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-->January 8, 2005
Eric Burns-White: A day of rest, light coughing.
This was another day of... well, next to nothing. Clearly, I needed the downtime. Tomorrow is a heavy writing day, both for here and other bits I'm behind on and bringing sobbing down from those who deserve better from me.
But I wanted at least to say hi, and say the unqualified astounding things about Issue 3 on City of Heroes, hand in hand with the Crappy Council (and they're not improving with time, I'm afraid -- their coolest new characters are the "Galaxy" figures... and they look almost exactly like Destro from G.I. Joe, only without his keen fashion sense.
Yes, I'm serious.
However, first off, the new zone, Stigia Island (which I think I just misspelled, but I'm not going to look it up because I'm... well, crap) is the best new zone of the game, so far. It's got all the joys of the Hollows without the impending sense of doom clinging to them. And they have lots and lots of new maps -- especially the cargo ship map, which just rocks.
Secondly... they did an amazing lighting engine upgrade. The sewers have always been somewhat funny -- these well lit sewers where villains like to hang out. Now they're full of shadows with shadow effects as you pass under the light sources. They're creepy, and that's perfect. We did the Dr. Vahzilok mission today -- a mission I've done about nine times before now -- and this is the first time it scared the crap out of me. Ambience is everything, and they've nailed it.
And when you go into the room where the Doctor is hanging around in his meat suit? Oh my Fucking God. Someone deserves bonus pay for this Issue.
So, City of Heroes remains an astoundingly cool game, and this free update remains phenomenal. Except for the Council. Fucking Council.
(You know, if they'd retconned the 5th Column into something cool, I'd have no problem. But they did things like take the Steel Valkyrie drones -- what a great name. The Steel Valkyrie -- and renamed them the "Zenith Hoverbot." The Zenith Fucking Hoverbot. It sounds like a brand of floating television! But I digress.)
On the other hand, the Council does have a Volcano Fortress. And it's amazing. I just wish it weren't being leased by such a pack of lamers.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:05 PM | Comments (0)
-->January 7, 2005
Eric Burns-White: The Pussification of the 5th Column
So, as you may have guessed, it's been a busy week down here at Casa Websnark. We got back from vacation and had... well, you know. Stuff. To do. Stuff to do. You know how it is. To give you some idea of just how busy... not only has my snarking been light all week, but I only got around to hooking up my Windows computer and booting up City of Heroes today.
"So what," you ask?
So... there's a new Issue of content out, Mister Man. Whole new areas! Whole new archetypes I'm never actually going to get to play! (Bastards.) Whole new sound effects and shifts of functionality!
And the 5th Column -- one of the premier bad guy teams -- has been wholly remade into "The Council."
We knew this was coming. There's been debate about it for months. You see... the 5th Column were Nazis. That's right, Nazis. Evil Germans who believed the Reich would rise again. They employed batteries of Helmeted Ninjas (because nothing says "Nazi" like the martial arts), guys with grenade launchers and Unteroffizers (I couldn't care less that I misspelled that) with names like Col. Wagner spreading their message of hate through the city, kidnapping and recruiting and blowing shit up. At higher levels, they also turned into werewolves and vampires and had Nazi Death Robots.
And it was cool as Hell... because it's seriously fun to beat up Nazis. You don't need any justification for it. You don't even have to think about it. A contact would give you a mission where the 5th Column were invading an office park to steal a valuable painting with some kind of encoded clue on it. You immediately got on your supergroup channel. "Bonedancer! Ms. Mercury! Azure Ampere! Nazi Art Thieves!" And a cheer would go up, and the Galaxy Circle would strike forth, assembling and entering and beating the living hell out of those Nazi bastards. Even just running along the streets in Steel Canyon, hearing them giving recruitment speeches, was enough reason to pause and start hammering them with electricity and radiation blasts. Because damn it, they were Nazis, and Superheroes fight Nazis! It's what they do! Nazis are evil and spread hate, and so we punch them in the head and call them "Ratzis" and make bad puns like "Don't cause a Fuhrer, Hans!" while you did it.
This is a core element of comic books. It has been since the actual Second World War. Captain America and the Invaders explicitly fought Nazis. The Justice Society spent a good amount of time fighting Nazis. The retconned "All Star Squadron" was a flying brigade of Nazi hunters. Nazis held on into the last part of the century, always ready to unleash a new steam powered Nazi robot on our heroes, who would defeat it and beat the fascists down for Justice -- and it felt good, because they were evil, rotten Nazis!
