Welp. As I said a few days ago, ThWiP was delayed due to me being out of town. Luckily, Was Taters, Jody, Gaijin Dan and Space Jawa already had their panel stuff waiting for me. What a great bunch of guys… and girl.

Frankenstein #0 is really weird in that it’s almost exactly how Jason Aaron’s Incredible Hulk run starts. You’d think they’d try to move it in a slightly different direction.

Avengers vs. X-Men #11
Jason Aaron, Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, Jonathan Hickman and Olivier Coipel

Avenging Spider-Man #12
Kevin Shinick and Aaron Kuder

Barrage #14
Kouhei Horikoshi

Read the rest of this entry �

I’ve been playing Square Enix & United Front’s Sleeping Dogs off and on over the past week. (Tekken Tag Tournament 2 is taking up some time, too, as is Papa & Yo.) It’s the latest game in the True Crime series, sort of. Those games have generally been pretty okay, but not spectacular. This one isn’t spectacular, but I think it might be genuinely good, bordering on great. The story isn’t special — an undercover cop in too deep? with a grudge? and an attitude?! whoa!– and the gameplay isn’t particularly innovative, but the combination of a faithful recreation of the Hong Kong we see in movies and some pretty smart writing elevates it above most other sandbox games. It’s not on Saints Row the Third‘s level, but it’s definitely beating the pants off that last GTA.

Sleeping Dogs juggles a lot of disparate gameplay elements (cars, counter-centric combat, good/evil alignment, two upgrade systems, several types of unlocks, etc) very well, and the pacing is sharp enough to keep you from getting bored. But more than anything, it’s the writing that’s keeping me going. The script is predictable, almost to a fault, but it’s a script that is emulating one of the types of movies that I like best. I mean, I’ve had speedboat chases and a shootout in a hospital with an AI partner. United Front knows their target audience, and it looks like we’re running through all the greatest hits. Which is cool; a nice cocktail of nostalgia and imminent danger.

There was one moment that leapt out at me, and it has nothing to do with John Woo or Johnnie To or Tsui Hark or people getting shot at all, really. It was during the mission Bride to Be, when you’re escorting Peggy Li to go pick out things for her wedding. You play Wei Shen, an undercover cop who has infiltrated Winston’s gang. Peggy’s marrying Winston, and by this point, you’re trusted enough to be alone with her and escort her around town. I was expecting some type of goofy infidelity plot, when they got in the car together and she started talking about dating. Half of it was because one girl I was seeing in-game had just blown up on me about cheating on her (which I hadn’t realized I was doing because Sleeping Dogs loves ambiguous fadeouts) and the other half was that crime movies love plots like that.

But that didn’t happen. She didn’t hit on Wei, and Wei didn’t hit on her. Instead, Peggy and Wei talked about dating, finding a nice girl, the importance of family, and knowing the value of trading your hardness for softness. Peggy shared a story about her mother-in-law, and explains that she learned, despite being a huge grump, her mother-in-law really cares about her. Wei offhandedly mentions his mother’s disappointment in his choice of girlfriends, and how that was a point of contention between them.

Quickie transcript, which is unfortunately devoid of inflection:

Wei: You’re lucky. My mother never liked my girlfriends.
Peggy: I guess it’s hard for the moms.
Wei: Well… I mean, you know I used to have a thing for blondes too, and that drove her crazy. Bad enough if I went out with a Chinese-American girl, but… but a whitey?
Peggy: [laughs] Well, it’s good to know she was loyal to her people.
Wei: No, she’s loyal to her prejudices, more like.
Peggy: That too.

I’m not sure what the term for this is, there might not be a proper word for it, but I dig it every time I come across it. I feel like it’s so rare in entertainment these days. It’s an admission that races and cultures are different, and that that fact affects our lives on a day-to-day basis in a way beyond just “one group oppresses another group.” It’s the type of conversation that you’d actually have in real life, and the kind of conversation you only see in fiction when you have an author who is talented and brave enough to just go in and damn the consequences. It’s prickly and it’s tough, but when done right, it really adds to stories.

I saw a preview screening of End of Watch with a friend a few weeks back. (It was good, and the Q&A after with Michael Peña and Natalie Martinez was especially good.) There was a lot of dialogue in there that explicitly addressed the fact that the two main characters were a white guy (Jake Gyllenhall) and a Mexican dude (Michael Peña). Gyllenhall asks what the heck chonies are and makes jokes about how Peña is always inviting him to quinceañeras. Peña is like, “Yeah, but if you marry one of my cousins, you’ll always have a party to go to! ;)” There were a few more exchanges of a similar vein, too.

We all practice this kind of cultural exchange on a minor scale on a regular basis (“Here’s a song my parents grew up with,” for one, “Here’s a home-cooked meal the way my family taught me” for another), and all too often in movies and games, that’s either played for wholly comedic effect or ignored altogether. Rush Hour, the Jackie Chan/Chris Tucker joint, was actually really good about being both funny and pointed, especially when Don Cheadle showed up.

