2 Flat 2 Furious

Now, if you're anything like me you've had no end of trouble visualizing what fourth dimensional figures would look like. Yeah, we've all seen that little animated gif of that spinny tesseract on wikipedia. And if we can model 3D objects in 2D, surely the same can be said of higher dimensions?

But no, I just don't get 4D space. That is, until I read Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, the OG dimensional thought experiment written in 1884 by one Edwin A. Abbot. Now I still don't get 4D space but I understand why and more about how a fourth dimensional being would view three dimensional us. The novella takes place in Flatland, and it's about a square who spends most of the time describing flat society and how they roll. Then, he has a vision of Lineland, and receives a visit from a fantastical sphere, who introduces him to spaceland and beyond.

Really, pick this book up. You can probably even read it for free because I can't imagine a world where it's not in the public domain, and it's very neat and surprisingly readable to the modern eye.

Let's get straight to the point, though. The back cover promised "sex between consenting triangles." Now, the way things work in flatland is that all the figures are male and the women are lines, and the gay sex thing was Not Done back in those days. Needless to say, there is absolutely nothing titillating in any way about this book. Not that that's a bad thing given the subject matter, but it really bothers me when they outright lie to you about the contents on the back of a book.

Pattern Fight, Day One

A package came in the mail! It was none other than my materials for one of the entries in the Pattern Fight, Vogue 2556. Let's open 'er up.

The contents of the mailing envelope oozed forth. I was pretty happy with the colors; I had been a little nervous about ordering them based on the color shown on my laptop monitor. The green is a polyester for the under flap part. It felt about how I expected. The blue is a bamboo/cotton blend and it feels very soft. Both are knits per the pattern requirements. In retrospect, it was really really dumb to get these colors since the winner gets to go to a friend's wedding, and the bride is wearing blue with the wedding party in green. I'm reasonably certain that they're very different shades of blue and green, and the groom has assured me that nothing I wear to this thing is going to be a faux pas, but still. Is this going to be enough to disqualify this dress from the competition?

Magnus, the official cat of Superlemons, was eager to help, as always. There was a hole in the middle of the blue. I was able to place the pieces around it with no trouble. Even so, not cool, fabric.com. Not cool. I cut all the pieces and spent like half an hour putting in tailor's tacks. Now, before I had only encountered them in vintage patterns and quickly dismissed them as overly fastidious old-timey nonsense. However, they have well made up for the effort I put into placing them, and now I am born again tailor's tacker. Hallelujah!

The day ended with the dress partially assembled. It's both more and less complicated then it looks like on the envelope. However, I've reached the point where I need some snap tape to continue, which fabric.com didn't stock and I've had trouble finding locally for a reasonable price. I have a budget to consider and a whole 'nother dress to build, after all.

Pattern Fight!

So my recent trip to Pennsylvania to visit relatives further reinforced a bizarre hypothesis I had first posed in Boone, NC: thrift stores in hick towns have the best haul. Now, I don't know the distribution models, but I have to assume that the items in thrift stores are donated locally, and people in hick towns have limited access to the good stuff, and, to make a terrible generalization, have no taste. And yet there's a high frequency of Banana Republic stuff and one time a tank top from Top Shop down at Ram's Rack.

So we went to this place in a neighboring town (I guess slightly better because it had a movie theater) which had an extremely sweet haul. My limited funds and even more limited closet space prohibited me from stocking up on old bowling shirts, the most ridiculous fur coat in the world (only $10) and some sweet hats, but I did pick up two vintage patterns AND a Vogue Issey Miyake pattern for like two bucks. Awesome!

Which brings us to the bout of the century: Pattern Fight. I'm going to to construct both of these patterns on this very blog. The winner, voted on by MY FAITHFUL READERS (both of you?) gets worn to this wedding I gotta go to. Let's meet the contenders!


Team Simplicity 4944:
This copacetic little bird may be getting up there in years, but we still think it's the berries. It didn't come with the original envelope and there's no date printed on the directions. The company also had two other patterns with the same number which complicates finding information. Judging by the price (65 cents) and the cut I'm going to guess late 60s or 70s. I'm going to go for View 1, but I'll probably revisit 2 in the future if it comes out okay.

