« December 4, 2005 - December 10, 2005 | Main | December 18, 2005 - December 24, 2005 »
December 17, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Oh, and Merry Christmas, while we're at it.
(From Todd and Penguin. Click on the thumbnail for full sized... oh crap...)
It's really our own fault, you know.
Todd and Penguin has always been a comic strip about an innocent, loving, cookie-obsessed childlike penguin, and the guy who owns/raises him -- a guy who absolutely has the worst life ever.
Suddenly, things started going well for Todd. He finally got a job he liked. He finally had the woman he loved. They were starting a family. They enjoyed hearing the child move, and feeling the kick. To quote Lily Tomlin's The Search For Intelligent Life in the Universe, the bonding thing happened.
A few days ago, Todd was exhausted. He came home. His wife wanted him to go shopping. He begged off. Frustrated, she went without him. "You get coal!" she shouted back, over his shoulder.
Merry Christmas, Todd. You get coal.
I once described Todd and Penguin as the perfect blend of bitter and sweet. Lately, the sweet's been predominant. We were overdue for a bitter pill. And from here, Todd's blackness can rise back up. And of course, we don't know that Holly will survive. In any other comic strip, it would be certain. In this one, maybe she will, and maybe she won't.
And if she doesn't? Todd gets to remember that he refused to go with her, and maybe could have prevented the accident.
And if she does? Holly gets to remember that Todd refused to go with her, and maybe could have prevented the accident.
Todd and Penguin's humor is soft, but not always gentle.
You get coal, Todd. You get coal.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 6:52 PM | Comments (72)
Eric Burns-White: Of course, we don't know how much collateral damage is done by a shaft of plasma ripping into the middle of a highly populated city, but let's not be morbid....
(From Schlock Mercenary. Click on the thumbnail for full sized Boom Today!)
Okay, so here's the thing. You occasionally see a piece of Story embedded in a comic which, though Story-oriented, brings the Funny so consistently that it manages to slip really horrible moments in where you aren't looking. This is despite a track record for the comic that shows the artist is more than capable of stark, almost apocalyptic moments.
Petey, the sometimes psychotic, sometimes cheerful AI presence from another galaxy that had worked with, employed and sometimes pulled the strings of Tagon's Toughs has, as part of saving the galaxy from ultimate destruction, joined a fleetmind with thousands of other AIs. This has created a superintelligence self-described as Godlike, and we've been seeing that Fleetmind begin to have impact on the universe at large. Not too long ago, we watched the Fleetmind act to save the planet Qlaviql from a Tohdfraug invasion. Last week, we saw Petey move on the Qlaviqlese themselves, accusing their leaders of leaving the defense of Qlaviql to chance without rebuilding their defenses despite the continued presence of enemies. He gave them ten minutes to mount a successful defense against a single warship.
The ten minutes is up, and the warship has fired -- on that specific building where those politicians lay. And now they're very, very dead in a rain of plasma.
Petey said that he and the aptly named Petard Brigade of Robots would "die alongside them," as it would be "amoral" to do otherwise, having invited this horror upon the populace. Only, that's not strictly speaking true, is it? Oh, the robot bodies of Petey and the Petard Brigade died, but their thoughts and minds, merged in with the Fleetmind, will continue on. The Tricameral Assembly of Qlaviql will not.
On the one hand, it's perhaps the most surgical of wars ever performed. The politicians who failed in their duty are the ones who have died (though not the only ones, of course. One must assume aides, support staff, janitors, cafeteria workers and the like were in the Assembly building as well.) The civilian population has not suffered. Only the politicians. This is the ultimate expression of power projection abroad -- the exercising of military might to affect change. In this case, the change has been to the entire leadership of a world. No doubt to one with a better understanding planetary defense needs, which is what Petey wanted in the first place.
On the other hand, this was an act of cold, premeditated murder. The justification is simple -- had they acted the way Petey and the Fleetmind thought they should act, they could have saved themselves. Instead, in Petey's own words, they chose to feed their populace and rebuild their domestic infrastructure instead of their defenses (in order to be reelected). Petey has decided that the Qlaviqlese don't have the right to decide for themselves, wisely or unwisely, who should lead their world and what their priorities should be.
