Choosing your Private Parts (in Videa Games)

I wrote a new article at Medium Difficulty about the choice of gender in video games. READ BY CLICKING.

My partner in crime actually wrote something too. Her article is about genre and Skullgirls, the alt pin up girl fighting game.

Seeing Other People

I'm writing over at Medium Difficulty. It's a site about video games.

My first article about the relationship between role playing and game playing with Mass Effect 2 as the focal point.

My second article about why a market without used video games isn't the end of the frickin' world.

--CPW

Suicide Squad #2

Two pieces of prerequisite information. 1) I realize I am way behind in discussing some of these comics, and my plan is to not go trudging through them. You don't want to read my opinions on comics that came out a month ago, and I don't want to dedicate myself to religiously writing a post on each issue. All this to say, I typically wouldn't bother discussing Suicide Squad #2 since the book's immediate relevance has passed. 2) I am only writing about #2 now, because I actually only read it last night. I haven't been too thrilled about getting on to the second issue since I read the first, but last night I was waiting for dinner and I found it lost in my stack of comics. I don't read them all at once and so sometimes things can, by chance, simply be forgotten. Suicide Squad #2 is a case.

But I chose to write about Suicide Squad #2 because it is fucking terrible.

Now, #1 wasn't so great. It was predictable and fairly uninteresting. What it did well was 3 basic things. 1) The premise is good. Super villains as part of a team to handle covert operations that are morally grey. 2) Harley Quinn is in it. People like her for a reason, and it's beyond the titillation that began around Arkham Asylum. 3) The shark guy was awesome. He speaks like a crazy carnivorous cave person and he chomps shit right off.

But, while it has those three things down, it couldn't even manage to pull those 3 off without a caveat for each. 1') I'm not sure #1 actually communicates the comic's premise clearly or efficiently. It's not complex and so maybe that's why the first issue isn't complete nonsense. The cover could suffice to communicate the premise if you are familiar with any of the context surrounding the book. 2') Harley Quinn is awful. She is dressed like an inflatable clown fuck doll and has the character of one. She says weird things and got dumped by Joker. Not much of the intelligent, deranged, but strong female villain that people actually like. 3') There is simply not enough shark guy. The comic HONESTLY spends times on the other "characters" rather than just the shark guy a'chompin all day.

Never mind 3 in that list.

Okay, so let's finally (FINALLY) talk about #2. I got a lot of problems with this book, and now you're gonna hear about it!

1) Harley Quinn is still awful. She is a ditz with a hammer. She swoons about how she likes a man that takes charge. She spouts unfunny one liners. The way she is depicted as showing off her smarts is her saying, hey, I'm smart you know, I used to be a psychologist. Remember creative writing 101, the show don't tell thing?

2) I have been struggling to think of the word I want to use to describe the art. While somewhat pretentious, I feel like the word I want to use is uninspired. The art just looks so bleh. It is functional in that it forms shapes and colours that your brain can decode into some semblance of meaning, but never does it really go beyond that. There is almost an absence of joy or fun in the art. The crowds of deformed robot zombies attack the teen girl squad and they are just kind of a bore of mutated fleshy shapes. Much in the same way that Frankenstein's tableaux of monstrosity just fades into a generic blob of what your brain just reads as "threat". EXCITING!

Also, the cover is like the same as the month before, just the characters are reorganized. Issue #3 also looks the same. I swear this is a budget title.

3) So the super senshi are dropped out of a plane in the end of #1 and they're told to kill everything in the stadium. Wow, you say, are they really there to kill a stadium full of people? That is certainly morally complicated. That complexity, oh so thankfully, is simplified immediately when we find out the entire stadium is infected with robo-zombie-ness. So yeah, killing monsters is killing monsters. They'd kill the world? Yes. No chance to fix them? Not really up for debate when there is a stadium waiting to kill the world. Fine and simple, torch the whole damn thing.

