Documentary (Webcomix, Part -4)
31 January 06 | 11:27 | Posted by:
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I'm not sure why Tomb Raider has to fall into the "guilty pleasure" category, but my abiding love for the original game has always been a point of scorn among my friends. Yes, Lara Croft is hideous and preposterously-designed, but the game itself was great. A 3D Prince of Persia without the fencing skeletons; a polygonal Metroid without the spin-jumps and shooting. Seriously, the original was good. Good enough, in fact, that I slogged through the entirety of the second game and a few hours each of its sequels, and considering how crappy those sequels were that's really saying a lot.
Well, soon enough you'll all see things my way. I've previewed Tomb Raider Legend over at The Land of Magical Paychecks, and the demo Eidos provided was really quite excellent. Of course, there's plenty of room for the final game to go horribly wrong, but somehow I don't think it will. So all you haters can kiss my tuchus.
Lara's chest, it should be noted, is still pretty preposterously huge, even after her much-lauded reductive surgery. And since this is the post-DOA era, she's, erm, very well animated up there. A nickel of free advice, Ms. Croft: A sports bra will make your future adventures far less painful.
In other gaming news, the news that Mother 3 actually exists and is coming soon has inspired me to trudge through Earthbound and Earthbound Zero. I made it all the way to Saturn Valley back in the day before Earthbound's generally bland gameplay trumped the charmingly ridiculous plot and I moved on to more entertaining endeavors like soap carving and counting bumps on the ceiling. But this time I'm going to make it all the way, though, honest. (This vow brought to you by Chicanery and emulation on PSP.)
Huh, I had a lot more comics hidden on my hard drive than I realized. So I guess I still have a ways to go before the Retro Webcomix section is complete. But I did take the time to reformat the bonus comic from the second zine issue for the web.
And the SF Portraits are back up, too, although they seem a lot less interesting now than they were at the time. I can't tell if that's because they actually weren't interesting to begin with, or if living in the city for so long has simply inured me to all the insanity.
Edit: OK, now all the comic archives are up.
Re-edit: MANNA has gone and posted a Perfect Machine of Snipe companion piece without telling me, the rat.
I'm not sure how many people are clicking on that second set of links to the left (the ones under the header "Articles"), but I've been slowly restoring this site's content in the exciting format known as "wiki." There's still quite a bit left to repost, and almost all of it needs to be reformatted to fit the new look. Not to mention re-edited to conform to something like "quality control standards."
Anyway, one portion is almost complete -- the "Retro Webcomix" section. I still need to add a few comics I've tossed together in more recent years, but since I seem to have caught the cartooning bug again I figured it would be good to have some foundational content. For reference. So I can look back and feel my work has improved, and everyone else can look back and wonder why my work was so much better back then. And we can all have a good laugh about how fat and lumpy the frog used to be.
I'm also working on reformatting the three bonus comics from the early issues of ToastyFrog Zine for the online format. I figure four years is more than long enough to keep them exclusive, and hopefully having them up will encourage me to keep working on Issue Six. At the very least, it will make me feel terribly guilty.
Anyway, the first one is up and I'll see if I can get the other two up by the end of the weekend.
Also, I apologize for how offensive those tadpoles look in the art panel posted here. You can pretend they're paisleys, if it helps.
I probably shouldn't have said anything about T-shirts yesterday, because now readers are asking me to make them. I really don't want to go down that path (especially since the one attempt I made to sell ToastyFrog shirts was an absolute bust), but far be it from me to fail to give The People what they want. So let's compromise. I'll poke around tonight and see if I still have my badge maker, and if I do I'll put together some New Game Journalist buttons. That way you can proudly declare your pretentiousness and desire never to know the loving touch of a woman, and I don't have to sell my soul to CafePress. And then we can all be happy, at least according to a fairly unambitious definition of happiness.
NEVER FORGET!!
Edit: I forget that not everyone visiting this site now has been reading for a long time (and little surprise there, as poorly as I've maintained it), so it probably bears mentioning that the comic posted here is several years old... the point being that Cafepress has been on my bad list for a while.
It's that time again! Time to savor fatal headwounds rendered lovely in stark black-and-white. That's right: It's Golgo Time.
Or more specifically, So-So Golgo Time.
Now that I have the complete collection of G13 in English, I can say Ice Lake Hit is easily the worst. The main story is actually pretty decent, if a bit formulaic; the problem is that the Ice Lake Hit section is actually just half of the book. The second half is really painfully lame. And the art is weirdly stiff and awkward, almost like old Doonesbury or something; the art in Golgo-13 always looks a little formal, but there are some serious issues of perspective and anatomy not usually present in the series. Maybe Saito was making use of the second-string protegés that month.
The story begins with Mr. Togo bagging himself a moose up in the Canadian wilderness. Despite the hunting guide's protests that the herd has been spooked and he could never possibly take down a skittish moose from half a mile away, Golgo manages to snipe not one but two, and all with a single shot.
For once, his ruthless accuracy works against him, since the hunting limit is one moose per hunter and some very earnest Mounties are patrolling nearby. They decide to arrest Golgo for poaching, despite the fact that his guide swears he fired only a single bullet. Their decision is helped along when Mr. Togo reflexively clocks the patrolman who approaches from behind -- his deadly talents working against him a second time in several pages. "Perfect machine" my butt.
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Cross-posted from my 1UP blog, because I'm lame like that.
I have lots of ambitions for this site, since it's been pretty much the one stable thing in my life over the past nine years (besides my family, I mean).
OK, stop laughing, "stable" wasn't the word I was looking for. I guess it's more that no matter what I do I always find myself turning back to this particular project and giving it another go, no matter how much I hate what I've done with it in the past. I guess when you're a relentless, nearly psychotic perfectionist this is the closest thing you can get to stability. The point is I've decided to face up to the fact that there's no escaping my compulsive need to write/draw/tear down a website and built it back up again. So, to that end, I've been tweaking it a lot lately and finally getting some content into the wiki section (you might know it better as "Articles").