This concept seems small, but it really isn’t. I dunno, I feel like there’s this tendency to sand down the uncomfortable parts of race in entertainment in favor of everyone always treating everyone else as… I don’t know. Normal. But you lose a lot in that. Normal isn’t interesting. Normal isn’t true. You avoid the terrible physical or emotional violence that makes race one of the dumbest concepts on the planet, but you also lose the beautiful cultural differences that make race one of the most amazing things in the world.

Real people have real conversations about how Wes Anderson makes white people movies and how so-and-so is too bougie to hang with you and whether shark fin soup or chitlins are grosser, or whatever whatever. We regularly talk about how our races affect our lives, and not in a pontificating or divisive sort of way, either. I’m talking about in a normal and most likely unexamined sort of way, a matter of fact sort of way. It’s like how people use the word “ghetto” in normal conversation and never address the subtext. It’s knowing that white music is one thing and black music is another, but not letting that stop you from enjoying either.

There’s a fine line to walk here, since you’re going to inevitably be dealing in stereotypes, but stereotypes aren’t bad in and of themselves. It’s how and why they’re applied. Here, Sleeping Dogs applied a stereotype to Wei’s mother, and more importantly, they didn’t condemn that stereotype. There’s an implicit critique in there, yeah — Wei is our character, we’re supposed to identify with him and assume that he’s right and moral. But not a condemnation. More of a “It is what it is,” I think, and an acknowledgement that that was then and this is now.

I’d like to stop being surprised when this happens in casual entertainment, too. I remember when Fred Van Lente & Mahmud Asrar tackled the unspoken complexities of interracial dating in Shadowland: Power Man. It was such a surprise because cape comics have a history of depicting more interracial relationships than intraracial ones, and any comment on interracial relationships was masked and fictionalized by the fact that one person had blue skin or wings or whatever fake thing they had. But, FVL and Asrar’s story was straight up “Yo, people feel some type of way about dating outside your race,” a subject that could easily get you slapped.

You know who’s really, really good at this? At this sort of honesty? Howard Victor Chaykin. For the most part, everyone in his books actually has a race that is acknowledged in the text. His books are filled with blacks, Jews, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Germans, and more, and that factors into their personalities, setbacks, and lives. Chaykin loves playing with cultures and culture in his work, whether via someone simply mentioning their background or people getting into arguments over things and it coming up. It adds a lot to his work. More people should be willing to shake things up like that.

Anyway, the car chases and bullet time in Sleeping Dogs are on point, too, so give that a look if you get curious. Personally, I’m rolling through the game while wearing the Mr. Black outfit: black suit, untucked white shirt, dirty tie, black sunglasses, and a hope for a better tomorrow. Portrait of the killer as a young man.

So good news and bad news. Good news is that I’m having a complete and utter blast at King of Trios in Easton, PA. Even if Chris Sims snores like a chainsaw (David can back me up on this). I’ll have a full trip report in a day or so, including how I was completely screwed out of the CHIKARA Not-Jeopardy Challenge and only made second place.

CHIKARASON! :argh:

The bad news is that I’m going to be in Easton until tomorrow and that means I don’t have the means to wait a day to do This Week in Panels. Which kind of sucks because this is the ending of the third year of the feature. This just means that I’ll have to do This Week in Panels #whatever tomorrow and This Year in Panels the day after that. So it’s not like I’ve completely forgotten about it.

Prelude to King of Trios 2012

(Thanks to Suben, Flameingblack and Strenuous Manflurry for helping me on some of the profiles)

So here we are. As of this writing, we’re one day away from the sixth annual CHIKARA King of Trios. It’s been a year and a half since the last show, so let’s get caught up.

Getting Caught Up…

Director of Fun Wink Vavasseur decided that after ten years of existence, CHIKARA is ready to have its own major singles title that everyone can compete for, rather than just those who qualify for the Young Lions Cup. To crown the Grand Champion, he put together the 12 Large Summit. Everyone on the roster would anonymously vote for someone to qualify. The twelve with the most votes would be split into two round robin tournaments. The winners of those tournaments would face off in the finals at the 2011 season finale.

Some believed that the finalists would be Eddie Kingston and Claudio Castagnoli, bringing everything full circle, but that wasn’t the case. Claudio’s downfall came from a slightly more surprising direction. One of the 12 Large participants was Sara Del Rey. Even though all of the BDK members were ordered to vote solely for Claudio, Sara somehow received two votes and Claudio received two less than he should have. It was little secret that Sara was getting more and more frustrated at the way Claudio and Ares were treating her and with Daizee Haze’s help, she was going to break out on her own. Claudio ended up striking against the two and put Haze on the shelf. Sara fought against the BDK and defeated various members in one-on-one matches, including Claudio in the 12 Large Summit. Claudio didn’t make the finals and ended up leaving CHIKARA so he could… play rugby and date hot Lithuanian women, I guess.