4) And this one really irks me. This book is trying SO HARD for you to think it is earning that T+ rating. But it's like the pastor's wife dressing in a leather jacket and talking to you about the dangers of drugs. The sheer obvious effort exerted to be edgy just sucks any sort of genuine moral complexity right out of the book. At the end of the book, Deadshot shoots a dude that was tasked with shocking every dead body to make sure it was good 'n dead so that whatever organization they are working for (I can't remember) can use him as a cover story. Oh and the evil monster they fight is pregnant! And one of the members is constantly fighting with Deadshot about how everything he does is sooooo wrong. Whatever, go back to choir practice.

It comes down to this, Suicide Squad is just poorly written. The dialogue is stilted and the narrative is contrived and painfully transparent. Then, the art can't pull the excess weight because it is simply there to classify this book as a comic. Maybe if the writing wasn't so bad I wouldn't mind the lame artwork, and maybe if the artwork was stunning I would just ignore the text. But no, we get, I think, my least favourite comic of the new 52.

SAVING GRACE TIME: So they find the woman they are looking for and she has the package they need to secure. Of course she is the carrier and her child the package, but when they confront her she starts to transform into a super hideous tentacle robo-zombie. <ASIDE> Why always with tentacles? Are we all afraid, actually afraid, of Chthulu? Why not like claws and shit? Animal Man can make things creepy without tentacles. </ASIDE> So the team starts to fight the mass of tentacles and shit and one mean big tentacle grabs Harley. Then it's about to squeeze her to death when shark guy BITES THE MONSTER'S HEAD OFF, and then spits it out. PATOOIEE! I think all villains should be defeated this way. NOM NOM NOM. Hilarious.

Don't bother though. It's not worth it.

Batman #2 and #3

Remember: Batman #1 was okay. When I wrote about Batman initially I was a little underwhelmed with the mystery revealed at the end of the book. I thought it obvious that Nightwing didn't murder that guy.

And in #2 the evidence that Nightwing murdered the victim is hastily dismissed.

While this dismissal is a nice character moment that shows Nightwing's closeness with Batman and him acknowledging Batman's anal retentiveness about detective-ing, it also works to explain the trajectory of the series thus far since the first issue.

Batman #2 starts out with Bruce Wayne falling to his death, pushed by a highly skilled assassin, from a tower his grandfather constructed in the early days of Gotham. As like every other narrative does, the book then goes back to show how it all started. What it does differently than #1 though, is actually make me interested in what happens in the story.

Honestly, Batman #2 and #3 have me hooked. Apparently there has been a secret society in Gotham since its earliest days, known as the Owls or something, and they control Gotham. The details aren't clear yet obviously, but I'd expect the run of the mill control of the government, cops, and crime. That's how these things work. Didn't you see The Skulls 3!?

There is also this nursery rhyme in Gotham that warns about the Owls and scares young children, which Batman of course dismisses as just a nursery rhyme. But oh ho ho, when an assassin in an Owl costume throws him from the top floor of a tower, through unbreakable glass might I add, he changes his tune. I know I've been through the whole thing with the Jolly Rancher gang in my city. Watch out for Watermelon.

Oh yeah, Batman is a badass.

Batman #3 then has Batman all detectin' and shit, uncovering some information about these Owl people. Much of what he learns about them connects to various historical facets of Gotham City. While I am aware that Gotham is a fictional city, subject to the history that is conjured by the needs of a writer, it is somewhat interesting to have a threat tied so much to the history of a major city. Might be the humanities major in me, but these faux-historical connections ground the mystery in a sense of realism. Gotham is a place with history, and the society of Owls is bound and integral to that history. Indeed the act of solving this mystery is akin to historical research, recontextualizing the historical narrative of Gotham City. But with like dudes dressed as flying nocturnal animals and have bloody knife fights.

Oh yeah, they seem to want Bruce Wayne dead because of the new Gotham project that is meant to rejuvenate Gotham. So obviously they are an allegory for conservative politics. Har.

Batman #3 also has one of my favourite covers of the DCnU so far. It also is part of the white cover trend I've noticed. I'll keep you posted on this unreported conspiracy.

