• I’ve written twice on the BoingBoing subject. I haven’t really changed my point of view on BoingBoing proper, but its increasing number of franchises has offered some areas of interests. BoingBoing Gadgets is a reminder of the earlier, more focused BoingBoing proper, but now the new BoingBoing Offworld is entirely gaming focused. The enormity of the BoingBoing brand is sudden and a little disturbing, but Offworld has already formed links with Rock Paper Shotgun and other folks in the biz, and it’ll be interesting to see how it goes.
• A rare political moment: this “visual guide to the economic crisis” was, I thought, a pretty good summation for people still trying to juggle all of the elements in their head. And while it’s certainly not comics, there’s a certain thematic link to my last column, about charts and timeflow.
• Everyone’s linking to this article, and it’s obvious why from the title alone: “Who Stole My Volcano? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dematerialization of Supervillain Architecture.” And speaking of “supervillain architecture,” check this out: I’m noting it for reference, for my current project, but… Lilypad, the floating city for ecological refugees. Stunning! And combine it with Google’s plan for floating data centers… everyone’s already seen the “real life road to the underworld,” so maybe this will be new for you?
• Leigh Walton of Top Shelf, in response to my last column at THND, linked to his own article on the “Big Kids Table” discussion, and he had this fantastic image macro:

• In lighter news: clowns vs. mimes: to the death!
• In less light news: Game reviewing is utterly fucked.
• And one enormous article on how Manga became a global cultural product. Whew!

Anyway, links aside: I’m getting deluged with comment spam. Swifty suggested a plugin which I’ll try to look at as soon as I’m able. I’m also looking for a new template: this site is dreary and a chore to scroll through. Anyone with suggestions, feel free to make a note in the comments.

Anyone who’s followed this site for a while knows Thanksgiving is Patch Brennan Day. I’ll be keeping my head down and out of site, so I hope you all have a happy holiday.

Boy, it’s late. I need to get back to work!

Savage Critic Abhay Khosla has apparently been reading my column over at THND, and posted a link to Column #4, the most recent installment, up at the Image Comics Forums - and Dirk Deppey felt it was Journalista!-worthy (note: find it down towards the bottom of the post)!

[[Edit: Whoops, apparently Abhay has been talking me up at Ivan Brandon's board earlier than that: "The first entry was a little stuffy, but this 3rd one's all about videogames, Ellis, superhero comics, fan relationships with superhero comics, videogame criticism, etc. It's all over the map, in the nicest of ways-- a nice piece of work. If you like reading that sort of thing. "]]

Khosla:

“I continue to enjoy / be impressed with the House Next Door’s comics column. This installment is all about the relationship of comics to cartography…? I don’t agree with all of it, but I really like how willing he is to try to wrap his arms around everything all at once, cramming opinions into every nook and cranny. I don’t quite understand the point of many of the digressions, but… I like digressions so…”

Deppey:

“A lengthy and absorbing essay on how juxtaposition and page design affect the reader’s perception of time.”

I’m flattered! Surely I’m all but “broken in” to comics now, right? Guys?

I failed to get much up on the site, at all, over the length of my vacation. You do have a new column at the House to read, as I just posted, but my long-standing and overdue posts have gone unattended.

That’s because I’ve been pushing to get my new project off the ground. I finished the fifth comic script of a new project this week - with full thanks to D. Edward Sauve for some vital groundwork (we went two different ways with the project). As Edward’s page states, the project is licensed under Creative Commons, so I’m likely to put the scripts up here eventually - but I’d like to get a little further along, refine what I have, and start talking to artists before I give every bit of it away.

That said, I’m definitely working, not wasting, so keep checking back! I hope to get some stuff rolling along shortly.

Huizenga is perhaps the great humanist of the “indie cartoonists” (Los Bros Hernandez does a different sort of work, and I tend to count them separately despite their general brilliance)—his work has the clean lines and formal experimentation of Ware with a more full-bodied emotional range. Curses, his one hardcover collection, is focused on wanting children and losing them, and despite the pain inherent in the story is at times very funny, very moving, and even occasionally creepy. When it comes to formalism—and the cartography of time—however, you can draw a line from Ware’s history diagrams to Huizenga’s short story “Time Travelling.”

Studs was a giant amongst men - but he always walked among us, always bent down to take our hands and to listen to the lowest of us from his great height. The world is so much poorer for his passing.

But we lost someone else this week, and I in no way want to demean the memory of these two great men in talking about this…

@MarsPhoenix announced that its time had come. She might flicker on and off a bit in the next few weeks, but winter is here and she’s been powered down - it’s likely for the last time.

I wasn’t sure that I’d even know what to write here. Thankfully, my friend and fellow blogger T.M. Camp found words - very well-chosen words - to pay her proper respect. Go read his own comments, they’re better than whatever I’ll say.

I’ve spoken before on my frustration with people’s apathy for space. As though exploration and discovery are somehow mutually exclusive with domestic reform, or as though science has yet to benefit from what we’ve learned out there. And it’s hard, these days, to put much faith in NASA, I’m first to admit: too many accidents, too many oversights, too many embarrassments. A broken-down astronaut in a diaper with a gun? Goddammit.

