Don’t look at the future. We drew something awful on it.
It’s Shabcast listenin’ time again.
This time I was joined by James and Daniel again, and – for the first time – by Kit Power. We talked for as long as you’d expect about Oliver Stone’s insane, brilliant ’90s political movies JFK and Nixon, thus helping to remedy the desperate online shortage of white guys talking about movies about white guys made by white guys.
This week you can listen to the first half of our conversation, here.
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Chew #57
Three to go.
Deathstroke #1
Good, competent stuff. I’m still not sure the non-chronological storytelling has a point as opposed to just being a thing Priest likes to do, but it’s at least a better way to introduce an important “old friend” character than many approaches in comics. Unless Wintergreen’s a longstanding supporting character; it’s not like I know Deathstroke’s supporting cast well. But still, Priest is working to introduce him, and the non-chronological story helps with that, even as it leaves the actual status quo of this book a bit muddy. This hasn’t grabbed me yet as such, but I’ll persist for an arc or so.
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #10
A frustratingly unfocused issue that sutures two half-issues together without much in the way of payoff or connection. Still good, as this book always is, but an obviously lesser issue that ends up feeling like it’s wasting a Ms. Marvel guest-slot, which, as I think about it, is probably the thing that’s most knocking this down towards the bottom of the list this week.
Snotgirl #2
Has the typical second issue problems of a modern comic, which is to say that it’s mainly tasked with fixing the problems that crafting a coherent and catchy first issue has created for the overall arc, which typically means going “right, so instead of paying off that cliffhanger we’re going to take a step back and fill in details.” And complaints that the book is mean-spirited about fashion blogging have a few more teeth after this one than they did after the first, although I still have a good amount of faith in O’Malley such that I’m willing to assume loving satire. Still, this is good, interesting stuff that I’m going to at least read a full arc of.
New Avengers #15
Al Ewing in his finest form, paying off scads of earlier stuff in inventive and unexpected ways while remaining funny and full of good character moments in the present. This is the sort of book that makes sure if it’s going to randomly bring in Warlock for a guest spot then Warlock is going to get to appear in a heartbreaking scene and also get to do a Warlockified “do you feel lucky punk” at the book’s opener. This is not a book invested in offering particularly deep pleasures, but it remains the book that most feels like my idea of what reading Marvel comics is meant to feel like, and that’s always welcome.
Patsy Walker AKA Hellcat #9
There’s a delightful slowness to the structure of this book – a willingness to spend time on the human moments just being goofy before getting to the nominal plot. So much of this consists of the characters converging at a karaoke night, and it’s scintillating. Eventually the plot shows up and is also good, in part because Leth is focused enough to make sure that the long setup actually feeds into the plot and keeps all her plates spinning, avoiding a Bendis-esque “and now for the one panel in which the thing we put on the cover shows up” bit of bullshit.…
No, I’m not going down the rabbit hole writing an essay on spaghetti, myths, and donuts. It’s just a clever title to cover up the fact that I haven’t had time to write in a while as I’ve been whipping The Last War in Albion: Book One into shape, and it’s finally given up and submitted to my ministrations. It looks like it’s clocking in at 237,000 words and 210 pretty pictures, covering 760+ pages. Whew. So that should be coming out pretty damn soon.
In the meantime, though, I was able to squeeze in some rather lovely conversations with some rather lovely people. A few weeks ago I sat down with James and Kevin of Pex Lives to discuss some Westerns and some Doctor Who. We’ve got three Sergio Leone flicks on tap — A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. This “Man With No Name” trilogy (which, by the way, totally applies to LOST) is juxtaposed with the fan-favorite Tom Baker classic, Underworld, which I chose especial for this chat. “What on earth,” you might be wondering, “is this woman going on about? Underworld?!? Compared to Sergio Leone?!?!?” Well, if you want to find out, you’ll need to listen to the podcast, which you can get here. Because the quest is the quest.
In even more exciting news, I am happy to announce what should be a new regular(ish) podcast series called Giant Woman, as the amazing Shana Wolstein of Oi Spaceman! and I both have a deep abiding passion for Steven Universe and we can talk about a few minutes of material for hours on end! (Yes, I’m exaggerating, but only kind of.) In our pilot episode, we talk about the first episode, “Gem Glow,” and compare it with the unaired pilot episode that got Steven Universe greenlit into a regular series on the Cartoon Network. We would be very happy if you would catch that episode here and listened to it with your undivided (undivided, that means “a fusion,” get it? Get it?) attention, and then come back (comeback!) to let us know in the comments what you think. (Sorry about the sound quality on this one, as we had a small technical snafu, which should totally be fixed when) we cover “Laser Light Cannon,” “Cheeseburger Backpack,” and “Together Breakfast” in our next podcast, which will hopefully come out next week.