There's suddenly a lot I like about this series. It is well written for the most part, with jokes and good dialogue, the mystery is intriguing, and the threat palpable. Definitely a step up from the first book. I highly recommend.

What Happened

If you've noticed I haven't posted in a few weeks, you could possibly be correct. I haven't got bored of comics or writing about them though. My computer just died.

M was working on some homework and went to save a conference application when the computer just froze. I was still half asleep so I reassured her that the computer freezes all the time and it's no big deal, and that it would unfreeze in 2 or 3 minutes. Worse case scenario, I said, it will blue screen of death and you'll just have to restart it. That's like a 1 in 30 chance though.

It blue screened.

M restarted the computer like I had done plenty of times before and she encountered a problem: "No operating system found".

I guess my computer had a bit of an existential crisis and it just couldn't go on as things were. I did keep a good number of philosophical and literary theory articles on there, any combination of which could have easily broken one's soul. Be it a metaphorical computer soul or no.

So long story short, the computer works again. Works being a generous application of the word given the various other idiosyncrasies that plague the computer that lives beyond its time.I couldn't find my Windows 7 product key though, so I'm running Linux Mint, which has provided me with a whole new set of computer challenges. But the takeaway here is that the I have a computer again and I can resume posting.

Just in time too because tomorrow is release day. I have some lingering #2s to pick up and my first set of #3s. Aside from my computer being down it has been some busy times, so I'm looking forward to dropping another fiscally questionable amount of cash on a trip to the shop tomorrow, and then spending the next week catching up on how Superman and Batman have been doing. I bet it has been awkwardly sexual.

If I had to guess, you know.

Frankenstein #2

I know that's not the whole title but I think Shade as an acronym is silly. Getting that right out of the way.

Spoilers as well.

In my last post I heaped praise on Lemire's Animal Man #2 like potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner. Well, now I'm on a diet. Frankenstein is, um, not good.

Essentially: Frankenstein discovers a bunch of kids and that other kids apparently were used as sacrifices. Frank bitch slaps the priest across the cellar and then mutters a one-liner about his wrath not discriminating by age. Ho-hum.

Then the crew inside the church walks out into the street where they were just moments ago last issue, and suddenly the street is clear of monsters. Well, living monsters. The vampire and werewolf dudes are standing over a massacre of vaguely drawn monsters. Apparently, they cleared out what was a huge effin deal last month in no time. Maybe in the time between issues they were still killing all the monsters that had overrun the town. Whatever.

So Father Time has figured out where the monsters are coming from so they head over. He picks the fish lady as his companion to go see the portal under the lake. In some lackluster storytelling, fish lady jumps into the water and narrates some stock narration intro to the effect of "while I should have been thinking about the mission I could only remember blah blah blah."

She gives us her back story that includes a dead child (sad) and then the resulting work she's done for SHADE. The first monster-making project actually made monsters (whoda thunk) and so they have to ditch them into a different dimension (hm, sounds suspiciously familiar). Later she used actual human adults for the existing team test and so that is the genesis of the team (yay now I know).

Of course we find out more about the monster portal and that the town has been superstitiously sacrificing children to it, and that the monsters they already fought were scouts, and the rest of the planet is set to invade.

Someone then makes the stupidest conclusion ever that they need to take the fight to them as a result. Or, you know, you could figure out a way to close the fucking portal to an evil monster filled planet set on invading your own. But no, they pull some dimensional ship out of someone's ass then they head through.

Science scanners tell them the planet's surface is organic but when they get through it's full of monsters. Oh no! And Frankenstein's "wife" is standing atop a pile of these monsters and she quips "about time". And scene.

Now, I realize I summarized here and summary is not criticism, or so M keeps telling her students, but I wanted to go through the plot to point out how ridiculous this story is. I don't require a serious or lofty story, but I do want one that makes sense, and this story is a disaster.