You may notice one change in particular to the sidebar. This is known as a "show of good faith." Like I said, I have a lot of ambitions for this site, but before I move ahead with them I need to do some housekeeping first. Which means that before I start any huge new projects I need to clear out the old ones first.
Anyone care to open a betting pool on whether or not I can actually get Issue Six out by the end of spring?
So anyway there's been this meme of sorts going around the Internet in which various comic artists offer up their own depictions of Batgirl. It is, generally speaking, pretty swell. But I've been reluctant to get involved because, as you've probably noticed, I'm not much of a comic artist and to toss my hat into an arena with people like Bruce Timm and Bryan Lee O'Malley would be pretty much an unforgivable act of arrogance. So I've decided to compromise by drawing a heroine better suited to my calibre of art:
Yeah, that's right. Squirrel Girl.
Big thanks to Nich for lending me his copy of GLA Disassembled so that I could appreciate the wonders of this fabulous super-heroine. For those unfamiliar (probably about everyone), she's a Steve Ditko creation, so beneath her ridiculous appearance there's probably some sort of deep metaphor for the plight of the proletarian or the triumph of Objectivism or something. I dunno, mostly I think it's awesome that even though her most impressive power is to talk to squirrels she was still able to take down Dr. Doom. If you ever wonder why Walt Simsonson retconned pretty much every appearance by Doom between 1964 and 1993 to be a Doombot, look no futher.
In the spirit of things, I did include a tiny reference to Batgirl, although it occured to me only after I watercolored the thing where the bat emblem is placed and the fact that Ms. Gordon is probably feeling a bit drafty as a result.
P.S. Yesterday's comic was the first time I've used watercolors in about six years so please don't hate me for my really horrible technique.
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I don't know how you spent your weekend, but I spent part of mine in the sleepy little town of Goondocks.
The Goondocks, home to the events of The Goonies. Otherwise known as Astoria, Oregon.
If there were such a thing as a pilgrimage to Mecca for dorks who grew up in the '80s, I'd personally make a strong case for this particular trip to be granted the honors. Memorizing passages of Richard Donner's admittedly wretched kid-flick is a sort of rite of passage for us navel-gazing dopes who grew up in the Reagan era. So my trek to the Walsh homestead was a vaguely religious experience. Except that instead of kneeling in supplication to the place where a great prophet made proclamations, I took photos of the house where an asthmatic Samwise Gamgee grew up.
I probably should have taken a shot of Data's house next door, but without the dangerous zip line connecting the homes the magic just wasn't there.
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Hello, The Internets! Effective immediately (or at least as soon as your crappy DNS server bothers to propagate the information), this site now has a second URL: Gamespite.net. And there's a very good reason for that, which will become apparent, oh, one of these years. I found a bargain rate on domain name registration, so I have five years to make good on it. Of course, toastyfrog.com will work for at least another year and a half -- until the current registration runs out, at the very least -- so basically I'm just being redundant. Story of my life, really.
I'm off and away from the Internet this weekend, savoring the joys of a sleepy little town called Portland. Golgomania!! returns next week, along with other assorted nonsense that doesn't involve steely-eyed gunmen with a thing for slightly chunky blonde women. I'm not sure if anyone's noticed, but I'm making a sincere effort to restore a bit of this site's former quality (such as it was). It's really sort of embarrassing how run-down it's become in the past couple of years.
Try not to flame me too much while I'm away.
Edit: Er, to clarify, I'm not actually abandoning the name toastyfrog.com. "gamespite.net" is just a second link to tie into something I'll (hopefully) be getting underway in a while.
First, two orders of business:
1. Today's entry continues the trend of being huge and image-centric, so I've moved a goodly chunk to an interior page. You can read it all by clicking the link at the bottom of this front-page prelude, or just click here.
2. toastyfrog.com is one of Google's top 10 results for "how to make someone else vomit." I win, Internet. I win so hard.
We now resume Golgomania (already in progress)
It stands to reason that after nearly 40 years of Golgo-13, not every episode is a winner. When your main character is a complete cipher of a killer whose range of emotion includes two stops -- stoic intensity and mild surprise -- there's only so much heartstring-tugging you can pull off. So just to be clear on the point, this isn't art. (Perhaps you're thinking of Electroplankton?)
Every chapter of Golgo-13 carries with it a minimal threshold of expectation. We always know that someone's gonna die, and somehow, Duke Togo's gonna get away with it... even if he has to break the Ridiculousness Barrier in the process.
Such is the case in the second volume of manga Lead translated back in 1986, Galinpero. Not once but twice the Inexorable G goes to utterly preposterous lengths to fulfill his contract. But it's OK, because in the end his victims remember to sputter, "This is no man! He is a demon/monster/entire Army regiment left to boil so long that it reduced down to a single man containing a lethal dose of regiment concentrate!"
So, you know, it's still pretty rad.
Galinpero
Galinpero is interesting for two reasons: It gives a small insight into what Golgo finds "acceptable terms" for taking a contract, and secondly it shows that he's so valuable to high-ranking members of the U.S. government for his ability to do their dirty work that they'll let him get away with pretty much any crap he wants to. He could probably punch the President in the face and Cheney would sputter, "Don't shoot! You're no match for this man. And who else can we hire to kill Michael Moore!?"
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Look up on these nerds, ye mighty, and despair. You'll probably despair over the image quality, too. Sorry, these are 20-year-old books printed on mediocre paper and my scanner is crap.
The Journey into Golgo begins here with "Into the Wolves Lair," the first Golgo-13 graphic novel to have been published into English. It was not, however, Duke Togo's first adventure, having been published in Japan some ten to 15 years after his 1968 debut. You can tell this is a late '70s/early '80s job because people keep name-dropping George Lucas (it's even a plot point) and there's a billboard for "The Star Wars III." So obviously this preceded 1983's Return of the Jedi, at which point most people looked at the Ewoks and said, "Oh wait, Lucas is actually a money-gobbling merchandise-creating hack and not in fact a latter-day genius."
Don't feel bad, we were all fooled.