Howard Tayler has done something remarkable here. We know that Petey and the Fleetmind are doing things "of concern." Maybe to make the universe a better place. Maybe not. And we know that sometimes "you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." At the same time, he's put Petey at the heart of that Omelet, both this time and when fighting the Tohdfraug invaders before. We get to meet the eggs. We get to feel some sympathy for them, even as we understand the reasons that Petey is doing what he's doing.
It would be simple to have Tagon's Toughs hear a report that the Tricameral Assembly of Qlaviql had been destroyed, and have Elf say "that's disturbing. Pass me more muscle relaxants." That distances the reader from what's happening. It's harder to see long necked aliens acting in a way that was questionable, but not downright evil, just before they get slaughtered on behalf of Petey's plan.
Oh, and to tell jokes during it all.
Howard Tayler gets a biscuit. A tasty, tasty biscuit.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:40 PM | Comments (76)
December 16, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Two brief quotes, in brief.
I now have copies of the two Order of the Stick books: Book 0: On the Origin of PC's, which is primarily new material that acts as a prequel to Our Story, and Book 1: Dungeon Crawlin' Fools.
I'll report in depth later, but there are two quotes I need to give you first, from the first book:
Crystal: It's like the old saying goes! There's no 'I' in Thieves' Guild!
Haley: ...you're an idiot.
--and--
Durkon: Thor's beard! These humans be like giants! *pause* Well, I guess at long last I know why we're called 'dwarves.'
Brilliance is a lovely thing.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:08 PM | Comments (30)
Eric Burns-White: Of course, I now can't get Three Dog Night out of my head.
As you all know, I'm a pretty monumental In Nomine fanboy. In Nomine brought me back into RPG fandom after several years away, and I've never regretted that. The game has undergone any number of travails, but it's seeing new life in electronic publishing, as Steve Jackson Games's e23 service has (finally) begun a steady stream of new updates. As has been mentioned before, the Core Rules are now available (and let me state, for the record, having the core rules in a searchable format rocks my tiny little world.) I also pointed you towards an extended dance mix of Lilith, the "Demon" Princess of Freedom, which has done pretty well all told.
Well, since then, there's been two other developments. One, I'm going to point you all at, because....
...well, because it's free, damn it! FREE!
The Sorcerer's Impediments is (yes, the proper usage is 'is,' because it's a title. I'm not referring to the plural number of sorcerer's impediments here. I'm referring to the singular title The Sorcerer's Impediments. Just to keep things clear) an introductory adventure that also includes a light (I'm not a huge fan of the word 'lite,' because... um... it's... silly) version of the core rules. This way, people can dip into the game, get a handle on its basic concepts, and smack around demons. (As In Nomine is designed for people to play either angels or demons, I kind of hope a simple demonic adventure is also put out, sometime in the future.)
It's a cute adventure, and it's free, so Jesu Christe in a bucket, why not?
But, for the In Nomine faithful, the big news isn't The Sorcerer's Impediments.
The big news is Eli.
See, here's the thing. Since Steve Jackson Games moved In Nomine publications to electronic format, there's been little new meat that's been put out. There's been a lot of adventures (good adventures, at that). And the Core Rules is huge -- it really, really is. But for longstanding players, for a long time, there was only the (well written) Liber Umbrarum to really add content to their games. And while a supplement expanding on ghosts and other such specters in the realms of In Nomine was cool, it wasn't the kind of thing the fanbase had been clamoring for. It wasn't details on the Grigori, or writeups of historical Superiors long since dead.
And, there were a lot of Superiors -- Archangels and Demon Princes -- that were lacking extended writeups. They had their original writeup (or worse, a writeup in a supplement that came out after the original core rules) and a whole lot of fan commentary.
Now, the first Superior to be e-published as an extended dance mix was, as I said, Lilith. And it made a certain amount of sense. Lilith is a recognizable name outside of In Nomine. Lilith is, by definition, a hot babe. Lilith enjoys a certain popularity in the game. And the Lilim -- Lilith's demonic children -- are exceptions to enough rules that it can't ever hurt to have more information about them out there.
