Recent Posts

Sharky I swear to God, three hrs ago I checked this forum and you hadn't replied yet--and then I went to lunch. As I was driving back from lunch, I started thinking how odd it was that you hadn't sprung for the bait--but voila!!! There you were!! obviously you were wisely keeping your own counsel until the time was right for your incisive and telling reply. These things must not be rushed!

Beta--I don't remember that test of the Scarlet Witch's powers at all. I wonder how that passed me by?

I didn't feel one way or the other about Wanda learning witchcraft--but what I definitely loved was how her time with Agatha Harkness resulted in a much more powerful character, who wasn't constantly exhausted. God that got on my nerves. And then she was always losing her powers, and getting them back--usually an inferior version of them! The only thing worse was that one issue where the Avengers fought the Sub-Mariner, and the Wasp had a stupid safety pin looking thingee as a stinger. That was just stupid. Jan shoulda sent Hank back to the anthill until he could come up with a real weapon.

So I guess nobody is reading this book. in a way I can't blame people because Hudlin's first couple of years were really pretty mediocre, but he's gotten much much better. And the art is really really good

Hey guys--I know everyone is rolling their eyes and thinking I'm heavily biased in favor for all things Black Panther--but the newest episode of Black Panther is IMO EXCELLENT. I'm not sure what happened to Hudlin about a year ago--but BP has been consistently good for a very long time.

T'Challa is back to his old noble self, and Hudlin has introduced spiritual elements to Wakandan society that is consistent with the core character first presented in FF 52. The art is beautiful and some of the new villains presented are very interesting! And last but not least--the storyline is not bogged down by being linked to 500 BIG EVENT story lines.

And for icing on the cake--NO WOLVERINE.

Good job, Mr Hudlin

we've talked about this before--but Wanda's powers, more than any other super heroes', have always been all over the map. I noticed that bit in the Essential Hulk about Wanda having to touch her hands together

well it's the Essential Edition of the Hulk, which is a black and white collection of a group of back issues, and yes issue #128 was amongst them. That is one of the few Avengers appearances that I never saw before!

Hee hee--Howabout a dark Doctor Doom? Or Doctor Doom light?

I feel like I am back in the 80's...blech

Shiryu--I think this Wolverine is Wolverine's son or some crap like that. I honestly don't know. honestly don't care.

It was pretty lame and boring. I only bought it because I like the characters. Happens a lot these days

Actually I'm almost impossibly good-looking for my age.

At least my five dogs think so.

I feel your pain DL. My face is so dry and leathery it looks like a saddle bag with eyes.

Sharky's are longer than mine, young man

Dl--it's both! It has to do, at the end of the day, with how much it costs to create a certain number of game assets. There is so much sloth and waste on our end--a CEO will look at the books and see that in, say, a one year period, American artists got half the game assets done for 200k. Then they look at the Chinese crew, who finished the entire asset list in 9 months, costing 100k. I have seen this kind of thing happen many times. On the other hand there are real problems with dealing with foreign nations--mostly the language barrier and time difference. It is really hard to get changes made when the company you are dealing with is asleep during our work-day!

In my 13 years of doing video games--I will tell you it is a FACT that the main reason most games either flop, or never come out in the first place, is because of the inability of management to decide, and stick with, the vision of what a game is going to be. Let me give you a stellar example from 2007. Here in Austin, a very large, very well known company, started working on an MMO (massive multi-player Online game) in 2001, and it didn't get released until late 2007. I came to this company in late 2006, and worked on another project, and when I got there, all the artists were laughing at the original concept sketches for the other team's MMO. Apparently the MMO was originally going to be a fantasy oriented, kind of sword-and-sorcery looking game. Well three or four years into the making of this MMO, everyone decided that the fantasy look sucked, and they completely changed everything to a more sci-fi look and had to just dump years of assets--which really means millions of dollars. I sat there thinking, okay all these idiots are laughing at the unicorns and elves from the original concept sketches--but who in the hell okayed them in the first place? How do three or four years go by and then you just throw the whole game out? The time to decide on the look of a game is before you start making it.

Everyone thought the whole mess was funny--and I'm thinking these people have no concept of money. None. So the MMO team switched to the sci-fi look, and the game came out after 7 years and one figure I heard was $70 mill, and the game completely failed. Nobody bought it. People didn't even know it came out. We all--even those of us who were on other projects-lost our jobs because of the failure of that game.

The worst part is that after the MMO failed, upper management basically blamed it on the fact that people didn't want to play a sci-fi MMO!!!! But the real reason it failed was that while everybody was harping on what the game should look like, nobody was paying attention to the fact that the GAME WASN'T FUN. It didn't draw you in, or make you want to keep playing it. I have talked to dozens of people who played it and they all said the same thing--it wasn't fun.

So of course management, who couldn't agree on a direction, blamed the team and the only "team members" who came out of it looking good were the outsource team in China. Why? Because they cost less and had nothing to do with design or direction--they were just handed sketches and had to build them in 3D. Now, these managerial geniuses have come to the conclusion that the only way to make a game inexpensively is to go almost exclusively with outsourcing--leaving out their role entirely.

DL--I am painfully well aware that the Chinese can live like kings in their country on a quarter of what we make, and they are. But remember it was OUR politicians who started this whole Global Economy/out-sourcing scheme. It started with an idea by Bush Sr (New World Order) and Clinton got most of the trade agreements pushed through on the premise that these agreements would actually help the US grow economically--without mentioning the fact that our jobs would leave in droves. Bush Sr and McCain and all those guys were all for it. These people don't give a d**n about us.

Now our economy is collapsing because, frankly, the good paying jobs are gone while our cost of living is still rising. We have become a service-oriented economy, in other words, low-paying, menial jobs. California has a 20% unemployment rate today, and that is disastrous.

Hi Badger and welcome to the forum. There are some titles that are somewhat self-focused, like Fantastic Four, Black Panther and Captain America--but not many.

Hey have you guys read the Resurrection of Captain America? By Brubaker and the awesome Bryan Fitch? The way they are bringing back CA is, for once, actually pretty damned cool. And it is a thrill for me to see Fitch render Hank Pym, the Vision and the Falcon. The beauty of his art almost made me forget what a stupid idea it was to kill off the Wasp and make Pym the new Wasp--I mean seriously, how many personas is Hank Pym going to have?

Ant Man
Giant Man
Goliath
Yellowjacket
Hank Pym
The New Wasp

By the way, is the Wasp (the real one) really dead? With all the alternate realities and general incoherence these days it's hard for me to tell what's real and what's not

Waspie--I agree that there is a lot of blame to be placed on today's overall sorry state of story writing. No doubt about it.

I also think the serious lack of battles is hurting Marvel, too. I mean what is going on? Look at Busiek's run--battles, battle and more battles. There was a time in Marvel history where you were guaranteed to have at least one battle per issue. When I look at old comic covers--it is always the issues with classic battles that I remember most fondly. Thing vs Sub Mariner, Thor vs. Silver Surfer, Defenders vs Avengers, Hulk vs Thing, all that stuff.

Now it seems like comics for the most part are just endless sub-par dialogue, standing and posing, and plots that go nowhere.