And hopefully I’ll get back to writing more about LOST and Doctor Who in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!…
A Guest Post By Anna Wiggins
As any die-hard EarthBound fan will tell you, in Japan EarthBound is called Mother 2, and is the middle of the three-part Mother trilogy. As a child, I just knew that I didn’t like EarthBound very much. The game is full of unpredictable tonal shifts, genre pastiche, self-awareness, and quirky humor, and these were either things I didn’t fully grasp or just didn’t enjoy. Somehow, the game just left me feeling vaguely alienated. Possibly, I just wasn’t ready for it.
Part of this may have been the gameplay, too. The basics are familiar to any JRPG fan: wander around, get into fights, select actions from menus, pray quietly to yourself. But the game is difficult, even by the standards of the day. It falls prey to a lot of common design flaws in JRPGs that raise the difficulty without adding fun. For instance, many enemies summon ‘backup’ occasionally, but with no bounds on how frequently this happens in a single fight, fights can become increasingly resource-draining without bound. Critical hits from enemies are far too common, and respawn rates are high enough to make getting anywhere a slog.
Aesthetically, the game is very distinct. It has cartoony graphics; the character design is frequently compared to Charles Schulz. The battle sequences featured bizarre, abstract backgrounds, a style referred to by the designers as an attempt at creating a “visual drug” experience. The spell effects were likewise highly abstracted, patterns of lines and diamonds that feel almost like sigils. The music direction is some of the best of the era; the soundtrack has an amazing range of styles and moods.
Despite all of this, I didn’t remember much about the game before returning to it. There is one part of the game, though, that left a very strong impression on me, and which more than lives up to my memory: the final battle.
The source of evil and ultimate villain in EarthBound, Giygas, remains an unseen but often-named actor throughout the game. The final battle with Giygas is one of the most deeply unsettling experiences I’ve ever had playing a video game. It takes the game’s underlying “weirdness” and cranks it up until it lands squarely in “uncomfortable.” Even in the battle with him, Giygas remains unseen. Instead, you seem to be fighting reality: Giygas is the wavy, “visual drug” battle screen background itself, and the combat music, both of which are now more sinister than anywhere else in the game. As the fight goes on, and you damage Giygas, the music gets increasingly frantic, the background increasingly angry.
After a short intro sequence, though, the only way to hurt Giygas is via one of the character’s (Paula, the lone girl in the cast, incidentally) “Pray” ability. Throughout the rest of the game, this ability has random (and usually very minor) effects. But now, each invocation of prayer leads to a cutaway scene of the characters you’ve met along the way, each feeling called to pray for you, until the whole planet is praying at once, lending their psychic power to help you.…
Stories belong to all of us. Sounds like a trite, sentimental truism, doesn’t it? So let’s add a vital corollary: Because we make them.
Let’s put it another way: the wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails (and probably any form of class society, if you ask me), presents itself as an immense accumulation of stories. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a story.
In the original lines that I’ve just travestied, Marx is actually talking about commodities, but he recognises stories as commodities, as – in other words – one of the things that are made for the market in capitalist societies. He goes on to say that a “commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference”. Here we shall concern ourselves with those that satisfy fancy.
Just as surely as the material products of human labour should be controlled by those who produce them, just as surely as the services we perform for each other should be ours to control, so should the stories we make be ours. Those who profit from them should be those who create them.
This is not going to be a whinge about torrents and filesharing (much as I don’t think you should diddle artists). This is nothing to do with the impoverished bourgeois view of individual rights. This is nothing to do with profit. Indeed, by distinguishing what I am saying from such concerns, I can also distinguish something else important.
What do I mean by ‘those who make them’? I’m talking about the human race communally.
Absolutely, individual producers should retain control over what they produce, and when, and how. Absolutely, individual service workers should have the freedom to control their own creation of services. Absolutely, those who produce should benefit to the full from their production. Absolutely, such elemental human rights should be respected, rather than routinely violated in the way that we currently take for granted as an everyday fact of life. I don’t doubt the existence of individual rights, to the extent that abstract concepts exist. Individual rights are a natural and valid and useful inference based on the facts that we are sentient beings capable of reasonably inferring the sentience of those around us, that we are limited in time, that we are separate bodies in space, and that we all feel emotions – not least simple pain and pleasure. Rights are real. Bourgeois philosophy and politics got that much right. However, bourgeois philosophy may not have grasped why they are real. The truth is: we make them real. They emerge from a dialectical interaction of our material circumstances with our evolving personal and social and historical conceptions of those circumstances, which then feed back into the circumstances… To be crude: rights are real because, at some point, we decided we had them. …
Demonic #1
Perfectly serviceable cop-horror story, and competently executed, but painfully by the numbers. The main character sells his soul to demons, which is a perfectly good hook, but it’s all executed so quickly that there’s no room to make him interesting before that, and Sebela is stuck establishing him entirely in terms of cliches. The big turning point when a demon shows up to offer him a deal on page thirteen should probably have been the cliffhanger. Still, if demons and cops is a genre setup you like, this’ll probably satisfy.