However, the simple fact is, Lilith already had an extended writeup, back in the Revelations Cycle. So while there was interest (and sales have been good), it wasn't the event that a major Archangel who hasn't had an extended writeup would be.
And Eli fits that bill perfectly. He is an enigma in the game. In the game's chronology, Eli was the first Mercurian created. Made Archangel of Creation, Eli was, effectively, the hands God used to create Heaven and the Earth. Other Archangels helped shape that creation, but Eli was the primal force behind it. He made Adam, Eve and Lilith. He represented art and the humanities and the driving need to build, to create, to make something new.
And, in 1950 or so, he walked out of Heaven and disappeared. Rumors have flown ever since. The Archangel of Judgment has had the dogs out, looking for him. His Servitors have been thrown into chaos -- largely sent to work for other Archangels, who don't trust them because they don't know what Eli himself is up to. There are rumors he's an amnesiac. Rumor's he's Falling. Rumors he's Fallen. Rumors he hasn't Fallen but is instead living a sybaritic life among humanity, breaking God's commandments. Rumors he's preparing for Armageddon. Rumors he's seeking the second coming. Rumors he is the second coming. And so on... and so on....
Needless to say, an extended writeup, designed to at least shed light on all this, if not resolve any of it, has been eagerly anticipated since the extended writeups first started appearing. So, the publication of In Nomine Superiors: Eli is an exciting thing.
I own it, now. And it's a good supplement. It's got lots of depth and lots of flavor and some cool new powers and the kinds of information that will have the fanbase arguing for the next five or six years. Which is of course what a supplement like this needs. It has some bits I'm not as enamored of -- most notably, it brings up the abortion and contraceptive rights debate, without taking a firm enough stand in either direction to justify its inclusion. Frankly, I'd have just left it out entirely.
But in the end, that's minor, and the writeup is solid. While it doesn't advance canon storylines (that ship may have already passed), it does give In Nomine fans what they really wanted for Christmas: new stuff.
And that's what Eli's all about, right?
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:49 AM | Comments (15)
December 15, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Dude. Seriously, *dude.*
(From Gossamer Commons! Click on the thumbnail for full sized Rankin/Bass Pagan Gods!)
Forgive the indulgence. Or, you know, don't.
Here's the thing, though. I'm having a huge blast writing... well, writing a Fairy Tale as Rankin/Bass might have done it. The story is The Year Without Herne The Hunter, and it's going astoundingly well.
Wednesday is doing the artwork. And this last time I got the script to her much, much too late to produce it. So it went out without the art.
Here's the thing. I had told her Rankin/Bass. I had sent her The Year Without a Santa Claus. But... well, I'd expected a traditional Herne.
The image I'm replicating here is what she sent me. And it blew me away.
Seriously. I squee'ed.
Squee'ed. In a Barnes and Noble, no less.
So. I wanted to show it off. So I'm posting it here. Because dude.
Dude.
Herne rocks. It's official.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 4:02 PM | Comments (35)
Eric Burns-White: I never did trust those bears
(From Yirmumah. Click on the thumbnail for full sized studio apartment!)
I should mention, before anything else, that I like the continued acknowledgment that Bob exists. And that karma is destroying him into a shattered gel of a man.
I've never typed the words 'shattered gel of a man' before. It's oddly fun.
However, I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here to talk about Cracked Magazine.
Growing up, I was never a long standing Mad fan. Oh, I liked Mad fine. I read a fair number of issues of Mad at the local supermarket (I read a fair number of Conan and Vamperilla magazines there too -- to this day, I assume the tiny French God-fearing Catholics -- Catholics who bitterly opposed the change in the law that permitted stores to be open on Sunday in town and who refused to open the IGA on Sunday even if that meant Soucy's made out like bandits -- never thumbed through those magazines. They might have realized they were selling soft core porn and... I dunno. Catholicked up or something. But I digress.)
