Rodanof42

becomingadonis:

kingofdisease:

sadfatqueer:

This looks like a nightmare. Is this like a Turducken except from another layer of hell?

Cthucken

good lord no.

When they come out of the ocean, I for one will be honoured to serve our tasty extraterrestrial overlords,

There are very few things I love in this world more than a story where a superhero teams up with Santa Claus to save Christmas. I mean, I love Christmas comics in general, but the ones where the Jolly Old Saint himself shows up are always just a little bit more special, especially when the hero in question is Superman. If I was in charge, you'd see Santa Claus literally every time there was a comic set at the Fortress of Solitude, because really, the North Pole has exactly three residents, and who else are they going to hang out with? But I digress.

My point is, Superman/Santa Claus team-ups are great, even when they're weird -- and folks, they do get weird. Take, for example, one of Superman's earliest team-ups with St. Nicholas, wherein they have to battle against the evil machinations of a dude who hates Christmas so much that he makes Santa Claus even fatter than he already was, and Superman has to help him lose weight.

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Jerry Siegel and John Sikela, Action Comics #105

Finally, a look at the new “remastered” MIRACLEMAN #1 by Alan Moore (name removed at his own request so credited as THE ORIGINAL WRITER) and Garry Leach with Mick Anglo along for the ride.

The new Marvel edition has modern computer coloring on some pages which leaves the art, if anything, flatter than the original, IN OUR OPINION. Retro moire patterns and all. But tastes change and all that.

“When these stories were originally colored, the artists were never consulted – and it shows” said Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso. “The coloring methods used at the time really hurt the finished product. But through close collaboration with all the artists, we’re proud to now present these stories in a manner that matches their creative vision.”

Working in closely with the original series artists, MIRACLEMAN has been remastered using the original artwork in every instance possible – and the most advanced restoration methods available applied to ensure the most authentic reading experience based on the artists’ original visions for the series.

“You’ve never really seen Miracleman, until you’ve seen this Miracleman,” said legendary Miracleman artist Garry Leach. “I’m positive this will rapidly be recognized as the all-time, definitive, Miracleman series. It’s simply looking that ridiculously sharp!”

In addition to material originally published in Warrior Magazine, MIRACLEMAN #1 also includes character designs, pencil sketches, original art, an article chronicling the history of Marvelman/Miracleman, an interview with Miracleman creator Mick Anglo, as well as a Mick Anglo’s first Marvelman stories. Don’t miss your opportunity to experience the most popular comic few have ever read when MIRACLEMAN #1 makes it’s long overdue return to comic shops this January!

The first issue goes on sale January 15th with variant covers by Joe Quesada, Mark Buckingham, John Cassaday, Skottie Young, Garry Leach, Jerome Opena, and Leinil Yu.

OH AND PS: Graeme McMillan has a side-by-side comparison of the old and new coloring here.

The last twelve months offered comic book readers a wide variety of work ranging from the most crowd-pleasing superhero epics to the most idiosyncratic of indies, and the return of old favorites to the emergence of exciting new talent. It was a busy and productive year for the industry, and one we’re pleased to celebrate with what we’re certain will be an uncontroversial, unenumerated list of awards that will prompt only resounding agreement and unbroken fellowship amongst our readers in the comments below. Welcome to part two of ComicsAlliance’s Best Comic Books of 2013.

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The last twelve months offered comic book readers a wide variety of work ranging from the most crowd-pleasing superhero epics to the most idiosyncratic of indies, and the return of old favorites to the emergence of exciting new talent. It was a busy and productive year for the industry, and one we’re pleased to celebrate with what we’re certain will be an uncontroversial, unenumerated list of awards that will prompt only resounding agreement and unbroken fellowship amongst our readers in the comments below. Welcome to part one of ComicsAlliance's Best Comic Books of 2013.

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With procedurally-generated game content being the hot issue of the weekend, what better time to get a closer look at how indie hit Spelunky used the programming technique to generate its endlessly-explorable caverns? A perfectly tuned mix of apparent randomness and clever structural design, Derek Yu's game yields its secrets thanks to Darius Kazemi, who hacked the code to show entire levels at a glance. (Note that the generator works only on Chrome).

