Long Day - Rifts, Hasbro and DC's Convergence among other musings

Today is going to be a long day: 24 hours without sleep now. Long story, too much "other" for this blog but I am looking forward to crashing later for a few hours before game begins. Ai!!!! So a random medley post doay:

Rifts
The Savage Worlds edition of Rifts I mentioned really is a shocker. I still can't believe that Palladium consented to allow this. It won't quite feel the same though without a long monologue in each book from Kevin explaining that the original manuscript was amazing but he still had to rewrite it entirely to suit his vision of Book X.

Hasbro on D&D
Hasbro's news that D& D "on a real tear" was cool but I am still amused that it was also grouped with Clue, Candy Land and other games in the Hasbro inventory in terms of where it stands in the corporate report. This led me to wonder if maybe somewhere deep in Hasbro's corporate network is a division of 7 dedicated developers working furiously to make Candy Land new and innovative, all glaring over at the WotC team for setting the bar to a new high.

DC's Convergence
Anyone following DC's Convergence mini-epic running this month and next? No? I'm guessing a lot of older fans habitually dodge all newer iterations of an old product without compelling evidence to do otherwise, but I happen to be a fan of the New 52 DC universe and also still a fan of (most of) the pre-New-52 universe (I followed the post-Crisis DC from around 86 through to 2000 before I finally burned out). The Convergence event, which I am told is actually a cover for DC to move its headquarters to California and not worry about having their comic lineup interrupted, is a storyline about entire cities of various realms of the DC multiverse which have been kidnapped to a distant universe where Braniac is collecting "dead cities." This has been an recurring theme for several storylines now in DC's New 52, and pretty much most of the recent weeklies (New 52 Future's End and Earth2: Future's End) have been building up to it. Anyway, this frame gives the DC authors an excuse to revisit dozens of older DC universes and cancelled books. So far it's been a real menagerie, but an unusual number of their entries date to sometime in the mid 00's prior to the major universe-revisionism that went on or back to the late 80's, when I really got into DC. It's a fun trip down memory lane but in a modern context; the interesting thing is going to be seeing what changes, if any, this new approach has on other DC books going forward.

Marvel's doing something similar with its Secret Wars, which appears to be a muddy mess of various miniseries revisiting key moments in Marvel's history while using the end-of-the-universe event they've been building up to in the Avengers titles for years now as a frame. The end result, I predict, will look alarmingly close to the Marvel Cineverse, but I could be mistaken....still, I'm going to dodge most of the Secret Wars titles as it looks like a ridiculous mess and honestly I haven't been "back" to Marvel since the early 80's, so for most of these spin-off titles they are referencing events that took place during the decades that I was almost exclusively in to either DC, Image, or Jodorowksi comics.

Plus, there are a lot of comics for these two events coming out from Marvel and DC both. For the sake of my budget a decision had to be made: and I decided it was more fun to follow the Convergence.

Disney Infinity - the unholy spawn of action figures, computer games and Magic The Gathering

So here's the formula:

Gamer Dad + Gamer Kid + Disney Infinity = Disney gets all my money......ah crap. Disney Infinity is evil, and it's the sneakiest sort of evil.

It has Marvel heroes for the guys and Frozen, Stitches and Maleficant for the girls. It's all very cartoony, but just interesting enough that it can grab both parents and kids. If you're a parent and you want something that's right at that interesting border of complexity where you can enjoy a thing without growing bored and your kid can also enjoy a thing without growing frustrated.....this is it.

It requires you to "respawn" by putting a new character on the game pad when you die. You also get new modules and things using these "discs"....which seem to sell in convenient randomized packs. The physicality of it always struck me as oddly gimmicky but I now realize it's an insidious, diabolical marketing scheme which truly manages to hoist the pirate flag of Disney over your miserable wallet. My only respite is knowing my son right now only wants the Marvel characters. But let me tell you....I desperately want Hasbro to get Dreamworks now because if Disney snagged them, the torrent of "How to Train Your Dragon" figs that my household might demand would be nightmarish.....!