The BDK fell like dominos around this time. Ares was betrayed by a cowardly Tim Donst during a tag match where a loss meant having to give up the Eye of Tyr to UltraMantis Black and Hallowicked. Ares, along with Pinkie Sanchez, vanished from the company and after losing his lengthy feud to Green Ant, Tursas quietly retired from the business. For a little while, the BDK was just the lowly tag team of Donst and Jakob Hammermeier, but after Donst lost decisively in a match against Hallowicked and came to terms with not being the best Young Lions Cup holder in history, Donst endured crippling depression that led to the complete erasure of the BDK name.

UltraMantis Black freed Delirious from the Eye of Tyr’s spell and gave him back his free will. Delirious was less than grateful and has dedicated himself to ruining the next two years of UltraMantis’ life, just like how UltraMantis’ actions led to the ruin of two years of Delirious’ life. He’s since become more enigmatic and calm, quietly walking around in a hooded cloak while gaining the favor of the Batiri and Ophidian.

Eddie Kingston defeated Mike Quackenbush in the finals of the 12 Large Summit to become the first CHIKARA Grand Champion. Since then, he’s taken on all comers and has stood tall. This has been the one piece of good news for the company in terms of the title picture as a visiting Tadasuke won the Young Lions Cup in 2011 and went back to Japan with it. Similarly, the Young Bucks had won the Campeonatos de Parejas from FIST and now hold the belts in ROH territory. CHIKARA and ROH seem to be bordering on a feud, but it’s been more like a couple unrelated instances than a full-out war.

Speaking of war, a group calling themselves the GEKIDO had invaded CHIKARA in the form of evil versions of CHIKARA staples. Led by the mysterious 17, the invaders include the Shard, combatANT, deviANT and assailANT. Quackenbush was able to decipher that the evil copies of the Colony – otherwise known as the Swarm – are actually Jose and the two Franks, three failed Wrestle Factory Students who have been subtly namedropped for years. They couldn’t play nice and didn’t want to pay their dues, so they were taught how to wrestle by 17, master of the 17 forgotten holds. Since his debut, 17 broke Quack’s wrist and ended the careers of several other wrestlers. The main CHIKARA crew banded together and got a big, climactic win over the GEKIDO, but it seems at the cost of Mike Quackenbush’s sense of decency.

Going into King of Trios, Wink Vavasseur came up with a new idea called Chikarametrics. An idea that only appears to make sense to him, he uses the stats of each wrestler on the roster to figure out who would make the perfect teammate for them. A big chunk of the teams in this year’s tournament are the product of this idea and none of them are exactly happy about it. History has shown that teamwork is the key to survival on this stage no matter how talented each wrestler is on their own. They better learn to live with Wink’s decisions or they won’t last long at all.

The Format

Seems like the usual style of eight tournament matches the first night, four the second and three the last. There’s been no Rey De Voladores tournament announced, so that’s a bummer. The second night will feature Eddie Kingston defending the Grand Championship against Tadasuke. Will he be able to steal away that title to Japan as well? We’ll see.

Read the rest of this entry �

My friend Sloane Leong is putting on an art show at Floating World Comics in Portland. It’s yakuza movie-themed, which has been something near and dear to my heart probably ever since I saw Takeshi Kitano’s Brother for the first time. I was young, it was cheap, and I don’t think I’d ever heard of Beat Takeshi before I found that DVD in a BX. Here’s the trailer, if you’re curious:

It’s easy to see why I got into this stuff.

Sloane’s art show sounds pretty awesome. Here’s the official descrip of Battles Without Honor and Humanity:

This exhibition will be based loosely around yakuza/crime noir films by directors such as Akira Kurosawa, Takeshi “Beat” Kitano, Takeshi Miike, Kinji Fukasaku, Seijun Suzuki, Yukio Mishima, Sogo Ishii and Shinya Tsukamoto. As a genre, yakuza films are divided into two subsets: ninkyo-eiga or “chivarly films” featuring honorable outlaws caught between duty and compassion. Then there is jisturoku-eiga, the modern yakuza films which feature the stifling brutality of a life of crime. The artists and writers in this show will explore and pay homage to this powerful and unique genre.

Sounds pretty ill, right? Here’s some of the art from the show that I pulled off tumblr:

Yowza. Lotta good stuff, especially Sophia Foster-Dimino’s homage to Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel. (New People, a local theater, put on a Kurosawa film fest and I got to see that and a bunch of others on the big screen. It was awesome.) From left to right, that’s Sophia Foster-Dimino, Ryan Andrews, Roxie Vizcarra, Ron Wimberly, Jeremy Sorese, Ian Macewan, Hwei Lim, Hunter Heckroth, and Emma Rios. The big image at the top of the post is by Logan Faerber. There’s more art, of course, and you can buy a limited edition zine called Yakuza Papers at the show or online. It’s got 23 illustrations, twenty-eight pages, and it’s eight bucks, plus shipping. You should go for it. (You should also buy The Yakuza Papers, Vol. 1, because Bunta Sugawara is on that Mitchum/Mifune/Nakadai level of cooldude.)

