for everyone else. And I couldn't help shake the feeling that the artist was some second-rate Scott McCloud impersonator.

Then I got to this image...

...and that the artist was Scott McCloud.

Whoops.

It's still not a very good comic, though.

Work Follies

One of our clients has already called to complain that his RSS feed isn't working properly with Chrome. We thanked him for noticing it, told him that this appears to be a known bug with Chrome, and informed him that while we make sure to keep on top of the latest technical developments we don't support products in beta. And afterwards I started grumbling about having to validate all of our sites in yet another browser, like it was 1997 all over again.

Then I remembered that this is a Google product, and it'll never get out of beta. Winner — me!

I was re-reading volumes 1-11 of Nana when this page jumped out at me...

Nana v2, p. 161

This is a pretty unremarkable page at first glance. There's a slight shift from small, dense panels to larger, emptier panels to accompany the slight change in Nana's mood from panicked to contemplative. There's the moon as a symbol for Nana's happiness and/or maturity. But it's that last panel that blew me away, because it's so subtle. Let's take a look at the focal point of the composition...

Nana v2, p. 161 detail

Gee, I wonder what could possibly be missing from the ring finger of her left hand?

That's just wonderfully subtle. It's easy to miss on your first read-through, and it's easy to dismiss as just stock theatrics (staring at your hands being shorthand for being lost in thought). And yet it still leaves an impression on your subconsious, delicately tinting your perceptions of Nana's character and goals.

Or maybe I just missed it on the first read-through 'cause I'm a guy. And also an idiot.

Um, look on the bright side, look on the bright side... Well, the Pirates didn't make any errors! Not for lack of trying, though. Some fun observations:

• It's been said before, and it'll be said again, but damn Prince Fielder is huge. Guess that vegan diet's not working.

• At first glance, it sure looked like Brewers right fielder Corey Hart had a cell phone in his uniform pocket and was checking his text messages between innings. A quick on-line search quickly reveales that Hart claims to carry a "cheat sheet" on how to deal with various batters. Funny, though, how none of the other Brewers outfielders seems to carry one...

• The fan seated to my right, a long-time season ticket holder who rarely misses a game, could not wait for yesterday's game to be over so he could leave. It was kind of funny to watch him stand up at the beginning of a pitch, only to sit down as the Pirates kept things alive. As soon as that last out was made he was out of the stadium like a rocket.

• An interesting fact that turned up in conversation: the Pirates lead all teams in the majors by offering 64 promotions a year. I suppose that's what you've got to do to keep the fans interested when you're on the verge of your 16th losing season. But even so, that's a lot of free crap, and I have to imagine the Pirates have hit the point of diminishing returns. I know I've run out of room on my shelves for bobbleheads and other trinkets, and I've even started to get burned out on fireworks displays. It'll be sad to see what happens when free crap can no longer lure folks out to the ballpark.

• Over on Bucs Dugout they cannot figure out why fans seem to like Nyjer Morgan. The stats back them up — he's an average player who'd make a backup player but what the Pirates really need is someone much stronger offensively.

  But Morgan actually shows some enthusiasm for being on the field. He hustles on every play, tries to make the most out of each at bat, and generally seems happy to be in the big leagues (as opposed to his teammates, who sometimes seem depressed to be playing for the Pirates). He plays a different style of baseball that we're used to seeing — when was the last time a Pirates player stole a base that wasn't a fait accompli? The fans react to these things, and it doesn't hurt to have someone on your roster that the fans actually like.

  Especially when you don't have many other options.

• By this time next week, the Pirates will tie the 1933-1948 Philadelphia Phillies with their 16th consecutive losing season. Whoo! Pennsylvania pride!

Story by Charles & Daniel Knauf
Art by Daniel Acuña
Lettered by Todd Klein

After three issues, it's pretty obvious that this Eternals series isn't for me.

The Knaufs continue to build their series around the Eternals, without bothering to give most of them anything resembling character or actual motivation. New characters are introduced but not explained, and then shuffled off to the sidelines. The Celestials aren't mysterious, unknowable space gods — they just don't deign to explain themselves. The Dreaming Celestial isn't some sinister judge — he's downright chatty and surprisingly helpful. The mysterious workings of universe appear to be simple power games straight out of Lensman, with the Celestials serving as Arisians and the Horde as Eddorians.

I would have dropped this series after issue #2 if it weren't for the art of Daniel Acuña.

Eternals (2008) #2, p. 7

As Makkari says, that's just beautiful. And yet, I'm still not satisfied, because his Celestials look too organic, too symmetrical and smooth. They're not jarring presences whose very existence throws your thought processes into disorder.

But I don't want to waste too much time on Eternals, because it's counterproductive. Marvel doesn't share my vision of what the concept is about, and probably never will, because it's not a marketable and they can't tie it to their existing superhero properties. I think their current take is shortsighted, and actively harms the characters and their mythology, but it's not my call to make. I've got a zillion other entertainment options and it's stupid to waste time working myself into a lather over this one when I could be enjoying something else.

Instead, I'll just say this. This series is sort of predictable, and completely impenetrable to anyone not already steeped in the lore of Eternals. And honestly, that's all you need to know.

Story by Mark Millar
Art by Tommy Lee Edwards
Lettered by John Workman

When we last looked in on Toby, he had just discovered that the creepy old Wyncham house in his neighborhood had been taken over by Marvel supervillains. Unfortunately, his friends and neighbors didn't believe him — though they'll probably have to change that opinion now that the villains have started slaughtering the townsfolk en masse. So Toby breaks into the Wyncham house to find help in the only place he can think of — the Marvel Universe.

Though issue #1 showed a lot of promise, issues #2-4 are pretty blah stuff. They're just very poorly placed — filled with supervillains causing mass carnage for no apparent reason, killing townfolk you have no emotional attachment to, and being thwarted by some stock characters you have no real reason to root for. A misfire on just about every level. At least it's finally apparent why this series is set in 1985 — it's the period where comics started experimenting with "gritty realism." I'm guessing the lesson Millar wants us to take from 1985 is that mixing the real world with your comics destroys them — that it leads to a world where the Blob eats soldiers while Sauron pecks their eyes, a world that's inappropriate for children and that any sane adult wouldn't waste his time on. Which is certainly a valid point of view but it's sort of funny to have it conveyed by Mark "I was sodomized by a Captain America pastiche" Millar.

And, as I mentioned before, it's not even competently plotted. There's no real characterization or depth, and there's only one mystery worth exploring — who is repsonsible for dragging Marvel characters into the real world? Toby is probably out. If he were the "master" of these villains they'd beating up his step-father and his teachers instead of random strangers. The Toby narrating the story clearly wants you to believe that the culprit is his father — he even refers to him as "the first mutant this world has ever known" and inserts an flashback that seems to back up this point of view. But this seems a bit too obvious — and that flashback is really ambiguous. If Toby's dad could subconsciously lash out at the people who've hurt him, he would have probably started a lot sooner, and it's not clear why he'd be subconsciously lashing out at everyone in town either. No, the #1 suspect is undoubtedly poor, brain-damaged Clyde Wyncham. The first people killed are his nurse and her boyfriend. In a flashback, his dead father is resurrected — why would Toby's dad resurrect Clyde's father? No, whatever fried Clyde's brain in the first place has undoubtedly stopped him from controlling his raging powers and things are finally hitting the boiling point.

At least there's Tommy Lee Edwards' beautiful art. Check out this wonderful sequence from issue #2...

1985 #2, p. 17

Stilt Man wandering through a half-lit, shadowy suburban environment has never looked so beautiful. Edward walks a deft tightrope here — Stilt Man is as carefully delineated as everything else on the page, yet retains aan otherworldly feel — there's still the potential that he's some fleeting phantasm, a beautiful fantasy for children rather than a murderous psychopath. The coloring is especially fantastic, evoking the hazy, muted colors of sunst in a way that you rarely see in a Marvel comic.

So it's a pity that Edwards may not turn out to be the right artist for this project at all.

Don't get me wrong. I like his depictions of the real world, and his depictions of the fantasy world are both wonderful and frightening at the same time. But the real problem is the sequence at the end of issue #4, where Toby wanders into the Marvel Universe. There's an attempt to make the MU look different from the regular world by cutting down on the hatching and shadowing, and using a sunnier palette. But the attempt fails because Edwards doesn't go far enough — the MU looks too much like his regular style and not enough like a fantasy.

But heck, his work in issue #5 and 6 could easily prove me wrong. And what he's put down here is certainly strong enough for me to give those issues a shot.

Okay, ever since the opening arc of Gold Digger v3, Gina's had a couple of djinni hanging around as houseguests. Dao, the male djinn, has settled comfortably into the role of Gina's lab assistant. Madrid, the female djinn, has been content to leech of the Diggers. But that's all about to change.

After the end of the Tournament of Arms on Jade, Gina gets a surprise invitation to visit the Shadow Elves in their mountain homestead, where she makes some shocking discovery. First, it turns out that the mysterious "shadows" that conquered Jade in the past are the same as the "Beta Phantoms" that have bedeviled Gina and Penny in the past. Next, it turns out the three artifacts of Jade — Tirant's "Bain", the Edge Guard's "Jain" and the Shadow Elves' "Dain" — are actually Nomad Artificer artifacts that pre-date the universe. And finally, it turns out that the Nomad Artificer responsible for building all of this is still alive, and she's... Gina?

Once Gina realizes that she's responsible for designing the Nomad Artificer's technology, she's able to increase her understanding of that technology exponentially. And one of the items whose workings she now appears to understand is Yh'dahjim, the djinni's "magic sun", which appears to be an extrapolation of her existing "phantom ring" technology...

And here's where Madrid comes in. It's always annoyed her that she's able to grant others' wishes, but never her own. The other djinni are similarly frustrated — Dao is by his inability to win Gina's love, and Genn with her inability to win over Seance. Using their powers in combination, the three of them hatch a plan to allow Madrid to steal Gina's identity, access the "magic sun" and become capable of granting all of their wishes. A plan that works swimmingly, until Madrid finally manages to contact the magic sun and discovers that "Artificer" Gina accidentally created the djinni when a group of Furbys she sends back to the present become self-aware and empowered by one of her phantom ring devices, the M-14 HAD 7h (look at it in a mirror, sort of). She also discovers that it was her own attempts to bypass the Ancient One and access the magic sun directly that led to the destruction of Yh'dalhjim and the enslavement of the djinni (by the Saurians and their psionic Amonian slaves, no less).

And that's when Gina and company have to step in to lay the smack down.

The above plot summary sounds a bit dry, but the story itself is actually pretty damn exciting. It's interesting to see how Fred is starting to draw together his universe here — the djinni, the Nomad Artificers, the astral rifts, the magic realm of Jade and the Beta Phantoms are all revealed as parts of the same puzzle, which Gina is still solving today. It's during these issues where Gold Digger goes from merely entertaining to something more, as bits of a larger plot start to become apparent.

And he also introduces the "key event" which has dominated current issues — a mysterious quasi-space accident that catapults Ancient Gina into the past and possibly destroys the entire universe. (Right now, it looks like Ancient Gina manages to change enough of the past to avert that specific accident but may have created a similar one that may turn out far worse for herself personally.)

The other key stories in this run include: Cheetah takes her mothers' students shopping, which serves mostly to forward the romance between Garfield and Luan (and which also makes the shop-a-holic Cheetah look less ditzy than usual); Ace and Penny are forced to do battle with Death Bird and her new Night Flight; Gina and Ryan must compete with Pee-Wee's "B-Team" and a Shaolin monk to explore a Saurian temple in the Congo; and the newly pregant Cheetah must defend her baby's soul from Tanya, who's still holding a grudge. Even these events are done in a way that foreshadow later developments — Carla's impetuousness hints at her later struggles with developing "murder" techniques, Gina's adventures in the Congo further her investigations into Saurian civilization, and Tanya's attempt to ambush Cheetah on the astral plane summons an unexpected guest and gives him some ideas that come to fruition in about, oh, 22 issues...

Gold Digger v3 #29, p. 9

Fred's art hasn't changed much during the last two story arcs. He is becoming more facile with is coloring effects, incorporating more special effects like transparency, glows, and color holds. I'm more interested, though, in a technique that doesn't see much use in other comics — colored backgrounds.

Most color comics tend not to use colored backgrounds, opting for either a pure white backgrounds (which are apparently passé) or black backgrounds (which are apparently more "cinematic"). On rare occasions, you'll have panels superimposed over a background image, but you rarely see solid color backgrounds that aren't black or white. Yet Fred uses this technique all the time.

Colored backgrounds certainly have their advantages — a well-chosen color can help enhance the overall mood of a page, while adding an element of visual distinctiveness. At the same time, it can be hard to pick a color that doesn't clash with or overwhelm the colors in individual panels, and a poorly chosen color can turn a page into an indecipherable muddle. Finding the right color for each page can either take a long time or a lot of insight into color theory, which is probably why most assembly-line comics don't use this technique.

So why does Fred use it? Partly because these aren't assembly line comics, and partly because he doesn't know any better. He doesn't always get great results, but sometimes he does manage to hit one out of the park. And it really does make his comics look distinctive, which is probably as good an argument for any for doing something.

A Nice Touch

Here's a nice bit of continuity. Back in the 40's of Gold Digger v2, one of G'nolga's flunkies takes a peek at Brianna and her friends with a scouter, and reports that her aura is brown with white spots. Then, four years later, when we finally see Brianna's aura in color....

Gold Digger v3 #38, p. 21

...it's brown with white spots. For new readers, it's an insignificant detail. but for long-time readers, it's a nice easter egg. There's actually a lot of that going on in these issues — the Nomad Artificer technology seems to be partially based on Gina's "phantom rings", Ancient Gina seems to have struck up a partnership with Empress Lynn's pal Subtracto (even though this isn't elaborated on), and even the pyramid Cheetah constructs as her "punishment" in issue #34 remains part of the Diggers compound to the present day.

Bonus Peebo

Gold Digger v3 #34, p. 20

Gold Digger #34 features the first appearance of PeeGee and PeeBrit, two "Peebo scouts" based on Brianna's sisters. They're insufferably cute — so insufferably cute that they later get their own spin-off to showcase how insufferably cute they are. Happy now, Mike?

Random Stuff

Gold Digger v3 #35, p. 17

I think I need to integrate the phrase "I challenge you — in the name of love!" into my standard conversational repertoire.

Thought #25

Well, I'm already on my third set of headphones for the year. No idea what killed the last ones — they just started getting staticky and then totally crapped out. Not sure the new headphones will last, though. I bought a set of in-ear earbuds because they were on sale, but I feel like I've got swimmer's ear when I have them in. And if I loosen them to get rid of that sensation, the sound quality goes to crap and then they fall right out. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and get one of those huge sets of stereo headphones, the ones that make you look like you've just robbed an audiologist. Then again, those would probably crap out on me too.

Thought #26

At the beginning of the year, Allegheny County instituted a 10% sales tax on poured alcoholic beverages to help fund the Port Authority (which, despite its name, is responsible for public transportation). Needless to say, this hasn't been very popular with bar and restaurant owners, who are currently trying to put a referendum on November's ballot to reduce the drink tax. Now, the drink tax has been pulling in millions more than its architects dreamed of, which seems like a good argument for reducing it to me, but I can see how reasonable people could disagree on this point.

The response of the drink tax's proponents on the Allegheny County Council has been to add a competing referendum on the ballot, which offers voters a chance to repeal the drink tax in favor of higher property taxes. (Though first they met in secret to unilaterally grant themselves the right to put referenda on the ballot — convenient but quite possibly a violation of the state's Sunshine Laws.) This strikes me as the most disingenuous move the Council could have made. There's absolutely no reason that a lower or repealed drink tax would lead to higher property taxes. Sure, those are some of the only sources of revenue the Council has — but the Council had no authority to levy a drink tax before 2007, and what's to stop them from getting the state legislature to authorize new taxes?

And none of this solves the main problem, which is that the Port Authority drastically needs to restructure its costs (especially their labor and pension costs, which are ridiculous) and throwing more money at it is pointless until they do.

Interestingly, local print reporters have been presenting a balanced take on the battle (though maddeningly short on specifics), though the opinion writers and TV news have basically decided to parrot the County Council's line.

However this turns out, I think I'll stick to drinking at home. Paying $4 for a drink in a restaurant is just silly when I can get a case for $20. Especially when there's still no charge for water.

Thought #27

Every day I walk by this convenience store on the way home. And every day it drives me nuts, because the kerning on that "s" is way off.

Of course, the kerning is way off because this store used to be called Aryan Tobacco. (It's run by two Indians who weren't thinking about the other potential implications of the word.) Still, the sign painters could have situated that "S" a few inches to the left and saved me a lot of aggrivation.

This isn't the only time that bad kerning has set me off. My company recently created an ad for the video monitors at PNC Park, which involved rearranging a square logo into a long skinny logo. The problem is that the logo has three sections, one of which is kerned differently from the other two. When the elements are stacked vertically, everything looks fine. But when they're lined up horizontally, the differently-kerned section is right in the middle and it doesn't read right.

This is probably just another sign that I spend too much time sweating the small stuff.

Thought #28

Make that my fourth set of headphones. The last set had these little "ear gel" things that you could swap out in order to get the best fit for your ears. Thing is, they also have an annoying tendency to pop off and then roll away somewhere you'll never, ever find them. A set of replacement ear gels costs half as much as a new set of headphones, and sticking the un-gelled buds in your ear isn't an option unless you like ruptured eardrums for some reason.

After a sprawling, year-long epic that culminated in four issues of intense, all-fight scenes, Fred unwinds a bit with two quick, two-part stories with a humorous bent.

In issues #23-24 Cheetah and Charlotte go hunting for "Scarface", the giant tuna that swallowed Cheetah's wedding ring (behind the scenes between v2 #50 and v3 #1). Of course, she also gets caught up in one of Gina's crazy expeditions, and is forced to choose between recovering her wedding ring or saving Charlotte from certain death. It's a simple little character-oriented tale and a nice breather.

Issues #25-26 feature Brianna and the Vaultron Force, who are pitted against were-rats who are trying to steal the leprechauns' magical gold making machine. (It also introduces us to "Prince Lowtor" and the "Uompa-Luoumpans" who will eventually become a major thorn in Princess O'Lura's side.) At first glance, this is another light-hearted breather — except it also re-introduces us to the were-rats and Gothwrain, who are going to become major characters over the next few years. It also establishes Gothrwain as a master of disguise, who's can infiltrate any organization at a moment's notice...

The A stories of these issues are back down to 16 pages, possibly so Fred can get back on schedule. In order to keep the page count up, they also feature 8 page intsallments of "Pink Slip", a story by Thor Thorvaldson, Jr. which pits "Pee-Wee" Talon's current, bumbling henchmen against his new, competent henchmen. "Pink Slip" is, frankly, horrible — pointless, clumsy, and badly illustrated. But amazingly, the characters introduced in "Pink Slip" somehow manage to stick around — they pop up every time Pee-Wee reappears, and one of them is even tucked into an ongoing subplot involving several minor characters. I can't think of any other characters from Gold Digger spin-offs who've received that honor, which is strange to say the least.