But for whatever reason, it was Cracked that had me. I learned of the brilliance of John Severin in its pages. I first saw Dan Clowes's work there. I could actually spell the name Robert C. Sproul, and no human being should be able to do that.
And, I always liked Sylvester P. Smythe as a mascot. I know he was a cheap knockoff of Alfred E. Neuman, but I just liked him better for some reason. Maybe because was a janitor. Alfred never felt like he... I dunno, did anything for a living. Sylvester had a reason to be at the magazine.
Anyway -- I know the new Cracked is more a ripoff of Maxim than Mad, but I'm still glad to see it's coming back. And I'm equally glad to see that Yirmumah is appearing at their website, and apparently will be appearing in its pages. While in a way, D.J. Coffman is more Don Martin than John Severin, it's worth noting Don Martin closed out his storied career at Cracked.
Anyway -- this is really cool, and it gave me a chance to wax eloquent about Cracked, which is a magazine I always seemed to like more than everyone else. So... you know. Good enough.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:44 PM | Comments (17)
Eric Burns-White: On the other hand, I'd buy a copy of that calendar.
(From Checkerboard Nightmare. Click on the thumbnail for full sized crush!)
Submitted without comment.
(...)
(...)
(...)
(Okay. I can handle this.)
(...)
(No. No, really. Breathe in, breathe out. You're a sensitive guy, Eric. You can handle this. You're not a neanderthal. Sensitive guy. Chicks dig sensitive guys, right?)
(...)
(STAY AWAY FRUM MAH WOMAN, YE BLUE HAIRED FREA--)
(No! No. No. Calm, Eric. Calm. Caaaaaalm. Breathe in, breathe out. She's not "your" woman. She's a self-actualized woman of intellect and bearing. She--)
(MINE!!!!!! You hear me, boy?!)
(...yeah, we're going to have a discussion about this, aren't we?)
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:42 AM | Comments (75)
Eric Burns-White: Insert obligatory hair metal joke here.
(From Winger. Click on the thumbnail for full sized ooze!)
As we all by now know, I'm one of those godless pinkos. My conservative friends (yes, I have conservative friends. Yeesh.) enjoy teasing (and debating) me. And at least once or twice I've hurt feelings unintentionally.
But yeah. I'm a liberal. And I'm known as a liberal. And so, I've gotten a reasonable amount of mail about Winger.
Winger, for those who don't know, is Carson "Elf Life" Fire's new comic strip. One that more or less passed under my radar, as I wasn't an Elf Life reader. (No rant here -- it just wasn't my thing.) But it got a certain amount of traction with a certain number of webcomics readers.
The mail, it's worth noting, wasn't polarized at all. But, people figured I'd have an opinion since Carson Fire is a dedicated conservative and Winger in many ways seems a response to dedicated Liberal Chris Crosby's Sore Thumbs.
The other thing I noticed about the mail was the flinch reaction. There's something about conservative comics that inspires... well, flinching. And some people who wrote in were writing from that standpoint. All... you know. Flinchy.
Well, I don't think the flinch reaction comes from a comic strip having a conservative bent to it. I really don't. I think the flinch reaction comes because so many conservative comic strips are bad.
Seriously. Mallard Fillmore? Sucks. B.C.? Somewhere along the line, Johnny Hart took a sharp blow to the head, I figure. It's not the politics, it's the crappiness.
But, Carson Fire clearly knows how to write a comic. He's got too many dedicated fans to say otherwise. So, I went in and had a look.
And... you know, it's just fine.
The comparisons to Sore Thumbs are apropos. In both cases, the strip paints both the left and the right with broad, satirical strokes. In Sore Thumbs's case, the left comes off somewhat better. In Winger's case, the right does. Certainly, as a card carrying Left-guy, I didn't find anything in Winger that offended me. And the fact that Minion -- the obligatory Liberal whackjob -- has pink hair a la Cecania isn't lost on... well, anyone, I figure.
(Which isn't to say some folks won't be offended. It's a sad reality of political discourse and especially political satire that someone will be mind numbingly offended by any suggestion they're being poked fun at.)
