Guest article series by Gabriel “TheJoker138″ Coleman.

Let’s get right into it again, because this is a short, boring episode where almost nothing of import happens. First off, there’s totally an on-screen title card again, that is once again in a totally different style than all of them before it, in a different spot than previous ones (they were all at the beginning, this is after the opening teaser) and is wrong:

I showed you the last one cause I thought it was weird. I’m showing you this one because it’s the most interesting thing in the whole episode.

Anyway, we start off with Taja in the marketplace, buying some stuff when she sees a man that she believes to be her father. She follows him into an alley and they embrace, but a portal to Outworld opens behind him and he drags her through. On the other side, her father vanishes and Not Jade is there waiting for them. Shang enters just as Taja and Not Jade are about to get into a scuffle and stops it from happening. His plan is to use Taja as bait to lure Kung Lao in and then… well, you know what he wants to do after that.

Taja, always the skeptic, still doesn’t even believe Outworld exists, which at this point is more stupid and stubborn than anything with all they’ve seen and faced. She’ll believe in guys made of oil, but not alternate dimensions that one of her best friends says he’s been to. She also doesn’t believe that it was really her father, just some trick that Shang was playing. In a twist, it appears it wasn’t just him morphing and that her father really is in the mines as a prisoner. Taja escapes from Not Jade’s grasp and runs off to try and find him. Shang tells another prisoner who is working for him to go get her and as long as he doesn’t kill her, he can do whatever he likes when he catches up.

The next morning at the training post, Kung Lao wakes up and joins Siro in the kitchen. As they’re bickering with one another about tea, they hear a strange sound outside and go to investigate. It’s a vision of Taja speaking in Shang Tsung’s voice, telling them that she’s being held prisoner and giving them a location that a portal will open that night. They’re told if they want to see her alive again, it would be wise of Kung to go through said portal.

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Some of you longtime readers might remember that a couple years ago, me and some guys experimented with iRiffs, a part of the Rifftrax site where any idiot with time and a microphone can record his own Mystery Science Theater 3000 garbage and put it online. Our first couple attempts were plagued with sound issues, mostly on my part, but we moved onto a project I practically begged the others for: Mortal Kombat: The Journey Begins. Journey Begins was an animated movie released to hype up the theatrical release of Mortal Kombat. Anyone who has ever seen it can tell you that it’s ripe with ridiculousness and begs to be made fun of. So we did just that.

We recorded our lines and everything, but things fell to the wayside and a lot of it was forgotten about. Considering Nick Zachariasen, also known as ManiacClown, had little to do after Ultimate Edit finished up and the new Mortal Kombat game was on the horizon, it made sense to get back to work on it. He worked his ass off on it and here it is. It’s me, Nick and James Howard, who rules the roost with his delivery. My quality has gone from outright terrible to plain crappy, so that’s a slight step up.

Rather than show you a preview and ask you to purchase it, I thought it would be better to just give you the whole shebang, synced up and ready to go. So here you go. The entire iRiff of Journey Begins for free. Enjoy.

There is an iRiff page for the mp3 file, so if you feel the need to pay a dollar for it, I won’t hold it against you.

(The last couple seconds repeat a few times. No idea what that’s about)

(Special thanks to Fletcher “Syrg” Arnett for his assistance)

With the new Mortal Kombat game coming out tomorrow, it feels right to cover another comic based on a game that tried to ape the series’ success with lesser results. Already, I’ve covered Killer Instinct and Primal Rage. Now it’s time for Eternal Champions, a short-lived backup featured in the UK publication Sonic the Comic. Sonic the Comic was a bi-weekly anthology featuring stories about Sega’s rodent mascot with the occasional backups of other Sega properties. It’s mostly remembered in the comic world for a series of Streets of Rage stories written by one Mark Millar. Eternal Champions got two story arcs and a special one-shot issue out of the deal.