The Ultimates #10
As with the last issue, a bit of a mess between the brilliant art of Kenneth Rocafort and the bland and lumpy faces of the guest artist who does half the work on this issue. And it’s a bit of a mess with Civil War II. But Ms. America kicks ass and takes names, Black Panther gets a genuinely hilarious moment, and Al Ewing remains entertaining. Still, this is not a great stretch of this book, I fear.
Deathstroke Rebirth #1
Came out last week, and paid for by a reader. Nice to see that Priest’s still got it after frankly too many years out of the game due to his (entirely reasonable) desire to be offered something other than books about black people. His inclination towards non-chronological storytelling doesn’t quite do him any favors here, though, and the occasional muddy plotting his work can suffer from is alas in full swing. Still, this is smart and well-characterized, and probably the best book of DC Rebirth so far. I’ll probably check out another issue or two.
The Black Monday Murders #1
Also from last week, and not at all sure how I missed it. It’s a Hickman #1, so massively long on promise, absolutely pregnant with insinuation and ideas, and clearly with the potential to be one of the most briliant things ever. One expects, being a Hickman series, that it will instead either go completely off the rails or simply stop coming out entirely after three issues, but this left my brain absolutely fizzing after reading it, and I intend to enjoy the hell out of the ride while it’s still quasi-functional.
The Wicked + The Divine #22
Well I think we all expected the end of Rising Action to be mind-blowing, but it also turns out to be heart-stopping and gut-wrenching. And the other panels are brilliant too. I’m starting to regret the enthusiasm I showed for the early issues, because I’m not sure I left room for my critical assessment of this comic to grow and emcompass the range of what it can and does do. Fun game: immediately after reading the final panel of this issue, go back and look at Laura’s first appearance in #1. Then try to wrap your head around the fact that we’re only at about the halfway point of the series, and there’s presumably just as much character development to go. Meanwhile, the next arc looks set to tackle big ideas I’m massively invested in.…
Video game sequels are a different beast than sequels in other mediums. In video games, a sequel is typically expected to improve upon its predecessor because video games are intensely technical. Since a game is thought of at least partly as a feat of software engineering, sequels are approached as a honing, refining and improvement of the original as much as they are a thematic and aesthetic continuation of them. In other words, we should think of video game sequels as new and improved models as much as the next chapter of a story, if not more so. On the other hand, the nature of a sequel demands in any medium of genre demands narrative escalation.Jane’s taking the week off in a push to get Last War in Albion Book One finally out the door, but I realize that I never actually got around to announcing the latest addition to our podcast stable, Pex Lives Xtreme, Kevin’s new sports podcast. Yes, we apparently do sports writing now too. Sports, sex, and Doctor Who. Why do you visit other websites again?
“The State of the Art” surrounds Use of Weapons, both diegetically and in publication. Externally, it was first published as a stand-alone novella in 1989, then became the title piece of a short story collection in 1991. Within the narrative, on the other hand, it takes the form of an account composed by Diziet Sma shortly after the events of Use of Weapons (“The State of the Art” is addressed to someone named Petrain, Use of Weapons has Sma tell Skaffen-Amtiskaw [revealed at the end of “The State of the Art” to be the story’s diegetic editor] to “send a stalling letter to that Petrain guy” before leaving to find Zakalwe) that, among other things, relates the circumstances by which she came to leave Contact (the Culture’s diplomatic service) in favor of Special Circumstances (the more interventionist intelligence service within Contact). It demands, in other words, to be read in context with that novel.
This does it no favors. Use of Weapons is, as mentioned, essentially the last Culture novel, at least in terms of what Banks created the Culture to do. “The State of the Art,” on the other hand, is a joke in which Banks goes and does one of the things that people were always going to ask him about until he’d do, namely have the Culture meet Earth. From the start, this was something the novels quietly resisted, with Consider Phlebas going out of its way in its epilogues to specify that it took place in 1331, so as to emphasize the complete irrelevance of humanity, then preoccupied with the Genkō War and Ibn Battuta’s visit to Kilwa, to its events. The Culture is pointedly not humanity’s future – its utopianism is altogether more abstracted than that.
Still, the possibility lingers tantalizingly, and Banks, a sci-fi guy to his core, made the eminently sensible decision to get it over with. And, inevitably, “The State of the Art” runs through all the obligatory jokes, most of them with delicious wit and charm. The best focus on Li, a member of the Contact expedition to Earth (covertly observing it in 1977) who becomes a die-hard Star Trek fan, attempts to persuade the rest of the team to elect him captain of the ship, which culminates in a campaign speech (while holding a real lightsaber) in which he serves the crew various dishes vat-grown from human cells such as Stewed Idi Amin, General Pinochet Chilli Con Carne and Richard Nixon Burgers, then vows that if elected captain he’ll destroy the planet because it is silly and boring. But there are some other good ones, such as the ship trying and failing to request (via postcard) that the BBC World Service play “Space Oddity” and dedicate it to the Arbitrary.
Other characters, meanwhile, espouse other standard and inevitable positions. One – Dervley Linter – decides he wants to renounce the Culture entirely and live his life as a human, having all of his Culture-specific abilities removed in the process.…