Team Vogue 2556:
This pattern is stiff competition, due to the involvement of big name Japanese designer Issey Miyake, who survived the atomic bomb to give the world the Pleats Please collection. But like so much high fashion, is this 2001 pattern too funky for its own good? I say the crazier the better, but I am concerned about the potential waist-negating effect. I'll be doing the dress A, the skirt is not a length that suits me and I can't afford to make a thing AND furnish my own top.

The fabric for 2556 has been ordered and construction will begin once it arrives and I track down some elusive snap tape. For 4944 I'll check around the house and see if any of my existing stash is up to the task. Gentlemen, the game is afoot.

Newsy Bits

Sorry it's been a while, I've been a bit lazy lately. I was going to do an exciting theremin build series of posts, but I got my hands on my state income tax refund and it wasn't quite enough. It will buy me college applications though, and that's a whole bunch of adventures waiting to happen. For those not in the know I'm wanting to go back to school for textile engineering. It's a fascinating field and I truly believe that high tech fibers are going to be the next big thing. Also, I wouldn't say no to a job in the fashion industry.

Picked up the first issue of the Doom Patrol relaunch this week. Not only is it Doom Patrol but there's a Metal Men side story in each issue as well! It started out a little slow but I'm going to pick up the next one for sure!

Now, I had a whole host of problems getting my laptop into working order. It's a Toshiba Satellite about six years old and I had stopped using it when I had a hard drive failure a few years ago. I picked up a new hard drive and a power cord to replace the one I lost, but once it was up and running it wouldn't stay on very long. So I had to get some Torx screwdrivers to open up the panel with the CPU and the heatsink (Phillips is good enough for every other panel on the thing) and cleaned it out and put in new thermal grease. In my infinite wisdom I put Ubuntu on it, which is a whole 'nother set of problems, but it's running great now. Unfortunately, no sooner did I get it into shape than the desktop developed a problem. A "won't turn on and smells like burning" problem. I don't have the parts to diagnose it but I suspect it's the power supply. Ah well, at least I have some way of getting my sweet, sweet dose of forums and hilarious videos.

On the gaming front, I resumed my third playthrough of Fatal Frame III, which deserves a post to itself, and realized just how nice it was to have someone in your bed at night after getting molested by the grim specters of sacrifice victims.

The Greatest Auto Dealer Commercial of All Time

To the educated connoisseur of sexy, Kevin McDonald is definitely the hottest Kid in the Hall. Yeah, I mean Dave Foley is all right for the gal who likes vanilla ice cream, but Kevin's right for the chick who digs pink bubble gum. Anyway, this reporter had a huge crush on him in high school.

Today, I was reminded of a lesser-known Kevin appearance. In 2002, he did a series of commercials aired over several months for Thomason Auto Group, a Portland car dealer, in which he played Santo, the mad genius commercial director attempting to make the greatest auto dealer commercial of all time. The ads take you on a roller coaster of emotion, from the auspicious beginning, to Santo's twelve minute walk-out, his touching motivational speech, and finally, the finished product. Well, I'm not going to spoil the big moment for you, but let's just say it's an intellectual tour-de-force of stock footage and car ballet.

I originally saw these on the ad agency's website, but since they no longer seem to exist--a pity because they did some pretty good work--some kind soul has put these up on Youtube. Enjoy!

Welcome!

So they've been running You've Got Mail a lot on cable recently, and I'm always looking for media that I don't really need to pay a lot of attention to while I knit, and hey, it's a movie featuring the internet made in 1998. The other thing is that they are showing this thing so often that I lost interest partway through and the next time I turned on the TV it was on again at the same scene where I left off. Who needs that in demand crap when you have basic cable service like that?

So the premise is that dude and chick are online buddies, and they're both nursing a serious e-crush for each other. IRL she runs a children's bookstore and he is a giant discount bookstore tycoon, who is opening a new location on the same block. They end up meeting and totally hating each other, of course. When they try to meet up as online friends, he finds out that it's her and bails. Despite the fact that she runs a well-established niche bookstore she goes under (how did Black Books end up surviving this scenario? I guess they same way they stay in business at all). Dude realizes he loves her and builds a connection in meatspace, both characters' significant others are conveniently disposed of, he does the big reveal and she is not at all upset that he's been deceiving her for months.

