Posts from — November 2008

It’s Thanksgiving, which means beer, turkey and football, but also some passing thoughts about what each of us is thankful for in our lives.  Normally, I’d scoff off that last bit and just say ‘Batman’ but this has been a tumultuous year.

This year I met Neal Adams, who’s one of my comic book industry heroes.  I interviewed Neal at New York Comic Con, and it was a great pleasure to spend time with him and his family.  That was a big deal for me, as were my occasional contributions to Newsarama.  My tour around the con circuit this year also let me meet Chip Mosher, C.B. Cebulski, Tom Brevoort, Molly Lazer, and Sean McKeever.  The cons in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore also helped me to spend some time with friends, specifically Rich and Bill from Film Buff Online, Kevin Church, and Caroline and Jennifer from Fantastic Fangirls.  And Kristi, her fiance Jay and Skip and Mike, who don’t have Web sites.  I’ll reiterate, as it seems I often do (but maybe not often enough) that the comics community is made of really, really good people, despite how bitchy and snarky we can get sometimes.

This year I found a new, stable, rewarding job, and I’m thankful for my employers and coworkers and most of my clients.

I’m thankful for each of you reading Conditional Axe; I hope it’s managed to get better over the past few years and that it’s a worthwhile part of your day.  I’m thankful for my pals at Alert Nerd bringing me into the fold, speaking of blogs.   Matt, Sarah and Chris are some of my favorite people on the Internet.

Most of all, I’m thankful to have really wonderful friends and family members who’ve given me the strength and the courage to make the painful and difficult decisions that I’ve made this year.  You are too numerous to name, but I appreciate every one of you.

Okay, that was really sappy; so let’s think about cyborg bears fighting flying laser sharks instead.

I’ve been thinking of writing a novel.  Because, really, lots of people write novels, dammit.

I don’t want to write a quasi-autobiographical meditation on Elvis Costello and my personal dysfunctions and failed relationships; there are several Nick Hornby books available to suit that niche.  So, as an exercise, I tried to think of some interesting topics for a novel.  I’ve come up with two.

The first is a supernatural romance.  It’s the 15th Century, and werewolves live on the moon, so that they can be in their dazzling wolf-man hybrid forms at all times.  These space werewolves fight an ages-old feud with space vampires who have some communicable form of space-AIDS and subsist on the dreams of others instead of blood.  It’s difficult for them because nobody dreams in space.  Anyway, a space werewolf from the moon and a space vampire fall in love and try to find a place that will accept them and it will be a seven-book saga full of smutty lycanthropic coupling.

The second idea was that strippers solve a murder.  I’d want it to be super-realistic, so I’d have to do a lot of immersive research that I’m not looking forward to.  However, friend of the Axe and playwright-in-potentia Cory Brin (who has no Web site for me to link to) tells me that an overwhelming majority of his fellow MFA students have been writing crime thrillers about strippers, so it seems once again that fate has beaten me to the punch.

I’d also like to write an autobiography of the Cosmic Cube, but I don’t think Marvel would actually let me do that.  It would be about 3000 pages long and feature a budding romance between the Shaper of Worlds and Kubik.

I don’t know which of these ideas I should go with.  What do YOU think?

Ham Sandwich from Adam "Slice" Kuban's Flickr

The key to creating good social media content is typing. Without typing, you really can’t interact online. There are plenty of reasons why ham sandwiches are awesome, but ‘having hands and fingers’ isn’t one of them. So, yeah, of course ham sandwiches suck at being part of the online conversation. Why would you think otherwise?

I mean, yeah, ham sandwiches are also kind of elitist and off-putting. And they have a coke habit. But mostly it’s the lack of hands. And it depends on the kind of mustard you put on it. Really, a bit part of it is that ham sandwiches don’t like me. I know you saw me with grilled cheese that one time, ham sandwich, but it didn’t mean anything. Please answer my calls.

November is apparently the month that I started gaming again. I’ve been immersed in Fable 2, Gears of War 2 and Rock Band 2 for the past few weeks, and enjoying all three of them quite a bit. Between that and N’gai Croal’s question about whether reviewers are missing the forest for the trees, the nuts and bolts of game reviewing is on my mind lately and, as always, I find that I can’t stand traditional gaming journalism - the softball interviews, the shoddy reviews, the lack of consistency that bedevils reviewers and editors alike.

I don’t like numbers, and not because I have an English degree either.  Well, not just.  Numbered reviews encourage people to look at the number and move on, but non-numbered reviews have a higher bounce because nobody wants to waste the time reading the review to find out whether or not the game is good.  The other problem with numbering is that a 7 from me might be a 9 from someone else and that a majority of reviews are never clear about how much a good or bad quality is affecting the score.  Oh, and of course, pressure from the publishers to score their games preferentially.

