Backlog Quest Log Side Blog - Infinite Reading list

Editor's Note: Sorry it's been a minute. Life n' shit, y'know?

The only thing I'll say about Marvel's latest film, Infinity War, is that you should see it. And then you should dm me on Twitter me so we can talk about it. 

Even if this scene is a fucking lie.

Instead, this blog is going to tackle what books you should read after you see the movie. You'll see Ant-Man & The Wasp when it comes out in July. You'll see Captain Marvel when it comes out next March, and you'll see Avengers 4 when it releases next May. 

But that's future-you's plans. What about immediately post-movie-you? What the hell is that person going to do?

That person is going to read this list of books and realize they have about 45 years worth of entertainment to catch up on while you wait for the next tentpole to invade your cinema. These are awesome books that will help you chase the high you got after that final post-credits scene rolled. The three main stories that the film draws its inspiration from are Thanos Quest, Infinity Gauntlet, and Infinity, and spoilers - those are totally on the list. 

But in addition to those, there are also a bunch of stories that left me feeling the same way I did after seeing the movie. The sense of scale, the awe of rules being broken, the giant ensemble casts, the weight of revelations - any many more feelings were some of my favorite takeaways from the film, and these stories reflect those super well, and most of these are pretty accessible no matter what your experience is with comics.

Thanos Quest / Infinity Gauntlet 

Thanos Quest documents how Thanos gained possession of the Infinity Gems (Stones in the films). It's weird as hell and it's awesome. It feels more like an issue of Heavy Metal than anything Marvel, but that's the power of Jim Starlin and Ron Lim. This is the start of everything that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been building towards. It's definitely not as sweeping as it was portrayed in the movie, but it's pretty... it feels like Faust, if Faust beat the devil in chess... So yeah - if the legend of Faust and the Seventh Seal had a baby, and then let that baby be raised by Mad Max, the 80's fashion, and super-overdramatic 70's science fantasy van-art, you'd have the Thanos Quest storyline. Every Gem Thanos acquires comes with a little trial that's themed around the gem in question, so it's a pretty cool story in that you see just how creative, cunning, and dangerous Thanos can be as he tries to hunt them all down. 

And spoilers - he hunts them down. You see the fallout of him hunting them all down in the first issue of Infinity Gauntlet, a pretty big inspiration for the film, Infinity War. It'll be super fun for you to read this after seeing the movie, because what you see at the end of the film is done in the first issue of the 6-issue story, so there's a ton of new story for you to read and it's interesting to see what was done in the movie vs what was done in the books the movie is predominantly based on. 

 

Infinity

The brainchild of Jon Hickman when he was firmly in the driver's seat at Marvel, Infinity is the third story that served as a pretty direct influence on what Infinity War ended up being. I'm going to be blunt so I could avoid being anything less than perfectly clear; Infinity is one of the single fucking best comic events I've ever read. I can totally see how Warren Ellis' writing turns people off because I can see it being read as a little too dramatic for some people's sensibilities, but Hickman does a fantastic job of conveying similar themes in a bit of a more digestible way. The entire point of this story was Earth basically accepting its place in the galaxy and forcing other species to recognize that it's not a little backwater drinking hole the way most alien species have been treating it. There's a war of absolute epic proportions that unfolds on a galactic scale and its rendered beautifully by Jim Cheung, in what's probably the second best book of his career (I'm very partial to Avenger's: The Children's Crusade). 

But that's only half the story. The other half of the story is Thanos realizing that while most of the world's super heroes are off trying to save the galaxy, Earth is essentially left undefended. This is the event where the Black Order, Thanos's lackeys, first appear, where a horizon wide invasion of Wakanda happens, and about 10,000 other insane things happen. Just as important as the main story are the issues of New Avengers and Avengers proper that Hickman was penning concurrently. In the collected trade, all relevant tie ins are included and do a fantastic job of adding to the story. The similar quality between the main story and tie-ins was so effective that it never felt like I was reading a "side" book, it all felt like it was part of one larger, ongoing conflict rather than a main book, a sub-book A, and a sub-book B the way other event comics have in the past. 

 

Annihilation

While Civil War was drawing lines in the sand and asking heroes to pick a side on Earth, the war that mattered was happening half a galaxy away. After being a long time pain in the Fantastic Four's ass, Annihilus decides he has a better chance of conquering everything if he doesn't start on Earth and yeah - he's not wrong. Annihilus shows up and fucks everything up pretty quickly, putting the galaxy's back against a wall. 

This book rekindled an affection for Marvel's more cosmic offerings, which had waned in popularity as books like Marvel Knights' Daredevil and the Ultimate universe picked up speed. Civil War might've been the important event, but Annihilation was the fun event, with characters that you genuinely thought could die at any second. The high stakes were immediately understandable and the way it elevated certain characters would set the stage for years to come. If you want a fun view of what the Marvel Cosmos can be, check out this series, its prologue, and it's 4 mini tie-ins, which are for the most part pretty fun too. The most important of the tie-ins are Nova and Silver Surfer. Super-Skrull is fine and Ronan is strictly okay, but you will be better informed going into the main series if you read them all. Nova was dope because it basically is what landed Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning the reins to Marvel Cosmic U, which let to a really good follow-up series called Annihilation Conquest, a Nova Ongoing, a Guardians of the Galaxy series, and Thanos Imperative (see below) among others. 

Thanos Imperative

Annihilation put the Marvel Cosmos back on the map and made people really give a shit about them. If that was the beginning of a cosmic renaissance, then Thanos Imperative was the end of it in that form. It didn't just give us a Nova ongoing (which rocked), and a Guardians of the Galaxy ongoing (which super rocked), but it gave us a ton of other events that excellently showcased a different side of Marvel. This event in particular saw a parallel universe where Death had been overcome. Once here in our universe, they see it as a failure because the living can still die, and wage a war to make our universe more like theirs. Against their better judgement, the cosmic heroes (literally everyone, it's awesome), decide that the only one who can kill these parallel dickholes is Thanos, and they recruit him to their team. 

This felt like a culmination of everything Giffen, Abnett, and Lanning had built over the years in their corner of Marvel's publishing line. Once Marvel realized how awesome it was, they wanted to bring it a little closer to the fold, which makes perfect sense, but for a minute it was almost like a boutique imprint line within Marvel and this was more than a respectful sendoff, replete with more than an average amount of "oh shit" moments. Be sure to checkout the prologue issue called "Thanos Imperative: Ignition".

S.H.I.E.L.D.

S.H.I.E.L.D. is a weird ass book. Its scope is impressively ambitious for what is actually such a focused book, but what makes it special is the way it shows just how big the Marvel Universe can be. It changes the way you think about what you thought you knew about the Marvel Universe. It's almost like The Da Vinci's Code of the marvel Universe, quietly telling you there's a hidden history where the dots connect so well, you almost feel guilty for not realizing it sooner. 

This book made the list because Infinity War reminded me of how I felt when I was reading it. The way there are callbacks and payoffs - everything you see in Infinity is a result of something you saw in one of the previous 18 movies released by Marvel Studios - and with even a cursory understanding of the Marvel Universe, you get that same "clicking" feeling while reading S.H.I.E.L.D. and having the pieces fall into place. 

 

Ultimate Nightmare / Ultimate Secret / Ultimate Extinction 

The Ultimate universe was a reimagining of what made Marvel so successful in the first place. After Bryan Singer's X-Men and Sam Raimi's Spider-man redefined what was possible at at the box office on an opening weekend, Marvel wanted to make something that better reflected not just the films, but the time the films were made in. So, they basically asked some of their best writers and artists "What would it look like if the Marvel Universe began today?" in the early 2000's and then boom - one of the most successful publishing imprint lines of all time and one of my favorite cover dress designs of all time too. This is a three part story told over 14 issues.

While the Ultimate universe is fascinating because re-contextualizes how characters would look and act in a post 9/11 world, you get a lot more than that from the story. I love the Ultimate Universe because it simultaneously looks at a broader picture and a more specific one at the same time. In every story there's a clearly conveyed scope but also an attention to detail that's a result of said scope and it makes such perfect sense in context, that there's not a lot else for you to do as a reader besides throw your head to the side and go "Yeah, of course that would happen". While there're a ton of great stories in the Ultimate-U, I chose this one because it spans multiple series and characters, while others pretty much just focus on the eponymous stars of the title. Here you get some X-Men, some Ultimates (read: Avengers), some Fantastic Four, and a broader look at the universe at large than most other series can afford due to their breakneck pacing. 

Also, Warren Ellis wrote this, and you know how I feel about Warren Ellis <3. 

Avengers Disassembled / House of M / New Avengers

While the Marvel Universe has been in motion since the early/mid 60's, there are some definite breaks that make for better jumping on points, and this one happens to be mine. After narrowly dodging bankruptcy in the 90's and early aughts, Marvel made a comeback with a lot of quality titles from quality creators. Probably the most high-profile shakeup was bringing in Brian Michael Bendis to take over the Avengers, which had slumped in popularity thanks to renewed interest in the X-Men after Bryan Singer's films. 

Bendis took these beloved characters and turned their entire world upside down. He broke the Avengers in two with The Worst Day They've Ever Had™, and then he let that break reverberate through the Mainstream Marvel Universe for the next decade. This story focuses on what breaks the Avengers, what happens in a world without them, and how they come out of the ashes (that's not a spoiler, they come out of the ashes because of course they do). After a brisk four or so issues of Avengers, there's an eight issue miniseries (House of M) and then a brand new ongoing that lasts about 60, so you can jump off anytime your interest begins to wane or jump in deeper, because New Avengers was where most major events were seeded, including House of M, Civil War, Secret Invasion, and Siege. Sorry for being deliberately vague, this story is just super fun and kind of a curveball if you only know the movies, So I don't want to spoil anything. 

Astonishing X-Men

In addition to Uncanny X-Men and the adjective-less X-Men, Marvel debuted a continuity-lite series for people who were jumping on the book-bandwagon from the films, and they did so with the stellar team of Joss Whedon and John Cassaday. Using a small team, Whedon cut to what makes X-Men drama so compelling, and Cassaday's cinematic approach to costume design was an excellent blend of the films' sleekness and the comics' rich history. 

This page still punches me in the gut. I love that Whedon knows sometimes you don't need words, he says in a way too long blog post.  

The great thing about the four volumes that Whedon and Cassaday did together is keep things surface level but still steeped in continuity. They make everything clear in the story, but present a lot backstory for you to research at your leisure. When a character comes back, you get why it's a big deal right there, but if you feel so inclined, it's an easy wikipedia search to understand the far reaching implications of what their return really means. 

There's great melodrama that looks beautiful thanks to a team that gelled so well together, it's almost surprising they haven't met back up again on another project. This is a great place to start if you want to dip your toes into the X-Men, providing a full story, but shows just enough of the X-Men's periphery to pique curiosity in the X-sphere at large. 

Silver Surfer: Requiem 

The lone fact that the Silver Surfer's film rights are owned by Fox is probably the biggest dagger in Marvel Studios' hamstring... That's a saying, right?

Marvel Studios did a great job of melding science and fantasy through the Thor films, but one thing that would've alleviated the pressure on the Thor franchise would've been the Fantastic Four. If you've read any of my old blog posts, you know I've got a rock hard soft spot (favorite joke of this blog post btw), for the FF, and the Silver Surfer is probably the coolest thing that franchise has given us. He's a herald of Galactus, a world-eating force of nature who's the sole survivor of the previous universe and wielder of the Power Cosmic, an immeasurable power source capable of doing... well, pretty much anything a writer can come up with, which is both exciting and eye-rolling. But usually exciting, because whenever the Surfer or Galactus shows up, you know shit is about to go down. 

Requiem is a story told out of continuity and serves as the last adventure of the Silver Surfer. It's about his death, but through that conceit, really all you do is get to see just how much of an impact the character had on the Marvel Universe. I don't mean the Marvel heroes we are so familiar with, I mean the entire fucking Marvel universe. We don't just see what we have because of him, but we see so clearly what a universe would be like without him, and we see even more clearly how much we fucking need him. 

And after reading this, you'll get the sense of how much the MCU needs him too. Galactus or the Kree/Skrull War are two of the best bets for where the movies can (and arguably should) go after Infinity War wraps up next Spring, and man-alive, it would be a whole hell of a lot easier to broach either of those with Silver Surfer swoopin' in from the rafters. 

Ultimate Spider-Man / Ultimate Miles Morales

We talked a bit about the Ultimate Universe above so I can save that pitch, but this series made the cut because the Peter Parker from the MCU is one of the stronger, more endearing characters in a world full of strong, endearing characters. I love the Raimi films and really like the Webb films (at least the first one, I still have the Amazing Spider-Man 2 Blu-Ray shrink-wrapped from a $10 impulse buy at a Toys R' Us from Needham, MA 4 years ago), but bringing Spidey back to high school and trimming all the fat on an origin everyone knows was what people wanted. You get the perfect marriage of The OC and spandex you always wanted, and for the most part, it seems like they aren't interesting in aging the character despite Tom Holland's character, y'know, aging. 

One of my single favorite issues of any comic series ever. 

What's so enjoyable about Bendis' Ultimate Spider-Man is that after seeing Peter Parker grow, age, and sort his life out, we got back to the teenage version of Peter that made him such a beloved character to begin with. Though it was taking cues from the Raimi films, it playfully reimagines all of its source material and gives us a more-times-than-not enjoyable and exciting refresh to the character. While the MCU version of Peter Parker is an amalgam of a bunch of Peter's and, well, social media, this Peter was obviously a huge inspiration. Bendis gives us the classic Spider-Man stories of the 60's updated for the 2000's and in time gives us the character you'll see in this December's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse animated film, Miles Morales. Bendis gave us a fantastic new character that's still kicking around the Marvel Universe even after the Ultimate Universe kicked the bucket. If you have a hard time getting into Silver Age stories (there's no shame, I do too), this is the perfect entryway into getting a ton of Spider-Man in a compelling and fun manner. 

Miles Morales is the fuckin' truth. Don't sleep on the dude. 

Anyways, those are my key series to read if you want to scratch that post-Infinity War itch. What'd I miss?

08 - Far Cry 5

In the three weeks since Far Cry 5 released, I've seen a lot of feelings on it. People are down on it because it doesn't say much about the current political landscape, but rather plays in its periphery. They laud the game but dismiss the 'stance' it takes, saying the previous ones were bolder in their conviction. Honestly, I'm surprised I haven't seen a hot take saying something like "the reason you don't like this game as much as older Far Cry games is because you're shooting white people, and what that says about you" because this game has been hot take city and I don't know if you've heard or not, but people have some fucking feelings about it.

I think that's super goddamn weird. The series has historically always kept one foot firmly in the insane and another in the strictly-plausible (but never likely), and usually the worst part about the series is how it rectifies those two - one rarely serving as a palette cleanser for the other, but instead being an abrupt dismissal of momentum as you segue between them.