Will I be a regular Winger reader? I'm unsure. But it'll go on the "sporadically checked" list, and we'll see. I do find it significant that it was originally off of Keenspot, but now it's on. And if you look closely, you'll notice that Sore Thumbs is under "Minion's Links" on the front page.
One thing is certain. Winger beats the Hell out of Mallard Fillmore.
And Non Sequitor too, now that I think about it.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:43 AM | Comments (42)
Eric Burns-White: Public record.
Comments on the last post are now closed.
Comments aren't even being opened on this post.
And I'm more than a little bit disgusted right now.
Want to yell at me for it? E-mail me. I'm going to bed.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:52 AM
December 14, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Holy Fuck.
As you should already know, Child's Play is once again ongoing. Child's Play is a charity founded by the exceptionally cool folks at Penny Arcade. For those who don't know, this is a charity that provides toys and other needful things for children's hospitals all over the world. You can donate money, or you can donate actual presents via Amazon.com wish lists that get sent to the hospitals in question, so you know exactly what's going to what hospital when you order.
Which, by the by, is very cool. As a New Englander who lived on the Canadian boarder much of his life, I have a certain love of the Maritimes. So, I sent a gift via Child's Play to the IWK Children's Heath Centre in Nova Scotia, and I sent some cash via Paypal to the main charity as well. You should do so too.
(I have no idea if I'm going to do another charity snark this year. I'm still waiting to hear from the guy who got the charity snark last year -- though at one point he sent an astounding piece of fan art for Gossamer Commons, so I know he's out there somewhere. But part of me feels like I should close the book on that one before I do this one. And other parts of me think "that's silly. Let the fans give money to the charity people." Chime in if you wish.)
Anyway. That's not why I'm saying all this. I'm saying all this because the Charity Dinner was held yesterday. Last year's dinner was highly successful, bringing in $17,000 plus. So, hopes were high for this year.
Guys.
Gabe and Tycho, at their charity auction, raised eighty two thousand, one hundred dollars. There was a bidding war for the "appear in Penny Arcade" item that went up to twenty thousand dollars.
Holy fuck.
Holy fuck.
At this point, I think those two could commit murder and still get into Heaven.
Wow, guys. Wow.
Don't think for one second that means you don't need to donate, though. Santa is watching.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:58 PM | Comments (40)
Eric Burns-White: Hitchhiking on the Mass Pike can be a *bitch.*
We noted last week that Randy Milholland put Faye from Questionable Content at the scene of Robert E. Howard's suicide.
Well, yesterday saw Davan and Nancy buying coffee at Coffee of Doom, clearly as Jeph Jacques's nod back to Something Positive. There was no interaction. Just a second quiet nod in return.
In today's Something Positive, Nancy still has the coffee cup.
This is one of the things that webcomics does well. This isn't a crossover. This isn't a rights issue thing. This isn't anything except Milholland read the suicide strip at Questionable Content and got a yen to throw a nod at it. Jacques appreciated it enough to respond, and now Milholland has acknowledged the nod. There's absolutely no need to read both comics to understand either.
It's just... well, nice. And it's cool to see in a medium where immediacy can be employed.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:39 PM | Comments (30)
Eric Burns-White: And if this means we're getting back to Priscilla? YAY!
(From Kiagi Swordcat. Click in the thumbnail for full sized independent conformity!)
I like strips like the latest Kiagi Swordcat. It puts me in mind of the now famous (infamous? Who knows) open letter Pete Abrams put up, in effect copping to the problems of Oceans Unmoving. And it highlights something that makes most webcomics different than most other storytelling.
Normally, when a person writes a story these days, they sit down and they write the whole story. They then edit. They see how characters and situations have evolved, and how they're different from their original concept. And then they go back and edit the first parts of the story to match up with the end of the story, tightening and improving the whole.
In webcomics... well, most of the time we don't do that. A strip is conceived of, written, drawn, finished, processed, uploaded and posted. In a lot of ways, we're seeing the first draft of a strip as the only draft, and then it's on to doing tomorrow's strip, because the strip is hungry and must be fed.
Only... sometimes stories don't go the way we intended. Sometimes they're not what we really want to write. And sometimes they're going exactly as you planned, only you realize you don't want to do it, any more.
