One of the nicest things about the complicated mess that is the production of mainstream comics is watching creative teams grow comfortable with each other and up their game. Frank Miller and Klaus Janson’s duties evolved over the course of their classic run on Daredevil, Walt Simonson worked with Sal Buscema on a lot of his Thor. Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson. Garth Ennis and Goran Parlov. Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz. Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso and Trish Mulvihill. Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev. Geoff Johns and Doug Mahnke. Joe Kelly and Doug Mahnke. Garth Ennis and John McCrea.

You know what I’m talking about–you can tell when people are really in sync and just black out on a comic. The other day, Marjorie Liu said something that got me really excited to see a comic. “The last issue of X-23 is going to be entirely silent, thanks to @philnoto’s magnificent visual storytelling skills.” Consider my interest piqued.

Noto, of course, barely needs any introduction at all. Not if you pay attention to ill artists. He’s the guy who drew these shots of Sharon Carter, X-23 & Jubilee, Luke Cage & Storm, the best Robin, this smile, Domino, and Black Widow. His style is super clean, and if you aren’t a fan, you need to get like the rest of us who know from good.

Liu, on the other hand, has quietly turned into one of Marvel’s best weapons. She turned X-23 into a character worth checking in on, and she did her best work on that book while working with Phil Noto and Sana Takeda. For her to feel comfortable enough with Noto to make the big finale of a series she’s guided from inception to execution a silent issue — something that I’ve rarely seen done well — is great. That makes me want that comic.

That’s exciting, and it’s exciting in a way that I’m rarely experiencing with cape comics these days. The writer/artist relationship is one of those things I associate with cape comics above all, mainly due to their assembly line nature. Sometimes it doesn’t work out. Sometimes it crashes and burns to an absolutely absurd extent. And sometimes, things like this happen. It’s one of the most pleasurable things about reading cape comics.

Yeah, I don’t know what happened to that title up there. Sorry. I’ll try harder next time.

I just remembered that Brandon Graham’s King City drops in about a month. 03/20! Preorders right now are sitting at around ten bucks for 400+ pages of one of my favorite comics. It’s a steal at twice the price. edit: King City is out in brick & mortar stores as of 03/07!

If you don’t know what King City is… man. I wrote a lot about it. Here’s twelve posts, here’s another post, one mo’ gin, and one mo’ one mo’ gin.

That’s a lot of words spilled over one book. I’m trying to think of a better way to sell you on this book…

If you like any or all of the below:
-Puns
-Jokes
-Fights
-Cats
-Cleverness
-Sharp dialogue
-Sex
-A realistic approach to relationships
-Fantasy
-Romance
-Butts
-Kickflips
-Knives
-Drugs
-Sex
-A drugknife you can have sex with

Then King City is probably for you. If you don’t like any of those, then you should read King City anyway, because it will make you like them.

Seriously though, ten bucks. Four hundred and some pages of one of the freshest books to hit comics in years. I don’t wanna overhype it, but it’s really good, y’all.

-You own several comics, movies, and compact discs. You find yourself quickly running out of space, so you decide to box up all that stuff and switch to digital.

-Do you have to re-buy these works in a digital format or should you be allowed to download them for free?

-You’re not going to share your downloads. They’re strictly for your use, because you are a lazybones and/or out of space.

-You’re allowed to have a copy of your media for personal use. Does downloading an mp3 or cbr count as a copy? If you get a copy created by someone else, since creating your own backups can be time consuming, is that still valid?

-What if what you want a copy of isn’t available commercially? If the scan is the only source of it, barring back-issue bins? What then?

-Is this piracy? I feel like it probably definitely is, but it’s a type of piracy that I’m okay with.

-What are you buying when you buy media? Are you buying the Blu-ray disc with Redline or are you buying the experience of watching Redline?

-I would argue the latter. I don’t care about a disc or floppy. I care about reading a story or watching a movie. The comics or movie industry would argue differently, of course, and the law is on their side.