This game is less of that, and I'm really fucking glad. The absurd and the acceptable blend together here exceptionally well, way better than past games. Maybe it's just that I've been playing Far Cry fairly regularly since 2012 and I just speak the language better, but with this latest entry, I definitely felt a better balance of tone. The critiques I've seen about the story itself it are what I mentioned at the top - that it doesn't go far enough to address Trump's America. But that's pretty unfounded to me because that's just not what the game's about.

Getting mad at a game for not talking about Trump while discussing religious zealotry or fascism is like getting mad at a landscape painting of the beach for not showing enough meadow. Like yeah, there could've been more meadow, an astute point, but maybe this wasn't about the goddamn meadow.

It's not about religion. It's not about fascism. It's about the sane and the insane. it's about fate and coincidence. It's about blowing shit up and being overwhelmed by the landscape. It's about bullies and victims. It's about a lot - but it's not about contemporary politics. 

30-something hours in I've heard exactly two lines that can be read as political: one of the batshit, completely disillusioned characters called another an "Obama loving libtard" and one of the game's main bosses said "Have you seen the headlines? They're a joke, have you seen who's in charge?" One line by an insane character does not a political game make, and one throwaway vague line that could just as easily apply to Hilary as it does to Trump does not a political game make either. Turns out the dude that said that was a cult-obsessed anti-federalist who liked branding sins into peoples bodies with hot pokers... so, yeah, I'm guessing when you go to him about opinions on a president, you're going to get what you pay for. Someone related to that character talked about how everything recently has brought us (as a country) to the edge and we're just waiting for someone to push us off it. 

This game's story is an exercise in vague allusions and loose aphorisms meant to be some semblance of reality, but hardly anything that could constitute something literally real.

The game doesn't lean into politics as much as use statements like this to sound like something plausible, like something the most insane person in your life would say, it's world building, not statement making. Honestly? If it weren't for the "Libtard" line, this game could've been set in the late 70's or early 80's, and it probably should've. 

But there's a lot of criticism on the game, and I may be failing to understand the greater point that people are levying against it. That's my interpretation of the problems reviewers had, and I could well be missing something, so please reach out if you think I'm missing something.

That's not my critique of the game. My critique of the game is that for every step forward it took for diegetic world building, it took two steps back in terms of being a video game; being more real made it less fun.

But barely less fun. Because Far Cry is... well, it's always a treat to play, in spite of its bullshit ending that made me want to pull my hair out, but I don't think it's very fair to compare the game's last 5 minutes against the first 35 or so hours I've spent with it. The ending is when the game gets its most interesting, but before you know it; credits roll. I'm not going to talk about the ending here because I don't want to spoil shit, but look for a post in the future about it, because hot-damn, even I don't know how I feel about it yet. 

The story, for the most part, is fucking rad. You're a rookie deputy called in by a US Marshal to serve an arrest warrant to a religious group leader named Joseph Seed, The Father. The closer you get to where he's set up shop in Hope County, Montana, the more clear it becomes: this isn't a religious leader at all, this is the head of a fucking doomsday cult. And this isn't him spreading influence throughout Hope County, this is him staging a religious insurrection on continental US territory. This dude's a goddamn maniac, and needs to be taken in. Or down.

Except it doesn't go smoothly because of course it doesn't. Once you're thrown into the world, it's up to you to give the local resistance shit worth getting excited about. You start taking back territory from The Father and his lieutenants - his brothers Jacob and John, and his sister Faith. They each have a little slice of paradise carved out for themselves and every mission you partake in gets you resistance points for their respective regions, and the more of those you have, the better position you're in to finally take them out.

"But George - you said the game is too real to be fun, do you really think religious law could take over part of the coun-" No - it's not the story that makes the game too real. The context of the story is fucking awesome - it's basically retelling the Branch Dividians failed stand against the FBI at Waco, TX and it blows it up to the nth degree. Joseph Seed is a fascinating main villain, as little you interact with him throughout the main story - and his fanatical siblings are fucking terrifying. Special shoutout to Faith - she might be the best amalgam of Batman's Poison Ivy and a psychopath I've ever seen. Her fiefdom deals with a drug used to suppress people and essentially make them zombies. Since you've been exposed to it, she starts popping up randomly while you're out and about - kinda like the way Elvis does in True Romance and it's unsettling, it's gorgeous, it's insane - it's awesome.

These are complex villains you want to understand but never want to sympathize with. They make that impossible because they're all so clearly out of their fucking minds. Just because Far Cry 5 doesn't twist the knife on the current socio-political climate of the United States, that doesn't make this a ratification of these crazy ideals, it's an indictment of them through and through. And you can tell they're complex villains because they don't simply inflict physical wounds - they scar you just as much psychologically as they ever do your body. They creep you out with their words, not threats, but by their passion, and their confidence in their beliefs.

They're at their most terrifying when they try to convince you they're right. 

Taking a cue from previous games, the Guns for Hire mechanic has been expanded to include generic fighters, specialists like pilots and snipers, and animals. Like Boomer the dog. Not only can he do a little recon and see every enemy in a given area, but he can also be given commands to take enemies down and brings ammo when you're running. There's also a cougar named Peaches and a diabetic bear named Cheeseburger that can do the same - a really smart blend of Far Cry 4 and Primal's companion system that gives you a thorough mastery of the game's impressively large and Darwinian world. 

Because of the large game world, there's one odd recurring quirk the game does to push the narrative forward. The more hell you raise in each of the regions, the more of a nuisance you become to its Seed-sibling commander. They address this by kidnapping you - they pull you in for what's essentially a little chat - a little sharing of their philosophy and how they feel you fit into it, before making you do a little gameplay that's more or less unique to each boss, though thematically similar across them all.

It's weird narratively, because since I first started becoming such a thorn in their side they've captured me probably about 8 times and never tried to put a bullet in my head. I get the difficulty because changing the world and advancing the narrative in a game that's completely driven by player agency is difficult as hell - but it's frustrating when they do cut me down at the knees and pull me in because they couldn't think of a better way to move the plot along. They remove all player agency because they forgot to tell you something important. 

A small gripe with the story, but nothing worth really getting upset about - those sequences are awesome and usually gorgeous and inventively executed. But, like... I just wanted to clear out an outpost and go to bed. I didn't want to get kidnapped the second I got into the region and then have to advance the plot. For a game designed to let the player do whatever they want, they take away control with regularity, which is different than previous games. 

If I'm scratching my head at one part of the game, it most certainly is not the story (besides that fucking ending) - it's the way the world builds. In previous Far Cry games, they were basically checklists. The map would be fogged until you got to the highest point - that would reveal territory and things to do there. Then there would be an outpost to take out - a mini base full of bad guys that you had to clear. The more outposts you cleared out in any area, the fewer enemies would appear - making it easier for you to accomplish smaller tasks, build your character up, and move on to the next area.

Far Cry 5 does away with a lot of that. Some missions require you to hunt animals - which is totally a Far Cry thing, through and through. However, you'll have no fucking clue where to find the animal you need unless you've:

A) heard about it from a character you've spoken to

B) Saw a road sign warning you about said animal being in the area

C) You read a hunting magazine that talks about a specific animal in a specific area

That's insane and awesome - that the world is literally built from the ground up to be explored and it's so realistic that only if you consumed relevant knowledge in the game will you have said information in the game. It's awesome... in theory. But not in execution.

Because stuff isn't marked on your map, because of the dismissal of the checklist system that Far Cry perfected - the game has never been more 'realistic', but never more involved to play. I legit felt like John Rambo trekking through a world that hates him, trying to make sense of this new strange place, but dammit I just wanted to play a video game, y'know?

I couldn't advance quickly in the game because instead of taking vehicles, I had to huff it on foot and look for shit I needed to advance the narrative of the game itself. And I had to advance on foot, because in the early game you get fucked up on the roads because you haven't destroyed enough of their foothold in each respective region. It forces you to explore the game, and as cool as that is, it takes time.

The game wanted me to respect its time more than it respected mine. Which is pretty incredible, right? How far we've come.

It's impressive how immersive, natural, and diegetic the world building is in this game. It's a huge achievement in interactive storytelling and I'm sure-beyond-sure that it's the future of open world games. It's just not my cup of tea, man. I want to jump into a game, complete clear, concise objectives, and get out. I'm accomplishing way less in-game for way more effort and it's great for the medium. It's just not great for me. It's not how I want to play games. I did less in an hour than any Far Cry game before this because I had to earn it. That's awesome, but overwhelming when you only have an hour to play.

I totally get that I could be in the only person in the universe who feels that way. But dammit - this is my blog and you asked how I felt.

Maybe you asked. I'm still not sure anyone reads this. Anyway, here's a gif of you killing someone and then Boomer bringing you a gun. 

One other side complaint? The fucking airplanes. Once you've advanced the resistance efforts in each region, they get tired of playing with kid gloves, so they sic some old P-51 Mustang style planes on your ass. Sometimes you'll just get fucked up and there's not a lot you can do about it. You'll just be there, hunting deer, a plane will see you (and you're almost never sure how), and literally drop a bomb in the exact nine square feet you're in just to get to you.

It's annoying, but it's also inspiring. It's making me play more... authentic, I guess? I'm sticking to tree cover more, I'm staying out of open areas, and it's changing the allies I have on hand - now I pretty much always have air support on command, but I'm still waiting for the day I can pull out my .50 cal rifle and snipe that piece of shit right out of the sky. This game is making me play like a maniac and it's pretty awesome, even when I - occasionally - want to snap my controller in half.

Should you get Far Cry 5? Hell yeah you should. The game is great, it's just less of the video game I wanted it to be, and way more of the tour of Montana I don't always have time to throw myself into. That said - the more I play, the more I familiarize myself with the game, the easier the world becomes to manipulate and make more game-y.

I'm definitely Neo seeing lines of code instead of people at this point as I wrap up some last things since finishing the story, but man alive. It took me a fuck lot longer than I thought it would to get here. It feels like all the systems they've introduced in previous games (enemy patrols, companions, flying vehicles, hostage missions, treasure stashes etc.) have finally coalesced and they've done so perfectly. It finally makes sense why you're doing all this shit instead of just doing it because you can. or to stretch the play-time like it did in previous games.

This is a huge step forward for the series because all of the side stuff that felt like it was there just for the sake of it finally means something, and contextually within the world makes perfect sense. It's a huge win systematically, and beyond impressive.

But all that has kind of taken a toll on me, gaming wise.

I almost feel like I've spent weeks/months mounting a guerrilla-rebel counterattack against a despotic cult leader, but, I'm not sure if I ever wanted to feel that way. That's a huge accomplishment, but not why I ever played the game series before - I never wanted to role-play as Jason Brody in Far Cry 3 or as that Caveman-dude in Primal... But taking out outposts undetected is still a rush. Unlocking companions and using them to pull off crazy Michael Bay-esque moments is hilarious. Getting a headshot with a compound bow from 200 meters away still makes you feel like a fucking god, and figuring out just what you're supposed to do to unlock a treasure location makes you feel like a genius.

The game does so much right. You just have to invest more time in it than previous games before you can get to what it does best- not that that's a bad thing. It's just a bad thing for me right now. With so much to do in the game, it's easy to feel like you're drowning instead of swimming for just a little too long but you'll get there. 

But that ending is wild. Maybe even a little too wild for me. 

Backlog Quest Log Side Blog - DC Rebirth's race to hurry up and wait

I know I write about Marvel a lot here, but truth be told, as of today (April 23rd), the only Marvel books I'm subscribed to are Marvel Two-in-One, Captain America, and X-Men Red, though I'll occasionally grab a random issue. 

No, srsly - this book owns. And I understand who every character in the book is, unlike X-Men Blue or Gold. 

Everything else is DC. And there's a lot of DC. 

That's because with DC's New 52 Reboot in 2011, I stopped buying comics. Everything I'd been reading over the past... lifetime, was suddenly up for debate and some of my favorite characters were all of a sudden never real (y'know, in the comics world. I know they were never real to begin with). 

Marvel got me back in for a bit in 2013/2014 with their "Marvel Now" line but within a year a new series was started. And then another one. And then there was Secret Wars. And then a new series. And then they went back to old numbering. And now they're doing new series. And I read comic books all the fucking time and even I'm confused about which volume is which and what's actually worth reading. 

I then didn't buy comics for another 2 years - I'd buy old shit trades, but nothing new. I couldn't be fucking bothered to sub to a book because in 8 months it would either be: 

A) undone

B) rebooted with the same creative team 

C) Cancelled (honestly, this pissed me off least)

and I just didn't have the patience for it. I couldn't be bothered with one company that shat all over everything they'd done to get me excited, and another that hit the reset button every year and a half because they figured out #1's sell more than #15's. In the case of Ms. Marvel, look - they used the same damn layout and font for the title - at least with Spider-Gwen they added an adjective, but tracking down back issues was a nightmare. 

Turns out when your first new initiative is "Marvel Now" and your follow up is "All-New Marvel Now", there can be some confusion between the two ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

But then DC released a book called DC Universe: Rebirth and al of a sudden I gave a shit about comics for the first time in years. 

Rebirth was a giant-ass 80-page book priced competitively at $2.99 (Marvel's attempt to do this a year later would be $5.99, and honestly not as good), with some of the best artists at DC working on a script from one of the greatest modern comic book writers - Geoff Johns. And since the book came out two years ago, I'm just gonna cut to the highlights because this is - like Countdown to Infinite Crisis (another awesome 80 page-giant Johns wrote over 10 years ago).

Batman sits there pondering something he learned at the tail-end of a major justice league story - that over the years, the Joker was actually three different people. Two years on, still waiting to hear what the hell is going on here. 

There's a narrator that Johns returns to - it's Wally West, the character he wrote for years on The Flash. Though he was gone/changed during the New 52, the red-headed nephew of Barry Allen (the current Flash)'s romance, Iris Allen isn't dead but he is dying. He's forgotten by everyone in the DC Universe, and he's basically the Ghost of Christmas Past at this point, a vestige of old things. 

And you know what? It's so fucking good to see Wally again. Wally being written out is part of the reason why I left DC/comics to begin with.

He comes to Batman in the hopes of being remembered. Wally is basically looking for what Barry was looking for in Flash: Rebirth, a (surprise, surprise) awesome Geoff Johns book from a few years back. He's looking for a lightning rod - something that can tether him to this reality. He thought it'd be Batman since Bruce still has proof of another world, and he's incredibly smart. It's not. 

But one thing that's pretty sweet about this interaction is we find out that Flashpoint and New 52, the entire thing - it was all by design. Someone stepped behind the universe and pulled some strings to make things different, and nobody knows except Wally. So come hell or high-water, whether he lives or dies, he has to deliver a message. He's just not sure whom to yet. 

