TheLastBaron

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by TheLastBaron


  1. I mean that's fair enough, but that's kind of the point. Watchmen was uncomfortable with how violent it was. I'm pretty neutral about Lost Girls specifically, but I appreciate what it was going for and at least in some way I'd imagine it led to books like Sex by Joe Casey (which also as a superhero deconstruction book owes a lot to Watchmen)


  2. To hear Moore tell it, Morrison copied the whole magic thing off him anyway. And has Moore's quality of work really dipped that much? Maybe LoG Vol3 wasn't as good as the first two, but Promethea, Tom Strong and all that were brilliant.

    I don't think it's dipped, I still enjoy stuff he puts out which is more than I can say for a lot of people. I heard Crossed +100 was good though I personally never got into Crossed ever despite really loving people like Garth Ennis and David Lapham. I also didn't pick up the first issue of his new (mini)series Providence which just came out since I'm not the biggest Lovecraft fan, but I'll probably at the very least give it a read when it's collected.

    To be fair to Grant Morrison doing drugs are a much bigger part of his shtick than doing magic. I use the word shtick in place of the word "thing", I like Grant Morrison. I'm bad with words.


  3. New mewithoutYou album is finally out (or at least streaming) and it's amazing. I was super stoked by the first song they released from it (Red Cow) which is definitely one of my favorite songs by them, ever. The album is for sure the best work they've done since Brother, Sister and I can't wait to get the deluxe edition which has even more stuff on it. 

     

    http://m.noisey.vice.com/blog/mewithoutyou-pale-horses-album-stream


  4. Finished reading Onwards towards our noble deaths by Shigeru Mizuki and while I knew about how important it for the Japanese army to never be captured and better to die in a suicidal charge as a matter of hounour reading a mostly autobiographical account of what it is like to be a soldier in that kind of army drove home how fucked up the whole thing was. 

    Yeah, his Showa series is also super good, I'm really looking forward to the final volume which I believe comes out in a couple months. 


  5. Humble has a Top Shelf/IDW Bundle going on and it has a ton of good stuff. The stuff I've read in it is Locke & Key, the Parker books by Darwyn Cooke, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen/Nemo books by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, the March books by Nate Powell, and Lost Dogs by Jeff Lemire. I would unreservedly recommend all of them, in fact I physically own all of them and for the most part these days I get most things digital unless I really like them. I even have the Parker books in the normal hardcovers and also the Martini (absolute) Edition. I normally hate absolute editions because I find them really annoying to read, but Darwyn Cooke's art is just so fantastic that it deserves being super-sized. 

     

    It'd be nice if they had had something by Alex Robinson like Box Office Poison or Too Cool to be Forgotten, but with what's already in the bundle it's hard to fault them for not having more. 


  6. Yeah when the head of the AFC was banned for life back in 2011 for corruption and Qatar still got the world cup (he was Qatari) it was pretty obvious FIFA had issues.


  7. Archie is childhood nostalgia for me as well and while I'm glad I grew up with them I don't know if I'd recommend it now.

     

    The weird new stuff is really interesting though especially considering what a huge shift in tone it is and that it's not-totally-embarrassing. The one that seemed the most promising to me was the new Sabrina from last Halloween which seemed like a new ongoing but hasn't come out with a new issue since.

    Issue #2 actually came out last month, but yeah.  While I'm fine reading Afterlife as a quarterly release, I didn't care enough about Sabrina to wait that long between issues.  I might check it out in a few years when there's a trade.


  8. Is Archie still the best selling comic in America? I don't think Diamond tracks their sales, and I'm too distant from that whole comic sales tracking thing to know how to look that up anymore.

    I don't think it has been sine the 70's-80's.  I'm searching around and the numbers I'm seeing are that single issues sell less than 10,000 units and things like double digests sell ~50,000-80,000.  For the big 2 their most popular books (Batman and Spiderman) generally break six figures and then for other books you're looking at 50-80,000 for main books with less popular books getting around 20,000 on the low end/ danger zone.  Afterlife sells pretty consistently around 25,000 an issue and the trade of the first arc sold a lot (it was the best selling tpb the month it came out).  Hopefully the new Archie books do well, this graph is pretty sad, though granted its for actual issues of Archie which I don't think anyone buys, just the digests.

     

    ArchieChart.jpg

     

    Also re: should you read Archie.  I really don't know if I can recommend the normal books/digests since while I still occasionally will read them so much of that is childhood nostalgia for me and if you don't have that I don't know if you would like them.  The Life With Archie series which ended with Archie dying is super soap opera-y so if that's your thing you might enjoy them and if it's not you definitely wont.  I read the short series it spun off from, The Married Life, which was a 6 issue or so series where in three issues Archie see his future life if he Marries Betty and then three where he marries Veronica.  After that I read the first couple issues of Life With Archie since as I stated there's nostalgia there for me, but I dropped it and didn't pick up any issues until the end when they had all the variants (I got the Ramon K. Perez and Cliff Chiang covers for the last two issues which are the only physical floppies I've bought in a really long time). 