In the Issue 2 update, we also got a new low level 5th Column Base Map, which was a warehouse painted up in 5th Column Regalia, with a speaker system that intoned in German as you stormed the base. It was a wonderful piece of atmosphere as you and your low level hero chums beat the snot out of the 5th Column. Even the name was cool in an evil way. The Fifth Column. It sounded like a potboiler from the 40's, evoking thoughts of insurgents and spies and bunds going out and doing evil.
Well.
Cryptic Studios is preparing to launch City of Heroes in Europe. Including Germany. And now... the Fifth Column has been retconned. Literally retconned. There's apparently something about time travel involved or the like, so that for the most part, the 5th Column never existed (or was tiny and inconsequential), and now they've been replaced by The Council.
The Council.
First off, the name is lame as Hell. It makes it sound like you're fighting a corrupt pack of City Aldermen. And, running through a low level Council mission earlier today, that's pretty much exactly what they are, or so it seems. It's all the same missions, apparently, only now the Nazi elements have been taken out and replaced with... well... you remember all those soldiers in Cobra? The ones who didn't get action figures of their own -- they're the anonymous soldiers who sprayed energy fire at their enemies, had no personalities, and pretty much existed to eject at the last millisecond when G.I. Joe blew their planes up with missiles?
Yeah. That seems to be the entirety of the Council. Only Cobra's Generic Soldiers got to shout "COBRA," which honestly seems like more personality than these doinks have.
The reason they claimed the change happened was because of their overall plotline bible. They claimed that the bible just naturally called for this to happen, and the fact that they're launching a German version of the game had nothing to do with it.
This, of course, is transparent bullshit. They spent significant time, money and effort creating skins and textures and ambience for low level 5th Column bases in Issue 2, which then had to be largely redone for Issue 3. Plus they had to rewrite every 5th Column mission to make sure all the Nazi was pulled out of them. And when they first did this, they also changed the dedication plaques extolling the hero Atlas's fight against Nazis at the start of WWII to nonNazi stuff as well, until people freaked. They then claimed it was an error.
The real reason all this is happening is a German law that makes the display of Nazi regalia and the positive portrayal of Nazis illegal. Only... the 5th Column didn't display Nazi Regalia (their symbol was a kind of Skull done in Soviet Realism) and they weren't positively portrayed. Quite the opposite. You were supposed to beat the Hell out of them! They were evil! There was nothing good about them! They existed to have their helmeted heads crushed before being carted off to jail, sterilized by nuclear radiation.
The overall experience of City of Heroes has been cheapened by this. It feels... craven, somehow. It feels like the people at Cryptic didn't have the guts to keep the cool villains they had, and instead had to replace them with lame villains just to make sure they didn't get angry phone calls. This, I would add, despite that fact that there are tons of video games that do feature Nazis and do get sold and played in Germany. Including things like Castle Wolfenstein and Battlefield 1942. Games where you can play as the Germans if you wish.
Will this cause me to drop City of Heroes? Nah. There's not a huge amount in this latest issue for me (though I have a character in the range of the new zone, so there's that at least), but I still loves me the Superhero action. But I kind of wish they'd just cut the 5th Column out entirely, instead of forcing a lameass sea change onto them to make them as inoffensive as humanly possible. The visceral pleasure of destroying virtual fascism and racism and anti-semitism has been replaced with the dubious pleasure of beating up well armed janitors.
When Captain America fights the Red Skull, there's something epic going on. It's America and Freedom against Nazism and Tyranny on a grand scale. When Captain America fights Hydra, you hope there's a few pictures here and there of his current love interest in scanty clothing, to keep your interest. City of Heroes gave up the Red Skull to get themselves the dorks Hydra don't return phone calls to. And that's just sad.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:20 PM | Comments (18)
-->Eric Burns-White: Now this is a tradition I can get behind.
(From Achewood. Click on the thumbnail for full sized motivational message!)
I don't spend enough time talking about Achewood. That's not really surprising, mind. I don't spend enough time talking about 80 or 90 percent of the stuff I need to talk about. But Achewood's on that list. And the pity of it is, there's nothing else quite like it, so it needs to be talked about.
