I love fighting games. I also love Mystery Science Theater 3000. Never have I really considered the idea of mixing the two.

A guy by the name of FutureDami decided that not only should such a thing exist, but he went the extra mile with it by making a gallery of “official” profile art for such a hypothetical video game. Rather than go with the obvious of Mike, Joel, the Bots and the Mads, FutureDami instead goes with the many, many bizarre characters our heroes have been forced to watch over the show’s ten seasons. Behold the world of Mystery Science Theater Beatdown!

Yes, who needs playable Mike and Joel when you have Trumpy, Torgo, the Phantom of Krankor, the Hobgoblins, the Beast of Yucca Flats and Mr. B Natural?

Each character piece also features a profile, including how they would fight had this game existed. Check it out. It’s a great who’s who/love letter.

PUMAMAN (Episode 903)

Professor Tony Farms could have gone his entire life without knowing he was THE PUMAMAN. Yes, he could sense danger. Sure, he could see in the dark. And he was vaguely aware that his hands were steel claws, after a series of broken nail-clippers and inexplicably ruined sofas.

But it was only when Tony was hurled out a window by Aztec priest Vidinio that he truly embraced his inner puma, making him technically some sort of 70s proto furry.

Pumaman is an aerial attacker, using the natural flying abilities of the puma(?) and feline grace to flail around and fall at a 45 degree angle. Most of his attacks involve him losing control of his pitch/yaw, crying and giving up, and simply slamming into his opponent with the force of a discarded dishrag.

PITCH (Episode 521)

Pitch is a part time devil working for Lucifer. After a brief stint lowering the productivity of bread delivery drivers, Pitch settled in to a decent routine of minor harassment. Working odd jobs for eternity in hell has given pitch a wide array or marginally useful skills.

In combat, Pitch is quite versatile, able to switch the position of his asbestos-tipped trident for various styles of fighting. He has three stances:

“Infernal” a fire based magical stance where Pitch uses his sulphurous combustion breath.

“Impenetrable” a guarded stance in which Pitch torments his opponents witch cheap ranged stabs and stuns.

“Ineffable” a forbidden hubris-based style that is inherently too overpowered, complex, and abstract to be adequately communicated.

DROPPO (Episode 321)

Droppo is lazy. I mean seriously lazy. The guy is such a bum, he can waste other people’s time simply from being in the same room. He is probably the laziest man on Mars. If there was a Martian DMV, he would work there. Part time.

He is equipped with pulse-phase anti-gravity boots, and a deadly q-ray pistol, but Droppo can hardly be assed to use them.

What, do you ask, is his advantage in combat? This: You can’t beat a guy who doesn’t give a crap. There is at this date, no known way to defeat Droppo.

NASTINKA (Episode 813)

Knowing his time was nearly at an end, the jovial Jack Frost adbicated his frozen throne and dominion over ice to pert young Nastinka.

She was, after all, the only person ever to recover from the bone chilling effect of his magic scepter. This weapon was susequently reclassified: “Will freeze to death anything it touches save for a few rare exceptions when true love and plot convenience is involved. Use as directed.”

Nastinka does not have a large health pool, and will shatter with a few punches. Good luck ever getting close enough to her, though. She will call down ferocious aoe snowstorms slowing opponents, and will slick the ground wherever she walks for several seconds causing enemies to slip and fall in a comedic manner.

She will smile in a pleasant innocent manner while you are entombed in a bitter cold casket, and wait patiently while all the blood in your veins turns to ice. Do not mess with Nastinka.

ZAP ROWSDOWER (Episode 910)

No description needed. Its ROWSDOWER.

(Drinking arm status: healed)

Awesome. Absolutely awesome.

“You know who goes to jail? Nigger stick-up men, that’s who. You know why they get caught? Because they fall asleep in the getaway car, Karen.”
–Goodfellas, 1990

“That’s what the niggers don’t realize. If I got one thing against the black chappies, it’s this. No one gives it to you. You have to take it.”
–The Departed, 2006

“Sonny: Niggers havin’ a real good time up in Harlem…
Carlo Rizzi: I knew that was going to happen as soon as they tasted the big money.”
–The Godfather, 1972

I love crime movies, man. I’m sure that’s obvious if you’ve ever read this site before, but it bears restating: I luv them. Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy was always around the house when I was growing up. For some reason, my grandparents weren’t down with Scarface, but they could watch The Godfather all day. (My grandfather had a tape of New Jack City, though.) When the DVD boxed set came out a few years back, the first thing I did was order it so that they could replace those awful double-VHS sets. I’d end up looking at about a foot of The Godfather every time I went to find a movie to watch.

