This site is updated Thursday afternoon with a new article about an artistic pursuit generally considered to be beneath consideration. James Schellenberg probes science-fiction, Carol Borden draws out the best in comics, Chris Szego dallies with romance and Ian Driscoll stares deeply into the screen. Click here for their bios and individual takes on the gutter.
While the writers have considerable enthusiasm for their subjects, they don't let it numb their critical faculties. Tossing away the shield of journalistic objectivity and refusing the shovel of fannish boosterism, they write in the hopes of starting honest and intelligent discussions about these oft-enjoyed but rarely examined artforms.
Recent Features
ROUND THE DECAY OF THAT COLOSSAL WRECK
In the run-up to, and wake of, the release of Watchmen, it has become common currency to say that adapting Zach Snyder, et al undertook a massive challenge in adapting Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ complex, sprawling medium- and genre-defining work for the screen.
But I’m going to suggest that they actually undertook an even more massive challenge: adapting Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ complex, sprawling medium- and genre-defining work for the screen - and completely missing its point.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By gillmen wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
--sorta T.S. Eliot
Do you hear that? Off in the distance? A song too beautiful to be real but somehow... familiar? The song twines over the water, through the cattails and the woods, into the window, eighth notes swirling all around. The creature in the lagoon is singing. He's not dead after all and who are we to resist him and the “centuries of passion pent up in his savage heart?"
Zahn's Star Wars; Or, Will This Death be Permanent?
A scrappy rebellion, a victory against an evil overlord, leftover spaceships in the dark outer reaches of the galaxy, warriors with extraordinary powers (nearly wiped out), now on the verge of a comeback. Laughs, thrills, moments of sadness, moments of sheer action. Exciting stuff! And oh yeah, it's a Star Wars tie-in novel.
When I was 11 or 12, at the variety store near my Grandma's house, I made a life-changing purchase. It was probably Christmas and I was probably killing time until I had to go back to a room full of adults. When I did return to the festive nest, I went home with the New Mutants.
The New Mutants, my introduction to superhero comics, were the teenaged superteam taught by Professor X. The X-Men were more powerful and had more exciting missions, sure, but I identified more with the younger, more awkward characters and the lower key, more plausible storylines. Plus the title had just started -- I was able to collect the dozen or so earlier issues of the New Mutants when the X-Men were already in the triple digits. But I wasn't really hooked by either power fantasies or collector fever; it was the social dynamics. As I delivered papers, I imagined what it would be like if I were a new student at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Would my sudden appearance irk the hothead Brazilian, Sunspot? Would I be taken under Cannonball's big-brother wing? Could I turn Magick from the dark side, or at least long enough to get a smooch?
Which goes a long way to explaining why I felt at home in City of Heroes (NCSoft, 2004).
This massively multiplayer online role-playing game is one of the most sociable I've seen. When you customize your avatar's appearance, powers and name, it has the feel of dressing for a party -- you can choose to dress appropriately and give people a sense of your real-world life (The Acerbic Accountant!) or dress daringly to bring out your inner self (Leering Lass!). Naturally, the clothing options are skewed towards the crimebusting -- i.e. there're no Buddy Holly glasses and there are several styles of medieval helmets -- but the colour palette is infinite. (Well, nearly. Marvel launched a lawsuit against the game, since dismissed, saying that it's set up to mimic their intellectual property. So if you give yourself a huge body, green skin, purple shorts and call yourself the Incredible Bulk, you will find your name mysteriously changes to something less libelous. Lame and intrusive behaviour on the parts of both plaintiff and defendant.)
When you do decide what kind of hero you want to be today, you make your debut in Paragon City, a retro-futurist-styled environment packed to the gills with your fellow heroes. It's fun just people-watching in the public square. You can check out the outlandish costumes, the hero names and watch their antics. Unlike a party, if you get bored you can go get a mission from City Hall -- your first one acts as a tutorial, gets you to kick some thug ass in the bad part of town. This starts you on your way levelling up and collecting medals and earning "inspirations," "enhancements" and "influence."
I was lucky enough to have a higher-level tour guide to show me some of the highlights of Paragon City, Cold Bob. Cold Bob has a number of chilly powers. He's normally clad in blue but when he's flying with his superteam, the Northern Rangers, he wears the team colours of red with a white snowflake on his chest -- the Rangers are a Canadian superteam that's "mostly social." He recently was able to level up to the point where he can fly because the Winter King had been threatening the city, which offered a series of missions and scenarios throughout the winter. Cold Bob was excited about this kind of realtime gameplay, which allowed the designers to react to the players and innovate on the fly as a complement to conventional pre-programmed gameplay. He also told me the story of how when Christopher Reeve died, a group of heroes got together and saluted in memoriam.
Cold Bob also showed me some dance moves, as one of the things you can do is throw down a boom box and play music. Impromptu dance party! Someone else liked the rave music Cold Bob was playing and danced for a bit, and we chatted via word bubbles that appeared above our heads.
I was impressed with the range of body language and variety of social gestures Cold Bob showed me. Most games with a mission component have very little of the social component, and vice versa -- online worlds like there.com focus on social interactions but it's easy to lose interest if you're used to goal-based games. To go back to the party analogy, there's a reason people play games to break the ice: it's more comfortable for a lot of people to have something to do other than stand around with a drink in their hand.
