28.2.11

If This Be Snackcakes, Part 1: The Top 5 Marvel Hostess Ads

If I could bring one aspect of '80s comics back to modern books, it was be the single-page Hostess ads. Actually running from the mid-seventies into the early eighties , the big two, Marvel and DC, and even some smaller houses like Harvey, had single page comics featuring their heroes stopping one-off supervillains or averting natural disasters using or in the name of delicious Hostess snack cakes or fruit pies. They also tended to be completely insane; even suspending enough disbelief to accept that snack cakes are the world's greatest crime deterrent these things make no sense. A group of extremists subdued by Fruit Pies is one thing, but then take into account that they're called the Phoomie Goonies (which manages to sound vaguely racist without actually meaning anything) and they attack a post office where Bruce Banner happens to be working as a mailman because why the fuck not.
You can find the ads collected on some sites like Seanbaby, who seems to have actually collected all of the Marvel/DC ads, and Tomorrow's Heroes, who have a great deal including the Harvey ads featuring Casper, Wendy et al (as well as a fine selection of other classic comic ads).
For the purposes of this post, I picked out what I think were the five strangest, most inexplicable ads Marvel had put out in their books. DC did had their share, including some featuring villains with names such as giant billboard monster Cooky La Moo and the dread Dr. Sorcery (who, with a monicker like that, I am shocked hasn't shown in up in one of Grant Morrison's nostalgia-heavy, reference-laden books yet). However, up against their famous Silver Age stories these almost felt par for the course. Marvel, on the other hand, had their share of strange tales and amazing fantasies but nothing quite like what was going down to shill for cupcakes.

Honorable Mention: Captain Marvel versus Nitro
As a Hostess ad, this was pretty tame. It is, however, one of the few that used an established villain to sell the goods. And not just any villain, but Nitro, the man who would go on to kill hundreds in the Stamford disaster and kick off Marvel's Civil War maxi-event. Imagine the tragedy that could have been averted (and the time that could have been saved) if the New Warriors had just happened to have a few Twinkies on hand that day.

The Secret Oscars: Triple Threat!

And the nominees for Best Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Robert Downey Jr. Or Javier Bardem are...


And the winner is...

25.2.11

Two and a Half Supermen

I read Charlie Sheen's open letter tonight, and was immediately struck at the wording. Besides (or because of) sounding absolutely insane, he came off less as an irate actor and more as...

Art by Frank Quitely, All-Star Superman #11 & #12

Comics reviews 2/23/11

This was a light week, and another one without any DC. As I said last week, I'll be the first to admit that between the big two I have a bit of a Marvel bias, but it's still weird to go two weeks without any DC titles whatsoever. I'm not sure if the ones I do read just have been getting pushed back or what, I feel like when I'm setting up my pull the week before (I use Comixology's PullList app, which while handy is a bit erratic with dates) I have DC titles on there but then come Wednesday they've been shuffled away somewhere further down the timestream. Additionally, my shop didn't have one book I wanted this week so until I'm free enough to skirt over to another store I'll just toss a title from last week I picked up.

Comics for 2/23:
Star Trek: Infestation #2 (of 2)
Atomic Robo: The Deadly Art Of Science #4 (of 5)
Power-Man and Iron Fist #2 (of 5)
X-Men #8
Amazing Spider-Man #655
Skullkickers #6 Jennifer Blood #1

23.2.11

All-Star Superman

All-Star Superman came out this week, and while the trailers didn't exactly fill with me confidence about the project, I still rushed out to grab a copy based solely on how much I loved the books. And so I'm a little surprised to say I ended up far happier with the movie than I expected. Telling the story of Superman's last acts before his death, I loved it but have a hard time separating it from the original source material, hopefully managed to look at it both as an adaptation and its own merits.


