–The Comic Book Guide to the Mission is an anthology of stories edited and curated by my friend Lauren Davis. She enlisted some great writers and artists to tell stories about San Francisco’s the Mission. There’s a wide spectrum of experiences in the book, and it’s a neat trip through an area that I rarely visit for some reason.

-Jay Potts, creator of World of Hurt, has started a Kickstarter campaign to get his webcomic printed in a nice HC. A quote from the page:

The first storyline, entitled “The Thrill-Seekers” finds Pastor in the middle of a search for a missing college student named Alicia Patterson. When Pastor’s missing person case turns into a murder investigation, his relentless quest for justice takes him from the city’s ghetto to a secret club of powerful, high society hedonists.

This Kickstarter project was started out of my desire to raise the funds to self-publish a graphic novel which collects the The Thrill-Seekers storyline. The graphic novel will also feature bonus material, such as production sketches, layouts and an introduction by author and filmmaker, David Walker of BadAzzMofo.com. The graphic novel will be an 88-page hardcover book with a landscape format of 13″ X 6.5″ to match the original dimensions of the comic strip. Although the interiors will be black & white, the cover will be in full color. Part of the Kickstarter funds will also be used to pay for an artist to paint over my cover pencils to recreate the classic, pulp feel of a Blaxploitation movie poster.

You might remember Jay from this monster interview from last year’s Black History Month series. I’m a pretty smart guy, and I’m smart enough to know that Jay is somebody worth paying attention to. I’m planning to donate to the campaign because, my fetish for digital books aside, this is a book I wouldn’t mind owning in print. World of Hurt is good, man.

-I bought Joell Ortiz’s Free Agent the other day. It leaked late last year on Amazon and was quickly pulled. I forgot about it until recently, and found that it actually came out in February. It’s not bad, maybe a solid B. He uses a little too much hashtag rap (That’s where you kick a punchline and then explain it… Drake.) for my tastes, but Ortiz is an extremely lyrical dude. For every hashtag rap he kicks, he busts out several tongue twisting skyscrapers, so I guess I can’t complain too much. It sticks out like a sore thumb, though. The title is apt–it feels like an album where he’s trying to prove his worth. He raps about himself, rapping, murder, drugs, and women (hip-hop’s favorite subject matter, in order of popularity) and does it well.

The guest features are surprising solid. Joe Crack goes in on his, but the highlight is probably “Put Some Money On It,” where the Lox, especially Styles P, come off real hungry. Jada’s got that old Raekwon slow-flow menace going on, too. “Killing niggas with the flow, H1N1.” “Call Me” makes me hope that Novel and Joell put together a full-length that I can buy some day. They work well together.

Guest article series by Gabriel “TheJoker138″ Coleman.

Let’s get right to it this time, shall we? We start off in Outworld, where Not-Jade is sitting around naked. This is the scene they took the shots of her for the opening credits from. She essentially has set up a sauna, and is using flowers as perfume. Shang comes in and implies that she must have whored herself out to get those flowers into the mines, which understandably pisses her off. He touches her hand, which causes it to wither and age, and then turns it back with a wave of his hand, saying that she hasn’t seen anything yet.

It cuts to the temple of the order of light, where Kung is meditating with the other monks. He has brought Taja and Siro with him, and she looks bored, while Siro is asleep and snoring loudly. She throws a pebble at him to wake him up, and then leaves. He follows, followed shortly by Kung. He asks them what’s wrong, and is actually quite understanding that they don’t feel the whole meditation and spiritual thing is for them. They decide to head back to the trading post, despite the fact that there is a heatwave going on, and it’s very, very hot out. Before they leave the head of the order of light, Master Wang, talks to both Kung Lao and them, saying that he’s sorry to see them leaving so soon and wishes them a good journey.

Heh heh… Wang…

Siro and Taja walk off, and Master Wang runs after them, giving them Kung Lao’s water bag to take with them. He’s out of breath from the run, and drinks from it as well. There is a person dressed in all black following him back to the temple. He rejoins Kung and the others in their meditation, but drops dead soon after, and his body decomposes into a shitty looking CGI skeleton and then to dust as Kung and the others watch. They figure it must be sorcery of some type, which causes the person in black earlier to run from the room, Kung giving chase. He catches up to the black clad figure, and pulls off their hood, revealing that it’s Not-Jade. She jumps through a portal back to the mines before he can do anything to her.

