Comic Review: Ghostopolis

Ghostopolis by Doug Tenapel is a very fun, cute and entertaining comic.

The art is cartoony but perfectly suits the story. I really enjoyed the color pallett used. It was bright and interesting without being garish.

The story felt rushed to me. The first half is paced fairly slow and then a TON of stuff happens very quickly all-of-a-sudden at the end. It feels like it was planned to be a longer serial and then got limited to this one volume suddenly.

My favorite character was Benedict Arnold. He is super memorable and fun. The other characters didn't really do much for me.

This comic is clearly written for children and as such it does very well by it's intended audience. It's pretty light for adults though.

I heartily recommend Ghostopolis for kids older than 9 or 10. You can read Angela's review here.

--Abe

Comic Review: Blankets

Blankets by Craig Thompson

Thompson's homepage is here.

Blankets is a critically acclaimed comic. In 2005, Time selected it as one of the 100 best English language graphic novels ever written.

Blankets is certainly worth reading for fans of comics that aren't of the superhero variety and would be excellent for people who have never read a comic before too.

The art in Blankets is appropriate for the story it tells. It's occasionally very beautiful. At other times it's very simple. It uses a beautiful blue, white and black color palette that suits the tone of the story very well.

The story is a brutally honest confession and, while some parts are sweet and funny, others are awkward, terrifying and very sad. It's a wild emotional ride.

The story tries to tie together the author's experiences with his first girlfriend, his realization that he wants to be an artist and his growth from the received faith of his youth to a more personally negotiated adult faith. Sadly, these different threads never came together for me and, at the end of the story, I felt like none of the stories had any sort of resolution and all of them had got less time and development than they deserved.

Blankets is a fantastic example of the power and scope that comics can have even though it fails to deliver on it's promise as fully as it should have.

I highly recommend Blankets. Angela also reviewed Blankets. Go take a look at what she thought.

--Abe

Comic Review: Koko Be Good

Koko Be Good by Jen Wang

We talked with Jen Wang at her booth at the 2011 Stumptown Comic Con. I was drawn to the cover of Koko Be Good because of the warm color palette and simple cover image. I thumbed through the comic and bought a copy from Jen, who was kind enough to address the book to me and to draw a little sketch inside the cover.

I'm not going to use a star or number system because I think that my likes and dislikes are idiosyncratic and I would hate for someone who might really like the book to pass on it because of a low number.

The art in Koko is beautiful. I particularly like the color palette. It's mostly shades of brown but has lots of blues, greens and touches of red. Wang uses these colors to great effect to create a charming, warm, sort of dirty, city setting. There's a sort of dream-like quality to the environments in the story and the color palette works with this to make it a welcoming dream.

The page layouts are great. They're easy to follow. There's a lot of variety in panel shape and the shapes fit well with the events they contain. Panel frames are rarely broken, and when they are it's to draw the eye to something important not just to "pop".

The lettering is excellent as well.

The characters are sort of inexplicable though. They just seem to do whatever the author needed them to do so they would end up in the right places for the story to make it's way to the end.

The story itself felt forced and contrived to me. Koko is a hyperactive teenage girl with a crappy job and no self control or goals. The guy, who's name I can't even remember, is just sort of bland. He's the sort of person who sort of drifts through life sort of doing whatever he thinks people expect of him. The guy character is just so bland that I couldn't care about his situation, or his personality, and it made no sense to me at all that Koko would talk to him for more than 2 seconds before deciding that he was boring and being on her way. Since I was never able to buy that these characters would even talk to each other more than once, the rest of the story felt forced and disconnected to me.

To me, Koko Be Good is an 8 or 9 for art and a 2 or 3 for story. It seems clear that the creators artistic skill is far more developed than her writing ability and the work suffers as a result.

I will be looking for future works from Jen Wang, however, because I am curious to see if her writing ability catches up to her artistic ability. Angela liked Koko more than me.

Cute dogs

Been a while. I've been busy.

