By Tim Stone on June 8th, 2008 at 9:45 am.
This one appeared in PC Gamer UK in autumn 06.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Strafe Left: The Formative Years #33
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Poor world.
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I don’t think I ever *quite* got this one. It’s a guy trying to run away?
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It’s just the spaces between the nuclear clouds forming what seems to be a person doing a bit of a jive.
Good show!
(also, lovely pun as part of the website’s subtitle, chaps!)
And lordy, DEFCON has been with us since 2006? Time flies…
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Oh dear, I thought the recent gps-path artworks were bad. Hopefully no one ever decides that nuke-art is what the world needs.
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DEFCON really inspires me. There should be more Armageddon games, don’t you think?
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Shades of Watchmen here, no?
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I always thought it was forever silently screaming in horror and pain.
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Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare-drum.
Curtains.
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Please don’t let Hollywood ruin yet another fine literary masterpiece with a cack-handed action movie- whilst V for Vendetta was passable in some respects, I don’t see how Watchmen is going to work…
And yes, Defcon is a prime example (along with World In Conflict) of why we need more nukes in games…
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I see how one nuke destroys the world, also destroys the person. Which is the world. Which is the person. Both…are…the same! Arrggg! Can’t compute!
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Yum. Abstracty goodness.
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Those are some of my favourite panels of Watchmen, incidentally. I don’t envy the film-makers the job of trying to translate that to the screen – more so than perhaps anything before or since, Watchmen really USES the medium, is inextricably linked to it. It’s fundamentally not a film – or at least, merely taking the plot, characters and even the dialogue and filming them would still rob the work of much of its beauty.
If a film equivalent to devices such as the palindromic structure of “Fearful Symmetry”, the skilful interweaving of captions and on-panel action referring to several things at once, the continued echoing certain images in certain panels – if film equivalents can be found for all of these, it could be quite remarkable.
However, somehow I doubt we’re going to get much more than a mostly-faithful recounting of the events of the comic….
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Thomas: That’s about how I feel: some stories are too intertwined with their medium to be accurately, or even well, translated. Hence why I’m so scared of the Bioshock movie that I hear is coming.
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Can’t really find the humour here, being the simpleton that I am.
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Note to all: An editorial cartoon doesn’t necessarily need to be funny.
KG
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@KG Probably a bit off the mark here, but could that possibly explain Garfield?
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Awesome.
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In fact, often times if you take Garfield out of the comic, and what he says, they can sometimes be better, theres a website somewhere devoted to the idea…
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@ Ben Abraham:
*Nothing* can explain Garfield, except maybe editor’s desire to maintain the status quo.
Also, this one pretty much perfectly captured the mood of Defcon for me. Mind you, I could never really get into Defcon much; it seemed a lot more real an atrocity than anything in first-person shooters or other RTSes.
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http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/
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Oh, my GOD! Have you seen the GARFIELD movie? It’s HI-LARIOUS! There’s this part where he eats all this LASAGNA! Of course, Odie’s up to HIS old tricks!
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awesome. symbolic and literal at the same time.
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A round of DEFCON with RPS folks would be amazingly fun.
This is my favorite Strafe Left so far. Awesome stuff (well, not that thermonuclear annihilation is awesome, but ya know)
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At first sight I saw there a football (soccer for some of you) player. Maybe some connection with EURO 2008…
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Getting off-topic here, but garfield minus garfield is one of the Best Things I’ve seen on the internet in a while.
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“Maybe some connection with EURO 2008…”
from 2006?
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Great strip. A great idea well executed. Very evocative and sad. Rich and deep, very satisfying.
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I’m intrigued: was this little comic created from a set of planned nuclear launch in the game or some clever photoshopping?
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Also, what part of the world is that supposed to be?
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Sad that so many don’t seem to know Defcon. Time for an RPS article, surely? Well, another one, at least. You know what I mean…
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I second the Garfield minus Garfield speech-bubbles… hilarious.
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432,009,209
\o/
———-
as an aside, i used to play defcon on my tv, 40″ 1080p defcon with the lights off on many a cool august night brought out the “muhahahaha” in me
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