Here’s some vital details:

WHO: Artwork and zines by Ralph Niese, Maritsa Patrinos, Joanna Kroatka, Alexis Ziritt, Andrew Maclean, Logan Faerber, Andrew Maclean, Robert Wilson IV, Sophia Foster-Dimino, Rebecca Mock, Roxie Vizcarra, D-Pi, Ian MacEwan, Zack Soto, Morgan Jeske, Hunter Heckroth, Emma Rios, Vlad Jean, Aluisio Santos, Frank Teran, Jeremy Sorese, Ryan Andrews, Hwei Lim, Amei Zhao, Kris Mukai, David Brothers, Stanley Lieber and M. Dominic
WHAT: Yakuza film inspired art exhibit
WHEN: Saturday, September 15th, 6-8pm; artwork on display until Sept. 30
WHERE: Floating World Comics, 400 NW Couch St.

and there will be a special movie, too!

WHAT: Screening of Seijun Suzuki’s masterpiece, Branded To Kill
WHEN: Saturday, September 15th, 9:30pm
WHERE: Hollywood Theater, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd.

So the show opens on Saturday, with a movie screening right after. Wish I could be there. It sounds like a good ti–wait a minute, David who is in the art show? David Brothers? Well dang.

Sloane likes to solicit text-only zines for her shows, and she was kind enough to let me grab a spot. So: I made my first zine and now I’m going to talk about it some because I’ve never done this before.

I didn’t go into it with any type of plan, really. I figured I’d write a story, print it, and ship it. It’s that easy, right? So I wrote a story that came in around 4500 words, maybe a little more, and fiddled with it until I mostly liked how it turned out. Then I turned it over to a few friends, asked what they thought, and fiddled with it some more. (I think they call that “editing.”)

After that, I had to figure out how to make a zine. I don’t know word one about zines, beyond the fact that they exist and had words in them and involved a lot of tedious folding and stapling. I emailed Liz Barker, who creates Strawberry Fields Whatever with Laura Jane Faulds and Jen May. (Liz and LJ made a set of Beatles-inspired zines that I picked up and greatly enjoyed last year.) Liz gave me some good advice and warned me about some pitfalls, and that was enough to get me prepared enough to go at it. I poked around online for tips, too, and I found a Word template that would help me with laying out the zine properly. I also hung out and talked with Katie Longua about folding and stapling things, since she self-publishes her comics (and other art). She let me borrow her long stapler, too, which was a life-saver. (I also asked a coworker a few dumb design questions, and she put me on game, too.)

I spent some time fiddling around with fonts and font sizes, trying to get the best-looking text to fit into the most amount of space. I ended picking Georgia, size 11, from a pool of Arial, Times New Roman, and Georgia. That left every page mostly full, and was easy on the eyes besides. I meant to indent each paragraph, and even worked up a mockup with indents, but botched that when I went to print. I did a single test print of the three typefaces and took a sheet of the cardstock cover color I wanted home with me to see how it looked. I printed the story on natural-colored paper, I think it was called. The Kinko’s lady asked if I was doing a resume, so maybe it was resume paper. Either way, it’s nice.

With all of that under my belt and in the back of my head, I was ready to go. I wanted a fancy cover originally, and reached out to a friend to see about designing one. Then I realized, wait. I’m broke and it would actually be kind of cool if every zine I printed was entirely my own. So why not do a cover myself? What could possibly go wrong?

I soon realized that I didn’t have a title, not a proper one, anyway. I like one-word titles, and the file name for the text was just “daisuke.txt.” “Daisuke.” would be cool, but I decided to go with something different: I’d just write the first sentence of the story on the cover and let it serve as a semi-title. I wanted the text to fit mostly evenly on the cover, semi-justified basically, and that meant I needed to know how to adjust my handwriting. I did a few tests with a leaky pen (the only pen I own!), none of which I particularly liked, but the bottom-right was moving in the right direction:

I moved on to Sharpie, and also began working out other front and back cover elements. The Sharpie is closer to how I write in real life than the pen, strangely. I also factored in that I would mess up, and wrote a few patch words so I could adjust the whole shebang in Photoshop:

Oh… covers shouldn’t have crooked text on them, huh? I grabbed a piece of paper and a mechanical pencil and ruled a page up right quick and rewrote everything. It ended up much better, I think. It’s not perfect, my handwriting will never be perfect, but it works.

The next step was getting it onto a computer so I could edit it and adjust a few things on the fly. Scanning is tedious. I wish I had an intern to do it every time I have to do it. Turns out the only thing more tedious than scanning is scanning paper and then having to chop out text. For some reason, I couldn’t just go to Levels or Curves or whatever and make the text dark black and the paper bright white, to ease the cutting. So I did it by hand, with the eraser, magic wand, and a 400% zoom. I eventually ended up with this, which has a transparent background:

After that, I was ready to print. I decided to go with plain type for the back cover. In part because that previous step was the tedious-est, but also because it felt like a better idea. Here’s how the front and back covers worked out after I printed:

One pitfall I didn’t expect were my own terrible math skills. I wanted to print 25 copies, in addition to my one proof I printed earlier. The story worked out to twelve folded pages. That means six unfolded, plus one for the cover. However, when planning, I for some reason counted folded pages when deciding to do 25 copies, and estimated that I’d be bringing home 300 pieces of paper to fold and staple. Ha ha ha, it was only 150. Anyway, here’s a rejected back cover copy attempt I scrawled with a ballpoint pen I found at work. You can tell when I decided it was a bad idea. I’m surprised I finished the word “and.”