Today's Achewood is 'straighter' than most. And it's funny, which is a bonus. But it's also a good exercise in characterization. On the one hand, there's Ray -- who's exactly the sort of person who'd inaugurate "Fuck You Friday." When Ray and Roast Beef began their inexorable domination of Achewood (in the old days, it was far more about Philippe, Cornelius Bear, Todd the Squirrel and the like), I wasn't very fond of Ray. But Ray grows on you. He gets under your skin. You figure out what's bluster and what's genuine, and you learn to appreciate him. Also, he went to Hell for a while, and met a blues man there. That's Ray for you.
But there's also a momentary glimpse into Pat's psyche. I'm reminded of the South Park Christmas episode where the boys had to travel to Canada and got stuck essentially in the Wizard of Oz. Their nemesis was Scott. And, in the words of their Canadian Guide. "Oh no! That's Scott! He's a dick!" And that was justification enough. "Watch out for Scott! He's a dick!" Well, that's Pat in a nutshell. He typically ends up on the run from the law after shooting a friend of his. (Mr. Bear got it last time.) He's demanding and shrill and annoying. But they accept him. That's just Pat. He's a dick.
And there's a little bit of vicarious wish fulfillment going on, too. I wish I had the nerve to tell telemarketers "no, fuck you." And, since it's Fuck You Friday, maybe I will.
Anyway. This strip may not be typical Achewood, but then they're never typical Achewood, are they? So go read the strip. You'll like it.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:25 AM | Comments (7)
-->January 6, 2005
Eric Burns-White: The Triumphal and the Surreal
I'm sitting at home, with no inclination to snark whatsoever. My cat is sleeping on my stomach, content as can be, and I'm watching an old (50's or 60's era) game show that Tivo snagged for me. It's called The Name is the Same, and the celebrity guest of the night just came out.
It's Salvador Dali.
Salvador Dali. On a game show. That's shilling Swanson Chicken. Weirdass mustache and all. The game show's premise is they have nobodies with famous names come on, and a panel of guests have to guess what that famous name is. If the panel fails, they have to make out personal checks in the amount of $25 apiece to the contestant.
But this is the real Dali, on as their celebrity guest, and playing their game where he's thinking of a famous name he "wishes" to be... only this is Dali, so before that he's being... well, Dali, describing his new painting, "One Soft Watch Exploding in Eight Hundred Eighty-Eight Pieces." Which might be Soft Watch Exploding, though that was the early fifties so I think not. Or it might be something entirely different. I'm not up on Dali.
And yet, years after his death, Dali's managed to make my life momentarily surreal.
Anyhow, because there's no impetus to do any real cultural commentary, I'm going to cut and paste a post from my Livejournal. I'm doing this because... well, because hours later, I'm still just plain proud. And besides, it's something to do.
Hopefully, tomorrow there will be snarking aplenty (or even the finishing of the Story Shortbread list). In the meantime, if it's as snowy where you are as it is here, be careful.
So, for those who didn't follow this journal last year -- because, well, most of you had never heard of me -- I had a gastric bypass last March. I was... large. What the jokes would call "Oh my god, he's coming right at us." And I was dying -- sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but the end was near.I've lost a lot of weight since then, and I'm still losing. I now climb flights of stairs for daily exercise, when before I had to take an elevator to go one floor, for example. But there was one area I was still terrified in.
Frankly, ice scares the hell out of me.
When I was at my top weight, slipping and falling on the ice was horrible. First, there was the fall itself -- a jarring impact that caused every joint to hurt and scared me on the way down that I'd break many, many bones. But that was just the start. You see, after that, I had to get back up.
And, if I fell where there was nothing to brace on, I couldn't.
I literally couldn't go from lying on the ground to standing up. I could get my legs under me, but they then couldn't dead-lift me back into standing position. So I'd have to either get help, or crawl to a tree or staircase or something.
It was humiliating. I remember once, last winter... I fell in the middle of the quad, on a snowy day. There was hidden ice, you see. It was the beginning of winter break, so there was no one on campus right then. And I couldn't stand. Finally, I started the long crawl across the quad back to the academic building so I could get up.
A teacher -- a nice guy -- saw me, realized something was wrong, and ran out to help me. And that was great of him, and excruciatingly embarrassing. I was helpless. I felt worthless. I felt like Darwin was standing over me, waiting with his chainsaw and smirking. I didn't deserve to live.
Well. That was then. I've lost over a hundred and twenty pounds since then. I now climb stairs willingly.
But I'm still scared to death of the ice.
