loonyblog.

One of the unfortunate side effects of my new job at Rockstar is that it’s all the way downtown, far away from my beloved Midtown Comics. There’s pretty much no decent comic shop that’s particularly close to Rockstar. The closest ones are Village Comics and St. Mark’s Comics, both of which (as I’ve said before), I find to be utterly reprehensible. Forbidden Planet is relatively close as well, but even that is too far away to go after work, as it’s in the wrong direction for me.

So anyway, I’ve been exploring other ways to get my weekly comics. Midtown offers a home-delivery subscription service, which would be ideal for me, except they require 15 monthly books just to sign up. I think at the absolute most (including books I pick up every now and then), I can think of 12 monthly books I buy. But my core group is around 8 – 10. I can always opt to pick up the books in person every week and bypass that minimum number, but the problem there is simply that Times Square is really far out of my way from Brooklyn.

I’ve looked at a couple of the web-based subscription services, but I haven’t been blown away by what I’ve seen. Mile High Comics seems to have the best mail-order service, but their web design circa ‘96 is really off-putting to me. mycomicshop.com seems like they might be okay, but I can’t tell if I can subscribe to specific books or if I have to pick the ones I want every single month (which would be a real pain, since I just buy the same ones every month anyway). One problem with both of these services is that they’re located outside New York, which means it’ll take about a week for me to get these books. With Midtown Comics, I’d get them within a day or two.

And then there’s the final option, subscribing directly from DC Comics (I only buy DC/Vertigo books on a monthly basis). This might work, but the problem there is that I’d have to pay for a year’s worth of comics all at once (and that’s really a lot of money), and also that the subscription services all offer some form of discount where DC largely does not (on the other hand, DC doesn’t charge for shipping).

So I’m a bit befuddled here. I inquired at Midtown today, and that 15 books a month figure is totally locked in, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Anyone have any advice?

This was sort of inevitable, but the popularity of television boxed sets on DVD has led to some questionable releases. Now don’t get me wrong here…I love my TV boxed sets. I love that I own the full run of Deep Space Nine, a soon-to-be-complete collection of Babylon 5, and the good years of Buffy (seasons 1 – 3). But those are all episodic TV shows. I own some others, like the complete Critic boxed set (whee!), the full Monty Python uberset, I, Claudius and the Simpsons sets that have come out, but I don’t really see any particular reason for owning actual sitcoms on DVD, particularly when they’re in syndication and the DVDs don’t contain much in the way of extras.

The overwhelming popularity of something like Friends or Everybody Loves Raymond sort of ensured their release (and there are sets of Seinfeld coming in the next year). But how well do you think the first season of the Dick Van Dyke Show is selling? Okay, okay that has the classic audience, and they’ll buy anything. How about Party of Five: Season One? Oh right…Neve Campbell’s hot. Okay, how about Little House on the Prairie: Season Four? Or Felicity: Season One?

Those not good enough for you? How about Saved by the Bell: Seasons 1 & 2, The Best of Laugh-In or Sanford & Son: The Complete Fourth Season? And you really know they’re scraping the barrel when Good Times: The Complete Second Season is available (I guess the first season sold well enough to warrant a sequel). And let’s be honest here: who really loves Gumby enough to shell out $100 for a seven disc boxed set?

Clearly these shows all have enough of an audience to warrant these boxed sets…I mean, I guess there are a lot of people who would wonder why on earth anyone would want the complete collection of The Critic…but I think that’s easier to justify than some of the above mentioned shows. I would hope The Critic is outselling Good Times. Good lord do I ever hope so.

The first of two short films starring Jerry Seinfeld and Superman has been posted at the American Express site. There were some commercials with the two a while back, but this is much longer (about four minutes long), and while some of it could probably have been trimmed a bit, it’s really quite entertaining. Which is odd since it’s basically just a shill for Amex.

As far as the Superman depiction, like the original Amex commercials, this is based after the Curt Swan-era Superman (my favorite by a huge margin), and the voice is provided by Patrick Warburton, who was the voice of Superman in the older commercials. Personally, I think Warburton made a better Tick than Superman (his voice is just too goofy for my taste) but this is played for laughs, so I suppose it’s good enough.

Anyway, it’s worth checking out. It’s goofy, and just a four minute credit card commercial, but it’s done with reverence and respect, which is a lot more than you can say about some superhero movies.

We’ve made the announcement over at Shacknews: I’m leaving to go work for Rockstar Games/Take Two Interactive. As I’m sure you can imagine, this is a really, really, really big change for me.

My letter to the Shacknews community lays out pretty much all the details, but as far as this site is concerned, there shouldn’t be any real difference. I won’t discuss anything related to my job here, but anything else is still fair game.

It’s sort of a relief to be announcing this. For the last couple of days I’ve felt a bit guilty, as if I were hiding something from the Shack community. Anyway, go read the announcement, and if you have questions, I’ll answer them here or in the comments over there.