It wasn't quite as funny in the obsolete technology department as I was hoping it would be, although it did bring back a lot of memories. Do you remember where you were on the day you found out that the terrible modem noise it makes when you're dialing up can be disabled? Or wandering into a chatroom and being bombarded with "a/s/l?" I actually had quite a few online friends as a teenager that I'd meet through various games. Now with all this web 2.0 business people don't seem to really connect, they just deposit their commentary and leave. Or maybe that's just because I don't really involve myself in online social circles as much these days. Now all my online friends are my real life ones who I don't live near anymore.

That said, I think I finally "get" chick flicks. Yeah, the appeal should be obvious, but I had never watched one while suffering multiple heart fractures before. They work when you want wholeheartedly to believe that the perfect person will enter your life by astounding coincidence. The thing is though, is that the world really is a magical place and every romance has just as cute a story behind it. Knowing this, these movies don't really have anything to show me.

It also got me thinking that maybe Doug is the only good portrayal of shyness and weird anxiety ever. You know how Doug will encounter a totally normal situation and have all these insane fantasies about how terrible it will turn out and everyone will hate him forever and then it turns out to be totally fine, but he still freaks out about stuff later on? This film features lengthy scenes of typing and deleting, and frantically clicking the send button, and shutting the laptop and leaving. Who thought "that's what I want to watch, people spending hours composing the perfect email!"? I mean, five points for verisimilitude but minus several hundred for being unwatchable.

Better Ed Then Dead

I am so tired of writing about underwear perverts! You'll get to know what else I ended up with at the con, plus a backlog of back issues bought for their silly covers when I'm good and ready. For now, we're going to talk about video games or hactual books with hactual words. Or that theramin I'm gonna build when I get some cash in.

Today, in honor of LucasArts being less dicks (I'm going to reserve "deciding to stop being dicks" until I see the pricing) and releasing their classic adventure games on Steam, which means that the rerelease won't go out of print and be just as big a pain to get my hands on, we're going to go on delightful romp through childhood memories of Maniac Mansion. That was a pretty serious sentence back there. For this article, I'm going to call the statue of limitations on spoilers, because this game is twenty years old at this point.

Maniac Mansion is what I tell people is my favorite game ever. Yeah, it's not exactly the most polished, or sophisticated, or even what I would call the best game, but it occupies a very special place in my heart. In lieu of having cable my parents would let us rent a game or a movie. Now this was back in the day, and I didn't get any game magazines for reviews. So when you were in the store you could either go with a known good game or take a chance on being stuck with a crappy game all weekend, and all you had to go on was the box art. I'd end up renting Maniac Mansion on a fairly regular basis, and I remember owning it at some point--maybe we bought it from the video store when they were paring down their stock at some point. The point is, I logged way more hours on this game then were strictly necessary to beat it. The puzzles were fairly difficult for me, and I only ever managed to get Bernard's Meteor Police ending. The thing is though, I was content to just wander around the mansion, trying to unlock its secrets all on my own. Now all I seem to care about is making progress; I still like to explore but unless each session has a noticeable accomplishment I seem to break out the walkthroughs on the internet. I'm actually kind of bothered by that change in behavior, and even though it means a lot of games ultimately end up unfinished I'm trying not to be such a cheater these days.

At the beginning of the game, if you go into the kitchen immediately Nurse Edna is in there, looking through the fridge, and as soon as she comes into view she sees you, shuts the door and comes chasing after you. That's the first time I can remember something in a game responding to my actions, and not just following their own patterns. I mean, yeah, there was interaction but it was more you reacting to them. And it was terrifying. As a kid I would check the other rooms first and wait to go in the kitchen, afraid that I hadn't let enough time pass. To this day I have this primal fear response to going in there, even if I do it purposefully to get caught and sent to the dungeon. Later on, you can ring the doorbell with one kid to get Weird Ed to come down from his room and have another kid root through his stuff, which was another panic moment for young me. Am I going to have enough time to get the card key and the change? Is he going to come back up and catch me with his precious hamster?

There's more to this game then just nostalgia. It came out in 1987, and it made a ridiculous number of innovations. It was one of the first games to use cut scenes to advance the plot; the manual actually spends a page explaining what a cut scene is. I mean, at this point even having a plot in the game and not just as color in the manual was a pretty big thing. You got a pool of characters with different abilities, and to some extent personalities, to choose from at the beginning, and switched between kids on the fly, which created a teamwork style of gameplay that is rare to see even today.

