Emerald City Comicon

This weekend, I'll be speaking at the Emerald City Comicon about making comic book-inspired video games in a session called "Fraught With Peril, Making Comics Into Games". I'm dragging my friend and colleague Matt Turnbull to help me say smart things.

Be there or be square!

Best Comic

Here's the list:

Avengers: The Initiative #12: Was this the last issue? It was a wrap-up issue where we realized how little we had come to care about these characters. There was a lot of promise there, but with the frequent bloody deaths and huge assortment of characters, what little character development there was faded from my mind before this issue.

Blue Beetle #26: A great, but short, issue that was mostly in Spanish (though there was a translation at the end). Another issue where the character development completely eclipsed the action, even though the action took most of the issue.

DC Universe #0: If I had known this was an advertisement issue, I wouldn't have bought it.

Immortal Iron Fist #14: The culmination of an arc that I didn't read, it was, nevertheless, not too bad. Not too fond of the art, though.

JSA Classified #37: A decent Wildcat adventure. Not too much else.

Noble Causes #33: Like the previous issue, I'm not sure if I care too much for the Noble Family any more. I think I'll have to drop this.

The New Avengers #40: A neat issue showing the evolving Skrull plan from the Skrull Empire's side with a neat reveal at the end. A good trick, making the new skrull empress/high priestess into a sympathetic character. I was also impressed with how sympathetic the skrull emperor was when he said "That Mud-Walker turned one of my family into a cow." (although blowing the head off a clone of Reed Richards was a little gross.)

The Order #10: The last of the Order, which is sad, because I really liked this book. It ended fairly well, though two of the characters died. The saddest part was that the end turned the whole series into a prologue for the big Ezekiel Stane villain who will plague Stark in the new Iron Man issues.

It was a hard choice between Blog favorite Blue Beetle and The New Avengers skrull issue. So I tossed a coin. Here's the result:

Iron Man: Two sentence synopsis

A planner, A maniac, A playboy, and A guy who welds things together when the going gets tough. Tony Stark is the A-Team wrapped up in one.

The benefits of altruistic selfishness

This article talks about how selfish behavior can become altruistic behavior. The most interesting quote, however, was from a study they based this study on. That previous study showed that cheaters were more likely to punish other cheaters than non-cheaters. A common sense thing,really. So, the next time you play your favorite multiplayer game, and someone calls you out for cheating, it's very likely that person is a cheater, as well.

Best Comic

Oooh...fresh from the comic shop, here's the list!

Countdown #1 : The last issue. Does a drop in the bucket in the middle of a forest where no one is there to hear it make a noise? Yes, and it's a sad, disappointed, anticlimactic noise. "I'm Mary DAMN Marvel" indeed.

JLA #20: McDuffie is back and good writing comes with him with a Flash and Wonder Woman pair-up. It starts slow, but it gets better as the pair totally pwn Queen Bee. Sometimes it's nice to see what happens when the heroes have it together.

Mighty Avengers #13: The Secret Invasion Skrullks in (see what I did there?) as we see what's been up with Nick Fury for the past year or so, showing he's already one step ahead of the game.

Number of the Beast #2: Still pretty decent, we see some of what's going on behind the scenes as we learn more about these new heroes.

Shadowpact #24: Blue Devil is back in his old costume and I couldn't be happier! On the other hand, not much else that I care about happened.

Wolverine: First Class #2: Really good writing and characterization makes this a great read. Kitty Pryde shows Sabretooth what for and gives Wolverine his first birthday victory over Creed.

X-Men First Class #11: A scattered issue showing what comic writers really think of the people who read comics. Kinda disappointing.

Best Comic this week was hands down Wolverine: First Class. Woohoo!

Best Comic

This week was better than average, but didn't excell. It was kind of a B+ week.

Here's what I got:

Annihilation #6: A good ending to this series. The calvary comes rushing in, the undefeatable foe is defeated and most of the characters live to see the end. Some weirdness happens when Ultron assembles himself out of a fleet of Kree robots, and I think that Warlock called Tyro his "son" (which isn't true), but all in all a non-disappointing ending.

Avengers: The Initiative #11: Endings must be the theme this week, as the initiative ends its battle with KIA. Decent action, but way too many characters getting thrown around for any decent story to be done.

Brave and the Bold #12: Ending the Challengers of the Unknown and the book of Destiny run, this finale was underwhelming. The main villain they have been chasing for 6+ comics turns out to be as shallow as that thin coat of water you get from wiping down a granite countertop with a wet rag.