Today it's snowing, and it was freezing rain before. And I was walking -- you guessed it -- across the quad. There were students everywhere, though. Which would actually be worse, if you think about it.
Naturally, I fell.
The first thing I thought as I hit the ground was oh Shit!
The second thing I thought, about a second later, was wait... that didn't hurt.
It didn't. At all. So, I shifted position, got my legs under me, thought "well, I guess we find out now, don't we?"
And stood.
I didn't strain. I didn't fight. I just popped right up, picked up the bag I'd been carrying, and kept on my way.
As I got close to the school, a student fell in front of me. I helped him up, asking if he was all right.
"I'm fine," he said, grinning and shaking his head. "Just embarrassed."
"Don't worry about it," I said. "I did the same thing a couple of minutes ago."
Take that, Darwin.
And if that's too feel good happy/overly personal bloggish for you... bear in mind that on the show, Dali just answered "no" when asked if Robert Q. Lewis, the host, was a person. "He is an Object!" he asserted. And then mumbled in French.
Either way, that's pretty cool. And he just drove Gene Rayburn off the stage with incoherence. Now that's entertainment.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:36 PM | Comments (5)
-->January 5, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Dude. It has the little pump action thing to extrude cresent shaped 'doh.' How cool is that?
So, in addition to the money I collected and donated in full from the Websnark Auction, I donated money of my own to Child's Play. In my own case, I went in and bought stuff off one of the hospital's gift lists (the auction money I donated straight to them).
Well, I must have screwed one of the donations up, because I just got a Big Barrel O' Play-doh from Amazon.com.
Well, I'm going back onto Amazon.com to order another Big Barrel O' Play-doh for the hospital. But in the meantime, I'm sitting in my office with a barrel full of little barrels of Play-doh. And it makes no sense at all to send it back to Amazon. Not for the small amount of money this cost.
Which means I now own Play-doh. Pink, green, blue, red, white, and yellow Play-doh. Plus a huge number of molds, collanders, extruders and rollers to work with my Play-doh.
Dude. I own Play-doh.
Sadly, I have to wait until the end of work to head home and play with it. But its going to rock! Dude! Play-doh!
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:13 PM | Comments (13)
-->Eric Burns-White: The Twelfth Commandment
All right. This is going into unusual territory for me. It's going into where the religious crosses over into the political, and it's going into a couple of hot button issues. You need to know this going into it. I promise that later on, I'll post something about a comic strip, and if you'd like to wait for that without reading this, I'll be perfectly fine with it.
Still here? Coolness. Let's talk.
I make no bones about my political ethos. I'm a liberal. I'm not an extremist, but I advocate things that moderates don't, so I pretty much have to call myself "liberal" and be done with it. I'm proud of this fact.
You may intuit, from that admission, my opinions and beliefs when it comes to gay and lesbian civil rights, gay marriage, the "gay agenda," and the "religious right agenda." Let's stipulate those before I move forward. I am a liberal. You know how I feel about the above, at least in general. I'm very unlikely to disappoint you.
Further, as I told you back when I was talking about Christmas in schools, I'm not a Christian. That's an important part of this essay too.
Got all that? Good.
In the last few days, I've seen a number of people -- including a number of my friends -- launch into tirades against what they see as the latest horrific tirade from "the Fundamentalists." Namely, the conflation of the Tsunami and all those killed with some kind of divine justice against the Sodomites. They're horrified. "This is why I despise Christianity," some of them say. "This is the kind of ignorant hatred these people spew! How can so many Americans be fooled by this bullshit?"
And I'm here as a cheerful Liberal Non-Christian to say to all of you reacting in this way a simple, pleasant message:
Know your opposition.
Notice I don't say "enemy." Any belief structure that necessitates making millions of Americans my "enemy" isn't one I agree with even slightly. But there are issues I am in fundamental opposition with those Americans over, and there are millions of Americans who agree with me as well.
But the tirades that you despise aren't coming from the Evangelical Christian Community. They're not.
The tirades mostly come from the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) of Topeka, Kansas. Their website is the cheerfully named God Hates Fags, if you care to have a look at the bile-filled hatefest for yourself. They describe themselves as a Primitive Baptist Church. However, their belief structure is mostly based on a particularly strict form of Calvinism. God has decided who will be saved and who will not. Those who will be saved will enter into grace and act perfectly before they die -- perfection meaning "agree with the WBC's interpretation of the Bible in all ways and act accordingly" in this case. They will have no choice in this matter -- God will select them and there will be nothing else they can do.
