I hated on 50 Cent for years because I was dumb enough to side with some rappers I’ve never met against him. To be fair, they made a pretty compelling case. Jay-Z’s “I’m about a dollar, what the fuck is 50 Cents?” is a pretty classic line, and Raekwon’s temper tantrum on Ghostface Killah’s Supreme Clientele is something else. Plus, 50 was emblematic of a type of rap music that was easy to hate on, if you wanted to position yourself as “conscious” or a specific shade of underground.

As a result, I looked at 50’s successes as exceptions. “Fif is wack, but man, ‘Ayo Technology’ really goes.” “I’m not much for 50 Cent, but I really dig ‘I Get Money.'” It’s stupid, right? And unfair, probably. But past a certain point, you’ve got to sit and realize that an entire mixtape being really listenable — I spent most of NYCC 2010 listening to 50’s Forever King on repeat — isn’t an exception. That’s just now how exceptions work, so stop being stupid and start admitting you like the guy.

At some point this year, maybe a couple months ago, I put Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ onto my iPod. It hasn’t left it since. I’m continually impressed at how well the album flows from song to song, from the introduction up through “Back Down.” The stretch from “PIMP” to “Don’t Push Me” is rougher, in terms of flow, but the album ends on “Gotta Make It To Heaven,” which is nuts.

Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ has a surplus of hits. What’s great about the album is how it doesn’t just sound like a collection of radio-ready singles. 50 is going just as hard as any other hardcore New York rapper, but his swagger, charm, and cleverness keeps the songs from sounded calculatedly commercial. Call it mean mug smiley face rap, I guess, but it’s clear that 50’s having a good time.

Two songs always force the singalong: “What Up Gangsta” and “Many Men (Wish Death).” “In da Club” is tight or whatever, but it’s also pretty played out at this point. I dig it in context, but I don’t queue it up in and of itself.

But “What Up Gangsta” and “Many Men,” those I bang all the time. The former are just catchy tracks with fun hooks. “What up, blood? What up, cuz? What up, blood? What up, gangstaaaa?” and “Many men, many many many men wish death ‘pon me. Lord, I don’t cry no more, don’t look to the sky no more… have mercy on me!” There’s something pleasingly tough about the former and soulful about the former. It crawls up in your head the way good songs do. It makes something click, and I like the combination of a smiley face or old soul hook and gangster theatrics.

“Heat,” tho. “Heat” manages to have one of the coldest 50 lines and one of the corniest music videos ever. I love this construction:

Look nigga, don’t think you safe ’cause you moved out the hood
’cause ya mama still around dog, and that ain’t good
If you was smart you’d be shook of me
’cause I’ll get tired of lookin for ya
Spray ya mama’s crib, and let ya ass look for me

I can’t even really tell you why, outside of my deep and abiding appreciation for threats. But it’s his delivery, his swagger, that really sells it.

On the other hand, though, here’s the video:

Man. Son’s video looks like a Kingpin: Life of Crime ripoff. They must’ve cut this video in Hypercard or something.

What it comes down to, though, the reason why I have finally admitted to myself that I like Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ and 50 Cent in general so much, almost ten years after his album dropped, is that I finally understand that dude is just a consummate entertainer, through and through. I don’t like his more recent tunes, but you listen to this album or “Ayo Technology” and you can see how 50 managed to elbow his way into being the hardcore thug/R&B feature kingpin of his day.

Hey, Was Taters is back, everybody! I was getting worried. Also have Jody, Space Jawa and Gaijin Dan, so ThWiP Voltron is at full capacity. In ThWiP Voltron, David Brothers would be Sven because he stopped showing up for this and he was “the black one”.

Jody somehow thought reading Avengers Arena was a good idea. To hell with that book.

Now let’s get to some panels. I’ll form the head!

Age of Apocalypse #10
David Lapham and Roberto de la Torre

Avengers Arena #1
Dennis Hopeless and Kev Walker

Avengers Assemble #10
Kelly Sue DeConnick and Stefano Caselli

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Y’all like Santigold? I like Santigold. My favorite song on her Master of My Make-Believe record has gotta be “Look At These Hoes.” I always forget that it doesn’t come last on the album, because it feels like such a victory lap type of song.