    Afterlife With Archie I can recommend with no reservations.  It comes out super infrequently (#8 just came out last week I think, maybe the week before, and the issue before that was from December), but I love it.  I agree with Tegan that having knowledge of the characters/relationships does add to it a lot, but even just as a zombie story its super good. 


  9. Personally what appeals to me is just the abstraction of everything, you're not giving everything thing tons of detail like in a modern game where everything is super high-poly so you end up filling in more of it in your head.  That doesn't have to be pixel art though, I mean I guess the HD version of Another World wouldn't be considered pixel art, but it's still super simple.  I don't play that many modern games that have pixel art, Superbrothers Sword & Sorcery EP is one of the few things that comes to mind (and I think it looks super good).  I've looked at Titan Souls though and I think the pixel art works really well in it.  Another thing that doesn't necessarily have to do with pixel art, but is a big part of the pixel art games I do like is having a simplified/constrained color palette.  That's another thing that really makes Superbrothers appeal to me.  Those gifs of Dungeon of the Endless aren't really my cup of tea for that same reason.


  10. Since i'm pretty sure nobody knew about the Xenoblade X direct:

    I wants it.

    I've been watching streams of it occasionally the past couple days (I guess it's out in Japan) and man it's a pretty game. I really don't like the faces though, all the characters look so weird.

  11. Well most of the time when someone stays on the ground they're trying to waste time and don't want to be helped up, or they dove trying to get a call and didn't and don't want to immediately get back up because they'll look even dumber. If it's something serious they'll have a trainer come on the field, but then the player is required to leave the field and can't come back on until the ref gives them permission.

    I can see why it bothers people, especially in the more aggressive situations where the player just grabs the other player and pulls him to his feet, but I don't think players should have the option to help opposing players removed just because sometimes the opposing players don't want to be helped. It makes me think of when Aaron Ramsey (Arsenal) had his leg broken and the only player on the pitch who didn't freak out and stayed calm was Glenn Whelan (Stoke) who went over and tried to calm him down and made sure he couldn't see his leg. Afterwards Ramsey wrote in the papers how thankful he was to Whelan. Not going to post a picture because it's graphic (I think some players on the field threw up). For the record Ramsey is fine now, he's one of Arsenal's best players.


  12. I don't know why any sport allows fighting. In my book, you shouldn't touch a player of the opposing team after the play is over, even to help them up, period.

    I definitely am the opposite here, I really like seeing players on opposite teams helping each other.  Granted it happens the most in soccer, which is a sport where attacking another player is probably the most severely punished, but when I see something like a player helping someone on the other team with a cramp it makes me happy.

    muscle-cramp.jpg

     

    As far as hockey, I don't really know.  I don't care about the Sharks, but even if I did them having someone like John Scott on their team would be enough to make me stop.  On the other hand I really like Zdeno Chara so like I said, I dunno.


  13. Re: NHL playoffs.  I'm a Bruins fan so I'm kind of bummed we ended up not making it at the very end, it came down to the last game which is always rough.  Boston were super inconsistent all season though so it probably would have been a first round knockout anyways, though if they hadn't slipped the last two games they would have ended up where the Senators are and I always enjoy seeing the B's play Montreal.  At this point I don't really care who wins the cup for the most part.  The exceptions are Montreal and Vancouver, and then to a lesser extent the Rangers and the Islanders.  I have some friends rooting for the Wild so I'm watching them, but I don't have high hopes, especially against Saint Louis.


  14. I completely agree.  It's been a real pleasure to read.  I was worried during the whole first arc that the books was just going to be Jason Aaron does Walking Tall.  I was so glad about how wrong I was.  Now, with Boss's story arc I'm starting to see the parallels with Scalped.  It's beginning to tell a deep intergenerational story of a place.

    I agree that with this second arc the parallels start to show, even how Scalped started focusing on Dash with Red Crow being just a full on villain, but then as it progressed it wasn't just about Dash, and Red Crow became really fleshed out. I think this last arc really filled in a lot of the character of Coach Boss, though I think the last issue pretty much confirms that we aren't going to come around to being sympathetic towards him like with Red Crow.

    I also agree that for a book that started out as a very specific story about one person it has grown to be about the place more than any one person. I hope we see some side stories like with Scalped, I really liked that that one-shot in Scalped about the old couple living alone far from town that wasn't connected to the plot at all.