-My gut feeling is that it’s piracy, but it’s not the type of piracy I’d get mad at someone for. Yes, it’s wrong, but I think it’s the type of piracy that’s… I hesitate to say reasonable, but that’s probably the exact word I mean. For me, the delivery system doesn’t matter much at all, unless I’m buying something specifically for that delivery system, like an Absolute edition or tricked out special edition. Does that make sense? I’m not buying anything physical. (Though that does raise questions about medium vs message, but let’s table that for now.) Does that change the conversation at all?

-Is buying something secondhand more legitimate than downloading something you own? In both cases, the original rights holders don’t get paid for the new twist, but were paid for the original purchase. There’s a difference in legal legitimacy here, obviously, but if your piracy position is all about the creator being paid, then they feel like they’re both in violation (which is why video games companies have been going hard on the used games market and punishing consumers for buying used over the past three or so years).

-Should you be able to pirate something you have already paid for? I’ve definitely bought Nas’s Illmatic several times now across several formats. Tape, CD, MP3, and then vinyl. I wanted to listen to one of my favorite albums on whatever device I had handy at that point in my life (and the ritual of listening to one of the best albums of all time on vinyl was irresistible), and the purchases were several years apart. At the same time, I have several bootleg versions of Illmatic that I didn’t pay for. I’ve deleted a lot of them since, but at the peak, I had two different instrumental versions (one was legit, the other a recreation I believe), a piano instrumentals version, an Al Green mash-up, a version with a few demos from the original sessions or something, a live version, and another version where other rappers recreated the songs. Am I out of line? Where do my rights stop, as “dude who bought the album?”

What’re your feelings on this one specific aspect of the piracy debate? Once you buy it, do you have a license to more of it, or should you have to pay? Legally, I think the answer is clear, but… morally, ethically, how bad do you need to feel about yourself if you bootleg Amazing Spider-Man 121 because you’re too lazy to dig Spider-Man: Death of the Stacys out of storage?

Couple notes for the comments because I hate how people use any post about piracy as a chance to talk about how piracy is totally, 100%, a-okay: piracy is not a revolutionary act in any way, shape or form. You aren’t fighting the power. You’re listening to stuff for free. Seriously, I don’t care. You should pay a fair price for the stuff you enjoy. You shouldn’t pirate books you hate just so you can hate them. Piracy can help, but it can also hurt. It’s obvious that the person who created the work should get to decide how it’s used. People pirate because they want something for free more than they want to kick somebody else some cash. Something something it’s illegal so go kill yourself for pirating you filthy pirate something. Blah blah information wants to be free blah. Use common sense. Use protection. Don’t do drugs. Piracy funds terrorism and therefore pirates should be drawn and quartered. Never trust a big butt and a smile.

Please don’t be annoying in the comments, is all I’m asking.

I don’t know anything about Yuki Kodama’s (shoujo?) manga Sakamichi no Apollon, but Crunchyroll recently posted an interesting bit of news about it. It’s being turned into an anime. Looks like the English title might be “Kids on the Slope.”

Key words: director Shinichiro Watanabe, music production by Yoko Kanno, set in Japan during the late ’60s, features jazz in a major way.

So yeah, to say that I’m “cautiously optimistic” would be underselling my feelings on this show. I want it like I haven’t wanted a TV show since Michiko e Hatchin, which I’m still missing because the anime industry doesn’t cater to me like it should, and I publicly offered to murder David “Second David” Uzumeri if that’ll help someone license and broadcast it online over here.

Help me help you, anime. (Sorry, David, but I’m sure you understand.)

Here’s a gag from Sergio Aragonés Funnies 6 that made me laugh and laugh:

Aragonés may well be my favorite funnyman in comics. He can do shaggy dog jokes, long and funny stories, and then just sorta basic high concept-y stuff like this. I like how mean this gag is, man. There’s not really any jokes in it until the very last panel, just cold police brutality, and then wham, tears in my eyes. I read it right before bed and late at night, so maybe that was a factor, but c’mon–this is funny.

I was thinking the other day about how someone should put together a nice archival collection of this guy’s work, since he’s been in the biz for decades and has remained funny throughout. Turns out MAD’s Greatest Artists: Sergio Aragones: Five Decades of His Finest Works came out in 2010. 272 pages worth of Sergio. Feels like a must-buy, considering how much I enjoy his jokes.