It has this great genuine horror/humor vibe and, especially given technical limitations, great writing and characterization, from the green tentacle who wants to be a rock star to the evil meteor, whose ambition was to rule the world...one teenager at a time! The meteor turns out to be a big softie if you get his novel published, though. Oh yeah, MULTIPLE ENDINGS. I told you this game was amazingly ahead of its time.

You could be a punk rock chick (or really new wave dude) and microwave a hamster. What's not to love?

Ok, this one's a rambling mess, so I'll let you go here. I'll most likely be picking up Loom and The Dig tomorrow, and even if you're not big on video games normally, but for some reason have read this entire post, I'd advise checking out some LucasArts adventures, but only if you like joy.

Bonus: Howard and Nester go to Maniac Mansion.

Convention Comics Cavalcade Part 1

Before I went to the con I made up a list of all the major Ambush Bug and Great Lakes Avengers appearances, as well as some of the other holes in my collection. It seems like all the stuff I want is in this weird collector's dead zone, because comics slightly newer are plentiful and older comics are also abundant but super expensive. Actually, I just found out that they published Showcase Presents: Ambush Bug featuring basically everything earlier this year, so it's just as well that I didn't spend too much. I do like having the actual issues around for the ads and letters, though.

Action Comics #560 (1984)


Cute story about this one: I was complaining that none of the booths seemed to have any Action Comics lower than 600 or so. Kyle asked me what I was looking for and he disappears for a few seconds and comes back with this book. Awww! On the inside front cover is a sweet ad for Mario Bros. on the Atari 2600, and then most of the issue is a boring Superman affair. He fights some guy who's destroying prisons and courthouses with some kind of crazy magic handcuffs as an act of revenge for being falsely imprisoned, although it kinda sounds like he did it and he's just delusional. I dunno, if it were me I would have just lay low after breaking out of jail instead of wrecking up municipal property and attracting any number of costumed do-gooders, but to each his own. I'm only really interested reading about Superman when he's being incredibly camp in the 60s and 70s, the kind of stuff that ends up on Superdickery.com.

Of course, the selling point of this issue is the eight pages of Bug-tastic action. Clark Kent comes into Ambush Bug's detective agency attempting to do a piece for the Planet, and AB quickly sees through his pathetic disguise (that super-humanly clear skin is a dead givaway!) and makes him a partner. Supes flies off in a huff, but Ambush Bug continues to prey on his mind.

Actually, Superman in this was really interesting to me. I don't know if they've attempted to give him more of a personality recently, but I know him as the most milquetoast, zero personality goody-two-shoes in the superhero pantheon. But in this story, he has a dream about Ambush Bug, and when he wakes up he says "the only reason I sleep at all is for dreams." The implication here is that he doesn't actually need to sleep, he does so out of a selfish indulgence. Superman actually wanting something for himself that no one else can benefit from and then indulging in it is so contrary to what my idea of the character was. He could be staying up all night fighting crime, but he chooses not to. Then I thought, hey, even having a real life is taking away from the good he could be doing the world. Why would he do that? He's lonely; only by being Clark Kent can he make actual human connections. Through the magic of Ambush Bug, Superman has become a much deeper character to me. Is it just the joke heroes that are this thought-provoking or do the mainstream comics have this much to offer? Am I missing out on a whole world of art here or just reading way too much into this?

Teen Confessions #58 (1969)

This purchase was inspired by my mate's recent post about Gidget. It's basically what you'd expect, super lame over-inflated teen problems based around dated social mores. In the first story, homegirl cheats on her Green Beret boyfriend while he's fighting for her freedom to do so in Vietnam. He comes home only to reveal that he's had half the town spying on her for him, and he forgives her...but only if she'll be just as understanding about him! Those wacky dames!

In the second tale, a girl is madly in love with a mysterious bearded man, but she can't help freaking out about it. "What is he really like? Is he handsome? Does he have a hideous scar to hide? Or...or a weak jaw line?" she wonders. Her friends hint at a dark secret, and he refuses to shave it off or explain. She breaks up with him, naturally, and later at the beach she meets a handsome, clean shaven stranger! Why, it turns out that the man is her hirsute heartthrob! And he only had the beard for a play. He couldn't tell her this why? And he didn't invite her to see his performance or anything? Argh, I'm already fed up with this crap. All these problems could be solved with just a little communication.