At this point, I’ve got the cover, I’ve got the guts, I’ve got a stapler, and I’ve got no idea how long it’s going to take to put this thing together. Luckily, I’d been slacking on watching TV, so I just caught up on Louie, Black Dynamite, and Children’s Hospital while I folded. 25 doesn’t sound like a lot, but boy does it feel like a lot of work when you’re in the middle of it and half done.

Physically, it was an easygoing process, though I was definitely tired of it and bored by the time I hit the end. But it was nice to be distracted by tv while I worked. I usually write with music for that exact reason. It gives me something to ignore, or lets me ignore and get some distance from what I’m working on. I can work in quiet, but it’s easier with a little bit of familiar noise.

I managed to fold almost every one of them perfectly straight, too. Here’s a peek:

I had half an idea about using old polybags as a container, but the size was all wrong for that. So I figured I was about wrapped up, but there was one problem: they didn’t lay flat. For some reason, despite having an apartment full of books, I didn’t go for the easiest solution. Instead, I stacked them up under my laptop and Katsuya Terada’s Rakugaking (and Felipe Smith’s Peepo Choo apparently) overnight:

And then, the next day at work, I found out that they all would fit in a Priority Mail package and that was that.

For a long time, I wanted to get published, to have somebody cosign my talents and put my work out there for me. Then I grew up, made my own site, and lost interest in getting signed. Why do I need somebody else to tell me what I can do? And for that matter, why do I need to print something for it to feel legitimate? I don’t. So I didn’t.

I liked doing this, though. It’s not something I’d do too often, and it is super cool to be even a small part of a show with a bunch of awesome artists. I’ve discovered people whose style I like a lot, and people whose art I already dug are present and accounted for, too.

Hit the art show on Saturday, if you can, or swing by Floating World after to check out the art. I sent Sloane twenty zines, so… keep an eye out for them? Maybe?

Tupac Amaru Shakur was born on June 16, 1971 in New York and died on September 13, 1996 in Las Vegas. In-between, he represented Oakland, Los Angeles, and young black men (and to a lesser, but still present, extent, women) everywhere.

A lotta heroes came out of the civil rights movement in the ’60s and the period shortly after, when the movement flamed out and was replaced with… something else. The three most significant men for me were Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and Richard Pryor. I love Ali because he showed that you can stand unbowed in the face of racism and let your confidence do the talking for you. I love Malcolm because he showed the importance of being plain spoken, of being a regular guy, but being razor sharp enough to slice strips off anyone who tests you intellectually. I love Pryor because he demonstrated how corny and stupid racism is, how to laugh at it, and when to stop and say, “Y’all probably done forgot about me… but I ain’t gon’ never forget.”

What the three have in common is that each of them pushed back in their own ways. They held out their hand and said, “You don’t get to go past this point.”

Tupac is complicated. He’s contradictory, or inconsistent, maybe. He walked on both sides of the street, so to speak. You can see it in “THUG LIFE,” the word he had tattooed across his belly. For some, it’s an indicator of a fetishized attachment to the darker side of black culture. For others, it’s “The hate you give little infants fucks everyone.” Tupac expanded “nigga” to mean “Never ignorant, getting goals accomplished.” Contradictions that aren’t contradictions, really. People can be a lot of things at once without being inconsistent, I think, and Tupac definitely walks that line.

One vein that runs throughout Tupac’s work is the idea that we didn’t get here by accident. We made this world, or our parents did, and now we have to live in it. And the only way to live in it is to know your worth, be honest with yourself, and make your own way.

I can’t write a eulogy for Tupac. I don’t think I have it in me. But I want to share this video. It’s “I Ain’t Mad At Cha” off that All Eyez On Me album, and it’s my favorite Pac song for a number of reasons.

This is a remix, actually. The album version sounds fuller, obviously isn’t censored, and Tupac’s delivery is different. Faster, more urgent. The drums are more prominent. The last verse is different, too.

It’s sorta funny how the radio edit makes the song more uplifiting. “Motherfucker” to “young brother,” “get fucked down” to “loved down.” Food for thought. I prefer the original, honestly, because the third verse is much better on the album. But it’s a good song.

Tupac is generally referred to as a gangsta rapper, but that’s not right at all. It’s ignorant, it’s too small. It’s not the whole story. The thing about Tupac, the reason why he was a legend before and after he died, is that he rhymed about life. Living it, losing it, everything. And he did it from several different perspectives. He had something for everyone, from the bougiest conscious rap stan to the cat that only likes songs about hoes and Alizé.

“I Ain’t Mad At Cha” is about change, discomfort, and love. Three verses, and each one tackles a different type of change. The first is about a friend going straight, the second about a girl who stands by Tupac’s side, and the third is about Tupac himself.