Shang is pissed that Kung saw her, and says that he’ll have to deal with the situation himself now. They also go on to explain why Shang doesn’t just use one of his portals to escape, by saying that there are guards and spies in the prison who would report back Shao Kahn if he was one day gone, and that they would track him and punish him wherever he went. I don’t quite buy this, but at least it’s something. Shang steals the soul of one of the other prisoners to make himself more powerful, and heads to Earthrealm despite Not-Jade warning him about the guards and spies.

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we
created: I feel like I’m so behind on stuff all the time. I’ve got a lot in progress, but not enough done, as far as I’m concerned. Gonna have to play catch-up this weekend.

–Q Hayashida’s Dorohedoro is ill.

–Marvel makes comics, here are some good ones

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are
consumed: Pusha T and Young Dro dropped mixtapes that are, at best, mediocre. Far as I’m concerned, that translates to “unlistenable.” There’s not much worse than somebody with talent, whether for punchlines or scorn, to come anything less than 100% correct. Ain’t no half-stepping, fellas, so do us all a favor and get it together.

–Jared draws two of the best fictional characters ever. I don’t really want to buy any more original art, but seeing artists take on Akira makes me second guess my stand. Akira is basically the best comic, and I don’t even know. It provokes reactions I keep forgetting I had. And that tac vest is such a sharp look, too, bird chest or not.

-How good is Asaf Hanuka’s The Realist? I love the art and the kind of airy way the strips progress. You get to fill in a lot of blanks yourself, and sometimes that takes a little mental legwork. It’s alternately funny, melancholy, and real.

-Nardwuar interviews Das Racist, Odd Future, Lil B the Based God, and Curren$y. Nardwuar is dope, and all of these are pretty entertaining. Curren$y is super weeded in his, too.

-Nardwuar’s interviews always end so poorly, man. He gets some good footage out of people, but he’s just so oppressively awkward that nobody knows how to take him.

-DC rolled out a bunch of new good digital stuff. We3, Flash, Garth Ennis’s Hellblazer, Catwoman, and New Frontier. I’m a fan of all of these, and while We3 is overpriced, these are all worth owning. Those Brubaker/Cooke issues of Catwoman are all pretty good, and I think that the Comixology run has the point where Brubaker really hit his stride. Get those!

–Amy Poodle takes on Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles for the second time. You can read part one here.

-Video games! I was going to make this a post on its own, but ehhh, it’s just some brief thoughts.

-I play games for work, so I generally avoid games at home. They’ve gotta be all-star affairs, you know? I don’t have time for mediocrity or “just okay.” Why would I waste that time?

-Currently playing: Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Killzone 3, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Portable, Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, Valkyria Chronicles, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, Final Fantasy 7, and Angry Birds. And maybe something else, I don’t know. Oh, Metal Gear Solid 4.

-I graze. I haven’t played a few of these in months (most particularly FF7 & P4). What I tend to do is focus on one game for a few weeks, then move on, eventually cycling my way back as the spirit moves me. Right now, it’s Brotherhood. Next is probably Persona 4.

-What I look for is an experience broken down into discrete portions. I like being able to drop in, get something done, and drop out. Sometimes this means ill multiplayer. Sometimes it means a compelling story with a lot of subplots. Anything that lets me sit down and have a bit of fun and leave it right there works. Shooters don’t really cut the mustard any more, multiplayer aside.

-I play games to relax, not to get frustrated, so something that pulls me in and is a brief escape is what’s nice. I purchase like… four new games a year. Last year, I don’t think I bought hardly any. Just Tekken, maybe?

-Sometimes, less is more, is what I’m saying. I could easily get a full year of gameplay out of what I own right now, but the way I play means that I sit down for 20 minutes or two hours (rarely), have some fun, and come back a week or so later. I could probably not buy a new game until 2013 and be okay. That’s a nice feeling.

-That new Pharoahe Monch is good, innit?