So what is Eternal Champions? The game was released on the Genesis in the early 90’s, followed soon after by an updated version with an expanded roster on the Sega CD. The game had a really cool and inventive storyline… until it remembers the part that it’s a fighting game and it falls apart. The idea is that there’s this being called the Eternal Champion and he’s a big force for good. In the distant future, he comes to realize that the balance between good and evil is way out of whack. Evil’s held its grip over history a bit too much and this will cause a major cataclysm. He notices a handful of beings who were killed before their prime from different time periods. People who would have made the world a better place had their lives not been cut so short.

The Eternal Champion decides to use his powers to bring in these nine souls (more in the Sega CD game) in an attempt to help set things right. It’s like Exiles with time travel. Despite having the power to pull them all from the time stream, he only has the strength to send one of these guys back a moment before their scheduled death. That’s a weird drawback, but okay. I was thinking you could blame the butterfly effect on that, but even if the caveman changes history for the better, the Sega CD endings feel the need to remind you that EVERYONE ELSE IS DESTINED TO DIE HORRIBLY via early-90’s CGI animation.

So how does the Eternal Champion decide who will get his or her second chance? FIGHTING TOURNAMENT, THAT’S HOW! Man, it’s a good thing all of these potential heroes are physically fit martial artists. So not only do they have to murder the fuck out of each other (and honestly, the “Overkills” are more violent than most Mortal Kombat Fatalities), despite the fact that they’re all pretty good people, they have to fight the super-cheap Eternal Champion to prove themselves. Why? Like, if he kicks your ass – and believe me, he probably will – he cancels the entire project and decides to allow reality to crumble to evil. All because you can’t defeat a nearly omnipotent deity with your knowledge of karate. What a dickhole!

Luckily, even the comic is aware that the Eternal Champion is full of snot. Let’s look at our nine time travelers:

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(A brief explanation: I feel bored and weird and unsatisfied and like I need something new. It Ain’t No More To It is borrowed from a Biggie song where he drops in, busts a verse like that Schooly D joint, and gets out in 50-some seconds. So: I took a loose idea [in this case, talk about Casanova] and spent thirty minutes writing about it. No post-writing edits, either, beyond adding in images and links. This’ll be an ongoing thing, and eventually they might even get good.)

My man Sean has me thinking about Matt Fraction, Fabio Moon, and Gabriel Ba’s Casanova tonight.

I read Casanova: Luxuria 1 and was turned off. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why, but it felt see-thru. Ephemeral, light, full of nothing. References for references sake, and the backmatter actually grated. Having such an overwhelmingly negative reaction to Fraction, Moon, and Ba’s book was a huge surprise surprise to me. Years ago, Casanova was everything to me, a bright, shining beacon of what comics could be, something that ran counter to the mainstream superheroes that tended to turn to ashes in my mouth.

Casanova launched in 2006. Since then, I’ve been through several major life upheavals. I moved two thousand miles from home. I sold my car. I got a job with a salary. I started drinking. I quit drinking. I met girls, I forgot girls, and then met them again. Saying “Everything is different now” is probably hyperbole, but in a very real way, I’m not who I was five years ago. I’ve done a lot of changing and a lot of growing up.

I get the Beatles, Blur, and David Bowie references in Casanova now. The story is different to me, though it’s the same story it’s always been. I’m different, and what was once revolutionary and mind-expanding is… just okay. Been there, learned what I needed to learn, and left it in the dust.

I used to love the backmatter in Casanova. It was like getting a guided tour behind the curtain, a personal connection between creator and consumer. It deepened my appreciation of the book, the way getting a glimpse of the person behind the pen tends to do, and it was something I wished more people would do. Bendis’s letters pages in Powers were a hot mess, but Casanova‘s text pieces clicked with me.

Part of it was that it served to make the book more clear. It made it plain that, yes, Casanova was about Jim Steranko comics and music and movies and sex, but it was also about Matt Fraction (and maybe to a lesser extent, the brothers Moon and Ba). It was his The Invisibles, a distillation of things he loves, hates, and fears put down onto the comics page. I could relate. Writing has always served as a way for me to work out issues (perhaps not always as well as I’d like) and crystallize my thoughts. Writing makes thoughts real. It creates realities. And reading Casanova felt like watching someone else work through that process.