There's also a switch from hand lettering to computer lettering in these issues, and while it's jarring the results are just awkward, not unreadable. It helps that Fred continues to hand-draw sound effects and emphatic dialogue, which allows him to have the best of both worlds.

On Cheesecake

Gold Digger v3 #25, p. 2

I couldn't find anything to discuss in the art, so I might as well tackle the big issue that hangs over Gold Digger like a cloud. Namely, that each issues contains cheesecake than a display case at the Cheesecake Factory. Now, there's a bunch of standard responses I could insert here. I could say someting about heroic proportions, remark that the art doesn't go out of its way to call attention to their considerable assets, or point out that Fred dishes up plenty of equal opportunity beefcake, or note that women in Gold Digger are the agressors, bold and confident in their sexuality¹.

But "I like boobahs" is probably a more intellectually honest excuse.

Honestly, though? The boobs don't even cross my mind most of the time. What makes Gold Digger more than mere cheesecake is that the characters aren't defined by their appearance in the slightest. Gina is the world's greatest scientist in the world, Brianna one of the finest technologists, and Cheetah one of the deadliest fighters. Julia is the greatest warrior in an entire dimension (and her chief rival for that honor is also a woman). Female characters are never helpless, and are always standing toe-to-toe with men if not surpassing them outright. That they all happen to be smoking hot babes is just a fringe benefit.

Strangely, in recent years the book has become oddly sexless. Gina may have started out as a boy-crazed archaeologist willing to jump into bed with anything with chiseled abs and a Y chromosome, but I can't think of one instance in the last four years where she's even been in the same room as her putative boyfriend. Cheetah has been completely monogamous since v1 #1, and her other sister abandons boys for guns at the beginning of v3. Heck, even the villains are paired off in monogamous couples. When romance does appear, it's always emphasized over sex (though it almost always has a sexual component as well).

Ultimately, I have to say the cheesecake in Gold Digger. doesn't bother me at all, because it is just a sidelight and not the main attraction. Admittedly, I've been immersed in comics for decades, and a lot of things that I take for granted would shock people who are looking at them with fresh eyes. Anyone else have a different take?

1. Of course, one could also argue that the sexually aggressive woman is just as much a male fantasy as the submissive woman, which basically means you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Get older
The world will fall into it's place
You may be sad
When you get older
You might be happy just to stay
Resist
Get older
Your memories won't slip away
And you'll be glad
When you get older
That you were happy for today
Who cares?

Today is my birthday, putting me one step closer to the Grim Reaper's cold embrace. So what better way to celebrate with some Pirates baseball? It's a lot like death in many ways.

I saw a few months ago that the Pirates would be in Philadelphia on my birthday and I thought it'd be nice to go home and see the game. Somehow this morphed into a family get-together where we all went out to the ballgame and to dinner at Morimoto. Not that I'm complaining — it's rare that we get the whole family together and i always love spending time with my parents and brothers.

We stood around during a two-hour rain delay (complete with heavy thunderstorms and tornado warings) until the game finally got underway. And it was a pretty good game. Well, except for the horrible play where the Pirates managed to make two throwing errors on what should have been a simple grounder. And the multiple wild pitches. And my Dad constantly asking why I didn't know the life story of every player on the Pirates roster, as if their entire bullpen hadn't changed in the last week. But hey, it wasn't a total blow-out and the Pirates managed to look competitive. And I'll settle for that.

On the plus side, the Pirates still have a lot of games to lose before they tie the Phillies record for lifetime futility.

The scoreboard

Mom makes a rare appearance at the ballpark

Steven, looking radiant in his overexposed white shirt

Oh, and dinner at Morimoto was exquisite. So were the hot dogs at the stadium (though not as classy, obviously).

And now the adventures of Julia Diggers, Barbarian MILF.

Turns out, while Gina and company were busy uncovering the lost secrets of the djinni, Julia lost the title of "Armsmaster of Jade" to her rival G'nolga, who we met in the last story arc of the black-and-white series. G'nolga, of course, cheated up the wazoo in order to win — and then made it look like Julia was the one fighting dirty. Julia is dead set on winning back her title and her honor, but first she'll have to fight her way through her own martial arts school, her own clan, and the strongest warriors in Jade!

Of course, there's more to it than that. G'nolga is working for Tirant and Array, who need her to be Armsmaster, because only the Armsmaster can requisition the super-artifacts used to fight off the evil "Shadows" in the distant past. Tirant and Array have also recruited Hanzo (a swordsman accidentally transformed into a swordswoman) and Rook (the ghost knight) to serve them as well. But Jade's Northern Edge Guard are hot on their heels, and the entire plan hinges on G'nolga.

Oh, and Gina and Brianna are bumbling around too, throwing a monkey wrench into everyone's plans.

This is another really strong, well-paced story. Each issue has a clear arc of its own — Julia relays the story of her defeat, the villains outline their master plan, the Edge Guard investigate what's going on, etc. — while at the same time adding to the overall story. Some new plot threads are introduced — the two djinni picked up in the last arc start plotting something, Julia picks up three students, and Gina starts to figure out the basics of magic. And, of course, those pesky Nomad Artificers pop up again, having apparently constructed not only some of Jade's super-artifacts, but the entire dimension as well.

One thing I've always been impressed by is the way Fred is able to present the antagonists as a challenge without making them ludicrously powerful¹. That's because in Fred's story both the heroes and villains lose all the time. Julia loses to G'nolga in the opener, and gets smacked around by every other opponent she faces before barely defeating them. Brittany and the Edge Guard fight G'nolga and her goons to a stalemate. The Edge Guard actually defeat Tirant and Array only to have victory snatched away by a freak coincidence. A power-boosted Tirant somehow lays the smack down on everyone, only to lose it all because he doesn't fully understand what he's controlling.

A lot of adventure stories tend to forget that success and failure walk hand-in-hand — one is meaningless without the other. Someone who wins all the time, who never shows any signs of weakness, is just as hard to get behind as a perrenial loser. People love a winner, but they hate someone who wins effortlessly.

Art-wise, Fred drops the more anglar style he was using for the early color issues and goes with a smoother, more pleasantly cartoonish look.² And, since he's now handling all the coloring duties as well, he dumps the fussy mud colors of earlier issues for a simpler, brighter palette that's both distinctive and eye-catching. This fight scene from issue #13, pitting Julia against her own mother, is a good example of the style Fred uses for these issues.

Gold Digger v3 #13, p. 16

Fred's fight scenes are always exciting reading, though it's frequently hard to single out individual pages or images for praise. There's a real sense of danger — Brunhildagard's strikes seem to be lightning-fast, and the awkward poses, close-ups, and extreme foreshortening make the reader feel as off-balance as Julia does. And despite the awkwardness, every one actions have been clearly choreographed — there's a clear sequence rather than a bunch of herky-jerky moments. The arc of Brunhildagard's elegantly flows from one position to the next with no break in the action, as do Julia's blocks. There is, perhaps, not enough shown of the arena for the audience to intuit Brunhildagard's strategy, but it's obvious from her actions that there is one.

If there's any criticism I have of these pages, it's that the color design could probably use a bit of work. The color of Brunhildagard's strikes is repeated in the background, and the color scheme is too warm overall which tends to blur the panels together. The coloration of the strikes isn't ephemeral enough — they seem solid, which helps convey their strength, but it also makes them seem a bit lumpen and rushed.

Production-wise, Fred ups the page count from 16 to 24 pages with issue #13, allowing him to be a bit more leisurely with his fight scenes and character development. There are also some major problems with consistent color matching — Julia's hair goes from orange to cherry red to dark brown, for instance — and it's clear that this isn't always an artistic choice.

And, for continuity fans, issue #12 marks the last appearance of Raphiel in the main Gold Digger title, though he pops up later in the GD: Tangent webcomics (and one of the Edge Guard minis, too, if I remember correctly). His disappearance always struck me as weird — Fred was clearly trying to establish him as a potential love interest for Brianna. Then again, he's already got a book with three main characters and almost two dozen key supporting players, so maybe there just wasn't room for Raphiel in the books.

Your Gratuitous Pop Culture Reference For Today

Gold Digger v3 #15, p. 6

Bonus Stealth PeeboChu

Gold Digger v3 #16, p. 10

Hmm. While I'm hoping things work out for him, there's no way that code's going to execute properly. Sorry, little dude!

1. Okay, Array is ludicrously powerful, part of her shtick is that a) she doesn't realize how ludicrously powerful she is, and b) is so lovestruck by Tirant that she lets him call the shots most of the time. Plus, at this point she's still eschewing the flashier uses of her power in favor of a subtler approach.
2. The old look persists on the covers for a few issues, probably because they're drawn well in advance of the actual issues.

Story and art by Fred Perry
Colors by Joe Weltjens (#1-4,9), Nathan Lumm (#4) and Fred Perry (#5-9)

Gina Diggers has lost her groove. It's true. In the last year or so of black-and-white Gold Digger she's been reduced to a supporting player in her own comic. Penny, her main rival, beat her to the archaeological discovery of the century. Her sister Brittany caused major havoc on the other-world of Jade, but also helped foil a plot by an evil supervillain. Her sister Cheetah's been stalked by were-rats. Even her pilot is in on the act, winning a thrilling dogfight with an unarmed DC-10. And Gina? She's stood around sheepishly while extradimensional aliens have saved the day.

So in the first story arc of the color Gold Digger series, Gina's got something to prove, and prove it she does by discovering the sunken city of Muthia and the long-lost race of djinni. But where there's djinni, there are greed-heads hungry for wishes — like "Pee-Wee" Talon and his flunkies, the foppish (but deadly) Fauntleroy and his draconic wives, and heck, just about every other explorer in the world! Can Gina hold off the entire Explorers Union and uncover the secret of the djinni's "magic sun" before some idiot ruins everything?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: well, maybe. We don't know yet. After all, most of the plot threads introduced in this opening arc are still playing out now, 90 issues later. Gina still hasn't found the magic sun, but she has learned more about the origins of the djinni and their creators, the Nomad Artificers. The djinni she discovers are still hanging around, causing trouble in various ways. Fauntleroy and Pee-Wee have gained items of great power and are still major thorns in her side. And the rest of the Explorer's Union? Well, they appear to be tied up in this crazy plot in ways you might not believe believe...

These issues are still fun to read, eight years later. The page count has dropped from 24 to 16 pages an issue, but Fred's compensating by paring back on the sub-plots and cramming as much action and humor into those 16 pages as possible. In nine issues we get to see Gina explore an ancient civilization, win a bizarre trivia contest, learn the secret behind the slaughter of the werecheetahs (which is revealed to be the plot of of recently-introduced uber-villain Gothwrain), brawl with every explorer under the sun at the Explorer of the Year Banquet, and explore the fabled "Halls of the Extremely Dead." Each plot thread has a resolution, but also contains the seeds of the next issue's plot. When questions are asked, Gina finds the answers (though sometimes those lead to more questions). Gina is in control and proactive, and her supporting cast members all get to strut their stuff without stealing the spotlight. It's a real step forward for Fred, showing his growth as writer.

Unfortunately, though Fred's plotting has improved, his art hasn't made the transition as well.

Gold Digger v3 #6, p. 13

At first, the color doesn't really add much to the comic. Most of the time it's very basic, purely descriptive without adding to the overall atmosphere. It's also muddy and overly detailed, with extraneous highlights and shadows that clash with the relatively simple linework. This leads Fred to add extra detail to his drawings in an attempt to make them seem less spare, but he hasn't figured the best way to spot these details, making his drawings seem fussy and over-rendered in the wrong places.

He's also tinkering with his style so he can stay on schedule, and it isn't working. Everything winds up feeling angular and stiff, and his anatomy just feels weird.

Still, these are positive signs. It shows that Fred is trying to adjust his style to his new circumstances. Perhaps he hasn't figured out how to best utilize the possibilities of color, but he's learning and improving with every issue. (And the coloring does drastically improve after he takes over the full-time coloring duties from Joe Weltjens.) He's also trying some new tricks that only work in color — Dr. Digger's purple-tinted vision up there really wouldn't work well in black and white, and while it's not terribly effective in color either at least he's trying something new.

Overall, an auspicious beginning to the era of color Gold Digger

Bonus Peebo

My friend Mike is constantly bugging me about Peebo, Brianna's scarily autonomous assault robots. "Why isn't there any Peebo in these issues?" "How come you didn't have any scans of PeeBee in your latest review?" "Who would win in a fight, PeeBri or Iron Man?" So here, for Mike, is the our first glimpse of the late, great Peebochu.

Gold Digger v3 #6, p. 10

Happy? Great. Now shut up.

Rich Oberg, Max Allan Collins and George Hagenauer. Men's Adventure Magazines in Postwar America. Köln: Taschen, 2008.

You've got to love the classic men's adventure covers reprinted in this book.. Not so much for the art, which is pretty pedestrian, but for the breathless titles — "Ravaged by Wallabies!" "Forty-Seven Days on Hell Island!" "Nympho Slaves of San Juan!" There's a zillion ideas for comics in here, and they're all terrible. And I love every blessed one of them.

Terry Pratchett, Making Money. New York: Harper, 2007.

Most Discworld novels can be summed up thusly — someone tries to introduce a bold new modern concept to the Discworld, and it goes horribly horribly wrong. In this case, scam artist Moist von Lipwig (from Going Postal) attempts to introduce the concept of fiat currency to Ankh-Morpork, stepping on the toes of the existing banking structure along the way, only to have the entire economy threatened by a surfeit of cheap labor. Well, at least that's what's supposed to happen. The paper money plot is dropped about halfway through the book, the big threat to the economy comes out of left field (and is resolved with an equally out of left field deduction), and the Medici-influenced bankers who oppose Lipwig don't actually have anything resembling a real plan.

It's still solidly entertaining, but just be aware that you're getting Moving Pictures and not The Truth.

Also, the man needs to get over his clown obsession fast. They're not even ironically unfunny anymore.

Terry Pratchett, Guards, Guards!. New York: ROC, 1991.
Terry Pratchett, Men At Arms. New York: Harper, 1993.
Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay. New York: Harper, 1996.
Terry Pratchett, Jingo. New York: Harper, 1997.
Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant. New York: Harper, 2000.
Terry Pratchett, Night Watch. New York: Harper, 2002.

Despite its flaws, Making Money was still entertaining enough to inspire me to re-read Pratchett's Watch novels.

I love the Watch but somewhere in the middle of Jingo the novels stop being Watch novels and start being about Sam Vimes, Supercop, and over time he's systematically stripped of his flaws and neutered. If I'd been thinking clearly, I'd have stopped with The Fifth Elephant — Night Watch isn't funny, and Thud! (which I didn't re-read, fortunately) is excruciatingly sappy. At this point I'd honestly like to see Vimes honestly retire and let one of the other Watchmen take over — I think they could carry an entire book as an ensemble cast without a strong central character.

Neil Weinstock Netanel, Copyright's Paradox. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

This is the second book of the year that I've been unable to finish.

Now, copyright reform is one of the key issues that all creators need to keep an eye on. The realities of the digital age necessitate a new look at the purpose of copyright, and the existing system is clearly being manipulated in abusive ways by large rights-holders, and there's a lot of interesting thinking being done on the topic right now. Yet somehow Netanel manages to turn a fascinating and vital subject into a joyless slog that only a law professor could love. (Note that the pull quotes on the back cover are all from law professors.) Someone could probably condense this entire book into a really interesting magazine article that would be a thousand times more readable.

Pierre Barbet, Games Psyborgs Play. Translated by Wendayne Ackerman. New York: Daw, 1973.

Now here's a terrible book. The fact that it was translated by Wendayne Ackerman is a tipoff — God bless the Ackermans for all they've done for science fiction fandom, but they just don't seem able or willing to make critical judgments about the object of their affection. Whenever I've seen their name attached to a novel it's always been unreadable crap.

Anyway, Games Psyborgs Play is about an astronaut who's sent to a planet that's like a really bad Dungeons & Dragons game run by a 10-year old. It's ruled by three god-like beings (the titular "psyborgs" though that name comes out of nowhere in the last chapter) who put our hero through a series of nonsensical but lethal tests which he is able to defeat with the superior technology that he pulls out of his ass as needed. Anyway, the psyborgs decide the hero is too much of a hassle to kill, and everything works out in the end, because something something Space Hitler. Honestly, that's what happens — the villains mumble something about Space Hitler, turning into energy beings, and setting up which is supposed to be some sort of parable about nuclear war but makes about as much sense as, well, the aforementioned bad Dungeons & Dragons game. But that's okay. Apparently your one-time opposition to Space Hitler gives you the right to act like the Squire of Gothos forever.

But beware, because Space Hitler could happen to you too! Or something like that.

There are two "sex scenes" in this book — one with a virtuous blonde maiden, and another with an evil raven-haired temptress. I find it amusing that the hero whammies the maiden with his portable orgasmatron, but makes sweet love to the evil temptress. Because despoiling Betty's virtue reflects badly on the hero, and taking advantage of Veronica's lack of virtue doesn't. Hey, if she's giving it away anyway, might as get some, right? Sigh.

Wow. There's an awful lot going on in these issues, and it's rare for a single plot to play out in consecutive issues. Here's a quick run-down of the plots and sub-plots.

• Cheetah is stalked by a group of were-rats, who ultimately plan to kill her because she has the potential to single-handedly wipe out their race. Ultimately, they manage to "bell" her with a magic collar that they can track.

• Stripe is scouted by a secret society of superheroes, who could certainly use the help of someone who has the ability to knock around evil galactic empires single-handedly.

• Gina and Penny explore the remnants of Civ-Alpha, trying to find a way to stop the Beta Phantoms from GD Beta. They manage to awaken the last surviving Saurian from Civ-Alpha, only to realize that the Beta Phantoms are trying to stop the Saurians from destroying the universe rather than vice-versa.

• Brianna, Genn and Seance travel to Jade to try and find a way to resurrect Raphiel, the fake were-cheetah from issue #40, and turn him into a real boy.

• Genn and Seance wrestle with their mutual sexual attraction.

• Jade's Northern Edge Guard are looking into a series of kidnappings. The trail leads them to some villains led by Tirant (the electric supervillain from issue #9).

• Tirant's girlfriend Array, who has the ability to manifest new bodies with vastly different powers and appearances, tries to convince Tirant that her slow, soft conquest of Jade is preferable to his flashy confrontational style.

• Tirant's henchman G'nolga decides to use Brianna and Gar in a complicated plot to get revenge on her old rival — Julia Diggers.

• A weird combination of events, including a solar eclipse and a sharp whack on the head, causes Brianna's long-dormant "Grave Digger" personality to re-emerge. When her two personalities are physically separated, the battle between the two of them practically levels an entire city, but Grave Digger is finally defeated by a kind word from Genn.

• A freak mid-air encounter leads to a rematch between Ace and Death Bird (and her sidekick Skippy). It's probably the most exciting dogfight you'll ever see, or at least the only one where the planes involved are a DC-10 and a

That's an awful lot of plot for ten issues, and the amazing this is that most of them are actually really good. Oh, sure, the GD Beta plot sort of fizzles out — the big battle between the Saurians and the Beta Phantoms takes place off-camera and isn't really brought up again. But the "Grave Digger" arc is actually really well done, the two-parter with Death Bird is perfectly executed comic relief, and even the Array sub-plot comes to a satisfactory conclusion. From here on out, Gold Digger plot lines really start to pay off in a big way.