I grew up on or around Air Force bases. Shepherd, Langley, and most of all, Robins AFB. A grip of my family members served, and I gave some real thought to enlisting while I was in high school. A side effect of being surrounded by the USAF is that I love airplanes. I built a bunch of models as a kid. The SR-71 Blackbird was my favorite, probably because that was where the X-Men and the Air Force venn diagrams intersected, but I built bombers, fighters, whatever I could find. I actually built an F-14 model late last year when I got a model kit as a gift from a client. It was weird, exercising those muscles again, but sorta comforting, too. I remember killing like five hours on a lazy Saturday with the TV off, music on, and laser-focused on my task.

I like the stories surrounding planes, too. I remember really liking the story of the Tuskegee Airmen. It’s a great story, kinda the flipside of the Tuskegee Experiments, but it’s inspirational. It’s “The sky’s the limit” translated to real life. They were just one of several inspirational black figures people pointed out to me, from high level cats like Martin and Malcolm to less famous people like Ben Carson. I didn’t learn any of this in school, I don’t think. It came from family and church more than anything. It was a tonic. George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and was too honorable to lie about it, but Ben Carson separated conjoined twins.

Red Tails, produced by George Lucas, drops 01/20. It’s about the Tuskegee Airmen, and despite my love of the subject matter, I was a little skeptical. I don’t hate George Lucas (I definitely like him better than modern-era Spielberg, for whatever that’s worth), so him producing wasn’t really a downside. Cuba Gooding Jr and Terrence Howard, two of my least favorite actors. Gooding has a history of starring in movies that I loathe (save for American Gangster, where he played Nicky Barnes to the hilt) and Howard is… that dude grates man, I couldn’t even tell you. There’s just something about that guy.

They were enough for me to feel some kinda way about Red Tails. My thinking was that if they put these dudes into the flick, then the rest of it was somehow compromised or tainted. I don’t know that I had any defensible train of thought about it, to be perfectly frank, just a gut feeling. What turned me around was George Lucas on the Daily Show.

While some of what he says is bunk (by what metric is Red Tails the first black anything? Wouldn’t Three the Hard Way count for something? At the very least, Bad Boys did gangbusters), he’s got a lot of interesting things going on. He talks about how studios wouldn’t fund it, and how he’s been trying to get it made for the past twenty-some years.

What got me were two things. First: he financed the movie himself. He believed in it enough to chip in more money than I will ever make in my entire life to get it done. Second: he said that “[t]his is not a movie about victims. This is a movie about heroes.” Which is basically exactly the approach I want to see. I don’t need more stories about how terrible racism is. I know how bad it was. The story of blacks and racism and being held back is, no joke, the one story I have heard the most over the course of my entire life. It is old.

The fact that Lucas and them approached this movie like an action film first, and Rosewood sixteenth or lower, goes real far with me. So I’m probably going to get over my big crybaby complaints about a couple of actors and check it out on opening weekend. The approach feels true, and Lucas says he has sequels planned, and I’d kinda like to see them. I doubt if it’ll take off the way I’d like it to, but I wouldn’t mind owning a gang of movies of black dudes in amazing mid-air dogfights. It’s one of those things I’ve imagined since I was a kid. It’ll be nice to see them realized.

I liked Spike Lee’s Miracle At St. Anna enough to buy the Blu-ray, despite it being a little overlong. How often do you see black people in actual roles in World War II pictures? Too rarely. I’m willing to support efforts like this, because they’re what I want to see more of. Black director, black screenwriter, majority black cast… I like this.

I just hope it’s good. The trailer is pretty straight, and the cast actually has a gang of people whose work I enjoy (Bryan Cranston, Method Man, Andre Royo, couple others). Fingers crossed, right?

Chris Ryall revealed the first preview for Darwyn Cooke’s 2012 adaptation of Richard Starker’s The Score the other day. As expected, it’s a great image, well in line with the other novels Cooke has done thus far. The Score is a good novel. Not my favorite–if I had to rank them, it’d probably go 1) The Hunter 2) The Outfit and 3) Butcher’s Moon–but it definitely rates. The hook alone makes it worth reading, really. “Parker gets a posse up and robs an entire town. And then things start exploding.