If someone asked me what Santigold sounded like, I’d point to “Look At These Hoes”. It feels like a distillation of everything that she does and is about, from the wordplay to the song structure to the beat to the subject matter. It’s a song that’s about Santigold, and more specifically, about her relationship to her competition.

Maybe it’s weird, but rap isn’t a genre to me so much as a gaping maw, eager to absorb and digest anything that happens to make it through its teeth. It snaps up dance music, soul, funk, jazz, rock, and whatever else is out there — afrobeat! — and absorbs it into the body of rap. The Roots and Curren$y and David Banner and Jean Grae all make rap music, even though none of their music even remotely sounds alike.

“Look At These Hoes” is such a rap song, too. It’s all about how Santigold is iller than her competition. So much iller, in fact, that she’s off in a position of safety like “Look at these hoes trying to come up, not knowing they got no chance.” It’s braggy, full of swagger, and double-time. It sounds like a song you want to bop to, hitting b-boy poses and showing off your flashiest gear. It’s begging to be acted out.

I really dig how she flips a rap staple, too. She ain’t cold — she’s “so damn gold.” There’s barely a difference in pronunciation, but I love the difference between the two. Not to mention the pleasant connection between Santigold and gold, right? She’s positioning herself, being Santigold, as the standard for being cool. I dig that.

“Look At These Hoes” has layers. Her voice goes through a few different treatments over the course of the song — my favorite is the screw voice, to the surprise of no one — and her flow is rapid-fire but staccato, with emphasis placed on every word and extra emphasis on the end of a line. It’s like driving at high speeds around a curving mountain path, right? Turn-turn-turn-turn-TURN. I like how the song feels different epending on which voice she’s doing at the time or how her different voices play off each other when they appear simultaneously. I’m real curious how the acapella sounds.

You could pull this song apart, from the weird ultra-processed video game whistle to the subdued drum machine beat to the way Santigold’s voice bends words into new shapes and find plenty of things to talk about.

That’s what I like about Santigold, really. There’s a wide variety of sounds and styles on her Master of My Make-Believe, but it still feels like a cohesive album, from the first yelp on “Go” to the body-moving beat on “Big Mouth.” (A friend recently put me onto Buraka Som Sistema, producers of “Big Mouth.” I was already down with the sound of “Big Mouth,” and now I get MORE? Awesome.) I know I can depend on Santigold to deliver something just a little off-kilter and ultra-fresh. That faith lets me take it in stride when she throws something new at me, because I’m in the default position of being open to what she’s doing.

Master of My Make-Believe is eleven songs long, and all of them bang for almost entirely different reasons.

I forgot about Missy Elliott and found her again in 2012.

I don’t know how it happened, exactly. I was living in Virginia when she was on the come-up, and I was obviously a fan back then. That whole little spiderweb she belonged to — Nicole Wray, Aaliyah, Timbaland, Magoo, and Skillz on the outskirts — was real interesting to me. Missy made songs that were good and catchy, undeniably so, until I decided she didn’t do that, after high school, and quit listening to her.

I didn’t miss too much, since my hiatus more or less corresponded with her own hiatus, but I look back at that hiatus as such a weird decision to make. Maybe it was the last vestiges of backpacking or something. “Rap music? That you can dance to?!”

I dunno and I don’t remember, in part because it was stupid. Missy brought something to rap for me that I’ve actually grown to sorely miss: dance numbers in music videos. Which sounds like damning with faint praise, but let’s think it through here.

Nobody dances angry. There’s not a Mean Mug Merengue. So a music video with a dance number is a music video that can’t be your typical hood rap video. It’s not just gonna be somebody’s cousin’s boyfriend’s sister twerking on the corner. You’re going to have choreography, several dancers, and a song that allows for dancing. A rap video with dancing ain’t the same as one with a bunch of dudes looking at a camera and throwing up signs.

A lot of the rap I’m into isn’t dance-ready. It’s too aggressive or it’s too weird. Missy and Timbaland, though, managed to make weird into an artform. I feel like he did a lot of his best work with her, and she with him. Missy’s been doing funny voices and mixing up her flows basically since she started, in addition to singing, so she can cover a wide part of the spectrum of rap music. She’s her own R&B collab, if she wants to be. She’s a powerhouse.