Artistically, Fred's style hasn't changed much from the previous year, but his fight scenes managed to kick it up a notch.

Gold Digger v2 #44, p. 21

Yep, this page is a bit chaotic and it can be a bit hard at first glance to see where one panel ends and the next panel begins. But there's a lot Fred is doing right — the dynamic panel shapes and irregular gutters heighten the sense of action, and he knows how to place the figures and cuts to give you the maximum balance between up-close action and a battlefield overview. And let's not underestimate the power of some nice big sound effects, either.

And then, the series made the leap to color, and everything changed...

Print Run: 5000

Issue #50 is the last issue that includes the print run in the indicia. By this point, though, sales have clearly leveled off.

With those numbers I'm surprised that Gold Digger was able to make the jump to color. I'd always thought you needed to sell 10,000 copies to make color printing affordable. Maybe Brenner was able to make lower print runs feasible. Or maybe with sales leveling off the jump to color was necessary to push the title to the next level.

See, now that's a good baseball game. A little long ball, a little small ball, a hated (if mostly one-sided) rivalry, and a hot crowd. And the home team wins (for a change).

Also, do you know how difficult it is to come up with Madonna-related taunts to direct at A-Rod? I mean, you can only encourage him to "Express Himself" or refer to a strikeout as a "Shanghai Surprise" so many times. And there aren't many baseball-related jokes you can make out of "Like A Virgin" or "Open Your Heart" or "La Isla Bonita."

Also, it has come to my attention that I've been spending too much time sitting on my duff reading. This will simply not do. I firmly resolve to spend more time this week sitting on my duff blogging instead.

Michael Moorcock, Corum: The Coming of Chaos. Clarkston: White Wolf, 1997.

One of the nice things about the "Eternal Champion" novels is that they're formulaic without being repetitive. I love the unexpected bit at the end of the Corum cycle where Rhynn and Kwll, who have been sent off to slaughter the Dukes of Chaos, announce that they've also annihilated the Lords of Law for good measure.

Michael Moorcock, Gloriana, or the Unfulfill'd Queen. New York: Avon, 1978.

If Mervyn Peake wrote erotic fan-fiction about Queen Elizabeth, it would go a little something like this...

This novel is somewhat infamous for its, um, climax, where Gloriana is finally able to, ah, climax because she's raped. Now, it fits perfectly with the overall themes of the novel — Gloriana has been built up as a perfect goddess, the embodiment of her country and other ideals, and the stress of living up to that image has made it impossible for her to achieve personal fulfillment until everything she has is symbolically stripped from her. The rape itself is neither gratuitous or erotic, and doesn't bother me all that much. It's the implication that this act somehow also redeems her sociopathic rapist that bothers me. Their subsequent marriage is just icky icing on an icky, icky cake.

I hear that there's a revised edition where Gloriana resists the rape, and I'm kind of curious to see how that plays out with the themes embodied by the rest of the novel.

Gary Gygax, Sea of Death. Lake Geneva: New Infinities, 1988.
Gary Gygax, Come Endless Darkness. Lake Geneva: New Infinities, 1989.

I have a nostalgic affection for Gygax's "Gord the Rogue" novels, but they're awful. They're poorly paced, dependent on tortured and broken logic, filled with purple prose and wooden characters. The best I can say about them it's like hearing about someone else's awesome D&D game — you honestly don't want to hear them prattling on about it, but it sounds like it would have been awesome to be there while it was happening.

You have to love the ccover of Come Endless Darkness, though, in which the greatest evil in the universe is portrayed as a hunchbacked charcoal-colored ogre with the face of Buddy Hackett. One of the reasons I've never been able to take Tharizdun all that seriously.

And hey, you also get...

Leda snuggled closer to him. [...] Then she put her arms around his neck and kissed him. "Will you be here with me when I need you?"

"Of course I will," Gord told the half-elven girl. He kissed her back, tenderly at first, and then with a hint of growing passion. He pulled his face slightly away from hers and met her eyes with his own as he continued. "For whatever reasons fate has decreed, you and I are following the same path. We'll be side by side when we enter the City Out of Mind," he assured her with all sincerity. "You and I are comrades, and friends too."

"Then let's become lovers as well," Leda said, using her little hands to stroke the side of his face and his shoulders as she brought her lips to his again in a lingering kiss. Soon passion ruled both of them, and they made love to each other for a long and wonderful time.

...romance, Gygax-style!

Yogi Berra, The Yogi Book. New York: Workman, 1998.

Bathroom reading. Nothing more. And truthfully, not even enough bathroom reading to occupy you for more than one trip.

Bob Costas, Fair Ball: A Fan's Case for Baseball. New York: Broadway, 2000.

It's disenheartening to read a trenchant summary of everything that's wrong with baseball today, and then realize it was written almost a decade ago. You may disagree with some of Costas's proposed solutions — I certainly disagree with the thrust of some of his economic arguments — but they're light-years ahead of everything that's been tried in the last eight years.

Suetonius, The Twelve Cæsars. Translated by Robert Graves. London: Penguin, 1957.
Procopius, The Secret History. Translated by G.A. Williamson. London: Penguin, 1966.

Ah, the dirty side of history.

The Twelve Cæsars isn't actually a very good book. It's curiously organized — Suetonius gives you a list of good things the emperor did during his reign, a list of the bad things the emperor did, a bit of his personal history prior to becoming emperor, the circumstances of his death, and a list of his physical characteristics. It assumes that you're already familiar with the history of Rome — for instance, Suetonius repeatedly refers to the treachery of Sejanus without actually bothering to explain what it involved. And it's full of things that just aren't true — like the two gods who vaporize Julius Caesar's corpse in the forum, Tiberius's ability to poke his finger through an apple, or Nero's propensity for knifing people in the back allies of Rome. In general, Suetonius seems more interested in painting the rulers of Rome in as negative light as possible without providing much insight into their philosophies or personalities.

Procopius has similar interests — he's painting as negative a portrait of Justinian and Theodora as humanly possible — but he also manages to construct a coherent portrait of them that actually seems plausible. Plus, his book is a lot dirtier.

She used to tease her lovers by keeping them waiting, and by constantly playing about with novel methods of intercourse she could always bring the lascivious to her feet; so far from waiting to be invited by anyone she encountered, she herself by cracking dirty jokes and wiggling her hips suggestively would invite all who came her way, especially if they were still in their teens. Never was anyone so completely given up to unlimited self-indulgence. Often she would go to a bring-your-own-food dinner-party with ten young men or more, all at the peak of their physical powers and with fornication as their chief object in life, and would lie with all her fellow-diners in turn the whole night long; when she had reduced them all to a state of exhaustion she would go to their menials, as many as thirty on occasion, and copulate with every one of them; but not even so could satisfy her lust...

See, if they taught that in school, I bet kids would pay attention.

Carol Off, Bitter Chocolate: The Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet. New York: New Press, 2006.

Um, yeah, so I picked this up because it has a scrumptious picture of chocolate on the cover, and didn't notice the subtitle until later. Needless to say, this is a book about everything that's wrong with the chocolate industry, mostly its continued reliance on child and slave labor. It's a sad tale of, well, everyone's indifference, from the the farmers growing cocoa to the corporations purchasing cocoa to the consumers buying the final products.

I'd stop buying chocolate, but I don't know how effective that would be as a gesture — the huge web of multinational corporations that control our food supply are going to get my money one way or another. Anyone have a better suggestion?

Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.

This is a pretty funny and informative look into sex research, past, present, and future, from Kinsey through Masters and Johnson and beyond. It's full of scientists hiring prostitutes to measure the force of their ejaculation, inserting television cameras into sex toys, arranging anonymous hookups to see what role emotions play in sex, smearing dentists' waiting rooms with monkey pheromones, and even surgically reconfiguring themselves to ee if it can help improve their orgasms. It's a little disappointing that Roach doesn't seem to have any deep insights into the material, but it's a fun read nonetheless.

I can live with rain delays. God knows, living in Pittsburgh, I've seen plenty of them over the years. What I can't stand is when the team deliberately drags it out. I think it had to be obvious to anyone looking at the radar that play wouldn't be able to resume, and it was just rude that they waited so long before breaking that news to the fans soaking in their seats.

Of course, it was a double whammy for me, because I was taking my father to the park so he could see the Pirates and Yankees play in Pittsburgh for the first time in 47 years. He's been waiting for this for a while, and probably won't be able to be there for the make-up date. Dammit.

And, as an after-the-fact editorial note, this was the start of a decidedly depressing weekend that included sitting in the rain, witnessing a terrible car accident, and being sick as a dog. Just not my weekend.

I don't actually have much to say about Gold Digger: Perfect Memory, which is really just a fan book that recap the comics for people who don't have access to them (#1 covers issues #1-25, and #2 covers issues #26-50). They're weird relics from an earlier moment in publishing, when it wasn't possible to pick up the entire run of a series in trade paperback. I stopped picking them up when I realized that I was paying for summaries of issues I already owned, which seemed stupid. After all, if I really wanted to know what happened in Gold Digger #35, it was sitting right in my long boxes. In fact, I'd probably have to flip past it to get to the Perfect Memory issues.

Which is why it surprises me that there are three more Perfect Memory, covering issues #1-75 of the current series, which are not terribly difficult to find and reprinted in the fan-friendly Gold Brick collections. I find it difficult to believe that anyone would buy these except for the most devoted fan — and they'd probably prefer the absurd level of detail reached in something like the Official Handbook of the Gold Digger Universe.

Does anyone else have a clue as to who would be buying these?

Written by Greg Pak
Illustrated by Ron Garney
Colored by Paul Mounts
Lettered by

People were raving about Skaar, Son of Hulk last week, so I figured I'd give it a try. I'm not sure what the fuss was about — it's a pleasant enough read, but I won't be dumping my back issues of Conan to make room for Skaar any time soon. There's really nothing in the story and art to carp on.

No, what I want to carp on are the lousy sound effects. Here are some of sound effects sprinkled liberally throughout the first issue.

A planet being torn asunder.

The approach of a great horde.

A dragon breathing fire.

These sound effects all have one thing in common — they're boring. I blame computers.

I understand the appeal of computer lettering from a production standpoint. As someone who hand lettered a comic strip every day for four years, I know old-school lettering can be hand-cramping drudgery. A well-tuned font can make lettering so easy that a trained monkey could knock out a 22-page issue every day. It allows editors and writers to make changes right up to the moment the files go off to the printer. The average comic reader can't tell the difference between computer lettering and hand lettering, and usually doesn't care even if he can). Sure, you lose out on some of the idiosyncratic possibilities of hand lettering, but then superhero comics have rarely made use of those possibilities to begin with.

So no, I don't have anything against computer lettering per se. My problem is that computer lettering encourages you to take shortcuts everywhere. Especially with sound effects.

Sound effects aren't dialogue or captions — they shouldn't be regular and repeatable, or they become lifeless. When every "snikt" is the same they just become visual clutter, something to ignore, and when prepackaged effects are used they're frequently inappropriate. In the above examples, the letterforms in "Krakooom!" are just way too thin to convey the agony of a planet being reduced to rubble. The rough edges and the baseline shift in "Rrrruuuummmblleee" is just too regular to convey the violent approach of an army. And there's nothing that makes "Hrraaaaaa!" particularly fiery or load except for its size.

Sound effects really should be treated as part of the art — and the artists and letterers who use them well actually do. Walt Simonson clearly designs his pages with sound effects in mind, as do Erik Larsen, Adam Warren, and a whole host of talented manga artists. Sure, it takes a bit more time and effort, but the results are an order of magnitude more exciting. And isn't excitement what superhero comics are all about?

Besides, if I see one more out-of-the-box "snikt" I'm gonna scream.

Story by Charles & Daniel Knauf
Art by Daniel Acuña
Lettered by Todd Klein

The new Knauf/Acuña Eternals series picks up where the Gaiman/Romita miniseries left off, with the recently awakened Eternals preparing for the imminent arrival of the sinister Horde. In the intervening months, they seem to have settled into a predictable pattern. Makkari gets visions of depowered Eternals from the Dreaming Celestial, and Ikaris and Thena rush to recruit them to their side before the sinister Druig can enslave them to his. In short, it's Transformers: Armada with Eternals instead of Mini-Cons and the Horde in place of Unicron.

This is a perfectly logical follow-up to the Gaiman/Romita series, if a bit lacking. At the moment, it's microfocused on the Eternals rather than some sort of grand cosmic conflict — and we're once again left with the problem that the Eternals themselves are not terribly interesting characters. Oh, sure, they've got conflicts of interests, but they seem to be caused by external factors rather than some sort of internal personality. I couldn't tell you how Ikaris and Thena would react differently to the same situation, and even their conversation about brainwashing doesn't do much to highlight the differences in their personalities. It doesn't help that the only Eternal who does have a genuine personality — Sersi — has had her basic characterization screwed with so many times that it's hard to know what she really thinks.

But I was expecting most of that. It's possible that things will kick into high gear next issue, when we're promised the sublime cosmic secrets of the Celestial. Though I have a feeling the revelations will somehow fall short of the mark set by recent cosmic work like Gødland.

One thing that I wasn't expecting, though, is how quickly I've tired of Daniel Acuña's art. When I first saw his work on Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters it was a bresh of freath air — a genuinely new look for mainstream American comics, pop and a little bit trashy, painted without being stiff, and made possible only because Acunñ controlled every aspect of the visual presentation. But two years later his style hasn't shown any signs of evolving, and the cracks are starting to show.

Eternals (2008) #1, p. 16

One of the significant weaknesses of Acuña's art is the sameness of his character designs. Sersi looks like Thena who looks like Linda West who looks like Miss America who looks like Emma Glenn who look like Phantom Lady. Makkari looks like Ikaris who looks like the Flash who looks like Firebrand who looks like Uncle Sam. And what makes it worse is that Acuña is clearly capable of achieving a wider range — Druig and Legba are truly unique-looking, the Red Bee had a different appearance than his other women, and there are background characters who are some wonderful-looking cartoons. It seems, however, that when drawing heroic archetypes he falls back on the same pattern over and over again.

There's also a lack of genuine emotion or expressive body language in his figure work. I like the expression on Sersi's face in the first panel above, but it doesn't seem to represent any sort of genuine emotion and definitely doesn't seem to match (or serve as a counterpoint to) her worried protestations. There's no longing in Sersi and Makkari's hand-holding, no passion in their kiss. There's no genuine worry on Sersi's face as she pleads with Makkari, and his reaction seems less like regret and more like "dropping a deuce."

He's also not a great storyteller. His simple grid layouts and the uncluttered compositions of his panels make pages are often very easy to read, but at the same time also no overall design to the page, nothing to lend a bit of extra drama to key scenes. One panel follows another, with no real attempt to juice any of them for maximum impact. There are no gestures or motifs to connect the panel, or a key moment that they're built around. There's no particular reason for any of the panels to be horizontal, vertical, or square. That dramatic kiss isn't elongated, and the extra-tall gutters just seem odd rather than meaningful. In short, it's a perfectly competent but dull page.

Still, it may be harsh to judge Acuña on his meager output. He's drawn what, twelve issues of comics in the last three years? And you certainly don't want to mess with a formula that's been successful. Still, I hope he shows us some new tricks soon or his success maybe short-lived.

Story by Mark Millar
Art by Tommy Lee Edwards
Lettered by John Workman

Thirteen-year old Toby has fled from the bitter reality of his parents' divorce into the fantasy world of Marvel comics. One day, though, he makes a shocking discovery — his world is about to be invaded by Marvel supervillains, who've set up shop in an abandoned house down the street.

Look, I'll be honest — I read some of Mark Millar's hyperbolic pre-release publicity for this one, and figured that it would be an awful piece of tripe I could rip into. And, as expected, there's nothing terribly original here, and some of the aspects of Toby's story feel like terrible clichés. But the whole comic is well executed and surprisingly intriguing, and I'm curious to see if Millar does go someplace interesting with this. Though I expect it'll turn out that the supervillain invasion is all in Toby's head, and he'll come back to reality but not before learning some important moral lessons from the superheroes.

For now, though, a cautious thumbs up.

One-Man Band

I suspect the real appeal of 1985 lies in Tommy Lee Edwards' art. I was going to say that he doesn't feel like a Marvel artist at all — but then I remembered that Marvel hasn't had a coherent house style since the early 90's. I think, more to the point, is that he's one of the few mainstream comic artists who are doing almost everything — penciling, inking, coloring — which allows his work to develop intriguing idiosynracies while avoiding the muddled mediocrity that comes out of the assembly line process. Here's a great example, an arresting two-page spread from the end of the book.

1985 #1, p. 20-21

This is a beautiful piece, with complex detail suggested by savage brushstrokes and scratchy pen marks, enhanced by the vivid warm colors that suffuse the entire drawing. It's hard to imagine a page like this emerging from the assembly line process. Edwards would have to execute much tighter pencils just to ensure that his intentions weren't lost. An inker would never lay down such rough inks, and would be tempted to leave large parts of the image open for color. And a colorist would tend towards representative color — a hint of the fire might bleed over into the background, but you can just bet Dr. Doom would be wearing a forest green cloak.

I know why Marvel and DC insist on the assembly line process — it prevents artists and authors from making ownership claims on corporate-held properties. But artists like Edwards and Daniel Acuña, who are developing compelling styles that are only achievable when they control all elements of the production process (and who are fast enough to produce work on a regular basis) may finally make them question their policies and allow some interesting work to emerge from the corporate ghetto.

The Death of the Bleed

Of course, I can hardly pick up a Marvel comic these days without noticing something missing — namely, the bleed. It seems like Marvel's done away with it completely these days, with the art on most of their high profile projects running right up to the edge of the page. I don't exactly mourn the loss of the bleed — it's an artificial constraint, born of the necessity to hedge against badly cut print jobs — but I'm not sure that Marvel has really thought through what eliminating the bleed means aesthetically.

First, the bleed allows the art to breathe by preventing side-by-side pages from running into each other. Now, this can be dealt with through some intelligent page composition, but since many commercial comics have to be drawn without knowing which pages will be run side-by-side (thanks, advertising!) this can be a daunting task.

Additionally, the bleed also allows the art to look like it belongs on the page. Eliminating it can make the art more absorbing and immersive — but it can also make the word balloons and panel gutters really stand out. I mean, really stand out — there are a few pages of 1985 where my eye isn't drawn to the imagery but to the vivid white gutters running across the page.

The bleed also prevents the art and lettering from running into the bound edge of the page. I've seen a few series in the last couple of years (Eternals comes to mind) where the art looked just fine when it was a pamphlet but became problematic when compiled into a hardback because word balloons are now vanishing into the gutter.

And finally, by totally eliminating the bleed, it becomes really obvious whenever there's a mis-cut page because there's now a crisp white edge running along the cut. (Again, the Eternals hardback comes to mind).

So Marvel? You might want to think about bringing the bleed back. It doesn't have to be as massive as it used to be, but you probably want something.