Now, the thing about crime movies that I hate the most is the nigger speech. It’s not in every crime flick, but it’s in enough of them (and most of the major ones) that it’s something I took notice of and started rolling my eyes over. The gist, if you somehow aren’t familiar with the nigger speech, is that a bunch of guys will sit around a table, maybe at a meeting or maybe at dinner, and talk about how they don’t do _____ like the niggers do. Usually it’s dealing heroin, but sometimes it’s petty crime or sticking people up on the street. It pitches the guys giving the speech as classy criminals, as opposed to the inelegant savagery of the negro peoples when it comes to crime.

It’s a cheap, lazy shorthand version of characterization. I get the reasoning behind it. It actually makes a lot of sense. You want to set your criminals apart from other criminals, and honestly, stick-ups and dealing drugs is probably the primary narrative in the media when it comes to black crime. The dominant image for black crime is basically street gangs and crackheads, right?

But man… black people have had some amazing criminal enterprises. The Black Mafia ran wild over Philadelphia, the Black Mafia Family as a concept is begging for a fictionalized movie (You know that bit from Prince Paul’s A Prince Among Thieves where Chubb Rock is like “I do prostitution, drugs, guns, and rap management?” I feel like that’s the secret origin of BMF), and there’s also The Council (recently immortalized in American Gangster), Nicky Barnes, Freeway Ricky Ross, Bumpy Johnson, and plenty more. If you’re looking for amoral predators willing to do anything to make a buck, there’s plenty you can pull from.

I get the nigger speech, but I don’t like it much. I’ve seen it too often, and I feel like it’s at the point where it’s only in these movies because it was in the other movies, and now the nigger speech is an accepted part of crime movie culture (for lack of a better phrase). The nigger speech puts forth a fake idea, and I don’t know that any movie has actually factored that into the speech as some type of dramatic irony. It’s never a rebuke. It’s just a statement: Italians (or whoever) do crime like this, black people do crime like this. It’s an argument of sophistication vs unsophistication, or honor among thieves vs dishonorable actions, more than anything else. It’s character- and world-building stuff, and it actually works pretty well, assuming the writing’s above a certain quality.

But I still don’t like the nigger speech. It’s not even the racism that bothers me. It’s not the historical inaccuracy, either. Neither of those is really what gets under my skin. (Well, maybe the racism, but c’mon. I live in America. I know how to roll with the punches/racism.) It’s really about the lack of originality for me. It’s like how every movie has to have a scene where the good guy and bad guy points their guns at one another and WHOOPS the guns are empty. We’ve seen that scene. We know how it ends. We’ve heard the nigger speech, and we don’t care. At this point, throwing the nigger speech into your movie just makes you a biter at best.

I missed out on Abel Ferrara and Nicholas St. John’s King of New York (released in 1990) the first time around. I’m not sure how or why. I certainly knew of it — I’m a big fan of the black Frank White and the movie was sampled in Tupac’s “Death Around the Corner”, which was my favorite Tupac song for years, so some things you absorb without even realizing — but I hadn’t watched it until last year, when either Sean Witzke or Tucker Stone urged me to do so.

I loved it. Christopher Walken was great. Laurence Fishburne was great. Giancarlo Esposito, Wesley Snipes, David Caruso, Steve Buscemi, everybody was good. Toward the end, there’s a bit where a guy goes “Hey. You.” and what follows is one of the coldest killings ever put to film.

But partway through the movie, there’s this exchange:

“Joey Dalesio: I’ve got a message from Frank White. He wants to sit down, he wants to talk.
Arty Clay: You tell him I don’t talk to nigger lovers.
Joey Dalesio: Well, he says he’s got things on his mind that he wants to discuss with you, and he wants to know where and he wants to know when.
Arty Clay: You tell him in fucking Hell, that’s where. He’s gonna wish his lawyer left him fucking those Sambos in the joint when I get through with him.”

I started to roll my eyes, because man, this is biz as usual, no matter how good the movie is. But, Frank runs with black dudes. He’s their brother. So, a little later, he goes to visit Arty. I can’t embed the youtube, but there’s an official excerpt here. And I loved this scene. I can’t even tell you. It instantly made up for the nigger speech in this flick and dozens of others. It’s this super hardbody statement of intent for Frank White and one of the coolest scenes out. It’s Batman delivering his ultimatum to the crooks in Miller and Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year One times a billion. “You guys got fat while everybody starved on the street. Now it’s my turn.”

King of New York upset a lot of my expectations on top of just being a dope movie. The violence, the plot, the dialogue, the acting, all of it was top notch. Getting a bit of blatant revenge on the nigger speech was just icing on the cake. When you add in “Hey. You.” from the end, you’ve got one of my favorite crime flicks.