When we revamped the scoring system at Snackbar Games, we used a 1-5 scale, but attached meaningful tags to those numbers.  5 is Purchase, 4 is Niche (games that are really great, but aren’t for everyone), and 1 is Save Your Cash.  SBG also crowdsources its scores - users can submit their own scores and the site will show readers how fan opinion stacks up against the reviewer’s.

Numeration aside, though, I think reviews get it wrong because they all try to talk about graphics and control - pretty much the only thing that most games have in common.  This is stupid.  Every movie has a Key Grip, but we don’t talk about how much better the Key Grip on No Country For Old Men was than the Key Grip on Snakes On a Plane.  Listen, we keep saying that we want the media taken more seriously, but we try as slavishly as we can to compare Guitar Heros to Gears of Wars - excellent yet fundamentally different gaming experiences.

So, what’s the right way to do things?  I think it comes down to isolating what the game wants to do - something a good number of reviewers don’t think about, instead focusing on what they want the game to do - and measuring the game against its goal.  It’s tough to do that, and slightly presumptuous, so people shy away from doing it - it’s much easier to talk about a limiting camera or jaggy graphics than an interpretation of the full play experience.

If games are art, we’ve got to start evaluating them that way.

I know I’m given over to wild hyperbole sometimes.  So when I say that Twilight and the massive embrace it has received from American readers represent the death of art in another couple of sentences, it’s likely that some of you will think that I’m exaggerating.

I’m not exaggerating.

Twilight and its attendant cult of fictionality represent the death of art.

Not because the movie is bad (it is) or because the book is worse (it is), but because the collective thumbs-up that our culture has given this underedited, overwrought ’saga’ of wish-fulfillment fan fiction denotes a massive lowering of our bar.  In fact, if given time and Red Bull enough, I can craft a flow chart that shows the negative influence Twilight has had on every piece of art, literature and cinema that have been released in its wake.  The book is an exercise in lazy self-indulgence and the film manages to do a workmanlike job of taking that inauspicious source material and not make it an apocalyptic disaster.  Oh, it’s still bad, but it’s a manageable kind of bad, the kind that you can laugh at with a few martinis in you.

Marvel Super Intern and Twitter pal LiterateKnits told me that Twilight was enjoyable as long as I could put myself in the frame of mind of a sixteen year old girl.  I tried, honest, but sixteen-year-old-girl Jeff is apparently the kind of sixteen year old girl that wants to drop a brick on Bella Swan’s head.  Maybe it’s just me, but I have a hard time rooting for a vapid, self-absorbed drama queen who spends half of the time bemoaning the cruel, cruel circumstances that she has created for herself and the other half of her time monologuing about how much of an outcast she is - despite being the BFF and crush object of everything with a pulse in a 20 mile radius around the ridiculous town of Forks, Washington.  And several things without pulses.  Like, you know, vampires.

As bad as the whole ‘pretty ugly girl’ part of Twilight is, the vampire stuff is what makes it criminal instead of merely disposable.  Not because they have none of the traditional vampire weaknesses.  Not because they sparkle in the sunlight (which is, let’s face it, ridiculously dumb), and not because an overwhelming majority of the vampires in Twilight are ‘good vampires’ (which is also ridiculously dumb - it’s like reading an R.A. Salvatore book and replacing all of the characters with different versions of Drizzt).

No, the reason I hate the vampires in the Meyerverse is the lack of theme, metaphor and consequence that they have.  They are only vampires instead of, say, angels or elves or sentient cheeseburgers because the author thinks that vampires are cool and sexy.  That’s not a crime, mind you - vampires, when done well, are cool and sexy, but the associations that fiction makes with vampires, the ones that make them not only cool and sexy but also dangerous and destructive.  If a vampire isn’t symbolic of the consequences of our baser urges - sex, drugs, gluttony, lust - then they’re totally impotent from a literary perspective.  There is no danger inherent in Bella and Edward’s relationship other than ‘Will Edward take me to the prom?’  There is no negative consequence to being a vampire; in fact, being a vampire is so amazing that Bella can’t wait to be one.  By the end of Bella’s story, the awesomeness of vampires is something that not only Bella, but every other person in the freaking world, apparently, has accepted as fact - even their sworn werewolf enemies (who are also hopelessly in love with Bella, by the way).