Morning in America

One thing that does puzzle me is why, exactly, 1985 is set in the mid-80's. I can think of plenty of reasons to set a story about Marvel comics in this era. There are the weird political and social dynamics of the Reagan era. It's halfway between the founding of the company and the current era, the beginning of the "modern era", the tail end of Jim Shooter's tenure, the beginning of the speculator craze and the ascendancy of the direct market. It's the tail end of the period where comics didn't have to compete for your entertainment dollar — when they were cheap, before they had to compete with video rentals and video games. It's the Secret Wars era, the period where many Marvel characters started to assume their iconic status, before everything became grim-n-gritty. For the current Marvel audience, it's the period where they started reading comics. But so far there's no thematic reason for the comic to be set during this era — in fact, you could probably set it in 1975 or 1995 without changing anything.

Or, if you want to be snarky, it could just be that 1985 was the last year you could actually find 13-year olds reading comics.

By Lewis Trondheim
Translated by Joe Johnson
Lettering and retouch by Ortho

Mainstream comic fans often prefer "realistic" drawing as a matter of course. A labored, detailed drawing seemlingly takes more effort to produce than simple one — and in the average fan's mind, more man-hours always equals better. Yet I think most of the most interesting work in comics is done by people who go in the opposite direction — creating drawings that are as simple as possible.

Drawing simply is often fraught with great peril. Too much detail can highlight the flimsiness of your underdrawing. Too little detail can make your drawings seem unfinished and inexpressive. If you're too slick, your drawings may feel sterile and lifeless. If you're too loose, your drawings may feel slapdash and crude. It can take forever to find a way to portray a complicated emotion without resorting to a pantomime shorthand. Misplace a single line and your drawing is revealed as sheer artifice.

And yet, when done right, the rewards can be great. Simple drawings can be universal, clearly understood, and direct. They speak to people across barriers of language and culture. A simple drawing can make the fantastic seem plausible, the commonplace seem extraordinary.

And to prove my point, here's five panels of Lewis Trondheim being tortured by his cat.

Little Nothings, p. 50

Trondheim's drawing here is masterful. There's not a line or gesture wasted — everything directly contributes to the overarching gag. The poses are not exact, but are specific enough that we can instantly grasp the overarching acture — Trondheim is tying his shoes, and his cat is playing with the laces. Note how Trondheim's eyes — represented by just a single line, or by two empty circles — can nonetheless express a wide range of emotions from from intense concentration to sudden surprise to agitation to a sort of world-weary boredom. The background, the setting are equally minimum — just enough detail to give you the suggestion of what you're seeing, to make it stand out from the page without seeming empty, but no attempts at specificity other than the rudiments of Trondheim's costume. The entire sequence is instantly comprehensible — there's no chance you'd read the panels in the wrong order, even without panel borders.

Little Nothings is the English langauge version of Lewis Trondheim's journal webcomic, Les Petits Riens. Honestly, I'm glad to see it finally released in English — I've been reading it online for a few years and lately it's been pushing my (admittedly poor) French to its limits. The book is filled with odd incidents, anecdotes, and observations drawn from Trondheim's daily life — and it also features his wonderful cartooning, in full color on every page.

Little Nothings is available from NBM, and more strips are available online at Lewis Trondheim's web site. Though you might want to brush up on your French first.

The recent heat wave has forced me to choose betwen blogging and eating ice cream on the couch. Well, the fridge is empty, so...

• Ryan Doumit had an amazing night — 4 for 4, two doubles, two home runs, three runs and three RBIs. He was essentially responsible for two thirds of the Pirate's offense. Of course, he also pegged reliever John Grabow in the leg when trying to make a throw to second.
• Paul Maholm started off strong but had one of the most impressive collapses I've ever seen, giving up back-to-back-to-back jacks. In all fairness to Maholm, it looked like Jason Bay could have made a play on at least one of those homers if he'd been doing something other than standing around watching them go over the wall.
• At this point Adam LaRoche is almost guaranteed to be gone next year — he's performing terribly and costing the Pirates a bundle. I mean, he's not in Derek Bell territory yet but it's close. Still, he makes me laugh every time he comes to bat because he uses "You're the Best" from The Karate Kid as his theme song.
• Towards the end of the game Nationals outfielder Elijah Dukes turned around to jaw with some of the fans in the outfield. He gave as good as he got, and he was pretty damn funny, too.
• For one night only the Pierogi race was changed to a relay, with the Pierogis facing off against the National's Presidents. When I saw Teddy was anchoring the last leg for the Nationals, I knew that the Presidents were going down.
• Jack Wilson's goatee makes him look like a spree killer.

I don't have any particularly deep thoughts about any of these books this time around. Probably because I'm writing down my thoughts months later...

Peter Watts, Blindsight. New York: Tor, 2006.

A simple tale of first contact — how do we communicate with creatures that whose minds and biology may be fundamentally incompatible with our own — is spiced up by Watts decision to turn the spotlight back on humanity, wondering how we even manage to communicate with each other. Having said that, I think Watts ultimately fails, for two reasons. First, because he goes into detail about brain chemistry and evolutionary biology in ways that take you out of the story. And second, because his posthuman characters don't feel alien — they're not as "unknowable" as they are "sketchily drawn."

But don't take my word for it — the whole available for free at Watt's website if you want to take a look.

Karen Wilkin, Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

The exhibition catalog for the exhibit I saw last month in DC. The essays putting color field painting into perspective are excellent, though I wish there was more commentary on the individual pieces.

Robert Twigger, Angry White Pyjamas. London: Indigo, 1997.

Englishman moves to Japan, has mid-life crisis, and decides to add some structure to his life by taking an intensive akido training course intended for riot police. I think this is the fourth time I've read the book — Twigger has a nice, breezy style and his subject matter is fascinating.

Eric Hoffman and Gary Rudoren, Comedy by the Numbers. San Francisco: McSweeney's, 2007.

You'd think a satirical book about comedy by two comedy writers would be funny. You'd be wrong.

Derek Zumsteg, The Cheater's Guide to Baseball. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.

A great look into how cheating has helped shape the sport of baseball, from the unsportsmanlike tactics that emerged in the game's early days to the high-tech cheating that dominates the sports today. Zumsteg has a sort of strange admiration for successful cheaters that's mildly infectious — he makes their ingenuity and resourcefulness seem almost quintessentially American. One thing I wish the book had, though, was a more technical discussion of how some of these cheats work, because my "hard slider" needs all the saliva it can get. Er, I mean help.

Michael Moorcock, Elric: The Stealer of Souls. New York: Ballantine, 2008.

This is the second Elric book I own with the subtitle "The Stealer of Souls" and there's not that much overlap between the two as you think. This volume presents the Elric stories in publication order, starting with "The Dreaming City" and ending with "Stormbringer," while the White Wolf ombinus edition presents them in chronological order, starting with "The Sleeping Sorceress" and ending, well, with "Stormbringer." It's kind of hard not to end with "Stormbringer."

Michael Moorcock, The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius. New York: Dale, 1979.
Michael Moorcock, The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Centurey. London: Granada, 1976.

After finishing The Stealer of Souls I figured that a shelf full of Moorcock novels would make for great train reading. So, I'm gonna say it now before one of my friends says it in the comments — my recent experiences have left me with a craving for Moorcock.

Moorcock's stories are often about the end of the world, whether symbolically (Corum) or in a very literal sense (Elric). But it strikes me that his Jerry Cornelius stories are the only ones that really deal with people living through the end of the world, trying to shape it to their own ends, succeeding, failing, despairing, or even trying to cling to the remnants of the past. I suppose if I wasn't half-asleep I could make some clever analogies to the Internet revolution.

Still, The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius features the following passage:

Eventually Miss Brunner emerged from the wheelhouse. She was dressed as severely as ever in a Cardin trouser suit as dated as Jerry's own clothes. She held a baby in her crooked right arm, a Smith & Wesson .44 revolver in her left hand. She gave him a bent smile. "Good morning, Mr. Cornelius. So our paths come together again."

"I got your note. What's up, Miss Brunner?"

She shook her short red hair in the wind and turned her feline face down to regard the baby. "Do you like children, Mr. Cornelius?"

"It depends." Jerry moved to look at the baby and was shocked.

"It's got your eyes and mouth, hasn't it?" said Miss Brunner. She offered it to him. "Would you like to hold it?"

He took a wary step backwards. She shrugged and tossed the little creature far out over the rail. He heard it hit the water, whine, gurgle.

"I only hung on to it in case you'd want to have it," she said apologetically. "Okay, Mr. Cornelius. Let's get down to business."

How can you not love that?

Leland Gregory, Stupid History. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2007.

I was kind of hoping that this would be more than diverting bathroom reading, but no, that's all it is. Still, it's always amusing to watch a book that aims to correct "misconceptions throughout the ages" that has a few misconceptions of its own. (Chariots are useless on a battlefield? Tell that to the Hittites.)

Adrian Shaughnessey, How To Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005.

Because every now and then I need some practical advice.

I'm going to have to start griding these out a lot faster if I want to have a chance of getting through the entire series before #100 is released...

GD-18 #1 (1998)

Print Run: 4,000

This one-shot is a collection of short stories featuring the Diggers sisters as cute-as-a-button six year olds. Fred Perry also uses this as an excuse to fill in a couple of holes in the backstory — Dr. Diggers' brief career as a superhero is mentioned for the first time (which also introduces a new character who pops up again in issue #41), we get to see the fateful day that Jonathan Diggers was mutated into the Lich King, and the question of "just what happened to Gina's pet canary Peeper" is finally resolved. Still, the stories tend to alternate between charming and touching, and they highlight one of the reasons that Gold Digger is so popular — Fred is able to create a sense that these are people who really love and care for each other, and their interplay feels like gentle ribbing rather than forced banter.

Oh, and did I mention that Gina and Cheetah are hideously cute six year olds?

GD-18, p. 15

Interestingly, at least one of these stories introduces a minor continuity error — namely, Dr. Diggers drops Cheetah's backstory on young Gina here, though in the Mangazine stories she claims to have never heard the story before. It doesn't make a lick of difference which version is the right one because it doesn't affect anything else in published Gold Digger stories.

Gold Digger v2 #40 (1998)

Print Run: 5,000

Here's what I wrote about this ten years ago when it was first released (thanks Google!):

GOLD DIGGER #40 (Antarctic Press): As Strype and Cheetah prepare to get hitched, a new werecheetah shows up! Will Cheetah be forced leave Strype to repopulate her species? Nah, probably not. A fun single-shot issue from Fred Perry, and a nice change of pace from the big cosmic going-ons of late. Expect a lot of cameos from characters we haven't seen in years, and the obligatory moment where the bad guys try to ruin everything. Perry's art also hits a new level, and some of the revised character designs in this issue are extremely cool-looking. Funny, thrilling, attractive, and as fun to read as it must have been to write. GOLD DIGGER continues to be one of books where the artist's love of what he's doing is infectious, and has you gripped from the first page. Always recommended in my book. Grade: B+

Weddings are a great storytelling device for serial fiction — there a chance to get everyone together in one place, to wallow in history, tie up loose plot lines and start new ones, and there's an (almost) guaranteed happy ending. Fred doesn't disappoint here, squeezing almost every friendly character from 45 issues of Gold Digger into one chapel, but he has a problem. Up to this point, Stripe and Cheetah's relationship has been defined by Stripe's feelings of inadquacy and weakness — he's just felt inferior both physically and emotionally to the girl of his dreams. Well, now Stripe is a near-godlike being with alien artifacts, and has managed to almost single-handedly save his entire species from extinction. So where does the dramatic tension at the wedding come from?

Through the introduction of a male werecheetah (Raphiel), who throws the whole wedding into chaos. Some the characters try to convince Cheetah to dump Stripe for Raphiel so that the werecheetah line won't become extinct. Other characters (like Brianna and the villanous Tanya) see a chance to turn the unstable situation to their advantage. And everyone is flabbergasted. The nice thing, though, is that all of the problems are resolved neatly. Cheetah gets to marry Stripe, Raphiel gets a chance to continue the werecheetah line, eeryone else comes to turns with their feelings. Well, almost neatly — Raphiel turns out to be a golem created by Tanya, and she turns him back into muck as punishment for his failure.

Anyway, a nice, light issue with an unreservedly joyous ending. Probably my favorite issue of Gold Digger, period. So let's celebrate with the last page.

Gold Digger v2 #40, p. 24

That's about as perfect an ending as you'll ever see in a comic book.

Gold Digger Beta #1 (1998)

Print Run: 7,000

And here's Gold Digger's first foray into color. Thing is, the color isn't much to write home about.

Gold Digger Beta p. 17

For starters, the color output is woefully inconsistent — Penny might be a rich mahogany on one page and chocolate milk on the adjacent page, and Gina ping-pongs from extremely blonde to mousy brunette. The coloring itself is pretty perfunctory — there's no serious attempt to incorporate atmospheric effects or to use color to guide the eye around the page, just to fill in objects with an appropriate color. Details added at the coloring are sometimes used to shore up some haphazard pencils, which I normally hate (but I'll give Fred a pass because he's both penciling and coloring the book).

And yet, the color version of the comic is still somehow more appealing than the black-and-white version. The bright, simple (and somewhat garish) coloring is a nice change from the dark, super-airbrushed Image coloring that was predominant at the time. And hey, let's face it, Fred never really seemed to master black and white, either.

The plot is simple — Penny Pincer discovers the ruins of an ancient civilization, brings in Gina to consult, and everyone gets jumped by a monster that may have been responsible for destroying the ancient civilization in the first place. Good, back-to-basics stuff. Still, who knew that we'd still be in the middle of this plot 100 issues later?

By Mari Okazaki
Translated by Angela Liu and Liz Forbes
Lettering and Retouch by Star Print Brokers

Mari Okazaki's Suppli follows the life of twenty-seven year old Minami Fujii. When she's dumped by her long-term boyfriend, she's forced to come to terms with the sad state of her life — she has no friends, is practically an old maid, and is stuck in an advertising job where she has little pull. But with the help of some friendly co-workers and a little self-confidence, just maybe she can turn her life around...

I didn't like Suppli on the first read-through, mostly because of the art. It's not that Okazaki is a bad artist — she's got a masterful command of body language and her figure work manages to capture some of the liveliness of fashion illustration without becoming sterile and static. No, I didn't like her storytelling. Pages are crammed full of chaotic overlapping panels overlaid on top of oddly arcane symbolic motifs, which makes them very hard to read.

Of course, on my second read-through I realized that all of these storytelling choices are intentional.¹ The chaotic page structure is essentially a reflection of Minami's own inner turmoil. The more conflicted and confused she is, the more chaotic the page becomes. But when she's free from disractions or focused, the storytelling is simpler, more conventional and direct.

Here's one of the more effective sequences from volume one. Minami's spent the last chapter putting together her dream project, shepherding it from conception to production, only to be called before the board of directors and told that the client has decided to go in a different direction...

Suppli v1, p. 96-99

In the upper right, Minami is in a purely reactive mode, trying to placate the board of directors. She's angry, confused, defensive, and the jumbled, fragmentary panels capture that state of mind. (I like how she's pushed out of her own panels by the careless comments of of others — a good use of dense word balloons.)

Then the decision is finally handed down, and Minami is forced to finally confront the fact that her project has been killed. This is relayed through some simple, forceful panels, in direct contrast to the jumbled critique we've just witnessed. And once it finally sinks in, the panel structure starts to be come more complex, though not nearly as complex as the argument on the facing page. Note that it's focused on Minami, now, with close-ups of her features and glimpses into her thoughts — this time the turmoil is purely internal rather than shared by the entire room.

And after all the anger, shock, and self-pity, there comes a final moment of resignation, solitude, deadness. I think we've all had a moment like this, where we feel powerless, and it's all we can do to just exist. It's a powerful transition, made all the more notable because it doesn't share the usual M.O. of a two-page splash. We're conditioned to expect big things to happen in a big spread like this — if not a slam-bang physical confrontation then a dramatic reveal or a powerful emotional moment. What we get instead is a moment defined by the lack of action or powerful emotions — just sheer exhaustion.

After all, that, though, I still don't like Suppli — not that it's bad, mind you, but josei just isn't my cup of tea. It's still worth reading to see a storytelling technique that's not frequently employed in American comics and which we can definitely learn from.

1. Okay, in retrospect it's pretty damn obvious, but give me a break. I'm thick.

Thought #21

Just once I'd like to hear Lanny Frattare pronounce "Kosuke Fukodome" correctly. Or at least pronounce in a way that doesn't turn the first few syllables into a curse word.

Thought #22

I have noticed that lately when I notice girls I tend to zero in on a single body part, such as "Good God, that's the most beautiful nose I've ever seen!" or "What a perfectly formed toe!" or "That philtrum looks so deliciously kissable!" I feel like Zeuxis cobbling together his portrait of Helena.

Thought #23

My Heavenly Hockey Club v5, p. 85

Thought #24

The other day I realized I was turning into my father. It wasn't because the way I looked in the mirror, or because of any particular thought I had. It was because I was eating cold beans from a can. As soon as the realization struck me, I dropped everything I was doing, washed up, and went out and had some proper dinner.

Saved the beans, though. I've got some burgers in the freezer they'd go well with.

Written by Kevin Rubio
Penciled by Lucas Marangon
Inked by Nick Schley
Colored by Andrew Dalhouse
Lettered by Troy Peteri

Eric Hoffman is having a bad month. First, his father dies. Then, he discovers that his father was secretly the notorious supervillain Abyss and is not actually dead, but merely in hiding while he coordinates a sinister plot against his arch-nemesis, the Arrow. The authorities think Eric is crazy. Can he stop his father's sinister revenge before it's too late?

I picked up the Abyss miniseries for a few reasons. First, I liked the logo, which has a nice classic look to it. The cover isn't any great shaeks, but the main character has a nice frantic look to him which seemed to promise madcap hilarity. And the blurb on the cover that says "by the creator of Star Wars: Tag and Bink" didn't hurt either.

Unfortunately, I had the same reaction to Abyss that I've had to other Red 5 comics — that it wasn't half-bad, but that it wasn't very good either. Rubio's story isn't hilarious, but it's not unfunny, either. Marangon's art isn't exciting or involving, but it's not dull or unreadable either. It's just mediocre.

Part of the problem is that the comic has a bit of a split personality. It wants to be a jokey comic where superheroes are a laughing matter — they drive around in a Prius because it gets great mileage, sell recalled action figures on eBay when they need money fast, are more frightened by bad publicity the threat of armageddon. At the same time, it also wants the stakes to seem high, for fight scenes to carry to potential for death or injury, for shadowy cabals to seem sinister even though they're composed of men in drag and afro wigs. It's not impossible to combine humor and high drama, but it usually requires you to firmly come down on one side or the other, which Rubio doesn't.

And yet, the series still has a certain charm. The characters are likeable enough, and the loony shenaningans could be appealing if they had a bit more bite. I wouldn't go out of my way for more Abyss comics but I wouldn't mind reading more either.

In fact, the only thing I didn't like at all was the coloring.