Substance, Style, Sucker Punch

While I'm writing a couple of other things, figured I'd post this in the meantime:


Sucker Punch is one of the movies I'm most looking forward to this year. Zack Snyder has proven time and time again that he understands how to make a movie look amazing. I don't think I've ever actively disliked any of his movies*, but that is heavily dependent on the fact that he bolsters a mediocre-to-good story with some mind-blowing visuals. Sucker Punch is the first of his movies, though, not being adapted from some pre-existing work, and this leaves me with pretty high hopes for it. Often, a film with an original concept, with origins a visually-oriented filmmaker is more personally close to, is substantially better than same filmmaker's adapted works (see also: Tim Burton). But, like I said, I am psyched to see this film, regardless of content, for how God Damned Beautiful it looks. This trailer, especially, puts its best foot forward. No dialogue, no inkling of plot, no conceivable idea of what's going on, just straight-up pretty things to look at. It may turn out to be style over substance, but dang, that is enough style to make up for it if it is. This is going to be the first film I've seen since this brave new age of 3D that I'm going to actively seek out in an IMAX theater. I want this thing to be presented to me as big and shiny and fine-looking as possible.

*I haven't seen the owl one, and really don't plan to any time soon. But, more to my point, I will admit that at least the trailer was visually stunning.

22.2.11

Because he kind of looks like a horse, you see.


Throw-away Doodle Number Tawoo. I am under no delusions that I'm the first to make this joke.

21.2.11

I can't think of a better title for this than 'Lost In Translation' and that is pissing me off


It's the simple things in life, and I've always been a fan of translation errors. There's the perennial Engrish.com, and Revenge of the Sith becomes almost tolerable when watched as  Star Wars: Backstroke Of The West. So I was especially ecstatic when my friend directed me to Convey This' Bad Translator, a site which will take any phrase and instantly bounce it through up to 56 languages of the Google Translator, which already isn't the most reliable tool at the best of times. And what comes out the other end is at best some delightful butchering of the original content or, more likely, complete gibberish leagues away from what you started with. So, for giggles, I decided to put a few comic-related phrases through to see what I got and post some of them here. Starting with Spidey's oft-repeated catchphrase:


We end up turning it into a sales pitch. Although, a decidedly not-inaccurate one. The skills and proportionate strength of a spider are certainly more advanced security features than you'd find on, say, some pepper spray or a taser, and Spider-Sense is probably far more functional in the case of a home invasion than ADT.

17.2.11

Comics reviews 2/16/11 - The dangers of high expectations

Last week I think was overwhelmingly positive for me, to the point that I had to bring in a book I disliked from another week just to bring in some negativity to balance it out. This week, not so much. Nothing I straight-up hated, but at the very least a lot of high expectations dashed away. Perhaps, then, I'm to blame for this disappointment? Hype and expectations can affect the enjoyment of something so much more than the actual content; wanting so much from something can turn something merely mediocre into garbage and by focusing on not getting what you expected one can become prone to miss the merit that is there. Conversely, not expecting very much from something can make the good in it that much more impactful, although this applies more to movies as I revel in bad movies while with comics I rarely am willing to shell out for something I don't expect to be good in the first place. Of course there are things that hype-proof, some things are just solidly good and, having managed to watch Batman Forever twice this month, I can safely say some things are just outright horrible.

Anyways, let's look at comics.


Comics for 2/16:
Transformers: Infestation #2 (of 2)
Mass Effect: Evolution #2 (of 4)
Fables #102
Silver Surfer #1
Thunderbolts #153
Spider-Girl #4
Amazing Spider-Man #654.1

14.2.11

Not so giant-sized

And then I drew Man-Thing as Cupid.

Valentime's Day

Tried to come up with something snarky for Valentine's Day but I'm really more apathetic about the whole thing so instead figured I'd write about one of my favorite "couples" who cropped up in pop culture in the past year: The Doctor and River Song from Doctor Who. Disclaimer first: This story is one that's still being told, and it could go in a way discounting everything we know at this point, especially with Moffat in charge. Also, if you're still catching on the new Who, there will be some spoilers in here.

