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

Free things are awesome, yes? I think so, anyway. Here are some free things that you should check out and enjoy.

-Charlie Huston has more free books for you. This time, it’s the first Joe Pitt casebook, Already Dead. I recently finished the last book in this series, and overall I’m pretty pleased.

It’s available in several formats, all for free, so fire up the ebook reader and get to getting. It’s vampire fiction for people who like it bloody, pulpy, and vulgar, so hey. Get some.

-Takehiko Inoue, creator of Vagabond (my current obsession), has done two basketball manga: Slam Dunk and Real.

No, that isn’t true. He’s done three. Buzzer Beater is online-only, released during a time when people said “World Wide Web,” drawn left-to-right, and in (sometimes garish) computer color. It’s also free. Check the characters here, then click here to begin the first chapter.

It’s a weird basketball manga, and aliens are treated very matter of factly, but it’s pretty enjoyable. I read half of it in one burst and the other half in one sitting, so it’s also pretty gripping. It may have been my first sports manga, because I doubt that Hikaru no Go counts as sports. The story is incomplete, but ends on a note that could easily be a real ending, rather than a cliffhanger.

–Metal Gear Solid is almost definitely my favorite non-Madden game franchise. I love the way that Kojima came up with this amazing story and groundbreaking gameplay, and then wrapped it all up in bizarre plot twists, baffling storytelling decisions, and a thick film of “This is art, that is why this is happening, do you get it?”

And I mean, I love it all unironically and unconditionally. MGS horrifically flawed and amazingly self-indulgent, but it’s given me four games that were some of my favorite gameplay experiences.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have a sense of humor about it all, though. That sense of humor got a workout when a friend pointed me to livejournal user hiimdaisy and her Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater strips. She’s gone through the whole series, so here are some links to posts that are simultaneously huge and hilarious:

MGS: one, two, three, four
MGS2: one, two, three, four
MGS3: one, two, three, four
MGS Portable Ops: one

There are ones for other games (incuding Persona 4!), so poke around the LJ a little bit. All are pretty much hilarious.

–Tim Callahan and Chad Nevett are back with their Splash Page. This time, the question is, “Are Mainstream Comics Increasingly Lame, or is it Just Us?” Parts one and two.

My answer? They’re increasingly lame. DC needed ugly plastic rings to move units and Marvel’s digging this heinous villain hole even deeper and wrecking believability in the process. When your Top Dog Villain kills sixty-thousand people just to get his way, you’re probably a little too extreme, possibly bordering on unbelievably dumb. But hey, keep sliding those colorforms around on the page. Rake in that money.

Adam Warren was kind of enough to consent to an email interview, so of course I immediately bombarded him with way too many questions. As a result, we’ve got a long, and wide-ranging, interview that I think is pretty interesting. We cover a lot of ground, and Warren does it with good humor. And I do mean a lot of ground– this thing weighs in at over 5800 words. I went through and added in links for context or reference, in case you’re curious about a few of the topics that come up.

Thanks to Ken Kneisel for supplying me with the majority of Warren’s run on Dirty Pair, Jacq Cohen at Dark Horse for turning an offhanded Facebook comment into a fun interview, and finally, Adam Warren for answering a million questions.

After you finish reading, you should buy some Empowered (One, Two, Three, Four, Five), Dirty Pair, Iron Man: Hypervelocity, and Livewires. While you’re waiting for those to arrive, visit his DeviantArt to look at some art.

Let’s get it in.

(and yes, adam warren week is just three days long. shut your face.)

At the time that I’m writing this, Empowered has been out for a couple of weeks. What’s your workday like now that it’s on shelves? Do you take a vacation between books or get right into working on the next volume? What do you do to relax?

Right now, I’m working on an Empowered one-shot (in conventional comics format, for once!) and frantically trying to wrap up a few other miscellaneous art jobs before I head off to the San Diego Comic-Con this week (ouch). This is more or less par for the course, as I usually try to work up other pitches or grind away at brief stints of better-paying work before I go back to full-time work on the next Empowered volume; in a way, though, this almost is a vacation, compared to the crazily long hours I often have to work as a volume’s deadline looms ever nearer.