But @MarsPhoenix was a reminder just how special, how important, how valuable, how amazing this all is. She was, for lack of better words, a beacon of hope. It’s funny, calling the little robot spacecraft a “she,” but the little lab that could was very much a she, so perfectly anthropomorphized and personified through the voice of the NASA employee who spoke for her.

She could be very funny: “brb, sandstorm.” And she took joy in everything she did. And she found ice, she found salt. How monumental is that?

Thousands of people followed her twitter log, asked her questions about how she worked, what she was discovering, and what it meant. Thousands of people, inspired by space. Look what you did, girl.

Her siblings and cousins are still out there, still discovering and still reporting. But she was the most charming, and she was the first.

NASA and Wired have been running a contest, to provide her with an epitaph. My contribution: “I’ll see you when you get here.” And we will.

Praise is already coming in, including very flattering words from House editor emeritus, filmmaker, and former New York Times critic Matt Zoller Seitz, easily one of the smartest guys I know:

“This is an amazing piece, monumental not just in its length but in the richness of its arguments and the breadth of its interests. It actually makes me feel kind of ashamed for not paying closer attention to comics…”

If you can stand listening to me rant for that long, I’m pretty proud of how this came out.

The next installment, on mapmaking, “The big kids table,” and the alternative comics that you should be reading, will be much shorter.

Next up: Vacation begins tonight at midnight - expect slightly more traffic from me around here, as promised - but I’m also going to try to script the unrealistic goal of 200 comic pages before my nine days are up. Join me in going crazy!

From Money and the Crisis of Civilization, via Slashdot:

… To understand it, let’s get clear on what constitutes a “good” or a “service.” In economics, these terms refer to something that is exchanged for money. If I babysit your children for free, economists don’t count it as a service. It cannot be used to pay a financial debt: I cannot go to the supermarket and say, “I watched my neighbor’s kids this morning, so please give me food.” But if I open a day care center and charge you money, I have created a “service.” GDP rises and, according to economists, society has become wealthier. …

Essentially, for the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based) money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship must be monetized. For example, thirty years ago most meals were prepared at home; today some two-thirds are prepared outside, in restaurants or supermarket delis. A once unpaid function, cooking, has become a “service”. And we are the richer for it. Right?

Another major engine of economic growth over the last three decades, child care, has also made us richer. We are now relieved of the burden of caring for our own children. We pay experts instead, who can do it much more efficiently.

In ancient times entertainment was also a free, participatory function. Everyone played an instrument, sang, participated in drama. Even 75 years ago in America, every small town had its own marching band and baseball team. Now we pay for those services. The economy has grown. Hooray.

The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item. …

• 24-Hour Comics Day is today! Are you participating? Sadly, I am not. Events beyond my control are keeping me out of the game today - but, it’s our intention to do the deed next weekend, instead - sadly detatched from the larger comics community, but still fun nonetheless. Depending on how events play, I may live-tweet the event. Check the feed widget in the sidebar next weekend to see!
• Also next Saturday: the first annual Windy City Comicon - Chicago’s best come out for a day’s worth of comic talk, merchandising, and rowdy behavior. Of particular note: the folks behind Chicago: 1968 will be in attendance, including writer (and Friend of PE) Len Kody. The con is right over in Wrigleyville - maybe we’ll sneak out for an hour or two of break during the 24-Hour festivities?
• This week: if all goes according to plan, Comics Column #3 should be up over at The House Next Door.  I need to finish the last segments, give it a once over, and scan some pics. Should hopefully be done by Monday, and then the column will (I think) be up on Wednesday.
• The first week of November, I’ll be on vacation from the day job - so (God willing) all week will be full of heavy updating, including a return to some of the features that I’ve let languish over the last month or so. We’ll get back to the “Transformers” Replay, the Princesses, GAINAX, “Scramble City,” ohgodI’msobehind…
• I spoke to some folks here and there about some new guestblogs - those will hopefully be appearing soon, as well.

Stay tuned for more updates this weekend!

Mother 3, the sequel to the legendary SNES RPG Earthbound, has been something of a holy grail for US gamers. Folks have lobbied Nintendo for years for a US release of the game, but Earthbound was never a great-selling game, despite its cult status - even Smash Bros. players will tell you that the series is largely an afterthought, even in that game’s canon-porn content. These diligent hackers have been working at this for years themselves, and it’s been a long and laborious process - translating all the text for a JRPG alone is a Herculean endeavor.

I entreat my game-playing readers to obtain a ROM (legally, I’m sure) of the game and apply the patch so that they can finally get the story of Lucas and Claus in full.

***

In other news - The Boston Phoenix recently ran a contentious list of the best bosses in video game history… every top anything list, ever, is largely just an excuse to provoke online argument, and a rather easy one at that, but the list isn’t wholly terrible. I’m pleased someone remembered the Colossi, and Metal Man is a suitably off-beat-yet-oddly-appropriate choice for “Mega Man representation,” but what pleased me is that SHODAN beat out bishounen heartthrob Sephiroth for the not-really-coveted #1 title. You can tell that it was, at least, an actual gamer over fourteen years old who wrote the list. That said, much of it is full of the very obvious standards.

How’d you rank your own list?