If you're unfamiliar with Spelunky, well, kiss goodbye to your morning.

Q: What do you think about Harley Quinn? --@Gavin4L

I'll be honest with you, Gavin: Harley Quinn is a tough character to write about. I've been struggling for a long time now trying to figure out how to get started, because there's so much there built around a single character that gets into a lot of tricky, complicated areas, from her almost accidental creation and often mystifying popularity to how much she's changed and been altered in a relatively short period of time, and how you can almost chart the changing aesthetic of the entire company just by looking at a single character. It's a lot to get through, even if you're someone who lived through every bit of it as a fan.

Really, I guess that's as good a starting point as any. What do I think? Well, I like the character a lot, but when you get right down to it, she's one of the most misunderstood and misused characters in all of superhero comics.

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bornofanatombomb:

It’s the Apache Tracker! I had no idea they made WELCOME TO NIGHTVALE toys, you guys!

drawbrandondraw:

Here’s the mini I made for Genghis Con! It came from a joke I made on twitter a while back about dogs and wi-fi.

I still have some physical copies of the book left so if you’re interested in buying one, send me a message or email or something. There are a lot of ways to contact me.

bigredrobot:

Highway to the ‘Bone Zone.

Alan Moore: 'Why shouldn't you have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind?':

I haven’t read any superhero comics since I finished with Watchmen. I hate superheroes. I think they’re abominations. They don’t mean what they used to mean. They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine- to 13-year-old audience. That was completely what they were meant to do and they were doing it excellently. These days, superhero comics think the audience is certainly not nine to 13, it’s nothing to do with them. It’s an audience largely of 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-year old men, usually men. Someone came up with the term graphic novel. These readers latched on to it; they were simply interested in a way that could validate their continued love of Green Lantern or Spider-Man without appearing in some way emotionally subnormal.

Thor 2 is a Cinematic McDonald’s Cheeseburger | Jacobin

The longtime Superman artist Al Plastino has passed away at the age of 91. I’ll always remember Plastino for his wonderful design of Supergirl, who he co-created with Otto Binder (granted, it is likely that Plastino was “just” working off of Curt Swan’s earlier rendition of a temporary “Supergirl” created by a wish in a [...]

Thanks! It is quite literally my only marketable skill.

There are no lazy plot devices, only lazy creators.

Last week, I took a hard look at DC's recent Superman: A Celebration of 75 Years hardcover, and to say I found it lacking is putting it mildly. Despite reprinting some very, very good stories, the tone of the collection was overwhelmingly, oppressively grim at best, and felt like the publisher was embarrassed by the very character they were claiming to celebrate at worst. It was more than a little disheartening, because it didn't have to be that way. It's not an accurate look at Superman's past, and really, it's a narrative that you'd have to go out of your way to create.

But let it never be said that I complain about things without offering a viable solution -- even though I do that pretty much all the time. With the same amount of space and the same division of eras in Superman, you can create a sequence of stories with the same resonance and the same level of quality that shows Superman at his best, triumphing over evil and making the world a better place.

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Q: You mentioned "The Problem" in last week's column. So, what is "The Problem?" --@green2814

A: Last week, I dug in a little into the idea that even though they share prominent creators and have influenced each other back and forth over the course of the last 50 years, the DC and Marvel Universes have some fundamental differences in the way they're structured. One of the things I really wanted to get across in that column was that neither one is really fundamentally better than the other, they're just incompatible in a lot of ways, and I touched on how that results in something I call The Problem. Since that's still pretty fresh in everybody's mind, and since you were nice enough to set the ball right on the tee and hand me the bat, I might as well elaborate on that now. It's actually pretty simple.

To put it bluntly, The Problem is that DC wants to be Marvel, and they have for the past 50 years.

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Thumb through DC Comics' new releases this week and you'll find the above image -- a teaser for the upcoming Batman: Eternal weekly series -- in the back pages of a good many of them (all the books I saw, in fact).

I had to look up the artist who drew it. It's Detective Comics artist Jason Fabok, but it could just as easily be Tony Daniel, David Finch, Guillem March, Ivan Reis, Adrian Syaf, or a handful of other current DC artists. Like it or not, this is, with a few exceptions, just how DC Comics look now.

