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	<title>TechTag: emanata &#124; Tech &#124; TIME.com</title>
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		<title>TechTag: emanata &#124; Tech &#124; TIME.com</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com</link>
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		<title>Emanata: Spider-Man Meets the Mayor</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/11/19/emanata-spider-man-meets-the-mayor/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/11/19/emanata-spider-man-meets-the-mayor/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Nov 2010 14:30:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comic books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[spider-man]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=55710</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The most widely circulated American comic book this week isn&#8217;t anything you can buy in comics stores: it&#8217;s Amazing Spider-Man, You&#8217;re Hired!, a skinny one-shot included with Wednesday&#8217;s New York Daily News, and distributed for free on Marvel&#8217;s iPhone/iPad app. (It doesn&#8217;t seem to be available on the Web, though.) Written by Warren Simons, drawn by Todd Nauck, and featuring a Phil Jimenez cover that bears more than a slight resemblance to the one he drew for Spider-Man&#8217;s meeting with Barack Obama, it centers on a down-and-out Peter Parker and his Aunt May meeting helpful New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. (More on Techland: 33 Years of Spider-Girls and Spider-Women) It is an odd, odd comic book, and not just because Peter&#8217;s meeting Bloomberg&#8211;this is a character who once met the Not Ready For Prime Time Players in a surprisingly good story. (It&#8217;s also entirely possible that, when ASM: You&#8217;re Hired! was commissioned, it looked like Spider-Man would be a Broadway star by the time it was released.) The premise of Simons&#8217; story is that Peter has lost his job as a photojournalist&#8211;putting this story in the regular Amazing Spider-Man series&#8217; continuity, somewhere slightly before last week&#8217;s issue of Amazing, in which he found a new job&#8211;and, after a chance encounter on the subway, Bloomberg teaches him to take advantage of New York&#8217;s resources for job-seekers, although he has to keep running off and fighting crime as Spider-Man. Also, despite the title, he doesn&#8217;t come anywhere near getting hired. As a brochure for the Bloomberg administration&#8217;s Workforce1 program, it&#8217;s fun and colorful. (There are actually also two different Spider-Man posters that plug the program.) But coming at it from the superhero-comics side, the real world and the fictional Marvel world jostle each other for primacy on page after page. Peter complains of having been fired by the Daily Bugle&#8211;but in the same sequence, he&#8217;s circling a classified employment ad in the Daily News. The ad in question begins as a description of a lab-assistant job and dissolves into bad lorem<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=55710&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
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		<item>
		<title>Emanata: Dimming of the Day</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/11/05/emanata-dimming-of-the-day/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/11/05/emanata-dimming-of-the-day/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Nov 2010 13:15:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comic books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[spider-man]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=53579</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This week&#8217;s Amazing Spider-Man #647 marks the end of the three-year, 102-issues-long &#8220;Brand New Day&#8221; sequence&#8211;a consistently entertaining run that could have been more than that. The premise of BND, when it started, was that Amazing was going to be the only Spider-Man book, that it would come out three times a month (giving Marvel slightly more slack than a weekly), and that it would be produced by a rotating crew of four writers&#8211;Bob Gale, Marc Guggenheim, Dan Slott and Zeb Wells&#8211;and a few rotating artists. That&#8217;s not quite the way it turned out. The writing collective ended up expanding considerably, incorporating a few guests, and bringing up some of its members in rotation much more often than others. (Wells, for instance, only wrote a handful of issues, although they were some of the best.) In theory, having that many writers should have meant that everybody tried to one-up one another and push the plot forward. Sometimes that actually did work out: Mark Waid&#8217;s Shocker story (the one that introduced J. Jonah Jameson Sr.) succeeded in making the overall dynamic of Spider-Man&#8217;s supporting cast more interesting, and Slott&#8217;s &#8220;New Ways to Die&#8221; kicked a lot of fun elements into motion. And basically any time the Osborn family showed up, the story crackled on the page&#8211;quite an achievement at a time when Norman Osborn was appearing in nearly every other Marvel series too. (More on Techland: Emanata: Forward-Looking Statements) In practice, though, BND often didn&#8217;t maintain the soap-operatic buzz it tried for. Characters or situations were often left in the hands of a single writer, which meant they could lay fallow for months at a time until that writer reappeared; bits of business remained in place long after they&#8217;d gone stale, because nobody was in charge of changing them. (Michele is a jerk to Peter! We get it!) The plot threads involving the repercussions of &#8220;One More Day&#8221; dragged on far too long. Maybe even more damagingly, BND was often paced like a weekly serial, but it didn&#8217;t actually show up<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=53579&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