Abyss #2, p. 15

The style Marangon is using seems to cry out for some bright, cartoony coloring, not the standard superheroic coloring seen here, which makes the characters look less like cartoons than or Splitting Image puppets. I mean, geez, does the at drawing of Eric really look like it calls for a defined philtrum and upper lip? It's actively working at cross purposes to the art. (Well, except maybe in the case of the Arrow's ludicrously defined musculature.) A different coloring style — bold, colorful — might have helped set the tone for the rest of the book.

When we last saw Prince Stripe, he'd postponed his wedding, stuck some dangerous alien artifacts under his skin, and blasted an entire city into outer space so he could go fight the spacefaring villains known only as the Dynasty. These issues pick up where we left off before "Time Warp" with the Diggers sisters and their allies (Ace, Penny, Charlotte and Vaultron) heading off to help Stripe with his fight.

By examining the Dynasty's technology, Gina is able to make a stunning discovery — the Dynasty were once members a race known as "the Gardeners" who tended to planets and spread life across the universe. One family went rogue, killing the other gardeners and draining planets of life to gain power, Galactus-style. But, as it turns out, the Gardeners and Dynasty don't have many powers of their own — what makes them truly fearsome is the bio-mechanical symbiots they've bonded with. And those symbiots have evolved a level of intelligence and remorse, and Gina is able to convince them to finally turn off that power once and for all.

What I'm trying to say is, the Dynasty goes down way too easily. They've spent three issues eradicating most of the life on planet Aebra, kicking the butts of everyone who isn't named Stripe, and plotting to reduce the planet to a pile of smoking asteroids, only to get their butts kicked by Gina with her pocket calculator and one punch from Cheetah...

Gold Digger v2 #39, p. 19

That's a gross oversimplification, but it does highlight one of the consistent problems with this era of Gold Digger — sudden endings. It's not that the stories don't end, or even that the ends are thematically or dramatically unsatisfying. It's just that they're never really given enough space to play out. Villains are just blasted away on the last page, in a way that seems to devalue the struggle against them.

On the plus side, both "Time Warp" and the Dynasty storylines have emotionally satisfying endings that help compensate for these deficiencies — Professor Peachbody gets smacked down but good, and Stripe's reunion with Cheetah is actually kinda touching.

These issues are also notable for introducing two new sets of characters into the Gold Digger universe:

• Running with the joke that Brianna likes big weapons way more than she should, issue #36 introduces "peebo," the self-aware bomb! The peebos later evolve into generic self-aware utility droids, with variants including Peebochu, PeeBri, PeeGee and PeeBrit. The peebos never get old — they're so completely innocent, guileless, and stupid that they have no idea what they're doing, and also they happen to be hooked up to some serious weapon systems. Comedy gold.
• Also in that vein, issue #37 introduces "Vaultron Force," a leprechaun version of Voltron assembled from robot shoes, with pilots like "McKeith" and "Princess O'Lura." Again, this is pure comedy gold — even the most hackneyed or melodramatic plot line becomes side-splittingly hilarious when your protagonist is a six inch tall leprechaun.

Print Run: 5200

I think this is what you call "plateauing."

Your Gratuitous Pop Culture Reference for the Day

Gold Digger v2 #37, p.1 2

Story and art by Jiro Taniguchi
Translation by Elizabeth Tiernan & Shizuka Shimoyama

Jiro Taniguchi has been a bit of an acquired taste for me. On the surface, there are some qualities to his work that I find repellent. His characters are often stiffly solid and inexpressive. His drawings sometimes accumulate detail in a way that detracts from the overall page design. There's a certain level of detachment to his storytelling that subverts my involvement as a reader. Often I find that his work exists purely at a surface level, with little in the way of subtext or nuance to keep me engaged.

And yet, Taniguchi is such a gifted artist and craftsman that I'm continually drawn to his work, even if I ultimately find it unsatisfying.

By now, you probably don't need me to tell you what to think of The Ice Wanderer and Other Stories, the latest Taniguchi release from Fanfare/Ponent Mon — dozens of other blogs have already weighed in. So I'll just go ahead and discuss the most memorable sequence from the book.

"Our Mountains" is a simple story — a Japanese hunter tracks down the one-eared bear who hilled his son, and by defeating it he's overcomes his own guilt. The strength of the story doesn't lie in its originality, of which there is none. It doesn't lie in the tense psychological drama, of which there is, again, none. It lies in the effective ways in which Taniguchi allows the struggle between man and beast to play out across the page.

Here's the climactic scene from "Our Mountains" where the hunter and bear finally face off. (My apologies for the small size of the images — because this is such a long excerpt I didn't feel comfortable reproducing these at the usual size.)

The Ice Wanderer and Other Stories p. 128-9

The bear tracks subtly lead your eyes across the right-hand page — from the solid black figure of the hunter they arc across the upper part of the page, curve down the right hand side, and lead you to the diagonal thrust of the hunter's hand and the slope he's standing on, catapulting you to the left-hand page. It's basic storytelling, but very well-done.

Unfortunately, I think the level of detail undercuts the effectiveness of these pages just a tad — the tangled growths of trees and cluttered shrubs sometimes shift the focus from the central figures to the background. To some extent, this is an effective way of putting you inside the hunter's head, shifting, confused, unsure of where your quarry lurks. But more often than not it just makes the pages hard to read.

Fortunately, Taniguchi's has one sure-fire way to keep you focused: the bear. The bear is big, black, and boldly inked. He feels much more real than everything else on the page, which is delineated with a fine, sensitive line. Every time your eyes start to drift towards irrelevant details those inky blobs grab them and force them to focus on the action. That thin close-up of the bear's eyes is the most noticeable and arresting panel on these two pages, and more than anything else they indicate that the time for wandering around in the snow is over — we're about to have some explosive action.

One thing that's not going to be clear from this excerpt is that until this point, Taniguchi has been very conservative with his panel layouts. For the most part he's been using simple rectangular panels, and hasn't allowed them to bleed to the edge of the page. But as action approaches, the borders begin to skew slightly, and panels start to creep towards the edge of the page.

Something else worth noting is that during this entire sequence, Taniguchi is using horizontal gutters to indicate changes in perspective or dominance. The top tiers of the left-hand page, for instance, are from the bear's perspective, but the bottom tiers are from the hunter's perspective. And they're separated by the only horizontal gutter on the page.

The Ice Wanderer and Other Stories p. 130-1

Taniguchi signals that it's go time by throwing a splash page at us — the only one in the entire story. In terms of raw energy, this page isn't very active, but then again, that's not the feel Taniguchi is going for. This isn't a hyperkinetic fight manga for boys, this is a down-to-earth survival story for men, and the level of restraint shown here helps underscore that.

First blood to the hunter, who seizes dominance in the fight — and a horizontal gutter marks his ascendance. He's got to keep on the offensive, though, and a flurry of tight, hyper-focused close-ups communicates the frantic speed at which he's reloading. Unfortunately for him, the same amount of time (space) it takes him to reload is the same amount of time (space) it takes the bear to stand up.

The Ice Wanderer and Other Stories p. 132-3

The hunter keeps firing, but the bear keeps coming — a horizontal gutter marks a shift from the hunter's perspective to the bear's perspective. The hunter's spear breaks off, and the bear seizes the offensive — a horizontal gutter marks the transition.

While the hunter is firing his rifle, Taniguchi sticks primarily to medium and long shots, but when the action shifts to hand-to-hand combat he shifts to a series of small, tight close-ups that helps emphasize the chaotic turmoil. Also note that Taniguchi is no longer using panels to indicate discrete actions — each tier is less of a sequence and more of a series of quick simultaneous snapshots from the same vantage point.

And as the fight intensifies, the panel-per-spread count increases, up to sixteen or seventeen panels per spread (from twelve or thirteen panels per spread in the non-action sequences). This may seem like an relatively insignificant change, but the increase in panel density is very noticeable once you sit down and look at the pages in question.

The Ice Wanderer and Other Stories p. 134-5

Hey, it's the faithful hunting dog to the rescue! Now the sides are equally matched. Horizontal gutter. The perspective shifts over to the hunter. Horizontal gutter. The hunting dog seizes the offensive. Horizontal gutter. Back to the hunter reloading. Horizontal gutter. Back from the hunter to the fight. Horizontal gutter.

Note that the dog has bought the hunter time to reload — no frantic flurry of panels here, but one long, smooth, continuous action.

The Ice Wanderer and Other Stories p. 136-7

Another instance where the detail works against comprehension — it's hard to pick out the action in those upper-right hand panels. Then again, the dog is caught up in the underbrush in much the same way that your eyes are caught on the details, so maybe it's intentional.

That panel of the bear being shot is the only panel in the story where an object crosses over the panel borders. Actually, scratch that — it's the only panel in the entire book where an object crosses over the panel borders. The sudden novelty of the gimmick makes the panel stand out even more. And of course it's the first large panel for several pages with a plain white background — no speed lines or tone or stray lines — which increases its impact as well.

Once the bear is dead, of course, everything goes back to normal — rigid rectangular panels. But they're still bleeding out to the edge of the page, which primes the reader to expect more action. And there is more to come, of course, but it's an emotional and psychological climax, not a physical one.

And there you have it, a fight scene masterfully choreographed by some solid formal elements, and probably my favorite thing about The Ice Wanderer.

It took me a while to figure out why I have such an irrational love of this book, beecause quite frankly these gaming tables are utter crap. And then it came to me.

I love this book because it gives me something to do with my 30-sided dice.

The 30-sided die is the omnipresent black sheep of the dice family. They're everywhere, and yet there's not a single gaming system that uses them — even Button Men barely uses 'em, and that's a game that uses d15s for God's sake! And let's face it, they are pretty useless — there's very little need for a level of randomness between the d20 and d100, and what little there is can be easily mimicked by creating a set of linked subtables.

And yet, I love my 30-sided die for some very simple reasons. Because it's huge, and it makes me feel empowering to roll it. Because it is completely useless and impractical, and it makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something when I actually find a use for it. Because I have trained D&D players to cringe in fear every time I ask them to roll one, even though I almost never do anything with the results of the roll.

So the next time I need to randomly determine an elf's height, or the type of a random pile of furs, or the exact specialty of an animal trainer, I'll turn to this book. Because if you're going to be useless, might as well do it with style.

The Crass Menagerie is the latest collection of Pearls Before Swine strips, reprinting the strips that ran from January 2005 to August 2006.

I don't read a lot of newspaper comic strips these days. Generally, they're way too middle-of-the-road — perfect for the irate grammas who actually write complaint letters to their local paper, but far too dull to attract my attention. My need for daily comics can be sated by any number of webcomics (and I read about 50 of those at last count).

But I still read a handful of newspaper comics, and Pearls Before Swine is one of them. It's a weird choice, because at first glance it looks like the sort of strip I'd hate. A lot of the humor comes from the writing, with the panels used for timing purposes only. The art is perfunctory and workmanlike and rarely stretches out of its comfort zone. So why do I keep reading it?

Because occasionally creator Stephan Pastis does something totally hilarious.

Every once in a while he'll throw some brilliant wordplay at us, such as the introduction of pig's anemone enemey, Ann O'Meade. Or he'll introduce some new characters who resonate immediately, the less-than-manly toy vikings. Or he'll freely take good-natured pot shots at some of the dinosaurs squatting on the comics page, like Family Circus or Blondie. Some of these strips are in the book, and if they don't raise a chuckle from you, you have a heart of stone.

The Crass Menagerie p. 77

One of the other things I like about Pearls Before Swine collections are the creator commentary that runs alongside the strips. For these strips from June 2005, where Osama Bin Laden joins the cast of Family Circus, the commentary is invaluable. It helps to know what thoughts were running through his head, that Bil Keane was cool with it, why the Family Circus homages look dated, and so forth.

But the overall presentation of the commentary is terrible. The type is probably a hair too large and feels amateurish rather than profesisonaly typeset. And the placement of the comments directly beneath the strips deprive them of room to breathe. They'd be much better running below all the strips, in a much smaller typeface.

Still, that's a minor gripe about an otherwise very enjoyable collection. The Crass Menagerie is still well worth purchasing for any fan of modern comic strips.

A complimentary copy for this review was provided by the publisher.

I'm in a bit of a bind here. See, the next big, Gold Digger story line is the "Time Warp" crossover with Ninja High School. But there's a completely unrelated issue that takes place after the end of Asrial vs. Cheetah, which I can't ignore because it contains some major plot points. So I'm just going to grind out a quickie review of that issue first.

Gold Digger #30 (1996)

In the wake of Asrial vs. Cheetah, the Dynasty is now at large in the universe again. Their first act is to return to their former throneworld and cleanse it of all life. But as it turns out, the planet Aebra has some new inhabitants — the Kryn, Amarans, and Atlanteans. When a Kryn distress signal reaches El Dorado, Stripe turns the city back into a spaceship so he can go home and help liberate his people. Even though it means he's going to miss his wedding to Cheetah. Whoops.

In the aftermath of El Dorado's departure — Lord Talon shows up with his goon squad to loot the ruins, while Ryan and Seance show up to investigate the disappearance. A big brawl results, and in the end everyone discovers the true reason for Atlantis's disappearance.

This is actually a pretty good issue. The fight scene is meaningless, of course, but pretty fun, and Fred does a good job of adding some complexity to Stripe's character. Before, he was driven primarily by his feelings of inferiority in his relationship with Cheetah, but playing up his overwhelming sense of responsibility makes him feel less like Cheetah's boy toy and more like his own man.

Though one has to question the wisdom of starting a big storyline only to put it on the backburner for a whole year. 'Cause the next year of Gold Digger is all about one thing...

Gold Digger #31-35/Ninja High School #54-57 (1996-1997)

...Time Warp!

Okay, issue #31 technically isn't part of "Time Warp" either, but it features the same villain and functions as a prologue to the crossover. Professor Peachbody, the time-traveling dog, has a problem — every time he tries to kill Gina in the past, she stops him, and the rules of time travel prevent him from visiting the same era twice. But his pet boy, Benji, actually manages to come up with a clever plan to trick Diggers sisters from leaving an era prematurely, leaving their very existence to the professor's tender mercies! Fortunately, Brianna is able to travel back in time to defeat him, proving once and for all that she's her own woman. Or at least proving it until the next time the story requires her to have an inferiority complex.

Afterwards, Professor Peachbody discovers a powerful time warp mechanism hidden in the Sphinx and uses it in a fiendish plan to claim the Chronoverse as his own. Using his wiles to gather together all the time travelers in the GD and NHS universes in one place, he scatters them to distant eras:

• Gina and Mita are sent back to feudal Japan, where they witness the origins of the Ichinohei ninja clan.
• Ichi, May, and Genn are sent back to ancient Egypt, where they help the Dragon Pharaoh recapture the villains who were trying to escape his tower in Gold Digger #23.
• Cheetah, Arnie, and Ryan wind up sent to the Age of Magic, where the help one of Mimi Masters's ancestors defeat Natasha, Queen of the Vampires, in a blatant rip-off of Army of Darkness. After defeating the armies of the undead, they're put into a deep sleep so they can help...
• ...Professor Azland and Akaru, who are helping Count Boscoe and Jesibell defeat Natasha in the 1600s, in a plot that's more than a little similar to Darkstalkers.
• Cheetah and Brianna are sent back in time to the war between El Dorado and Atlantis, and Cheetah hits on the brilliant plan of disabling El Dorado's spaceworthiness and preventing Stripe from leaving. Alas, all her meddling only succeeds in reinforcing the status quo.

Eventually, everyone returns to the "present day", where Mita tries to wipe professor Professor Peachbody from existence by neutering his ancestor. A huge fight results, Quagmire is destroyed (but later restored from a "backup copy") and Professor Peachbody is stranded in the distant past with no way to escape.

If there's a problem with "Time Warp" it's that, while entertaining enough, the issues really don't build to anything in a meaningful fashion. If this were a Saturday morning cartoon, each character's jaunt into the past would end with him recovering some key item which would be used to defeat Peachbody in the present day, but that doesn't happen here. Instead, the middle issues are just trials to be endured until the big fight at the end. (Fortunately, it's a pretty good fight.)

There's also the slight problem of "who cares?" Were people really dying to know more about the origins of the Ichinohei ninja clan, or about Count Boscoe? The answer, of course, is a categorical "no."

Okay, then, so what does "Time Warp" actually accomplish? Really, there are only two lasting effects from the crossover.

First, Ninja High School's timeline is reset to a point right after issue #45 — in other words, erasing every issue of NHS done by someone other than Ben Dunn or Fred Perry from continuity. This one strikes me as sort of petty, but it's a pattern that you'll see repeated every so often, when Ben Dunn has some modest success with a Warrior Nun Areala or Marvel Mangaverse and announces he's leaving NHS forever. Of course, six months later everything has crashed and burned and burns he comes crawling back home to make his triumphant return. It wouldn't bother me so much if he didn't then proceed to ignore every issue others had cranked out between his hasty departure and his ignominious return. It shows an unhealthy disrepsect for the creators who he hired to produce those issues, as well as a small level of contempt for the fans who actually purchased them only to have them wiped from existence.

Second, Ninja High School and Gold Digger no longer take place in the same universe. Actually, this one may just be an unintended consequence — there's never an explicit case in the books that this is the case — but from this point forward characters and storylines never crossover between the two series. Honestly, isn't a big loss — both series have a huge cast of unusual characters and it's not like they need to double that cast in size.

Ninja High School #56, p. 21

"Time Warp" is also a bit of a step back artistically for Fred, as well. The pressures of producing eight consecutive monthly issues with a huge cast and complicated action scenes is clearly too much for him at this point in his career. In order to cram in as much story as possible he resorts to cramped, pointless complex, and hard-to-read panel layouts. The large cast also helps to spotlight the weaknesses in his drawing, like the lack of variety in his facial types.

On the plus side, like any talented artist, he's constantly improving throughout the story. He may be, but his anatomy is getting a lot better — about halfway through the crossover he starts using a far wider variety of poses — and his cartooning becomes a lot more fluid and effortless. He even starts messing around with some new effects in the final issue — a more angular and expressionistic method of figure drawing that he'll eventually incorporate into his regular style.

Print Run: 6000

What I find fascinating is that the print runs for Ninja High School are about 500-1000 copies higher than the print runs for Gold Digger. This implies that 10% of the NHS audience were missing half of the story and didn't care, which seems to defeat the whole point of having a crossover in the first place.

Story and art by Yoshiki Nakamura
Translated by Tomo Kimura
Lettering and retouch by Sabrina Heep

On the first Tuesday of the month, I dutifully make the journey to my local Borders to pick up the new manga volumes. But the title I always look forward to isn't some obscure release from Fanfare or Vertical. It isn't the latest volume of Naruto or Bleach, or even Nana or Yotsuba&! No, the comic I'm always looking forward to is Yoshiki Nakamura's Skip-Beat!.

Skip-Beat! is the story of Kyoko Mogami, who's a decidedly strange firl. She's dropped out of senior high school, doesn't have any friends or family, and is holding down two full-time menial jobs just to make ends meet. But Kyoko's living a dream — she's sharing an apartment with her childhood crush Sho Fuwa, who also happens to be a famous rock star. She's perfectly happy to sacrifice her own dreams for Sho, because she knows that in the long run her love will be repaid a thousandfold.

Except, as far as Sho's concerned, she's just his housekeeper. And Kyoko happens to overhear him telling this to his real girlfriend. Needless to say, she doesn't take it well.