(You know what sucks? I can’t embed a trailer of this movie from youtube being LionsGate doesn’t understand how the internet works. Check the trailer here, though.)

Here’s some stuff I think you should throw money at or read or hear or kiss that I haven’t had a chance to write about in detail just yet but probably will in the future:

–Jack Kirby: Here’s a Jack Kirby youtube I liked:

I never thought of the Silver Surfer as a fallen angel before, but that’s good. I like that a lot.

–Carbon Grey: The Carbon Grey kickstarter is still going. I wrote about it here, and here’s the direct link. They need 40k, and they’re currently sitting at 32.5. Help out if you can!

–The Zaucer of Zilk: I haven’t gotten a chance to go and pick up my comics in over a month because of reasons, but I’m really, really looking forward to this. It starts (started?) in 2000 AD prog 1775, but CBR has posted the entire first chapter. It’s everything I expected it to be. Brendan McCarthy is great, and I love how he manages to make the drab psychedelic and the psychedelic into, I dunno, psychedelic plus? Just look at the thumbnails on the CBR page. They build to a fever pitch, like a dam breaking in slow motion except WHOOPS the dam was holding back a rainbow. I like Al Ewing, too. I haven’t read a lot of his work, but he did this nuts Judge Dredd choose your own adventure thing in prog 2012 that took me like three entire days to read, and I appreciate that in a writer. He created Zombo with Henry Flint, too, so he’s definitely got that mean sense of humor I like to see in my comics. My only expectations for Zaucer of Zilk is that it’s gonna be like nothing else in comics. Judging by the preview, I think they’re on the right track.

Actually, I just looked at my pull list or whatever, and I should have progs 1765, 1767, 1768, 1769, 1771, and 1770 (in that order) waiting for me. Who in the world is in charge of shipping those comics? And why are they like a full month behind in the US? Confusing. You may not be able to buy this yet, but if you can, do so. Comics!

-This video for Odd Future’s “Oldie” is fantastic, the most rappity-rapping thing I’ve seen in ages.

There’s something so pure about this video. It’s a bunch of friends having fun, and there’s always gonna be something magical about a gang of rappers spitting directly to the camera without any speedboats or video chicks gyrating. Also Frank Ocean has got that understated cool that works so well for him.

“Bumping oldies on my cellular phone” is so good, and so is Earl’s line about “crunchy black cats in a taxi,” but Tyler kills it with this:

This is for the niggas in the suburbs
And the white kids with nigga friends who say the n-word
And the ones that got called weird, fag, bitch, nerd
’cause you was into jazz, kitty cats, and Steven Spielberg
They say we ain’t actin’ right
Always try to turn our fuckin’ color into black and white
But they’ll never change ’em, never understand ’em
Radical’s my anthem, turn my fucking amps up!
So instead of critiquing and bitchin’, bein’ mad as fuck
Just admit, not only are we talented, we’re rad as fuck

The Of Tape Vol. 2, and I’m digging it. Mellowhype’s “50” is the crunkest song since whenever the last Waka Flocka banger dropped, and makes me want that Numbers album even more. Hodgy and Domo are all over the album, and Mike G gets it in, too. Hodgy is still probably my favorite lyricist in the crew, and he shows some nice range. Domo’s Under the Influence mixtape is extra dope, so you should cop that, too. Lotta OFWGKTA bangers out there now. Golf Wang.

–Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo: I wrote a thing about Stan Sakai’s lettering for ComicsAlliance and he showed up in the comments to thank me. That was pretty cool.

-Oh yeah, I took a month off from CA because… I don’t know, but I did. I’m writing there again, so y’all can resubscribe. I know you missed me.

–Alabaster: Wolves: This comic by Caitlín R Kiernan, Steve Lieber, and Rachelle Rosenberg is pretty dope. I wrote about the dialogue and art for CA. I like it. It’s on Dark Horse digital.

–Heart: I don’t think I ever mentioned it except in passing, but I was a big fan of Blair Butler, Kevin Mellon, and Crank!’s Heart. Sports comics are all too rare, and this is a good example of how they should work. The team stuck the landing. I wanted to throw this out there in case I get distracted again. It’ll cost you like eight bucks right now for the digital copies.