Anyway.....it's a fascinating concept, and Toys R Us was nice enough to have around 30% to 50% off all DI products "Black Tuesday" sale in time for my son's 3rd birthday. He's been playing it nonstop for the last two hours, although admittedly he doesn't so much "play" as run around and do all kinds of crazy stuff only a 3 year old would think of, all while switching characters and setting every five minutes.

Dad may even take a break from his more serious games to play a little, too!

Hulk gets intellectual Wiplash - A Review of the 2014 Series so far

I can't quite decipher my mixed feelings for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare yet, as they border somewhere between disgust that I bought it and an appreciation for what is essentially a rip off on Titanfall (yes, no one's making the comparison but I'm calling it now: the juggernaut exo-suit is just a mini-titan). So more comic stuff instead!

Hulk issues 1-7 (2014)

I admit I really like the Hulk these days. When I was growing up Hulk was the least interesting or plausible character out there, or so I felt (next to Thor) and I shied away from several Marvel titles for this reason. In my defense I grew up at a time when the original Hulk TV series was an actual current thing, so that had a lot to do with my perceptions of the book.

Cut to 2014, and Hulk's kinda cool. The character has gone through the wringer time and again over the years, and a lot of detritus shows it (from all the other Hulk-like characters floating around to the number of times weird things have been done with the character). The new series is screwing with the formula --again-- but in some interesting and different ways.

The initial five issues address Hulk in the waning days of his connection to SHIELD (long story Bruce Banner talked SHIELD Director Maria Hill into letting him "work" for SHIELD; that's also a good series from 2013ish, fyi). We begin immediately with a Banner who's been ambushed by a sniper who knew exactly what he was doing....and a crew desperate to operate on Banner and take some blood samples while they're at it, all in the name of a good cause. What at first appears to be a SHIELD effort turns out to be a ruse, and then descends into a mystery as Hulk escapes, but with a massive open head wound from surgery. Maria Hill and her stalwart crew of idiots who like to fly highly destructible floating aircraft carriers everywhere (the SHIELD helicarriers go down in flames more often than helicopters in action films) find Hulk and seek to secure him safely away in another innocent town which is soon to be destroyed. Problems arise when they realize the brain damage done to the Hulk/Banner has made Banner himself a shell of what he once was.

Thanks to the magic of Comic SCIENCE! Bruce gets better, but toward issues 6-7 the plot line turns about on us as the cure to Bruce's affliction with retardation lies within the nanites of Extremis, something I know little about since I don't read Iron Man and can only infer from all his nigh-infinite appearances in other books is some sort of super nanite mechanism that dramatically improves mental capacity.

The twist, of course, is that it also works on the Hulk...and the Hulk in turn changes....for good. Turns out the Hulk doesn't want to turn back now that he is intellectually equal to Banner, and he takes to calling himself Mr. Green, then sets about righting many wrongs as only a super-intelligent Hulk could, including working to purge the world of the manny Gamma monsters unleashed upon it over the ages --which it turns out is a shitload; I had no idea virtually every supporting cast member of the original comic is now hulkified, including Banner's old ex!

If like me you've been around long enough to recall other eras when Hulk gained intelligence while hulked out, I can only assure you that the new title is doing a better overall job of it right now, and makes no assumptions about such prior events for this story.

Anyway, if you want a good single character read from Marvel, Hulk is worth it. More on Hulk later with the Savage Hulk, which is also worthy of attention...

Avengers 2: Age of Ultron trailer

I'm just going to link this here in case by some miracle you haven't seen it. Marvel had to drop the first trailer for Avengers 2 a little early due to a leak, so now we have the official hi-definition version:




I like this trailer because its a bit hard to piece together what the story's going to be, or how it will all fit together. We know this much: lots of Ultron, probably a Stark experiment gone horribly wrong, signs of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, a traumatized Banner, and lots more. Oh, and the Hulkbuster suit shows up, too....fascinating!

Comics on Tablets

With the increasing ease of access to hi-resolution tablets, reading electronic editions of comics is getting easier. In the last few months I've taken to collecting a lot of back-issue trade paperbacks on both the Marvel and DC lineups, as well as using the medium to experiment with third party books (Cyberforce, Savage Sword, Robyn Hood and others to name a few). As a result...I have a few bits of advice and direction to help out those curious about the choices available.