The dancing shows that rap is way bigger than the little boxes we tend to put it in. It’s not too long ago that we had a bunch of dudes dressed in identical jerseys doing the same jig onstage, but that fell off. You’re not gonna see Rick Ross getting his boogie on. Fat Joe doesn’t dance. He just pulls up his pants and does the Rockaway. But Missy? Missy’ll get down, and she’ll get down extra hard if you can throw some weird wire effects in there, too.

Missy Elliott makes playful music, is what I’m saying. Her joints exist to put a smile on your face and a pep in your step. And it’s contagious.

When’s the last time you heard “One Minute Man?” I’m thinking specifically of the version with Jay-Z and his semi-tongue-in-cheek ode to the wonders of premature ejaculation and denouncement of all that is Destiny’s Child in the world. Or really any version of the song, come to think of it. They’re all pretty fun.

Making a hit song about dudes not lasting long enough in bed is amazing. I love songs that feature dueling male/female vocalists. They usually — not always, but usually — end up being real funny and clever, and I like how they break down when you’re talking or singing with friends. It’s like how every dude will yell “WE WANT PRE-NUP!” when you do Kanye’s “Gold Digger,” but both sides get to get it in.

I don’t listen to enough smileyface music, and Missy brings some of the best of it. Even her little guest appearance on J Cole’s album, “Nobody’s Perfect?” It’s just a reminder that Missy’s dumb talented, and all she does is a chorus. I didn’t know I missed her until I heard her voice and was like “Oh, yeah. That’s right.”

Word is she’s got a new album in the works. Looking forward to it. Rap needs more Missy.

It’s the Christmas season and amongst all the joy and laughter comes the utter strangeness that is the Christmas concept. Whether you’re talking about Jesus or Santa or whoever else, the whole season is a cultural mixing bowl of strange pop culture. That makes it all too fun to laugh at.

Throughout its many decades, Mystery Science Theater 3000 and its many spinoffs have given us much to celebrate. So many bad movies have been pointed at and made to look even more foolish. Like all good TV shows, there would be the occasional Christmas episode. These Christmas-themed riffs are always fondly remembered by the fans and tend to be revisited every December.

But what’s the best? I’ve decided to rewatch all of them and rank them based on my own fair and just rating system pulled directly out of my ass. I’m covering all corners of the Riffverse for this: Mystery Science Theater 3000, Mike Nelson’s offshoot Rifftrax and Joel Hodgson’s Cinematic Titanic. I wish I could have included the Film Crew – the other offshoot created by the Rifftrax guys – but with only four episodes, nothing really fit with the season.

I’m also disqualifying any of the Rifftrax shorts releases as individual entries. Everything on the list has to be at a minimum of 20 minutes. As for the ratings, each entry will be graded on four things:

– WTF Factor: Sometimes the best fodder come from movies that are just so strange that you have just as much fun explaining them to others as you do watching them.

– Watchability: I enjoy a good bad movie, but sometimes a bad bad movie can be a bear to sit through no matter how funny the jokes are.

– Riff Quality and Extras: The movie may be a mess, but how funny are our guys giving it the business? Not to mention the stuff that isn’t part of the movie itself, like skits and such.

– Christmasness: You’re watching this because of Christmas, right? Well, how much does it really have to do with Christmas?

I wanted to go with a top 10 list here by including Space Mutiny to round it all out, but I decided against it. It didn’t feel right that it would rank so highly when the only reason it’s on the list is because one of the supporting characters looks a bit like Santa Claus. So let’s get going with the Top 9 Best Christmas Riffs!

9) NESTOR THE LONG-EARED CHRISTMAS DONKEY (1977)

Rifftrax (2006)
Mike Nelson

Rankin/Bass, the people behind such holiday classics as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and A Year Without Santa Claus, go in a more biblical direction by telling the story of Nestor, a donkey born with exceptionally long-ears. These ears end up getting him in trouble and make him the laughing stock of the animal kingdom. After the death of his mother, he’s greeted by a cherub who gives him an important mission to find Joseph and Mary, as he will be instrumental in the survival of their baby.