As for relaxing, well, once the workday’s over, I might read some books, watch a DVD (starting over with The Wire season 1, at present), or crack a Sam Adams or two and catch some Craig Ferguson in the wee hours… (Though the latter’s not an option, of late. Since the spectacular onset of the digital TV revolution, my remote neck of the woods went from receiving about eight different TV stations’ signals to receiving a grand total of none whatsoever; yay, DTV! So, no Craig Ferguson for me, nowadays.) Ah, the manifold joys of the rural-dwelling freelancer’s off-work lifestyle…

How fast are you, art-wise? Do you do any digital work, or are you strictly lo-tech? What do you listen to while you draw?

I certainly wouldn’t claim that I’m an especially speedy artist in general… but, when working in the straight-to-pencil format used for Empowered, I can usually turn around at least two pages per full workday, which isn’t too shabby a production rate.

That’s the whole point of the format, really: to move on to the finished page as quickly as possible, leaving out all the intervening stages that used to slow me down as an artist. As in, my technique used to progress from scrawled roughs to very tight but undersized layouts to even more tightly penciled, full-size pages to final inks that were even tighter still; on Empowered, I jump from the thumbnail/rough stage straight to final, penciled pages (at the wee 8.5” X 11” size, BTW), a considerably more streamlined process.

While the technique I use on Empowered is indeed extremely “lo-tech”—nothing but graphite on letter-size copy paper, without resorting to such high-tech, cutting-edge, space-age innovations such as bristol board or inks or a separate lettering stage—I  can’t say that it’s strictly lo-tech, as the pages still wind up getting scanned into Photoshop, then tweaked and cleaned up (and lettering-corrected, as necessary) at Dark Horse. Contradictorily enough, only modern scanning and printing technologies make Empowered’s primitive process viable in the first place…

Nowadays, I listen to a helluva lot of talk radio when I’m working, mostly of the sports-related variety (I am a New England native, so Pats/ Sox/ Celts interest comes naturally to me), occasionally mixing in some books on CD for variety… I do, however, switch over to music from the ol’ iPod when working on scripts, due to the sad fact that talk radio’s babble frequently derails my train of dialog-related thought. (Unless I actually want to mix references to KG and Jonathan Papelbon and Randy Moss into my scripting, which is rarely the case.)   

While doing research for this interview, I realized that you don’t sell your original art. I don’t think that you travel to many cons, either, so genuine Adam Warren Sketches(TM) are pretty rare. Do you prefer to keep your art within the confines of published books, rather than sketches and such?

It’s not that I’m particularly opposed to selling my artwork; it’s just that I’ve never clawed out enough free time to set up some means of actually selling the stuff. (Plus, I am a tad paranoid that some Empowered material might need to be rescanned at some point; such are the problems inherent to working in the ever-tricky medium of grayscale.)

I should say that, back when I used to attend considerably more conventions than I do now (the invites dried up a long time ago, for better or for worse), I did crank out a goodly number of commissioned sketches every year… Empowered is descended from the last major clump of such commissions (mainly of the “damsel-in-distress” variety) I took on, after all. Now, though, I no longer have the time to deal with many (or any) more such requests along those lines.

Side note: Come to think of it, my attendance at San Diego this year will mark my first convention appearance during the entire time that Empowered has been coming out… Alert the media! Well, perhaps not.