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		<item>
		<title>Emanata: Astro Zombies</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/10/15/emanata-astro-zombies/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/10/15/emanata-astro-zombies/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:53:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Blackest Night]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comic books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=50726</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It&#8217;s a zombie moment. Grey, shambling, undead ex-people are the most durable monster fantasy of right now, and hat goes double for comics, from The Walking Dead on down through Blackest Night and the unkillable Marvel Zombies franchise. Zombie stories are stories about assimilation&#8211;being robbed of one&#8217;s individuality and absorbed into a mindless mass that can only perpetuate itself. That&#8217;s a big cultural fear at the moment, obviously, but it&#8217;s particularly a fear in the context of English-language comics, which are perpetually on the verge of being absorbed into a bigger entertainment machine. Also, zombie stories involve insanely high levels of gruesome violence, which comics are very good at getting across. Al Ewing and Henry Flint&#8217;s Zombo: Can I Eat You, Please? is the most bizarrely charming zombie comic I&#8217;ve seen lately, an American collection of the first few storylines of a recent British serial from the venerable weekly sci-fi anthology 2000 A.D.. (There&#8217;s no connection to zombo.com, now and forever the greatest site on the Internet, but it&#8217;s nice to imagine how they might relate.) The premise for the book&#8217;s first half is a variation on the old horror staple of a lost group of travelers being picked off one by one, in this case by a sentient planet whose every plant and animal species is doing its best to kill them; Zombo, the government-created creature that&#8217;s unleashed to protect them, is a kind of half-zombie designed to fight the inhabitants of &#8220;the zombie planets.&#8221; Ewing pulls off some hilariously overheated dialogue: &#8220;They said it was in defiance of the laws of science&#8211;of man&#8211;of God! They said it was impossible&#8230; but they were wrong!&#8221; Most of the cast is actually eviscerated off-panel seven pages into the story; a few pages after that, a Russell Brand lookalike is fatally squished by a carnivorous, singing psychedelic tree. It&#8217;s that kind of comic. (More on Techland: Emanata: The High Cost of Comics) The satirical element is even broader in the book&#8217;s second half, &#8220;Zombo&#8217;s Eleven,&#8221; which ups the ante by allying Zombo<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=50726&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
		<media:content url="http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/9d70ec92cd6988f33f755995786e3e60?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
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		<item>
		<title>Emanata: More Weekly Comics, Please!</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/09/03/emanata-more-weekly-comics-please/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/09/03/emanata-more-weekly-comics-please/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:40:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=43650</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What this country needs is a good weekly comic book. Admittedly, the last few attempts haven&#8217;t worked out terribly well, and the most recent stab at something similar&#8211;the thrice-monthly &#8220;Brand New Day&#8221; era of Amazing Spider-Man&#8211;is drawing to a close after a series of missteps and delays that led, at one point, to two issues coming out the same week. But if mainstream comic book serials are going to survive (and, as somebody who&#8217;s specifically been enjoying them in that form for a long time, I&#8217;d like to see them survive), they need to take advantage of the thing that serial fiction do best. Which is to say: they need to create excitement for the next installment, and deliver that next installment regularly and frequently. American serial comic books are delivered to stores on a weekly basis; it makes sense that the rhythm of at least some of them should be weekly. It&#8217;s a lot easier for a reader to stay engaged with a story if the next installment comes out in seven days than if the next installment might come out in a couple of months if all the creators involved are up for it. In fact, actual (and de facto) weekly comics have been done successfully, and recently&#8211;which makes it all the more surprising that there aren&#8217;t any American ones at the moment. Remember DC&#8217;s 52? That was less than five years ago, and it was a solid hit, selling around 100,000 copies an issue for most of its run. It also had the advantages of a tightly knit team of big-name writers, a strong design aesthetic (and terrific cover art by J.G. Jones), internal art that was consistent if not often inspired, and plotting that was very heavily driven by an &#8220;OMG what&#8217;s gonna happen next?!&#8221; factor. (More on Techland: Emanata: Jesse Reklaw&#8217;s Cartoon Diaries) DC&#8217;s tried a few times to re-bottle that particular formula, without quite as much success. Countdown was done in by risible plotting, weak art and a disastrous lack of direction; Trinity had<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=43650&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