– WTF Factor: There’s an awkwardness to the special based on the desperation to reinvent the wheel on Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The basic concept is incredibly similar, only it has none of the charm and fun that makes Rudolph such a holiday staple. There’s not much else to mention other than the truly bizarre ending. In the beginning, Nestor and his mother are taken care of by a really abusive donkey breeder named Olaf, who angrily throws them out into the cold, where Nestor’s mother dies. After Nestor’s journey to Bethlehem, the story ends with him returning home and all the animals – AND OLAF – are all happy to greet him, like they somehow heard news of Jesus being born over Twitter or something. 4

“All those of you who rubbed raw my soul with your bitter mocking laughter: THANK YOU! You truly are my friends!”

– Watchability: Despite being 25 minutes long, Nestor is rough to get through. Like I said, it’s Rudolph with none of the charm. Remember the beginning of Rudolph when the other reindeer make fun of him for his nose? Imagine that for about twenty minutes straight. Mix that with Nestor’s mother’s death and the whole thing is teeming with depression. Even worse is the soundtrack, made up of the same forgetful song played again and again with different lyrics. It isn’t even weird enough to be enjoyable. But hey, at least it’s short. 2

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Aesop Rock, “Nickle Plated Pockets” (2002): “The prickly outer shell’s genetic; it helps defense mode/ But it also helps to fuck up a couple of sacred friendships”

I’m a pretty private dude, I feel like. I’m good at making friends or whatever — I got jokes, son, get at me — but I spend a lot of time in my own head. When I run into trouble, my first thought is to handle it myself instead of asking for help. This goes from getting really bad news to just venting problems to friends, really. I’m not that guy, for whatever reason. There’s a gap there for me. I tend to think that it comes from moving every couple of years all through my formative years. I had to learn how to make friends real quickly, but I also had to learn how to forget them, you know? But maybe that isn’t it. I don’t know. I am careful who I let inside my circle, though, and the inner inner circle? That’s probably just me and the wall.

Aesop Rock, “1 of 4 (Thank You)” (2002):

This ain’t a burner for the whips (no it isn’t)
This ain’t even Aesop Rock fly earthworm demeanor (no it isn’t)
My name is Ian Mathias Bavitz and I was born in Long Island, New York, ’76, before Graham and after Chris… okay
In August of 2001 my seemingly splinter-proof brain bone scaffolding imploded
I kept it on the hush, but nearly tumbling to the cold hard concrete on near bodega trips for cigarettes and soda shook me to casper
Dizzy with a nausea chaser, motor sensory eraser
Agoraphobe tunnel vision, guilt, self loathing arrangement
Rose rapidly outta fog I’d never fished in

I got depressed after high school and didn’t realize it until I was dropping out of college four or five years later. I got caught flat-footed and had no idea how to process what I was feeling. I didn’t even really know what I was feeling. It felt like drowning in space, or suffocating in air. I usually call it a black cloud these days, because I like that image. My friends knew something was up, but not what. I remember one guy saying that there were two Davids. One told jokes. One was prickly. I didn’t get it at the time, but I appreciate being told that now.

I didn’t ask for help. I didn’t know I needed help, I think. I spent a lot of time alone. It was the new normal. You want to know how to be productive on your comics blog? Get depressed and don’t do anything but write, because writing is the only thing that doesn’t taste like ashes in your mouth. I’ve never been a therapy guy, but I should’ve let that prickly outer shell down more often than I did. I should let it down more often than I do.

I got put onto Aesop Rock in high school, back when I was backpacking and a hardcore def.jukie. I dug him and then I dig him now. I dig him partly because he put into words a mode that I struggle with. Back in the day, it was obfuscated beneath thick language and hard metaphors, thanks to his style. Now it’s this, from “Cycles to Gehenna” off Skelethon: “Here is how a great escape goes when you can’t take your dead friends’ names out your phone.”

