Observations

   I haven’t actually been playing a lot of videogames lately, which is a pretty normal thing.
I’m still waiting to get a copy of Dark Souls II, and patiently waiting for next Tuesday’s release of
Drakengard 3 (the latter is a weird title to be anticipating so heavily)
   Recently, I’ve just moved to a new writing position at http://dccomicsnews.com
Where I’ll be (for now!) reviewing a handful of different titles every month.

Like this one! (Worlds Finest #23)

In writing about comics, I try to bring over what little I know about writing about videogames.
   Like anyone else who’s ever wanted to make their mark doing this, I got my start by just
noticing things about videogames. The whole critique of more than just concept like game mechanics
and graphical style hems from seeing that a lot of people consider reviews to be the most boring way to write about videogames.
   In a lot of ways, I agree that the straight up review format is mostly over-
utilized and there’s probably a better example of deciding whether or not a certain game is worth the
hours that you’d have to put into it.
   Nobody needs to be told that Comics, being a different medium, require a different type of criticism. In videogames, your enjoyment comes from the mechanics – the way the player interfaces with the game world, whatever thing you want to call what pushing a button and making someone reload a gun or vault over cover
   Comic Books are largely more cohesive than videogames (at least big budget games) appear as, becauseyour enjoyment is tied to the whole book. Clever dialogue and pacing can be ruined by an artist who can’t keep characters on model – or even worse doesn’t understand how to effectively structure a layout. So in focusing more on comics lately, I’ve been trying to figure out if there’s a line where critique of videogames and comic books can cross over. In a lot of ways, it’s a line I see as kind of needed – comic books are way, way older than videogames.
   Even the most genre based stories have roots in stories that go far deeper than any videogames do. Yet if you were to compare the cultures of criticism about the two – more interesting things have been said by creators and critics in positions where people can hear them in reference to videogames than a
medium that’s existed for over eighty years. Comics and Videogames aren’t really similar in other ways, too.
   Where there’s a burgeoning indie scene– and dozens of very vocal indie developers in the videogame world, it doesn’t seem like many wheelhouses have give independent creators a position to talk about how they feel about the market and be heard.
   Even some of the larger websites like Comic Book Resources are still dominated by a discourse that focuses on Superheroes and “The Big Two” even if they offer a small sliver of their website being dedicated to places like Image and Dynamite.

   This is in a contrast to videogame journalism where even the largest websites started to cover the “indie phenomenon” pretty early, coinciding with the release of games like Cave Story that were initially just free to play curiosities.
   When Koji Igarashi decided to leave Konami just a few months ago, almost every major news outlet covered it or had an interview with him. Likewise, when someone leaves a comic company like DC to launch something creator owned – you don’t often find out until the release of the first issue. Sometimes I wonder if this is because larger comic companies, especially now that Marvel is backed by the media giant Disney, have a lot more image control going on.
   “Image Control” is of course something game companies – luckily for players and consumers, don’t seem to have a lot of. Even when they do attempt to do any kind of image control, using the recent Sim City disaster as an example, it works out poorly in their favor. I say players benefit from that because a lack of image control lets consumers actually know what
they’re dealing with when they make a purchase, and that’s actually a good thing.
   If I was a corporate manager, I probably wouldn’t think so.
There’s also the bit where some of the heaviest hitters in the realm of comics journalism have very close ties to the industry.
   A lot of the contributors are comic writers or artist themselves and many of them work very close with the companies they follow. The criticism seems a lot more lax in that vein, when you look to amateur comics journalists, those traditionally outside of the market, the criticism is a lot more intellectual and more cynical too.
   What I’m kind of stumbling on here is that as much as Videogames can learn from the Comics industry, Comics can learn from Videogame Journalism.
In a perfect world I’d be able to handpick a group of game journalists to write about Comic Books.
Instead, I’ll have to continue to try and write about these things myself, because we don’t live in a
perfect world.

Tonight....someone close to me will die!