First off: Choice of tablet is pretty important. Make sure you get a hi resolution tablet, and make sure it's noted for how decent the resolution is. The screen size can have an impact as well. For example, my reader of choice is my Nook HD+ which at 8.9 inches with a 1920X1280 resolution screen is fantastic for reading comics. I was enjoying my Asus Transformer Infinity 700T which has a bigger 10 inch screen but roughly the same resolution, and the pairing doesn't work so well; things which are sharp and clear on the Nook HD+ can be muddy on the Asus. So....do your research carefully, but of the various tablets I've tried the Nook HD+ is the best size and resolution for me. If you have youthful eyes and don't mind tiny print you might get away with using a Nexus 7, too.

Second: choice of app is also important. Right now you can buy comics through a variety of mediums. I haven't explored Comixology or Kobo yet, but I have purchased comics on the Google Play, Nook, Kindle and Marvel Comic store apps. Here's my quick run-down on each:

Google Play

Google's comics are hi-res and larger size files. The store is the one you'll be familiar with on Android platforms. There's nothing wrong with Google Play, and it was my default venue for a while, but three problems crop up with it: first, it's very slow to load books. Put them in queue and wait a while. Get too many downloads going and wait a long, long while. Second, not a lot of customization on how to view your library of content. You can't hide former reads, only uninstall and note what's got the little blue circle to indicate what is and isn't loaded. Third and of consequence mostly to Marvel readers, Google's editions of Marvel books are not synchronized to show pages correctly...when you have a double-page splash you can't see both pages at once by turning the tablet on its side, nor does it "shrink" them for viewing at the same time. Big problem.

Google's prices are fairly competitive. Some of their library is a bit pricey compared to the competition, but they mark sales better. Searching for stuff is a weird experience....for a Google product you'd expect their store to show you all the related content you are looking for a bit better. Finally, Google Play does have plenty of Trade editions and is getting lots of DC single issues, too....but no single issues for Marvel.

Marvel Comics

The Marvel Comics app is the best place to find Marvel offerings. They seem to keep some issues and editions in reserve for their store only, and it's the only place to find single issues as well. Marvel's also got a promotional thing in virtually all of their print books where you can get a code that will give you access to an electronic edition of the print book, and sometimes this code includes other free comics or TPBs as well. The downside of the codes is that you pay $4 for a book to get a code for the comic you just read....useful for future reading, I suppose. The stickies that hide the code are also prone to malfunction...about one in five tends to come off wrong, and then it's a guessing game as to what the code actually was supposed to be. Still, it's a cool perk if you like the idea of having e-copies for posterity.

The store itself is a great reader, and includes a feature which lets you tap to highlight specific panels, which works a bit better than the Kindle version of the same (in my opinion) but is just as useless, at least for how I like to read comics (I really prefer a full-page view). Unlike Google Play and Kindle, most of the Marvel comics in the app will correctly display double-page spreads for reading.

The main problem with the Marvel store is price. Most TPBs are discounted, but all single issues are priced at the same cost as a print issue, and rarely seem to get discounted in price. Still, hard to beat as a place to find the occasional issue you can't locate anywhere else.

A second much more serious issue if you travel a lot and are away from wi-fi is that the Marvel Comics app will not work unless you are able to log in remotely. For this reason alone I don't buy on the Marvel Comics store unless I have no other choice. Apparently it's never occurred to Marvel that the main time people read content on a tablet is likely when they are not near a computer, which means that they likely aren't near a convenient wi-fi hotspot. If your circumstances are such that you never find yourself away from a connection this won't be a problem for you, though. For me...it means anything I have on the Marvel Comics app probably isn't accessible when I go on vacation.

Kindle 

The Kindle app is friendly to use and has a wide selection, but its files load fast for a reason: they are lower-resolution smaller files, and show poor quality compared to the other stores I discuss here. Marvel comics also have a "read" problem with double page spreads, and the panel-zoom is a pain to use in my experience. I disliked the Kindle app as a comic reader enough that after trying out Wonder Woman, Hawkman, Five Ghosts, New Avengers and a couple others I gave up and moved on. Even the occasional ridiculous sales prices Kindle offers aren't worth the savings....you will find these unpleasant to read once you're used to the higher quality of the other store apps.