–Alpha Princess Garou Shoujo: My shoujo broujo Sloane made a comic about a wolfgirl. It’s pretty good. You should read it. “100% tooth & nail comix by sloane.” Magical Girl Wolf Pack Cute Them All, bang bang bang

–Esperanza Spalding: I really, really like Esperanza Spalding. Her Radio Music Society is a really good album. Very easy to listen to, catchy, intelligent, and plenty of other adjectives that all basically mean “I like this, you should listen to it.” I liked Chamber Music Society, too, but I think Radio Music Society is legitimately a step forward. Different, but very good. Here’s “Radio Song”:

–I Am Not David Bowie, But We Have The Same Initials: I’ve been listening to Ziggy Stardust, Diamond Dogs, and Station to Station. I’m pretty sure those three are my favorite (no rank) Bowie records. I’ve been fiending for some Bowie karaoke (Bowieoke?) but I’m hilariously broke so it’ll have to wait.

–Sourpuss Blvd: This is cute, and congrats to the winners, but I can’t help but feel some type of way since the artists here are making more money off the back of the Avengers movie than Jack Kirby’s family will ever see. Maybe that’s an obnoxious thing to say and now I’m That Guy, the sophomore who just discovered social injustice or philosophy or something and won’t shut up about it, but whatever. I don’t care. Marvel has screwed a lot of people, and I think that once we’re talking about billion dollar box offices or whatever, it’s worth pointing out that they could do much, much better than they do. “Hey Jack, we’ll dedicate comics to you all day, everyday, but when it comes to actually giving you what you deserve… haha, sorry bro, the lawyers won’t let us. It’s the Mouse. You know how it is. King!”

Anyway. Comics!

Fantasia, directed by a lot of dudes, written by a lot of other dudes, 1940 (Amazon VOD): This was playing at the Castro Theatre (which turns 90 this year!). I haven’t seen Fantasia in years. Probably 15 years? Definitely not since Y2K. As a result, this was almost entirely new and a real deal delight. In my head, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” was much, much longer. I’d somehow forgotten about “Night on Bald Mountain” and its blend of the profane and sacred, and the totally insane “Dance of the Hours” with the dancing gators and hippos, too.

I watched this on an old 35mm print, I think, so it was pretty scratchy, but still beautiful. The theater was full of old people and children, which was nice. The kids a few rows behind me kept gasping and talking about the action on the screen. They sounded impressed. I was, too. I think my favorite sequence was “Nutcracker Suite.” I like the song, but the animation was nuts, the ice and water effects especially. Watching the fairies dancing around and the colors slowly fading through the seasons was amazing.

My absolute favorite part of that sequence was the very beginning, as the fairies bring color and life to the land. Everything about it, from the palettes to the detailed animation and the sweeps of color that serve as pollen or contrails or whatever, rocked my world. The bit with the spiderwebs especially, where the fairies are dropping dew on the web? Yeah, that. Dang. All of Fantasia is good, but this was the bit where it looked like someone was trying to show off. “Look what I can do.”

Second favorite is “Night on Bald Mountain.” I’ve been really into looking at… I don’t know the term, occult iconography? Hellboy stuff, basically–Ars Goetia, cultural monsters and demons, what evil looks like to different people. That sort of thing is really interesting right now, and “Night on Bald Mountain” is an incredible example. I remember being surprised that “Rite of Spring” was basically “Evolution: The Movie.” I mean, 1940–was that sort of thing cool back then? But then “Night on Bald Mountain” brings it back around to religion.

I love the monsters in this one. The creepy limp demons and lizards, the paper-thin ghosts, and then that bit where the demons and skeletons are dancing in front of the fire pit as their brethren are destroyed. The demons feel like they’re part worm. They look like regular monsters, but the way they move is disgusting. They’re the embodiment of the other. I love the bat-faced monster, too. He’s such a great idea, and so well-conceived. He’s an overpowering, burdensome presence while he’s in action, and then when he disappears, it’s obvious that he’s just around the corner, laying in wait. He looks and feels like a predator. The part when the bells begin chiming and light strikes him is a very arresting visual, too.

“Night on Bald Mountain” is basically 1 Peter 5:8 in animated form. “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” He’s always there, lurking in the shadows, and everyone is a target, no matter how sleepy your town might be.

I liked all of Fantasia, really. I was surprised at how much nudity there was (the harpies have nipples!), but it was a really good ride. I was actually thinking about Kubrick’s 2001 while I watched it. The wordless visual cacophony late in that movie bugged and bored me, but I had no trouble with the first part of Fantasia. They’ve got two entirely different goals, I think, but I couldn’t help but compare them.

It’s kind of surprising to me that something from 1940 can look so good. Some parts have aged better than others, yeah, but by and large, this looks really good. Everything has a ton of personality, and the little useless things that add verisimilitude (bubbles popping, excess splashing, you know what I mean) abound. It’s sort of like Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira in that way. So much care was put into giving the movie not just a style, but a high level of quality, that it ends up looking really good. I want the Blu-ray, but this is definitely a movie that was worth seeing in a theater.