Once it's clear that Bruce isn't the one that can bring Wally back, he's pulled away to another connection. After Bruce he tracks down an old man in a nursing home who for all intents and purposes seems like he's going fucking crazy, except of course he's not crazy - he's Johnny fucking Thunder - the coolest name in all of the DC Universe and a member of the Justice Society (guess what? Geoff Johns wrote that book too. Noticing a pattern yet?), and he's missing his team. 

Two years on, still waiting to hear what the hell is going on here too. We saw a teammate from the Justice Society for half a goddamn second. And that's pretty much it. 

After failing to get freed by Johnny, Wally takes a little tour of the contemporary DC Universe. He sees a woman in lockup at Gotham City Police Department and it turns out - yeah, she's a superhero. And a pretty important one. She's Saturn Girl, a member of the Legion of Superheroes, the super team of the future. Yeah, everyone thinks she's crazy too. 

Two years on, we're starting to hear what the hell is going on here. She appeared in the same story we saw the JSA teammate in, and she was just featured in Doomsday Clock, a big-ass 12 issue series from Geoff Johns (SURPRISE, MOTHER FUCKERS) and Gary Frank. 

After that we see The Atom in a story I never really cared about. Followed up Blue Beetle and Dr Fate in another story that I never really cared about either. But then we see Pandora, one of the characters introduced in New 52 (she appeared in every single #1 issue of the entire publishing initiative), and she gets 86'd - which is great, because this was the proof that New 52 was a mistake and they heard the complaints of fans. This was the promise that they were undoing the shit they'd done that nobody liked, and the rest of the issue was proof of them working hard to keep the stuff people did like. 

Wally sees the death site of the New 52 Superman, and comments on the shit that's changed so much - stuff like Dinah Lance and Ollie Queen not really knowing each other at all, when they used to be so close. As a fan it was nice to hear someone with Johns' knowledge comment on the drastic changes made during the New 52 because there was an implied intention to change things, to let these people rediscover each other. We see the Superman from Pre-New 52 who somehow survived, he meets Mr. Oz - a superfucking powerful dude who seems intent on testing Superman the way God tested Job. Two years later - we've answered this one. 

But then Wally remembers he's dying and needs to find someone who remembers him. He was married so next on the list after best friends is, well, his wife. His ex-wife? The dude technically never existed, so not entirely sure how to qualify her. For the first time all issue, we see Wally smile when he's finally reintroduced to Linda, the woman who had twins with the guy. 

And then she uses her non-super-powered hands to rip Wally's super-powered heart out of his super-powered chest. 

Wally pops in on a few more friends to see if any of them are the lightning rod he needs to get back to reality. None of them are, but he takes a second to peak in on Wally West - the one that was created for the New 52 and in typical Johns fashion, an incredibly simple explanation clears up why there are two fucking Wally Wests. 

And then Wally is ready to die. But there's one person he has to see before he can officially let go. And I'm going to put all the pages for it in there because holy hell is it emotional as shit. 

And just like that, Wally accepts his fate like a goddamn hero. He's ready to die, and his last words were those of love, respect, and kindness, because he's too good for this world, and that's why he has to leave it. 

But Barry is a fucking hero too, and he refuses to let anyone die. Especially someone like Wally. 

Whoever is cutting onions needs to fucking quit it, okay? There's only one real page of consequence left and it's the last one. While there was a ton of foreshadowing (like the nine-panel pages, the breakdown of the clock, etc.)  throughout the issue, the final page is a hammer straight to the dome, where we get the first hint as to who caused this entire universe that shouldn't have happened to happen and it's a fucking doozy. 

Two years on, this is finally started to get addressed the aforementioned miniseries Doomsday Clock. A 12-issue, bi-monthly series that's seemingly taking place in DC Continuity but not, and is currently moving slower than anything I could possibly make up a metaphor for. I'm no longer excited for this series. I'm waiting for it all to come out, because this every two month bullshit is just that - bullshit. It's killing all momentum. 

And that's the book that got me back into comics. It's epic, it's emotional, it's apologetic, and it's exciting, and it's self-aware. But... two years later and we still don't have a lot of answers, and it's starting to wear thin on me. We got a four part crossover between Flash and Batman called "The Button" where essentially one thing happened in four issues, and everything else was just a wink and a nod. In two fucking years.

DC is starting to make me less excited about comics because they don't seem to have to the chutzpah to actually commit to a story one way or the other. Their books are doing fine, generally, but few are rollicking must-reads the way they were to me a few years ago when I thought we'd get some goddamn answers. 

For the past two years it's been hurry up and wait for the ball to move forward, and in spite of some great issues we've gotten from all the series (Aquaman, Green Arrow, Red Hood and the Outlaws, Super Sons, Detective Comics, Action Comics, Batman, and Superman in particular have been awesome) and we got an All-time event in the form of Metal - that advanced the universe, but it was the promise of answers that got me back into DC to begin with and two years on, we're severely lacking in that department. 

I'm going to cancel a few DC books on my sub. I'm going to be adding more Marvel until they dick me over again. But with DC's wheels spinning in place on what they promised the story would be (for two years), and Marvel seemingly firing on a more cylinders than it's used to, I'm going to follow the momentum. 

That's what got me into comics in the first place.

Backlog Quest log Side Blog - The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises is the best of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. 

No, seriously.

Batman Begins is a close second - and The Dark Knight isn't a bad movie by any means (it's a pretty perfect movie) but Rises represents the best of the trilogy because of its ability to marry a real-world aesthetic with a comic-book inspired tone. It's really unlike anything else in the Super Hero tentpole genre that's been taking over movie theaters for the past decade and because of it stands a cut above the rest of genre fare. 

Picking up 8 years or so after the events of The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises sees a Gotham that has returned from the brink the Joker had brought it to. Thousands of criminals from Gotham's old mob days were behind bars, but at the cost of Batman's legacy. Instead of telling the truth about District Attorney Harvey Dent's actions at the end of the previous film, Batman took the fall in order to keep everyone dent prosecuted locked up. Bruce gave up being the Batman, Commissioner Gordon is on the verge of retiring, and everything is pretty quiet.

Until Bane shows up to rip shit in two. And you know what?

Once it becomes clear that Gotham is in somebody's crosshairs again, Bruce Wayne knows its time for him to come back as the Goddamned Batman and make it right. What started his career was his mentorship under Ra's Al Ghul and the League of Shadows, so it makes sense that Batman's final mission would be against what that organization became. 

Y'know, because themes. 

After that it's pretty much off to the races. Some cop Gordon takes under his wing deduces Batman's secret identity and it's cool seeing Bruce have someone to talk to about cape shit with besides Alfred for once, Anne Hathaway plays anti-hero Catwoman who loves to cat-burgle and cat-betray, and we're treated to an all time fight with some of my favorite lines from anything ever.

"Peace has cost you your strength; victory has defeated you."

"The Shadows betray you because they belong to me."

"Ahh, yes - I was wondering what would break first; your spirit, or your body."

It wasn't just badass lines, it was so perfectly translated from the page it was drawing inspiration from - showing something every Batman fan has wanted to see since 1994:

Y'know what? Just take a five and watch the whole scene because it's freaking rad.

Not only do we get one of Batman's most iconic moments realized on the big screen, we get it realized so gorgeous. The cinematography in Nolan's movies is always jaw-dropping-ly gorgeous. You can tell care and consideration went into the framing of everything and the end result is probably the most beautifully filmed superhero movie we're ever going to see. 

But it's incorporating this key element of the Batman mythos that led to one of the two greatest criticisms of the movie, and usually what leads people to call Rises the worst of the entire trilogy. 

Also, hats off to Tom Hardy for crushing it (heh) as Bane. Not only is he physically terrifying, but that voice - with the accent you can't place and the tonal cadence you can't predict is so fucking unsettling that the dude just scares you when he breathes. 

After Batman has one of his vertebrae's dislocated, he's dropped in the middle of fucking nowhere - a literal hole in the ground prison that you have to make an impossible leap to escape. 

All the while, Bane is wreaking havoc in Gotham - the dude has cut it off from the rest of the world and basically lit the fuse on what's a nuclear bomb - that will decay in three months time into a big fuckin' ass explosion that'll finally wipe Gotham off the face of the earth. He's making Gotham suffer the way he did in that same prison Bruce is in, the prison he used to be a captive of. And the police can't do a damn thing about it because they're all trapped underground in the sewer system.

Y'know, because themes. 

And the first piece of criticism is that there's no WAY Batman (gonna keep calling him Batman instead of Bruce Wayne because who would you rather hang out with?) could recover and then make it back to Gotham to fight the good fight. Fuckin' Julian Edelman was out for the entire year when he tore his ACL in a preseason game, you think Batman can break his back and make it home for supper?

Yeah. I do. Because I'm a fucking romantic. 

Batman's spirit is so indomitable, so absolute that he literally transcends what we understand to be human in a way that's completely understandable. You read stories about mothers finding the strength to lift cars to protect their babies, well Gotham is Batman's baby and he's moving every obstacle in his way of to the side because his need to protect, that inherent thing inside of him telling him "no more orphans" is louder than an airhorn and the singular thing that exists. As an audience, t's not our job to understand how Batman is better than us; all we have to do us understand that he is. 

So of course he pulls himself up by the bootstraps and wills his back into alignment because of course he does - he's the goddamned Batman, son. 

Once he gets back to Gotham, he needs an army to fight Bane's. he gathers allies he trusts, and allies his allies trust and the chessboard is pretty much all set up for a final showdown. He rescues the cops that were trapped underground because the bomb is going off tomorr- oh shit, this is the other part that people say is so stupid it removes the movie from contention as best of the trilogy. 

Completely unrelated to Dark Knight Rises, I've just always loved this cover by Jae Lee

"Those cops were underground for three months - they hadn't seen the sun in a quarter of a year and there's no fucking way they weren't malnourished out of complete physical relevance three weeks in, let alone three months."

And more so than the back one, this is the best argument I see against the film, but again, it's too damn romantic to let it get in the way of something like watching the superfluous take precedence over utility and see a sweet ass army of cops charge on a not-sweet-ass army of assassins and terrorists. 

It's too fucking epic. It's some Lawrence of Arabia level shit. 

But this criticism is understandable because Batman is historically the only unrealistic element in any of Nolan's three movies. Here's a dude who's so freaking perfect - smart, strong, imaginative - that he seems like he's the next step of humanity. So we can accept him doing inhuman shit because we know he's better than us, but whenever anyone besides his foil does something that breaks from our notion of reality, we can't accept that - we have to call foul because those aren't the rules. The rules are that Batman is the apex predator, then its his villain, then there's 50 feet of blank space - and then there's the rest of us, with Gordon at the top. 

But the cops being confined underground for three months and then all of a sudden mounting an attack? That breaks those rules. And to people who file that under unacceptable, all I can do to argue for it is...

Y'know.... because, themes.

This moment is Gotham's ascension - this is the common person, the most basic level of Batman saying "fuck you" to the paradigm and rising up, doing something completely inhuman in the service of humanity. It's a fucking beautiful moment where they get the chance to live after being dead for three months and do so in the likelihood that they're just going to die again. 

And that? That's beautiful as shit. That's the most comic book fucking thing ever - that's why millions of issues of Detective Comics would sell in '39 and why it's still a top 10 book now almost 80 years later. None of us will ever be born on Krypton. None of us will ever have Zeus be our father, none of us got injected with super-soldier serum in World War II, and none of us will ever be bitten by a radioactive spider... 

But anyone of us could put on a cape and do the impossible. This movie just proved we don't even need a cape to do it anymore.

Backlog Quest Log Side Blog - Call of Duty Black Ops and Change

I don't think rumors are even worth the grain of salt you're supposed to take them with, but this one in particular has me too giddy to just ignore it. 

Per Polygon, and a bunch of other sites operating under the same sources, this fall's Call of Duty - Black Ops 4 - will not feature a traditional single player campaign. It's a departure for the series that cut its teeth being a war simulator, telling sweeping single player stories that, for a while, set the bar for console shooters. 

But there's an overlooked word that appears in the report, and that word is "traditional". That can be a pretty loaded word, so let's take a quick second to unpack it. 

'Traditional' in regards to Call of Duty means an 8-10 hour narrative-based campaign, full of over-the-top set pieces and something that'll tie into the greater Black Ops continuity that's been building since 2010. 

And yeah, I'm going to miss playing a Call of Duty campaign this fall, like I have pretty much every fall since 2007. I fucking love Call of Duty campaigns. They're loud, they're dumb, they're fun, and they feel so damn good. 

But Battlefield One had a non-traditional campaign. Star Wars Battlefront II (2005) had a non-traditional campaign. Civilization V. Even Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare wasn't really a traditional campaign. Lots of games have non-traditional campaigns, and some of them are really fucking good, so there's no real reason to assume Call of Duty Black Ops IV won't be one of them, if this rumor turns out to be true. 

Even Call of Duty Ghosts had Riley

It's silly to assume, because whether you like Call of Duty or not, no one can say they're bad games. Even the worst Call of Duty games are still pretty good games. It's like Pixar - Pixar's worst movie (I'm lookin' at you, Cars 2) is still more fun than 85% of everything else out there. 

But I said at the top of this thing that I'm excited and that's because Activision and 72 and Sunny (the agency of record for Call of Duty) are in pretty rarified air for annualized franchises: they can do something new. 

Like it or not, a Call of Duty game releasing without a traditional single player campaign is a new product. Without leaning on the likenesses of Kit Harrington or Kevin Spacey to get people invested in a narrative like past advertising blitzes, they have to do something new to get people's attention in what's not just a crowded market, but a market that's leaning heavily towards F2P 9free-to-play) games like Fortnite and Warframe. 

Drake and some dude named Ninja had 500,000+ concurrent pairs of eyes watching this game a few weeks ago. The future is free-to-play and the revolution will be streamed.

They have to explain why something that was included with the $60 product you bought last year, and every year before that, isn't there. And to do that, they have to/can do one of the following things

A) sell their multiplayer as the single best online multiplayer experience of the year (compete against Fortnite / PUBG / others)

B) lower the price to compensate for less product (doubt it)

C) Create something new to replace missing feature (Battlefield One style vignettes, co-op elements like Spec-Ops)

D) Transition to the seasonal model of F2P games, Turning Call of Duty into a platform (doubt it)

E) Include Modern Warfare 2 / Black Ops / Black Ops II Remastered as the SP offering (unlikely, why call it Black Ops IV then?)

F) Act like nothing is different

Activision isn't stupid. If they're not including a traditional AAA style narrative based single player campaign, it's because they feel like the juice isn't worth the squeeze. They have analytics. They know just how much time people spend in their campaigns, how far they get, and what the ratio is of time invested in single player to multiplayer.

Seeing the success of properties like Destiny or The Division, they're probably opting for what used to be in the game before the survival mode stuff took off - small, focused cooperative missions with a score system to encourage re-playability, or something with drops like Destiny, again to encourage re-playability. 

