welcome to the compound
Miscellanous posts, shop talk.
Buff, buff, buffing along. Okay, so I only have about 1 and a half pages to show for the extended break, but if I keep rolling at this rate, I’ll be easily set. Dare I say it, I’m getting into the vibe of my own universe again!
Hopefully when next I post here it will either be with a new theme and/or the year in review piece. KANGEKI! GO, GO, GO NEXT ZONE
I’d really like to hear the explanation for why Cartoon Network STILL prefers to show 70’s Scooby reruns to classic Looney Tunes during the dead portions of the day. Currently playing is that one where they’re driving all over Chinatown while generic hippy music plays as usual- in fact, the exact song parodied in that one Johnny Bravo cartoon.
It’s hard to say if the old cartoons are more or less palatable than the new direct-to-video movies that they’ve taken to airing just as frequently. At least in the old ones they don’t bludgeon you with an almost offensively stupid version of Fred while making Daphne out to be a genius martial artist (the better to undermine Fred’s only other attribute, his ‘muscle’) TV star, surpassed only by Velma in wits. It’s better than her being perpetually-posed eye candy in a Crayola dress like before, but was it really necessary to make the former alpha male hideously stupid (which started seemingly in the 80’s “WHAT IF THEY WERE KIDS edition.) Make ’em all smart, why not. We’ve demeaned stoner hippies for too long. You can’t make Scooby-Doo funny in any way, shape or form anyway, so it’s no big loss to sacrifice the backup doofus.
I should probably get back to work before this starts sounding like Bizarro Crimitism.
RK will be back next week, as previously/vaguely implied, I’m taking the hiatus week I skipped between 13 and 14 to make up for the reboot. Don’t worry though, I’m getting way ahead in penciling, which should be good as far as avoiding so many delays once we resume with track 15.
As tempting as it is to, you know, fucking nuke everything and start it over again.
I was an avid follower of Your Webcomic Is Bad(…) when they were updating, and as someone drawing something easy to dismiss as an ‘animu bullshit’ comic, naturally every so often it would make me stop and think about what traps I do and don’t fall into. I’m glad so many people have given me good feedback, by which I clarify, regardless of positivity or negativity, points out a direction in which to improve.
One time I posted a page on 4chan in hopes of attracting the maybe two people there who actually do real critiques. For the most part, it was, as in their native tongue, FAIL. The most generous comment was something along the lines of “The first panel looks okay, then you stopped trying.” Which really, pretty much hit the nail on the head.
It’s pretty clear that lately I’ve been going more experimental as far as trying new art styles, be they the ultra-ultra thick look I went with for a while, the ‘blobby lineless’ style, or going back to normal for the end of the chapter. I kinda liked that style, but it was pretty easy to get sloppy with. I’m starting the next chapter in a similar manner, I think, but only if the first page looks good enough, otherwise it goes right back to the regular ink style.
Anywho. I’ll start off with the traditional three a week thing when i get back to it.
In other news: LET’S BIBLE!
I’ve been toying with what iPhone commercials refer to as the ‘kinda-sorta’ Internet, testing out the browsers on both my new Pantech phone and PSP. I’m fairly content to say that 3/2’s actual blog updates display pretty well on the phone, even though it pretty much parses everything to plain text. It loads faster and reads easier than pretty much everything else I frequent (displaying Gamespite for some reason forces me to scroll past a huge, empty box.) One thing that irks me is the device’s refusal to display nearly any images- while nice for speed concerns, it leaves you pretty effed in the absence of alt tags. At any rate, even if I am pretty late to the party, being able to change my ringtone to the Goldion Hammer theme from GaoGaiGar or putting Gunbuster wallpapers on the thing is pretty sweet.
Couple articles coming soon. Poking away at the Year in Review thing a bit at a time, and I think I’ll be doing a rare ‘Analog Gaming’ review on Heroscape; I’ve gotten to play with friends a few times now and it seems to be catching on. Spread the joy, and all. Last night playing against classmate and frequent warez hookup Jake, it dawned on me that there were in fact, actual tactics at play and I could pinpoint the exact turn I boned myself in.
With the onslaught of games that came out at October’s end, I haven’t really had time to review (or really start, in the case of Front Mission) any of the titles I was worked up about. I’m in the thick of Mega Man ZX Advent, and I have to say the tweaks added are giving me a love/hate thing for the game. While it is cool to shapeshift into bosses, most of the Repliroid forms are redundant at best and downright crippling at their worst (Chronoforce’s time slower is nice and all, but he plain CAN’T move on land, instead lurching slightly and making a pathetic grunting sound, for example.) I find myself using the more traditional “Model” forms a lot more. I think i prefer ZX’s idea to remove speech entirely to either version’s voiceover tracks- though hearing Ashe’s English voice yell “It’s over!” every time you use a charge shot easily pushes the local edition a few more feet past the line. That and the random, nonsensical name changes. At this point I think Capcom’s just addicted to them.
Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations is… more Phoenix Wright goodness. If you don’t ‘get it’ yet, you’re probably not going to, and I pity you. Probably the best installment of the three, including the odd, out of place 300 reference. Features a woman who is such a total bitch, she doesn’t even let dying get in the way of further bitchitude.
Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness is a solid, more or less direct port of the original, though I wish some of the later Nippon Ichi game elements had been incorporated into it (healers gaining EXP for healing being a big one) They added a recordkeeper to track what percentage of items you’ve collected thus far, among other things, and ways to change the theme music to Item World. Multiplayer has also been added though I’ve yet to try it. The biggest new addition by far is Etna Mode, an extra scenario that shows what would have happened if, at the game’s beginning, Etna went ahead and shot the Prince in the head. It’s quite a bit shorter than the main game, but pretty funny stuff.