Please note -- this is the polar opposite of Evangelist Christianity. To the Evangelists and Charismatic Christians, it is all about Free Will and choice. Sinners are born Sinners, but can choose to repent, declare their faith in Jesus Christ, and enter into Grace. God Loves Everyone, and Everyone can be Saved, but you have to come to Him -- He doesn't do the work for you.
To the WBC, all things are expressions of the Divine Will. And, as an Apocalyptic Cult, they feel that Divine Will is very unhappy with we the sinners. And when God gets unhappy, he destroys cities and floods the world and kills pretty much everyone and most of them get cast into Hell. And that's a good thing. By definition, because God Wills It. To them, God explicitly does not love everyone. He hates gays and lesbians -- and Jews and Muslims and Catholics and any other church they consider to be apostate. This explicitly includes, but is not limited to, the Episcopalians, the Lutherans, the Catholics, the United Church of Christ, the Assemblies of God, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Southern Baptists, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Unitarians, and of course all Jews who don't accept Jesus as the Messiah. They single out Billy Graham in particular as a dangerous heretic and false prophet.
The WBC has offered up loud and public thanks for the Tsunami, because they believe that it killed thousands of Americans and Swedes (they hate Sweden) and is yet another sign of Divine Wrath against the Sodomites and their Sympathizers. They have offered up thanks and praise for the 9/11 attacks for the same reason. They have openly expressed their hope that God destroys the entire North American Continent as punishment for our sinful ways, and they have expressed out and out joy that prominent gays who have died (especially those murdered) are now burning in Hell without release. Their God has no room for Mercy -- there is nothing anyone could have done to prevent this. Had he wanted to save Matthew Shephard's soul (they've been actively trying to raise a monument commemorating Shephard -- who was a teenaged homosexual brutally killed by gaybashers -- as burning in Hell, and they picketed his funeral with God Hates Fags placards) God would have reached out, caused Matthew to renounce homosexuality, and preach the gospel as they see it. They also believe God made Matthew gay, as God made all things, and chose not to save him.
They take joy in God's Hatred and Wrath, joy in the death he spreads (including, explicitly, children -- since they were being raised to do evil anyway), and joy in the coming End Times that will see America and all nations like her destroyed by a vengeful hand. They preach their hate-spewed gospel because the Bible says they must, but they don't believe it will do any good -- God will save those he wants to, and besides, it's too late for us.
So yes, I despise these hateful, tortured bastards. I despise anyone who takes pleasure in the death of one person, much less the death of thousands upon thousands. I wouldn't share a meal with any one of them. And if it turns out they're right and their God is the true one, I'd rather go to Hell. Eternal torment is preferable to a Divinity of Hatred and Selfishness, and I do not accept any deity capable of creating the Heavens and Earth could also be capable of that much bile and intentional, impersonal horror.
But I never, ever confuse these horrible people with Evangelical Christians. The Religious Right has an agenda I can't stand, but their churches don't advocate the destruction of America, joy in the death of tens of thousands, and joy in the torment of sinners. I know more than one Christian who believes in Exclusive Salvation -- the doctrine that only through Christ's grace and the acceptance of Him as your Savior can you enter the Kingdom of Heaven -- and none of them like the thought of their friends and even acquaintences burning in Hell. They would give anything to help you avoid that fate. The WBC will just literally dance on your grave.
So when we the Liberals point to the WBC and say "you see? This is what those bastard Christians want to do to us! This is what they stand for!" the Religious Right -- the real, honest to God Fundamentalist Christians stare at us and say "you honestly have no idea what our religion is about, do you?" They give up on trying to have a meaningful dialogue about the issues dividing this country, because we're not trying to understand -- we're lumping them in with the worst of their breed. It's exactly the same as the days when all left-leaning people were tarred as Stalinists -- not even just Communists, but followers of the Butchers of Budapest. It's exactly the same as when environmentalists are looped in with radical ecoterrorists. It's exactly the same as when the Gay and Lesbian Movement is conflated with NAMBLA.
And it wasn't true in those cases and this isn't true now. And by conflating the Religious Right with Antiamerican Apocalyptic Death Cults, we're ensuring that no decent communication can take place between the left and the right in this country. We're ensuring that Christians fully believe we aren't willing to distinguish between decent people who have different moral values than we do and monsters. And right now? That hurts Liberals more than Christians. Take another look at who won the last election if you don't believe me. And when we go on the offensive against all of Christianity because of the radical, hateful ethos of one tiny splinter of horrible people acting in unChristian ways nominally in the name of Jesus, we put all of Christianity on the defensive. That's just plain stupid.