I've only owned "Into the Wolves' Lair" for about three weeks, but it already holds a special place in my heart -- mainly for proving that I am not, in fact, completely delusional. Back around the time I discovered the Golgo milieu courtesy of an NES game that inexplicably had its controls reversed (stupid Vic Tokai, everyone knows A is for jump, not B) I saw this graphic novel promoted in a random gaming publication I was skimming through. A few weeks later I found the first comic-sized issue at the local convenience store and kept watching for this enticing chapter about taking down the Fourth Reich to show up as well... not realizing it had been published three years prior. Over the years I've checked price guides, comic shops and the whole of the Internet to confirm its existence, but no one ever seemed to know anything about it until I wandered across the official Golgo-13 web site, which has a tiny shrine set aside to the handful of related materials to have made it into English.
It took 15 years, but it's nice to learn I wasn't just imagining things as a kid. Now I just need a little reassurance about my current mental competence and I'll be set.
So, Golgo-13. Like I said before, he operates according to a strict (but as-yet-unrevealed) code of ethics; he never kills unless it's in self-preservation or to complete a contract, he only takes jobs from employers who play by his rules and always fulfills his task, and there are certain jobs he won't take. But he does at least pass the modern baseline moral test: He goes after Nazis with gusto. Everyone hates Nazis, except maybe the Nazis themselves, so that's good. It'd be kinda tough to take up the cause of a guy who ices people on Der Fuhrer's request.
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In case you somehow missed me babbling about it a few weeks back, Viz Media will begin publishing an ongoing series of Golgo-13 graphic novels next month. This makes me very happy, because I've been wondering why (given the rising popularity of manga in the U.S.) Viz has completely disregarded one of the most enduring franchises ever. And, it should be noted, one of the first series it attempted to pubish back in the '80s when no one in America except Carl Macek and a handful of really, really scary people with an unhealthy fixation on the Dirty Pair cared about manga.
Everyone always seems surprised to find that I like Golgo-13. Given that he's an amoral, ruthless murderer whose treatment of women makes James Bond look like a staunch monogamist and all. Fair enough, since that's pretty much the exact opposite of my normal tastes... but Golgo-13 has history on his side. He's the Rolling Stones of manga; as far as I know Takao Saito's sniperiffic adventures are the longest-running manga series to be continuously serialized in Japan. It's a little daunting to see ten or 15 volumes of a given manga on the store shelves, to say nothing of Ranma (nearing the end of its run at 32 or so), but Golgo-13 is up to something like volume 135. That is an awful lot of precise headshots, and you have to respect that much killin' and shootin'.
More importantly, Golgo-13 was my introduction to manga. Plus it was a pretty decent NES game. Well, no, the NES game is kind of awful, but I still like it.
I've made it my mission to collect every single chapter of the manga published so far in the U.S. -- which, I recently learned, was actually quite a bit more than I originally realized. I'd picked up the first of the two comic-length issues Viz published back when I was in junior high, shortly after I picked up the NES game, and I collected the three-part squarebound "The Professional" miniseries (in which he killed an elderly Juan Peron) when it came out a year after that. Imagine my grim-faced delight when I discovered last month that Leed Publishing also translated four 168-page volumes of snipery back in the mid-80s.
Like it or not, I'm going to share them with you over the next month or so. I'm compelled, because Golgo-13 is awesome.
See, even these Mossad dudes agree, and they're hardcore. Especially the one whose fingernails were ripped out by Nazis.
In case you're not familiar with Golgo-13 -- aka Duke Togo -- he's a man of uncertain nationality with a vaguely Asian appearance that allows him to blend in with the natives in more than half the world. He's capable of speaking an unreasonable number of languages, has incredible physical prowess and can shoot anything that moves with 100% accuracy from ridiculous ranges. As the book says, he's the perfect machine of snipe, and his comics don't really have much dramatic tension since you know he's going to kill his target and escape alive; the appeal is mainly seeing what sort of elaborate situation Saito (or Saito's army of lackeys) is going to concoct for him and how he'll pull off the next impossible hit. His catchphrase is "....." and he operates according to a strict code -- if he takes a job, he'll kill anyone who jeopardizes his mission, but there are certain jobs he won't take, suggesting that maybe he's a swell guy underneath it all.
What a man of mystery! His name, adress and even his bone are indistinct! Please note this is from the very first volume of the series -- not only was he fairly talkative and even smirked sometimes, but he also hadn't settled on a number quite yet.
Anyway, brace yourself. There's plenty more of this nonsense on the way.
There are just a few phrases that can knock gamers into an instant coma these days through force of their sheer oversaturated abuse over the past year or so.
But none of these phrases are more annoying and tiresome than the new poster child for posturing pseudo-intellectuals everywhere:
"Can games be art?"
Actually, the question itself isn't so bad, but the debate surrounding it is enough to send most people into a murderous rampage. What could be a valid analysis of the legitimacy of this burgeoning medium typically degenerates into a bunch of snotty kids calling Roger Ebert names and a handful of self-proclaimed intellectuals with no actual art education stroking their chins excitedly at the chance to use a lot of very large words. It would be too easy for them to offer a simple, empirical analysis, though, so they mostly talk about how Ico was all ethereal and made them so very sad, or how Rez made their pants throb even without the Trance Vibrator.
I'm glad Electroplankton has come along to put this ridiculous debate to rest. It's an authentic work of art, which means that games can be art, thanks. Here's my proof, derived from six long semesters of art history.
Electroplankton's designer and programmer, Toshio Iwai, is an award-winning fine artist who works in multimedia formats. Sound, visuals, even interactivity -- the same stuff Electroplankton offers. Iwai's other work is recognized as art by the stuffy types who make such arbitrary calls, so disregarding Electroplankton simply because it's presented in videogame form is so narrow-minded as to be downright churlish. And no one wants to be a churl.
II. Art can be mundane.
Boo hoo, it's a videogame, and you can buy videogames at Wal-Mart. Art could never be that gauche!
Yeah well, whatever. Marcel Duchamp poked a hole in that one almost 90 years ago when he presented "Fountain," which was simply a discarded urinal on which he had scrawled the words "R. MUTT 1917." Two years later he defaced a reproduction of the "Mona Lisa." It was not medium, technique or skill that made Duchamp's dadaist works art, but rather the creative intent behind the work.