But yo, seriously, the dancing mushrooms–they were supposed to be Chinese stereotypes, right? That made me a little uncomfortable.

I had a joke I wanted to make about Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia being a re-imagining of “Rite of Spring,” but I can’t quite bridge the gap and make it work. But yeah–I definitely spent some time during that sequence like “Oh man, Melancholia was a huge downer, but really pretty.”

Neal Kirby, Jack Kirby’s son, wrote a remembrance of his father for the LA Times Hero Complex blog. It’s not a big to-do or anything like that, some type of wide-ranging biography. It’s just a guy talking about his dad through the lens of the early 1960s. It’s a touching portrait, and humanizing, too. We all hear about Jack “King” Kirby, father to everyone’s style and one of the greatest comics artists to ever do it. We rarely hear about Jack the dad, Jack the husband, or Jack the man. This is valuable reading. I loved this bit:

I wonder if Michelangelo had a kid watching him paint? Was there a little Luigi watching the ceiling from a quiet corner of the Sistine Chapel? Extreme example, maybe, but the emotion would have been the same that I experienced watching my father at the drawing board. I had to stand on his left, looking over his shoulder. Starting with a clean piece of Bristol board, he would first draw his panel lines with an old wood and plastic T-square. Then the page would start to come alive. He told me that once he had the story framed in his mind, he would start drawing at the middle, then go back to the beginning, and then finish it up. Everything seemed to come naturally; he didn’t even needed a compass to draw a perfect circle. He worked fast but smooth, too, no wasted movement or hesitation.

There’s something about watching someone work that’s magical, whether it’s bringing down a tree with precision or throwing lines on a page.

And I guess the punchline to all of this is that Marvel’s going to make a billion dollars off the back of the Avengers movie and Kirby’s estate gets nothing for it. That’s comics, I guess.

I liked this post by my bud Dylan Todd about Robert Kirkman, Nick Spencer, Felix Serrano, and Shawn Martinbrough’s Thief of Thieves. I’ve been making fun of that ridiculous “How does a thief stop being a thief?” line for ages now, millions of years in internet time, but Dylan pointed out something even more egregious. I don’t want to repeat what Dylan said, so be sure to read his post. The short version, though, is that this sort of construction makes for storyboard comics, “Please make this into a movie” comics, instead of good old adventure comics.

If you want to read the full sequence, CBR has a preview. It opens with this intensely boring page, trips to another conversation that’s just as stiff though not as static, and then onto an awkwardly depicted gunfight (what is with the jumping dude?). This page, though, is the sort of thing that makes bad comics worse.

“Talking heads comics” is a pejorative, and rightly so, I think. At this late stage in the comics making game, this sort of construction is enormously weak. There’s nothing to this page, no excitement, no drama, no nothing. The woman is stuck in a shocked pose, as if to say “WHOA, what?” (My twitter follower @ardaniel tweeted at me to say “I keep making that woman’s panel 1-3 pose and it just makes me go ‘DON’T LOOK AT MY NIPPLES.'” and I’ve been laughing ever since). The guy is holding his cup in the air while delivering life-changing information. And then… frame two.

I’ve got two reasons why this is so weak. For the first, let’s assume that you absolutely have to have a scene where two characters conversate in one room, never leaving their seats. A meeting, essentially. Now, have you ever had a conversation? Think back to the last one you had. Even if you’re theoretically sitting still, you’re moving around. You’re cocking your head, coughing, making hand gestures, or stretching. The only time you sit and stare directly into someone’s eyes for minutes at a time is… I don’t know, actually, maybe never, or if someone is in a coma but you think they might be faking. We emote when we talk, and we all emote in idiosyncratic ways. We pick up gestures (jerk-off motion, a pshaw hand-flip, a “stop right there” hand, a half grimace to show disappointment) from somewhere and employ them to our own ends. We make unconscious motions. We blink real hard. Our eyes wander. We move, basically, and we move often. Even when you’re having a conversation with someone when you’re half asleep, you still wave them away.

We all do these things. It’s what makes people-watching so interesting. Not including such a basic part of our lives in a scene that should have several different touchstones for us to latch onto takes whatever verisimilitude the comic has and beats it in an alley. I don’t believe in this scene at all. It’s stiff and awkward. Let’s assume that panel one is fine. She’s surprised and she doesn’t want the guy to look at her nipples, so her hands are up. Cool. Panel two — she’s just heard some serious news. What’s her next position when she’s trying to find out more information? A shrug would work here, or a cocked head. Something inquisitive, not surprised. She’s still surprised, but at this point, she’s moving on to the next step, which is “What the heck is this guy talking about?” In panel three, she’s starting to get angry and caustic. “What is with this guy?” That’s an entirely different motion than “You quit?!” Panel 4: she’s angry and he’s smug. Fine. Sure.