And they should. Because people by-and-large aren't touching their single player stories, so why should Activision pay money for something most people don't even touch?

"George, how could you possibly know that nobody is playing Call of Duty's campai-" MATH, YOU SAVAGE.

Y'all got some New Balances or some Dansko's on? 'Cause we're about to go for a walk.

As of January 2018, Call of Duty WWII, the most recent entry has sold about 10.87 million units (at retail, this does not include digital sales, which aren't reported). 

And as of about November 2017, the PlayStation 4 has roughly 69 million units (nice) out in the wild. Xbox One has about 34 million, add that up, you get 103 million, which we're going to round to a cool 100 and PlayStation 4 to a cool 70 million units because even though I love Good Will Hunting, I am most certainly not Good Will Hunting, and most maths hurt my brain. 

Obviously the following figures are not exact.

So, let's assume that about 7 million of the near 11 million people who bought it, did so on PlayStation 4. 

PSNprofiles.com is a site for hardcore game nerds - it lets them track, compare, tabulate, and plan out the trophies for everything in the PlayStation ecosystem. You have to give a shit about games to even know about it, let alone sign up for it; it's made for people who want to 100%, or damn near it, their games. But, something it, and you, have access to is something pretty interesting: the trophy data for every PlayStation 4 user. It lets you compare to the average PlayStation user.

This doesn't just give us the data for users - this gives us the difference between users and likely users - the hardcore fans who own a PS4 and signed up for PSN Profiles, and the people who simply own a PS4. 

Of those 7 million people, 50.08% of every PlayStation user completed the first level. 57.99% of PSN Profile holders - the people who are supposed to give the most shit - completed the first level. Only 31.35% of those PSN Profile holders even finished the campaign outright, and 24.5% of PlayStation users made it that far at all.

A quarter of 7 million is a lot of people. But three quarters of 7 million people is a lot, lot more.

No, really. It's 3x as many. 

Right? I'm almost entirely certain that my math is maybe kind of right. But in college the only math course I took was "Word Problems" so, who's to say? No one's to say, because I turned off comments. Let it Rain, Man. 

But if that's the case - if only 50-60% of the people who bought your game bothered to finish the first level, and if only about 25-30% of people who bought your game are bothered to finish it at all, then what's the point of them throwing good money after a ton more of good money that people couldn't even pretend to give a shit about last year? 

That's why what Call of Duty's doing, this rumored change, is so fucking exciting. It's giving itself a chance to convince people it's the pinnacle again, it's got the chance to shout "HEY BITCHES, WE GOT SOMETHING FRESH OVER HERE". There was a time when online multiplayer was new. There was a time when battle royale modes were new. This new game needs a chance to at least stretch its legs before you can say it's shitty at making the run towards first place. 

And of course I'm bummed to see the traditional single player campaigns go, but that's not to say they're not being replaced by something better. I'm ready for y'all to wow me, Call of Duty.

Backlog Quest Log Side Blog - Marvel Unlimited F$%#ing RULES

If you've been reading this (lol) then it's probably been easy for you to assume I have something of  Marvel comics bias, since I've only ever talked about video games and Marvel comics. That's pretty funny, but only if you know one thing: 

I'm currently subscribed to exactly three (3) Marvel books and about 15-20 DC books. Every month I give DC all my money and Marvel my pittance. So, why am I always talking about Marvel instead of the House that Batman built?

Two words: Marvel Unlimited. 

Marvel Unlimited is a digital comics distribution platform put out by the House of Ideas, and after a week free-trial it'll set you back about $10 a month. What do you get for a measly Hamilton?

Honestly, you get pretty much everything you could fucking want, and it's wonderful. 

Marvel Unlimited offers pretty much every single Marvel comic you could ever want, until 6 months ago. Every week there's a selection of recent books added, as well as classics added as collections. I want to say it's like Netflix for comics but really it's more like Spotify - they don't just have everything you like, they have pretty much everything.

Like Spotify, the only thing that's missing is that collection of bootlegs and weird rips you'd spent the better part of the late 2000's acquiring through Pirate Bay and Demonic, but when you're getting 98% of everything you want, it's easy to overlook the 2% you're missing. 

Unless I'm talking about shit that's coming out today, it's because of Marvel unlimited, letting me revisit my favorites without bringing all my freaking shortboxes anywhere I go just to rehash a story. 

It has the entire Ultimate Universe. All of Bendis' Avengers books. All of the Fantastic Four going back to '61. The entire Infinity event that the upcoming Avengers movie is based on. 

It has goddamn everything. I'd be more than willing to make a playlist for anyone who wants to know what's worth a look, and in fact, that sounds like a kickass blog post. So don't mind if I do. 

Backlog Quest Log Side Blog - The Thing (2005)

Alright, let's try this one again, huh?

I promise I won't make this a tirade about anything but the series, alright? Pinky. It's just gonna be about this book and strictly reasonable tangents. 

From the outside I had completely forgotten The Thing was an attempt at an ongoing series that only lasted a few months outside of the gate. It seems like a series nowadays usually gets more than 8 issues to find itself, but 2005 was a different time for Marvel. This was between House of M and Civil War - Disney wouldn't be buying Marvel for another few years, and Elektra just hit theaters. Oh, snap, there was another movie that hit theaters that summer too, and I think I figured out why we got an ongoing for The Thing all of a sudden. 

Given how much I've seen companies foam at the mouth for things like synergy, you'd think that an ongoing about the/second most visually interesting (sorry, Jessica Alba) character on the team would've been a slam dunk, but if you've read my previous post, you know that ongoing itself kicks off with something more akin to a whimper than a bang. 

Something I totally forgot about - Ben Grimm, the ever-lovin' blue eyed Thing (as he refers to himself, multiple, multiple times so I feel it's okay for me to call him that too), comes into a bit of money, and doesn't turn out the better for it. Being the financial beneficiary after so many years bein' the debbie downer of any group he was ever in ever - was the status-quo shift that marvel thought could carry a new ongoing. And they were... half right and half wrong. 

I still think this series failed because of that disastrous opening arc. Ben was dating some hot actress who brought him to a swanky party. Everyone there (including Ben, Tony Stark, a d-list hero, and a former c-list villain) gets kidnapped and brought to an island in the South China Sea where they have to survive evil machinations and half-truths from their murderous host. 

It. Was. So. Slow. And the end result was that Ben's girlfriend only liked him for his money - which it's kinda hard not to see that "curveball" coming, but the logic Ben uses to arrive there is actually pretty fucking stupid. She has to distract the cameras from noticing Tony Stark slip away, so she pretends to strike up a huge argument with Ben, and even though he notices her plan, his conclusion is that he's seen enough of her movies to know she's not that good an actress, and breaks up with her. 

I mean, that's funny as hell, but I don't think in the way Slott intended. 

And just like that, Ben abusing his money for privilege he wouldn't be able to enjoy without it is put to rest. Which stinks, because I really, really liked seeing covers like this one hit the shelf.  

After the snail's pace first three issues, things don't get much faster, but they certainly get a hell of a lot more interesting. Ben struggles to use his money responsibly and quickly discovers that money can't solve everything, even if it's well-intentioned. 

When Ben was a kid, he and his brother ran around with the Yancy Street Gang - and as the little-hell raisers they were, Ben actually racked up quite the bill from a local pawnshop, despite his best attempts at using a five finger discount. Even though he's now worth billions, the pawnshop owner refuses to take his money to settle the debt, and instead wants to see him there every Sunday to work it off. 

Ben learning about pride and dignity through working at a pawnshop is, honestly, right what I fucking wanted from this book. Just a hero doing regular-ass things and looking weird while he does it, because it's hard not to look weird when you're a 1,200 pound pile of orange rocks. 

I'm super bummed this book got cut down when it did, but I'm also not surprised. The last issues are definitely more "we're going out, we might as well have fun" attitude that's always an unfortunate blast to read. 

In the second half of this series,  the following happens;

- The Thing agrees to take Lockjaw as a pet from the Inhumans

- The Thing and Spider-man team up to battle a common foe

- Ben takes his sculptress ex-girlfriend to ancient Greece for her birthday

- Ben hosts a poker game for heroes 

Like, the book is the easy breezy break from tights and superhero drama that was desperately needed as the Marvel Universe transitioned into Civil War. If it's not the three issues with, umm, Arcade that killed this series momentum, it must have been the tonal shift between this and every other book Marvel was putting out on the line at the time. 

If there's one problem I could pick with the series and in particular with San Slott's handling of the character... When he writes the character, it's like the dude just fell out of the 1960's. This character hasn't aged at all, Reed is guilty of this too to some extent but significantly less so than Ben. Sue and Johnny seem to be written pretty well, but with Ben - it feels like instead of writing the character The Thing, Slott is instead just doing a really, really good impression of The Thing. And it's cool he can do that, but it ultimately feels like the character itself is out of time. Like the joke is "Hey look at this person from the 60's here in the 2000's, isn't it a weird fish out of water story lol?" - and that makes it so damn hokey that it's hard to get into. 

I know the character is an old soul. I know he's stubborn as all hell. But damn, man, stubborn in 2005 has to look different than it did in 1961 because it just fucking has to. This ongoing was put out the same time as Tales of the Thing, a three issue miniseries that was made to be evergreen - it didn't beat you over the head with continuity - and this is where you want The Thing to sound like it's 1965.

(Side note: You should read this, it's actually pretty fun and one of the comics that helped me get back into comics when I was a high school freshman - it's on Marvel Unlimited, do ittttt.)

I'm a little curious if I'll ever see Dan Slott steal a moment with The Thing - like take the character and really put his fingerprint on it, y'know? It's cool that he can imitate that character so well, but it's... it's a bit like hearing a cover song that sounds exactly like the original. It's awesome that you can sound like who you love so much but... if you're not adding anything new, then what's the point? 

Joe Cocker covered "With a Little Help" so GODDAMN hard, sometimes you almost forget it's a Beatles song. Are we gonna get the comic equivalent from Dan Slott and Sara Pichelli this summer? I dunno, man. But I really hope so. 

I'm pretty sick of the fucking Beatles, so to speak. 

Backlog Quest Log Side Blog - Arcade can go fuck himself

I did it just like I said I would. After Dan Slott's Spider-man/Human Torch, I finally read The Thing after putting it off for about 13 years.

So this book is... The thing about Dan Slott's 2005 book The Thing is... Okay, let me get something off my chest real quick so we can cut the bullshit and just get back to talkin' fun about funnybooks, alright?

Don't ever make Arcade your villain a multi-issue comic arc. Don't ever make Arcade your villain, period. And most especially, don't ever make Arcade your villain in a multi-issue comic arc to kick off your brand fucking new ongoing series. The character sucks ass, and has for nearly 45 years. Not only is it a total waste of time and talent to even give this shitsipper even a moment's thought, It's exponentially worse that this pair of fucking clownshoes, this fuckface waste of ink three of his own issues at the top of any ongoing.

With all due respect to Dan Slott and Andrea Divito, no wonder they fucking cancelled it 8 issues in. Look at this piece of shit you put all your faith in to set the goddamn tone:

Oh really? Your name is Arcade and you build giant, multi-million dollar deathtraps that exclusively fail in spectacular fashion? Tell me more, you Rube Goldberg knock off fuck, shitty-ass market pantry brand Wile E. Coyote. 

He's made even worse by some other waste of a goddamn character who looks like the baby Astro-Boy and the T-1000 had just tagging along for the goddamn ride and I am so angry because these characters are ass and it should be illegal for Marvel Comics writers to give them any semblance of screen time, let alone fucking charge people to read about them as if they were credible goddamn conflict or something. 

Honestly I think that's about all I can type today. I got a little too heated and I'm sorry about that - I'll tell you about The Thing's 2005 ongoing tomorrow or something. Because there's a lot of stuff to like... 

But Arcade is most certainly not one of them. You're a piece of shit, Arcade. I hope you died in Secret Wars. 

Backlog Quest Log Side Blog - Spider-man and the Human Torch

With the (very welcome) news that the Fantastic Four is returning, I couldn't help but get giddy. In case you couldn't tell from previous posts, I'm a huge fan of the franchise. The creative team announced to reintroduce the team to the Marvel Universe is no slouch either - Dan Slott and Sara Pichelli, both pretty well known for their work on Spider-man and helming pretty respectable runs for the character. That said, I was still a bit apprehensive about their work on a book so near and dear to me. Which is pretty stupid, since, let's say they end up creating one of the worst runs on the characters of all-time (they won't, but let's just say) - getting bad FF comics is still better than no FF comics. 

This seemed as good a time as any to revisit some of Slott's older work with characters from the Fantastic Four. In 2005, a five issue mini-series called Spider-man Human Torch kicked off. It chronicled the development of Spider-man and Human Torch's friendship, with each issue loosely tied to different eras of each character. It's pretty well regarded and I was stoked to check it out. 

The conceit is pretty awesome - we get to check in on these characters and see not just how they've changed, but how the Marvel Universe itself changed too. The early issues deal with pretty traditionally 60's era shit - these characters were still relatively new, so when Spidey pretends to join Dr. Doom to trick him, Johnny believes its for real.

The art even compliments the era its supposed to take place in, which is super fun, especially when you consider what else was going on at Marvel at the time. In 2005 Avengers Mansion just got blown up, a snap reaction from the mentally unstable Scarlett Witch made the population of mutants go from thousands to just shy of 200, the Winter Soldier just started running around, and if you listened very closely, you could hear the subtle drum beats of Civil War in the distance. 

So, given all that, it makes perfect sense that a series like this would be loved. I just don't know if I loved it. I personally have a hard time getting into older books. I think their pacing is weird, their A story is inconsequential, and the dialogue is stilted. Most books from the 60's saving grace is the art, and as much fun as the two artists on the book (Chris Sotomayor and Ty Templeton) are, with all due respect they're not Steve Ditko or Jack Kirby. They're solid artists, but nothing in this book really wowed.

I know comparing people to the King isn't fair, especially since I struggle to draw stick figures. 

You could tell the creators were having fun though, there's a lot of great jokes, a lot of funny pokes at some of the more ridiculous aspects of older books. But my problem with old comics, except for the ones that introduce new characters, is it feels kinda like dog years; 

Like every 7 issues gets you the net advancement of one issue. And the same is true for this series. The coolest issue by far is the final one, where Johnny finally realizes that Spider-man and Peter Parker are the same person. 

And the next part is... well, it's lame for a superhero book but I fucking love it. Y'know how you see tabloid photos at the grocery line checkout of Reese Witherspoon or Chris Pratt or someone getting a Coolata from Dunkin' Donuts and you're just like - whoa - "Kinda nice knowing Elle Woods is normal"?

No? Just me? That sucks, please still hire me though. 