Before the main feature, we have a real life teen romance problem action letter! M.R. is so lovesick over this girl that he's dropping stuff. Breakable stuff. His parents wisely advised him to write to a comic book advice column instead of actually offering guidance or support. Good ol' Doc Gluck sets the kid straight by recommending that he actually talk to her. Oh, if only it were that simple...

Ahem. Moving on we come to the cover story, "The Teeny Bopper." Girl is in love with this guy that she's bullied since childhood, but she goes one step too far when she snubs him for the hero of the beach. The guy leaves town for a few days and comes back in a psychedelic VW Beetle with this way-out happening hippie chick. Who of course is his cousin helping him out, because he's just trying to make the girl jealous. Dames!

We finish with a one-pager advising waiting until the man finishes school before marriage. Peppered throughout are ads for weight loss and seriously creepy beauty products, like Whyten, which looks a lot like dentally applied liquid paper. Eww.

Bird Hurdler

It's a free anthology of indie comics. They're all quite short, some are cute and some are surreal. I don't really have a lot to say about them because I seem to have wasted "the magic" on Teen Confessions, so check it out yourself. I also picked up a bunch of sweet postcards (also free) at the same booth (pictured below).

Spy Groove

I feel as though this blog has become a bit comics-heavy. Comics are the things I'm least nerdy about, believe it or not, and the more I write about them the more I fear that some portly gentleman dressed as a wizard at his computer will swoop in and harangue me about how what I've said is a completely illegitimate point, as any moron would find in Uncanny X-Men volume 6, issues 7-10 and 22. So let's take a break with some cartoons and get back to the con later.

I managed to catch a couple episodes of Spy Groove when it aired on MTV back in 2000. They only showed six out of the thirteen episodes produced, and it got canceled pretty quickly and forgotten about. Normally when I talk about a TV show I'd link the intro, but I can't seem to find the stupid thing on the internet right now; I know it's been posted before which I suppose illustrates how unloved yet zealously defended for copyright reasons this thing is. But enjoy these grainy screenshots!

Anyway, I recently got my hands on the first twelve episodes. Like Get Smart and Inspector Gadget before it, Spy Groove is rigidly formulaic but keeps it interesting through the strength of the writing. There's a cold open of the villain of the week scheming, then it goes to Agent Number One and Agent Number Two hamfistedly hitting on Mac, "one part urban cocktail waitress, two parts Lady Godiva, and a dash of cayenne pepper," at the Maxi Bar. There they get contacted by Helena Troy and sent off to an exotic locale on a mission. The agents do they spy thang and infiltrate the scene, unravel the evil plan, team up with and/or get betrayed by hot babes, and use zany gadgets to take down the bad guy. Helena and her assistant Carlo show up at the end to pick up the prisoner, and the agents do an improv bit over the credits.

The art style is colorful, cheesecakey, and fun, but unfortunately the characters only move when they absolutely have to. It's mostly a talking heads kind of show, but the dialogue is snappy and clever which makes up for it--sort of. Maybe it's just me, but I could only get through one or two episodes in a sitting. It's really a shame they didn't have more of a budget, because the few fully animated sequences look great.

Like Daria, most of the background music consists of samples from songs, which I expect puts it in the same category of licensing nightmare. Combined that with its relative obscurity (MTV no longer even maintains a web page about the show) and you're basically looking at no DVD release ever.

Heroes Con '09 Report Part 2

Saturday:

After the three of us spent the night on a pile of Sumo pillows, an experience like "being in a ditch filled with beans" as Kyle put it, the Editor, Kyle, and I bid each other a tearful adieu and they returned to the crappy podunk towns from whence they came. I hit the con again with Chase and Jason.

We spent most of the time down at the Indie Island and the artist tables. We checked out Guy Davis again who had a stack of the Free Comic Book Day Hellboy, which he signed and gave to each of us. He is such a sweetheart! Chase picked up Comic Book Tattoo from Kelly Sue DeConnick, which actually looks really cool despite my aversion to Tori Amos. She was the nicest lady; she pointed out all the other people at the con who had had a hand in it to get autographs and offered Chase a candy bar when he made a comment about not being able to buy dinner. Dawwww.