You should all know the Ten Commandments (even if you're not a believer. This is a part of your civilization). Robert Heinlein informed us that the Eleventh Commandment was "Thou shalt not get caught." Well, I think the Twelfth Commandment is "Know Thy Opposition."
We have fundamental issues before us right now. We have battles that are crucial -- that must be fought. If, like me, you are a Liberal (at least on these issues) or even a Moderate who leans left on civil rights, you have to know what the positions the Right (especially the Religious Right) hold on Abortion, on Gay Rights, on the Separation of Church and State. You have to know the nuances of those issues, and know where the battle lines have to be drawn. And you have to know that your Opponents are not your Enemies -- they are Americans you disagree with on a number of issues.
And we can't do any of that if we're drawn into tarring them all with the WBC's brush. Trust me, the Religious Right doesn't want the WBC on their side of the debate any more than we do. But if we force them to include them, they will... and it will lead to ever worsening conditions for the Left.
And, if you're on the Right in these debates -- if you disagree with my stances... know too the difference between the Liberals and the Extremists. Know the difference between proponents of Choice and Gay Civil Rights and the extreme left nutjobs and proponents of pedophilia. And know that while we oppose many of the things you believe in, we are not your enemy either... and if you cast us as your enemies and lump us all into one great Leftist Horde... it will lead to ever worsening conditions for the Right, as well.
Know thy Opposition, and know thy Battlefield, and don't get distracted by the depraved rantings of a few horrible people. The issues are too important, and America needs us to be at our best in this debate.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:38 PM | Comments (24)
-->January 4, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Looks like she's married, mm?
(From The Ice Queen, a Trespasser's Mystery. Click on the thumbnail for the subscription required full sized renderings! Or, click on the link for today's free installment!)
Many people know Joe Zabel for his critical work, most particularly as the driving force behind The Webcomics Examiner, which is unquestionably the most ambitious and academic journal devoted to the burgeoning field of webcomics and webcartooning, currently.
What people sometimes forget is Zabel is also a webcartoonist. In fact, he works in 3D modeling (I don't want to say "Poser," because if he can make Poser do the stuff he does, I for one don't want to know it, given how horrendous my own Poser work has been), creating rendered work that's just about the best I've ever seen applied to sequential art.
Well, we're fortunate, because he's just begun a new mystery over on Modern Tales. Which means if you're reading this the same day I wrote it, you can actually see the first "real" entry even if you're not a subscriber. (Yesterday he posted the evocative and beautiful cover art to Ice Queen.)
Now, I recommend a Modern Tales subscription regardless. Because, dude. Narbonic. And No Stereotypes. And now The Ice Queen. And if this mystery proves to be as detailed as today's art suggests, you're going to want to go back and review the clues as they were laid out.
But for today, just look at the art. Just look at it. It's not quite Industrial Light and Magic/Gollum, but neither is it trying to be -- it works within the slightly artificial constraints of modeling to produce its effects, and it blends models to photographs (I assume) very very well. The details on his models are phenomenal, regardless, and his use of light and shadow sublime.
We don't yet know the merits of The Ice Queen's story, but it's looking good to begin with. So have a look. And get ready to follow the mystery.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:12 PM | Comments (3)
-->Eric Burns-White: Sad news.
Will Eisner has passed on. He had quadruple bypass surgery, and while he was expected to come through that, there's a host of problems that can arise when you have that extensive a surgery. One of them was enough, though we don't have details yet.
Which is almost odd, in a morning already made surreal by his passing. Will Eisner was all about the details.
There's always been an understanding -- at least among the cognoscenti -- that comic strips and cartoon art was really illustration, and worthy of something more than dismissal as "the funny pages." But the same can't be said for comic books. It's not that they were always seen as "kid's stuff." They weren't. Back in the heydey of the publishing world, when Superman and Action Comics sold millions of copies, they sold them to adults just as often as children. But there was still a sense that comic books weren't serious. They weren't art.
But Will Eisner knew different. And we know different now, because of him.