Or this, the third verse of “Gopher Guts”:

I have been completely unable to maintain any semblance of relationship on any level
I have been a bastard to the people who have actively attempted to deliver me from peril
I have been acutely undeserving of the ear that listen up and lip that kissed me on the temple
I have been accustomed to a stubborn disposition that admits it wish its history disassembled
I have been a hypocrite in sermonizing tolerance while skimming for a ministry to pretzel
I have been unfairly resentful of those I wish that acted different when the bidding was essential
I have been a terrible communicator prone to isolation over sympathy for devils
I have been my own worse enemy since the very genesis of rebels

Aesop Rock has routinely and casually scooped my guts out since I first started listening to him in 2001 or so. He was the headliner of the only show I’ve been to, back when the Bazooka Tooth tour came through Athens. He’s a dude my favorite teacher described as writing tenth grade poetry, and he’s still a writer I’m massively jealous of. I study Aesop Rock.

It’s hard to put this into words that make human sense, but listen: I’ve greatly enjoyed the times that Aes has savaged me and my emotions. It helps put things into perspective, show me the options I have at my beck and call, and forces me to own up to my own emotions and shortcomings. It gives me a chance to see where I’ve been and where I’m going. It inspires awareness.

Aesop Rock has a way of laying complicated and horrifying emotions bare. There’s something so honest and straightforward about his style, even when it’s obscured by wordplay, that hits me right in the soul. It’s not a tearjerker, I’m not that guy, but if I was that guy? Sobbing in the shower at what I’ve made of my life. Instead, I just think it through and try to make it better next time.

Skelethon is his latest, and it’s a high watermark, both in terms of emotional content and sheer skill. He’s escalated his emotional onslaught at the same time that he’s refined and nearly perfected his style. He’s still got a chance at being Rap Game Heideggar, but his rhymes aren’t as dense and opaque as they used to be. The density is the same, but you don’t have to work as hard to divine his meaning. He used to be difficult. He’s still difficult. But now, there’s something about his delivery and approach that makes him feel easy.

Maybe it’s because I’ve grown up listening to his music, and this is the musical equivalent of being able to identify a director’s tropes and interests. I don’t know, but I feel like at one point in time, Aesop Rock was an axe. He would hit something and it would break and leave you a mess. His style was enjoyable but bulky and heavy. Now he’s a knife in the dark. He’ll sneak up on you with something that’ll rip your soul bare.

He sounded like an underground rapper, the mental image that people come up with when you say underground rapper, for years. Now, he sounds like something different. More confident and more effective.

Skelethon makes me feel good, even when it’s reminding me of past horrors. I’m not saying that Skelethon is his best album. It is definitely among his best. I don’t think anyone would argue with that. But I do think that if someone told me it was his very best, and I could tell they believed it, I couldn’t fault them at all. Skelethon is tremendous. I’m happy to own it.

This week I’m just flanked by Jody and Gaijin Dan, but that’s okay, since they both read a lot of stuff. Lot of great books came out this week, such as Action Comics, Avengers, Deadpool, Minute Men, Hawkeye and that Hellboy thing (so I hear).

Panels, away!

Action Comics #15
Grant Morrison, Brad Walker, Rags Morales, Sholly Fisch and Chris Sprouse

All-New X-Men #3
Brian Michael Bendis and Stuart Immonen

Animal Man #15 (Gavin’s pick)
Jeff Lemire, Steve Pugh and Timothy Green II

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I bought a Nintendo 3DS XL, Super Mario 3D Land, and Liberation Maiden. Since I’m me, I decided that two good games simply weren’t enough, so I asked Twitter to recommend me some games and googled around on my own for some recs. I eventually landed on Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor Overclocked. I like the SMT series, though I’m terrible at actually completing them, and having an RPG to poke at every once and a while is nice.

I don’t really read game news (it feels like homework), so here’s a list of things I knew about this game after I ordered it:
-It is in Tokyo.
-It stars teenagers.
-Shigenori Soejima probably didn’t design the characters.
-It is some type of RPG, possibly strategy.
-It is called Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner Overclocked.

So yeah, I went in this so cold that I didn’t even really know the title of the game, despite having paid cash money for it. Now that I’ve played it, I more or less know the title — Didn’t Something Obfuscate? — and the gimmick. I’m not sure how this is going to shake out in terms of longevity, but I’ve got a chance to talk about this game and RPGs in general now so I’m going to take it. I’m going to do a piece per “day” of the game. This one’s rough, since I just decided to do it in the middle of my playthrough, but I think you’ll get something out of it.