Reason two. I’ve been reading a lot of Leiji Matsumoto manga recently, specifically his Galaxy Express 999. A lot of his stuff doesn’t have any action at all, in fact, and is composed of long conversations. Bald exposition isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and boy does Matsumoto indulge himself sometimes. I was particularly struck by a scene from Galaxy Express 999, volume 1, when Maetel and Tetsuro land on a planet and have a quick conversation.

Instead of it being rendered like this scene from Thief of Thieves, the conversation takes place over a series of different scenes. They walk around, they check into a hotel, Maetel takes a shower… it was a fairly exciting way to show both time passing and to still give the reader all the exposition in the world. The conversation is impossible as depicted — they cover too much ground and do too many things for it to truly be one conversation — but it works to both introduce you to the land and the characters.

I know the pedants are getting ready to chime in with cries of “Manga is different!” (it’s still comics, shut your face) and “You’re comparing one page to ten!” (I am, but it’s not a 1:1 comparison, obviously). The thing is, Galaxy Express 999 is a great example. You can pick any one page, barring the splashes, and you’ll see a visually interesting conversation. Matsumoto shows that you can do more on one page than just show people talking, and that if you are going to show people talking, you can at least make it interesting to look at. People move and react and look around. It doesn’t get the blood pumping, but it lets you build up your world and characters. It’s characterization and world-building all in one. Tetsuro laying on the bed face down is meaningful in a way that three straight panels of “Seriously, you cannot look at these nipples right now” isn’t.

That’s what this really comes down to. Characterization. Every single thing we do as humans reveals something about us. A sneer hints at arrogance. A tentative smile suggests shyness. A sleazy smile and low eyes puts us in mind of naughty times in the bedroom. This sort of acting is characterization, even if it’s just two characters walking around a city or sitting in a room. Comics are an amazing information delivery system, and this Thief of Thieves page is lacking in info. It’s boring. It’s a speed bump.

I’m not saying that all comics need to have intricate conversations conducted by people who wiggle their arms like muppets while traveling across a bunch of diverse locations. Not by any means. I’m not saying that statted panels are evil, either. They have their place, just like anything else, and can be used to great effect. But here? No. Here, they betray a lack of imagination, or oncoming deadlines, or something. What I’m saying is that there’s none of the drama that this conversation deserves or that would keep the reader glued to their seats. There’s not even enough drama to justify checking in every once and a while. This is anti-drama, something to make you remember that you’re reading a comic, and hey, guess what, you paid three or four dollars for this thing.

The entire point of verisimilitude is to trick you into believing something that isn’t true, but appears true. This doesn’t appear true. Instead, this is boring, and that is one of the worst things comics can be. Bad comics have their high points — discussing bad X-Men will never get old, like that time they left Gambit in Antartica like “Yeah, find your own way home, murderer” — but boring comics just feel like a waste of time. They fade from memory. They don’t leave an impression. They’re vapor, instead of being something more solid. Boring.

Further reading.

So I didn’t write anything between the last ThWiP installment and this one. I’ll try not to do that again. Sorry.

I’m helped out this week by David Brothers, Space Jawa and Jody. Jody offers the Avengers vs. X-Men and Avengers vs. X-Men: Infinite panels, something I find myself staying away from. I’m rather shocked by how little I care about this event. I think part of it comes from the bluntness of the concept. The events from the past few years haven’t been perfect, but they’re all based on really solid ideas. It just so happens that all of these ideas lead to heroes vs. heroes. And I was cool with that. It’s just that when nearly every single major story is heroes vs. heroes, doing a story that is literally heroes vs. heroes in the title makes it hard for me to care. It’s self-parody and it has me rolling my eyes.

Maybe if it gets some good word of mouth I’ll check it out, but after Fear Itself burned me with its terrible pacing, I need to sit this one out.

Now to the panels.

Action Comics #8
Grant Morrison, Rags Morales and Brad Walker

Age of Apocalypse #2
David Lapham and Roberto de la Torre

Animal Man #8 (Jody’s pick)
Jeff Lemire, Steve Pugh and Travel Foreman

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So it seems that there has been a development in the Wonder Woman continuity, and it’s even more of a surprise than Wonder Woman’s not-so-secret origin.  It has put the internet in an uproar.  On the off chance that you haven’t seen the spoilers, I’m putting in a cut.

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This is probably going to seem really namedroppy and braggy, but please believe me that I don’t intend it that way. I hope you see it for what it is–genuine gratitude and a sort of… stunned appreciation.