The new backmatter struck me as the opposite. It felt like a flinch, like he’d touched a hot stove and drew back. It was alternately smug, infuriating, and annoying. The rejection of snark from Fraction felt fake, as did the “stop downloading and start uploading” tag in the indicia. It sounded like the old dichotomy of an artist up there, a reader down there, and if you’re one, you clearly aren’t the other, so man up and make something. And that grated.

I don’t think I’d realized how much I’ve changed until I read through Casanova: Luxuria. I say there were upheavals, but it was more like anything else. Brief bursts of growth that, when viewed in hindsight, were more gradual than they felt. I wonder if I was expecting Casanova to still have that revelatory effect that it had when it was fresh to me, and that’s why I had an allergic reaction to something I used to love?

I can’t really call it. I’m different, Fraction’s different, and I’d come to terms with not really checking for his work until I read this essay by Sean Witzke. A character says, “I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing this for me. I don’t care about your expectations. So go fuck yourself, Doug. Fuck everybody. Fuck you.” Fraction often used to put overt examples of his voice into his characters, and this reads pretty plain to me.

And I liked it.

The story that followed clicked in a way that his Iron Man and Uncanny X-Men didn’t. It was weird and noodly and personal and all the things I originally came to love about Casanova. And that line, and Sean pulling the story apart on his autopsy table, convinced me to go back. I want to read the next volume of Casanova now. He’s ditching the backmatter, it looks like he’s telling the stories I want to read, and it feels right.

It won’t be the same, but that’s obvious. Things can only be revealed once. The Dark Phoenix saga is purple and bloated now. Miller’s Daredevil is an arrangement of cliches. Back then? They were the bomb. Now, they’re classics with caveats. So it’ll be nice to see where Fraction goes next. Claremont has pretty much kept pressing the same button for the entirety of his career–whether to maintain or refine, I do not know–and I can’t think of a single reason to pick up his comics now. Miller, on the other hand, has pushed himself forward with each project. For all the talk about how Miller only has one gimmick, you can’t look at his projects and go “This guy hasn’t learned anything or changed.” The Sin City projects are pretty different from each other, and All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder is an experiment with the grotesque that proves that he doesn’t stand still.

Fraction’s Marvel work went from being pretty good to losing me entirely. Almost all of Iron Fist and specific bits of The Order? They hold up pretty well. Iron Man? Tried to like it, wanted to like it, but Salvador Larocca’s art is garbage and I can’t get into the story. Uncanny X-Men has been adrift since Austen left. But the last eight pages of Casanova: Gula feel pretty good, like finding an old friend that grew up different than you expected, but no less interesting. So which one is Fraction going to be? Claremont or Miller? Stagnant or open to mutation?

It’s tough to tell. Five years is a long time, and in hindsight, I’m not too surprised my overwhelming enthusiasm for Casanova cooled. That’s natural, isn’t it? That’s how it’s supposed to be. If you’re still psyched about something you were into five years ago, you either need to consume more culture or stop being so excitable. Embrace the new. Learn something. That forces you to readjust and reconsider.

Which I think is absolutely a good thing. I may not love Casanova like I did, but I think I might be able to appreciate it more now. Back then, it was all about being fresh and shiny. Now, it’s more like seeing how the puzzle pieces of influence fit together to form a brand new whole.

Spoiled, spoiled, all is spoiled.

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From Osborn 3, words by Kelly Sue DeConnick, art by Emma Rios, color art by José Villarubia:

There’s a lot to like here. Rios’s art is looser, messier than it was on Hexed and Strange. Villarubia’s colors really work, too, with that orange and purple putting me in mind of Frazer Irving and early ’90s X-Men comics simultaneously.

What’s crucial for me is how she’s showing speed and, to a lesser extent maybe, impacts. Those thick, chunky lines are nice, but I like how she’s restricting the speed lines to certain parts of the body–blondie’s arms and body are a blur of lines and motion, while his face is fairly still in comparison. His tattoos are distinct, but look at his waist. All blur.