This is a book with lots of Alan Grofield, too. Grofield is easily the best supporting character in these novels. He’s a thespian slash thief, and each of his interests informs the other. He pulls heists to keep his theater going, and he tends to think of his jobs as being excerpts from exciting films. He’s suave, but he’s all about his business. He’s not unlike Lupin III or Gambit in certain ways, to be honest, which is probably part of the attraction. He really enjoys acting and stealing, and that makes him an incredibly enjoyable character to read. There’s this great bit in Butcher’s Moon where he takes up with this librarian who thinks she’s too big for the town she’s in that’s just wonderful, a sublime mix of Grofield being able to spot a type, adjust to that type, and then lose interest as soon as he gets focused on the actual job at hand. He’s a romantic, but he knows how and when to turn it off.

Here’s a couple of bits from that chapter in Butcher’s Moon:

“Very nice library you have here,” Grofield said.

The girl walking through the stacks ahead of him turned her head to twinkle over her shoulder in his direction. “Well, thank you,” she said, as though he’d told her she had good legs, which she had.

They went through a section of reading tables, all unoccupied. “You don’t seem to get much of a business,” he said. She gave a dramatic sigh and an elaborate shrug. “I suppose it’s all you can expect from a town like this,” she said.

Oh ho, thought Grofield, one of those. Self-image: a rose growing on a dungheap. A rose worth plucking? “What other attractions are there in a town like this?” he asked.

“Hardly anything. Here we are.” A small alcove held a battered microfilm reader on a table, with a wooden chair in front of it. Smiling at it, Grofield said, “Elegant. Very nice.”

She smiled broadly in appreciation, and he knew she knew they were artistic soulmates. “You should see the room with the LPs,” she said.

“Should I?”

“It’s ghastly.”

He looked at her, unsure for just a second, but her expression told him she hadn’t after all been suggesting a quiet corner in which they could bump about together. The idea, in fact, hadn’t occurred to her; she was really a very simple straightforward girl, appropriate to the town and the library.

The girl was on the lookout for him, and came tripping out from behind the main desk as he was going by. She gave violent hand signals to attract his attention, and when he stopped she hurried over and whispered, “It turns out I’m free tonight after all.”

She’d broken her date; headache, no doubt. Feeling vaguely sorry for the young man, and both irritated and guilty toward the girl, Grofield said, “That’s wonderful.”

It was Tucker who got me to finally pick up Butcher’s Moon. I read something like thirteen Parker novels in a shot a couple years ago, so I’d been on a bit of a break, but his review got me back on the horse. I had no idea that Slayground got a sequel, and I love that book. It was my #3 before I read Butcher’s Moon.

University of Chicago Press is continuing their Richard Stark reprint series with three Grofield novels in April. In order: The Damsel, The Dame, and The Blackbird. I’m looking forward to reading them.

Someone on Twitter, I forget who (sorry), posted a link to “Shit White Girls Say… to Black Girls,”, and this video had me laughing hard at work.

With a few exceptions (“Jews were slaves, too” & “My grandma hates collards” mainly, ’cause what kind of monster hates greens?), I’ve heard all of this, despite not being a black girl. This is one of those “So funny it’s true!” videos, and its jokes have plenty of bite. I keep my hair super short in part because some white people LOVE to touch black hair, like it’s catnip or magical or something. (It isn’t. It’s just black. And mine.) If I say no, you can’t touch my hair, then that’s… I don’t even know, playing hard to get? “Your mouth says no but your hair says YES YES YES TOUCH ME TOUCH ME?” And I mean, I’m a grown man with a good aight job who’s self-sufficient, and people still pull that. I had a mohawk for a couple months in late 2011 (word to travis bickle) and it still happened. C’mon, son. It’s always so awkward, too, because nobody means nothing by it but it’s enraging and then you’re taking things too seriously and you gotta loosen up, your hair’s cute, i just wanna touch it and–

Don’t even get me started on afro-fetishism (it’s not that cool of a hairstyle, y’all, especially after you put your hands in it) or calling black folks some variety of chocolate or other brown foods as a romantic thing. Really? Are you twelve?