[There are spoilers in this article for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ]

    One of the most well established tropes of comic book writing is to have secondary characters that are women exist for the express purpose of at best being a love interest or at worst to be a tragic fatality. It doesn’t matter if it’s an indie book, a superhero comic, or even a 60’s tale of romance.
    In the most extreme cases, these characters move beyond tragedy and are ‘fridged’
referencing Kyle Rayners one-time love interest who was literally disarmed and stuffed into a refrigerator. That’s a plot point you’d expect in a Frank Miller Batman and Joker comic, not for the story of the pluckiest of Green Lanterns. Beyond brutality against women, what fridging most represents is the idea that women are best put to use to drive male characters to action.

pictured: a good depiction of women in comics

   I’m not the type to say comics have made anything close to great strides since then; what has happened is a series of small steps towards being more inclusive and better depictions of marginalized groups. While it’s likely that Comics are treating women better than they ever have (especially indie comics) there’s still a lot of room to be covered. Even while comics are making great lengths, other representations of the medium still lag far behind.
    In the original issue of The Amazing Spider-Man that the events of the last movie are based on,
Peter Parker is forced to make an impossible choice, between the life of Gwen Stacy and stopping a villain. What should have been a normal rescue doesn't go as planned.
The result creates one of the most famous deaths in comic books: Gwen Stacy falls from the Brooklyn bridge and as Spider-Man rushes to save her, he inadvertently causes her death.
    Outside of clones and ill-advised plotlines, Gwen’s one of the few characters who’s ever stayed dead permanently. Even now, writers lacking a clever device to make Peter Parker’s life miserable can always fall back on the fact that Peter Parker essentially murdered one of his ex girlfriends.
    We can see this in the plot trends of the newest Spider-Man films directed by Marc Webb and starring Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone.  In The Amazing Spider-Man 2, we’re given a Gwen Stacy that’s much more than she ever was in the comics. In the storylines that follow her death in the various Amazing and Spectacular Spider-Man series, Gwen Stacy is almost an object of nostalgia as she was an object of comic readers’ infatuation.
   Gwen Stacy represented the often sought ‘girl next door’ archetype, who was demure without being too aggressive. There’s nothing about her character that was meant to be abrasive at all: Peter Parker’s failings with her were always dictated to be because of his own lack of experience in dealing with partners.
   This is of course a common point of derision for women in comic books, and the traditional comic book love-story. The easiest finger to point is the use of women purely as visual and emotional titillation: Peter Parker is meant to be a hopeless nerd (or that’s what people know about the character) yet he dates Mary Jane Watson, a redheaded model/actress/object of teenage dudes’ fixation.
   In one of her most famous appearances, Mary Jane faces the camera and utters what’s also her most famous line: “You just hit the jackpot, tiger.” She then proceeds to talk in incomprehensible slang for the rest of her early appearances as Mary Jane Watson, model and rebound.

   Throughout her existence as a character, that seems to be what most writers design her character around where the decision to include her in the Spider-Man mythos was purely “Peter Parker needs a new girlfriend!” Instead of the thirty plus years she’s had to grow and develop as a character, becoming much more than she ever was in the comics she was introduced in.
   That’s an easy mark to hit, too – if you don’t read comics and want to cover their depictions of women from a negative standpoint it’s easier to latch onto characters like Mary Jane
that seem shallow at a glance.
   Mary Jane’s been criticized before as a weak entry into the canon of Superhero love interests, especially compared to someone like Lois Lane. Superman’s famous intrepid reporter catch from the city of Metropolis. Lois Lane and Mary Jane aren’t bad comparisons to make, either. Both Superman and Spider-Man are often seen (in and out of universe) as the respective “hearts” of the fictional worlds they inhabit.
   Where we have Lois Lane as the tough reporter who has to constantly be pursued by the shy, small-town Clark Kent, we contrast Mary Jane’s depictions as primarily a pursuer. Her sole “Face it tiger.” Somehow being the apex of her and Peter Parker’s relationship; the mythical “This is it, I have indeed hit the jackpot,” every desperate guy with a crush has ever hoped for from the object of his desire.
   It cemented her most as the ultimate nerd-bate fantasy woman. Peter appears to have a stable relationship despite his reluctance to ever ‘pursue’ her. She falls for his shy personality and chiseled body that he never has to work for.
   Where Lois Lane had eyes for Superman and Clark Kent, Mary Jane had no interest in Spider-Man.
I think the message the comparison sends the most is that for women, being an active pursuer and deciding the value of your own existence isn’t as valid an expression of womanhood as it is to be pursued and defined by the men around you, which is awful any way you look at it.
    Yet what seldom is mentioned about her “Face it tiger.” Is that in one single line of dialogue, Mary Jane managed to cement herself as a woman who’s in touch with her own self-worth. She might depend on Spider-Man to be saved, but she never depend son Peter Parker to support her or validate her existence.