We headed out and got some chilly drinks (Charlotte isn't too far from where I live but it's a million times muggier!) and went through our hauls. Chase runs a webcomic which I will plug for him again, Particulates! We talked about getting a table next year and brainstormed some ideas. I figure this gives me about a year to learn to draw and be half as awesome and creative as he is. Then it was nap time, or in my case, devour his Scott Pilgrim collection time.

The evening was passed with pizza, beer, anime, and gossip about my romance problems. We watched Memories, of which I had seen "Magnetic Rose" in high school. The other two segments were definitely not on the same level, but they were both pretty good. He also introduced me to Robot Carnival, which is so amazing that it's going to get its own article later, but go ahead and watch the intro:



Well, that about does it for this year's Heroes Con. I had a great time and hopefully I'll be on the other side of the table next year! Keep feverishly refreshing this page for the low down on all the crap I came home with.

Heroes Con '09 Report Part 1

Thursday:

Recently I attended Heroes Convention down in Charlotte, NC: The Queen City, The Hornet's Nest, Crown Town, My Big Fat Chinese Buffet, The C-Nasty. My car, the 1991 Toyota Celica, Undisputed King of the Road, seems to have developed a problem where it starts getting way too hot after it's been running for about an hour, but I made it down there by running the heat with the windows down. I stayed with my main bro Chase, who doesn't care how smelly you get when you've been driving in the heat with the heater on. It was pretty late when I got in, so we just chatted a bit and watched some music videos, including that one video they showed on Beavis and Butthead one time with that guy on fire. It turns out that they really set a guy on fire to make it. Who knew?

Friday:

Chase had to work, so I headed down to the con. I had prepared a giant list of all Ambush Bug and GLA appearances, plus the holes I have in my collection. Can you believe I'm still missing The Tick: Karma Tornado 6 and 8 after all these years? After a longbox search-induced cuticle injury (gasp!) I went back to the lobby and perused my growing haul while waiting for my main lady bro, the Editor of Capt. Ahab's Shanty, and this guy Kyle. We did the lunch thang at a resonably priced and reasonably tasty pizza joint down the block. With my tiny system thus fueled, I and my chums hit the con full force.

Now, I'm kind of a shy person (viz: meet every criteria in the DSM-IV for social anxiety disorder), which is why I only prattle on about my day using the anonymity of the internet, so going around and chatting with strange artists isn't something that would even occur to me as a thing to do. I found out that it totally is. We made the rounds of all the people who we wanted to sign things who weren't too popular and checked out the little guys. Everyone was really nice and I'm very jealous of people who have drawing ability. Guy Davis was there and he was free to do an sketch and have a nice chat. Jeff Smith was there but what with that line there was absolutely no way. I felt kind of bad for him though when I caught a glimpse of him with his little carpal tunnel wrist brace on. I didn't have too much money to spend, but I picked up a really nice Nightcrawler print and a tiny comic about mugs from Joseph Lambert, who messed up my change twice, but signed his name extra big.

At one point, Kyle bought a pack of TMNT trading cards which still had the original gum within. We tried to eat it which was totally a mistake. It was too powdery to spit out and too nasty to just deal with it. After the con we headed back to Chase's place and got some dinner and drinks with him and Jason. Stay tuned for the Saturday report and the con swag review!

How Stealing Cars Makes Me Feel, or Like Thirty Minutes With GTA4

So, Grand Theft Auto 4 has been out for quite a while, but Superlemons cares not for being the first to report, but rather the being most touchy-feely about video games and their greater role in the collective consciousness and as art pieces, or whatever. Having finally gotten access to a PS3, I've had the opportunity to check this game out.

To preface this entry, I've had a long battle between being able to express femininity vs. being a vacuous ninny. I recently got excited about and then spent way too much money on shoes, and I enigmatically suck at Metal Gear Solid now. So I thought I'd do something manly to balance the books. Remember the simple joy of taking a helicopter out to the beach and chopping up unsuspecting holidaymakers in the blades in GTA: Vice City?

Well.

To sum it up, GTA4 is the single girliest game I have ever played in my life. I am not even kidding. The opening is surprisingly emotional; a man leaving his war-torn homeland for a better life, only to realize that his cousin lied to him about how the streets are paved with gold in the land of opportunity.