So, it’s not the bad, fanfic romance or silly supernatural elements that make Twilight so unbearable, it’s the total lack of substance behind it.  Unfortunately, its devotees like it that way.  I saw the movie a few days ago, and the throngs of mindless, lovestruck teens nearly deafened me with their whoops and applause and shrieks of ‘OMG’ and their swooning whenever Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson locked lips.  It was like being at a tent revival, except instead of religion, these hapless kids were getting crappy supernatural romance.   Pray for them.

I meant to talk about Halloween.

So, Halloween was another one of those nights when my friends told me:

1. I need to get the divorce off of my mind.

2. I need to have fun.

3. I need to go clubbing with them.

Unfortunately, some part of my brain was unable to accept only 66% of the proposition, and so I ended up at the local meat market of record’s Halloween party and was perhaps the only person dressed like a pirate that wasn’t also dressed like a slut.

Because my people know, respect and gracefully tolerate my geekhood, one of them points to a couple clad in superhero costumes, thinking that I’ll appreciate it.

Green Lantern, his hair and beard dyed bright green, accompanied by Poison Ivy.

My response, “That’s not even canonically accurate.”  And that’s where the title of this post comes from.

Dear DC Comics,

I’m a  longtime reader - I remember clutching an issue of Firestorm in my white-knuckled hands as I took my very first plane ride and wishing that Ronnie Raymond and Dr. Stein would show up to rescue me when the turbulence got unbearable.  I tell you this not to invoke pathos, just to point out that I’ve been in this for the long haul.

I’m writing because I wanted to tell you that I’m a big fan of your current direction.  One of my favorite books is Judd Winick’s Titans.  Please keep Mr. Winick in your clutches as long as you can and make sure that he writes even more books going forward.  More Winick, less Morrison.  I don’t like to think when I read.

Some other things I really like: unnecessary death and brutality, Gunfire, the dark and edgy take on the Marvel family, Alex Ross’s continued involvement with the plot of JSA, and the character of Atrocitus.  He should have his own series.  I like him so much that I’ve been practicing vomiting up my own blood! I’d suggest that this Red Lantern ongoing replace something stupid like Blue Beetle, but you’ve already come to your senses and axed that pitiful comic.  Maybe you can pull the plug on that awful “Catman and Deadshot Make Out for 20 Pages” book next.

Also, what about a book where Lobo kills people and makes out with Starfire a lot?  Maybe him and Robotman (or a dark, edgy Animal Man who wears a trenchcoat instead of a bomber jacket!) could have beers and then brutally kill C-list DC villains?  I think it’s a good idea and I’d be available to write it.

I was starting to get anxious a year or two ago when I read that your tone was going to be changing to a more family-friendly (lame) one, but I’m incredibly happy that that never actually happened.  Don’t listen to the haters; they obviously don’t understand what’s fun and awesome about comics.  Will we be seeing more Wonder Dog outside of Teen Titans?  Maybe he can kill Phantom Lady or Zatanna or Spoiler (hee hee).

Thanks for noticin’ me,

Jeff

The Internet is abuzz with the news that Jeff Robinov, the mastermind of Warner Bros.’ handling of its DC licenses on-screen, has quashed “The Graysons” an hourlong teen drama about Richard “DJ” Grayson before his assumption of the mantle of Robin. The Graysons would have aired on The CW, and probably would have starred one of the douchebags from Gossip Girl.

Fan response ranges from “Why didn’t this happen sooner?” to “Thank fucking Christ!”

So yeah, that’s good.

In other comics-to-film news, Grant Morrison is doing his standard terrible job of denying in any way that he’s involved with a Flash movie, leading virtually everybody to ask “There’s a Flash movie?”

Listen, it’s pretty clear where my affiliations lie if you’ve been reading the Axe for any amount of time, but no matter who you support, just get out and vote.

I heard on the news this morning that this could be a record voter turnout with only 65 percent of eligible voters actually doing so.  That’s embarrassing.  I believe we’re better than that, dammit.

That Quarantine will not be successful is not amazing surprise, but it is unfortunate.

Unfortunate because, for a remake of a movie that draws heavily from Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project, it’s not that bad.  On the bad side, it’s simple and workmanlike, without the nuance that informed the other two “This is bad and I’m recording with a camera” movies I mentioned above.  On the plus side, It’s taut, it never drags and many of the ‘dumb mistakes’ that horror victims often make seem a bit more natural here.

Just like Blair Witch, Quarantine’s premise works because while we know it can’t happen, some hidden part of us is sure that it could, that it has, that it could even happen to us.  Of course, rather than getting lost in the woods, this particular fear is that our government will wordlessly leave us to die in the name of the so-called greater good.

If you’re pro-zombie, Quarantine’s a Netflixer, but take some Dramamine first because, like, lots of shaking and running.