Heaven or Hell, let’s rock:

Crew: I stole this from Wikipedia:
Designer: Shinjiro Takada
Artist: Suzuhito Yasuda, Kazuma Kaneko
Composer: Takami Asano

The only name I’m familiar with off the top of my head is Kazuma Kaneko. He’s been a designer for ages, and he’s done a few things I liked a lot, like the art for Maken X and a few other SMT games. I’m not sure why there’s no director or producer listed, and I don’t have the case for the game nearby.

Setting Up: One thing that kind of drives me crazy about these games is how long it takes to get going. I loved Persona 4, but there was about two hours of set-up, exposition, and world-building before you could do anything on your own. I vastly prefer games (and movies, and books, and and and) that throw you right into the middle of it. Hook me first, and then you can show me where I’m at in excruciating detail.

Devil Survivor Overclocked doesn’t take that long, but it does have a pretty long getting-to-know-you period. Twenty, thirty minutes, maybe? You meet your core cast, get a long-running gameplay tutorial that isn’t actually complete, and get to set out on your own at the end.

There’s no big hook early on, nothing that really wowed me and made me feel like I have to play more of this game. A lot of talking — well-acted, more on that later — and explaining, really. I feel like that’s a missed opportunity, especially for a portable game. But I’m used to it, and I figured that was the score going in.

I like that the game is split up into days. Catherine used a similar gimmick, and playing “day BEFORE” is actually kind of cool. There’s a sense of foreboding there that I hope they can follow-up on. I like games that start with apocalypses, and while DSO already missed that chance, they might make up for it when everyone dies on day one.

Idiotsyncratic: My go-to name for main characters in RPGs has been “black,” all lowercase, pretty much since Final Fantasy 7, my first real RPG outside of Zelda and Startropics. I don’t even remember why, but I’ve stuck with it. I think DSO is the first time I’ve actually had to include a last name for one of these dudes, and I swear it took me five entire minutes. I thought about doing something in Japanese, but didn’t want to google the main character’s canonical name in case. I didn’t have a lot of characters to work with, so I just bit the bullet, fulfilled an unspoken promise from 1997, and named my dude “black power.”

This is me, I guess. Live and direct in 2012. Get at me.

Visuals: The majority of the game is basically a visual novel, at least at this point. It’s not too different in approach from Persona 3 Portable, I don’t think, though not quite as hi-res. The non-combat sections are very visual novel in approach, but the combat is straight out of the Game Boy Advance visual library. It’s not bad, exactly, but it’s a curious choice. Surely the 3DS can do better?

Official art up above from Yasuda Suzuhito. That’s Yuzu, nicknamed Yoohoo (awesome), though she doesn’t wear that in the game. The character design is going to take some getting used to. It’s plainer, or maybe less fashionable, than Soejima’s stuff. There are other problems, too. Yuzu is distractingly busty. I don’t mean that in the “wow look at those boobs, those are great, I just can’t stop looking at those hypnotic things” sort of just-hit-puberty-and-saw-a-lady-in-a-lowcut-dress sorta way either. I mean Yuzu’s breasts are distractingly large, even when they’re hidden behind a text box. It doesn’t feel like good character design so much as “I bet we could make a grip off a few hug pillows and boobie-armrest mousepads.” It feels like cheap fan service. I’m all for sexy characters, but this is like… nah, son. Try again, kid. I’m sure the porn is grotesque.

I din’t understand the weird cables that black power (center) and Atsuro (top left) have, either.

Story So Far: Right, RPGs have stories. In this case, black power’s cousin Naoya gives the main cast three Nintendo DSes, called COMPs in-game, and is generally a myserious jerk about a coming demonic apocalypse. Your crew gets attacked by monsters and you realize that the world is much larger than you thought it was before. Naoya, however, continues being cryptic and weird.

I was kinda disappointed to see the cast break down like pretty much every other RPG’s cast. Yuzu’s the healer, black power can do anything, and Atsuro, the third member of the main cast thus far, is kind of in-between. Yuzu has the only sane response to the catastrophe (freaking out and wanting to go home), but when you compare Yuzu to black power and Atsuro, she looks shrill and very kind of stereotypically anime schoolgirlish. “Kyaaaa, this is all so dumb and scary and math is hard” sorta thing.