And again on page 2, where Norman Osborn delivers what’s basically a 2011-era Kirby Punch. Blondie’s gone flying, dominating the panel, but he’s still in motion. Osborn’s the one with the blur now.

This is nice work. Love that pose on Osborn on page 3, too. Here’s a preview of Hexed.

I live fairly close to a Japanese bookstore, and that gives me a chance to recklessly spend money on things I can’t read. I’ve got a few manga, a few art books, and a few magazines that had pictures I like. I was flipping through one I bought a while back, Inio Asano’s Sekai no Owari to Yoake-Mae (Before Dawn and the End of the World), and really took notice of the kiss that closes out the last story in the book. It got me thinking about kissing and comics, and trying to figure out the first kiss I saw in comics.

I’m pretty sure that it’s in Chris Claremont and Jim Lee’s X-Men 1. During a Danger Room sequence, Gambit steals a kiss from a robot duplicate of Jean Grey. She explodes, and Gambit’s response is, “As I always suspected… redheads, they have a dynamite kiss.” It’s part of the personality spamming Claremont often got up to, something to remind you that Gambit is a Cajun lothario with a sense of humor.

There was another kiss later in the same story. A brainwashed Cyclops steals a kiss from Jean Grey (I’m just now realizing how weird it is that it happened TWICE in the span of three issues) and asks if his kiss is as much fun as Wolverine’s, which is actually this whole weird cuckolding/male competition thing that I’m not sure I’m okay with in my old age.

I asked Twitter about other notable comics kisses. The most common suggestion was from Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman. After gallivanting around Earth and using their superpowers all day, Superman and Lois Lane share a kiss on the moon.

The next most common was from Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s The Dark Phoenix Saga. I flipped through and spotted a couple. I think most people thought of the kiss on the bluff, but here’s two:

The only multi-page kiss I found came from a suggestion from Jeff Lester. He suggested Gerry Conway and Ross Andru’s Amazing Spider-Man 143, which is toward the end of the golden age of ASM for me. This is one of the few kisses that lasts longer than 1 panel that I came across, and it’s good, if you’re a Spider-Fan.

There are plenty of others. Brandon Graham’s King City had a couple gooduns, Batman and Wonder Woman in Joe Kelly and Doug Mahnke’s JLA: The Obsidian Age, and Ennis and Dillon’s Preacher undoubtedly had a few great ones, though specific instances are escaping me right now. Azzarello and Risso’s 100 Bullets had a great one in New Orleans.

The thing about 99% of the kisses I’ve seen in comics, with precious few exceptions, is that they all look basically the same. Look at the examples I’ve pulled. It’s usually a man, who is generally taller than the woman, in a dominant position, with one arm around the woman’s waist and maybe a hand bracing her head. The woman’s arms go around the man’s neck. It usually lasts just a panel.

The similarity got me thinking. This is a cultural thing, isn’t it? This is how people kiss. This is what it’s supposed to look like. It’s very Hollywood and screen-ready. Neither party is obscured from an observer, the man gets to lead the way, visually at least, even if the woman initiated the kiss… where’d this representation come from?

Here’s Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day in Times Square. You’ve seen it before, I guarantee. It’s a spontaneous kiss, rather than a posed one.

I kinda feel like this is the kiss in America, too. It’s definitive. It’s what you see at marriages, when people propose, and in movies. This has to be the genesis of that specific kiss configuration, at least pop culturally, right? Sort of like how John Woo and Chow Yun-Fat are the genesis of hard-edged heroes with twin guns, Bruce Lee is the genesis of 90% of kung fu fools in comics, Clint Eastwood is the source of Wolverine and all of his descendants, and on and on and on. V-J Day in Times Square may not have been first, but it’s got to be the biggest touchstone.

What’s interesting to me is that this type of kiss is far from the only type of kiss in real life, but it’s the most dominant in media/pop culture. It’s fairly chaste, isn’t it? There’s no groping, no grinding, none of the stuff that makes kissing so unbelievably interesting. There’s passion, but there’s no lust, for lack of a better word. It’s just a kiss. It’s romantic.

