Jason, “Hey, Wait” and “Sshhhh!”

 Posted by (Visited 5918 times)  Reading
Nov 162005
 

A while back I was lucky enough to meet Jim Lee, he of comics fame. We got to talking comics (of course) and I told him that I wasn’t much for the superhero stuff anymore. When I was a kid, yeah — it was all about JLA, Spidey, a little bit of X-Men (I kinda had a crush on Dazzler), Batman of course, and even some of the old 40’s Wonder Woman stories that I got in a tattered used paperback. I was also growing up outside the country, so I was heavily into Asterix, Tintin, the Marsupilami and the Moomins, Mafalda (finally available in English!!), and of course Valerian and his sidekick Laureline. Most of these latter ones are largely ignored in the States — it’s only recently that Valerian has gotten an English translation, for example.

But then, a long hiatus, unbroken until my buddies in college turned me onto Watchmen and Sandman (which was then being released, one excruciating issue at a time, and which they kindly let me read issue by issue out of the polyethylene bags, no doubt ruining their collectible value). Because of them, I read Rude & Baron’s Nexus and Moore’s Swamp Thing and Miracleman runs, Ostrander’s Grimjack, and a host of others that let me know that comics had grown up a little bit while I wasn’t looking.

Nowadays, if I read comics, it’ll be Gaiman and Moore (and yeah, there’s superheroes in Top Ten), or stuff like Maus, Persepolis, Blankets by Craig Thompson, or Jimmy Corrigan. But not much of the sort of thing that Jim draws himself, at least as I understand it.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, of course, to learn that an accomplished comics artist is also a fan of all sorts of comics. So in the mail one day, I get a package with a bunch of comics that he thought I’d like. And the first ones I read were two by a Norwegian artist named Jason.

I don’t think I can summarize these. After I read them I just sort of stared at them in disbelief. Jason draws anthropomorphic animals with almost no expression on their faces. He uses a thick, rough line. The books aren’t in color. Lots of repeated panels.

And Hey, Wait… will just about tear your heart out in 64 efficient pages. It’s about friendship, about childish daring and peer pressure, about regret and loss, about how one incident can transform a life, about the way a memory can reshape every event that occurs and cast it in a different light. I don’t think it would work as a poem or a short story–it would come across as trite. But panel by panel, the artistry mounts until you reach the unbearable conclusion.

Sshhhh! is more of a set of connected stories, ones that look at a life from different angles. They’re excellent, though not quite at the heights of Hey, Wait, which is simply one of the best comics I have ever read.

In one way, though, it reminds me of how I felt when I finished watching Grave of the Fireflies — I am not quite sure I want to read it again. Not quite that bad, but getting there.

Worth taking a look, even if you’ve given up on the funnybooks. Thanks, Jim.

Blue world

 Posted by (Visited 13620 times)  Game talk
Nov 152005
 

Everyone doesn’t really want games that appeal to women. Everyone really just wants women to play their games. Otherwise, wouldn’t everyone be specifically looking to hire females to be on the design team, or to take more chances when it comes to design? — Xanthippe, on f13.net.

Once upon a time there was a world where half of the population couldn’t see the color blue. Painters got very frustrated when people kept asking them to paint their house the color of the sky, or of water, because they couldn’t see blue, most of them, and they didn’t know what was being asked for.

The painter’s union started having seminars on blue. “Sort of greenish, but with less yellow in it.”

The painter trade association was very surprised when something sort of purplish sold very well, and immediately started measuring the red quotient in it.

A lot of fans of painting said that it didn’t matter, because blue was sissy anyway, and not real painting.

But the people who could see blue kept insisting that blue was all around them, if only they would look and see.

So a few of the painter companies tried hiring some of the folks who could see blue. They quickly complained that other workers were painting over their blue all the time, because they couldn’t see it. “Outline it in yellow?” they were told. Or, “Are you sure there’s really blue out there? Because we see no evidence of it, and market research says that there aren’t any blue paintings that sell.” A lot of them never got hired, because it was figured that if they were crazy enough to want to paint with blue, they’d probably make bad employees.

A lot of the folks who could see blue ended up doing other things with paint instead–calligraphy, or graphic design. Nobody really noticed that they used blue like crazy, so it was only the painting industry that had a limited market.

Eventually, though, it was noticed that over time, everyone gets to see blue–the folks who didn’t see it tended to start seeing it as they got older. But then they had trouble working in the painting industry too, because they were too old, and their paintings didn’t have enough red and yellow in them, and were “too subdued for the market.”

In the end, the anti-blue brigades even got the industry to the point where the top sellers were only certain shades of yellow and red and green.

The conclusion, of course, was inevitable. Painting was probably inherently incompatible with blue. There was never a market for blue. Those blue-seers who worked with paints adapted in order to make a living.

And that’s why in that world there tend to be very few seascapes or pictures of puffy clouds.

Whither Online?

 Posted by (Visited 6622 times)  Game talk
Nov 142005
 

I’m working on getting some of the stuff that hasn’t been on the site put up in the next few days. As part of converting over the KGC talk (still coming shortly) I also came across this opinion piece, which appeared in Game Informer a while back. So it’s now on the site in the Gaming/Essays section.

Anyone remember what cyberspace looked like a decade ago? There we were, all fresh arrivals in the Metaverse, dreaming of Snow Crash’s virtual bars and William Gibson’s skies like televisions on dead channels. We wondered if the Holodeck would require one of those newfangled 3d hardware video cards or not. If we were really old-school sci-fi fans, maybe we thought about Bradbury’s Veldt or Vernor Vinge’s “True Names.”

Back then, we dreamed about dynamic worlds that we could morph on the fly with a thought (or at least a twitch of a mouse). We had a lot of grand visions about really realistic NPCs that would move about the world like the ones in Ultima VII did. We thought maybe the orcs would be invading virtual towns because they wanted to, not because there were spawn points set up by the city gates.

These days, after suffering through Lawnmower Man and Disclosure, maybe our dreams are a bit less lofty…

Read the whole thing if you want.

I also went ahead and linked my GDC 2004 talk A Grammar of Gameplay and my Training Fall 2005 keynote Why Games Matter from the Gaming/Essays page as well as The Love Story Challenge and a talk I gave at a local IGDA chapter meeting, both from 2004.

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