In general, I suppose that I do prefer to keep my artwork within the confines of a published book, or at least within the confines of a story… Drawing as such doesn’t interest me all that much, save for as a means of conveying a narrative. I’ve never filled a sketchbook, I don’t draw people in the subway (er, that is, assuming I moved to a location that had a subway), I don’t hang around sketching with fellow artists after conventions (though the first part of the social “Drink & Draw” experience does appeal); in short, I don’t do the things that a real artist, someone who’s Crazy In Love With Drawing, should do. Luckily, this isn’t a major, psyche-twisting source of angst for me, as I pretty much see myself as a writer who happens to be able to draw.
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I’m a huge fan of Metal Gear Solid. It’s probably my favorite series, though I’ve undoubtedly put more time into Madden NFL than MGS by virtue of having played Madden for 14 years now to MGS’s ten. I got to help out on the guide for Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, which was a really cool thing to do.

MGS4: Guns of the Patriots is out and it is quite honestly game of the decade for me. I beat it over the course of a weekend. Not because I’d planned to, mind you– I just got wrapped up in the story and enthralled and suddenly it’s Sunday and I have to be to bed in two hours and I’m just now finishing the hour long ending and oh man I want to start over and do it all again but I can’t I have work really I can’t okay maybe just a little before bed.

If I had to make a comics comparison, MGS4 is to the Metal Gear series what All-Star Superman is to Superman comics, only even more comprehensive and even better.

Hideo Kojima is a director who doesn’t skimp on the details. This shows in the attention paid to the story and what you can do in the game itself. One of the things that interests me the most about MGS4, other than the functioning in-game iPod which you can apparently rip your own music to, is The Beauty & The Beast Unit.

One of the overarching themes of the MGS series is that war makes monsters of men. No matter how honorable, good, evil, or whatever you are, war is going to ruin you. It’s the nature of the beast. The Beauty & The Beast Unit are the embodiment of this idea. They are four women who, while they were still young, encountered war and suffered under its boot. The girls ended up with post-traumatic stress disorder and were turned into war machines by an unknown party.

They became The Beauty and The Beast Unit, SNAKEHOUND, and were given special code names: Screaming Mantis, Laughing Octopus, Crying Wolf, and Raging Raven. Each prefix is a reference to a certain unit from Metal Gear Solid 3, while the animal tags are taken from FOXHOUND and the unit from MGS1. The Beauty represents what they once were– attractive young women. The Beast represents their outer appearance– monstrous war machines.

“They are humans that have been transformed by battle. They are the ultimate casualties of war.” According to Kojima, he chose to base these characters on beauty from the real world. “The world created these ugly beasts, but underneath they are gorgeous women. These ladies — this beauty — is real.”

Hideo Kojima, 1up.com

Where it gets even more interesting is their origins. Kojima wanted them to represent the real world. Lyndall Jarvis is from Cape Town, South Africa, and Laughing Octopus is ethnically Scandinavian. Yumi Kikuchi is from New York, and plays Raging Raven, a woman from Indonesia. Scarlett Chorvat’s from Slovakia, but Screaming Mantis was born in South America. Mieko Rye, Crying Wolf, is from Brooklyn, but reps Africa in-game.

It isn’t a 1:1 correlation, but it’s a step in the right direction. Their nationalities aren’t a huge part of the game. They’re pretty much literally one line in an audio conversation per boss. It isn’t a big deal, but it is at the same time. It’s a great move. War affects everyone, no matter where they are or who they are, and having the Beauty and Beast Unit be multicultural is a sharp way to represent that.

The Metal Gear Solid series has always been about storytelling. Its themes of war and its effects on life reflect throughout the entire series. The B&Bs are an obvious parallel, with their innocence being twisted and malformed into violence. There are plenty of other examples, as well, but this is one that leaped out at me.

It’s smart world building. It’s the kind of thing I’d like to see more often in comics. Let the little details do the work for you. You don’t have to have characters hop up on a soapbox and blah blah blah about their motivations or what they mean. Let the reader infer some things. MGS4 is amazingly unsubtle about basically everything on a certain level, but sometimes it slips in these little touches that make you pause.

In case you were wondering, the girls are all delightfully creepy bosses.

Shots below are ripped from Kotaku and various places on the internet.

Also, just for fun– Kojima and Frank Miller.

Now imagine Kojima making a Hard Boiled or Rusty the Boy Robot game.

Yes.