Eisner's storytelling techniques were seminal. The Spirit was more than an action pulp -- it was a dynamic study in how to tell a story in sequence. And it was exciting, but also poignant, and brought the funny in good and appropriate measure. The term "sequential art" is credited to Eisner. The first graphic novel was Eisner's, and there was nary a spandex clad gladiator to be found in it.
Most of all, Eisner was a teacher. He did more than produce remarkable art. He used that art to inspire and education a new generation of artists. Face it, when Jules Feiffer, Wallace Wood and Scott McCloud all cite Eisner's profound influence, you know you're looking at the headwaters.
Eisner also believed in the sequential form, as a tool as well as an art form. In his seminal Comics and Sequential Art, he covered comics as entertainment and comics as instruction -- and for many years he illustrated training manuals. He believed history and science and basic how to's could all be explained in a clear and entertaining fashion through comics.
The comics industry will mourn, of course. They loved Will Eisner. In a land of Stan Lees and Jack Kirbys and Julie Schwartzes -- beloved giants of comic art -- it was Will Eisner whose name became the highest award in the comics. And cartoonists will mourn -- Eisner was no stranger to the newspaper pages, and one of his characters still appears in Will Eisner's JOHN LAW over on Modern Tales -- that's right, the webcartoonists get to count just a little piece of Eisner among them as well. And his spirit runs through any number of webcomics.
It's odd, almost. I wasn't personally a Spirit fan. I liked it fine, but it didn't change my life the way so many others did. But I loved Eisner's technique and form and belief in the academic discipline of comics, so I feel this death. And I know many cartoonists who feel bereft now. It's like the uncle who taught you everything you knew has passed on, and you feel like he had so much left to say.
Perhaps so. But one thing is clear. So long as artists lay out stories in panels, where one panel leads to the next with a sense of drama and story... so long as men in suits fight for women in dresses who are no damn good for them... and so long as bristol board accepts india ink from a brush, Will Eisner is going to be a part of the comics.
That's the real Spirit in the comics, and he belongs to us all now.
Thank you, sir.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:54 AM | Comments (2)
-->January 3, 2005
Eric Burns-White: It's like a shout out, only it's not
One of David Letterman's running jokes of the night is his love of the word "Snarky."
Do you have any idea how weird it is to hear that from David Letterman, over and over and over? It's not like the word is mine in any way -- it's just I don't expect him to use it.
Snarky. It's just fun to say.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:58 PM | Comments (2)
-->Eric Burns-White: You know, this is the kind of trinity I can get behind.
(From Cheshire Grin. Click on the thumbnail for full sized Hosenpheffer!)
So, I needed time away today. It was the last day home with my folks (I'm heading back to New Hampshire tomorrow, and back to the glories of work on Wednesday), and there were Things Afoot, so I'm running late today. And I guess I'm okay with that. I own my lack of posting in this the new year.
But I'll make up for it by talking about Cheshire Grin, which crossed my radar not too long ago.
Cheshire Grin's fun. The art is distinctive, the humor is humorous, the sad bits are sad. And this was my favorite of the strips I've seen of it so far. (Well, that and the dragonslaying enchanted poison dog. I've been in games where those would have been par for the course.) This one isn't really representative -- it's just funny, and that's what I'm in the mood for.
The thing is... the strip takes the ground Dork Tower and Knights of the Dinner Table (and even the tabletop RPG sections of PvP) and treats it less as gagaday and more as a celebration of what it means to be what they call a "tabletop role player" these days. (Don't get me started on the theft of our hobby's name). I've been where these guys have been, way too often. I recognize everyone in this strip. And I've gone through periods where I, like Bill the GM, decided it was time to "put childish things aside" and cut off my nose to spite my face.
This is a sweet, sometimes dark, and funny strip. And right now they're doing a LARP thing that's both fun and beautifully colored. So, read it.
That's what I've got for today. Enjoy.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:11 PM | Comments (5)
-->January 2, 2005
Eric Burns-White: A music thing
Can someone tell me why the incredible, complex, musical, sophisticated and somewhat angry Nellie McKay is considered "Pop?" Pop these days makes me think of Britney Spears and her demon brood. McKay doesn't seem to fall into that so much as "twenty-five years from now we will fucking revere her as a genius in an age of vapidity."
Or am I missing something?