This chick saying “______ is soooo ghetto” and “Hollerrrrr” had me in stitches. It’s a dead on impersonation, and the ghetto one is a particular pet peeve of mine. It’s pretty screwed up, if you think about how that word is used and the perception of who is in the ghetto.

I am totally bummed out over some real life drama right now, BUT I wanted to say that if 1) you like the site and 2) are planning to shop at Amazon for Black Friday (or whenever) then you could do us a solid by clicking any of the links in this post before adding stuff to your cart. We get referral money if you buy something after visiting Amazon from one of our links. You don’t have to buy what we link, either, just visiting and buying your own ish after is enough.

So, on that note, here’s two thousand words on stuff that I like that’s probably worth buying if you like things like I like things:

–Do you want music? I’ve actually been striking out on music lately. People I like drop mediocre albums (Pusha T) or albums that don’t grab me (Yelawolf). That new Busta Rhymes & Chris Brown song starts off super tight before descending into garbage. (Andre 3000: “Took a shower, kinda sour ’cause my favorite group ain’t comin with it/ but I’m with ya ’cause you probably goin’ through it, anyway/ but anyhow, when in doubt, went on out and bought it/ ’cause I thought it would be jamming/ but examine all the flawsky-wasky”) But anyway: I just discovered Lianne La Havas thanks to a tip from a friend, and Lost & Found is pretty good. I like her video for “No Room For Doubt”. Here’s her website, which has a link to a free EP. Aesop Rock, DJ Big Wiz, and Rob Sonic are Hail Mary Mallon, and their Are You Gonna Eat That? is pretty good. It sounds like exactly what you’d expect them to produce, but in a good way. Aes has really grown as an emcee, too, from nice to even nicer. (I’ve been listening to these cats since high school. Cripes.) Special shoutout to “Grubstake” for being about an eatery that is basically a block and a half from my crib (if you’re in SF, hit it up. They’ve got meat for days) and also being an ill song. I love that trading verses thing pretty much every time I hear it. This bit especially: “Traded the jalopy for a nickel bag of fake bud/ Wait, what?/ Fake bud!/ Wait, fuck!/ Wake up!/ 9:30, back home, no chick, sober/ Sober?/ Sober./ No shirt?/ Stouffer’s.” Little Dragon’s Ritual Union is by Little Dragon, and therefore good. Here’s the title track, which sounds sort of like a sway looks when that rising… organ? Is that it? Whatever that instrument is. You’ll know it when you hear it. Another video: Brush the Heat.

I like Charlotte Gainsbourg a lot, and her Terrible Angels EP is pretty good. Dig the video for the title track. Have I written about this before? I have. “Terrible Angels” is the song that plays at the dance party just before the end of the world kicks off. When the timer hits 3:15, the bombs drop and the ether begins to release.

Tabi Bonney’s The Summer Years is a fun album produced entirely by Ski Beatz. There’s a few great features from Nicole Wray, too. Remember her? “All In My Grill”? “Make It Hot”? I’d buy a new Missy Elliott album, too. Rappers don’t dance enough any more. All they do is this. Anyway, here’s a video off that Summer Years that makes roller skates look real cool and features all my favorite lady hairstyles. This one features parachutes.

That video actually puts me in mind of Pac Div’s ill song “Fallin'” and their similarly-themed video. That takes me to “Anti-Freeze”, which has a real hard beat. “Peep a nigga’s footwear, now I’m all Italy/ Ricky D flashy nigga, on-point actually, nigga.” That takes me to “Posted”, which is like West Coast crunk, I don’t even know. It sounds like some ill lo-fi Lil Jon joint, really. It’s off The Div, which just dropped a couple weeks ago. It’s ill. Like that video, too. “Who the FUCK are you on the phone with?” That last chick is so bout it.