   If it were any other kind of story, Mary Jane would be the example of a stereotypical ‘trouble’ woman who’s too aware of her own purpose and value to be held down by a man, the standard subconscious reinforcement that women should be strong and empowered, but not too strong and empowered if they still want to be desirable.

    In the film, Gwen Stacy exhibits most of these character traits without ever openly stating them, taking advantage of the fact that a movie has more time and ability to impart character details than  the standard 30 pages that a comic book has to do it in.
   Yet even still, there’s deeply rooted sexism (if not outright misogyny) in both of these characterizations. Because of how we function as a society, we’re less inclined to notice it. Where women like Lois Lane are concerned, people have been constantly reinforced by the same tropes used by popular media.

   We see the same examples of the Strong Female Protagonist archetype that there are somehow more valid examples of womanhood than others. A woman who knows and understands her own self worth is still viewed as dangerous. That is, unless that person’s self image can only be validated by someone else, usually a man.
   The reason Lois Lane and Mary Jane make such a good comparison is primarily their relationship with their suitors. Even at her most aggressive, Lois Lane’s existence was still dependent on Superman – whether she was getting saved or sharing a byline with Clark Kent.
   Arguably, Mary Jane’s character started off the exact same way. I mention earlier that she was introduced because the comics needed a stronger relationship dynamic again, and she was created to fill that void after several other love interests came and went.

   Somewhere down the line, even after both characters had married their long-time partners, they diverged significantly. If you examine the character of Mary Jane for the last thirty years, you see that she was given steady ways to grow beyond her initial characterizations.
   She’s been trained in hand-to-hand combat by Captain America. She’s a successful actress and model and she constantly refuses to ever be put down or held back by Peter Parker. Their relationship in the comics has been more or less defined by her insistence that Peter Parker needs to be more than just a smart guy and a superhero to stay together