I mean, we could definitely go somewhere with a set up like this, right? And I'm not saying the game doesn't. But the first few missions are about shopping, and going on a date, and texting your peeps, and maintaining social connections. You get assigned a mission where you actually have to drive to a clothing store and pick out a fierce new outfit because girlfriend, you are in serious need of a makeover. Your cousin constantly calls you up to hang out. And get this, I had to wait in line and pay a toll on a bridge. What happened to the mayhem, the senseless carnage? Do they all start out like that, or am I just spoiled by my end-of-the-game save files in GTA3 and Vice City?

Other notes: all the cars drive like aircraft carriers. I mean, I get that they're going for the inner city thing and you don't get the good cars until you get to the nice areas, but even poor people (yours truly) have really old sports cars sometimes. I also found the controls a bit of a hurdle since they're such a departure from the traditional scheme, and the trigger buttons on the PS3 controllers feel really weird.

I'd buy that for a dollar!

I’ll buy any comic for a dollar or less on a strictly cover-art basis. Today, I went down to my local comic shop in my new locale for the first time, and they had a bunch of longboxes with old comics--which were not alphabetized at all--out front. Here’s what I came home with:



Wha…Huh? (2005)

Now, I used to read What If? as a kid, but unless it had the Fantastic Four in it my eyes would just sort of slide of the page. I was concerned about this one because the fearsome foursome didn’t appear on the cover, but my trepidation was quickly overridden by my curiosity about how anything with Spider-Ham on the cover could be “suggested for teen and up.”

When it came time to sit down and read the thing, I realized that I might be a bit out of the loop in case they wanted to poke fun at any character introduced or developed after 1985, which is where my knowledge of the Marvel Universe ends. Fortunately, this comic was made for the nerdiest of the nerds, my kind of nerds, the ones who keep track of like sixty years of continuity. Wha…Huh? is a delicious and silly romp through your dad’s comic book collection. It devotes a page or two to such questions as “what if the the Avengers all had beards” and “what if Doctor Doom was named Doctor Strange and Doctor Strange was named Doctor Doom?” And it’s even got a couple Fantastic Four stories, one of which features the Thing attempting to hit Mr. Fantastic with a “moon tree.”

If you’ve got small children you’re probably still freaking out about that parental warning thing I mentioned in the first paragraph. I’m honestly not sure what makes this thing risqué in any way, except maybe the implied voyeurism on the part of the Watcher. I was pleasantly surprised by a sweet ad for BOD, the poor man’s AXE, by Glen Hanson, the guy who did the art for Spy Groove. This prompted me thinking about Spy Groove for the first time in years and, possibly, another post in the future! This is truly the comic that keeps on giving, and was, ironically, the only one in the bunch that actually cost me less than its original cover price. The irony is that it's the only one that has any value.

Dazzler #2 (1981)

I bought this on the merit of it being about Dazzler and it being the “last stand in discoland!” Dazzler, fresh from all that Dark Phoenix business, has decided to pursue a career as a disco queen, which will undoubtedly bring her long-term success. Apparently in the last issue she won a gig over the Enchantress, who will not let this stand. In an obvious attempt to get people to actually buy this comic, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and the X-Men all show up to Daz's first performance and end up in this huge fight with the Enchantress, and then help Dazzler get an audition with a record exec.

I’m not an expert on the character, but her power seems like it could be a lot less lame than it is. She’s at this disco “dazzling” her opponents, but what does that really mean? Is she giving them epileptic seizures, or more subtly using specific light patterns to hijack with their brains somehow, like optical phone phreaking? Or can she just mess them up with lasers? These are the questions that are totally brushed aside by this nonsense.

At least it’s got some good visuals, in that pop art kind of way. I think this one’s going in the decoupage pile. I will one day have the most boss (bossest?) end table. Also, Hostess cupcakes!

Fantastic Four #276 (1985)

This one I picked up because I kind of liked how they extended the whole consumed-by-blinding-light thing to the title and box with the little picture on the upper left.

We open with the Human Torch moving in on Thing’s woman, oh snap! Then they declare that they’re tired of talking about feelings and get to the action, namely Reed and Sue in disguise in the suburbs, setting up secret identities to give Franklin a normal life. Except their crazy neighbor thinks they’re witches and summons up a whole bunch of demons to fight unholy fire with unholy fire. And then it’s up to Doctor Strange to bail them out...next month.

The letters page contains a discussion of the relative temperature of the Human Torch’s feet. Overall, it’s just a comic. It doesn’t stand out in a particularly camp way or a particularly interesting way.