Nook

I'm a Nook fan, but I don't think that overly influences my buying decisions as much as does the fact that their reader rather nicely displays hi-res files, load quickly, is easy to navigate, and also correctly shows double-page splash scenes in all cases I've tried so far. They occasionally have sales, and for some reason I've found books on Nook that aren't on Google Play (they might be on Google Play, but the search engine over there is shady at times). All of the Nook comics I've loaded to date are very nice and clear hi-res copies, too.

Nook's main problem is price....you'll typically pay 50 cents to a dollar more for many titles on their store than Kindle, though they tend to be comparable to Google Play more often than not. As a result, if price is a big issue, I'd suggest Google Play (which will have more discounts over time), but if ease of management for your library as well as good download speeds for bigger hi-res files counts, then stick with Nook. Still, if you stick with Nook then you can avoid supporting the predatory nature of Amazon and stave off the inevitable collapse of the publishing industry into Amazon's hole of mediocrity a little longer.

Summary

It's possible the Kindle works best on the Amazon tablets. It's likely that if Google Play resvises the Google Books app then it will bump up in my estimation...and if you just want Marvel comics then you really do need the Marvel Comics app. But from my experience to date, the Nook store gives you the best and speediest reading experience.

On Reading and Collecting Comics in 2014 (Part I)

Taking a break from writing about RPGs for a bit to talk....comics!

Drinking from the comic book fire hose is never a good thing. You can drown in the sea of Marvel and DC comics (never mind the cornucopia of independents, Dark Horse, Image and others!) and after a while reality begins to warp....the fourth wall starts to loom large, preferably in the reading of the comics and not the real world, but hey....you never know!

This rant was sparked by doing precisely that: I've spent the better part of the last 18 months getting back into comics in a manner consistent with the way it used to be for me, from an era when almost all of my entertainment came from RPGs, comics, and an occasional theatrical release.

For one reason, comics are actually easily digested in relatively short bursts, and are surprisingly easy to get into and also put down when distractions arise....and I have a lot of distractions with my son, to use an example. For another, it's going to be fun to be able to hand over a ton of comics to him in years to come when he needs reading inspiration. I was hit hard by the awesomeness of comics when I was about 8 years old, and it was the single greatest motivator toward improving my reading skills at the time (outside of a cherished tome on Bigfoot, Nessie and UFOs I dragged everywhere).

For another reason, I spend a lot of time in a stressful position tied to the unholy commingling of the medical insurance industry and accounting/auditing. It's an industry I've grown to master, but I am very careful to compartmentalize work and life as much as possible; bringing this stuff home only leads to an early grave, I feel. Comics are a great destresser, even better than video games because you can generally get more plot in 22 pages than you get in 12 hours of your average FPS.

Anyway, as the last year and a half has progressed I've reached the point where I think I'm buying more books per month than I can easily consume, and I probably should cut down. It's hard, though....stopping a good title because its superfluous is harder than dropping one because it's poorly written or uninteresting. Sometimes a book has a weird thing going for it and you just want to see where it ends up (I'd call that the Grant Morrison Factor). Other times you just want to get the whole story, and comic publishers are still up to their old tricks where they find ways to tie the whole "Summer extravanganza" into multiple titles that practically command you get them all to make sense of what has happened.

In fact that last marketing strategy was a huge reason for my decline in interest in comics in the 90's....the cross-referential story lines made it too painful to keep up. I was pretty much just an Image fan for the first half of the 90's, enjoying the shared universe and interesting and more modern character designs and themes of Wildcats, Grifter, Cyberforce, Youngblood and Spawn before the entire thing blew apart and left a smoking crater where a decent comic universe used to exist. Now...it doesn't matter so much. I'm keeping up with Marvel's Original Sins titles just fine, thanks to making a godawfully larger amount of money now than I did in the nineties (duh) and also DC's Batman Eternal and "Future's End" books, which have the decency to be largely self-contained in exchange for having a weekly release schedule for an entire year. Yowza.