Aric Hooley has hit that point with Kiagi Swordcat. And today's strip is a metastrip. It's an apology and an explanation and an assertion of an artist's right to say "dude -- I don't like doing this. I'm going to do something else."
Good on Hooley. It's the opposite tack to what Pete Abrams did (though Pete's copping to the problems and asserting his intentions both for the current storyline and for storylines to follow was just as legitimate a response to it), but it's effective nonetheless. In the end, Hooley's the one who has to write and draw this thing, so it has to be something he wants to write and draw.
So, we'll see where his asserted independence goes from here. Will the story just end and the next begin? Will there be a sudden reversal or a random joke? Will there be, you know, pizza?
Who knows? Sky's the limit, dude.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:53 PM | Comments (13)
Eric Burns-White: For me, it's the Bruce Springsteen "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." I heard that seventeen times a day working at a bookstore in the eighties, and to this day it is burnt into my cerebral cortex.
(From Help Desk. Click on the thumbnail for full sized "your call is very important to us...")
For quite some time, people have been calling Help Desk the anti-User Friendly. Where a cornerstone of User Friendly is the concept that users are stupid and banal and deserve the righteous smacking that we the technical cognoscenti give them, the cornerstone of Help Desk has always been "technology companies are soulless, evil corporations and the technical staff who work for them, especially in technical support, have to balance ennui with corporate mandate, which resolve together into a casual disdain for people who call in with problems."
It must piss Chris Wright off when his strip is called the Anti-User Friendly, by the by, given that Help Desk is a year and a half older. That's right. Help Desk came first.
Now, here we are -- almost a full ten years later. And Wright still manages to breathe new life into that casual disdain.
This is a joke I've heard before, for the record. In fact, I think Friends did an episode where Phoebe was on hold for forty-eight straight hours. That I know that fact makes me want to go all Pi on my prefrontal lobe, but I digress. Obscurely.
However, Wright understands that sometimes it's not the freshness of the joke, but the approach. It's not just that the user has been on hold for a solid week. It's that the process has destroyed him -- it is almost a sociological construct. The user has been transfigured by the experience. And, of course, in the end the corniest joke in the world came out. (It's just a slight hop away from "what -- and give up show business?!?") But even that joke feeds into the overall theme. The user has bought into Ubersoft's system. He has been on hold. He persevered. And now, as he drinks his victory gin a tear comes to his eye. He has done it. He has won. He loves the hold system.
And... well, that's funny.
Or so I think, anyway.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:21 PM | Comments (28)
December 13, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Notoriety
If you haven't yet seen, the "Year in Review" issue of Comixpedia has begun. It began with a roundtable that both Wednesday and I were pleased to participate in, going over the Year in Webcomics. So, if you want some "Webcomics Year In Review" stuff from Weds and I, that's a good place to go looking. And it was an exciting roundtable, full of smart people who have smart things to say, not always in agreement with each other. And that's a pretty cool thing.
It was a Roundtable that also proved to be really, really freaking good for my ego. Or bad, depending on how you look at it.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 6:12 AM | Comments (81)
December 12, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Apropos of nothing, this weekend's "Boondocks" was the best one so far.
(From Rob and Elliot. Click on the thumbnail for full sized insensitivity!)
I always worry about overexplaining humor that I really like, when I write a snark for a given comic strip. The essence of humor is timing, and the essence of annotation is the abject murder of timing and the burying of it at the crossroads.
Sometimes, it's hard.
Take today's Rob and Elliot. This is really brilliant. It's funny, but not "hah hah" funny. It's some other kind of funny that doesn't have a "hah hah" in it. And it makes its point really well, and it works on, like, three different levels.
But if I dissected those levels... if I tried to demonstrate why it was funny... you would sit there, and say "well, that isn't funny." They would therefore decide that Rob and Elliot wasn't funny. And then the Yount boys would have to show up and break my kneecaps.
I like my kneecaps, gentlemen.