City of Heroes strikes a great balance between the social component and mission-based gameplay. Where I felt this most strongly was when I was recruited by Goddess Within to back her up against some Clockwork robots in a warehouse. Many of the challenges you face are very difficult to face alone, which encourages collaboration. We were running across town together and chatting occasionally, and I thought, "This is just like hanging out with the New Mutants."
I can tell you, now that I have spent over 100 hours (in the last month!) in Paragon City, there is a lot more to the city (just in terms of architechitural design, and groups of villains) than the bare surface we scratched together four weeks ago! Outside of Atlas Park, there's ruined cityscapes, there's forests, there's caves, there's dock lands, there's industrial parks, there's abandoned cemeteries, there's hilly terrain, there's rivers and lakes...you name an environment, and one way or another, Paragon City probably has a zone that contains it! If all of Paragon City was this sort of idealized modern urban environment, the game would be kind of flat...but the beauty of this game is, it feels almost infinite in its selection of things to do, heroes to see, villains to fight, areas to explore, challenges to tackle...and the game is constantly evolving! New story arcs, new villains, new powers, new in-game features (in the coming months CoH will be rolling out an expansion #4 to the game called "Colliseum" where heroes get to fight each other, player-versus-player, in tournaments!)
You should see Cold Bob today: in the last month, I've worked him up to level 22; earned about 50 different badges (for both defeating villains and just exploring the city); got a bunch of new powers including flight; earned my cape; earned a spare costume; joined a new supergroup (getting second spare costume for that); and just generally made a lot of both player and NPC contacts throughout the many zones of Paragon City...
I can tell you, now that I have spent over 100 hours (in the last month!) in Paragon City, there is a lot more to the city (just in terms of architechitural design, and groups of villains) than the bare surface we scratched together four weeks ago! Outside of Atlas Park, there's ruined cityscapes, there's forests, there's caves, there's dock lands, there's industrial parks, there's abandoned cemeteries, there's hilly terrain, there's rivers and lakes...you name an environment, and one way or another, Paragon City probably has a zone that contains it! If all of Paragon City was this sort of idealized modern urban environment, the game would be kind of flat...but the beauty of this game is, it feels almost infinite in its selection of things to do, heroes to see, villains to fight, areas to explore, challenges to tackle...and the game is constantly evolving! New story arcs, new villains, new powers, new in-game features (in the coming months CoH will be rolling out an expansion #4 to the game called "Colliseum" where heroes get to fight each other, player-versus-player, in tournaments!)
You should see Cold Bob today: in the last month, I've worked him up to level 22; earned about 50 different badges (for both defeating villains and just exploring the city); got a bunch of new powers including flight; earned my cape; earned a spare costume; joined a new supergroup (getting second spare costume for that); and just generally made a lot of both player and NPC contacts throughout the many zones of Paragon City...
A wrestler-fairy? A nerd-werewolf? A caveman-pirate? All these and more in Creebobby's second Archetype Times Table.
~
Wong Fei-Hung's been on my mind lately. Luckily, Kung Fu Cinema has a nice video (scroll down) of Wong Fei-Hung in the movies from Kwan Tak-Hing to Gordon Liu, Jet Li as well as Jackie Chan and actress Angie Tsang Tze-Man's portrayals of young Wong Fei-Hung. There's also a detailed companion article tracing the historical and fictional Wong Fei-Hung through newspaper pulps, radio, tv and film.
~
"It's common practice for one of those guys, in a single day, to
chainsaw his way out of the belly of a giant worm, take a detour
through a zombie shantytown, euthanise his long-lost wife, and spend
hours in a sewer trawling through blood and waste, with monsters
leaping up at his face and depositing their brain matter on his boots."
Hit Self-Destruct again, on what life's like for videogame heroes.
In the run-up to, and wake of, the release of Watchmen, it has become common currency to say that adapting Zach Snyder, et al undertook a massive challenge in adapting Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ complex, sprawling medium- and genre-defining work for the screen.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
A scrappy rebellion, a victory against an evil overlord, leftover spaceships in the dark outer reaches of the galaxy, warriors with extraordinary powers (nearly wiped out), now on the verge of a comeback. Laughs, thrills, moments of sadness, moments of sheer action. Exciting stuff! And oh yeah, it's a Star Wars tie-in novel.
When I was 11 or 12, at the variety store near my Grandma's house, I made a life-changing purchase. It was probably Christmas and I was probably killing time until I had to go back to a room full of adults. When I did return to the festive nest, I went home with the New Mutants.
I was lucky enough to have a higher-level tour guide to show me some of the highlights of Paragon City, Cold Bob. Cold Bob has a number of chilly powers. He's normally clad in blue but when he's flying with his superteam, the Northern Rangers, he wears the team colours of red with a white snowflake on his chest -- the Rangers are a Canadian superteam that's "mostly social." He recently was able to level up to the point where he can fly because the Winter King had been threatening the city, which offered a series of missions and scenarios throughout the winter. Cold Bob was excited about this kind of realtime gameplay, which allowed the designers to react to the players and innovate on the fly as a complement to conventional pre-programmed gameplay. He also told me the story of how when Christopher Reeve died, a group of heroes got together and saluted in memoriam.