Finally, Danny Brown and Black Milk’s Black And Brown album (EP?) is pretty solid, but feels real short. I mean, it’s just over twenty minutes long. I dig it, though, and “LOL” goes super hard. “Niggas sent the text, said ‘it’s light on the scale’/ I text back, ‘LOL'”. “If it ain’t about money, TTYL.” Wild ignorant, foul, and funny. I guess that’s Danny in a nutshell, though. “LOL” is the “Bruiser Brigade” of Black and Brown, I figure. Super hot, but real ugly if you actually listen to the lyrics. The #1 rapper you could never play for your mother. (psyche, that’s DMX)

–Are you looking for book books? Or maybe Kindle books? I’m all Kindle at this point, personally. I bought what is now apparently called a Kindle Keyboard at the top of this year and I don’t regret it a bit. It’s light, like a wallet, and super-easy to use. It’s nice to have a dedicated ebook thing, instead of a multipurpose heavy device like an iPad (which I also enjoy, though for different reasons). Anyway, Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s All You Need Is Kill was a treat. It sort of spins a video game concept (what if you had infinite lives, like in a video game, but were conscious of that fact?) into a really interesting meditation on war and life and the best ways to kill aliens. The lives thing is executed much better than you’d expect just hearing a summary. Free excerpt over here. (Great title on that book, too.) I haven’t started it yet, but Ryu Mitsuse’s Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights is another book with a great title and hook. I liked the sample I read, I just need to wrap a couple books up first.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t recommend Richard Stark’s stuff. You know the drill already probably, but I’ve read The Hunter probably half a dozen times, and The Outfit has my favorite scene or bit of writing or whatever in any book ever. Here:

The receptionist knew that no one was supposed to come behind the desk. If anyone tried to without permission, she was to push the button on the floor under her desk. But this time she didn’t even think of the button. She reached, instead, for the package. Suddenly, the mailman grabbed her wrist, yanked her from the chair, and hurled her into a corner. She landed heavily on her side, knocking her head against the wall. When she looked up dazed, the mailman had an automatic trained on her. “Can you scream louder than this gun?” he said in a low voice.

She stared at the gun. She couldn’t have screamed if she’d wanted to. She couldn’t even breathe.

The outer door opened and the four men came in, two carrying shotguns, and two machine guns. The girl couldn’t believe it, it was like something in the movies. Gangsters carried machine guns back in 1930. There was no such thing as a machine gun in real life. Machine guns and Walt Disney mice, all make-believe.

The mailman put his gun away under his coat, and removed the mailbag from his shoulder. He took cord from the mail sack and tied the receptionist’s hands and feet. She gaped at him unbelievingly as he tightened the knots. They were in the wrong office, she thought. It might be a television show shooting scenes on location, they must have wanted the office next door and these men had come into the wrong place. It must be a mistake.

The mailman gagged her with a spare handkerchief as one of the other men brought the two musical instrument cases and two briefcases in from the outside hall. The mailman took the briefcases. The men with the machine guns led the way. They all walked down the inner hall and stopped at the door next to the book-keeping room. The mailman opened the door, and all five of them boiled into the room.

This was the room where the alarm buzzer would have rung if the receptionist had remembered to ring it. Four men in brown uniforms wearing pistols and Sam Browne belts, were sitting at a table playing poker. They jumped up when the door burst open, then they all froze. They believed in machine guns.

“They believed in machine guns.” If I could be half as good as that at some point, I could die happy. “Machine guns and Walt Disney mice, all make-believe.”

Got a few more on my list here… Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) is great, but you knew that already. Duane Swierczynski’s Fun and Games has a really slow start, but once it starts burning, it explodes like a forest fire. James Sallis’s Drive is a speedy read, and different enough from the movie to be worthwhile all on its own. I wrote about the movie last month.

Colson Whitehead’s Zone One: A Novel is pretty good, though a slow burner. He spends a lot of time building up the world, but that time is split with origin stories (for lack of a better phrase), anecdotes, and some really great imagery. I’m a third into it, I think? And thus far the main line in the book has all taken place in one scene. Very interesting way of writing, but I’m digging it. Last one is David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero, which Tucker Stone recommended to me. I read the first couple chapters in an airport, and they about knocked me off my feet. It’s very lyrical in style, and puts me in mind of my time in high school studying Everyone’s Favorite Fascist Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, though much less opaque than that work. It’s sort of hard to explain, but it struck me as being very good and extremely enthralling. Hypnosis in text form. Snake-charming from a typewriter.