10.2.11

Comics reviews 2/9/11 (and some 2/2)

Figured I'd get into the habit of talking about the books I'm picking up every week, but since this is the first week I'm getting back to it, I might throw a couple of honorable mentions from last week as well. Otherwise, I notice I pick up about ten books a week, so that should provide ample material to write about. The majority of those are going to be from the Big Two publishers, and we can further simplify that down to mostly Batman- and Spider-man-family titles. I do read my share of Image and Dark Horse and the smaller publishing houses, though, and on rare occasion I'll even venture to pick up an indie title. I'll concede there often time a lot better than the mass-produced stuff being churned out, but usually I wait until they've already been out and recommended to me to read them. Anyway, presented in no particular order aside from how they're piled in front of me, here's my pull this week and my write-ups on them beyond the cut:

2/9
Infestation: Star Trek #1 (of 2)
Power Man and Iron First #1
Batman and Robin #20
Batgirl #18
Knight & Squire #5 (of 6)
Atomic Robo: The Deadly Art of Science #3 (of 5)
BPRD: Hell On Earth: Gods #2 (of 3)
Carnage #3 (of 5)
Amazing Spider-Man #654


and from 2/2
Weird Worlds #2 (of 6)
Daomu #1
Witchfinder: Lost and Gone Forever #1 (of 5)
Amazing Spider-Man #653

Quick movie wrap-up: Biutiful and The Illusionist

I'll probably do a more in-depth write-up on a lot of the nominated films around the Academy Awards ceremony, but just wanted to jot down some thoughts on what I caught last night while they're still fresh in my mind.

Biuitiful (IMDb)
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, starring Javier Bardem, Maricel Álvarez, Guillermo Estrella

This was a powerful film to watch, but like its esteemed competition Black Swan, I was more impressed with the acting than the film itself. I could see Bardem giving Firth a run for his money in the Best Actor category (as could Franco and Eisenberg, to be honest, this is probably going to be a tight race). The movie itself was a bit erratic, but the grounding element was Bardem's Uxbal, continually making bad decisions for the right reasons, digging himself into a deeper mess in the name of making a better life for his children and the people around him. The film bounced from family drama with his children and his estranged wife to dealing with elements of the Barcelona underground, and we saw the effects of this life effecting essentially with everyone who was within one degree of separation from Uxbal himself. There was a supernatural element I have to concede I didn't quite understand and might have appreciated more if I did. It could have been a cultural thing I'm just not familiar with; at times Uxbal seemed to act as a medium and conduit to the recently deceased, but it was used so infrequently and without much of an explanation to me that I just mostly felt lost. Ignoring that, though, the more mundane elements made it a powerful, relatable story. Only major complaint I might have is the length, the pacing at times borders on glacial and I was left very aware that I was watching a 160-minute movie.

The Illusionist (IMDb)
Directed by Sylvain Chomet, starring Jean-Claude Donda, Eilidh Rankin

I had seen Chomet's other works so I was excited to finally see this one, but I wasn't expecting to like it as much as I did. A story of the eponymous, down-on-his luck parlor magician and a girl from a small town in Scotland, Alice, who believes his "magic" is real seemed fairly simple. Initially, I was just impressed with the animation, this is some of the most beautiful traditional animation I've ever seen. The character design is brilliant, there's a sense of depth to the scenes and later on the landscapes around Scotland are simply breath-taking. After the fairly downbeat Biutiful, I may have been a little emotionally weakened but I was immediately struck by how adorable this story was, even in the face of some dark scenes. The brashness and naivety of Alice, the immediate paternal rapport form between the two main characters comes across powerfully and naturally, all done without dialog, other than a few words of quick or mumbled French, English or Gaelic. The cast of supporting characters was equally as colorful and rounded out the film quite well. We see the Illusionist carry on with his act and various odd jobs to try and help Alice and maintain the childlike naivety that charms him so, but in the end the film is less about him and more about Alice and having to finally face growing up. The overall tone takes something of a downward shift near the end, but overall the film manages to hit all levels of emotional highs and lows and in the end you're left seeing how each character affects each other for better and worse.