It's nice seeing a different side of the people you normally know for beating the shit out of each other. There are 10,000 comics about the Human Torch and Spider-man and it was really cool getting the last third of the issue about Peter Parker and Johnny Storm. 

I wish the entire series had been shit like that instead. Like - that movie Interstellar was awesome, but don't you kinda wanna see the movie where Coop steals the ship to go and find Anne Hathaway? That sounds like a pretty rad movie too, right?

I know the book is fun, but I'm not exactly in a rush to re-read it anytime soon. I'm eager to check out Slott's other work on characters from the Fantastic Four in anticipation of his return to the series this summer with Pichelli, and this book did nothing to wane my interest. 

There's a lot for someone to like about this book, but to me, it was just shy of hitting the mark. 

Backlog Quest Log Side Blog - Captain America: White

As a copywriter, knowing what to say is never as important as knowing how to say it. It's so easy to wax poetic and say something in 250 words, but can you say it in 250 characters? In 100? In 15? It's a struggle to know when more is actually less, when romance is necessary, what word is vernacular, but all that stuff adds up and makes you think about how superfluous most words are. 

But the job of writing advertising copy is an exercise in ratios; how can you say the most with the least? Which is awesome, because Moneyball isn't just one of my favorite movies, it's one of my favorite verbs too. You're trying to make the most impactful headline as simply as possible, and simplicity translates to word economy. Occam's Razor was actually a character count this whole time.

And comics? Comics are two things; they're art, and they're words. And honestly, most of them could do with fewer words. 

I get the irony of saying people should write fewer words and showing a panel that has 21 of them, but you missed the irony of me writing an entire fucking blogpost about it. 

Y'know, this blog non-withstanding. But hey, let's get back to the point.

Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale are an amazing team. They've told some iconic, character defining stories together, between Batman: The Long Halloween, Hulk: Gray, Spider-man: Blue, and a ton of other out-of continuity, evergreen collaborations. When you're trying to get a friend into comics, you're probably gonna throw one of their projects into the mix; they're just that good. 

But recently I was reading a book of theirs that I missed because of delays (it took nearly 8 years for the zero issue and 1-5 to come out) and honestly, I just kinda forgot about it. Captain America: White tells the story of Bucky and Cap teaming up with Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos behind enemy lines for an operation in Nazi-occupied Paris. 

Let's not mince words here - Loeb knows how to craft a simple story that's compelling. The way Indiana Jones captures the romanticism and adventure to set up a narrative that instantly feels like a classic, Loeb does that for the funny books and it's wildly addictive. It's so simply told, it should be taught in textbooks, and simple is never a knock. It's really, really hard to tell a story simply.

Goddamn Sale is good. His work on Long Halloween was way more stylized, but this is a bit more proportional and realistic, while still being unmistakably Sale. 

And let's not mince words again (because that'd be just as silly a second time) - Tim Sale can art the fuck out of a book. His art direction is pretty singular - he instantly makes these characters his own but always familiar, and his traditionally black-heavy colors are a little more forgiving here. They're slightly more washed out, and you see a greater emphasis on a gradient of darker tones rather than full-on darkness most associated with his work on Batman. It's also pretty cool to see him tone down the musculature a bit on his figures. Instead of being exaggerated, they're a little smoother; a bit more simple to match the story. 

The conceit of the entire comic is that Cap is remembering how Bucky discovered his identity and became his partner. Every time there's an exposition box, we can tell that Steve's reflecting on things he could've done differently, and had he done them so, Bucky might still be alive. The entire comic is an apology letter, something you can imagine as a private obituary for a friend. The reeling you do in a tragedy that you felt like you could have, or should have averted. 

And honestly? I think that makes the book worse. The exposition taking place at a different time really just feels like a wink to the reader, and offers no real story-lifting for the narrative at all. It's just kinda there, blocking gorgeous art. It's well-written, but unnecessary - superfluous. 

It tells, when it was already doing such a good job of showing. The exposition given literally just serves three pages in the entire series, but not the story at large.

It's not bad - I fucking loved this book - it's just a great example of when doing less could do a lot more. 

Is there anything you get from the exposition boxes that you don't get from the image? I'm leaning towards 'no'. Instead you just get powder blue contrasting the shit out of the art.

07 - Emily is Away

I haven't beaten a game in a while, huh? Man, that kinda shoot's my blog's point right in the foot. 

Anywho.

I think part of the reason people are so nostalgic lately is because they want to go back to a time where they understood less, and when the potential of something was exciting. People are fawning over the 90's because they either didn't give a shit about politics back then or because they like those politics a hell of a lot more than they do now. They think movies back then were better because studios couldn't just rely on cgi, and every song was a banger because in third grade there's not a lot to do after getting into your tv-less bedroom and listen to the radio and learn every word to every song played on B97.1 FM's Top 5 @ 9, which is why Third Eye Blind is the greatest band of the 90's: they were banger city. 

I don't think most people missed 1999 because of something consequential happening in 1999. I think they miss it because of how they felt in 1999. Nobody ever misses the thing - they just miss the way that thing made them feel. 

Emily is Away definitely plays up this nostalgia tailspin our generation finds itself in, and to be honest - I'm all for it. Emily is Away is a choose your own adventure (can you tell I definitely like two types of games yet?) that takes place entirely in a reconstruction of AOL's (formerly) iconic chat messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM for people over the age of 40 or under the age of 22 (two huge demos for my blog). 

It's not so much a game as much as it's a time machine. The game is lovingly recreating a very specific time and a very specific place. It does its best to recreate the experience authentically, letting you choose a then-relevant buddy-icon, and before too long, titular Emily logs in and you get to chat with her. The sound of someone logging in... I don't know how I forgot about it. 

There are a couple of canned responses you can shoot her, and after selecting one you're left with a blank chat-field. Typing any key on your keyboard triggers the sounds of a mechanical keyboard typing in a more conversational/human version of what you selected to type to her. It's your senior year of high school and there's a party you're not sure about going to. But Emily is going. 

Well... did you go, or not?

The game branches depending on responses, and those responses inform what you and Emily will talk about the next time she logs on. Essentially, you're chatting with her once a year throughout college and your last conversation influence the relationship you have with her. Yes you can hook up with her. Yes you can choose not to. The world is kind of your oyster in that regard, but it feels less like a branching story, and more like a river that splits into smaller creeks before reforming downstream and feeding into a single tributary. In the beginning, The game's alphabet always starts with A and ends with Z, but it's more or less up to you how the other 24 letters are arranged. 

The ending is a bit frustrating because of that seemingly singular destination, but it's never about that - it's about the journey, right? As frustrating (y'know, relatively) the ending is, the actual trek there was a nostalgic dunking that reminded about things I'd forgotten. The iconic sounds, the rush you feel when someone you're crushing logs on, choosing just the right lyrics to go into your profile - while the story was frustrating, being transported back to 2003 most certainly was not, and to the games credit - the story is impactful regardless of what ending you choose, and the game itself is short enough where going back to see how else things could've possibly panned out never feels like a waste of time, but rather an exercise in reflection. Reflecting on the times that were, the person you were, and maybe the person you should've been. 

A phenomenal goddamn game, that you'd do well to spend some time with. And I'm 98% sure it's free on Steam, so please give it a shot and tell me the last lyrics you remember assigning to an IM service. 

MSN Instant Messenger circa 2007, courtesy of Modest Mouse: Went to the porch to have a thought, got to the door and again I couldn't stop. 

I was hashtag deep. What was yours? Were you also hashtag deep?

Lol, just kidding, I know no one reads this shit. 

BACKLOG QUEST LOG SIDE BLOG - THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MARVEL AND DC (PART 2)

That was then...

On the surface level back then... I don't know. I don't know what someone living back then thought when Marvel just came out of the gate roaring like that - I'm only 27, so I can't speak to the social impact of their all of a sudden being a second comic book publisher trying to eat DC's lunch. 

But as for now, with so much data to completely misread conclusions from, it appears to me that DC tried to take advantage of the state of the world when it reintroduced its superhero line, by removing the magical elements that were so prominent in the 30's and 40's and give them a more scientific edge in a more scientifically inclined world. People understood Boeing was a big deal back then, so they could handle the idea of a test pilot who moonlights as a superhero, they didn't started letting science and science fiction do some of the work to make readers suspend their disbelief instead of just using that catchall word "Magic". 

Marvel had the benefit of starting out in the Cold War climate. They didn't have to change their world as much as reflect the one around them. I find it pretty fascinating that the Fantastic Four - the comic that put Marvel on the map, were characters that didn't have secret identities. They were Cold War Heroes because of their scientific endeavors but mostly because they were public personas - there was nothing sinister about them, there couldn't be - they had nothing to hide, wearing their true selves on their sleeves, pretty much completely uprooting the paradigm that DC had established with its super hero renaissance.  

And then along came a Spider-man and the crisis of conscience that he faced by being indirectly responsible for his Uncle's death. This was a dude suffering from a tragedy of his own inaction and all the while he still had to navigate the later stages of puberty and early steps of adulthood while dealing with that guilt. Batman was sad about the death of his parents, but never guilty. Superman was sad about losing his parents as well, but also never guilty. 

That's a key factor in separating Marvel and DC - Marvel was way more mired in being more realistic. DC was escapism - you were literally going to new places like Gotham, Metropolis, Central City, Coast City, etc - these places had approximations, but were never real locations you could point to on a map. Their characters had otherworldly problems that seemed so fantastical, that they had to be fiction. 

But Marvel's characters fought in New York, in London, in Los Angeles - they were integrated into the world we knew and they felt the same things we did - they felt guilt and love and heartache, and isolation and temptation - they were humans with powers, they weren't gods that had moved beyond their humanity. 

DC's figures, even now, feel like Modern Mythology - the Justice League and its typical associates are a pantheon of otherworldly characters who step in and save the little guy, but they don't always feel like they're part of a real world, that they're saving their favorite falafel cart every time they stop aliens from invading wherever they happen to invade. That's part of what makes them great - this is mythology being created and expanded and preserved right in front of us.

Marvel on the other hand doesn't feel like a pantheon, it feels like the natural evolution of the species. These are dudes and chicks who had their own lives going on and then had powers dumped on them. They're a lot more relatable which makes them special in their own way, because you totally get it when Spider-man spreads himself so thin emotionally, physically, financially and then gets excited about a paycheck only to remember it's the first and he has to pay rent.

That's a problem Superman will never have which is awesome - it lets him focus on other shit, while that's Spider-man's MO and it's awesome in its own right - because that's relatable as fuck and it's really nice to know I'm not the only one. 

... This is now

Honestly the comics seem a bit superfluous now compared to the films, don't they? There's a kickass article on Vox that talks about how Marvel's movies are an endless attempt to re-write 9/11 and I don't think that's terribly far off the mark. That footage is some of the most horrendous shit of the century so far so if you could even pretend to stop it, I don't see why artists wouldn't create their ideal world where it never happened. That's probably why Marvel films have been so successful - they're superheroes with levity and an integration in the real world. There's no way they'd let something like that happen, right? It'd be impossible for the two to exist at the same, heroes and tragedy. 

That's why the first Hulk movie failed and why he was a breakout star in the Avengers film. In Ang Lee's Hulk we saw Banner express time and time again how much he didn't want to be the Hulk, how it's his shame, a monster he can't control. The dude actively told the audience how much he didn't want to do this one single thing... but the audience doesn't give a shit about Bruce Banner - they give a shit about the Hulk. No one wants to watch a movie about a fictional scientist not want to do something, especially when they can watch a movie about a giant-ass green dude with infinite strength throw thanks and smash monsters. The audience felt like shit whenever he turned into the hulk because we knew that was the one thing he didn't want to do, but that was the one thing we wanted, and that tension ruined the movie. 

Fast forward a decade to the Avengers, and they created a situation where the only correct answer to the destruction and devastation was the Hulk. We needed a fucking bruiser to save New York, someone with all the rage of the entire world for trying to fuck up New York - no, no, no - this happened once before, but not on our fucking watch does it happen again, you alien shit-sippers. They took the least controllable character in the history of comics and turned a wrecking ball into a fucking scalpel and the only person who wanted to be the Hulk more than the entire audience was Banner - and that's why it worked in the Avengers. 

The jokes.... run me a little thin to be honest. But the levity is necessary because it shows that there's a group of people who are more than happy to save the world for you, the universe for you. There's a joy in saving the world, it can be fun doing the right thing - it's literally their pleasure to stop this plane from crashing, to contain this explosion from going off or myriad other tragedies. Tragedies that won't happen and you know they won't because their comedy fucking kills it in the face. 

DC gets flak because it's superheroes are too serious, too moody, too angry, and not fun enough... And yeah, that's true, but honestly, but they're doing a pretty good job being the heroes of a stilted world. Whether that's the world we live in or not is up for debate. Check Twitter and you'll have a hard time deciding if the world has never been better off or if it's the worst it's ever been - it's 50/50 split every single day... So, are they reflecting the dour-side of the world? I think so. 

And it's strange, because even though Marvel's properties feature a literal god - he doesn't feel like one, especially when compared to the godliest of them all - mahfuckin' Supes. In Superman, they created the person you wish you could be, someone who's ostensibly perfect - he's a dude who in the character creator got max stats like he was Madden or NBA2k or something. And I think that's why audiences have such a hard time accepting him in a Post-9/11 world - the balls on Bryan Singer to have him STOP a plane crash in Superman Returns. Snyder tried to make him flawed in Man of Steel/Batman vs Superman but because he was flawed - and that little change, well, that made him not-Superman. It's a real catch 22, but it's where we are.

Instead of trying to ensure audiences that something like 9/11 would never happen on their watch, DC's heroes seem to imply that tragedy can and will happen, but they're the best answer we've got. They're literally the heroes we deserve because their world is dark and cruel. Is ours? Yeah, again, according to approximately half of all social media posts, it is. 

But then there's a post of a cat wearing a sweater vest, and there you have Guardians of the Galaxy, because the other approximate half of all social media thinks this is the best of all possible worlds since there are dogs and pancakes and, well, comic book movies. 

But what about the comics though...

That's just my two cents, and while there are tons of movies I've drawn those conclusions from, there are even more comics I have to go back to for what I consider this, the real difference, at least between Marvel and DC as comic publishers, not media giants. Keep in mind anything I say in support of one company isn't singular to said company, but it's way more that particular company's modus operandi. 

Marvel takes place in our world. Its heroes worry about rent and love and where they're getting dinner from. They fight in real places that we know, places we've probably even been to. Its heroes are doing the best they can against a bar that you've help establish. The baseline of Marvel is you and what you're capable of. It's fucking fantastic seeing the world you know harbor something fantastical, and to see these people be impressively, impossibly human. It's almost like a documentary, but, y'know, with superpowers - they're way more concerned with making a relatable, familiar world, with a twist. There was literally a Captain America comic that had Red Skull disguised as a third party candidate gaining national traction because he was campaigning on a bummer economy - the book used the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 as a goddamn plot point. 