Oh yeah, speaking of Tucker– his review of Richard Stark’s Butcher’s Moon made me want to read that book even more. I read the first thirteen Parker novels over the course of a few months and then took a break. Butcher’s Moon sounds like a good comeback novel.

–Thinking about buying video games? The story in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is dumb as rocks, but the Spec Ops and multiplayer is just as fun as ever. People like that Batman: Arkham City. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception was a pretty fun ride, with some pretty impressive visuals and action set-pieces. I’ve been thinking a lot about moments in gameplay, those scenes where you aren’t in full control but still a part of the action? Uncharted may well be the best in the business at those. More on that later, maybe. I’m still digesting.

I play an absurd amount of NBA 2K12. I usually play a certain friend online after work each day. I’m up 41 to his 39, but he’s beating me on points, 4774 to 4711. If you figure each game takes 25 minutes (including time-outs, delays, free throws, etc), then… what is that, like thirty-three hours of that game? At the least? That isn’t including my time on MyPlayer and all that. I’m a fan. I worked on an early rev of Saint’s Row: The Third, but I’d love to play the full game. Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 is a worthy update to a solid game. I like it a lot better, actually. Being able to spectate online adds a lot. Metal Gear Solid HD Collection is a must-have, as far as I’m concerned. Metal Gear is the best franchise.

Also, yo, you can get a PS3 for like two hundred bucks tomorrow. Black Friday 2011 Bundle: LittleBigPlanet 2 Special Edition and Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One If you do that, then, I dunno, I owe you a drink or something.

So I’m sure you have heard about some miraculous snowstorm that happened the other day in the early month of October. My first reaction to that being, “Hey, snow! Neat!” Especially since it got me off work Saturday. Unfortunately, the whole thing turned out to be this huge ordeal. When Hurricane Irene hit me a few months ago, it wasn’t too bad. It rained like crazy for a day, the power eventually cut out and the next day everything was so sunny that the streets weren’t even wet. You wouldn’t have even known a hurricane had happened if it wasn’t for the tiny branches spread all over the pavement. I got my power back in a day and my cable back in another.

The damage of the snowstorm was at least thrice as severe. Fun fact: leaves on a tree are like tiny little catcher’s mitts. When it snows in the fall, those trees get weighed down like nobody’s business. I drove a little during the storm and every other tree was leaning over, ready to snap at any given moment. Crazy dangerous. It didn’t take long for me to lose power, as well as most of the area. Huge branches and even entire trees simply tore apart and killed countless wires. Even the lack of electricity wasn’t that bad. It was the post-storm wreckage. It seemed nearly every road was blocked off in some way. Doing something as simple as going to work meant having to go through an hour-long maze of finding a path to the end.

Every cloud has a silver lining, though. With all the darkness and live, dangling cables everywhere, those little toilet paper-tossing bastards didn’t do shit on Halloween Eve. Sadly, there was very little in trick or treating too. I myself went from Saturday to Wednesday without power or heat, which is maddening, but that’s all over.

Because of that little misadventure, I was forced to skip out on This Week in Panels and Brave New World; Bold New Direction. Guess I’ll just have to lump them together with this coming week’s stuff, so stay tuned for that.

Since I had nothing much to do on my day off, I dropped my phone off at work to be charged and hit up Real Steel, which I had been meaning to do for a while. It’s a really fun movie, albeit one of the most derivative ones I’ve ever seen. The final battle is like a checklist of references from the different Rocky movies with the robot champ Zeus being like Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang and Ivan Drago rolled into one. Still, it’s like a big wrestling show with really good CGI. It tells a story that allows cool fights to happen and even if it’s all been done, it’s a good time that’ll get you cheering the heroes on. It’s worth checking out.

Despite the limitations, I was still able to get my Halloween groove going on Monday.

Yeah… that nametag probably would have looked better had I had access to a printer, but it is what it is.

I’m back, though. And thank God. After all, I don’t want to miss tomorrow’s Beavis and Butt-head.