Here’s the kiss from Inio Asano’s “End of the World.” Long story short, the girl’s dating a dopey guy, but she loves him anyway. It makes her a little uncomfortable, being so content, and I sorta feel like this is their first kiss. Five pages:

This is really interesting. There are a few major differences from the standard kiss. She’s in control throughout, it’s explicitly erotic (consider her knee on the first page), her tiptoes and subsequent collapse lend it a sense of both desperation and satisfaction, and I feel like the way both of them are blushing and sweating only add to the effect. And then there’s the tongues and the spit. This sequence is wet. It looks raw. It looks like making out. I really like the difference between page 1, panel 1, and page 3, panel 1. One’s a surprise. The other’s a genuine embrace.

You can imagine why I found this sequence so striking. I was raised on a diet of women bent backward, chaste mouth locks, and variations on a specific pose. This is dessert. Makeouts, instead of kisses. I feel like it’s more reflective of real life, too, and it’s almost definitely the best kiss I’ve seen in comics. I don’t think most porn comics even go at it like this.

(A few asides:

(-googling for info on the history of kissing, how kissing is different in various cultures, and really anything in detail on kissing got really really weird and makes me self-conscious in a way I really wasn’t expecting. Do I need to make some apologetic phone calls? In any case, tell your mom I said hello.

(-As pointed out by my man Jamaal Thomas (who should really write more, once he finishes doing things like “having several jobs”), the kiss in All-Star Superman is deflated two pages later by the overwhelmingly paternal kiss on the forehead Superman gives Lois. I’m not saying dudes shouldn’t be kissing their ladies on the forehead or anything, but in that instance? It’s a little too much like a father tucking in his daughter. Mmmmmno, thanks.

(-here’s the origin of the title of the post.)

Guest article series by Gabriel “TheJoker138″ Coleman.

First off, I’d like to apologize that I’ve only done one of these this week so far, when I’ve been trying to crank out at least two. I’ve been busy with both class and work and also… Well, I read a brief synopsis of this episode before watching it and it sounded like the most boring thing ever. For the most part, it was, but near the end it changed to being pretty inadvertently hilarious. But regardless, putting it off wasn’t really fair to anyone actually following these and I’ll try not to let it happen again. From the synopsis I’ve been reading, I’m about one episode away from it actually starting to consistently feature characters from the games for the most part, so that should help. One more thing before we get to it, I would like to mention I have this staring me in the face, right next to one of the bus stops on the way to the college I attend:

It’s like they’re taunting me…

Oh, and another thing before we get into the actual episode. I’ve already said that this series is a bootleg I got a few years back and the quality isn’t consistent, but the one thing that has been weirding me out is the on screen titles. They’ve all been wrong and none of them have even had anything to do with what actually goes on in the episode. This one has one of these that fits both those criteria, but is also in a totally different format than the previous titles. Before, they would be on the bottom of the screen, as a single line of text that would be almost lost in the on screen credits if you weren’t paying attention. This episode has… well… see for yourself:

Taja is in this episode for all of 5 minutes

Anyways, this episode starts out at the training post, which Taja and Siro are now running the trading section of, while Kung will seemingly be handling the training parts. I somehow doubt we’re ever actually going to see anyone getting trained here though. Siro is haggling with a monk, who is an old friend of Kung’s from the monastery. Kung convinces Siro to back off a bit on his price, but after the monk leaves Siro reveals that Taja has him using a business strategy where even after giving the monk this “deal” they’ve still made a 200% profit. Kung is, of course, disapproving of this, but he promised to let them handle this end of it for a while and see if it works, so there’s not much he can do.

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WWE’s NXT experiment has been going on for a bit over a year and despite its ups and downs, it still draws me in with its uniqueness. For those late to the party, the show is about 6-8 wrestling “Rookies” who are trying to earn their way onto the main roster by being paired with their “Pros”. A group of established wrestlers mentor these new guys and it’s turned into a fake reality show where these guys are voted off based on internet popularity and the consensus of the Pros. It’s a mess of a show, but one that I watch regularly. When it’s good, it’s good. When it’s bad, it’s usually so bad it’s good.