Fuck, that's awesome.

DC's heroes are better than you. Superman is perfect and kills time on the moon. Batman is the Nietzchean ideal realized. Wonder Woman was sculpted out of clay by gods and goddesses. The Flash takes laws of physics and destroys them everyday. They're a pantheon of characters who live in metaphors like Gotham or Metropolis. Batman's concerns are something we can never understand because normal people just don't operate at that capacity. They're more philosophical in a sense, playing with themes that humans understand, but don't see immediately in the world. There was a story arc in a book called Animal Man where a surrogate for Wile E. Coyote - forever caught in a cycle of life and death - and by the time you get to the end of the issue and you see him dead on an intersection - you realize this cartoon character is essentially Jesus and dying for our entertainment only to be brought back again simply to entertain us again. 

Fuck, that's awesome. 

And thank God...

And thank God for them both. I don't want every movie to be as smart as Douche Bigalow, European Gigolo, but at the same time I don't want every movie to be a cerebral mindfuck like Donnie Darko. So pick your poison and like poison - remember it's only temporary. And remember - never be that asshole who asks..

Are you a DC fan, or a Marvel fan?

Backlog Quest Log Side Blog - The difference between Marvel and DC (part 1)

It's a pretty tired line to walk, but it is one people (read: nerds) still emphasize - are you a Marvel fan or a DC fan?

It's a stupid arbitrary line to toe - why would you shut yourself off from 35% of the entire comics market just to enjoy the other 35% of the comics market? Plus, there are only so many books out there - you're going to run out of shit to read at some point, so why limit yourself? There are amazing books by Marvel, DC, Vertigo, Image, Wildstorm, IDW, Boom, Archie - read all the cool shit you can, man. You're going to die someday, so why die on such an arbitrary fucking hill now?

That said, there's a world of difference between the two big publishers, that it's easy to see why lines would be drawn in the sand, as stupid as they are. So let's take a little dive into just what makes the two so different, and occasionally - so similar. 

Also, this is gonna be a long and vague one, so - strap in, nerds. Get ready for bramblin' Captain Rambles in 3, 2... 1. 

DC

Don't read any favoritism on me listing DC first, they just happened to establish themselves first, more or less, and I once read somewhere that timeliness is next to godliness, or something like that. Keep in mind I'm not a historian. That sounds awful. But I'm going to lay some groundwork, so please tell history to watch its feet - I'd hate to step on them. 

DC put itself on the map back in 1934, but back then it was called National Allied Publications and it put out, more or less, bulk tabloid size comic collections not that different then what you see in newspapers - stuff like Beetle Bailey and Garfield. They all had a humor slant that would eventually be replaced by the youth fascination with superheroes. 1937 would see Detective Comics, their next big breakthrough comic, but it would be released from what was essentially an offshoot company. Then they'd publish Action Comics 1 in 1938, and the world would meet Superman. Detective Comics would hit issue 27 in 1939, and the world would get Batman. Corporate consolidation would happen, we'd get National Comics, and then when it became clear that Detective Comics was their best selling book, a final name change to DC would basically give us the beginning of what was called the Golden Age of Comics. in 1941, Sensation Comics would debut, and then the world had Wonder Woman. DC's trinity would be complete. 

Shit was going super well during the war - turns out seeing people have superhuman abilities and unrelenting moral character was a good thing in one of humanity's darkest periods. Eventually we'd get the Flash, Green Lantern, and a few other names people today know - ish. 

What stopped these superheroes from running into Germany and beating the shit out of Hitler to end the war yesterday? Well, it turns out there's a very good reason - Occult-obsessed Hitler found the Spear of Destiny - y'know the spear a roman guard used to pierce the side of Christ, and it gave him magical powers. Notably, he could mind control superheroes who were within his border. So that relegated most heroes to stateside operations and... yeah, it's pretty sweet that they thought of a reason though, right? They banded together and decided to make the best of a bad situation and form a team. Known as the Justice Society,  Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman were all super busy in their own books, so they were honorary members. The Flash, Green Lantern 

By the late 40's/50's, the well on Superheroes had kinda dried up. DC's big three - Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman - would keep seeing print, but every other superhero would ride out into the sunset with little fan resistance. These were funny books after all, not gospel, so there wasn't exactly a revolt or anything. Thank god Change.Org wasn't a thing then, though there probably wouldn't have been a fight.

Superheroes faded, and romance, science fiction, western, and every other genre under the sun that didn't involve tights came into prominence, feeding imaginations the world over. 

That last part's probably not true. It's probably more like the country over. But, like - more than the tri-state area, less than the world, so pick your own happy medium there. 

Y'know how nowadays, every so often there's a news story about how video games are corrupting our youth, making them more violent and terrible? In the 1954 there was a version of that for comics. Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent painted comics, specifically superhero books, as the nation's scapegoat, saying they were making kids worse and generally shitty, so that helped push in the new paradigm of everything but superheroes. 

But then in the 1956 DC realized that dude was kind of a douche and decided to reintroduce its superhero lines. The Flash was brought back, but with a twist. He was a new character with ostensibly the same powers, and same with Green Lantern - these were basically modernized takes on the same characters from the 30's/40's, updated to reflect the times just a little bit better. Green Lantern's ring was no longer magic-based, it was science based, and the dude wielding it was a test pilot. Barry Allen was the Flash now and instead of being a football star science student, he was a forensic scientist working for the police department. These were significantly more grounded stories because they actually gave a shit about the characters backstory beyond the "hijinks" that could ensue when they weren't wearing their masks. 

Before long, they all started hanging out. Before long - they had the Justice League. And the DC Universe as y'all know it is more or less born. And then destroyed. And then reborn. Let that happen a few more times and all of a sudden it's 2018 and you're basically all caught up. 

Marvel

In 1939, Marvel had another name - Timely Publications. Their first book, however - Marvel Comics and wait... 

God, comics are so stupid, I love them. 

Marvel Comics saw the debut of The Human Torch and Namor, The Sub Mariner. By 1941, we'd get Captain America courtesy of Joe Simon and Jack "The King" Kirby. Those dudes teamed up and rocked the Axis powers as best they could as a team called The Invaders. And they'd wreck house. And be vaguely racist. Marvel doesn't want you to remember that part now, but hey, it's there. 

Timely Publications became Timely Comics, but unfortunately the name change didn't make them any more immune to the superhero bubble bursting than DC was. They toed the line with what was popular at the time, chasing trends like it was their goddamn job, because, well... I mean, like, it was. 

Sorry, that one got away from me a bit. 

In the 1950's they were known as Atlas Comics, and Stan Lee, the godfather of Marvel Comics himself has even stated that the only reason they survived was because they were fast and good enough. They'd turd out Romance, Horror, Western, and every other thing under the sun and do it Moneyball style. 

But by 1961 when DC had reintroduced superhero comics and shown they were here to stay, and after Atlas had a name change, the newly renamed Marvel Comics finally had a new trend to chase. In 1961 The Fantastic Four debuted and rocked everyone's socks off, because their target demo wasn't kids the way most comics were with other publishers. Marvel wanted an older, smarter audience and created more mature, focused books that were a bit more complex and challenging. 

After a big hit like that, Marvel had a universe to fill around it. 1962 saw the debuts of Spider-man, Thor, Ant-Man, and the Incredible Hulk. The following year the X-Men, Iron Man, and Wasp made their first appearances. The next year, Captain America reemerged in issue 4 of Avengers after taking a break since the end of the war, and was explained into current Marvel continuity. Daredevil would see his first issue in '64 as well and y'know what? I'm gonna stop there. There are too many damn heroes for me to tell you when they all came out. Shit like that is what wikipedia is for. 

But you can see some common ground, right? These two mediums were basically built from the ground up to chase trends cheaply, and then you can tell that they found their own voice pretty quickly - not just reflecting the times but reflecting them well. Little bubbles of time trapped forever.

What separate them? Next time, champions. 

Backlog Quest Log Side Blog

I think it's time I stop numbering these since A) I'm falling down a comics rabbit hole and B) I hate math. What have I been reading lately?

I've been reading the fuck out of Jon Hickman's Fantastic Four. And it's all been pretty damn fantastic indeed.

I've always loved the Fantastic Four because while they're a superhero team (originally they were Marvel's answer to DC's Justice League), they're a family first. The drama between Johnny and Ben is like that between brothers, the drama between Johnny and Sue is between brother and sister, the drama between Reed and Sue is between husband and wife and so forth - it's a tone you're just not gonna see in a lot of other books, so I've always appreciated the team-up nature that also brings in the natural, relatable interactions in a way books like Justice League, Avengers, Wildcats etc. simply can't. 

But Jon Hickman's run. Ho. Lee. Fuuuuuuu. 

I think the most impressive thing about the dude is his ability to balance big and simple. The opening story has Reed feeling guilty about what happened both at the end of Civil War and Mark Millar/Bryan Hitch's previous run, where Reed decides only he can save the world, so he dedicates his bandwidth to one thing: solve everything. 

This leads him to create a machine that connects him with Reed Richards from other universes, who have met up and formed - wait for it - the Council of Reeds. These Reeds have basically forsaken everything to save the universe, which is awesome, but terrifying when you see what they've given up. They perform surgeries on suns and create worlds that are just farms to feed the universe... but they also lobotomize every single Dr. Doom they come across and leave them in a basement, not entirely unlike the second season of Desperate Housewives. That known, Reed still wants to join them and solicit their help in trying to save his, and every, Earth. 

That is, until he finds out that every single other Reed has given up their family. So consumed by their work, they've lost their wife Sue,  their friends Ben and Johnny, and their kids Franklin and Valeria. Just as our Reed decides the cost is too high and he can't lose his family, a group of Celestials, these crazy ass cosmic giants whose power is measured on a "We can destroy the universe" scale from a rogue universe where they went evil crash the Council of Reeds and just start killing everyone - it's an absolute bloodbath. We get to see a bunch of Reeds from different Universes show off their powers and it's pretty fun seeing the different ways Reeds could pan out. A bunch scatter and go to their respective universes to get weapons to fight the Celestials, but our Reed, the 616 Reed, is the only one that comes back and they manage to fend off these crazed space Gods. Reed decides he's had enough of these Reeds and returns home to his family. 

Hickman quickly goes from this onto another arc that pays respects to previous Fantastic Four stories and you think you just got a cool, crazy, random Reed story about parallel universes. But what sets Hickman's run apart from others is the subtlety of each story in relation to the other. After a few of these arcs come out though - you start seeing the bigger picture and realizing how they all connect to tell a greater story. 

After the subtlety, and the art of telling big stories simply, Hickman is just so damn good at making his story fit into A) the bigger marvel picture and B) into his own bigger picture. 

A) his overall story found ways to tie into other Marvel stories like Mark Millar's previous run on the F4, his stint on Old Man Logan, Realm of Kings, and so many other stories, that it's sort of amazing how respectful he is about cutting the trim on his story so it neatly fits in with others. He doesn't step on any other writer/artist's toes to tell, what's frankly, his opus. 

B) Another cool thing about Hickman is that this wasn't the only book the dude was writing. And while all of his stories tie into a greater Marvel Universe, when you read all the dude's books, there's definitely a throughline that connects everything with his name on it into its own mini-saga. It's like the guy hijacked the Marvel universe for a few years and everything from Secret Warriors to Fantastic Four to his later titles like Avengers and the final event he did, Secret Wars, is its own condensed manifesto on what makes comics great and characters interesting. 

All things told, I don't think it was the cleanest told story. There were some moments that I wasn't quite sure what exactly was happening and when the impact of certain actions were revealed, some were either underwhelming or unclear, but you could tell tonally that it was an "oh shit" moment so that excitement carries you even if the execution falls a bit short. 

That said, there were some of the craziest fucking revelations made in his tenure on the book that I just cannot forget. I will not forget. The way Franklin and Valeria were propped up was nothing short of beautiful and epic to a degree that you don't always see in comics, especially Superhero comics. The ambition of what the dude did in an ongoing was insane: and then when the companion book FF comes out - the scope of what he did with two normal monthly books - completely eschewing what could have/probably should have been an event comic - is just ridiculous and borderline unprecedented. The closest comparison I can think of is DC's Sinestro Corps. War or Marvel's own Death of Captain America story. 

This kinda shit just doesn't happen often in comics, and when it does you need to stand up, take a step back, and enjoy the fuck out of it.

It's like a comet. It happens every couple years and you need to let the world around you slow down and appreciate just how weird everything can be. 

I read Fantastic Four 554-588: FF 1-23; Fantastic Four 600-611 and it was goddamn brilliant. I can't recommend enough that you get Marvel Unlimited and do the same.

Backlog Quest Log Side Blog 3

I've had a thought I haven't been able to shake lately. The more success comic based films get, the more thankful I am for the comic books they're based on.

But then the pendulum swings, and the more I think about the comics they're based on, the more I appreciate what the movies are doing. 

But nothing makes me love either like having the ability to love both. If you're not indulging both, then you're penis really only getting half the story. 

In short, you're fuckin' up, kid. 

Don't take that as some kind of nerd/genre gatekeeping - I fucking love the films, and I'm not one of those assholes who's going to tell you "but, umm, actually, the books are better". 

They're awesome. All of them. Even the bad ones are fucking awesome. They're four color fun on print and they're 90 minutes of insanity on that thing that used to be celluloid. It's entertainment to the nth degree. All of it, no matter which way you slice it, if you wanted to slice it at all. 

I'm thankful for the comics because after 10 years we more or less still have them the way we remember them, while the actors like Chris Evans, RDJ, ScarJo - the dudes have got to be exhausted right? Nobody can blame them for hanging up their respective tights.

But in the past ten years of comics, Peter Parker has aged maybe 6 weeks tops. I missed a few dozen issues, so Mephisto, the devil incarnate, could've showed up again and maybe even made him younger, who's to say? And if not, that could totally happen next month, because comic books are crazy like that. There's almost no real consequence because next month is another story. 

It took Marvel a month to put out the four issues of Spider-Man's One More Day story (with the aforementioned Mephisto), but all that took place in the span of a single night. All four weeks in a few hours, because one of the coolest things about the comics is how they condense time better than Eisenstein ever did on that damn staircase. The scariest thing is how the live action movies, by their nature, simply cannot do that. The comics stand alone. The pendulum swings.

They expand and contract like a living thing, and the films are about to get their first taste of that, and while they have to march forward in a way that makes it harder to go back than the comics (unless that de-aging CG shit Lucas/ILM has been playing with keeps going, which I hope it doesn't), then we're lucky enough soon to have the best of both worlds. 

The comic books have the freedom to revert to the status quo and reset the barometer for new, lapsed, and continuing readers alike, letting them understand the "classic" beginning of the character and watch things blow up from there until the next contraction to the new status quo. But then the pendulum swings back. 