Here's a nice picture I took of the dogs this morning. They had been sitting like that in the sun for about an hour. My picture taking distracted them and Nisa got up and went to her kennel. Ernie came in and sat by me at the computer.

That's really all I have to say at the moment.

--Abe

Rift!

So, I've been playing the beta of Rift for the last few days. It's an MMO so, really, if you don't know what that means, you aren't interested and should probably just head off to the next blog in your reading list.

Alright, all the non-mmo fans are gone now, right?

MMO's are weird because, in terms of subscribers, there's WoW with it's 12 million, or whatever it is now, subscribers, and then there's ALL the other MMO's added together with about 25% of the income of WoW split between them. Lots of those WoW players have been playing for years and they are burnt out, or just bored. This situation leads to people constantly hyping new MMO's as "WoW Killers". First there was EQ2, then Warhammer online, Aion, Conan, Lotro, none as successful, in terms of sunscribers, as WoW although all profitable and successful in their own ways. And yet, the hunt for the "WoW killer" continues and Rift is the current candidate. And that's really a shame because Rift is not a WoW killer. There is no WoW killer.

And it's really too bad that people are looking at Rift in comparison to WoW because the game is clearly a mashup of all of the greatest features from most of the best MMO's of the past ten or so years. It's got a friendly, useful, customizable, ui. A gentle learning curve. Actually useful Help. A story driven solo questing experience. Shinies, collections, PvP, battle-grounds, public quests, armor dyes, excellent music, beautiful vista's, etc. The list is really too long to enumerate. The important thing to know is that it's all done thoughtfully and in a way that is more bug free than many games that have been on the market for years.

Remember Richard Garriot's abortion Tabula Rasa? Remember how it was supposed to revolutionize everything about MMO's? And, remember how it was painfully exactly the same as all the other MMO's in the world but with guns! In space! And with an extra clunky first person / third person abortion of an interface! Well, Rift is NOT a revolutionary game. It is an evolutionary game. It gets a lot of the stuff right that all the other MMO's leave half developed, poorly thought out, and ineptly QA tested. It's a fantasy MMO, that part is nothing revolutionary. But, only having to click on one mobs body to loot the enormous pile of them laying dead at your feet? Now that's a welcome evolution.

So, should you buy Rift?

If you are looking for a "WoW killer", you should probably skip it because your expectations are going to prevent you from enjoying the game. Just keep playing wow.

If you are looking for a finely crafted mmo then you should check it out. Rift is an honest contender.

Let me use a music metaphor, if Rift were a band it would be a band that isn't unique or original but makes up for it by being honest, fun, interesting, well rounded and performed with the love of a craftsman.


--Abe

What I did today

I spent the day cleaning the house. I've downloaded various audio production programs over the last few days; ableton, sonar, sound forge, reaper, just to name a few. In between house chores I spent the day setting them up, doing tutorials, reading help files.

So far, I like ableton the best. The help is FAN-FUCKING-TASTIC. It walks you through everythign starting with setting up the program. The interface is pretty clean and is fairly easy to figure out. In comparison, Sonar is cluttered, ugly, hard to figure out and has abysmal help / tutorials. Reaper is cool but seems to be more of a recording suite where sonar and ableton are complete music creation tools.

I also started packing up the christmas decorations. We decided to do them piece-meal this year. We don't have a tree so there's no real rush. And, I'm really enjoying how the house looks. It's very festive.

I'm really looking forward to the next rift beta too. It's starts on the 25th of this month. I'm going to keep playing my warrior from the last beta so I can get to test the higher level content.


--Abe

The Actual Quote

Gravity's Rainbow, page 33.

"For God's sake, next you'll be consulting horoscopes."
"Hitler does."
"Hitler is an inspired man. But you and I are employees, remember. . . ."

I chose this quote because it encapsulates the mentality I see in most of the people around me. Leaders (people in positions of authority) are considered to be inspired--to have access to information and methods not available to ordinary people--and are unquestionable because of the opaqueness of their reasoning.

This quote demonstrates both the unquestioning attitude and the mental excuse that lets it happen. We just work here.

--Abe