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Whenever a publisher puts out a "Best Of" collection for a long-running character, it's always really interesting to see what kind of stories make the cut. They make a fascinating look at the character -- not just the past, in the stories being reprinted, but in how revealing they are about the attitudes about those stories when they're all collected. If you go back through books like The Best Batman Stories Ever Told or The Very Best of Spider-Man, they're just as much of a snapshot of how the companies saw those characters when the books came out as they are of the times when those stories were originally printed.

Last week, DC put out an especially interesting highlight reel for their flagship character, Superman: A Celebration of 75 Years, and the stories they lined up as the best Superman has to offer say an awful lot about how DC looks at the Man of Steel. They might call it a "celebration" on the cover, but when you actually go in and read it, it feels more like a funeral dirge.

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It’s just a TV show, dogg. DON’T BE DEFINED BY WHAT YOU CONSUME.

“It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but don’t open it yet, not for a second. While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there’s an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little foetus you carry around inside yourself. The eye knows what’s in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know, too. But the clammy, sad little foetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn’t want to know what is in that envelope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing. The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can’t know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn’t got and which if he had it, would save him. There’s the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of man is to know.”

- Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men, describing a moment you either have known or someday will. Or, God help us, both.

I have enjoyed Star Wars Angry Birds since I first discovered it almost a year ago, at the suggestion of my brother (a fellow Star Wars fan). While I never warmed to the original Angry Birds, I was tickled that I could clearly identify the Star Wars characters the birds represented in the themed version of the game. When Star Wars Angry Birds II released last month, I anxiously dove into the sequel.  On a whim, I decided to use the new store feature to look through the many characters that I might someday unlock.

When I finally scrolled through all of the characters in the game, I noticed something peculiar.

Han Solo (played by Harrison Ford, a white male, in the Star Wars films) is portrayed by a yellow bird. Luke Skywalker (played by Mark Hamill, a white male) is portrayed by a red bird. Qui-Gon Jinn (played by Liam Neeson, a white male) is portrayed by a tan bird. These birds all have costumes or props that identify them as the characters they are meant to represent, but their color is not related to the skin color of the characters/actors in the films.

This pattern held true for every (human) male character with two notable exceptions: Captain Panaka (played by Hugh Quarshie, a black male) and Mace Windu (played by Samuel Jackson, a black male) are both portrayed by brown birds.

So, what’s the message? Well, for white, male Star Wars characters, skin color is unimportant; white characters can be represented by a bird of any color. It is the costuming or props used by these birds that convey the essence of the character. But for black Star Wars characters, their skin color (brown) becomes the defining element conveying the essence of the character.

Likewise, gender is also a defining characteristic for the portrayal of female characters. Princess Leia (played by Carrie Fischer, a white female) and Padme (played by Natalie Portman, a white female) are both portrayed by pink birds. There are no other pink birds in the game.   Again, the color of the bird is unimportant, unless the bird is female, in which case the character’s gender (denoted by its pinkness) becomes the essential element of that character.

This same pattern also appears in the original Star Wars Angry Birds, in which Princess Leia is the only pink bird and Lando Calrissian (played by Billy Dee Williams, a black male) is the only brown bird.

White privilege and male privilege persist, in part, by framing the white, male experience as normal. Even in a game like Star Wars Angry Birds II we see the invisibility of whiteness and maleness and the foregrounding of race and gender for people of color and women.

Galen Ciscell is a visiting assistant professor of sociology at Pacific Lutheran University.  He is also the designer of the cooperative board game Atlantis Rising.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

edwardspoonhands:

OK…so my friend Emma puts this video of her venting her frustration (with much profanity) about Google Plus on YouTube. It gets an overwhelmingly positive response…30,000 likes after like three hours of being online and less than 1000 dislikes.

And yet…let’s take a look at the “Top Comments” YouTube decided would be more relevant and important to me:

1. From everything I’ve seen on every YouTube video I’ve watched in the last day, popular google+ users are almost universally misogynistic, racist assballs. Like, this comment integration makes google+ seem like a miserable place populated by awful people, and I tend to respond to those sorts of social environments by not spending time in them.