Who’d have thought that American sign language would ever be bitten by the politically correct bug? From this week’s issue of the wonderful World Wide Words newsletter:

As every deaf person knows, signing is not just a shorthand to aid comprehension, but a series of fully developed languages with their own grammars, dialects and slangs, and which evolve over time. In a development that echoes debate in the USA over the nature of some signs, it has been reported this week thatVee-TV, a programme for deaf people made by the British TV station Channel 4, has banned certain signs because they might be thought racist or homophobic. The Daily Telegraph said that: “The abandoned signs include ‘Jewish’, in which a hand mimes a hooked nose; the sign for ‘gay’, a flick of a limp wrist; and ‘Chinese’, in which the index fingertips pull the eyes into a slant. Another dropped sign is that for ‘Indian’, which is a finger pointing to an imaginary spot in the middle of a forehead.” These signs have been replaced with others considered inoffensive. Some critics are said to feel that the ban is a form of discrimination against the culture of deaf people.

Here’s a wild sculpture for you…

An artist (who also was behind the “Fake Screenshot Contest” exhibition) has created a foam resin sculpture based on the character model in Quake III Arena modeled after engine programmer John Carmack. This is really a clever little project, as it’s a sculpture based on a 650 polygon model, not the actual person. This gives the model a unique look. Here’s a quick glimpse (check out the artist’s site for more pictures):

There’s a great interview up at Comic Book Resources today with Eddie Berganza, the editor of the Superman line at DC Comics. There are big changes coming next month, and he talks about this bold new direction, and surprisingly, it’s more or less in line with what I had hoped. I say “more or less”, because there are some areas I’m a bit troubled by.

The good news, is that Berganza wants to restore Superman to his former glory, emphasizing the larger-than-life character instead of the futuristic city and cosmic enemies we’ve had for the last few years. That really is good news, and it’s nice to hear.

My biggest concern is the involvement of Brian Azzarello on Superman. I liked the first two 100 Bullets collections, and I agree that Azzarello is a talented writer…but on Superman? Before reading his run on Batman I’d have thought this would be a bold, but encouraging decision. But Azzarello’s run on Batman has been just awful…filled with unlikable characters, little-if-any connection to the Bat-continuity and bad, bad dialogue.

Also of concern is Berganza’s statement that Adventures of Superman will be “pulp fiction” style (referring to the old digests, not the movie). The idea that the book will show a “gritty version of Metropolis” is a bit suspect. But it could be really cool. We’ll see.

Generally speaking though, I’m looking forward to this revamp. I’m enough of a doe-eyed fan that I’ll keep reading it no matter how bad it gets, but I’d rather it get better, not worse.

MoveOn, the great grassroots organization that’s already done some amazing things, has started a new campaign to raise funds for a new advertisement that will spread the word about the revelations from Richard Clarke’s new book, including this quote:

Frankly, I find it outrageous that a president is running for re-election on the grounds that he’d done such great things on terrorism. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11

It’s a worthy cause. Read the storyboards for the proposed ad, and donate if you can.

The battle over gay marriage took a turn for the surreal yesterday, when Benton County in Oregon banned all marriage, gay or straight, until they can decide what to do about this issue. This is the same county that had originally planned to hand out marriage licenses this week to same-sex couples, so this was their temporary reaction to that.

The funny thing of course is that groups that support same-sex marriages are happy that they’re treating everyone equally. Which I suppose is true…it’s not discrimination if all people, gay or straight, are denied the right to marry.

Perhaps this is the solution states have been waiting for…ban marriage outright, and you won’t have to worry about gay couples destroying the sanctity of marriage! Even better, divorce won’t be an issue, nor will bigamy, adultery, or any of the other sinful practices that threaten marriage!

From Fatman Games’ exhaustive preview of World of WarCraft:

Remember that magic you felt the first time you clicked with EverQuest?

Nope.

I’ve played every single Blizzard game since the original WarCraft (including all the expansion packs), consider WarCraft II to be among my favorite games of all time, and I’m not looking forward to this game in the slightest.

It’s not that I don’t think Blizzard can make a quality MMO (if anyone can, I think it’s Blizzard) but I just don’t care about massively multiplayer games. They bore me to tears. I’m on Blizzard’s press list, which means I’m in the beta test and will receive a review copy when the game ships…but I just don’t care about this one.

Truth be told, I was looking forward to WarCraft Adventures more than I am WoW. That game never really looked very good at all, and admittedly this is only because Infocom vet Steve Meretzky was brought in to save it towards the end (sadly he failed and it was canceled).

I hate to be a bitter gaming fan, but even though I recognize that there are going to be a lot of people who love WoW and play it for many, many, many years, the fanboi in me wishes Blizzard hadn’t devoted so much of their time to this project. MMOs are huge undertakings, and I’d much rather have seen a StarCraft, WarCraft or Diablo sequel instead. That’s not to say that none of those won’t happen, but the push to concentrate on WoW didn’t help.

For the record though, I do think it’s really, really, really cool that even World of WarCraft is going to be a hybrid Mac/PC release. That’s really quite amazing. Even the beta is cross-platform!