The last time I had it "this good" in comics as a reader and collector would have to be roughly 1995 and then 1988. In 1995 I was graduating from college and spent a bit of time jobless and untethered, traveling with my sister to Colorado and abroad, a stack of Image titles in tow so I could play catch-up on Gen 13, Backlash, Grifter and Wildcats (among others). Prior to that in 1988 I was a high school student about to graduate, and I was getting weekly shipments from Mile High Comics by mail order of about as many comics as I currently collect (albeit at better prices) thanks to some profitable publishing efforts and a family windfall that actually trickled down to me. I still remember the old 80's revival of Action Comics as a serial collection...loved that book; or the "vote for the Jason Todd Robin to die" event. For being a comic collector/reader those were good times.

Now, sitting as I am in my forties with a good career and decent income I appreciate that I can still even do this thing I like to do with collecting comics....but I have to wonder how anyone my age in 1988 (17 years old) or 1995 (24 and freshly graduated jobless ex-student) would have pulled this off. Buying 30 comics in 1988 cost about 75 cents an issue, so I'd spend $22.50 a month. In 1995 buying 30 comics a month at $1.50 a copy meant I had doubled my monthly cost for the same intake to $45/month. Now, in 2014, comics are typically $2.99 or $3.99 with a trend toward the $4 side (DC holds most of its titles at the $3 mark but if you pay a higher price you're usually getting a deluxe issue). For 30 comics that's roughly $105 a month assuming a median average of $3.50....bump it up if you like Marvel only.

$105 a month for comics? In 1988 I could afford to pay for 30 comics a month on the money I made working for my folks or publishing cheap games and fanzines. In 1995 I was largely destitute for a while and still managed to scrape together the money once I found even a low wage position. Today? I can do it on my income, but if I made what I did even just three years ago I wouldn't even be buying comics as an unnecessary expense with a low "fun time:cost" ratio.

Now, that said....comics today have better graphics and usually better art than ever before. Paper quality is superior, coloring is digital and state of the art. Writing is often better, or at least it's taken an uptick from a trend I saw in the late nineties which I call the "Liefield Effect" in which you can take two pages of actual story and make it last for 22 pages. But....it looks like comics today are trending away from that (to be replaced by different bad story habits....but I'll save that gripe for another column!

Juggling Continuity - or how Disney got me interested in Star Wars novels again

Like many beloved continuities the Star Wars Expanded Universe grew over a period of thirty years in a manner typical of a complicated invasive pest organism let loose into an unprepared wilderness. Like tumbleweeds in the American Southwest, rabbits in Australia or the nutria in Louisiana the Star Wars Expanded Universe has run rampant though the unexplored off-screen potential universe of Star Wars. For better or worse this has led to some memorable stories that people love (anything by Timothy Zahn) and some horrible stuff that we all wish we could forget (list too long to name; also, contentious as everyone has their pet peeves). It's also led to an interesting and weighty nightmare in terms of just how a reader keeps up with all of this. Take a break from Star Wars novels for a year or two and you could find yourself hopelessly out of touch, unable to catch up and figure out what the heck happened.

Juggling continuity like this is a real beast of an issue, and some IPs have managed this better than others. Comic book publishers are especially famous for this: DC Comics, for example, periodically likes to reboot its universe and uses its many alternate realities to do so, a tradition going back to the Crisis on Infinite Earths which was ironically designed to clean up their many alternate-reality crossover storylines that had turned their comic continuity into spaghetti mush. This has the advantage of making it easier to jump into a contemporary storyline for DC (with the New 52 reboot most recently) but with the disadvantage being that older graphic novels and comics may be contradictory or nonsensical in relation to the newer tales.

Marvel, by contrast, dogmatically sticks to their core universe and periodically "soft reboots" with retellings and reimaginings of the classics stories of yore (for example, the Season One graphic novels) that are designed to make the original tales (many dating to the sixties with all the baggage that entails) more contemporary while not precisely negating the original tales. As a result, you have to read all Marvel comics with the implicit assumption that everything that has ever been published for the series technically takes place within the last 10-15 years of their condensed "super-floaty timeline." That means that in the early eighties when I was reading about the first Phoenix tale, in "Marvel-universe-time" those stories technically took place around 2000-2004 in "current Marvel-universe-time." And in ten years those stories will be taking place ten years later.