I think this is my favorite song because it’s so melancholy, but positive. After reminiscing over how him and his boy used to be two niggas of the same kind, quick to holler at a hoochie with the same line, Tupac takes a look at his man’s new life and gives him a regretful blessing. There’s something I like a lot about “And I can’t even trip, ’cause I’m just laughin atcha/ You trying hard to maintain, then go ‘head/ ’cause I ain’t mad at cha.” That thing about “trying hard to maintain” tells me that Tupac knows how hard changing can be, but he respects the effort, even if it isn’t particularly for him at this point.

I get a lot of things out of Tupac. I love that he was able to be not just explicitly pro-black in his music, but commercially successful, too. It’s more rare than I’d like these days. David Banner and 9th Wonder dropped a positive album that hit with a thud and Kanye and Jaÿ-Z nodded in the direction of how screwed up life is on Watch the Throne, but the deepest thing anyone popular’s kicked recently is Kanye on “Hell of A Life”: “Tell me what I gotta do to be that guy/ She said her price’ll go down if she ever fuck a black guy/ Or do anal, or a gangbang, it’s kinda crazy it’s all considered the same thing.”

But here’s Tupac, making bank off painting a picture of the spectrum of black life, of American life. Striking that balance between thug thizzo and Black Power.

A lot of times, even though the idea of the best of all time is a juvenile idea, I feel like Tupac is the GOAT, or at least one of maybe two dudes (Rakim being the other) who deserves that title.

Rest in peace. Thank you.

King of Trios 2011: Night 3

Match 1
King of Trios Semifinals
The Osirian Portal (Amasis, Ophidian and Hieracon) vs. the Colony (Fire Ant, Soldier Ant and Green Ant)

Handshakes all around from the two trios. Green and Ophidian start it up with some opening grappling. Amasis and Soldier do some low key holds to each other. Hieracon and Fire continue the feeling out process. Fire is pulled into the Osirian Portal corner and Ophidian comes in to chop at him. The match starts to speed up and intensify between the two. Soldier and Green come in to fight Hieracon and Amasis with synchronized offense, leading to dual backdrops sending them to the outside. With the Portal nestled together outside, they’re prime targets for the Antapult. Only this time, the Portal guys grab Green and Soldier by the legs and drag them out before they can pull off the move. Ophidian puts Fire in the Cobra Clutch, but the ant is saved by Soldier doing a saluting forearm. All three Colony members get a shot at Ophidian, then move on to hitting Amasis with a bevy of corner assaults. He ends up falling into the corner and the Colony do a variation of FIST’s triple dropkick corner move.

They prepare for the Anthill on Hieracon, but Ophidian shoves them down, then follows Soldier out of the ring with a leaping corkscrew into a forearm. The Portal focus on Green, each getting their licks in quickly. Ophidian does a springboard senton and Fire breaks the pin. Fire tries fighting Ophidian and Amasis at the same time, but isn’t good enough to keep track of them both and it blows up in his face. They beat him down with teamwork and Hieracon ends it with a standing moonsault. Fire kicks out. Hieracon picks him up for a vertical suplex and Fire reverses it into a Stunner. The Portal switch it up and focus on beating down Soldier. They have him laid out in the middle of the ring and Ophidian and Amasis climb the ropes for the Osirian Sacrament. Fire and Green try to stop them, but it just causes them to direct their jumping attacks at these intruders instead of Soldier. Ultimately saved, Soldier is able to get up, grab Hieracon and put him down with a TKO. Hieracon kicks out, so Soldier locks on the CHIKARA Special. Amasis rushes in to make him break the hold. Ophidian gets on Amasis’ shoulders and performs a superplex on Soldier. Without missing a step, Hieracon picks him right up with this weird rolling Angle Slam thingy here.

Soldier kicks out. Green clotheslines both Amasis and Hieracon, then reminds everyone of his Viking-slamming might by bodyslamming them both.

Amasis does a rapid flurry of palm strikes on Green, bounces the ropes, Fire pulls the top down and Amasis flies out. Hieracon and Soldier both crawl into the empty ring and end up literally head-to-head. Hieracon’s offense gets a little on the sloppy side, but he’s able to reverse a TKO into a DDT and follow with a Shooting Star Press. Soldier kicks out. Hieracon goes back to the top, Soldier stands up and dropkicks him. He climbs to the top, puts Hieracon over his shoulders, does a saluting Inverted TKO off the top-rope and gets the pinfall. The Osirian Portal take the loss well and Amasis tells his friends straight up, “The rest is up to you.”

Read the rest of this entry �

I’ve been planning (loosely planning) this thing for a while now. It’s the 30th anniversary of The Hernandez Brothers’s Love & Rockets, and I was going to check them out and write about them from a beginner’s POV. Partly out of guilt, I think — I’ve never read any Love & Rockets, and my first Los Bros book was Sloth, which I found sort of weird and impenetrable at the time.

