Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This was announced last week, but when I checked, I couldn’t actually find the comic. Except now I have. Mr Linky, signing up. Anyway, popular army-recruitment device America’s Army is now doing a free comic. Which you can read the first issue online now. Now, I haven’t read it – I don’t really understand comics, so wouldn’t want to offer up an opinion. Besides – if I read it, didn’t like and said something like “America’s Army is useless”, we’ll probably get invaded. But I found this review of the comic by comics-gossip-wunder-waffen Rich Johnson at his new blog Bleeding Cool. Any good, Rich? “Not so much Generation Kill as Generation Kill Me Now” says he. Maybe not then.

I found myself chatting to Rhianna Pratchett yesterday about her just released comics spin-off of Mirror’s Edge. Well – the first part of six anyway (First pages here). It’s been interesting for her. As she tells to CBR, it’s her first work in the medium, and she had to do some serious thinking about its strengths and limitations before doing so. Which got me casually thinking a little more on the topic, but from the other way around – as in, what’s the specific strengths and weaknesses of bringing a game to a comic. And while there’s been a deluge of games-to-comics work in the last few years, what games would I pursue were I a comics editor interested in putting out entertaining comics. Which is, of course, a different thing from a comic that does the business.
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While I completely failed to pay any more attention to Stargate Worlds than reading the advert on a bus which rolled past the convention, when I was at San Diego, this did catch my eye. Wildstorm produced a short preview comic of the forthcoming Mirror’s Edge (Which has been scanned by Silicon Era). Words by the games’ writer Rhianna Pratchett and art by Matthew Dow Smith, I’m always interested by the comics/games interface. On one hand you have comics like this, which are pure promotional items mainly of use for swiftly introducing a games’ concept (And are harder to write than you may think). On the other, you have the licensed tie-in, which are hard in almost the exact opposite way. The former are pre-game-exposition, so demanding a lot to be crammed into scant pages. The latter, generally speaking, are post-game-exposition, so while people will abstractly care and know the world, you’re limited to doodling in the margins of the universe. Because, of course, you’re an auxiliary creative exercise and anything genuinely meaningful will be saved for the central games.

Not that would stop me jumping at a chance to do a Thief comic if anyone wanted to pay me to do so. Anyone else got something they’d like to see?

Since the second-string to my bow is a comics writer, I obviously scanned the Eisners list to see if any of my mates, peers or people who I bought drinks for once had been short-listed for anglophone comics most prestigious awards. So I’d seen Ivan Brandon’s 24/7 anthology, Jonathan Hickman’s Nightly News and Jason Aaron’s Scalped got nods. Hell, even my eye-rolling at Casanova not getting nominated again was leavened by Fraction getting a little appreciation for his Spider-fellow pictorial narrative and his Immortal Iron Fist with Mr Brubaker. But I didn’t realise, until commenter Briosafreak mailed me, that Obsidian’s Chris “Will forever have Planescape Torment in this gap” Avellone is included in a nomination. Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures is in the best Kids comic category, to which Avellone contributed stories in issues 7 and 10. So a hearty congratulations to him.

And while we’re talking developers and comics, someone call Grant Morrison, yeah?

I’ve been traveling for the last week, and between playing Puzzle Quest, reviewing games which I’m NDA-ed up to the journo gills about, drinking heavily, and and getting crushing existential dread with Alec when walking across a bridge in Vancouver, I picked up some comics. And one of them is relevant to the blog, so I’ll write something about it. Yes.

It features this bloke. And since there’s two incarnations of it out, it’s a bloody PC Game.

It’s Halo: Uprising, it’s by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev and it has a review hidden around here, somewhere. See if you can find it.

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