Worse, it really does seem like those monsters that fish lady made in our shoehorned narrative flashback have a good shot at being the monster planet. Which would be super lame. And super convenient. And, worse, very poorly foreshadowed. I hope I'm wrong.

I also joked before about the vaguely drawn monsters, but the art in this book is a little underwhelming. Where Animal Man has a weird art style that compliments the genre it is working in, Frankenstein's art style just seems lazy and fails to illustrate this convoluted world they are constructing. This is a real campy series, and I dig the premise, but give me some details and consistency in the art. When characters are not in focus they are drawn like after thoughts, and the whole village/planet of monsters loses all impact because they look like a mass of monster masses. Nothing can be too scary or threatening because they just look like body shaped squiggles with some teeth and eyes. Save me.

So then my final complaint is one I wrote about in my impressions of Frankenstein #1, and that is Frankenstein's lack of character. This guy is supposed to be the main character of a series that is inherently campy. The werewolf dude makes a joke with Frankenstein and he's all like, hrrm, I don't have time for humour. Of course, by the end he does make a joke, and he says that he is learning to adapt. He better learn to adapt pretty damn quick and make that a defining characteristic, because a campy comic with a main character without a strong sense of irony is a comic that falls as flat as the last two issues. If you're going to rip off Hell Boy, at least rip off the reason people like Hell Boy.

I still like the mummy. If nothing else, they should make the comic about him. Cuuuurse...

Animal Man #2

Spoilers!

Before I began to read the new 52 I really didn't get the idea of a horror comic. My mind went to Tales from the Crypt, and then, obviously, to the Tales of the Crypt cartoon from my childhood. Not exactly the stuff of nightmares. I couldn't understand how a comic could be scary.

Then I read Animal Man and now I get it.

Animal Man isn't a scary per se, rather it's just kind of fucked up.

The last page reveal from #1 was a pretty haunting image. It made me begin to reconsider my conception of horror comics. Animal Man #2, however, completes the argument. I see how a comic work within the horror genre. It might not be nails into the chair suspenseful, but it is disturbing. And Animal Man is quite disturbing.

Where Animal Man #1 had a single horrifying depiction, #2 has long list or terrors.

• Feeding the skeleton cat milk because it is hungry.
• Maxine morphing the neighbour's arm into a chicken leg.
• The gigantic tumors on the hippos.
• Some monsters that appear to have open sores for skin.
• The possessed human forms with their swollen cheeks.

And this is without addressing the cover, which is pretty messed up in and of itself. A mass of fleshy gore with a single eye that doesn't stare at the fleeing Animal Man and Little Wing, but straight off the page at the reader.

Forget all the monsters and the possible evil that is entering the world, the most disturbing part of this issue is when Maxine turns the neighbour's arm into a chicken leg. While all the other things are also disturbing, their origins are in some form of threat or evil, presumably Sethe, but this incident is born out of a little girl's fear for her family. She sees this man hurting her brother and so she protects him--a perfectly reasonable and human reaction, but the manifestation of this aid is terrifying. And Maxine isn't disturbed by what she has done to him either. She has to be convinced to change his arm back.

Such horror coming from a place of innocence is truly unsettling, especially as it hints at the cruelty that is bound to that innocence.

Final thought for #2: at first I was a little put off by the art in Animal Man. Even when I was looking at preview pages I assumed they were still in draft form. The art style is not at all what I think of when I think comics and it really took me out of the first issue.

I have come to see, however, how this style really lends itself to the horror genre. It at once keeps "reality" surreal and the fantastical elements like the dream world or the deformations less obviously fantastical.

By destabilizing how we see the real world of the comic, we don't recognize the horrific elements as foreign to that world. Which is sort of creepy and impressive.

And that is what I love about Animal Man. Everything really does work together to create a whole. Instead of separate words and pictures, Animal Man seems to be intentionally constructed as a comic. Real darn impressive.

Also, did you notice when Maxine is gearing up for the journey she has glasses on that kind of look like the old Animal Man goggles? Nice touch, Little Wing.