I walk around with a black cloud a lot of the time. I have for years, really. I forget if I ever went into detail about what went down during March, but it was a bad month. My knee, two different payday screw-ups (both out of my control), an absurd wisdom tooth situation, and a variety of other things, both big and small, made for a very, very cloudy month. When you add in my long-running breakup with the comics I grew up on… let’s just say I was Charlie Browned out, to understate the situation. I was having a hard time, despite the advice and efforts of friends.

My temper burns cold, too. Even when I’m really heated, it’s not really obvious to everyone else. It’s like… the cloud metaphor works, actually. It’s like a cloud swirling around in my head, building up a head of static, rather outward responses like screaming and yelling. But after nearly a month of letting this cloud run things, after some new trauma arriving with every new week, I decided that I could either let myself be crushed or just sort of roll with the punches and laugh about it. A hollow laugh, maybe, but better a fake-ish laugh than sitting in my room in the dark on the weekends like I’d been doing. (And if we’re being honest, my luck in March? It was at Charlie Brown levels, which is actually pretty funny.) I made a joke on Twitter that I’d need Emerald City Comicon to be transcendant. Turns out… it basically was.

I wasn’t going to go to ECCC originally. I’d been curious about it, but if you’ve been reading this blog at all over the past year, you know I’m pretty burnt out on the industry. But Brandon (King City) Graham and Adam (Empowered) Warren were tweeting about it one day, and I think Brandon suggested I should go. I pshawed. It’d be cool, but nah. I had the money, thanks to my first tax refund in several years (that evaporated in March thanks to my leg, ha ha), but comics? Comics, comics, comics. But then Dennis Culver, a local artist whose work you’ve definitely seen online, threw me a DM that basically called my bluff.

So I booked a hotel right then, booked a flight later, and then, on 03/29, I caught a flight to Seattle. Rooming with Dennis was a lot of fun. He’s a good dude, and he knows a lot of cool people.By Thursday evening, I’d been introduced to half of Portland’s comics scene and a wide variety of other people employed in and around comics.

That night basically set the tone for the weekend. I met a lot of new people and saw a handful of old friends, and all of them were extraordinarily kind. I described it as “unbearably kind” in an email to a friend, but that could be taken the wrong way. What I mean by that is that I was surprised and flattered to be where I was, in kind of a “What did I do to deserve this? Is this real life? Or is it just fantasy?” type of way.

Let’s be honest here: I’m nobody. I write well, and I’m thankful for every reader I have (even this guy), but as far as the bigger picture goes? I’m a customer, homey. But the kindness on display at ECCC, whether coming from a complete stranger or someone who knew my work, was stunning. No, stunning is the wrong word. Devastating? Imagine being given a gift and it’s so good that your first thought is “I don’t deserve this.” It’s that feeling. Whatever that’s called.

I met Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover. They’re outrageously funny people. I knew and enjoyed their comics work, but seriously: dang. Josh Williamson, Jason Ho, Dennis, Andy Khouri, Vinny Navarrete, Doc Shaner, and Mitch Gerads are great people to hang around with. I didn’t get a chance to get into a deep Spider-Man conversation with Josh, but we danced around it all weekend. My SF and former SF buds Chunk Kelly, Emily Stackhouse, Nick Shahan, Greg Hinkle, and Jason McNamara came through and we had a lot of fun catching up. Joe Keatinge was tabling with Emi Lenox and her awesome hair bow, and chewing the fat with those two was great, too. Jen van Meter and Greg Rucka were unbelievably gracious as we talked for an hour or so. Ravishing Ron Richards, iFanboy extraordinaire, was running the floor of the con when he wasn’t being stopped by his scads of fans. Euge Ahn, aka Adam Warrock, was kicking around. Steve Lieber is a funny guy. Jeff Parker is the best kind of rascal, and it was a pleasure to finally meet him. Zack Soto is another cool dude, even though I keep forgetting that I owe him emails (sorry! I am the worst at email). Adam Warren and Brandon Graham both let me chill behind their tables for a couple of hours and talk while they signed and chatted with fans. I met this guy Mike who sent me a really kind note when I talked about feeling down a long time ago, and he showed me his awesome looking comic. I ran into Nolan Jones, who is a cool dude, even if his beloved Kansas U beat my beloved Ohio State Buckeyes by two points in basketball on Saturday (booooo!). The always delightful Allison Baker & Chris Roberson were around. Rachel Edidin and I bonded over X-Men and Thor. I think I ran into Sam Humphries in two different elevators before we got a chance to stop and chat. I hung around with Ali Colluccio and Cheryl Lynn. I got breakfast with Tom Spurgeon, Graham, and Robin McConnell (there’s a pic or two here) I told dumb stories about breaking my finger while playing video games and played down my leg brace. I talked about shoes.

