Up On The Rooftops

So my new buddy Lindsey turned me on to one of the coolest superhero blogs I’ve ever seen. Its called Project Rooftop. It’s a great character re-design blog with tons of fantastic makeovers for those aging cape wearers. The thing I really like about this site is how the women characters are drawn. They look fantastic, not cheap. Where they appear as adults they look sexy and powerful, functional and bad-ass, or both. As girls they look strong and confident. There is one redesign of Wonder Woman as a cowgirl –who rides an invisible pony. My 7yr old would be ALL OVER this if it were a cartoon or action figure.

I totally fell in love with Mai K.’s Supergirl costume and Dean Trippe’s illustration of her is just marvelous. Not a word I use very often. Because it sounds queer. But in this case its perfect. Dean is one of those artists whose work instantly transports you back to those days when you were a kid and you could see the unblemished awesomeness of being a superhero. That pure ideal of what it means to be a Good Guy. Other fantastic artist you can find on the Rooftop are Daniel Krall, Maris, and Ross Campbell, to name just a few.

 

 

 

I’ve been playing a lot of Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat lately. I’m not done squeezing all the good out of Team Fortress 2 just yet, but I needed a break. And CoD4 is just the sort of mindlessly addictive thing I needed.

As you can see from the video, it’s a fucking intense game. And, like all 3^rd Gen games, it’s primarily aimed at on-line multi-player action. There is a problem with that though. One of the major differences between TF2 and CoD4 is the Chode-to-Nice Gamer ratio.

I’d say that 90% of the random people I have played TF2 with have been really nice. Be they some 12 year old, a college kid, or an adult, most people seem to be good sports and into the fact that teamwork is required to win the game.

CoD4 is the exact opposite. You all know how the internet is full of douchebags I’m sure. Now imagine those jerks being able to shout right into your ear via the X360 headset. It sort of sucks all the fun right out of the game.

In theory it takes teamwork to win most CoD4 games also. But in practice you are much better off on your own, watching to see where the shots come from that mow down your teammates so that you know where to shoot. Only once have I played a random on-line game where my team acted like . . .well, like I team I guess. We watched each others backs, we communicated with one another, and we kicked ass.

I still like CoD4, and as I become better at the game I learn how to outfox the assholes and its really quite fun to shoot the virtual video game shit out of them. Headshots are particularly happy moments.

But this sort of jerk-off behavior, (mine included –even if it is righteous and justified), is where my dislike for many of the 3^rd Gen games comes from. We need more games like TF2 and Katamari.

 

I’m down in NYC this weekend for my friend Mike Oeming’s 35^th birthday bash. The shindig took place last night at the Irish Rogue over in Manhattan and it was a rockin’ good time. Got to see lots of friends from Oeming’s message board and that was great. We usually catch up at the various cons all through the year but this was nicer. We weren’t exhausted from sitting at tables slavishly selling artwork and doing sketches. Its odd hanging out with people that you normally see on a daily basis via the internet. You sort of have to try real hard to think of anything to say because you’ve said it all a million times on the forums. The internet is strange that way.

It was also my birthday this past week. Somehow I managed to completely forget. I knew it was coming, but working from home I often have no idea what day it is. Sure I know its Monday, but don’t ask me the date. It wasn’t until I got home after joining some friends for lunch that I opened my email to see about 3 dozen different “Happy Birthday” notes from people on Facebook, MySpace, and a fist full of message boards.

 

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been watching a lot of WWII related documentaries that focus more on the social and political situations that allowed the war to actually happen. Many of these are from the German perspective, some from the French, and a few from the Soviets.

Here in America we see WWII as this event that shaped the “greatest generation”, and our nation for the next 60 years. Yet compared to what it did to Europe we might as well have been on a weekend holiday.

Anyway, this one film on the Germans interviewed many different people. Some had been Nazis, some Communists, many just ordinary people, out of work, hungry, and frightened, just trying to survive from day to day –a concept that none of us can really appreciate as we sit here staring into our computer monitors. One view that really stuck me was how for many people the difference between the Nazis and the Communists were non-existent. Yet they could look at Stalin’s Russian and say, “Well we KNOW that’s a shitty deal.” It was like supporting Hitler was the only way to stop the Communists, and in a very real way I think that was true. In the early days the Nazis and the Communists were more or less neck-in-neck for the race to seize power in Germany. If the business tycoons of the day hadn’t backed Hitler (knowing what the Commies would do to them), things would have been very different.

I’ve always felt that despite how horrific, racist, deplorable, and insane the Nazis were, Stalin was worse. He murdered at least twice as many innocent people as the Final Solution ever did. Yet all this was swept under the carpet by the Allies very effective propaganda machine because we needed Stalin as much as he needed us. Until the war was won, and then suddenly he was a monster again.

What is also striking, is that for all that WWII did to shape America and Europe, the war as we see it was a side show to the real war between Germany and Russia. Think I’m wrong? 9 out of 10 German soldiers wounded or killed in the war were fighting on the Eastern Front. In effect, the WWII that we know was little more than a 6 year diversion that helped the Soviets will the war. By keeping Hitler busy we bought Russia time to build the largest and most effective army in the world and crush Germany with it.

 

Speaking of WWII, I really need to get started on Atomic Robo Vol.2 now. But I’ll leave you with this stuff:

 

Broken Frontier gave Atomic Robo “Best Debut Book” of 2007

Some early reviews for Atomic Robo #5 at The Pullbox and Comics And . . .