This constant assurance that there's going to be a reversion to the familiar leaves little room for consequence. Johnny Storm will die, but only for a few months. Steve Rogers will get shot, but he'll actually fall through time fighting to come back out. Peter Parker gets to work for Tony Stark and finally not worry about money, until he does. 

But the movies, the movies are about to do something super exciting - they're about to get a fucking ending. We're getting to the point where a door closes and that's unheard of in comic books. If superheroes are your jam, then that might be the most exciting thing of all time. We're getting a version of a Marvel Universe that begins, and then ends, and then adapts, and finally evolves. You can't put the genie back in the bottle because fuck you if you try while ScarJo or Chadwick Boseman are still alive, you maniac. 

That makes me so glad I have the comics to fall back on when I miss Steve Rogers being Steve Rogers. 

Which in turn makes me so glad I have the movies I can go to when I want to see what happens when the Infinity Gauntlet or the Cosmic Cube can't be used to make the world what it used to be. When I want a beginning, followed by a middle, and then punched in the face by an ending. 

That's batshit. 

That's incredible.

That's why you're fucking up if you're only dippin' your toes into one Marvel or the other. Because the pendulum, man - it swings. 

BACKLOG QUEST LOG SIDE BLOG 2 - What I've been reading

I know, this isn't a game, and the one person who stumbles across this accidentally might be mad (sorry, Dad), but I've been swamped at work. 

I sold my first commercial, yayyyyy. 

So as such, I haven't been able to justify sitting on the couch and blowin' up aliens. I wish I were. That sounds rad. But instead it's mostly been working and hangin' out with the girlfriend and the friendfriends. 

When I finally manage to crawl into bed with my achey, occasionally wine-drunk (less so now that Bachelor is over tbh) self, I've been hittin' the comics, and I've been hittin' 'em hard. So, instead of writing a games piece (I think I'm about 4 games behind now, I'll make it up over the summer), I'm going to do another comics piece. Because fuckin' a - I love comics. 

1) New Avengers by Brian Michael Bendis / David Finch / Steve McNiven / Mike Deodato Jr. 

This was one of the three comics that got me into comics. It was 2004 and I had just moved back from South America, where I couldn't do much about reading comics except for read weekly reviews online. But getting back home, I went to Comics Plus in Ellsworth, ME and there on the shelf were three #1's - Green Lantern, Ultimates 2, and New Avengers. Reading this book isn't tha different than blasting the bands and songs I was obsessed with in high school, and largely still listen to now. This book is my comfort comics, mashed potatoes for my eyes. 

The story is pretty simple: The Avengers had a really, really shitty day and disbanded, until fate would bring certain key members of the original group and a few new faces together to fight the foes no single hero could face. Classic characters like Iron Man and Captain America were met with unlikely inclusions such as Luke Cage, Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Wolverine, and an entirely new character named The Sentry. 

Bendis's New Avengers run buttressed the Marvel Universe for the next several years, providing an awesome place for comic events to get a little breathing room as well as additional context, and occasionally birthing its own events like Secret Invasion. It was a must-read for anyone hoping to stay up to date with the Marvel Universe. 

Bendis's penchant for Sorkin-paced dialogue with a Tarantino-tone were always matched by some of the top artists Marvel had in its stable at the time, including David Finch, Steve McNiven, Mike Deodato Jr. (his debut Marvel work), Leinil Francis Yu, and Stuart Immonen. The book sounded great, and always looked gorgeous. The book managed to pay plenty of respect to what the team had meant to the MU at large, while also carving new territory for itself with a tone and place in Marvel history all its own. 

Super fun book that's well collected in neat volumes as "New Avengers by Brian Michael Bendis", which are also incredibly cheap at instocktrades.com . 

No, I'm not getting paid to advertise for either, but fuuuuck, read these books if you can 'cause they're more rad than two monkeys skateboarding. 

2) Silver Surfer by Dan Slott / Michael Allred

Turns out any book by Michael Allred is going to be fucking gorgeous, and with a script as cosmic and weird as Silver Surfer, you've never known out there could be so beautiful. 

I'm only 10 issues or so into this book so I can't wax too poetic about it that much, but I can try. I've always liked Dan Slott's writing but found it kind of derivative. You don't have to work very hard to find the influences he's drawing from, and in this case, Silver Surfer is straight up Doctor Who. The Surfer is called into protect a planet that shouldn't exist - that should by every right be impossible. Worried that he won't have enough motivation to protect the planet out of the goodness of his heart, they abduct a woman from Earth who won't be released until he succeeds. This woman, Dawn Greenwood, thought she was lucky enough to be born in the most beautiful place in the world and never wanted to leave her hometown (obviously in New England, duh, because it's great), but this rip out of time and space made her realize just how big the Universe was and the two begin adventuring and exploring together. 

The book is completely in its own little pocket corner of the Marvel Universe and it's better because of it. It's not continuity-laden or drowning in references to other books, so it's a pretty solid jump on point if you want to read a Superhero comic that isn't really about comics, and is pretty gorgeous thanks to Allred's pop art pencils. 

3) Fathom by Michael Turner

I bought every comic book Michael Turner ever did the cover of because that dude is just that good - he was my generation's Jim Lee. So, it's something of a crime that I never read the dude's creator owned work, but thankfully amazon two day shipping and the Fathom Definitive Edition were there to put me in my place. 

Fathom is this insane book about a cruise ship that's been missing for ten years and when it comes back to port. Aboard the cruise ship is the entire original manifest but one additional passenger in tow - an eleven year old girl named Aspen who doesn't remember a goddamn thing before arriving on the ship. 

Now an adult, Aspen is a marine biologist who specializes in underwater propulsion. She's brought a science lab called the Deep Marine Discovery - DMD - at 1200 ft. below sea level, where she's introduced to a craft that defies humanity's current understanding of... well, everything. It belongs to a race of humans capable of living underwater, who seem to have a deeper connection to Aspen than she knows, but one I'm fucking dying to keep reading. 

This book I'm only a few issues into, but holy crap is it awesome. I started writing a sci-fi story last week because I needed to write something that wasn't a headline or a script or a manifesto for once and I feel guilty writing stuff that's not a game blog but I'm finding Fathom as a huge, huge influence and inspiration for what I'm doing. 

It's really nice, and increasingly rare, to find a book that's written and drawn by the same creator - but it's always so interesting to see someone who only has to interpret his own story rather than try to understand someone else's and do their best to translate. When you're the author and the artist, you can blend things together in a way that two-people teams simply can't, and you're given more room to explore the medium, kinda like Turner is. 

So far there are three main characters, and there have been several points where the same moment has been analyzed from all three perspectives and it kinda blows my mind that I haven't seen that more in the medium, but the dude, rest in peace, had made a book that was pretty far ahead of its time for 1998. 

Not to mention the book is just oozing everything I love about 90's comics - messy line figures making them look like more like sketches than portraits, saturated colors, some pretty early looking digital color and inking techniques that make everything look so smooth, and some real fuckin' cheesecake character designs. The women are so out of proportion it's hilarious and the dudes are even worse. This comic is a moment in time that's captured forever on paper and I'm thrilled beyond all-hell that it'll stay like that forever. 

4) The Boys by Garth Ennis / Darick Robertson

If Planetary, a book I mentioned in a previous post, is a critique of superhero comics and a meta-analysis of comics at large, then The Boys is a middle finger to superhero comics while shoving an airhorn up its ass. 

If that sounded crass, don't blame me, blame the book. It's some of the most outrageous, dark and depraved shit I've ever read, and not just in a comic. Imagine the rat/pvc pipe scene from American Psycho but for 60+ issues and all, the goddamn, time. I can only read a few issues before taking a break but it's super fun and crazy shit. 

The book premise is pretty simple - in a world where there are over 200,000 super heroes, there's also a CIA team created to keep them in check, because it turns out the powers, the fame, and the lack of accountability has gone to their fucking heads and they're monsters because of it. There's a sex-addict version of Batman who literally fucked a cup of coffee. There's a version of the Teen Titans where a dude was keeping a hamster in his pants. 

This is a fucked up book but it's a gripping read, because you're trying to see the next superhero you loved since childhood distorted to the nth degree, but still within recognition and you get that sobering moment of acknowledging "Yeah, in real life, they probably would be this fucked up". 

I had to stop reading it on the bus. That's how bad it can get. But fuck is it satisfying seeing a real piece of shit get the stuffing stomped out of him. Robertson knows just how much viscera is enough viscera to make you uneasy without making you throw up. 

5) Ultimate Thor by Jon Hickman / Carlos Pacheco

Pseudo Prequel/pseudo super-prequel to Marvel's The Ultimates, this four issue series talks about the last days of Asgard and whether or not Thor is actually a Norse God reincarnated on Earth or just crazy. 

There's some powerful imagery in the beginning and end of the book - it's pretty rad seeing the SS team up with frost giants and try to invade a realm of Gods, there's no denying that. And there's some clever loose-end-tying that goes on in the end, but ultimately (heh), I found this series to be a bit superfluous. It comes out after we've already established that Thor absolutely is a reincarnated Norse God, so what was the point? 

The art leaves me a bit conflicted, because on one hand, how the hell can you not love the pencils Pacheco turns in? The dude is a master of making fun, kinetic panels that jump off the page and might just be one of the best "comic book" artists out there. The dude is just such a great example of the pulpy nature of the books, while offering clean, beautiful lines that allow plenty of color to pop. 

That said, it feels like a bit of a mismatch for the Ultimates Universe. Founded to be a bridge between the movies Marvel was producing in the early 2000's and the rest of Marvel's publishing line, Ultimates comics, especially the first two volumes of The Ultimates proper, felt so fucking cinematic it's still hard to believe those issues are 10+ years old. They look like jpegs someone ripped from a movie and laid out carefully on a page. This book however feels like what happened to the rest of the Ultimates line - just another book. 

It's still a goddamn gorgeous book, but tonally off. Though it feels reductive to sit here and criticize a guy who isn't Bryan Hitch for not drawing more like Bryan Hitch, it's more a of a presentation problem than an execution problem. And again, I can't stress enough - it's gorgeous, just off. 

I'm lucky enough to live near a pretty cool shop that threw this into a purchase just to get rid of it, so as far as free books go, it's not bad, but unless you're trying to fill out a collection of everything Hickman has done, or every story from the Ultimate Universe I'd probably pass on this one. 

06 - Coming out simulator

What does something need to be considered a game? How much game do you need to be a game? Why are film majors super pretentious and always posing questions like this?

While there were a few people in my degree I liked, most of them irritated the shit out of me because they'd constantly pose questions like that, needlessly overcomplicating things but recently I've come across a situation where I feel there's nothing I can do but overcomplicate it. Some things deserve over-complication and scrutiny and discussion. 

The coolest thing about the internet is how things don't go away. I was recently perusing through an old folder and found a link to a game I had saved now four years ago. Thankfully, it's still there, and I felt compelled to play it on my commute. And yeah, the game totally holds up. And yeah, you should absolutely play it. 

Written, Programmed, and with art all by a dude named Nicky Case, Coming Out Simulator 2014 was made for a game-jam contest, but depicts a very chaotic night from Case's past. It's a choose your own adventure presented like a text conversation, including actual things said by Nicky, his then-boyfriend, and his parents, and according to him includes things he did, should have, and never would have said, but "it doesn't matter which is which. Not Anymore.". Current Nicky Case introduces you to himself, the game, its premise, and its intent before shuffling you along to the aforementioned night. It's pretty ominous, and in spite of a name like "Coming Out Simulator" it takes a very horror vibe, almost like Rod Serling at the beginning of Twilight Zone. 

Whether that's intentional or just my take as a straight white-ish dude reading a situation I inherently can't relate to is anyone's guess. This is where I start to overcomplicate things. This is why you need to play this game. 

The game's writing is sharp as hell, even all these years later. You're given three options for every dialogue choice, some are subtle-funny, some are "I've never met a gay person before and don't know how to talk to them", some are poignant, some are blunt - there's a range but they all feel right - they all seem like a real reaction a real person would have, so despite Nicky's claim that he waited until the night before the deadline to submit his game, you get a feel that the dude really put a lot of forethought into it, and crafted a perfectly-human feeling to the options. 

The art style is slick as hell, I can really only describe it as the way you remember New Grounds looking all those years back. It feels very Scott McCloud derived with a unique art direction twist that borders on minimalism but doesn't feel annoying the way most minimalistic things do. 

But now there's nothing left to talk about besides the things I'm not sure what's left to talk about. Is this a game? While less involved mechanically than the previously played and discussed Guardians of the Galaxy, I'd say - yeah, this is a game. It doesn't matter that it's 20 minutes, it doesn't matter that there's only three options and occasionally they can feel superfluous and unnecessary. 

This game, significantly more so than any made by Telltale, does an amazing job of making it feel like it's your story. That probably has something to do with the presentation of the game itself - the images take up the the top half of the screen while the bottom is reserved for the text responses so it really does feel like you're playing this game within iMessage. Add on the fact that NIcky, is simultaneously very charming and borderline apologetic when he's your narrator/host, and innocent and naive when he isn't. You want to take care of him to the point where you're identifying with him so effectively that as I mentioned earlier - it feels like it's your story. 

Coming Out Simulator is an important game, a well-made game, a thought-provoking game, and impressively - it's also a short game. There isn't a good reason you can't take 20 minutes out of your day to play it.

Backlog Quest Log Side Blog 1 - Warren Ellis

Sorry about that title, I got lost in an Arrested Development reference. 

Also, sorry this hasn't been updated in a minute. I was contracted to do some video capture work for a relatively huge game. That on top of my day job copywriting at a design firm and the realization that fuck I need to lose weight because that's cheaper than buying new clothes has eaten into the time I was previously dedicating to this. I'm planning to bust through a game this weekend to update y'all with an 06 entry, and I still plan to hit 52 by the end of the year, but for right now, it's taking something of a backseat. 

But I miss long form writing, so instead of gaming I wanted to take a moment to tell you about something else I've been enjoying the shit out of lately - comics. And Bachelor: Winter Games, but let's talk about comics. 

Maybe about once every two years I bust through what I consider some of the finest work the medium has ever had, and that's what Warren Ellis produced in three separate titles that were all pretty indirectly connected (two less indirect, but I digress). These books are Stormwatch, The Authority, and Planetary. If Stormwatch was originally an answer to the hyper violent craze of the earlier 90's, then its spiritual successor The Authority was a perfectly succinct and pragmatic counterpoint that we the readers had grown up and demanded precision and nuance to our fantastic stories. Stormwatch and The Authority in particular are

Warren Ellis (and John Cassaday, artist on Planetary, Bryan Hitch, artist on The Authority and some issues of Stormwatch, as well as a bunch of other artists on Stormwatch as well), set the tone for the industry, in particular the books that the Marvel Cinematic Universe was informed by - and now dominate the box office every three months. 