Electroplankton's manual offers a brief dissertation by Iwai on his inspirations and ambitions with the game, all of which are sufficiently high-minded (a synthesis of audio-visual experiences based on microscopes and Famicoms, etc. etc.) to place the game in the same genre as "Every Shot, Every Episode." If Huggy Bear and a toilet can be art, then by all means, so can Loomiloop and Tracey.
Besides, you can't buy Electroplankton at Wal-Mart... just Target and online. It's classy. And if you really need the extra validation, send your copy of the game to me with an SASE and I'll scrawl "R. MUTT 2005" on it for you.
III. Art can be mass-produced.
One might argue that the merit of works like "Fountain" and "Every Shot, Every Episode" (as well as the works of other multimedia artists like Nam Jun Paik) is due in part to the uniqueness of those works -- they exist as single installations. Electroplankton, on the other hand, is a mass-manufactured consumer product churned out by the thousands, and even the original game was the collaborative creation of a team of programmers and artists working with Iwai.
The corpse of Andy Warhol laughs in your face. His works like "Marilyn" were mass-produced, frequently by people working for Warhol rather than by the artist himself. This doesn't make his work any less valuable -- any one of the countless silkscreens produced under Warhol's supervision is worth tens of thousands of dollars and would proudly be displayed by any art museum.
"But videogames don't move me." Congratulations, you didn't cry when Aerith died and you think Lumines is boring. Aren't you manly? Well done. Me, I don't really find my heart atremble when I look at pretty much any American art prior to the 20th Century, but if I were to walk up to a curator and demand he remove Whistler's Mother from his collection I'd probably be shot on sight. Disregarding a piece of art because you don't get it puts you in the same category as those who laughed at Monet's "unfinished" paintings or the jarring chaos of Picasso's first forays into cubism. These days we call them "MORANS." (We used to call them "morons" but the Internet has knocked the collective I.Q. of humanity down a few digits and we don' rite so good no more.)
In any case, I've found Electroplankton to be entrancing, so it still meets this particular proof. Sorry if you're too thick to get it, though.
V. This is stupid, shut up already.
Well, that's what I've been saying all along.
Anyway, Electroplankton fits every definition of art, so it's art. And a game. Which means that by the Transitive Property of Have a Little Common Sense You Idiot, games can be art.
As for my next trick? I'll be sorting out the world peace thing.
I don't sing the praises of San Francisco's Chinatown often enough on this blog, so it's time to rectify that problem. Not only is Chinatown (and its various spinoffs, including Inner Richmond's Clement St. and the Outer Sunset's Irving St.) a source for delicious, inexpensive food, oversized Piyo-Piyo dolls and cheap housewares of suspicious origins, it's also a great place to get back in touch with your childhood.
Who could forget the heartwarming exploits of A. A. Milne's Pooh-Pooh, here depicted in loving detail on a small coin purse?
And this fantastic coin wallet rekindles old memories of hours spent by the fireside reading about the comical adventures of Deformed Snoopy (and all the Deformed Peanuts gang).
And let's not forget that most famous of Japanese sentai superheroes, Superman.
God bless you, Chinatown. May your goodness shine brightly forever. Even the dim sum.
(And by "vacation" I mean "tiny bonus check.")
My love of tiny, shiny things and florid art featuring black-lipped girly-men got the best of me and I crumbled. I bought a Final Fantasy IV limited edition Game Boy Micro. I'm sort of ashamed, but it's so rad I can't feel all that terrible. I know, I should have used the money to help subsidize world peace or something. But, oh well, pretty Amano pictures framing dated video games is probably a better investment than some sort of global utopia anyway. A happy world is a boring world!
Also, I should note that in 1UP's end-of-year wrap-up I offhandedly commented that the Xbox 360 power brick is big enough to hold a dozen GB Micros. In fact, I made a comparison today and it turns out it's only big enough to hold eleven. I regret the error.
I should also note that if the above image appears out-of-focus, it's not a reflection on my inadequacies as a photographer. It's, uh, heat distortion from the sizzling-hot adapter warping the images. Yeah.
My sister made me a set of Katamari Damacy magnets for my birthday last year -- the King of All Cosmos, the hapless Prince and half a dozen of his royal cousins, all depicted with loving care via the woefully underappreciated medium of Shrinky-Dinks. They currently adorn the metal drawers behind my desk at work, where they are loved by all who see them.
Imagine my surprise when I visited my sister's apartment over the Christmas break and discovered she's been holding out on me. At some point she made herself a complete set of cousins. Needless to say, it's a pretty awe-inspiring sight.
Apparently the process of making them is fairly time-consuming, which is why I only have a "best of" sampler. Her next project is to create magnets for the We <3 Katamari characters as well, but it's a fairly daunting task and she keeps balking. I tried telling her about the eight new royal cousins in the PSP game but for some reason she clamped her hands over her ears and shouted "LA LA LA NOT LISTENING."
Too bad these are so difficult to make. She could totally go into business selling these things and make that katamari hat chick cry in defeat.
The Gyroids would dearly love to wish you a Happy New Year.
They'd love to, but they can't. Because they're coming for you next. Chance are that your new year will be short and not very happy. Still, do try to make the most of what you have.
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Raiders of the lost tomb
30 January 06 | 15:21 | Posted by:
I'm not sure why Tomb Raider has to fall into the "guilty pleasure" category, but my abiding love for the original game has always been a point of scorn among my friends. Yes, Lara Croft is hideous and preposterously-designed, but the game itself was great. A 3D Prince of Persia without the fencing skeletons; a polygonal Metroid without the spin-jumps and shooting. Seriously, the original was good. Good enough, in fact, that I slogged through the entirety of the second game and a few hours each of its sequels, and considering how crappy those sequels were that's really saying a lot.
Well, soon enough you'll all see things my way. I've previewed Tomb Raider Legend over at The Land of Magical Paychecks, and the demo Eidos provided was really quite excellent. Of course, there's plenty of room for the final game to go horribly wrong, but somehow I don't think it will. So all you haters can kiss my tuchus.