Currently, it’s in its fifth season. The first season, which aired on SyFy, ended with Wade Barrett winning decisively. He would go on to lead the Nexus in a storyline that was plenty awesome until they wrote themselves into a corner and “fired” John Cena despite his continued appearances on the show. The winner of the second season was Kaval, an indy wrestling darling whose victory was short-lived. WWE has a boneheaded tendency to shove popular acts down the card to see how they react. If they take their burial in stride? They’ll be pushed stronger later. If you’re like Kaval and you complain about it on Twitter? You’re gone. The third season was an all-female roster and was renowned for being a gigantic train wreck. By this time, it stopped airing on TV and became broadcast on the internet only (SyFy started airing Smackdown as their lone WWE show instead). The winner was Kaitlyn, who has gone on to do nothing since she really isn’t prepared to be on TV yet in the first place. For the fourth season, the winner was Johnny Curtis, who has gone on to do absolutely nothing, boggling the mind of anyone following the show.

Sometimes it isn’t the winners who matter. I want to talk about the losers. One of the more interesting parts of the show is when they have to vote off a Rookie. The way it will usually go is that all the remaining Rookies will line up outside the ring and the host Matt Striker will direct their attention to a roulette-like graphic that stops on the one the fans and Pros decided was the least impressive. That doomed wrestler will then look all bummed and will be given the opportunity to give a farewell promo. With a couple exceptions, there’s value to find in all of these. Sometimes they’ll give a promo so good that you might wonder, “Why didn’t this guy act this awesome before he got voted off?” Sometimes they’ll mumble through some embarrassing tirade that makes you shake your head in disbelief. Sometimes fights will break out. Sometimes the Pros will mess with them. Either way, it’s always a highlight.

So here’s the top 25 goodbyes in NXT history. How can there be 25 when there were 24 losers? I’ll get to that in time. Keep in mind, these aren’t listed from worst to best. No, that would be another list entirely. These are in order from how entertained I was by them.

25) NAOMI
Season 3
Date: November 30, 2010 (Week 13)
Rank: 2nd
Pro: Kelly Kelly

Naomi reacted to the news that Kaitlyn is the next breakout star by shrugging, calling it bittersweet and spending five seconds talking about how everyone worked hard. Yep, that’s it.

Not only are the women lacking in the last name department, but most of them lack the personality as shown in this list. Let’s get the other two out of the way.

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I spent this weekend at Wondercon, and more specifically, I spent Saturday night hand-selling Frank Quitely’s original art to attendees at Isotope’s smashing Saturday party. I was in the room from around 2100-0330, talking to people about the art, pointing out his insane perspectives, astonishing blue line work, and pencils. I never got bored, only repeated myself a few times (I really liked his blue line work, shut up) and generally had a lot of fun putting on an impromptu art school. (Which will pay off here on this blog once I get a chance to sit down with my favorite X-Men story ever, believe you me.)

So I’m high on comics right now. You know how it goes. Here’s two recent things in comics that I liked and just sorta want to present to you so that you can like it, too. There’s also one thing which is a total downer but beautiful and amazing and the saddest thing ever. Figure out which is which! I was going to do these with no commentary, but blah blah whatever. I’ll keep it brief.

Mike Mignola, Hellboy – The Wolves of Saint August
collected in Hellboy, Vol. 3: The Chained Coffin and Others

It’s “He made me this,” it’s Kate physically trying to hold back a sob, and it’s Kate’s slump. It’s Mignola, man. Precious few can touch him.

Frank Quitely’s CBLDF print
She’s brown. Do you see that? And she’s cute, and her necklaces are neat.

From Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo 136,
in honor of the Dark Horse’s 25th anniversary.

I love Usagi, and I love this image. I mean, dang, look at it already.

Bonus round: X-Men To Serve and Protect, which was otherwise completely forgettable (or, no, strike that–the Immonen Gambit/Hellcat jawn was pretty good) comes this treat from Jed McKay and Sheldon Vella:

Two things:
1. “DEATH! SQUAD!” is ill
2. “White chicks, am I right?” Colleen is so down. She’s great.

Good time to be a comics fan, I think.