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renegades
David: Hellblazer 277, Hulk 31, Power Man and Iron Fist 3, Uncanny X-Force 6
Esther: Yes: Batman Incorporated 4
Maybe: Batman: The Dark Knight 2, Superman/Batman 82
Gavin: Batman Incorporated 4, Green Lantern Corps 58, Green Lantern 64, Justice League Generation Lost 22, Invincible 78, Astonishing Spider-Man Wolverine 5, Daken Dark Wolverine 7, Deadpool MAX 6, Deadpool 34, Hulk 31, Namor The First Mutant 8, Power Man And Iron Fist 3, Uncanny X-Force 6

On Friday night, I journeyed into New York City to see the show that I was destined to see. Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has been the butt of many jokes and it’s hard not to join in. David Uzumeri summed it up for me nicely with the term “spiderfreude”. The whole broadway show concept, the inflated budget, the head-scratching reviews and the laundry list of injuries and mishaps has made it a phenomenon for absurdity-loving comic fans such as myself. The whole thing is too strange to exist and I knew I had to get on the train before it crashes for good.

Lo and behold my amazing, spectacular Christmas gift of tickets to see the show.

And it’s a good thing, too! The show is being closed down in a few weeks for the sake of being retooled. Best case scenario, they’re going to change a lot of stuff and I got to see the rougher draft of the Broadway show. Worst case scenario, they’re going to deep six the entire production and I got to look into God’s eyes before it was too late.

It also makes me feel less bad about going into full spoiler mode. For those who don’t want to muck through the spoilers and want the gist of my experience, I didn’t think it was bad. There are parts that are pretty awful and kind of embarrassing, but it really starts to gain steam. The performances are really good, especially Patrick Page as the Green Goblin and the set designs are so extravagant that at no point do you wonder where all those millions of dollars went. The music… I’m not really qualified to comment on. I’m no theater expert and I’m sure if I listened to them in one more go I’d have more impressions, but my main reaction was mostly, “Yes, that is most certainly something inspired by Bono.”

I should also get the obvious out of the way. No, nobody died or got horribly injured from what I saw. The only mishaps were few:

1) One of the Spider-Man stuntman guys swung around over the crowd, bounced around and ended up on a high platform where the right side of the stage cuts off. Noticed by some, he could be seen momentarily strangled by his cables before getting free.

2) The obligatory “Spider-Man: NO MORE!” scene lost a little oomph when Peter’s tights bounced out of the garbage can and fell on the floor.

3) There was a part in the second act where the curtain wasn’t closed all the way and some could get a pretty good look at one of the actresses during a costume change. Actually, scratch everything I said. This show was awesome.

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You can stream Pharoahe’s new album here:

I don’t see the mp3s on Amazon, but it’s ten bucks on iTunes, so go ahead and cop that. I bought it this morning because I didn’t want to hold out hope that Amazon would get it in anything even resembling a timely manner.

Pharoahe is one of the nicest emcees ever. Compared to Pharoahe, your favorite rapper isn’t even nice. He’s just polite.

Guest article series by Gabriel “TheJoker138” Coleman.

Seeing as I’m going to be here talking about Mortal Kombat stuff with you guys for quite a while, (22 episodes of Conquest, 13 of Defenders of the Realm, 2 full length movies, and two… other things) I figured you might want to know some of my background with the series. When the first game came out, I was only six years old, so I missed the boat on actually playing it when it was new. However, by the time Mortal Kombat 2 came out, I was a second grader who had a Sega Genesis coming to him for Christmas of 1994. I got the Genesis itself, the pack in game Sonic The Hedgehog, Sonic 2, and Mortal Kombat 2.

I don’t recall ever asking for the Genesis, but I was already somewhat familiar with MK2. The Pizza Hut near our house had two arcade machines, Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat 2. I always gravitated towards the MK2 machine, wasting quarters and hardly ever winning matches against the CPU. I guess my parents picked up on it, and not being the reactionary type who think that video games cause children to become psychopaths, probably got me the Genesis so I would play it at home and not throw away their quarters anymore. This didn’t really work out for them.

I had this Genesis and my MK cartridge for a long time. It was the only system I had until after the PS1 was already out, at which point I switched to a N64. There were other games, of course, including Mortal Kombat 3, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and of course the first one which I had missed out on. But it was always MK2 that I came back to. I borrowed an older friends strategy guide for it and photocopied it at my moms office. I practiced the fatalities and special moves by plugging in a second controller in and doing Vs. matches against no one. I improved enough at it that I could get through the arcade version in one or two quarters most time, and even beat a lot of human competition.