Lara's chest, it should be noted, is still pretty preposterously huge, even after her much-lauded reductive surgery. And since this is the post-DOA era, she's, erm, very well animated up there. A nickel of free advice, Ms. Croft: A sports bra will make your future adventures far less painful.
In other gaming news, the news that Mother 3 actually exists and is coming soon has inspired me to trudge through Earthbound and Earthbound Zero. I made it all the way to Saturn Valley back in the day before Earthbound's generally bland gameplay trumped the charmingly ridiculous plot and I moved on to more entertaining endeavors like soap carving and counting bumps on the ceiling. But this time I'm going to make it all the way, though, honest. (This vow brought to you by Chicanery and emulation on PSP.)
category: games | forums |
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Further adventures in dustery
28 January 06 | 11:26 | Posted by:
Huh, I had a lot more comics hidden on my hard drive than I realized. So I guess I still have a ways to go before the Retro Webcomix section is complete. But I did take the time to reformat the bonus comic from the second zine issue for the web.
And the SF Portraits are back up, too, although they seem a lot less interesting now than they were at the time. I can't tell if that's because they actually weren't interesting to begin with, or if living in the city for so long has simply inured me to all the insanity.
Edit: OK, now all the comic archives are up.
Re-edit: MANNA has gone and posted a Perfect Machine of Snipe companion piece without telling me, the rat.
category: blog | forums |
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Dusting off the archives
27 January 06 | 11:23 | Posted by:
I'm not sure how many people are clicking on that second set of links to the left (the ones under the header "Articles"), but I've been slowly restoring this site's content in the exciting format known as "wiki." There's still quite a bit left to repost, and almost all of it needs to be reformatted to fit the new look. Not to mention re-edited to conform to something like "quality control standards."
Anyway, one portion is almost complete -- the "Retro Webcomix" section. I still need to add a few comics I've tossed together in more recent years, but since I seem to have caught the cartooning bug again I figured it would be good to have some foundational content. For reference. So I can look back and feel my work has improved, and everyone else can look back and wonder why my work was so much better back then. And we can all have a good laugh about how fat and lumpy the frog used to be.
I'm also working on reformatting the three bonus comics from the early issues of ToastyFrog Zine for the online format. I figure four years is more than long enough to keep them exclusive, and hopefully having them up will encourage me to keep working on Issue Six. At the very least, it will make me feel terribly guilty.
Anyway, the first one is up and I'll see if I can get the other two up by the end of the weekend.
Also, I apologize for how offensive those tadpoles look in the art panel posted here. You can pretend they're paisleys, if it helps.
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Compromised integrity
26 January 06 | 18:24 | Posted by:
I probably shouldn't have said anything about T-shirts yesterday, because now readers are asking me to make them. I really don't want to go down that path (especially since the one attempt I made to sell ToastyFrog shirts was an absolute bust), but far be it from me to fail to give The People what they want. So let's compromise. I'll poke around tonight and see if I still have my badge maker, and if I do I'll put together some New Game Journalist buttons. That way you can proudly declare your pretentiousness and desire never to know the loving touch of a woman, and I don't have to sell my soul to CafePress. And then we can all be happy, at least according to a fairly unambitious definition of happiness.
NEVER FORGET!!
Edit: I forget that not everyone visiting this site now has been reading for a long time (and little surprise there, as poorly as I've maintained it), so it probably bears mentioning that the comic posted here is several years old... the point being that Cafepress has been on my bad list for a while.
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Perfect Machine of Snipe, Part Four
24 January 06 | 10:55 | Posted by:
It's that time again! Time to savor fatal headwounds rendered lovely in stark black-and-white. That's right: It's Golgo Time.
Or more specifically, So-So Golgo Time.
Now that I have the complete collection of G13 in English, I can say Ice Lake Hit is easily the worst. The main story is actually pretty decent, if a bit formulaic; the problem is that the Ice Lake Hit section is actually just half of the book. The second half is really painfully lame. And the art is weirdly stiff and awkward, almost like old Doonesbury or something; the art in Golgo-13 always looks a little formal, but there are some serious issues of perspective and anatomy not usually present in the series. Maybe Saito was making use of the second-string protegés that month.
The story begins with Mr. Togo bagging himself a moose up in the Canadian wilderness. Despite the hunting guide's protests that the herd has been spooked and he could never possibly take down a skittish moose from half a mile away, Golgo manages to snipe not one but two, and all with a single shot.
For once, his ruthless accuracy works against him, since the hunting limit is one moose per hunter and some very earnest Mounties are patrolling nearby. They decide to arrest Golgo for poaching, despite the fact that his guide swears he fired only a single bullet. Their decision is helped along when Mr. Togo reflexively clocks the patrolman who approaches from behind -- his deadly talents working against him a second time in several pages. "Perfect machine" my butt.
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Katamari Akira
23 January 06 | 10:33 | Posted by:
Cross-posted from my 1UP blog, because I'm lame like that.
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Housekeeping
22 January 06 | 11:52 | Posted by:
I have lots of ambitions for this site, since it's been pretty much the one stable thing in my life over the past nine years (besides my family, I mean).
OK, stop laughing, "stable" wasn't the word I was looking for. I guess it's more that no matter what I do I always find myself turning back to this particular project and giving it another go, no matter how much I hate what I've done with it in the past. I guess when you're a relentless, nearly psychotic perfectionist this is the closest thing you can get to stability. The point is I've decided to face up to the fact that there's no escaping my compulsive need to write/draw/tear down a website and built it back up again. So, to that end, I've been tweaking it a lot lately and finally getting some content into the wiki section (you might know it better as "Articles").
You may notice one change in particular to the sidebar. This is known as a "show of good faith." Like I said, I have a lot of ambitions for this site, but before I move ahead with them I need to do some housekeeping first. Which means that before I start any huge new projects I need to clear out the old ones first.
Anyone care to open a betting pool on whether or not I can actually get Issue Six out by the end of spring?