Actually, that would be a serious understatement.

Skip-Beat! v 1, p. 51-2 (not facing pages in original)

This scene sets the tone for the rest of Skip-Beat! You've got high drama and low comedy, realistic emotional reactions welded on to bizarre hijinx right of Looney Tunes. It's an oddly appealing combination, one that lets Nishimura put her characters through the wringer without letting things get too depressing.

(Also, I love how the panel borders almost — but not quite — line up between pages. That's a great way to help establish continuity across a page flip. I'll have to remember that technique...)

Getting dumped by Sho is a transformative experience for Kyoko. The sweet, innocent girl who first came to Tokyo is transformed into a bitter, vicious schemer with revenge on her mind. Kyoko decides that the best way to have her revenge is to become an even bigger celebrity than Sho. Unfortunately, she doesn't have any special talents other than "gritty determination" and her recent experience has left her missing the one thing a celebrity needs — the ability to love and be loved. But something about her caches the eye of president of the LME talent agency, and she finds herself drafted into the agency's "Love Me" section, where emotional cripples are rehabilitated into successful celebrities.

By doing menial work.

In a hot pink jumpsuit.

Did I mention that Kyoko is the first actual person to join the "Love Me" section, and that everyone else thinks it's a crazy idea? Or is that just understood from the above description?

Skip-Beat! v6, p. 123

One of the things that's appealing about Skip-Beat! is the reversal of cliché Lucky shojo heroines get to dance with the man of their dreams while wearing glamorous haute couture. Kyoko, on the other hand, gets to chisel dirty chewing gum off the floor while wearing a hideous work uniform. Most shojo heroines are two-dimensional nice girls. Kyoko's so bitter that her favorite word is fugutaiten — the feeling of hating someone so much you want them to die.

It's also refreshing to see a character driven by negative emotions as well as positive ones. Her goals are not constructive — she's less focused on improving herself and more on dominate and destroying her enemies (she eventually has more than one). In spite of all her talk about being bitter and cynical, though, Kyoko isn't all that bad. Deep in her heart, she's just a normal girl who longs for simple things that she's been denied for years — friends, family, and love. Maybe life has kicked her around to the point where she no longer remembers how to enjoy these things, but as she works for the Love Me section these feeling start to come back. One of the joys of the series is watching her move past her bitterness and become a better person.

Nakamura's character design for Kyoko manages to encapsulate her dichotomies perfectly — she's cute without being cutesy, tough but vulnerable, wild and unpredictable but very conventional at the same time. The short unkempt haircut, the wide (but not huge) eyes, even her tremulous chin and the upturned collar of her uniform all help create an image of someone trying to project an image that's directly opposite to their being.

Skip-Beat! v3, p. 19

The open-ended nature of the Love Me section's business lets Nakamura thrust Kyoko into any number of strange situations. She gets locked in an "acting battle" with a young starlet with a bad attitude, helps the LME president's granddaughter reconcile with her estranged father, makes a new friend out of an actively hostile enemy, and has to babysit an actor who can't be bothered to take care of himself. She even gets a few breaks in showbiz — appearing as a regular on a variety show (albeit in a chicken suit) and winning a role in a soda commercial via an open audition. And shadowing her through all this is the mysterious Ren Tsuruga, the veteran actor who's been mysteriously cruel to her since the moment they first met...

One of the other appeals of Skip-Beat! is the way it's relentlessly cartoony in an old-school way. For all the serious drama that might be going on, you never know when Kyoko might desire something so much that a "hand came out of her throat"...

Skip-Beat! v1, p. 14

...or find herself plunged into the "depths of despair" (complete with marine life)...

Skip-Beat! v1, p. 14

...or even "spring into action" with gigantic, elastic arms.

Skip-Beat! v4, p. 67

A character who's "surrounded by a dark aura" will be emanating an inky black cloud that's totally visible to other characters. When something "hits someone like a ton of bricks" they'll find themselves driven into the ground by a giant cement block. There's also Kyoko's "grudges" (seen in the first image at the top of this entry), who are always flying around providing her advice. They've also got the abilities sense "evil emanations", to hold people down or assault them from a distance.

They're also a great example of something that comics can do seamlessly. To use a dated reference, they're like Ally McBeal's flights of fancy, except seamlessly integrated into the narrative in a way that only comics can do. And really, that's why I look forward to Skip-Beat! every other month — to see what sort of wacky visual metaphor Nakamura will come up with for the current situation.

Skip-Beat! v1, p. 82

Special thanks to Shaenon Garrity's "Overlooked Manga Festival", which introduced me to Skip-Beat! oh so many months ago.

Deep in the Amazon jungle, an ancient hyperspace rescue beacon is activated. Alas, this model of beacon has been discontinued because of its unfortunate tendency to attract monsters from hyperspace, and so the Salusians dispatch Princess Asrial to deactivate it. When Asrial tracks down the beacon, she discovers a centuries-old Salusian named Konam — and Cheetah, who's there looking for the Fountain of Youth. The two of them fight, but it's not long before the true villains arrive on the scene — the Dynasty, a family of alien invaders who plan on using the Fountain to restore their fading powers!

This story is important for three reasons...

1. It introduces the Dynasty, who will be Gold Digger's main villains for the next year or so. At the moment, they're just some generic, millennia-old aliens who think that they're the rightful rulers of the universe. Later... well, later they'll still be pretty much the same but they'll get some characterization.
2. It reinforces that Gold Digger and Ninja High School really do take place in the same universe. Ironically, this would be largely retconned by end of the next crossover....
3. It provides a chance for Fred Perry to draw furries with large bazongas beating the crap out of each other. And also getting groped by a 900-year-old pervert.

Honestly, it's just a big stupid fight scene, an issue of Marvel Team-Up done with Antarctic Press characters. And honestly, it's sort of unsatisfying, because there's no satisfactory resolution to any of the plot threads. There's no significance to the discovery of the Fountain of Youth. Konam is never heard of again. And most tellingly, the Dynasty isn't defeated — they use the Fountain to gas up and then scram, depriving the heroes of a decisive victory.

I don't have anything to say about the art that you haven't heard before, except to note that this issue hails from a period where Brenner Printing seemed unable to print anything properly (there are screening artifacts everywhere, even on the linework). So here's some cheesecake instead.

Asrial vs. Cheetah #2, p. 4

Print Run: 6000

As usual, a bump on the print run, to accommodate both the Gold Digger and NHS fans who will be purchasing the series. Interestingly, it's the same-sized print run they used for the last miniseries, which might suggest that the Gold Digger audience is leveling off at this point, or that the audience for the core books just hasn't been translating into spin-off sales.

I finally managed to get down to Oakland to see the Carnegie International today. It's good stuff, I'm still composing my thoughts about it and will probably have more of them later.

Anway, the exhibiton has a pleasant surprise for comic book fans — a room filled with replicas of the bottle city of Kandor by artist Mike Kelley. Here's a video of an earlier installation that features some of the same pieces on display at the Carnegie:

From the catalog:

Kandors (2007) is the artist's most polished and fantastical realization of these ideas. Stemming from Kelley's observation of a persistent lack of continuity in the depiction of Kandor in Superman comics, this installation reenvisions that fictive capital city through miniaturized Atlantis-like cityscapes. Covered by glass domes, these sculptural landscapes are bathed in the glow of luminescent lights and connected to other minimalist-inspired objects and arhitectural elements via respiratory tubing. Each of ten assemblages corresponds to a slightly ominous, tornado-like video projection on the wall. Sound (synthesized ambient and new-age music composed by the artist as well as "emotive" sounds), light, and motion envelop viewers of this spectacle. Here Kelley narrates a surrealistic topography through an all-encompassing sensory experience, suggesting through his numerous imaginative reinterpretations of a single motif the infinite variations of personal history. In this way, he is faithful to both the virtues and the shortcomings of memory.

The Kandors on display have an immediate sensuous and tactile appeal, regardless of their position re: memory, and are among the most memorable works on display.

Also, one of the collage/paintings by artist Mark Bradford seems to feature a few pages from an issue of Crisis on Infinite Earths (or some other comic where you'd find Dr. Light II and Nightwing on the same page — I'm not a DC geek so I couldn't tell you).

Escrito por Jai Nitz
Ilustrado por Mike Norton y Trevor Scott
Rotulo por Rob Leigh
Coloro por Guy Major

One of the benchmarks for good cartooning is that it can tell a story without words. One of the hallmarks of the hallmarks of superhero comics is that they're essentially visual gibberish that can't be understood without words. So I was sort of curious to see how DC would handle Blue Beetle #26, an issue where 85% of the dialogue is in Spanish. Would it be a tour-de-force of cartooning that anyone could follow, or a mess of pin-ups and glamor shots that no one could follow?

Neither, as it turns out.

Now, Blue Beetle #26 has a very simple plot, and one that's pretty clearly communicated by the art. Jamie takes his girlfriend to a family reunion, spends some time talking to his mother and grandmother, flies off to go fight the Parasite, and beats him by hulking out somehow. All very straightforward. But the art is still a failure, unable to communicate overall context and tone to non-Spanish speakers. For discussion purposes, here's an early page where Jaime talks to two of his cousins:

Blue Beetle #26, p. 5

Now ask yourself, what's going on here? Obviously, we've got four people talking to each other, but what are they talking about? More importantly, how are they talking to each other? Is Jamie happy to see them, just being polite, or even condescending to them? Are his cousins angry, sad, jealous? If this were a Mexican film, I'd be able to pick up those emotional undercurrents from body language, line readings, even the mise en scene.

Now, I don't expect to the art to communicate everything — there are some concepts which are just too complex to be expressed exclusively in visual terms. For instance, let's say Jamie was being insulted by his cousins. I might never know whether they insulted his hair or his girlfriend or his political beliefs. But I should at least be able to tell that he was insulted.

In corporate comics, providing these cues is the responsibility of the artist, but it's a responsibility that's been abandoned because corporate comics are being created and developed by people who have little knowledge or respect for the craft of storytelling. Here, the fact that the an unfamiliar language merely exposes these structural weaknesses in the art.

To be fair to Mike Norton, he actually manages to put together a fight scene that has a nice ebb and flow to it. But the real highlight of this issue is Jamie's interaction with his girlfriend and his family, and his inability to inject life into these scenes dooms them from the start.

at the National Portrait Gallery through May 26

The Smithsonian American Art Museum at the National Portrait Gallery is currently hosting a major exhibition of color field painting. It's a good exhibition, well worth your time, but I find myself more interested in how it's been presented curatorially.

Most exhibits of this nature tend to lead visitors by the nose via audio tours or extensive on-site documentation. "Color as Field" goes in the opposite direction — the works are presented as-is, with little in the way of contextual information. On one hand, I like this approach — it lets the work speak for itself and allows the viewer to develop his own critical faculties. But it's a strange approach to take for this exhibition. The general public is notoriously ambivalent towards abstraction, and especially this sort of minimalist, post-painterly abstraction. A few gallery cards and a more rigorous timeline might have helped win over some of the patrons I saw listlessly wandering from piece to piece.

Fortunately, there's plenty of sensuous work on hand by Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, and Gene Davis to win over even the most hardened heart. Hell, the exhibition is worth seeing just for the Morris works alone.

The American Federation of Arts has conducted a series of interviews with Larry Poons to help promote the exhibition. They make for some great viewing.

This is the first time I've really had a chance to use my zoom lens with my new camera body. For some reason, it wasn't locking into position right. Fortunately, I was able to fix that by adding a few layers of duct tape to the lens body. Ah, duct tape, is there anything you can't do?

Is "The Library of Congress Experience" a cover band?

They were demolishing this building downtown and I thought it looked really neat. Then later I also realized it looked like the Okalhoma City bombing which ruined that.

The Café at the National Portrait Gallery

You can't read it at this size, but the only comment in that book is "Contemporary art is horrible."

I went down to DC this weekend to visit my brother and to catch a game at shiny new Nationals Park. The theme for the day was a "Salute to the Negro Leagues" and so each time was wearing the colors of its local Negro League franchise instead of its regular uniforms. Pittsburgh was dressed as the Homestead Grays, and Washington was dressed as... the Homestead Grays. (There was a period where the Grays split their home games between Pittsburgh and DC.)

• I really like that the Nationals haven't sold the naming rights to their stadium. Nationals Park isn't the most original name, but it's succinct and rolls off the tongue a lot better than, say, "Citizens Bank Park."
• The stadium itself is lovely. Now if only they could do something about the ticket prices... (Hey, I'm from Pittsburgh, we're spoiled in that regard.)
• I was half-hoping that there'd be a diehard French Canadian fan in the front row bitterly yelling "Allez les Expos!" every time there was a rally. No dice.
• But there was a guy in front of us wearing a Kevin Young shirt, and it looked like it was in great condition, to boot. Wonder what was up with that?
• It was a bit disappointing to see Maholm get rocked so early, especially given his last performance. Then again, at times it looked like he was being backed up by the Keystone Kops on the field so it's not entirely his fault.
• They had some Negro Leaguers signing autographs during the game, including Mamie "Peanut" Johnson — a woman who used to pitch for the Indianapolis Clowns in the waning days of the Negro Leagues. Yay gender equality.
• During the Presidents Race, T.R. stopped at a street vendor's cart and was abnormally late getting on to the field. When he finally did show up, he was chasing the Pittsburgh Pierogis with a spork. Funny.

This is the first time I've really had a chance to use my zoom lens with my new camera body. For some reason, it wasn't locking into position right. Fortunately, I was able to fix that by adding a few layers of duct tape to the lens body. Ah, duct tape, is there anything you can't do?

The Center Field gate would look a lot nicer if it weren't for those parking structures on either side of it.

Chris chillin' with T.R.

Abe was flashing some gang signs right before this.

If Photomerge was a man and I was a woman...

...I would totally have its babies.

That must be Jelly, 'cause jam don't jiggle like that.

Mamie "Peanut" Johnson signs autographs on the Scoreboard Walk.

I was at Borders the other day, and since they didn't have any of the new titles I was looking for, I decided to pick up the first volume of Kohta Hirano's Hellsing instead. Plot-wise, it was more or less what I expected — vampires hunting people, vampires hunting vampires, vampires fighting evil Catholics. But what caught my eye was the art.

Hellsing v1, p. 104-5

If you only had this volume to go on, you'd have to say that Hirano isn't a very good artist. A character's clothing and appearance might change wildly from panel to panel. Proportions are wrong — characters will have impossibly long arms, Modiglianiesqe necks, 48 teeth. Poses are tortured, with hands and fingers bending at unnatural angles. There's a tendency to use lots of fiddly non-descriptive details in place of clear drawing. The composition and storytelling are mediocre at best.

And yet, there's still something strangely compelling about it. A misproportioned, misplaced eye leaps out at you — but it can also make a picture creepy and chilling. The tortured poses may be overdone, but they're also extremely dynamic and energetic. The fiddly details may be unnecessary, but they also create an uneasy energy that permeates each page.

Truth be told, it reminded me of early Rob Liefeld, and I mean that as a compliment. He's quite clearly on to something that captivates your imagination, but he hasn't got all the pieces in place yet. At this point in his career, Hirano has an equal chance of developing into a compelling artist or degenerating into a fannish pile of bad habits.

So I went back to the bookstore to pick up a copy of the latest volume, just to see how his style had changed in the intervening years. As volume 8 starts, London has apparently be turned into a battleground between Protestant vampires, Catholic crusaders, and Nazi werewolves. It's mostly gibberish, and almost impossible to follow. But how about the art?

Hellsing v8, p. 162-3

Well, after seven years, Hirano hasn't developed into a "compelling artist" — but neither has he degenerated into a "fannish pile of bad habits." If anything, he's moved sideways.

In some ways, he's improved. His character designs are largely consistent. His characters actually seem to exist in three-dimensional environments. The tortured poses have been replaced with more realistic foreshortening. The random line weights of the earlier volumes have been replaced with a more expressionistic inking style that helps lend the drawings weight and solidity.

In other ways, though, he's degenerated. The storytelling is still impossible to follow. Characters may be solid, but they also seem stiff and less dynamic. Proportions are still off in noticeable ways. Fiddly litle details abound, and they still don't add anything to the overall drawings.

More than anything else, volume 8 of Hellsing reminds me of medieval German woodcuts — obviously done with great technical skill and lavished with great detail, but stiff and unconvincing nonetheless.

Sadly, the way Hirano develops between these volumes doesn't interest me as a fellow artist. I'd much rather deal with the loose, haphazard potentialities of the first volume than the stiff realities of the final volume.

On the subject of translation...

The translated Hellsing has some of the most obvious cultural mistakes I've ever seen in a manga, including...

"The Protestant Church." You will encounter this phrase over and over and over again through Hellsing. And yet, no one ever refers to themselves in real life as a Protestant — they're Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and so on. Clearly, Hirano has done enough homework to know that England is not a Catholic country — but not enough to know that "Protestant" is a category and not an actual religion.

"Sir" Integra Hellsing. Of course, a female peer would be "Dame" Integra Hellsing.

The most awful Scottish accent you'll ever see. Seriously, it makes Chris Claremont's worst attempts at dialect read like the Queen's English. Half the time I just try to guess what Father Anderson's said from the way the other characters respond to it.

Now, it wouldn't be too difficult to go through the script and replace "Protestant" with "Anglican", replace "Sir" with "Dame", and tone down the accent, but this raises the question — is it more important to be a literal translation of the original work, or to capture its spirit? Personally, I'm a big fan of cleaning up the rough edges, especially when they don't affect the plot all that much. But a case could be made for both, and I'm kind of curious as to where you would draw the line.

I'll be backfilling my Annihilation entries over the next day or two, but until then...

Friday, April 25th

Saturday, April 26th

Sunday, April 27th

Man, let me tell you, Paul Maholm throwing a two-hit complete game really helped take the sting out of seeing Matt Morris put on one of the worst pitching performances I've ever seen in the majors. Having Nate McClouth bang two homers right over my head helped too.

• When announcing the Phillies' line-up they used the theme music from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. (They usually use the "Imperial March" from Star Wars).
• There were an awful lot of Philadelphia fans at the stadium all weekend — maybe a quarter to a third of the fans in the stands were cheering for the Phillies. Strangely, they were all well-behaved, which seems odd for Phillies fans.
• I hate to say it, but every now and then it really looks like Jason Bay is dogging it in left field. I don't necessarily think he needs to be sliding and diving at every ball but it wouldn't hurt for him to show a little more hustle than he usually does.
• Riding the T after the Friday game was nuts. The Pirates and Pens game let out not too long after each other, and then you had additional traffic from people who'd been hanging around after the Gallery Crawl and the other performances going on in the Cultural District. Game was over at 10:00, and I didn't get home until almost midnight.
• The Pirates have great video packages and scoreboard entertainment. And yet, sometimes I find myself wondering how many minor league scouts they could hire if they cut out all that crap.
• So Taguchi has an enormous face. Really. It takes up way too much of his head.
• Got my first sunburn of the year on Sunday. Usually I get that during the home opener but it just hasn't been bright enough until today.