8.2.11

Dead Space 2 review and musings

I can usually gauge how much I enjoyed a game not on its first play-through but how quickly I want to jump into a second. I have my handful of Fallout lives, burned through three play-throughs of Mass Effect 2 almost immediately after picking it up, I've rebought Brutal Legend after trading it in just to give it another go, and I couldn't even estimate how many times I've repeatedly gone over every level in Bayonetta at this point. I don't do this to top some leaderboard or hone skills or unlock every achievement (although the latter can often provide me with new goals and focuses). I do this because the game was fun, I actually enjoyed playing it (and I have an addictive personality) and I just want to keep playing. So with that in mind, I think it will give a clear indication of how I felt about Dead Space 2 when I finished the single player campaign today, and I was into the second chapter of a New Game+ before I could put it down. And on top of that, I had gone back to Dead Space 1 and finished my fourth play-through there about a week before picking up the sequel.



In the past few years, Dead Space was one of my favorite new IPs to pop up, somewhere between the Silent-Hill-In-Space I had originally hoped it to be and an excellent, fast-paced third-person shooter. Dead Space 2 didn't change a whole lot as far as gameplay; other than a smooth graphical upgrade, a bit of streamlining and an ever-so-slightly different button mapping I'd call the bulk of the game damn near identical. Playing the original right before this one, I slid into it fairly seamlessly, which is handy because I found I, and have heard others, died a lot in the first 5-30 seconds of the game, as it dumps you right into the action. And action is an operative word here. Where Dead Space 1 was heavier on the horror elements, isolation and atmosphere and jump-scares, 2 shifts the focus more to the action side of its spectrum. Indictitive of the shift, I noticed there seemed to be some balancing in combat. Stasis is made less powerful at slowing down the enemies, it doesn't last as long and noticeably the enemies themselves tend to be much, much faster than they had been in the past. Alternatively, the telekinesis beam is a much more powerful tool, with metal spikes and Necromorph arms in plentiful supply and the added mechanic of harpooning an enemy across a room adds both a fun and helpful alternative killing method when you find ammo in short supply. Additionally, melee now seems to actually be a viable method of taking down foes. You're able to knock back enemies if you get surrounded, and generally kick, punch and blast your way out of most altercations. The game becomes a focus on combat rather than survival.
I also found the game to be a lot more wry than it's predecessor which was a direct result of probably the most substantial change between games: Isaac Clarke himself. Originally he was a Silent Protagonist, locked in his RIG, only showing his face in the first and last minutes of the game and never saying a single word more complex than a grunt or scream. In the second game, it is substantially harder to shut him up short of letting the Necromorphs go to town on him, and spends a great deal of time taking his helmet off, including points where you kind of have to question why he'd bother and I'd swear there were even a couple of scenes where he mugged for the camera. Rather than just having characters tell him where to go and explain everything to him in detail, he is actively talking back and smarming the people telling him where to go and explaining everything to him. It's hard to say if this actively added or detracted from Clarke; he certainly had a bit more depth of character but getting to know him wasn't really an improvement, especially after growing attached to the less smartalecky, more stoic Clarke in the first game. However, it did work playing off the equally-smartalecky Ellie after she shows up in the latter half of the game.



I've heard a lot of praise for the story, although I'm not sure where it's coming from. I found it at least fairly standard, and the psychological elements were fun, leaving you sure that Isaac is insane but never sure exactly HOW insane he's become. It picks up three years after the events of the first game but for all intents and purposes you're coming in exactly where it had left off. With the majority of the world-building out of the way already it's a pretty standard fare, and dropping you right in the action it's probably not hard to pick up what's going on even if you haven't played the first game. And while the Marker and Unitology stuff probably makes less sense if you haven't been through it all already, even if you have it still probably doesn't leave you making all that much more sense in the end.
The other major change-up from the first game, and this one certainly an improvement, is the revamp to the Zero-G sections. While there was really nothing particularly wrong with the first game's handling of it, the old gameplay was completely scrapped and replaced with a flying mechanic that I THINK is akin to the jetpack-flying in Dark Void, which I never actually played but from I know of it I believe it was similar. It crops up every now and then and it's very fun to zip around and solve puzzles or avoid deathtraps as warranted, and the only problem I could find with it is the infrequency of the sections. At least, when they do pop up, most of them are short and over with quickly, and I could have gone for some longer segments utilizing the flying rather than just floating around, grabbing a power source, plugging it in, etc.