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Almost Batgirl
19 January 06 | 23:50 | Posted by:
So anyway there's been this meme of sorts going around the Internet in which various comic artists offer up their own depictions of Batgirl. It is, generally speaking, pretty swell. But I've been reluctant to get involved because, as you've probably noticed, I'm not much of a comic artist and to toss my hat into an arena with people like Bruce Timm and Bryan Lee O'Malley would be pretty much an unforgivable act of arrogance. So I've decided to compromise by drawing a heroine better suited to my calibre of art:
Yeah, that's right. Squirrel Girl.
Big thanks to Nich for lending me his copy of GLA Disassembled so that I could appreciate the wonders of this fabulous super-heroine. For those unfamiliar (probably about everyone), she's a Steve Ditko creation, so beneath her ridiculous appearance there's probably some sort of deep metaphor for the plight of the proletarian or the triumph of Objectivism or something. I dunno, mostly I think it's awesome that even though her most impressive power is to talk to squirrels she was still able to take down Dr. Doom. If you ever wonder why Walt Simsonson retconned pretty much every appearance by Doom between 1964 and 1993 to be a Doombot, look no futher.
In the spirit of things, I did include a tiny reference to Batgirl, although it occured to me only after I watercolored the thing where the bat emblem is placed and the fact that Ms. Gordon is probably feeling a bit drafty as a result.
P.S. Yesterday's comic was the first time I've used watercolors in about six years so please don't hate me for my really horrible technique.
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Webcomix, Part -2
19 January 06 | 00:05 | Posted by:
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The Goondocks
17 January 06 | 21:00 | Posted by:
I don't know how you spent your weekend, but I spent part of mine in the sleepy little town of Goondocks.
The Goondocks, home to the events of The Goonies. Otherwise known as Astoria, Oregon.
If there were such a thing as a pilgrimage to Mecca for dorks who grew up in the '80s, I'd personally make a strong case for this particular trip to be granted the honors. Memorizing passages of Richard Donner's admittedly wretched kid-flick is a sort of rite of passage for us navel-gazing dopes who grew up in the Reagan era. So my trek to the Walsh homestead was a vaguely religious experience. Except that instead of kneeling in supplication to the place where a great prophet made proclamations, I took photos of the house where an asthmatic Samwise Gamgee grew up.
I probably should have taken a shot of Data's house next door, but without the dangerous zip line connecting the homes the magic just wasn't there.
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Webcomix, Part -1
16 January 06 | 23:22 | Posted by:
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State O' Things
12 January 06 | 13:30 | Posted by:
Hello, The Internets! Effective immediately (or at least as soon as your crappy DNS server bothers to propagate the information), this site now has a second URL: Gamespite.net. And there's a very good reason for that, which will become apparent, oh, one of these years. I found a bargain rate on domain name registration, so I have five years to make good on it. Of course, toastyfrog.com will work for at least another year and a half -- until the current registration runs out, at the very least -- so basically I'm just being redundant. Story of my life, really.
I'm off and away from the Internet this weekend, savoring the joys of a sleepy little town called Portland. Golgomania!! returns next week, along with other assorted nonsense that doesn't involve steely-eyed gunmen with a thing for slightly chunky blonde women. I'm not sure if anyone's noticed, but I'm making a sincere effort to restore a bit of this site's former quality (such as it was). It's really sort of embarrassing how run-down it's become in the past couple of years.
Try not to flame me too much while I'm away.
Edit: Er, to clarify, I'm not actually abandoning the name toastyfrog.com. "gamespite.net" is just a second link to tie into something I'll (hopefully) be getting underway in a while.
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Perfect Machine of Snipe, Pt. III
11 January 06 | 14:12 | Posted by:
First, two orders of business:
1. Today's entry continues the trend of being huge and image-centric, so I've moved a goodly chunk to an interior page. You can read it all by clicking the link at the bottom of this front-page prelude, or just click here.
2. toastyfrog.com is one of Google's top 10 results for "how to make someone else vomit." I win, Internet. I win so hard.
We now resume Golgomania (already in progress)
It stands to reason that after nearly 40 years of Golgo-13, not every episode is a winner. When your main character is a complete cipher of a killer whose range of emotion includes two stops -- stoic intensity and mild surprise -- there's only so much heartstring-tugging you can pull off. So just to be clear on the point, this isn't art. (Perhaps you're thinking of Electroplankton?)
Every chapter of Golgo-13 carries with it a minimal threshold of expectation. We always know that someone's gonna die, and somehow, Duke Togo's gonna get away with it... even if he has to break the Ridiculousness Barrier in the process.
Such is the case in the second volume of manga Lead translated back in 1986, Galinpero. Not once but twice the Inexorable G goes to utterly preposterous lengths to fulfill his contract. But it's OK, because in the end his victims remember to sputter, "This is no man! He is a demon/monster/entire Army regiment left to boil so long that it reduced down to a single man containing a lethal dose of regiment concentrate!"
So, you know, it's still pretty rad.
Galinpero
Galinpero is interesting for two reasons: It gives a small insight into what Golgo finds "acceptable terms" for taking a contract, and secondly it shows that he's so valuable to high-ranking members of the U.S. government for his ability to do their dirty work that they'll let him get away with pretty much any crap he wants to. He could probably punch the President in the face and Cheney would sputter, "Don't shoot! You're no match for this man. And who else can we hire to kill Michael Moore!?"
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Perfect Machine of Snipe, Part II
09 January 06 | 11:52 | Posted by:
Look up on these nerds, ye mighty, and despair. You'll probably despair over the image quality, too. Sorry, these are 20-year-old books printed on mediocre paper and my scanner is crap.
The Journey into Golgo begins here with "Into the Wolves Lair," the first Golgo-13 graphic novel to have been published into English. It was not, however, Duke Togo's first adventure, having been published in Japan some ten to 15 years after his 1968 debut. You can tell this is a late '70s/early '80s job because people keep name-dropping George Lucas (it's even a plot point) and there's a billboard for "The Star Wars III." So obviously this preceded 1983's Return of the Jedi, at which point most people looked at the Ewoks and said, "Oh wait, Lucas is actually a money-gobbling merchandise-creating hack and not in fact a latter-day genius."