This is the first time I've really had a chance to use my zoom lens with my new camera body. For some reason, it wasn't locking into position right. Fortunately, I was able to fix that by adding a few layers of duct tape to the lens body. Ah, duct tape, is there anything you can't do?

The Pittsburgh Parrot

Adam Eaton

Nate McLouth

I took an awful lot of fireworks photos that would look awesome if they weren't totally out of focus.

Calibrating the aperture and shutter settings for the LensBaby.

That's So Taguchi!

An usher surveys his domain.

Oh yeah, I'm intense.

This has nothing to do with baseball, I just saw these pretty tulips in my neighborhood and thought they'd make for a good photo.

Written by Javier Grillo-Marxuach
Illustrated by Kyle Hotz
Colored by Gina Going
Lettered by Cory Petit
Cover art by Clint Langley

On the edge of Kree space an entire Phalanx armada is defeated by a single man with no name. This mysterious stranger is possessed by the Exolon, alien parasites that feed on his soul and grant him strange powers that the techno-organic alients just can't cope with. Will the Phalanx be destroyed by this unholy wraith, or will his secrets be discovered their newest servant — Ronan the Accuser?

Wraith is a bit of a mixed bag. I like the character — essentially a sci-fi version of "The Man With No Name" with some neat slithery visuals — but revealing most of his origins and resolving all of his long-term goals in his first appearance sort of ruins his uniqueness and long-term viability. The story is also a bit rushed, with plot points rushed out, characters not given sufficient space to develop, and expository speeches taking the place of well-timed reveals.

It's not a good sign that major continuity problems start to pop up in the first miniseries. Assimilation by the Phalanx is presented as a process that takes days, if not weeks or months and can be shut off by the destruction of an outside entity, when in the prologue (and previous Technarchy appearances) it's a near-instantaneous infection that can be transmitted by touch and can only be thrown off from within. Hala appears to be the only world that's been direclty conquered by the Phalanx, when the prologue makes their influence clearly felt across the entire Kree galaxy. Large swaths of the population appear to be uninfected, though the prologue also clearly showed huge masses of infected Kree. The Supreme Intelligence, killed off at the end of Annihilation, is brought back to life just so he could be killed again.

Plus, there are some weird mystic things going on here that I'm not entirely comfortable with. Sure, Marvel's cosmic characters have always had a bit of a mystic side to them, but Wraith features creatures that feast on souls, vllains who try to conquer the universe from the "psychic plane" and a hero who absorbs the "Kree godhead" into himself. It feels less like science fiction and more like Warhammer 40K.

On the plus side, I like the concept of "selection," where the Phalanx allow assimilated creatures a degree of autonomy that increases their effectiveness as tools. It allows the villains to have a degree of individuality that the Technarchy really haven't had in previous appearances. It's half collaboration and half enslavement, which raises the question of where the Select's true loyalties lie. It also raises some additional questions about why the Phalanx are acting differently than usual...

And I really like the work Kyle Hotz is doing here. He's able to make Exolon and the Phalanx seem genuinely alien and unsettling. Plus, he's got a weird sort of Jack Davis thing going on which I enjoy. Plus, he's an effective storyteller.

Annihilation: Conquest — Wraith #1, p. 19

This is a simple but effective way to make a talking heads sequence more interesting. Typically, when drawing a face, it's best to leave more space in front of the eyes than behind them. It prevents things from feeling claustrophobic or alienating. Hotz does the opposite here, to good effect as the odd compositions help drive home the mutual suspicion between Wraith and Ra-Venn.

While I'm at it, here's an annoying technique I've seen in a lot of Marvel comics lately...

Annihilation: Conquest — Wraith #3, p. 8

A scene like this cries out for a sound effect, but there isn't really any way to slap a normal sound effect over top of the picture witout obliterating the original art, so they use the outline sound effect. You get your sound effect, and you can still see the art through it. Problem solved, right? Except the sound effect is barely readable. And those extra lines run counter to the shapes and thrust of the original image, which totally torpedoes the image comprhenension.

Now, this isn't a terrible technique — it actually works for simpler panels where a solid sound effect would still obscure important parts of the image. But the letterers have a bad habit of slapping it on top of complicated images like this one. Of course, if the original art left room for sound effects, the letters wouldn't have to resort to tricks like this...

Written by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning
Illustrated by Mike Perkins
Colored by Guru EFX
Lettered by Cory Petit
Cover art by Aleksi Briclot

The original Annihilation was one of the few enjoyable comics that Marvel has released in the last few years. It was off the editorial radar and featured characters the licensing department honestly didn't care about — which gave the creators free reign to screw around with the status quo in a way that even Marvel's golden boys can't. The results were genuinely interesting, a little bit exhilarating, and blissfully liberated from the continuity quagmire of Marvel's Earth-bound heroes. And it sold pretty well, too, so now we have a sequel. Of course this time, editorial and licensing are paying attention, so the creators weren't going to have the same sort of free reign they had before, but if the new series is half as good as the original it'd still be worth checking out.

So is Annihilation: Conquest any good? Let's find out.

This prologue starts off by showing us the post-Annihilation state of the galaxy by through the eyes of two protagonists. On one side we have Phyla-Vell, who's helping the Priests of Pama distribute aid to to the downtrodden and needy. Thing is, she's on a backwater world that's not representative of the galaxy at large (and for that matter the temple she's supposed to be rebuilding doesn't seem to be damaged at all). On the other side we've got Star-Lord, who's helping the Kree upgrade their ruined defensive grid. Thing is, he's on Hala, which seems to have been completely untouched by the Annihilation Wave. Effectively, Abnett and Lanning are telling us the galaxy is in ruins rather than showing us. Strangely, their first issue of Nova did a much better job of setting the stage by showing us a harried Nova, hopping from one bombed-out planet to the next, putting out fires as fast as he could in the hopes that they wouldn't spread.

Anyway, back on Hala, Star-Lord has made a deal to update the Kree War-Net with Space Knight technology. Unfortunately, the Galadorians prove to be less than trustworthy, and Sentries start to run amok, destroying ships in orbit and bulding a big tower that somehow manages to seal off all of Kree space from the rest of the universe. One Sentry even makes it to the backwater planet that Phyla is living on and attacks her.¹ As Phyla defeats the Sentry and gets a mystic vision commanding her to seek out "Kree savior," Star-Lord gets pushed off a skyscraper and the true villain stands revealed as the techno-organic Phalanx. Who look a lot different, and yet somehow familiar.

This part of Conquest actually works pretty well. There's some effective confusion as the main characters try to figure out just what's going on. There's a nice bit of misdirection with the Galadorians, and the closing sequence will be genuinely shocking to new readers but containis enough clues to tip off long-time readers. There's a definite direction — Phyla needs to go find the "savior" before the rest of the empire is assimilated. There are even a few mysteries — who's sending these visions to Phyla? Why are the Phalanx deviating from their usual M.O.?³

No, it's not Shakespeare, or even Lost. But it's enjoyable enough for disposable entertainment and intriguing enough to bring you back for more.

As for the art... well, you're going to notice a common thread over the next couple of days, which is that I think the artists are tremendous draftsmen and terrible storytellers.⁴ Here's a good example from the beginning of Prologue.

Annihilation: Conquest — Prologue p. 2

Now, the art team has rendered the holy living heck out of that temple. The perspective is spot on, and the inking and coloring help give the building substantial weight and volume. The coloring is suitably out-of-this world, soft and familiar yet alien, and the added detail doesn't overwhelm the pencils. There are lots of little details and imperfections that help particularize the structure — heck, there are even little snow shovels crammed off into one corner, though you can't see them at this size — and yet there's not so much detail that you're overwhelmed by it. The figures actually feel like they're standing in the space instead of just floating over top of it.

And yet this spectacular drawing is situated in the lower left-hand corner of an awkward two-page spread with no clear focal point. And that's the pattern the book follows — every time Perkins wows me with his drafstmanship he makes some awful storytelling decisions that confuse me. Here's another example from near the end of the book.

Annihilation: Conquest — Prologue p. 39

I get what that bottom tier is trying to do — our camera view remains unchanged as Star Lord plummets out of a window to his doom. But it doesn't read well, for a few reasons. First, The diagonal panels are cut at weird angles that make them seem strange rather than dynamic. The brown gutters don't sufficiently separate the individual panels. The shattered struts complicate things, because they're almost the same color as the gutters and run counter to the diagonal of the panel, which further confuses things. And there are just too many panels — you could probably get the same effect with three panels instead of five.

(Interestingly, that bottom tier works at better at screen resolution than it does at actual size, because there's less room to get lost in the details.)

1. I understand that space opera often depends on unrealistic superluminal communication, but having a Sentry a) instantly show up on a planet that the Kree empire has supposedly abandoned and b) immediately attack the only two named characters on said planet is just lazy writing.²
2. Strangely, though, I don't have a problem with the equally-unrealistic concept of a single spire instantly generating a completely impenetrable force field capable of sealing off a galaxy light-years across, which would require not only superluminal communications but also more power than a single star could possibly generate.
3. The Phalanx's usual M.O.: a) Assimilate everything in sight. b) Build Babel Spire. c) Get eaten.
4. Which is actually pretty close to the Marvel house style these days — beautifully drawn, totally unreadable.

Thought #17

I'm always sort of surprised that there's not more intergender competition in sports. While men and women aren't physically equal, there's a lot of overlap in their abilities, and a lot of low-contact sports that reward both power and finesse. While I don't expect to see men and women facing off on the gridiron any time soon, I can't think of a single good reason why they don't regularly compete in tennis and golf. Or baseball.

I'm always surprised that there aren't more women in baseball at any level. Yes, they may not be capable of developing the same upper body strength as their male counterparts, but speed, finesse, and instinct are also a large part of baseball and there's nothing stopping women from having any of those qualities. In some ways, they're in a similar position to Asian players, who used to be dismissed as no-power shrimps. And conceivably, they could break in the same way as Asian players — by proving their value as pitchers before producing a few outstanding position players. So why haven't they?

I blame softball.

Asian players may face an uphill climb, but at least they're playing the same game as the rest of the world. Most women, on the other hand, wind up going into fast pitch softball — bigger balls, under-arm throwing motions, smaller fields, shorter games. So right from the bat a female pitcher is automatically a conversion project, and, Rick Ankiel aside, those almost never pan out. So any break-through female player would have to be a freak case — someone who doesn't give up on baseball after Little League, who keeps going through high school and maybe college in spite of some tough opposition, and who has all the tools to catch they eye of some chauvinistic major-league scout.

I guess I shouldn't hold my breath.

Thought #18

I somehow wound up with a Canadian quarter today. Before, when this happened, I'd usually try to see if I could trick a vending machine into taking it, or set it aside to buy a newspaper with next time I wound up in Canada. Today, I found myself wondering if I could buy something cheap with it and demand some change.

Thought #19

I am apparently the Death of Headphones. Last year I went through ten sets — the longest of which lasted just over two months, and the shortest of which lasted just under a week. I managed to yank wires out, get wires wrapped around doorknobs and almost strangle myself in the process, dunk earpieces in coffee, roll earbuds over with an office chair, and even bend the plug. So in a way I'm glad that I just managed to make a pair of headphones last nearly four months.

Thought #20

One of the most wonderful times of day is the hour before dawn, when all the birds are out and about claiming their territory. I've been waking up early the last several days, and I've spent a few minutes just sitting there listening to the birdsong as I drink my coffee. It's just beautiful.

Okay. Here's a quick attempt to clear a small pile of paperbacks off my desk. They're in the order from least-liked to most liked, if you care.

Kon Kon Kokon v1

Story and art by Koge-Donbo
Translation by Satsuki Yamashita & Jason R. Grissom
Lettering and retouch by Keiran O'Leary

Ren Hinonishi may look like he's got it all, but beneath his cool and collected exterior lurks a country bumpkin and a monster otaku. He's trying to suppress all that so he can score with the cutest girl in school, but his plans go awry when a fox spirit from his hometown shows up on his door. Her name is Kokon, and she's here to repay Ren for a past kidness — by becoming his wife!

I figured this would be cute when I picked it up. I wasn't expecting it to turn into a lolicon harem manga, where Ren picks up an army of cute monster girls eager to "repay" him for some past kidness. Truth be told, I really can't stand lolicon's sexualized little girls or the creepy wish fulfillment aspects of the harem manga, and a combination of the two of them is extremely off-putting.

It's not particularly good either. There's practically no logical plot structure — by the end of the first volume Ren has picked up three monster girls in rapid succession, but it never occurs to him to figure out out why any of them are hanging around. The characters are either fawning girls or Ren, who, while not completely unlikeable, is the sort of personality-free mannequin you always find at the center of a harem manga.

Kon Kon Kokon v1, p. 143

Koge-Donbo's characters are cute in a minimalist way, but there's nothing particularly creative or compelling about the character designs. This is particularly disappointing given that most of the characters are monsters, and the Japanese have some really weird monsters that could make for some interesting character designs. An umibozu, for instance, is a sea monster whose defining characteristics is that it's big and bald. I've seen depictions that have ranged from a Hedorah-like octopus monster to a giant kappa-like ogre to a human-sized freak. The umibozu above, though, is just a generic cute girl with some fish-fin ears slapped on. Not very exciting, and very similar-looking to the existing characters.

I do like some of the techniques used in the drawing above, though. The black areas are intelligently spotted in a way that frames the central drawing, and the use of white tone to lighten the background gives everything a luminous soft-focus quality that makes you feal like you're in an undersea dreamworld. The panel layout is solid if unspectacular. It's also unfortunately atypical. In general, Koge-Donbo just piles panels on top of each other one after the other with no regard to how the overall page looks, and the result is a confusing, hard-to-read jumble.

I'd give a strong recommendation to avoid Kon Kon Kokon unless you've got a taste for loli. A really strong taste for loli.

Wild Ones v1

Story and art by Kiyo Fujiwara
Translation by Mai Ihara
Lettering and retouch by Mark McMurray

When Sachie's mother dies, she's taken in by the grandfather she never knew esisted. That would be disturbing enough on its own, but it turns out that her grandfather's a yakuza oyabun who lives in a house full of thugs. And to top it all of there's Rakuto, the underling he's assigned to watch her — an impossibly polite, handsome high school boy who keeps treating her like a fragile princess!

This could be entertaining nice set-up, and the preview in Shojo Beat was entertaining enough to convince me to pick up the first volume. Alas, as entertaining as Wild Ones is, it's still an utterly forgettable, by-the-numbers manga.

The biggest weakness is that there are only two characters — Rakuto and Sachie. They're actually pretty well-defined characters — Sachie seems like a normal girl but occasionally shows flashes of yakuza toughness that she's inhereted from her mother and grandfather, while Rakuto is a serious-minded young man who's taken a childhood friend's advice to always let a smile be your umbrella a bit too far. The two of them are clearly meant to hook up, and by the end of the first volume, they're well on their way to hooking up with no significant obstacles standing in their way. It's not a situation that creates a lot of dramatic tension.

There's also no serious attempt made to utilize the yakuza atmosphere for anything other than some cheap laughs.

Wild Ones v1, p. 82

The art is standard for a modern shojo comic — there's nothing particularly good or bad about it. Fujiwara actually has a bit of a flair for dramatic staging, but not enough to pull it off completely. For instance, I like some aspects of the above page — the sudden, violent transition from horizontal to vertical emphasized by Rakuto's thudding hand, followed by some brief moments of silence and a washed-out close-up of Rakuto's face that lends the drawing some extra dramatic weight. Unfortunatley, I think the effect is spoiled by the second panel, which complicates the layout and takes away from the horizontal thrust of Rakuto's fist. The thin-line inking doesn't help much here either.

You won't regret picking up the first volume of Wild Ones but neither will you be clamoring for more.

Stand-By Youth v1

Story by Young-Bin Kim
Art by Juder
Translation by Lauren Na & Kereth Cow-Spigai
Lettering and retouch by Star Print Brokers

Hyungmo is a smart kid, but he cracks under pressure. When he fails all of his college entrance exams, he enrolls in a test-prep school filled with juvenile delinquents and slackers. He'd drop out but a beautiful student named Sora catches his eye. Unfortunately, if his eyes are on the girl, they're not on his exam..

Stand-By Youth is almost a very good manga. Hyungmo is an intriguing character, and though he's portrayed sympathetically the creators don't shy away from his negative qualities. He's self-absorbed and self-pitying, to the point where he mistakes his family's soft-touch treatment of him for condescencion. He has the skills necessary to succeed but not the focus necessary to use them, and always finds something outside himself to blame for his failures. Being held back makes him a social reject, but it's also partly his own fault for not trying to maintain a connection with his friends. It's rare to see such a complex characterization in a mainstream comic.

For instance, there's a wonderful scene where Hyungmo's extended family drops by for a visit. Hyungmo escapes all the family drama by spending a few hours basking in the simple, unconditional love of his niece, only to have his self-confidence dashed when his grandmother tries to give him some money. Anyone who's got enough pride to try and make it on his own can understand the reticience to take a handout — but it's still rare to see a depiction of that in popular culture.

Stand-By Youth v1, p. 182

The art almost conveys the sense of uselessness that Hyungmo is feeling. It certainly manages to capture how small he feels through the forced perspective and his dejected expression. However, the decision to plop him into an abstract swirling background is a strange one. It may be an attempt to capture his inner turmoil, but his feelings of uselessness might have been better captured by a forced perspective shot of Hyungmo, standing alone in a very empty room, or something understated and personal. The redundant captions don't help — you could lose everything after "but..." and still get the same amount of information.

And that's pretty much the problem with Stand-By Youth in a nutshell — it almost pulls off the effect it's going for, but not quite. Every time you think you're going to get something resembling a personal breakthrough, Hyungmo gets pulled into some wacky antics by his fellow students or has to spend some time dealing his two potential love interests. It's two steps forward, two steps back, and what you're left with is an open-ended character study going nowhere in particular.

The Palette of 12 Secret Colors v1

Story and art by Nari Kusakawa
Translation by Sheldon Drzka
Lettering and retouch by Wilson Ramos

Cello is in training to be a "palette" — a color magician who can transfer pigments from one substance to another. Unfortunately, she just can't seem master the fine control necessary to pass her exams, which keeps staining her hair and clothes and landing her in Dr. Guell's office to get de-colorized. Fortunately, she's got her pet bird, Yoyo, and her best friend, Mousseline, to cheer her on. Can Cello unleash her hidden talents before the school kicks her out?

I really liked this one. Cello is a plucky heroine who's on the cusp of adulthood. She may not be able to do everything her fellow students can, but she has some unique talents that need to be nurtured. She's clever and determined enough to solve her own problems and take the initiative, but she still needs some help from her friends and teachers every now and then. The adventures she has are fun and light, whether she's helping triplets have a fun birthday or trying to track down the bird thieves who've framed her.

There's still one major flaw, though — ideally, a story that's about color wizards really calls out for the occasional splash of color, but The Palette of 12 Secret Colors is entirely black and white. Still, Nari Kusakawa does a nice job of creating a sense of color in black and white by using a specific set of screen tones to indicate intense, shimmering color. Here's a scene were Cello uses her powers to steal Yoyo's color from a great distance, something none of the other palettes can do...