This leads in to the only complaint I really have about the game, is that it could have stood to shake things up a little. Aside from Zero-G and some steering-falling segments, it's pretty much all running-and-gunning and simple puzzle-solving through the 15 chapters. There's some variety in the foes you'll face, ranging from the swarms of childform-Necromorphs, the standard-issue Necromorph sieges you must hold off and the admittedly fun but quickly repetitive Stalker sections, in which galloping creatures ostensibly resembling malformed pachycephalosaurs (and sounding like Jurassic Park velociraptors to the point that getting through the first section of them unlocks a Clever Girl achievement) hop and hide around a maze of obstacles (typically large shipping crates) until they get a chance to charge at you, and briefly the game becomes more about strategy and timing than straight gunplay. The Brutes are back with a couple of other larger Necromorphs creating a few miniboss segments but the very concept of the miniboss implies there is a larger, grander boss fight which this game never really delivers. Even the final boss fight is primarily just another swarm you had to fend off. Alternatively, the first game had two massive boss fights, the Leviathan and the Hivemind, and even to a lesser extent the asteroid field and the Slug boss segments. The Leviathan remains one of my favorite boss fights of all time, an action set that was a masterpiece of lighting and design and just fun gameplay that I could write a lot more about than I probably should here, maybe some other time. Even the Hivemind was a wonderful Final Boss fight, transplanted into a modern game from a begone era, a giant monster with a repeating moveset to learn and glowing weak-points to shoot. It was the kind of boss fight I'm happy to build up to, to have as a cap on the game. It's not enough to ruin my enjoyment of the game, but the lack of variety really stood out to me. That could even be part of why I dived immediately into the second play-through, there was no break in the gameplay that particularly sated me, but I was happy to just keep rolling. And I'll gladly roll into the inevitable third* game in the series when that crops up, too, no matter how much or how little has changed.

I haven't said anything about the multiplayer because I have no interest in playing the multiplayer. Maybe if some friends are playing I'll hop on with them, but otherwise it's fairly useless to me.

Dead Space 2, developed by Visceral Games and published by EA Games. Images taken from Dead Space 2's official site.

*Accurately, it'd be, what, the fifth game? Plus two movies and a comic. This thing built up a sizable franchise quick.

2.2.11

Why we're here

So let's kick this off with a mission statement: I have no idea what the f@#k* I'm doing.

That is to say, I'm not starting this with a particular theme or focus. As you might glean from the title, I'm probably going to talk a lot about comics; between trying to get more serious with my illustration work and just generally what media I'm consuming at the moment it always comes back to comics for me. But more than anything I just kind of wanted to write, write anything about anything. I had my Twitter account (accounts, now) as kind of a go-to mind-dump, but I find it generally leads me to write less because of it, forcing my entire thoughts on things into one or two 140-character blocks which gets my opinion Out There but also negates my ability, or at least the need, to expand on those thoughts. I'll still drop random observations and one-liners on the Twitter feed but starting this as a chance to get my thoughts out long-form and stretch my mind-legs a little more often than I've been allowing myself lately.

Concerning the name of the blog, it comes from my ongoing battle against the hipster ideals. If you know me, you know I rag on hipsters pretty often but amazingly I've never been called out on the fact that I'm at least half-hipster myself. Eventually landed on the idea that I'm less a non-hipster and more an anti-hipster, comparable to the anti-hero epithet dropped on characters in that murky, undefined area between hero and villain, and while I'm not the biggest Punisher fan per se, Frank Castle tends to be cast as the anti-hero poster boy (and if there are two words that describe me best, it's murky and undefined). I don't want to make this the focus of the blog but I do want to establish the mindset where I'm coming from.

So I'll fill this space up with mini-essays about what's on my mind, what's pissing me off, reviews of what I've read/seen/played, art posts; all in the name of honing my skills and emptying my head rather than any actual interest in getting my opinion out there. This isn't now a fully-formed idea, even calling it "half-cocked" is probably giving it too much credit, but I've nothing to do here now but jump in and maybe it will take shape over time. Maybe it'll fall by the wayside, or maybe I have before me a solid block of blog I can slowly carve into my snarky, opinionated word-David.


*Oh, I will most definitely swear on here. Just sometimes the censoring makes for a nice aesthetic touch.