Don't feel bad, we were all fooled.
I've only owned "Into the Wolves' Lair" for about three weeks, but it already holds a special place in my heart -- mainly for proving that I am not, in fact, completely delusional. Back around the time I discovered the Golgo milieu courtesy of an NES game that inexplicably had its controls reversed (stupid Vic Tokai, everyone knows A is for jump, not B) I saw this graphic novel promoted in a random gaming publication I was skimming through. A few weeks later I found the first comic-sized issue at the local convenience store and kept watching for this enticing chapter about taking down the Fourth Reich to show up as well... not realizing it had been published three years prior. Over the years I've checked price guides, comic shops and the whole of the Internet to confirm its existence, but no one ever seemed to know anything about it until I wandered across the official Golgo-13 web site, which has a tiny shrine set aside to the handful of related materials to have made it into English.
It took 15 years, but it's nice to learn I wasn't just imagining things as a kid. Now I just need a little reassurance about my current mental competence and I'll be set.
So, Golgo-13. Like I said before, he operates according to a strict (but as-yet-unrevealed) code of ethics; he never kills unless it's in self-preservation or to complete a contract, he only takes jobs from employers who play by his rules and always fulfills his task, and there are certain jobs he won't take. But he does at least pass the modern baseline moral test: He goes after Nazis with gusto. Everyone hates Nazis, except maybe the Nazis themselves, so that's good. It'd be kinda tough to take up the cause of a guy who ices people on Der Fuhrer's request.
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Perfect Machine of Snipe: Part the first
06 January 06 | 13:24 | Posted by:
In case you somehow missed me babbling about it a few weeks back, Viz Media will begin publishing an ongoing series of Golgo-13 graphic novels next month. This makes me very happy, because I've been wondering why (given the rising popularity of manga in the U.S.) Viz has completely disregarded one of the most enduring franchises ever. And, it should be noted, one of the first series it attempted to pubish back in the '80s when no one in America except Carl Macek and a handful of really, really scary people with an unhealthy fixation on the Dirty Pair cared about manga.
Everyone always seems surprised to find that I like Golgo-13. Given that he's an amoral, ruthless murderer whose treatment of women makes James Bond look like a staunch monogamist and all. Fair enough, since that's pretty much the exact opposite of my normal tastes... but Golgo-13 has history on his side. He's the Rolling Stones of manga; as far as I know Takao Saito's sniperiffic adventures are the longest-running manga series to be continuously serialized in Japan. It's a little daunting to see ten or 15 volumes of a given manga on the store shelves, to say nothing of Ranma (nearing the end of its run at 32 or so), but Golgo-13 is up to something like volume 135. That is an awful lot of precise headshots, and you have to respect that much killin' and shootin'.
More importantly, Golgo-13 was my introduction to manga. Plus it was a pretty decent NES game. Well, no, the NES game is kind of awful, but I still like it.
I've made it my mission to collect every single chapter of the manga published so far in the U.S. -- which, I recently learned, was actually quite a bit more than I originally realized. I'd picked up the first of the two comic-length issues Viz published back when I was in junior high, shortly after I picked up the NES game, and I collected the three-part squarebound "The Professional" miniseries (in which he killed an elderly Juan Peron) when it came out a year after that. Imagine my grim-faced delight when I discovered last month that Leed Publishing also translated four 168-page volumes of snipery back in the mid-80s.
Like it or not, I'm going to share them with you over the next month or so. I'm compelled, because Golgo-13 is awesome.
See, even these Mossad dudes agree, and they're hardcore. Especially the one whose fingernails were ripped out by Nazis.
In case you're not familiar with Golgo-13 -- aka Duke Togo -- he's a man of uncertain nationality with a vaguely Asian appearance that allows him to blend in with the natives in more than half the world. He's capable of speaking an unreasonable number of languages, has incredible physical prowess and can shoot anything that moves with 100% accuracy from ridiculous ranges. As the book says, he's the perfect machine of snipe, and his comics don't really have much dramatic tension since you know he's going to kill his target and escape alive; the appeal is mainly seeing what sort of elaborate situation Saito (or Saito's army of lackeys) is going to concoct for him and how he'll pull off the next impossible hit. His catchphrase is "....." and he operates according to a strict code -- if he takes a job, he'll kill anyone who jeopardizes his mission, but there are certain jobs he won't take, suggesting that maybe he's a swell guy underneath it all.
What a man of mystery! His name, adress and even his bone are indistinct! Please note this is from the very first volume of the series -- not only was he fairly talkative and even smirked sometimes, but he also hadn't settled on a number quite yet.
Anyway, brace yourself. There's plenty more of this nonsense on the way.
category: manga | forums |
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Wherefore art?
05 January 06 | 12:21 | Posted by:
There are just a few phrases that can knock gamers into an instant coma these days through force of their sheer oversaturated abuse over the past year or so.
- "Jack Thompson is on the rampage again..."
- "_______ is going to be a Halo/Zelda/GTA-killer!"
- "Hot Coffee."
But none of these phrases are more annoying and tiresome than the new poster child for posturing pseudo-intellectuals everywhere:
"Can games be art?"
Actually, the question itself isn't so bad, but the debate surrounding it is enough to send most people into a murderous rampage. What could be a valid analysis of the legitimacy of this burgeoning medium typically degenerates into a bunch of snotty kids calling Roger Ebert names and a handful of self-proclaimed intellectuals with no actual art education stroking their chins excitedly at the chance to use a lot of very large words. It would be too easy for them to offer a simple, empirical analysis, though, so they mostly talk about how Ico was all ethereal and made them so very sad, or how Rez made their pants throb even without the Trance Vibrator.
I'm glad Electroplankton has come along to put this ridiculous debate to rest. It's an authentic work of art, which means that games can be art, thanks. Here's my proof, derived from six long semesters of art history.
Electroplankton's designer and programmer, Toshio Iwai, is an award-winning fine artist who works in multimedia formats. Sound, visuals, even interactivity -- the same stuff Electroplankton offers. Iwai's other work is recognized as art by the stuffy types who make such arbitrary calls, so disregarding Electroplankton simply because it's presented in videogame form is so narrow-minded as to be downright churlish. And no one wants to be a churl.