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:53 PM | Comments (12)
-->Eric Burns-White: Thoughts on the future of Websnark... in a technical sense
So, there's some technical stuff that's always bothered me about Movable Type. Key among that stuff is the trouble so many commenters have with Typekey, which seems very much like a beta service pressed into general release. (I'm sorry -- I'm as big a proponent of Firefox as the next person, but if your browser based comment authentication service won't work with Internet Explorer it's a problem.) So I'm thinking about switching to WordPress. Wordpress is free, and it's robust, and looks like it has excellent features, and it looks like it has ways to block comment spam that doesn't involve blocking... well, everyone else.
Yeah, it means I'm out the money I spent on Movable Type, but so what? MT did what I asked, and if I've outgrown it, that's okay. And sure, I'll need to learn how to tweak Wordpress to get all my stuff. And processing things properly so that all my old linked thumbnails work will be grunt work, but that's okay.
The problem is... it doesn't seem to have an engine to upload and thumbnail images, and that's a dealbreaker.
Yeah, I could manually thumbnail, but I'm not going to. It would take too long. So does manual uploading, for that matter. I suppose I could use MT to upload, and then post in Wordpress, but that's downright stupid and I won't do it.
I see there's a thumbnailing plugin out there (probably based on Imagemagick). But it needs someone else to upload things via FTP first. Which might be workable and might not be. But it brings to mind exactly what I would like in this functionality.
I would like, beyond anything else, to be able to input the URL of an image, have it find it, give me the dimensions of the image, and let me set the dimensions of the thumbnail. It then would save the thumbnail and let me put in the link to the page the original came from, and stick that into a post for me to write. Preferably with settings that would let me decide alignment, hspace and the like.
That would make my life tremendously easier, and it's vastly beyond my ability to code. And yet, I suspect it wouldn't be hard to code.
I wonder if there's anyone out there I could pay to do this thing for me. Thoughts?
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 4:30 PM | Comments (9)
-->Eric Burns-White: It amazes me just how good a Flip Dr. Pill Mell makes.
(From Narbonic. Click on the thumbnail for full sized Oh! Um! Oh! (if you have a subscription to Modern Tales. Otherwise, click on the link for today's Narbonic!)
One of the seminal comic strips in history -- the strip people like me always bring up, whether you want to hear about it or not, dang it -- is Little Nemo in Slumberland by Windsor McKay. Possessed of a sense of the surreal, a sense of wonder, and a terrific sense of humor, McKay's strip brought a real sense of dream logic -- which is to say, no logic at all -- to Nemo's adventures as he slept, with certain guideposts along the way. (A sign or indicator that reads "Wake Up" to end the strip with Nemo, possessing epic bedhead, sitting up after awakening with some pithy comment, for example.)
Well, Shaenon Garrity -- a person I have unhealthy adoration for at the quietest of times -- has captured the pure essence of McKay far far far better than any homage I've ever seen, with today's strip. That includes Neil Gaiman's take on Little Nemo in "The Doll's House" run of Sandman (which while brilliant sacrificed the essence of Little Nemo to make a chilling point about abuse -- and raised a dual symbolism for Jed's capture), and any number of affectionate turns. Garrity understands McKay, and what made Nemo work -- particularly what made the strips work as standalone pieces, even when McKay had continuity.
Through this all -- the Princess pining for her playmate, Flip/Mell's amused taunting, Dave rushing to join his playmate and running into himself in dreams, the awakening scene at the end -- there is that same sense of the surreal, the imagination unleashed. This is a dream. If you don't think these are hard, look at any given television script that includes a dream sequence (all right, excepting Sheridan's dream on Babylon 5, though that was more of a vision), and see how utterly literal they are. The worst one I've ever seen was on an episode of Enterprise, because it absolutely captured what doesn't work in scriptwriter dreams. It featured one of the characters having a meeting with a crewmember who had died, realizing it was a dream, and having a wholly logical and rational conversation before the obligatory "waking up before being forced to admit what they need to admit to make their tortured psyche all better" ending.
That's not how dreams go. Not even lucid ones. That was just a plot point, clumsily written. In seeing it done well here, both in terms of dream logic and in terms of a tribute to Windsor McKay, I find myself just plain happy. Especially when you consider that Dave's conversation with himself is a plot point that does reveal something key about Dave, his feelings towards his work and Helen, and even his Time Travel adventures.
And that's not bad for a Sunday morning, now is it?
EDIT: Looking at it again, Mell looks more like Flip and Dr. Pill kind of mashed together. The hat is all Dr. Pill, but the attitude is all Flip. The cigar is something of a toss up.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:29 AM | Comments (20)