Countdown #2: Spoiler alert. Orion supposedly kills Darkseid in this issue. I can't see DC wanting to get rid of a villain they get so much mileage out of, so I'm thinking he'll be back in some form or another. It was interesting to see the art get more "Kirby-esque" as the battle between Orion and Darkseid raged.

Incredible Hercules #116: A decent issue which serves as a fun battle with the Eternals and the introduction of the Skrull menace into the book. This Hercules is a lot more introspective and a lot less drunk than previous incarnations. I think it's an interesting change, and one I'm interested in reading more about, even though I have a lot more fun with the swaggering, egocentric, womanizing drunkard Hercules trying to bestow "The Gift!" upon everyone he meets.

Noble Causes #32: A reboot for the Noble Family. Not as interesting as the previous book, as the tensions that book started out with have been mostly resolved.

Number of the Beast #1: I read a good review of this last week and decided to pick it up. Its not a half-bad team book. The characters are pretty interesting and I think I'll get the next issue.

Wolverine Origins #24: A talky issue where Deadpool and Wolverine verbally joust as Deadpool is about to drop Wolverine into a deathtrap. Meh.

There are several books kinda tied for first place here, but if I have to choose a winner, it's gotta be the Annihilation finale. Woot Annihilation!

Forbidden Kingdom

It's the Wizard of Oz meets Karate Kid!

To all the people who want to know how many children Barry White had...

I use Google Analytics to track the nearly 3 people who regularly read this blog. Some interesting information you can get from this service is exactly what search words people were using to find my site through search engines like google. This post is to address some of those search terms:

How many children did Barry White have? Officially, 7 + one stepson. Daughters: La nece, Deniece, Nina, Shaheara and Barriana. Sons: Barry Jr. and Darrell. Stepson: McKevin.

I get links to that as I did a post about a study on how lower voiced men are more fertile.

"Enjoying another's Misfortune.": This is called "Schadenfreude". I'm assuming people are searching for this word. This comes from a post I made about how men enjoy another's misfortune more than women.

Interestingly, this blog is in the top three results for both of those search phrases.

This has been a public service announcement.

Best Comic

Here's what I got this week:


Avengers Fairy Tales #2: The Vision as Pinocchio. Sadly, these tales are still not living up to the X-Men series last year. The point of these books should reveal the iconic nature of the superhero character, by showing how easily they fit into these more mythic stories. However, the real trick is to show sides of those characters we hadn't thought of before, but are now revealed when we think about them in this different light. The problem with this particular book is that nothing new is revealed by this story. The Vision remains the Vision.

Booster Gold #8: This book is a little painful. They bring Ted Kord back, and now they're showing what a bad idea that was. It's page after page of "well, looks like we're just gonna have to kill Ted all over agian so everything can go back to normal! Teaches you to mess with time, Gold!" Hopefully, they won't do that, but they're certainly pushing this message.

Countdown #3: TWO.... MORE... ISSUES! Interesting that they decided to make Superman kinda bloodthirsty. Ok...maybe not.

JSA #14: Interestingly enough, I like the issues where the characters just sit down and talk better than the action issues. It'll be interesting how they fit Gog in with the upcoming crisis, if they do that at all. Nice last panel with Green Lantern and Obsidian.

Nova #12: Warlock Dies! Then, Warlock Lives! Everyone is cured! Hurrah! Some action panels but everything felt a little rushed compared to the glacial pace of the previous couple of "infected" issues.

The Last Defenders #2: Still not getting in to this title. Bring back Gargoyle!

Titans #1: Not too bad. Naked Starfire was a bit much, though.

Wolverine #64: The fight with Mystique carries on. The two Wolverine books are kinda like Dragonball Z episodes. They're several books containing just one endless and kinda boring fight.

What's the best comic this week? Hard to say with the lackluster performance I'm seeing here. Instead, I'll leave you with a link to this cool game you can play for free on the web called Magic Pen.

Working Memory

An interesting study from UC Davis reaffirms that people can only remember 2-4 things from every quarter-second "frame" they see. Basically, if you are shown a picture for a quarter second, you might be able to remember only 4 things from that picture.

News like this always reminds me that we need to keep game HUDs simple and uncluttered, allowing players to get the information they really need without mistakenly soaking in data that they don't. Too much visual information can result in confusion.