The Palette of 12 Secret Colors v1, p. 49

Those soft, shimmering screen tones are only used to for the color effects in the book — everything else is done with simple dot and pattern screens. Consequently, when the bright colors start flying, you get the sense of tremendous brilliance even though you're looking at things in black and white.

The rest of Kusakawa's art is nothing to write home about, but it does keep up the light and friendly tone established by her writing.

The Palette of 12 Secret Colors is definitely a comic for the younger set — I can't imagine that anyone who's hit puberty will spare it a second glance. But for a children's comic, it's fresh and charming and definitely worth a look in spite of its flaws.

Sorry to drop of the face of the earth there. My brother was in town last week, performing at the Pittsburgh Funny Bone, and a lot of this week was spent either whipping my apartment into shape for his visit or hanging out with him when he had a free moment.

The Mattress Factory

On Saturday, we'd originally planned to go visit Fort Necessity, but the (mildly) inclement weather forced us to change our plans. Instead we decided to go visit the Mattress Factory, since my brother had never been there. And, as much as I hate to say it, I haven't been to the Mattress Factory in over a decade — not since they first installed Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Dots Mirrored Room and Repetitive Vision — so another visit was long overdue.

On our way to the museum, we were wowed by Huang Xiang's "House Poem", which is made all the more memorable for being located in the middle of an ordinary residential zone. Alas, I only had my point-and-shoot on me so I couldn't get a great shot...

Most of the main building was off limits so they could install the upcoming "Inner and Outer Space" exhibition, but the permanent collection was still on display and it's well-worth checking out. My brother and I were particularly impressed by the work of James Turrell, whose work was instantly accessible and entertaining, but raised fascinating questions about perception and presentation that kept us discussing his work for hours. It's hard to imagine now that we spent 25 minutes sitting in a pitch black room, trying to see if we could eventually perceive the difference between reality and bio-optical phenomena caused by the near-total darkness.

There was also a temporary exhibit on display at 1414 Monterey.

Gestures: Illustrations of Catastrophe and Remote Times

at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh through May 11

Despite the grandiose title (and the nonsensical assertions of an essay by the guest curator), there's nothing particularly apocalyptic, visionary, or metaphorical about the work on display in this exhibition. Truth be told, it's just an excuse to spotlight work by Pittsburgh-based installation and performance artists — and there's nothing wrong with that.

Much of the work on display seems facile but fleeting. Fabrizio Gerbino's lead-coated wooden objects bring to mind the aesthetic of Scandinavian, design divorced from form-follows-function considerations; Jenny Lee manages to playfully combine Aztec and Scottish motifs; Ladyboy's "wall drawing" of fluorescent tape reminds one of Jim Lambie having a '80s flashback; John Carson's photos of car accidents reveal his highly-developed design sense. And yet, none of these works really seems to grab a hold of the psyche or beg for further interpretation, making them momentary pleasures at best.

A few of the works on display feel like overblown art school projects. Christiane Leach and the members of Black Moth Super Rainbow present installations that reveal a highly developed aesthetic but also one that completely fails to communicate with the viewer. Michael Ferrucci's elaborate tableau is about as subtle as a bag of hammers.

The exhibition does feature two works which stand out as exceptional. Jennifer Howson's "lost" features tiny Fisher Price people wandering in a world constructed from meticulously painted bowling pins, and features an appealing design-y aesthetic as well as several repeating motifs that beg for further consideration. Laurie Mancuso's "Aging a Decaying Mill Town" turns one of the rooms at 1414 Monterey into a rotting husk composed entirely of paint, a technical masterpiece that brings to minds questions of perception vs. reality.

The success of those two works sparked a vigorous discussion on our drive home. Increasingly, artists are trying to present ideas that are just too complex to be communicated dthrough purely visual means. Many works are dependent on highly personal symbolism and motifs that require a detailed knowledge of the artist's history and thought processes to unscramble. It strikes me, then, that one of the most valuable criteria you can use to judge a work of contemporary art is its ability to inspire a disinterested viewer who knows nothing about the artist and his work to learn more.

Or maybe I'm just talking out of my ass.

Then again, when I got home yesterday I googled "Jennifer Howson" and "Laurie Mancuso," not "Fabrizio Gerbino" or "Black Moth Super Rainbow." Make of that what you will.

Cincinnati Reds vs. Pitsburgh Pirates

This wound up being a quick game in spite of a brief rain delay at the beginning. The rain kept coming down throughout the game, but it never really amounted to more than a drizzle — just enough to dampen your spirits without dampening your shirt. Reds rookie phenom Johnny Cueto gave up his first walk of the year, but still looked pretty sharp. The Pirates had some tense moments but for once they weren't overwhelmed by them and made the most out of the hits they got. Good times were had by all.

I'd also like to give some respect to the Reds fans who were seated in the row behind us. They had fun heckling the players on the field, but they clearly knew their baseball, they weren't obnoxious about it, and they kept it clean in front of the kids. They were the sort of bleacher bums every stadium needs more of.

One Final Photo

This is the current state of the new offices/condos going up at Fifth and Liberty. I like the way that the elevator shafts tower over the rest of the construction like some sort of grim watchtower or gun emplacement. Strangely, I don't think that's what the architects were going for.

Hey, I've got a home opener to go to, so let's keep this short.

Ryo Hayakawa is a seemingly ordinary junior high school girl. She's stopped dreaming of high school, and she's planning to drop out and help her widowed mother run the family oden bar. But Ryo has a secret — a devastating 130-kph fastball that can strike out men twice her age! One day, she's approached by the Chairman of the prestigious Kisaragi Girl's High School, who shares her dream with Ryo — to put together a girl's baseball team that can take on the boys and win the National High School Baseball Championship!

Working with the Chairman and her misbegotten drunk of a coach, Ryo quickly finds nine new teammates: Hikaru and Yuki, two softball MVPs who just want to keep playing; Seira, an Olympic-class sprinter who's become a street tough; Koharu, an intimidating batter who used to play on boy's teams until she developed; Mao, a straggler from the judo team who may be the only girl capable of catching Ryo's pitches; Kanako, who plays baseball in disguise so she won't be found out by her parents; Yoko, who may only be joining the team to jumpstart her career as a pop idol; Nene, the energetic manager who learned everything she knows about baseball from Shonen Jump; and the Chairman's daughter, Izumi, a tennis prodigy who can't stand all the attention this common girl is getting from her mother and her putative boyfriend. If she wants to make it to Koshien, Ryo has to has things out with Izumi — and deal with the mysterious secret from her past that may destroy her love of baseball!

Watching Princess Nine has become sort of a pre-season ritual around here. Some time during the last week of spring training, I dig through my video collection, warm up the DVD player, and watch the entire series over the course of five or six days. Truth be told, though, Princess Nine isn't all that original. In fact, for the most part it's just a huge pile of shojo and shonen clichés.

But strangely, the shojo clichés and the shonen clichés actually work well together — the emotional highs and lows of the character's relationships actually intensify (and are intensified by) the dramatic highs and lows of a good baseball game. You wind up with overlapping love triangles, which drive the intra- and inter-team rivalries. You wind up with players whose crippling emotional problems render them physically unable to play baseball. You get baseball duels on the beach at dawn. You get a girl's team that are the ultimate underdogs, fighting against prejeudice at the same time that they battle boy's teams. You get the unlikely spectacle of a batter and pitcher, pushed to their physical and emotional breaking points, declaring their mutual love as they face off on the baseball diamond.

Oh, and did I mention that it's about ten cute girls who play baseball? Never underestimate how far a cute girl can go. And if one of them isn't exactly your type, well, you've got nine others to choose from. And maybe Ryo's mom if you're into that type too.

For that matter, there's plenty of baseball here as well. Perhaps not as much baseball as I'd like, but they manage to squeeze in three or four complete games over the course of a 26-episode series, including some close games as well as some blow-outs. You get to see the girls pulling off the hit-and-run, the squeeze play, the hidden ball trick, and even a rare triple play. That's more than most baseball movies manage to do.

Plus, it's also got a tremendous soundtrack, performed by the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, that does a great job of underscoring the themes of love and competition that run through the series. In fact, it's so good I always load it up on my MP3 player when I head out to the ballpark. Like today.

Anyway, if you like cute girls, emotional highs, and baseball, it's hard to go wrong with Princess Nine. That's why it's one of my favorite things.

Update: Chicago Cubs vs. Pittsburgh Pirates

An ugly, ugly game. It looked like amateur hour for both teams.

Stephen E. Braude, The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

As a kid I always like reading books about the paranormal — probably because they're racked next to the computer science books in the Dewey Decimal System. I never really believed in Bigfoot or UFOs or screaming crystal skulls, but they made for a nice diversion from real life and were exactly sort of thing I needed to get my young imagination racing. So every now and then I'll check out a book on parapsychology just to see if there's anything interesting in there.

This book starts off with an nice foreword, where Braude takes knee-jerk skeptics to task for being utterly dismissive of things beyond human experience, and for slandering paranormal investigators as credulous dupes. Braude then squanders that over the next eight chapters by proving that he's a credulous dupe. During Braude's investigations he makes wild conclusions based on incomplete data sets, conducts experiments with insufficient controls, manages to incompetently document mysterious phenomena, and picks and chooses only the sources that are favorable to his conclusions.

Braude has an unfortunate tendency to fall back on the cases of D.D. Home and Eusapia Palladino, because he thinks they're well-documented and unimpeachable. And they are — by nineteenth century standards. To twentienth century eyes the protocols used for the controls are woefully insufficient, the observations made are maddeningly vague and irrelevant. Plus, everyone involved in these investigations has been dead for a century, so there's no way to re-examine the data or conclusions in a meaningful way.

Here's a particulary ironic moment. In one chapter Braude recounts a tale of a Baltimore police officer who's managed to delude himself into seeing images in the random folds, which leaves Braude shaking his head at the man's level of delusion. Yet only a few short chapters later Braude is reading all sorts of fantastic details into a blurry Ted Serios photo. The images in question are reproduced in the book, and Braude's description of the photo is significantly divergent from the reality.

In short, there's a lot of sloppy, unscientific thinking going on here, a lot of sound and fury that proves absolutely nothing. There are interesting observations to be made about the extraordinary and paranormal, but Braude isn't the person to be making them.

Jonathan Lethem, You Don't Love Me Yet. New York: Doubleday, 2007.

I fint the experience of any given Jonathan Lethem about the same. For the first half of the book, I usually find myself wondering why I should care about anything that's happened so far. Then, there's a brief shining moment in the middle where everything totally clicks, I totally get it, and I'm really curious to see where things go from here. And then he loses me again, and I wonder why I cared in the first place.

Which isn't to say that You Don't Love Me Yet is awful. It's got some interesting characters, bizarre situations, and meaningful themes, but it's just not able to draw them together in a way that's consistently interesting or entertaining.

David Bainbridge, Beyond the Zonules of Zinn: A Fantastic Journey Through Your Brain. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

As much as I hate to admit it, this is the first book this year that I couldn't really finish. I mean, I finished it, but I only read the first half in any detail. I skimmed through the second half of hte book.

It's not that the subject matter is inherently uninteresting — the central nervous system is a fascinating topic, and Bainbridge is not only trying to explain how it evolved, but how our thinking about it has evolved. But the book is just a tad too dry, a tad too technical, to reach a general audience. I think I'd be more receptive to the material in a different format, too — maybe as a series of magazine articles, or a TV documentary.

Peter Watts, Starfish. New York: Tor, 1999.
Peter Watts, Maelstrom. New York: Tor, 2001.
Peter Watts, Behemoth: B-Max. New York: Tor, 2004.
Peter Watts, Behemoth: Seppuku. New York: Tor, 2005.

I've been searching for the third and fourth books forever, only to find them up the street at the library. So I checked 'em out, sat down with them, and then realized about 50 pages into B-Max that I couldn't remember who any of the minor characters were.

The Rifters books are weird. They're the storie of Lenie Clark, a cyborg responsible for maintaining geothermal power stations along deep ocean rifts. Unfortunately, she and her colleagues run into something that's not supposed to be down there, and which the government doesn't plan on letting out.

The first 100 pages of Starfish are pretty much perfect — if you could end the book right after Lenie and Ken meet for the first time, you'd have one of the greatest science fiction short stories ever written, hell, one of the greatest character studies ever written. The rest of the book is pretty good too — there are some interesting interrelated points about life and intelligence, and everything gets pulled up into a nice, satisfying package. Maelstrom is still pretty damn good — as Lenie becomes the focal point for what might be the end of the world, Watts uses the degeneration of society as a metaphor for evolution and manages to neatly tie things together with the themes from the previous book.

Behemoth, though, is a major step down. It does complete Lenie's character arc in a satisfying manner — she goes from dead inside in the first book, to angry in the second book, to guilty in the third book, and finally manages to get her shit together by the conclusion of Seppuku. Unfortunately, Watts increases the focus on Lenie's personal evolution by discarding most of the larger philosophical issues, and in the end we're left with a confrontation between a tragically flawed cyborg and the cackling sociopath who's trying to destroy the world for no particular reason.

Erich von Däniken, Gods from Outer Space. New York: Bantam, 1971.

Pulled this one off the bookshelf while I was prepping for my essays about The Eternals. It struck me that von Däniken might make a better public speaker than an author — when he can't control the pace of his presentation it becomes very obvious that he's not really constructing an argument as just heaping "facts" upon "facts."

Still, one of the reason I like von Däniken and other wackos is that they have a tendency to think big thoughts. Totally impractical, wrong-headed, insane thoughts, but nonetheless fascinating. Sometimes, a temporary immersion in pure crazy is just the right thing to get the creative juices flowing.

Harumi Kurihara, Harumi's Japanese Home Cooking. New York: Penguin, 2007.

I do cook, but I'm not exactly a gourment chef, so I tend to appreciate cookbooks like this one that include a lot of basic kitchen instruction and include a ton of simple recipes that are easy to modify. Admittedly, I haven't managed to prepare anything out of the book yet, but I'm working on it. Really.

Christopher Buckley, Boomsday. New York: Twelve, 2007.

Buckley has a reputation as a political satirist, but he's always struck me as more of a farceur — he never seems to have strong opinions or meaningful insights about his subjects. Boomsday, for instance, is ostensibly a novel about Social Security reform, but the most penetrating insight he manages to throw out there is "Gosh, Washington's gonna screw that up, aren't they?" Having said that, Buckley's never dull. Boomsday is full of terrible people doing terrible things to each other in amusing ways fashion, and everyone (including, to some extent, the insufferable heroine) gets their comeuppance by the end. And hey, if you're not going to be meaningful, it's always good to at least be entertaining.

Thought #13

Me: What's this?

Mark: It's the new component that the client selected for the pods. They like it because it's cute. They like cute.

Me: So, if we paint the damn things pink and slap Hello Kitty on them, the client will buy more of them?

Mark: Well, but they also like black.

Me: So we paint them black and put Bad Badtz Maru on them.

Mark: That'll work.

Thought #14

astralagos: Goddammit, when are you gonna get to the peebos?
astralagos: I WANT PEEBOS!
astralagos: PEEBOS ARE THE GREATEST IDEA EVER!

ninjorilla: Well, maybe some hot Jazz-on-Perceptor action will take some of that sting away.

astralagos: I hate you in ways that language cannot describe.

Thought #15

Thought #16

I am, by nature, an impulse buyer. For years I have done my best to try and curb those impulses. And yet today I find myself the proud owner of two "smencils" — scented pencils that smell like root beer.

Two steps forward, one step back...

Manga fans are frequently frustrated by the misconceptions that the general public has about their hobby. No, manga is not all ninjas and giant robots, big eyes and small mouths, speedlines and Speed Racer. We know better, but constantly having to explain yourself gets tiring after a while.

So every now and then it's nice to get a reminder that the Japanese totally don't get American comics either.

AmeComi Illustration Technic is a how-to guide to drawing "American-style comics", published by You Kusano in 1989. Kusano is apparently the Japanese Christopher Hart — someone who publishes tons of "how-to" illustration guides despite not having more than a surface familiarity with his subject, a work history that would make a publisher think he knew what he was talking about, or even a flair for explaining things.

Anyway, you can see the first problem from the cover — the conflation of "American comics" with "superhero comics." A two-page spread inside shows some more specific inspiration — a random pile of mid-'80s Marvel comics, issue #2 of Legends, a Lynda Carter Wonder Woman poster, and a rubber Bird-Man figurine sitting in a model kit of '56 Ford T-Bird. An odd assemblage to be sure.

Interestingly, Kusano's drawings bear no resemblance at all to the source material.

That doesn't look like any American comic I've ever seen. What it does look like a bad Kaiji Kawaguchi drawing inked with a toothpick. It's even more obvious when Kusano draws mechanical devices.

Okay, so it's obvious that Kusano doesn't really have any familiarity with his purported subject. Is there anything of value in the book?

Well, yes and no. Obviously, I don't speak Japanese, but it's easy to tell from the illustrations that there's tons of standard drawing instruction in the book — breaking down the body into geometric shapes, simple perspective, basic tool use. However, there's nothing here that you couldn't get from any drawing instruction book, and no indication as to how an American would do something differently than his Japanese counterpart.

It also doesn't help that Kusano is trying to draw everything with a technical pen. Here's an example.

Okay, this is a perfectly fine way of doing speed lines. Draw your first line with a Rapidograph pulled across straight edge, pivot the outer edge a bit around your focal point, thicken the line, and repeat, trying to keep your lines vaguely parallel. However, if you're going for a classic Sinnott-style suburst, you're better off doing it with a Hunt 102 crow quill — just apply some pressure at the outer edge and flick rapidly towards the center. Gets the same effect a lot faster with just a little practice.

And that's the whole problem in a nutshell, really. Kusano barely has a grasp of his own idiom, and he's over-extending himself by trying to explain an idiom he himself barely understands. I suppose those who can, teach well, and those who can't, teach badly.

Re-reading all my John Romita Jr. comics for yesterday's post, I stumbled across Peter Parker, Spider-Man v2 #6, which is one of my favorite Spider-Man comics.

Now, this isn't a great comic by any means. It's a simple, uninvolving story about the Kingpin reclaiming control of the underworld, mixed in with the interminable Senator Ward subplot that dominated the Spider-Man titles after the relaunch. There's a lot of talking, a lot of unresolved plot points, a short (but memorable) fight scene featuring Bullseye. It's got some great art by John Romita Jr., but it's not like JRjr Spider-Man comics are in short supply. So why do I like this particular issue so much?

Because the coloring is fantastic.

No, really. This particular issue (along with most of the Mackie/Romita Spider-Man issues) was colored by Gregory Wright, who's one of the most talented colorists working in the industry. The man is a master of simple, yet effective coloring jobs that enhance the linework without totally overwhelming it. And this issue is one of his unsung masterpieces.

You see, this issue takes place over the course of a single day, and Wright carefully alters his color palette to match the position of the sun. The first few pages take place in the hazy, pre-dawn hours, and are mostly blue and gray. The next sequence takes palce in the pale blue of early morning, and a few pages take place in the bright blue of the early afternoon. And then there's the capstone, a gorgeous sequence where Senator Ward and Arthur Stacy finally confront each other on a construction site at sunset...

Peter Parker, Spider-Man v2 #6, p. 13-18

I mean, wo