Almost right after I came up with this plan, Fantagraphics announced that they’d be doing digital versions. Awesome. I’m running on empty when it comes to space, and I don’t need 4 or 8 or 16 or 32 books or however many stinking up the spot and leading to my eventual death-by-falling-books. So I backburnered my plans for a couple months and waited.

The one thing I didn’t expect was that they’d put the digital books up for full retail. There’s just two right now, Heartbreak Soup and Maggie the Mechanic, both marked volume one. Other than figuring out what order to read these in, I’ve got to choose whether or not to pay full retail for a digital comic that I do not legally own and cannot download or to order Heartbreak Soup and Maggie the Mechanic off Amazon for twenty bucks (ten bucks cheaper!) instead and get rid of something else to find space. I’ll also have to spend time scanning those, which I think dissolves the value of the savings. I’ve also got to figure if spending 30 bucks to make 50 makes economic sense (it doesn’t, I don’t think, especially when you factor in time spent reading + writing) or if I should just go about my business and find something else to write about.

It’s not a big deal, but it’s kind of a weird (and disappointing) high-wire act. “I want to do this thing, but I can’t make it make sense for me to do. So do I buckle or do I leave?” I don’t know the answer yet.

King of Trios 2011: Night 2

You may have noticed that King of Trios 2011 has a major Transformers motif going on. There’s a reason for that. As it turns out, Mike Quackenbush is good friends with musician Stan Bush, best known as that guy from the Transformers: The Movie soundtrack. His more modernized take on his memorable song “the Touch” is the official theme to King of Trios 2011. As part of that, he got to do a live performance of it at the Fan Conclave.

Also at the Conclave, they had a contest to see who could bodyslam Tursas. Many tried, including both fans and wrestlers, but nobody could do it. All of the sudden, Green Ant marched out and challenged him while wearing American flag Zubaz pants and a fanny pack. The two got in a scuffle and Green Ant briefly held him up. Before he could do anything, Jakob clipped Green Ant’s knee and Tursas crushed him. The rest of the Colony ran into the ring and Tursas backed off… for now.

Match 1
Archibald Peck vs. ???

A little background on Archibald Peck. In the months leading up to King of Trios, CHIKARA started showing these videos on YouTube about how “the Band” is coming. The videos acted like it would be this major event with a split-second sample from the nWo theme song. As it turns out, the Band is the name for the former nWo guys in TNA. That led to speculation. Would CHIKARA really have a team of Kevin Nash, Scott Hall and Sean Waltman show up in King of Trios, let alone at all? Would that be a disaster of epic proportions? Well, that didn’t happen. The Band turned out to be bandleader Marchie Archie and his valet Veronica. If it was someone less entertaining, this would have fallen flat. Luckily, while Archie isn’t the real Band, he is the real deal.

He’s announced an open challenge against anyone in the back. He comes out to a marching band cover of “Any Way You Want it” by Journey and, much like the nWo, starts his promo with a survey. What month is it? April? No. It’s irrelevant because as long as Archie and Veronica are around, it’s always MARCH MADNESS! A taker to his challenge shows up in Colt Cabana. I wonder if he and Matt Classic crossed paths backstage. Archie challenges him to a duel by slapping him across the face with his glove. Colt removes his boot and does the same as to accept.

As he tries to put that boot back on, Archie puts him in a headlock. Archie keeps attempting shoulderblocks, but he bounces right off each time. Then in one instance, he stops himself and takes out Colt’s feet. After Colt falls, Archie goes around celebrating like he just won the lottery. Maybe twice as long. Colt gets up and knocks him over with another shoulder and does a mock celebration. Archie doesn’t take this too well.

The crowd chants at Colt, “SAY YOU’RE SORRY!” but he refuses. He spends the next few minutes making an absolute fool out of Archie, as if Archie needed the help. Archie gets some offense in there and knocks Colt down. He climbs to the top rope, sees Colt already standing and shouts at him to lay back down so he can do his finishing move. Colt can’t believe this and the ref asks him to just humor him. When Archie does jump off the top, Colt gets up and punches him in the stomach. Archie gets some fortune when he kick-shoves Colt so that he hits the corner post shoulder-first. He tries another top-rope diving headbutt and Colt moves out of the way. A minute later he tries yet again and this time lands on Colt’s boot. Colt gets up and goes on a rampage of clotheslines and elbows, knocking Archie down again and again. And again. And again. And again and again and again. Archie keeps getting back up only to be knocked down. Colt even stops putting effort into his strikes.

He prepares a Butterfly Suplex and Archie’s able to reverse it into a Playmaker. He makes another trip to the top rope and gets crotched. As he’s sitting there prone, Colt runs over, jumps and nails him with his posterior. He goes to the top for a superplex and Veronica starts distracting the ref. During this, Archie pulls out a baton and clocks Colt in the skull. Colt goes down, Archie FINALLY lands a diving headbutt and he wins the match.

Read the rest of this entry �

Last December, I started a draft for a post. The working title was “guts,” with the loose idea being that I would talk about or around a few different scenes that rip your guts out, emotionally. I went back and forth over it a few times and never came up with anything that I thought particularly worked or had the effect I wanted. But it stayed in the back of my head and I wanted to make it work.