II. Art can be mundane.
Boo hoo, it's a videogame, and you can buy videogames at Wal-Mart. Art could never be that gauche!
Yeah well, whatever. Marcel Duchamp poked a hole in that one almost 90 years ago when he presented "Fountain," which was simply a discarded urinal on which he had scrawled the words "R. MUTT 1917." Two years later he defaced a reproduction of the "Mona Lisa." It was not medium, technique or skill that made Duchamp's dadaist works art, but rather the creative intent behind the work.
Electroplankton's manual offers a brief dissertation by Iwai on his inspirations and ambitions with the game, all of which are sufficiently high-minded (a synthesis of audio-visual experiences based on microscopes and Famicoms, etc. etc.) to place the game in the same genre as "Every Shot, Every Episode." If Huggy Bear and a toilet can be art, then by all means, so can Loomiloop and Tracey.
Besides, you can't buy Electroplankton at Wal-Mart... just Target and online. It's classy. And if you really need the extra validation, send your copy of the game to me with an SASE and I'll scrawl "R. MUTT 2005" on it for you.
III. Art can be mass-produced.
One might argue that the merit of works like "Fountain" and "Every Shot, Every Episode" (as well as the works of other multimedia artists like Nam Jun Paik) is due in part to the uniqueness of those works -- they exist as single installations. Electroplankton, on the other hand, is a mass-manufactured consumer product churned out by the thousands, and even the original game was the collaborative creation of a team of programmers and artists working with Iwai.
The corpse of Andy Warhol laughs in your face. His works like "Marilyn" were mass-produced, frequently by people working for Warhol rather than by the artist himself. This doesn't make his work any less valuable -- any one of the countless silkscreens produced under Warhol's supervision is worth tens of thousands of dollars and would proudly be displayed by any art museum.
"But videogames don't move me." Congratulations, you didn't cry when Aerith died and you think Lumines is boring. Aren't you manly? Well done. Me, I don't really find my heart atremble when I look at pretty much any American art prior to the 20th Century, but if I were to walk up to a curator and demand he remove Whistler's Mother from his collection I'd probably be shot on sight. Disregarding a piece of art because you don't get it puts you in the same category as those who laughed at Monet's "unfinished" paintings or the jarring chaos of Picasso's first forays into cubism. These days we call them "MORANS." (We used to call them "morons" but the Internet has knocked the collective I.Q. of humanity down a few digits and we don' rite so good no more.)
In any case, I've found Electroplankton to be entrancing, so it still meets this particular proof. Sorry if you're too thick to get it, though.
V. This is stupid, shut up already.
Well, that's what I've been saying all along.
Anyway, Electroplankton fits every definition of art, so it's art. And a game. Which means that by the Transitive Property of Have a Little Common Sense You Idiot, games can be art.
As for my next trick? I'll be sorting out the world peace thing.
category: games | forums |
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Big radness in little Chinatown
04 January 06 | 12:30 | Posted by:
I don't sing the praises of San Francisco's Chinatown often enough on this blog, so it's time to rectify that problem. Not only is Chinatown (and its various spinoffs, including Inner Richmond's Clement St. and the Outer Sunset's Irving St.) a source for delicious, inexpensive food, oversized Piyo-Piyo dolls and cheap housewares of suspicious origins, it's also a great place to get back in touch with your childhood.
Who could forget the heartwarming exploits of A. A. Milne's Pooh-Pooh, here depicted in loving detail on a small coin purse?
And this fantastic coin wallet rekindles old memories of hours spent by the fireside reading about the comical adventures of Deformed Snoopy (and all the Deformed Peanuts gang).
And let's not forget that most famous of Japanese sentai superheroes, Superman.
God bless you, Chinatown. May your goodness shine brightly forever. Even the dim sum.
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How I spent my Christmas vacation
03 January 06 | 19:12 | Posted by:
(And by "vacation" I mean "tiny bonus check.")
My love of tiny, shiny things and florid art featuring black-lipped girly-men got the best of me and I crumbled. I bought a Final Fantasy IV limited edition Game Boy Micro. I'm sort of ashamed, but it's so rad I can't feel all that terrible. I know, I should have used the money to help subsidize world peace or something. But, oh well, pretty Amano pictures framing dated video games is probably a better investment than some sort of global utopia anyway. A happy world is a boring world!
Also, I should note that in 1UP's end-of-year wrap-up I offhandedly commented that the Xbox 360 power brick is big enough to hold a dozen GB Micros. In fact, I made a comparison today and it turns out it's only big enough to hold eleven. I regret the error.
I should also note that if the above image appears out-of-focus, it's not a reflection on my inadequacies as a photographer. It's, uh, heat distortion from the sizzling-hot adapter warping the images. Yeah.
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katamary magnacy
02 January 06 | 13:29 | Posted by:
My sister made me a set of Katamari Damacy magnets for my birthday last year -- the King of All Cosmos, the hapless Prince and half a dozen of his royal cousins, all depicted with loving care via the woefully underappreciated medium of Shrinky-Dinks. They currently adorn the metal drawers behind my desk at work, where they are loved by all who see them.
Imagine my surprise when I visited my sister's apartment over the Christmas break and discovered she's been holding out on me. At some point she made herself a complete set of cousins. Needless to say, it's a pretty awe-inspiring sight.
Apparently the process of making them is fairly time-consuming, which is why I only have a "best of" sampler. Her next project is to create magnets for the We <3 Katamari characters as well, but it's a fairly daunting task and she keeps balking. I tried telling her about the eight new royal cousins in the PSP game but for some reason she clamped her hands over her ears and shouted "LA LA LA NOT LISTENING."
Too bad these are so difficult to make. She could totally go into business selling these things and make that katamari hat chick cry in defeat.
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mega auldlangsynoid
01 January 06 | 17:52 | Posted by:
The Gyroids would dearly love to wish you a Happy New Year.
They'd love to, but they can't. Because they're coming for you next. Chance are that your new year will be short and not very happy. Still, do try to make the most of what you have.
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