In Marvel's defense, they do seem to be progressing their universe, ever so slightly. It just so happens that their batch of younger protagonists, the second and third generation after the originals, tend to be really uninteresting. Marvel's focus on a sort of "quasi realism" in terms of these character arcs and the whole super heroes in suits concept puts brand recognition for the younger characters at odds with the more readily identifiable characters.

Marvel also has a problem with characters tied to specific time periods: the further the timeline "ages" the weirder the stories and justifications for these characters get. Magneto, as an example, should be 79 years old roughly by my estimates. He looks it in the movies, but I suspect in the comics he's had some sort of slowed aging going on....something? Who knows.

But back to continuity and Star Wars. The idea that the Expanded Universe would survive Episodes VII-IX is silly; there's no way that the people working on the films would slavishly adhere to the bizarre complex canon that grew up in the Expanded Universe, and in fact by not doing so they have opened up the Star Wars universe to a new reinterpretation, one which does not reflect the many years of various special projects, games, novel events (NJO) and other detritus that turned into the Expaned Universe.

For people like me this is a great thing: I get to jump back in to Star Wars feet first when they start releasing the "new canon" novels being scheduled for release. This is going to be great, especially if you (like me) often found the old EU novels to be strange ducks, a product which was one part fan service, one part "we don't know what we can/can't write about in relation to the prequels" and especially the weird anachronism that is the unaging characters of Luke, Han Leia and the rest whose real-life actors carried on in the real world while their on-screen doppelgangers at best got a slight dusting of gray around the temples on their book covers to symbolize the decades spinning away.

I don't know if ditching the whole canon like this is a good move for the cavalcade of Star Wars die hard fans out there, but for me it's just the incentive I need to actually think about getting back into the core Star Wars universe. I really look forward to reading some novels free of the baggage that the EU brings with it everywhere it goes.

Diving Back into Comics...Justice League Dark, Voodoo and Pathfinder

I've been in a funk lately....video games have been unfulfilling (usually), MMORPGs feel like stale toast to me these days, my focus on RPGs has narrowed down to Pathfinder for now as I find I only have time to focus on it for my Wednesday game and (occasionally) the DDN playtests. On the other hand some fiction I've discovered has been very engaging...I've especially enjoyed Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim novels and Tim Curran's awesome writing (especially Zombie Pulp, a fantastic collection of short fiction that reignited my inerest in both short stories and zombie fiction). Both are excellent reads if you're in the mood for some grizzly, down-to-earth weird horror and modern supernaturalism.

One thing I used to be into which fell to the wayside was comic books. Among my old favorites were Planetary, the Wildstorm universe books (Grifter, Wildcats, Stormwatch, Backlash, Team 6, etc.) and the unbeatable Top 10. Eventually Wildstorm sort of fell apart, and its inconsistent revival through DC made following it tough. Other greats (like Planetary) died due to the whim of the creator, though one can't fault a writer for deciding to end it when the creative drive for the project stopped.

For myself, another big part of the exodus was due to the difficulty of re-entry to the more mainstream comics. Comics are rather expensive by the issue, and the big publishers have a habit of marketing them in ways which make it difficult to get a coherent story if you aren't following every single storyline. I'm a victim of the era of the Blackest Day/Brightest Night (or whatever) era of comics....and effectively dropped out about a year before the New 52 hit. Marvel's even worse in my book....trying to keep track of it all was painful, and some of their writers need to be dragged out back and taught a lesson or two in good storytelling. The Ultimate series was good....until it, too, got overly convoluted and then who knows what they did with it, because staring at the comic shop walls? I can't tell anymore what the hell is going on with Marvel. Easier to stick with the movies, I say.

In the end, the only series I continued collecting were the Dark Horse Conan releases (which are quite good, actually).

Anyway, after a visit to the local Kaboom! comic shop I snagged volumes one and two of Voodoo, the first volume of Justice League Dark, and ordered Grifter and Suicide Squad. I also snagged the compendium of the Pathfinder comic series and put in some orders for the Conan graphic novels my collection is still missing.

I'm kind of excited to be getting back into comics, I like how DC is methodically printing these series in 6-issue compilations at a time, and I think it's just the "spark" I need to help me get some creative energy back.

I'll offer up some belated opinions and reviews soon...