I think I was inspired to do it by Frank Ocean’s “There Will Be Tears,” particularly the first verse:

My grandaddy was a player
Pretty boy in a pair of gators
See I met him later on
Think it was 1991
The only dad I’d ever know
But pretty soon he’d be gone too
Hide my face, hide my face
Can’t let ’em see me crying
‘Cause these boys didn’t have no fathers neither
And they weren’t crying
My friend said, “It wasn’t so bad
You can’t miss what you ain’t had”
Well I can

Which is maybe the roughest moment, emotionally, on Ocean’s Nostalgia,ULTRA.. The album’s full of these little moments of sharp, burning resonance. Some of them are warm, like when Ocean explores what guys do to trick girls into liking them on “Songs for Women.” Others are darker, and the darker ones stand out for me a little more. But they’re harder to describe, to explain why you like them, because that involves talking just a little bit more about yourself than I’d like.

I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know comics artist Dustin Harbin via Twitter over the past… year? Six months? I don’t know. Some amount of time that is shorter than five years and longer than two weeks. He’s a cool and funny dude, so it feels like I’ve known him longer. He’s been doing a strip called Boxes since June, beginning here, and I’ve greatly enjoyed it. Boxes is a lot of things, but the simplest way to put it is that it’s about how we perceive the passage of time — long, drawn out periods of time suddenly flashing to their end point, moments that stretch into infinity — and how we perform our personalities.

(It’s a pretty book, too, of course. Harbin sticks to a neat four-panel grid, two by two, and when he breaks the grid, it’s to great effect. He’s using watercolors on the background, I believe, which gives the comic a cool soft appearance. Harbin’s self-caricature is great, all ears and beard, and while it takes some of the sting out of the emotional content Harbin is writing about, it doesn’t decrease the power of the points he makes at all. It turns his comics musings into a scalpel, instead of a knife. [Maybe that only makes sense in my head, but I sure do mean it.])

Boxes is good. It’s harrowing. He talks about asking questions, instead of volunteering information, and how that’s a sign of (his, but really “our”) introversion and nervousness. He talks about feeling stagnant while his friends proceed apace. He talks about when life makes sense and when it stops making sense, and what we do to cope. He manages to do all of this while tying in physics (astrophysics? I am not a Scientist), Albert Einstein, and what it feels like to be a part of the comics industry.

I read Boxes and I get that weird bad/good feeling that you get from watching movies or reading books that make you cry. It’s sort of like the feeling I associate with horror movies, a “Bad things are about to happen” type of foreboding, but with the benefit of knowing there’s an answer at the end, or if it not an answer, confirmation that you aren’t alone. A creeping/comfortable feeling, maybe, or brutalized/validated.

The bad feelings that you get from the work, the lumps in your throat and identification you feel, hurt, but they also confirm that someone else is feeling what you feel.

Do you remember this bit from Casanova: Avaritia, by Gabriel Ba, Matt Fraction, Cris Peter, and Dustin Harbin? This is what I mean.

I can’t do this stuff. I’ve tried. I recently wrote a piece about not grieving over on my pal David Wolkin’s objects & history & feelings blog. It took a lot out of me, and a different kind of “a lot” than writing about race, which is something else that’s hard to do sometimes. The level of introspection required to not just identify your feelings, but track why you feel that way, come to an answer that doesn’t totally destroy you, and then put all of that in front of other people… that’s tough.

It’s tough because you essentially have to look at yourself and, instead of hiding it like we all do, put exactly what’s wrong with you on display for yourself and others. And that’s terrifying. I always feel like I’m held together with duct tape and spiteful stubbornness, and doing anything that would upset that balance would inevitably lead to my ruin. Isn’t that stupid? But it’s true.

The boxes that Harbin is talking about are what we hide behind. At one point, he says that he’s “trying to be real, to be actual, to be present and engaged… to populate my world with real input, rather than endless projections, status updates, possible tweets, and bullshit.”

And that is true. There are definitely several types of David, from pseudo-scholar 4thletter! to glib and annoying twitter David to whatever personality it is I put forth on tumblr David. They’re all a pose, to an extent. They’re all true, obviously, but they aren’t the True David, right? They’re what I choose to show you, in an attempt to make you like me and feel good about myself.

Boxes is good because Harbin is cutting through all that stuff and trying to be real on the page, as in his real life. So he’s frank and honest about himself and his emotions, and that scares me a little, but it also drew me in. I can relate to what Harbin’s going through and trying to work out. He’s able to do it in a much more public and compact way than I ever could, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t just a tiny bit jealous of that fact.

You should read Boxes. Harbin nails an ending that’s actually usually pretty tough for me to buy, which is awesome. If you can afford it, you should definitely pre-order Diary Comics 4, which includes Boxes and fifty more pages of comics. Diary Comics 4 is debuting at SPX this weekend, and he’ll be shipping out print copies after that.

Pick it up if you’re at the con, if you like comics like the ones I like.