   Much more than Sam Raimi’s trilogy did, it’s easy to tell that Marc Webb’s definitely drawn off of modern Mary Jane’s characterization much more than he does Gwen Stacy’s.
The way both characters have kind of ‘switched’ who they are at their core isn’t really a problem when it comes to storytelling, for comic book fans though, it’s been a classic point of derision aimed at both sets of films.
   My argument is that it’s not much of a problem: The goal of a storyteller is self explanatory: to tell the best story they can. Compared to Kirsten Dunst’s performance as Mary Jane, Emma Stone managed to turn a pretty flat one note love interest into a fully realized character. Of course it helps that as an actress, she was able to embody a journey of growth that took Mary Jane years in the comics.
   Gwen Stacy in the movies is probably one of the best ‘love interest’ characters ever used in a kind of good vs. evil pulp movie. I can’t name many other characters that establish themselves as so dominant -- The movies kind of build it up to be as much about Gwen’s journey as it was Peter’s. It’s just…unfortunate in the face of the ending they ultimately give her character.
   In The Amazing Spider-Man 2 we see a Gwen Stacy who’s neither relegated to the role of manic pixie dream girl or protagonist stabilizer. Some of the opinions of Comic Book fans I’ve seen so far in light of the movie have been pretty hate-filled. What kind of hero is Peter Parker for deliberately putting Gwen Stacy in danger against her father’s wishes, etc.
   Most of the arguments (if not all of them) I’ve seen tend to favor Peter as a victim of Gwen’s selfishness, when only the opposite is true. At the end of the first movie it’s true that her father makes Peter promise to keep Gwen out of his life, but even as her father that’s not a decision he can make for her.
   If anything, the whole second movie is meant to practically be about that issue. Gwen’s constantly refusing to be answered for by anyone but herself , and it’s ultimately her decision to be involved in Peter’s affairs that he’s even able to defeat one of the villains.
    Yet the reactions by primarily comic book fans to the movie still paint Peter’s insistence on making and trying to control her decisions as heroic or noble. An easy way to sum up the critique is that people are upset Gwen won’t bend to the wills of the males around her.
   Her insistence that yes, Peter’s life as Spider-Man is a dangerous one but that it should be her decision to acknowledge she might be put in danger and is prepared for that eventuality is hers, not Peters forms the driving force behind a lot of the drama in the movie.

   Gwen still has to die though, ultimately because of canon that was determined in the 70’s as somehow essential to the mythos of the character. That’s hella odd too, because most of what Marc Webb draws from for inspiration is the Ultimate Universe in terms of characterizations – one of the established takes on Spider-Man where the way Gwen Stacy dies isn't just wholly different - but she actually comes back (and the story is no worse for it).
   Even then, that can most likely be excused after enough rhetoric in its favor – this isn’t by any mean an attempt to create the ‘definitive’ Spider-Man story, yet its’ most dated by its adherence to things like assuming the only way for a hero to lose the person they love most is by having them die.    
   That it is somehow inexorable for a heroic character to be a victim of romance and not another person’s murder. That somehow, despite making our representations of women better and giving them more opportunities to shine as characters and actresses that their existence is still ultimately defined in pop culture as either objects of love and obsession or to be used as a catalyst to spur a heroic  character back into action – usually through their death.
    Mary Jane Watson was originally going to be in the original version of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which makes me question how bloated the movie was even before it hit the cutting room floor. Ultimately, Marc Webb decided that it was just too much to add her into a movie where the romance was already so well cemented and focused on two characters, so all of the scenes involving her were cut after almost all of them had been filmed.
    From the way her character seemed to be depicted, her portrayal would have matched Kirsten Dunst’s more down-to-earth portrayal of the character from Sam Raimi’s trilogy.
I don’t think her removal is something that can be seen as detracting from the quality of the movie. If anything, it reinforces the point that Gwen Stacy isn’t just doomed by canon, but that she has to die because she doesn’t need her existence to be validated by the male protagonist:
She’s willing to put herself into danger selflessly, and could be seen as a result as being ‘too dangerous’ compared to a shy and awkward Mary Jane.
   Though her removal doesn’t detract from the quality of the movie, it does detract from the impact of the argument here. Had she been left in the movie – It’d be even easier to argue that Gwen Stacy has to die because she’s too ‘dangerous’ compared to the down-to earth and understanding Mary Jane.
   While comic books are in no means perfect, movies tend to recreate trends cribbed from stories that are now decades old, re-purposing events and creating a kind of faux-nostalgia for a particular zeitgeist that can never be experienced again.
   Marc Webb attempts to translate Spider-Man as an almost pulp romance comic to the big screen, bringing the accompanying baggage that saddles the medium with it.
It's been more than fifty years since Spider-Man was introduced in an issue Amazing Fantasy. Maybe it's time someone realized that next time they bring the character into another medium.

-skeletons

(P.S. Special thanks to Brad and Hayden for the input.)

Cave Story thoughts + Memories.