Atsuro, of course, takes everything in stride, and black power does whatever I want him to do. It’s nice that you have a chance to actually make decisions and talk to people in the visual novel portions. I assume that’s going to lead to some type of payoff toward the end of the game, but the choices thus far tend to be “I don’t know what’s going on, explain it to me” or “I know exactly what is going on, but explain it to me anyway.”

The writing is okay. The dialogue feels pretty natural and cool, but tends to lean on exposition a whole lot more than I’d like. Characters repeat things you read in an email or that you just heard, presumably for emphasis. It’s strange, but not insurmountable. I can see bursts of really solid writing peeking through, and I figure that feeling will only increase as I play more.

Spoilerwatch: I wanted to find images to illustrate this post, and in doing so, I tripped over the fact that a character I met on 1st day is going to try to kill herself soon. Thanks, internet!

Right now: I’m engaged and interested, but cautiously so. I trust Atlus and the SMT franchise, but it’s a little rocky to begin with. We’ll see where it goes.

つづく: More talk about boobs, a tighter focus on what I’m doing and how I talk about it, some actual gameplay talk, and a look at how time keeps on slipping, slipping.

When they announced that Twinkies were going away, I didn’t really care that much because I tended to stay away from Twinkies when I grew up. The end of Bazooka Joe comic strips stung slightly, but I only really remembered paying attention to them in the days of pee-wee baseball. I stopped reading Nintendo Power shortly after the 100th issue in 1997, but when I heard that the publication was being canceled, I felt it. Sure, I haven’t read any of it in 15 years and I was more surprised that it lasted this long, but it still represents a chunk of my childhood and seeing it snuffed out takes a lot out of me.

Today at work, we got in the new issue. The final issue, featuring a cover made to look much like the one that came out in 1988.

Which reminds me, why hasn’t Nintendo ever brought back Wart? They use Shy-Guys and Birdo, but they never reintroduced King Wart. What’s with that? And where’s that purple alien guy from Super Mario Land?

Anyway, I had to pick up the final issue for old time’s sake. While they’re long gone, I did have those initial issues, like the creepy one with Simon Belmont on the cover holding Dracula’s decapitated head, garnering the complaints of many parents. I think I stopped when I came to terms with the fact that Nintendo Power is a propaganda piece from Nintendo. It was a stage of growing up. There were better magazines out there (though certainly not that waste of paper Gamepro) and other game systems worth reading about and the chance that somebody might completely lay into a terrible game.

And you know what? Back in the days of the NES, that stuff wasn’t necessary. Nintendo Power obviously had the better finger on the pulse of Nintendo news than the other magazines. Nintendo practically had a monopoly on video games worth playing until the Genesis arrived. Most importantly, it didn’t matter that it was propaganda and that they were talking up how great nearly every single game was. Back in those times, being a kid in the NES era, nearly every single game WAS worth playing. It was a simpler time where you were either stuck owning a game or you were renting for the weekend. Unless the game was confusing or flat out terrible, you’d play the everloving hell out of it. Years later, I found out that Ikari Warriors 2: Victory Road was a bad game. My seven-year-old self played that thing for weeks!

I haven’t had much time to really sit down and read the final issue, but the last few pages caught my eye. Early on, Nintendo Power had a regular comic interlude called Howard and Nester, based on Nintendo employee Howard Phillips. The series went on for a while, eventually Howard left and it became teenage know-it-all Nester’s show. After the failure of his Virtual Boy game, Nester fell into obscurity, making a special appearance every now and then.

Not counting the “GAME OVER” final-final page, this is how Nintendo Power volume 285 ends. Not with Howard and Nester, but Nester and Maxwell, showing off how many years have passed since that clay Super Mario Brothers 2 cover from back in the day.

The last thing I noticed in that final panel was Howard’s bowtie in the center. Damn. :frown:

To cheer myself up, here’s a completely metal cover of the Ikaris Warriors 2: Victory Road main theme by Ryan8bit that I discovered many years ago.

I don’t know about you, but this makes me want to surf on a tank while on my way to fight the devil.