I remember one day I went into the Pizza Hut and the cabinet wasn’t there anymore, leaving only the Street Fighter 2 machine and one of those claw machines you can get stuffed animals from. I guess that MK2 either wasn’t profitable for them anymore, or it broke down and they figured it wasn’t worth it to fix. Either way it was gone. There were places to play MK3 at, sure, but none of them were as close to my house or as oft visited as that Pizza Hut.

By the time MK4 came out, my love of the series as a whole had already started to diminish. I caught a few episodes of the animated series on TV when I was up that early, which wasn’t often. I saw the second movie when it came out on VHS tape for rental, and it put me off even more. I never even bothered to watch Conquest when it was on. But that MK2 cartridge was always there, and to this day it’s the one thing I miss most about my Genesis. Sure, there’s a downloadable version of it (arcade perfect even!) on the PS3, but it’s not the same. There’s something about blowing out the cart, whipping out my stapled together bootleg strategy guide, and watching as lighting illuminated the cloudy sky to reveal the MK dragon that I’ll never have again.

That’s one of the reasons the new game has me excited enough that I decided to go back and look at this material I skipped at the time. The footage from it has everything I loved about MK2, but updated with a shiny new coat of next gen paint. The demo plays like a souped up version of MK2 with all the best parts of MK3 thrown in for good measure. The roster is all classic characters that I remember and love (or hate… I’m looking at you, Nightwolf) and remember. I know it will never live up to my memories of MK2, but I still hope it can carve out it’s own niche in my long history with video games, one that will be just as fulfilling as those days gone by. But anyway, I’ve blathered on enough about the good old days, let’s hop into our second installment of Mortal Marathon, with episode 3, Cold Reality.

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-That weird noise is the dishwasher I somehow forgot was on while recording.
-It ends fairly quickly, though, so suck it up.
-We bought comics!
-Esther bought Tiny Titans 38 (Franco/Baltazar).
-How crazy is it that Tiny Titans has been around for three years? Time flies.
-I bought Uncanny X-Force (Remender/Albuquerque), Hulk (Parker/Hardman), Thunderbolts (Parker/Walker), and Batman, Inc (Morrison/Paquette).
-I also got Ruse (Waid/Pierfederici) and Sigil (Carey/Kirk) for free.99.
-I like Batman Inc, but I don’t like like it any more.
-Somehow we talk about seven comics for forty-five minutes.
-You know how it goes.
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-See you, space cowboy!

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Hey there and welcome to another week of ThWiP. This week I’m joined by David Brothers, Space Jawa and Was Taters. It’s Taters who contributes the most contrasting of comics in Tiny Titans and Vampirella. Yes, indeed, not only is Vampirella of all comics making an appearance here, but it’s sent in by the one female contributor. I don’t get it either.

Now to get this out of the way so I can continue writing my review of the most amazing and spectacular Broadway musical that I happened to catch last Friday.

5 Ronin #3 (Punisher)
Peter Milligan and Laurence Campbell

Avengers Academy #11
Christos Gage and Tom Raney

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(Gavok note: In a month from this writing, the new Mortal Kombat game will be released to consoles. Everyone at 4thletter! who doesn’t matter is excited about it! I’ve always been a big fan of the series and its entertaining sense of crazy mythology. Over the next month, I intend to cover a few things that relate to the series, some more loosely than others. Meanwhile, Gabriel “TheJoker138” Coleman was inspired enough by my looks at the old MK comics to start up his own series of reviews. Not for the comics, but for the two Mortal Kombat television series and the movies. He needed a place to showcase them and I felt bad for denying the other 137 Jokers, so here we go. Oh, and he’s got a Twitter too.)

Mortal Kombat was huge in the 90’s. In the nearly 20 years since the first game in the series was released in arcades, it’s easy to forget that. Some readers may not have even been born yet in it’s heyday. But make no mistake, Mortal Kombat was one of the first video games to really hit the big time as far as multimedia blitzes go. In fact, it was able to accomplish a few things that even today’s biggest video games, such as Halo or the Call of Duty series, haven’t. Like those series there were action figures, a novel, t-shirts, and other such merchandise, but there were also movies and TV series. Sure, the first movie is a guilty pleasure, the second is awful, and neither of the series lasted longer than a season, but the fact remains that the MK brand was strong enough to justify their existence.

And that’s what I’m here to talk to you about today. In this series I plan on going through both films, and both TV series on an episode-by-episode basis. I’ll take a look at their similarities and differences to the games that inspired them, and review each movie, each episode, and each series as a whole.