2. It’s a horrendous idea to privilege the comments of assballs who happen to have been circled by a lot of fellow assball google+ users over the comments of people who actually like and watch and care about online video.

3. Hank points out in his comments that this will probably get worked out, and I hope he’s right. But this has the faint smell of new digg about it to me.

4. Great video, Emma! Thank God there are still great ukulele songs on YouTube or I would just give the hell up.

When Fantagraphics co-publisher Kim Thompson died earlier this year, the company suffered more than just the loss of one of its key figures. As an editor, Thompson was responsible for a great deal of the translation and distribution of European comics, and with his sudden, unexpected diagnosis of lung cancer and his death just four months later, the publisher had to delay a third of their line. As you might expect, this caused a pretty significant financial shortfall.

Now, the company is turning to its readers to make up the difference. In order to support their Spring line of titles, including work by Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Floyd Gottfredson, Don Rosa, Dan Clowes, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez and more, they're attempting to raise $150,000 via Kickstarter. Check out more information, as well as a very, very strange Kickstarter video, below.

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Cuccinelli finishing out the campaign by bringing in Ron Paul to suggest insurrectionist "nullifcation" strategy against the federal government.

“Hunter (December 1962): “When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.”
The Man With the Getaway Face (March 1963): “When the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger.”
The Outfit (September 1963): “When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed.”
The Mourner (December 1963): “When the guy with the asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away.”
The Score (July 1964): “When the bellboy left, Parker went over to the house phone and made his call.”
The Jugger (July 1965): “When the knock came at the door, Parker was just turning to the obituary page.”
The Handle (February 1966): “When the engine stopped, Parker came up on deck for a look around.”
The Seventh (March 1966): “When he didn’t get any answer the second time he knocked, Parker kicked the door in.”
The Rare Coin Score (1967): “Parker spent two weeks on the white sand beach at Biloxi, and on a white sandy bitch named Belle, but he was restless, and one day without thinking about it he checked out and sent a forwarding address to Handy McKay and moved on to New Orleans.”
The Green Eagle Score (1967): “Parker looked in at the beach and there was a guy in a black suit standing there, surrounded by all the bodies in bathing suits.”
The Black Ice Score (1968): “Parker walked into his hotel room, and there was a guy in there going through his suitcase laid out on his bed.”
The Sour Lemon Score (1969): “Parker put the revolver away and looked out the windshield.”
Deadly Edge (1971): “Up here, the music was just a throbbing under the feet, a distant pulse.”
Slayground (1971): “Parker jumped out of the Ford with a gun in one hand and the packet of explosive in the other.”
Plunder Squad (1972): “Hearing the click behind him, Parker threw his glass straight back over his right shoulder, and dove off his chair to the left.”
Butcher’s Moon (1974): “Running toward the light, Parker fired twice over his left shoulder, not caring whether he hit anything or not.”
Comeback (1997): “When the angel opened the door, Parker stepped first past the threshold into the darkness of the cinder block corridor beneath the stage.”
Backflash (1998): “When the car stopped rolling, Parker kicked out the rest of the windshield and crawled through onto the wrinkled hood, Glock first.”
Flashfire (2000): “When the dashboard clock read 2:40, Parker drove out of the drugstore parking lot and across the sunlit road to the convenience store/gas station.”
Firebreak (2001): “When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.”
Breakout (2002) : “When the alarm went off, Parker and Armiston were far to the rear of the warehouse, Armiston with the clipboard, checking off the boxes they’d want.”
Nobody Runs Forever (2004): “When he saw that the one called Harbin was wearing a wire, Parker said, ‘Deal me out a hand,’ and got to his feet.”
Ask the Parrot (2006): “When the helicopter swept northward and lifted out of sight over the top of the hill, Parker stepped away from the tree he’d waited beside and continued his climb.”
Dirty Money (2008): “When the silver Toyota Avalon bumped down the dirt road out of the woods and across the railroad tracks, Parker put the Infiniti into low and stepped out onto the gravel.””

- dumblr: The first line of every Parker novel  (via mattfractionblog)

We’re a fucking pathetic and hugely racist nation.

Yo, fuck all your racist biases people, and fix that shit!