These books changed the fucking industry. They changed the comics industry. They changed the film industry. They changed... everything. 

And it all started because of some British trans-humanist writer with a chip on his shoulder for the world simultaneously embracing the future and shunning it at the same time wasn't afraid to dream a little bigger.

For every person out there obsessively checking online for the latest leaked trailer of an upcoming comic book movie, there's someone else who's dreading the next one to be released, and I totally get that - fatigue is real. I own probably around 10,000 comics and even I don't bother with everything on CW or ABC in terms of comic fare, I just can't keep up and I don't particularly want to, there's just too much. 

I think what's most incredible about each book is the thin line they manage to balance. One scene will have the characters furious at some group for singlehandedly halting progress. Whether that's because of diseases that haven't been cured, areas that haven't been explored - secrets being kept. They're furious, and it's hard not to be furious when you're reading it. You start thinking shit like "We could've had a fucking moon base by now if we hadn't paid for every single war we've been in since Vietnam" and you start to see the bigger picture of what Ellis is trying to say. 

But then in the next panel you see a moment that, in spite of these books focusing on superheroes with truly otherworldly powers, just so perfectly encapsulates the beauty and the glory of everything we as a species have accomplished and it's inspiring. You stop getting mad that we don't have a moon base and start getting romantic about the fact that we walked on the moon at all. Because think about it - we managed to strap three people to the world's largest bullet and figured out just how fast it had to go to leave everything we'd ever known. And we did that the same year The Archies released Sugar, Sugar. 

Warren Ellis finds a way to get you mad we haven't done more, but to truly appreciate what we have done at the same time and it's fucking masterful. 

If there's one drawback to what's probably the dude's opus, Planetary, it's that the series itself is kind of a meta-commentary on comics as a whole. He takes about 70 years of comics and boils it down to 27 issues. Yes it's absolutely a trip, but it's a trip that means more if you know the general history of comics, including stuff about Marvel and DC characters, as well as publishing trends throughout the years. 

I was so enamored rereading these books that I went on a fucking tear. Huge thanks to Amazon for having the following books, also penned by Warren Ellis;

Storm (limited series)

Ignition City (limited series)

Bad Signal Vol. 1 & 2 (collection of his old blog posts from the late 90's and early 2000's)

Injection Vol. 1 & 2 & 3 (ongoing)

Aetheric Mechanics (graphic novella)

Crecy (graphic novella)

Frankenstein's Womb (graphic novella)

Ocean (limited series)

Orbiter (limited series)

Ministry of Space (limited series)

Ultimate Hulk Vs. Iron Man (limited series)

City of Silence (limited series)

Transmetropolitan Vol. 1 (maxiseries)

I haven't been this obsessed with a writer's entire output since I read Rules of Attraction in 10th grade. What sets Ellis apart from other writers is the way he uses bleeding edge sci-fi to ground his intricate worlds and tell very human stories within them. He creates terrible, horrifying villains who find a way to inflict pain on the world in manners you never see coming, and their foils who are flawed into oblivion but couldn't be described as anything less than heroic, let alone inspiring.

If you are interested in comics but the long continuities of characters like Batman or Spider-man give you pause, I can't recommend checking out the three books I mentioned earlier. They're collected very neatly and are very friendly to new readers. While they might not change your mind about the superhero movies coming to theaters, they should definitely change your mind about what the medium can offer. 

05 - Super Mario 3D Land

Man, Maine is cold. Like really cold. It's also far away from my consoles, but traveling opens up a bunch of opportunities to play something oft-forgotten about: mobile games. This post is late. I was in a depression-cocoon because the Pats lost a very winnable Super Bowl against a very beatable Nick Foles led Eagles. I guess my first game of the week was not dying from alcohol poisoning. 

But after that, I jumped back onto something I haven't given enough love recently: my 3DS. I grabbed the cart for Super Mario 3D Land I was blown away by how good the game was, all these years after its release. 

While it eschews the main hub world of my favorite Mario game, Super Mario 64, 3D Land takes a lot of its design philosophy from that seminal 64 bit platformer. Even though the game came out within this decade, I was getting flashbacks to third grade and had a smile on my face the entire time. 

If you've played one Mario game, you've played them all. Kind of. Peach gets kidnapped. You look for her. You jump on enemies. You hit question blocks and chase power ups. You collect yellow coins, you collect red coins - you know the drill.

But the levels. Man, the levels. 

I'd never accuse any Mario level of being too long, but 3D Land more than any other game in the series really takes advantage of the platform it's on and makes every level easily digestible. Taking a cue from Angry Birds, there are three stars hidden throughout each level that reward the player for carefully and thoughtfully exploring the environment. Also, this game brought back the flagpoles that you finish the level on and dammit it was nice to get back to that style of Mario.

There's just something so magical about Mario games. Design and technology has advanced so much since the platformer was created, that in terms of movie comparisons it's silent film of games. Mario is Buster Keaton of games, and he doesn't just find a way to stay relevant with each release, but finds a way to redefine the genre. 

It's more than a game, it's a time machine. The series takes you back to a simpler time of games - you don't yell about lag, you don't worry about your K/D radio, you just jump and enjoy the creative puzzles the designers have made into a navigable environment. They're testing to see how clever and courageous you are through pure gameplay in an almost minimalistic environment. It looks like you're jumping through the dioramas you made in grade school but there's a gauntlet being thrown at your feet with every level getting increasingly more difficult to navigate. The aforementioned stars don't just serve as challenges for curious players, but unlock later game levels. 

There's usually a gimme-star in each level. In around 40 levels I haven't, if my memory serves me, finished any of them without a single star. They're metered out throughout the level, and marked as to whether it's the first, second, or third - letting you know where you should go and look for any that you've missed. 

There are 8 worlds with about 5 levels in each and there's no Ice World, Desert World, nothing like that - every level is a completely new design not based off what's come before. At times it can feel like there isn't cohesion, like everything was poured into a blender and served up to the player. You'll go from a water based level to the insides of a clock to a series of floating platforms suspended in the sky. You get a feel that the developers didn't feel constrained to one up previous levels and go for broke on a theme, but were rather allowed to make a statement with each level and then go on to the next part of their creative agenda. It's some pretty masterful work that never overstays its welcome. 

Also, let's say you're struggling in a level, and you think it'd be easier if you had a specific power up, like the fire flower, or the boomerang, or the Tanooki suit - you can go to previous levels, get the power up, exit to the level selection screen, and then head back to the level in question. I don't think this was intended to break the game (and I don't think it does, necessarily), but the fact that there are small manipulations you can do to make the game a hair easier if you need it, is pretty awesome. It shows a flexibility in design that's most definitely appreciated. 

Especially by someone like me, who's still drunk from that fucking Super Bowl loss and not great at precision platforming that challenges your ability to calculate time and space. 

Since beating the main story of 3D Land, I can't stop thinking about it. It's just such an inviting game that's takes every opportunity to be user friendly and occasionally offers moments of white-knuckled panic. I think my favorite part of it is its design - not just the level design which is masterful and a cut above other platforming games out there, but the design of the game itself. There's no pressure to succeed, just to be wondered and humbled. It's a game that first and foremost asks you to have fun and shows just enough of the underlying challenge that it tricks you into going for it even if you're not a compulsive type of gamer. 

Good god, I can't believe I waited so long to play this game. 

04 - THE BACKLOG QUEST LOG - BIOSHOCK

Somehow, I've gone 11 years without playing Bioshock. That's nuts. But that's also what this blog is for - to play the games that I missed and experience things I haven't yet.

And I'm so fucking glad I came back to Bioshock. It's not just a superb shooter with fun mechanics, it's one of the most cohesive virtual worlds I've ever played. It's a first person shooter with light horror and survival mechanics (technically?). For the first time in a forever, I played a shooter game with health packs. 

But, before we go any further,  I need to get something off my chest. I'm going to be blunt so I can avoid being anything less than perfectly clear: 

Bioshock is one of the best fucking video games I've ever played. And if you're like last-week me, you're a goddamn moron for not having played it yet. So, get on it, ya wonderful dunce.

But hey, let's get back to the game.

After surviving a plane crash over the mid-Atlantic, you stumble across a lighthouse with a strange looking gondola at the center of it. You get in, and you're taken fathoms below the surface to the city of Rapture, a hidden utopia designed by famed industrialist Andrew Ryan. It's 1960, but everything has this incredibly gorgeous Art Deco art direction that makes the city from afar look like a city that fell right out of the 1939 World's Fair. 

Rapture is a breathtaking sight. An entire metropolis on the ocean floor that was designed with Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy in mind. A place where a person's happiness and success is the purpose of their life, with the only social structure that can promote this rational self-interest being a laissez-faire capitalist society. The purpose of art is to transform your perception of the world in a physical, tangible thing that can be viewed objectively and heighten your perception of reality.

That's what Rapture is - it's Galt's Gulch from Atlas Shrugged and Andrew Ryan is Ayn Rand. His name is even an anagram for "we r Ayn Rand". Between that and the content of the game... yeah, they're laying it on pretty thick. 

To set the mood the way the game did, let me share one of the first things Ryan says to you, the player, through a pre-recorded radio message as you descend upon Rapture from the surface. 

"I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? "No," says the man in Washington, "it belongs to the poor." "No," says the man in the Vatican, "it belongs to God." "No," says the man in Moscow, "it belongs to everyone." I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different; instead, I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well."

Pretty heavy shit, right? Right. And just when you think it's about to get heavier, it gets creepier instead. 

While intended to be a utopian society without restriction or regulation, the city has descended into madness, addiction, and even civil war. The scientists of Rapture had discovered in the depths of the ocean a sea slug that contained something they called ADAM - a substance that could unlock genetic potential in humans. This sea slug could keep producing ADAM when implanted in a human host, but the only host that could survive the parasitic relationship was young girls, no older than a kindergartner.

That... unsavory predicament will come back later. 

This industry ran unchecked long enough until someone named Fontaine had amassed enough power to challenge Andrew Ryan for control of his own city, and even though Fontaine has died, A man named Atlas had introduced populist sentimentalities, representing the working class for once in a society that favors only the most successful. Atlas decides enough is enough and the only thing left to do is leave Rapture. That's where you come in; he needs your help to get him and his family out of there. 

Since the civil war, most of Rapture has fallen into complete disarray, with ADAM-addicts going insane from all the genetic manipulation they've inflicted on themselves. These people, known as Splicers, have killed most of the normal population of Rapture and an army of them stand between you and helping out Atlas. They look like kinda like Malcolm McDowell from A Clockwork Orange - they're well-dressed, well-armed enemies covered in blood scrounging to survive and hoping to cut you in half.

After using a little ADAM yourself, you have powers of your own that when coupled with a large selection of weapons, gives you a fighting chance of dealing with Rapture's crazed denizens. You'll be shooting and shocking (and incinerating, and freezing, and like 45 other things) your way through Rapture. 

That may seem like a lot of backstory but the game does the most incredible way of explaining it to you. There are no cutscenes in Bioshock, there is never a single break from your perspective. Story instead is shared through the environment, through Atlas and Andrew Ryan on the radio, and through audio diaries scattered throughout the world. Every piece of storytelling is completely diegetic. You're never told there's a civil war, not really - instead you'll do things like find the audio diary of someone who's been supplying weapons to two different camps, and he'll name the clients. Then later, you'll find one of the logs of said clients and hear about their plan to take over a section. It's a web where each new thing you find expands upon something you've already found building out a fully-fleshed-out world that feels like it was genuinely lived in until it was genuinely destroyed. 

Throughout the game you're given chances to upgrade your powers, known as plasmids, but you need ADAM to do it. The biggest supplies of ADAM, are the aforementioned young girls, referred to as Little Sisters when producing ADAM. There are a set amount roaming each section of Rapture, and they have these giant (awesome looking) protectors called Big Daddy's that put up one hell of a fight to keep you from getting to them. Atlas will tell you this little girl is no longer human, that you're putting her out of her misery by removing the slug from its host. Doctor Tenenbaum, the scientist who discovered the slug and created ADAM says she created a new plasmid capable of removing the slug and saving the girl's life, but at the cost of getting significantly less* ADAM than if you were to kill her. The screen hangs on the little girl, looking scared out of her mind, and two prompts appear. 

Press X to Rescue.

Press Y to Harvest.

You may have noticed an asterisk, and though it may look small, it's actually a pretty fucking big asterisk. It seems like such a moral dilemma, right? Powers are super fun, and they're part of the reason why you're playing the game - powers are awesome, but you only get them if you kill a fucking child. You can save the child, which is... admittedly, not as cool as powers, but great for, y'know - your conscience. The powers aren't just cool, they make the game easier, letting you upgrade your health, the damage of your weapons, hacking, buying items you desperately need, and a thousand other things. Making people choose between getting more powerful and being an evil degenerate is SUCH a good decision to force on the player, a true quandary**...

* **Except every three girls you 'rescue' instead of 'harvest', you get a huge fucking gift basket from Dr. Tenenbaum rewarding you with the same amount of ADAM. So ultimately, they force you to choose between being a dick for no reason, and being a not-piece-of-shit, not exactly the hard decision it was initially billed as. 

The game is ironic since nothing you do is done for yourself. Andrew Ryan is a man driven by self-interest, but the player never gets to choose what they can do because that's the nature of a video game. There are barriers in the game that lock you out unless you follow specific orders. "A man chooses, a slave obeys", Ryan eventually says, but you're never given any choice in the game except what to do with the Little Sisters, which isn't a real choice at all, since they both have what's essentially the same result.

It's a bit frustrating from a game design perspective, but also, since the entire game is basically an indictment of objectivism and Ayn Rand at heart, it kinda makes sense. Everything there is just a huge middle finger to the philosophy. Rapture fails. The free market collapsed the city. The lack of regulation led to a world of addiction and decay. The lack of restriction turned what should've been the 8th wonder of the world into one of the other wonders of the world - a fucking mausoleum. The entire game tells objectivism to go fuck itself so it kinda makes sense that the way you play it feeds into this meta-narrative. 

I will admit that after the game's famous second act twist, some of the story got a little frustrating and a little too outlandish considering the game's already insane premise. While it lost me after the twist, it got back on track just to lose me right before the end. All that said though, I still love the game's story. Since I beat Bioshock, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.

I've looked at books on objectivism, I've watched a crap load of videos on the game( including a two hour director's commentary interview with the game's creative director), and about every other possible thing I can do to throw myself further in its world. I finished it, and I'm already about halfway through the sequel, and stoked to play Infinite, the third game in the series and one I played about 5 years ago when it launched. It's taken over my life.

If you haven't played it, I cannot recommend it enough. It's the closest I think we'll ever get to a Christopher Nolan level of "holy shit" moments from a game, and it just snuck into my top ten list for best games of all time. Please play it.

A+