The first of these to be released was the feature film in 1995. But that’s not where I’m going to start. Instead, we flash forward to 1998, and Mortal Kombat: Conquest. By this time the end of the Mortal Kombat boom was already almost over, and this series failure may have been the first real indicator of that. As I said, it only lasted a single season, and was largely ignored, even by fans. I will admit that when it first aired, I never even watched a full episode of it, and I was a pretty big MK fan. The only reason I even know it exists was due to the fact that it aired either right before or right after (I honestly can’t recall which, but if you told me I had to choose I’d pick before) WCW Monday Nitro on TNT, and was advertised pretty heavily on it.

The reason we’re going to start with this series instead of the first film is because, chronologically, it comes first. It takes place 500 years before the film (which I assume was set in 1995, meaning this takes place in 1495) and focuses on The Great Kung Lao, ancestor of the Kung Lao we all know from the games. In the canon of the games, he was killed by Goro in the tournament after Shang Tsung was dethroned as champion. If you’ve read Gavok’s short write up of weird things that the MK brand spawned, you know it doesn’t quite end that way for him in this series already, but we’ll get to that later. I should also mention that the first episode is actually a two-parter, and one that packs a ton of set up and action into it, at that, so this might take a while.

This starts off, like a lot of MK media, with a voice over by Raiden (played by Jeffrey Meek) that sets up the basic premise of the show, and of the MK tournament itself. During this, Kung Lao is shown practicing for his match against Shang Tsung, where he is the last Earthrealm fighter. Shang Tsung is also shown finishing the previous fight, where he dominates his opponent and steals his soul. Shao Kahn (also played by Meek) watches over this, pleased. Shang looks pretty close to his MK2 look (minus the silly Devo hat), as does Kahn. Kahn’s helmet looks kind of cheap, by the way, but still much, much better than he did in the second film.

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There was an episode of The Twilight Zone entitled The Big Tall Wish. The episode – and recent graphic novel adaptation – is about an aging boxer named Bolie who is about to take part in a match against a young fighter who will no doubt beat him. Adding to that, he busts up his knuckles before the match. There’s a little boy named Henry who looks up to him and Henry makes a big, tall wish that Bolie would win the fight. Despite the beating Bolie takes in the first round, reality twists and he finds himself standing over a beaten opponent. He’s the winner.

Nobody notices any foul play. Everyone celebrates his miraculous victory. His fist isn’t even all that hurt anymore. He finds Henry and tells him that this isn’t right. Henry warns him about how disbelief can ruin the wish, but Bolie, as a hardened adult, can’t handle it. There are too many holes in the story. The reality is that he could never win that fight… and so he didn’t. Reality sets itself back to normal with Bolie on the mat getting counted out. With no memory of the alternate reality he created, Henry becomes disfranchised with the idea of wishes and loses a big piece of his childhood. The story has a great message to it, but it’s so damn depressing.

The existence of Axe Cop has that same moral as Big Tall Wish, but comes off as a celebration rather than a damning. If you haven’t heard of Axe Cop, it’s a young, but explosively popular webcomic series by the brother duo of Malachai Nicolle and Ethan Nicolle. It’s the adventures of a gruff, enigmatic and at times deranged police officer who goes around killing bad guys with a fireman’s axe. The big twist and selling point is that the artist Ethan is 30-years-old and his writer brother Malachai is only six. It’s such a brilliant little concept. It’s brilliant and I’m glad to see how successful it is.

The webcomic has been released in a volume recently, which has added commentary by Ethan about every little strip and how they came to be. A few weeks ago, the first issue of their Dark Horse miniseries Axe Cop: Bad Guy Earth was released. In it, Axe Cop and his partner Dinosaur Soldier (AKA Flute Cop, AKA Avocado Soldier, AKA Ghost Cop) go up against an incoming planet that they can sense is evil. They destroy it, but a couple survivors come to Earth and plan to turn it into a Bad Guy Earth by taking a device that turns bad people good and reprogramming it into a device that turns good people bad.

I’ve seen people hate on the comic and give it the damning of being all, “wacky ninja cheese random.” I can see where that argument is coming from, but I think Axe Cop deserves a pass. If it was an adult who wrote it, then yes, point at it for being stupid. Someone like that should know better, I suppose, but a child adds extra dimensions to it that raise it to something far more intriguing.

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