I’m trying to write about the panel layout in a comic that comes out this week and what it means. More specifically, I’m mulling over the best way to discuss the layouts, rather than being stumped or blocked. That sort of thing isn’t my strength, mainly because I don’t have the vocabulary for it. It’s a level of nitty-gritty that I only have a passing familiarity with. I can’t even fake it at a high enough level to convince people, you know?

I read most of my comics on iPad at this point. It’s cool, because if you press power and the button at the same time, it’ll save a screenshot. I can then dropbox that screenshot to my laptop, where I forget about it for a few months. I’ll trip over it later, always in the middle of trying to hook up images for paying work, and wonder why I clipped it. Anyway, here’s a page from Akira Toriyama’s Dr Slump, specifically volume nine.

Toriyama gets chewed up a lot because of the excesses of Dragon Ball Z‘s tv series, but the guy is a pretty incredible cartoonist. He can do realistic, he can do cartoony, and he can do stuff like this, where he shatters the fourth wall in the pursuit of telling a story. Arale (glasses girl) and Gatchan (weird pre-verbal flying baby thing) are hanging onto the gutters and above some of the art.

Comics have been breaking panel borders for years. Probably one hundred of them, if my memories of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comics are true. Spider-Man swings from one panel to another, Batman throws a Batarang through the gutters, and a Chris Ware protagonist… I dunno, cries and the tears land in the tier (“tear” ha ha) below him and collect in a puddle. You know what I’m talking about. Breaking panel borders isn’t that ground-breaking.

But this bit from Slump really caught my eye. It’s a cute joke in a dumb gag manga for children, yes, buuuuuuut… it’s also a great magic trick.

In the top panel, Arale and Gatchan are behind Senbei Norimaki. They’re facing us and speaking directly to us, right? So if that panel is panel 1, their kicking legs take up panel 2, then panels 3 and 4 are directly below that. Arale and Gatchan are facing away from us while Senbei runs directly at us. The camera’s POV has switched around.

Panels 5 and 6 to the left of those panels are where it gets really good, assuming you’re into this stuff. The camera swings back around as Senbei looks back at Arale & Gatchan & us. They’re on an angle now, instead of a flat bar, because the camera isn’t head-on any more.

I like how the dumb joke gives the spread a sense of place, too. We’re rotating around the same area, which I feel like does a better job of world-building than Toriyama’s generally randomized landscapes.

(also of note: the different ways Toriyama draws running. Speedo Sonic the Hedgehog spirals vs a pose… the spirals are rushing, right, while the pose is just “running normally”? I think.)

I also clipped this page from Dragon Ball. I think it’s from volume one.

Toriyama’s panel-to-panel storytelling is immaculate as ever (the rock-scissors-paper sequence in particular, check out Goku’s arms and how his body turns), but the bit I want to point out is the bump at the top of page 131. It’s another irrelevant detail, but it’s cool, because now you realize Goku hit the guy SUPER hard, right? Toriyama doesn’t call a lot of attention to it. It’s just another cute joke. But it really, really works. It’s Looney Tunes-style comedy. It’s fun.

(This was definitely a jan-ken-pon-ken joke in the original Japanese, right?)

Here’s three pages from Mike Mignola’s Hellboy in Hell. It ships this week. You’ll have to visit CBR for the rest of the preview. Page 3 has a little of what I’m trying to figure out, that tall red panel transitioning to tall black to tiny grey. I realize what I’m talking about is kind of vague, but I’m really interested in how you’re supposed to read this comic. The effect Mignola is going for. I really want to figure this out, which is a pretty good place to start from when writing about comics, I think.

But even talking about Slump and looking at this preview again has sparked further thoughts. I’m right that Mignola uses gutters in interesting ways, but I was wrong in thinking of it in terms of gutters alone. It’s about the pacing he creates by placing his gutters. The inset panels, the bit where Hellboy crumbles into dust… Mignola is giving his comic a lot of room to breathe, isn’t he? What’s that all about? Is it about atmosphere? Pacing? Something else? All of the above?

I’m going to figure it out. How does “The Anatomy of a Hellboy Comic” sound? Does that sound like something you’d like to read, possibly later this week????

(Clem Robins’s lettering is super good in this, isn’t it? I don’t know what he’s doing different, but it really caught my eye, especially that “AHHHHHH”. Dave Stewart’s colors are as good as ever, too.)