The piece of fiction I was working on ended up becoming quite long by the end of the week!
I've decided that instead of uploading it all as one piece of content, I'm going to continue to chip away at it and transform it into a short story rather than something simple like five pages of Things Happening.

   Cave Story, or “Doukutsu Monogatari” was released in 2004, and translated some time later into english.
My relationship with Cave Story is a pretty important one – maybe more than Super Metroid and at least as much as a vidoegame can be responsible, it's probably the most influental game that relates to me I can name.
If you aren't familiar with Cave Story (how does the underside of that rock look) it's arguably the game that started the “Colorful 2D platformer” trend when it comes to independent games.
   Cave Story has influenced me as an artist and kind of an aspiring developer. (Keep a look out for that!)
Under the surface of an explorative platformer is a game that's not just a loving homage to retro titles, but also an example of how limitations – self imposed or technological, can strengthen development.
If you want an example of an incredibly famous game doing it, this is Fumito Ueda's entire design philosophy.
   Fumito Ueda was the Director of Shadow of the Colossus, which underwent massive changes during development until it was restrained to its most basic necessary elements.
Cave Story may not appear like this initially, but everything in Cave Story is essential.
   Even if we examine it simply, just looking at one element a time, this observation holds up.

Cave Story looks like a retro game but every pixel that, well, Pixel, the Director uses in the game is entirely essential. Nothing is spared on superfluous animation or characterization. Characters have portraits with few expressions but those expressions are always well used to reinforce simple dialogue.
   In a way, it's the exact opposite of the most recent Metroid game, despite being structured like the best entries in the series. Cave Story imparted a pretty important lesson the first time I played it that has everything to do with games I like and even games I’ve planned or helped design over the years.
Less is more, and even if something seems absolutely wonderful and cool, it's always important to examine your work from a position of imagining it missing what might make it 'whole' Cave Story is an awesome rad game, even if it's been remade several times over the last few years, each remake kind of...distracting from what made the original game so wonderful.
   The Wii release has “SUPER HD GRAPHICS” which still look absolutely wonderful, but jar with the revamped sounds and music. The 3DS release is maybe the most pointless at all. Cave Story is inherently a game that works for any portable system and any length of play, but the game was completely remade to have 3D graphics that look pretty sub-par to the pixel art of the original release.
   Even though Pixel directed this remake – I think it's misguided and sort of misses the point of the original. Maybe we're just, as people who enjoy videogames, infatuated with remakes. I don't think there's a game that's necessarily undeserving of one , but c'mon, Cave Story? The game is meticulously planned out. Every detail is completely necessary and thought for.
   This all might seem kind of glowing and it really is, but Cave Story is still a pretty important game and I don't think developers have learned as much as they can from Pixel.
   That's the problem with it, too. The game isn't labyrinthine by any means yet what I see other developers take away from it can be simplified as “Metroid-style games can be popular.” and “Pixel art can be cute.” My first time playing the game was shortly after the initial translation and I remember it pretty well - at the time I was at a place that was once a stellar community for amateur pixelartists but is now more of a trainwreck and echo chamber for the few talented artists left.
   Cave Story was a lot of things to young developers when it started, I think. Tons of us overestimated the talent required to make it and saw the game as an example of what one person could do.
At the time, 'making a game in five years' probably didn't seem like that much of a chore. A lot of projects that were massive in size started popping up, not a single one of them ever came to fruition. I even worked on a couple of them.
   The majority of the failures were just from overreaching, too. We were all completely amateur with nothing under our belt, and every project that got started had to be the 'next' Cave Story. Some people were so discouraged that after multiple failures they completely abandoned the community. I'm sure some of them don't even do art anymore, let alone pixel-art. Striking out on your own as a developer will do that to you.
   Now it's ten years gone, and few of my friends have made their own titles - almost none of them are people that I knew back then. Cave Story imparted maybe it's most important lesson: No matter how simple the graphics or game seems, developing something 'good' is a challenge. Cave Story's true labriynth isn't the island, it's development itself.