I basically got to hang out with a bunch of cool people and forget about everything (barring the knee, which was always present, but you’d be surprised what a bunch of alcohol will do for pain killing). At one point on Saturday, I was in a deep conversation with Cheryl Lynn and Ali (sitting on either side of me) and Graham and Warren (sitting on the wings). I took a quick moment to recognize that my life had officially passed the surreal barrier and shot on toward absurd.

A funny thing is that I realized once I got to the con that I’d read the brochure wrong and the panel I really wanted to see, a three-way conversation between Adam Warren, Brandon Graham, and Bryan Lee O’Malley, was happening when I’d need to travel to the airport to leave. I was pretty bummed about that. Then, on Sunday, I got a series of notices that my flight was delayed, but that I still had to show up on time just in case. Which is cool, whatever, I’d already resigned myself to not seeing the panel and just catching Robin’s MP3s at a later date.

And then I got an email that my flight was canceled and the soonest they could fly me out was Tuesday morning. Which is ridiculous, obviously. Suddenly I was homeless for the next two days and facing missing a couple more days of work than I’d planned for, which would basically tip the deadline dominoes much faster than I’d wanted. Cold temper, though, right? So I made a joke about it, decided to call the airline after the panel, and caught the panel of the convention. I had to rush out of the con a little after that, but it is what it is. (I later got a flight that next morning, after a whole lot of stress and a dead phone battery.)

I know I’m forgetting some people. I got sick after the con, sick enough to work from home today, and I’m buried under cold/flu meds, among other things. I apologize for that, but if we met and talked, I almost definitely liked you. (Everyone except that Ron Richards! :argh: ) I just wanted to thank as many people as I could, and by name and in public, because that’s how grateful I am. I can’t even tell you, man. My heart didn’t grow three sizes (it’s still blacker than midnight at Broadway and Myrtle), but like… I don’t know that I have the words to express the gratitude I feel. I was having a real hard time, and for a weekend, I got to come up for air and avoid that black cloud.

So, seriously, truly: thanks. I had a great time. Easily the best convention experience ever. Y’all are stunning, and I’m extremely, extremely grateful.

I like this comic Carbon Grey quite a bit. It’s created by Hoang Nguyen, Khari Evans, Paul Gardner, Mike Kennedy, and Kinsun Loh. The first four came up with the story, Gardner scripted it, and then Evans, Loh, and Nguyen are responsible for the art. It’s this fairly solid little steampunky tale, with a World War I-type setting and dirigibles and stuff. But really, it’s an art showcase. It’s very pretty.

Nguyen provides layouts for the issues, Evans does the pencils and inks, and then Loh colors everything. Evans is freakishly talented, one of those dudes who gets me to check out a comic just because his name is on it. Carbon Grey is clearly a Khari Evans joint, but it’s also unlike the rest of his work, due in large part to Loh’s colors. Loh’s doing a lot of rendering with the colors, and it makes Evans’s inks look more realistic than they usually do. There’s a synergy going on there that I like a lot.

I mention this because, unbeknownst to me, a Carbon Grey Kickstarter has been going on. They need forty grand to finish the series, and they’re a little over halfway there with just ten days to go. I kicked some money their way tonight, and if you like how this comic sounds, you should think about doing so, too.

I always make this assumption that people who make comics that I like are well off and can afford to do it forever. Part of me still thinks, “Oh, you’re doing books? You’ve made it! You’re doing great!” But that isn’t true, is it? If it was true, my bookshelf would look a lot different. It sorta sucks, really. I’d like to believe that everyone can make a living doing what they love, but that isn’t true, I guess. So when push comes to shove, if I’m able, I’m more than willing to help support the work of people whose talents I’ve enjoyed. (That sentence is awkward, but you get me.) I’m blessed enough to have a steady job that leaves me with a little bit of spending money, so I might as well pay it forward, right? Comics are hard, and I don’t mind helping out when I believe in the work.

I’ve written about Carbon Grey and Khari Evans a few different times. Here’s some further reading:
–‘Carbon Grey’ Gives Khari Evans A Chance To Show His Stuff (a detailed look at the art of Carbon Grey)
–Black History Month 2011: Khari Evans (a quick look at what makes his art so good)
–Pretty Girls: Khari Evans (a look at how important a sneer can be when you’re drawing ladies, amongst other things)
–Great Moments in Black History #11: “Leave a ring around your eye and tread marks on your back” (I like this fight scene)
–All the books available digitally (the original series is two bucks each, so if you’ve got coffee cash to spare, give it a go)

Here’s the Kickstarter vid and a widget:

If this is your thing, give some thought to backing the project. I’d like to see it finish.