Therefore. Let me say this. Today's Rob and Elliot works. Just take my word for it.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:43 PM | Comments (46)
December 11, 2005
Wednesday Burns-White: How can you remove the hyphen from your brother's eye when there is an elongated dash in your own eye?
I am the only person in the world (apart from possibly Jan Crouch) who is excited about the new TBN channel.
The appallingly named Smile of a Child launches 24 December on American cable and satellite. I'm hoping very hard that it also gets streamed online, as with the other TBN stations. See, as the name implies, the channel is all kids' shows, all the time.
All Christian kids' shows.
As with their secular counterparts, many of these shows involve puppets. For some reason, I can suspend my disbelief enough in order to accomodate dealing with the puppet's lifestyle issues, or even when it becomes keen to explain matters of theology. However, particularly in mixed human/puppet environments, actively considering the puppet's salvation or having it engage in prayer strikes me as slightly dubious. It's not so much that I can't grasp the idea of a fictional character having a fictional soul, goodness knows, but the spiritual crisis later in life must be rather on a par with Santa Claus. It's bad enough trying to determine whether or not your pets are going to heaven; what the heck are we supposed to make of, say, anthropomorphized hamburgers? How do we even account for anthropomorphized hamburgers in any form of Christian theology? Really, my issues with talking animals just pale by comparison.
That said, I can cope with thinly veiled allegory, especially when it comprises a chunk of high school TV nostalgia. One of SoaC's launch programs is the Canadian high-fantasy puppet show Kingdom Adventure, which was sort of kinda impressive almost fifteen years ago. At the time, it was an interesting stab at straddling Christian and secular children's markets, something we wouldn't see take serious hold until Veggie Tales came along a few years later. I found the idea of the experiment fascinating, and kept hoping that the execution would grab me.
Unfortunately, as with any syndicated kids' show not bent on selling hot product back then, you only got to see it insensibly early in the morning. I used to watch it in the mornings, when the reverse insomnia kicked in and it was too early for anything else but County Calendar and weird, babbling nuns. Lacking reruns of Rocket Robin Hood and the Trans-Lux Hercules, what else are you gonna do?
The answer? Mostly, build up a tolerance and miss Newton.
Unfortunately, the production company -- Crossroads Christian Communications, best known for 100 Huntley Street -- didn't do the best job in retrofitting effective metaphor to their high-concept agenda. There's a bunch of cute little elfy characters in cute little woods. And a bunch of cute little ugly monsters in the service of evil. And a cute, beloved Prince. And that Prince's Bride.
The Prince dies. Then the Prince comes back. Gosh.
While there's really only so many times you can watch the Gelflingscute little elfy things expounding on how much they like the Prince, how much they need the Prince, how bad it is that the Prince is gone, &c., it's not without brain candy merit. Anyone who gives you guff about how unsubtle the various Chronicles of Narnia were? Point'em at Kingdom Adventure, where cute little elfy things are yelling from the cute little treetops: "I SAID, IT'S TOTALLY BEEN THREE DAYS AND I WONDER WHERE THE PRINCE IS! GOSH, I HOPE HIS BRIDE IS OKAY!"
There was also a sword involved. And bad animation (Kingdom Adventure made an admirable effort to combine puppets and 2-D animation on an insufficient budget, but it just didn't pull together very well). Mostly, though, I remember the highly marketable Lolly, all red yarn hair and pug nose. She really should have grown up to take over the cute little elfy world. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the Prince preferred blondes.
Honestly, I'm kind of sketchy on a lot of the details. I haven't seen this in years, and there's not a lot around to punch up the memory. The show faded into utter obscurity in North America. Kingdom Adventure was dubbed for the Russian market, and the only reference I can find to the show at Crossroads's website concerns demand there for an overtly evangelical tie-in colouring book. You can find the show on video, at least in theory, but there's nothing on IMDB to indicate that it ever really existed. I know it's not for me, but it must have been for someone.
At the time, I'm sure I found the show utterly forgettable. Right now, though, I'm kind of looking forward to catching it on SoaC, if only so that I can remember how forgettable it really was. Give it a week, though, and I'll totally be praying for the batty technology and grievous heresies of Superbook.
Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 3:49 PM