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		<item>
		<title>Emanata: Eight Comics That Demand to Be Reprinted</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/08/06/emanata-eight-comics-that-demand-to-be-reprinted/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/08/06/emanata-eight-comics-that-demand-to-be-reprinted/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 06 Aug 2010 13:21:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=38930</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[There have been rumors floating around for a few weeks that Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman&#8217;s long-out-of-print Marvelman/Miracleman comics are either closer to republication than they&#8217;ve been in a while, or further away. (Arguably, the recent kerfuffle over the &#8220;Medieval Spawn&#8221; case is just the latest set of aftershocks from the Marvelman quake.) Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell&#8217;s Zenith, another much-desired series, may be coming back soon too. But there are plenty of other out-of-print comics that deserve to be made available again, whether a reprint is realistically possible or not. Here are eight I&#8217;d line up to buy, in no particular order. 1. Master of Kung Fu. A reprint of this &#8217;70s-&#8217;80s series is not likely to happen any time soon: Marvel owns the rights to most of the characters, but no longer has the right to publish stories involving Fu Manchu, who turns up all over the place. That&#8217;s a real pity, because most of the original Master of Kung Fu series ranged from &#8220;trashy fun&#8221; to &#8220;really beautifully crafted trashy fun&#8221;&#8211;check out, for instance, this gorgeous spread from the period when Paul Gulacy was drawing the series. (And, while you&#8217;re at it, read the fascinating Sean Witzke piece, about the film/comics relationship, in which it appears.) 2. The complete Doonesbury. There&#8217;s a big old 40th-anniversary Doonesbury retrospective coming out at the end of October&#8211;but what Garry Trudeau&#8217;s strip really needs is a complete, nicely designed, unabridged series of books collecting its entire run. Yes, there was a CD-ROM, The Bundled Doonesbury, back in 1997. That&#8217;s still missing a third of the strip&#8217;s history, and it&#8217;s not nearly as useful as print books would be. 3. The Anal-Retentive Cerebus. Or whatever title you like for a collection of all the Cerebus material that didn&#8217;t make it into the sixteen paperbacks that collect most of Dave Sim and Gerhard&#8217;s 300-issue series. There is rather a lot of it. Some of it is gorgeous (like the full-color stories Sim and Gerhard did for Epic Illustrated); some of it is pretty<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=38930&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>12</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
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		<item>
		<title>Emanata: When I Am King of Comic-Con</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/30/emanata-when-i-am-king-of-comic-con/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/30/emanata-when-i-am-king-of-comic-con/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:22:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comic-con]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Comic-Con 2010]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=37811</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;m not going to deny it: I had an absolutely great time at this year&#8217;s Comic-Con. I saw some fascinating panels (and moderated a few), I found some books I&#8217;ve been looking for forever, I bought some fantastic original art, and I was convinced, contra Lev&#8217;s essay, that nerd culture is the healthiest it&#8217;s ever been, both in numbers and in general attitude. (I also don&#8217;t think nerd culture is a counter-culture&#8211;it&#8217;s enthusiastic rather than oppositional&#8211;but that&#8217;s an argument for another time.) But Comic-Con is also an experience full of stressors and irritants. If I were actually in a position to do something about them (I&#8217;m not), here are six things I might do to make the show more enjoyable for people, like me, whose interest in it is primarily on the comics side. 1. Organize the show floor around comics. If there&#8217;s one complaint I heard over and over from the comics side of the show, it&#8217;s that getting to the small-press tables and individual artists&#8217; areas involved like half an hour of advanced parkour. Artists&#8217; Alley was all the way at one end of the hall this year, against a wall, meaning that there was no way for it to get any pass-through foot traffic. The movie studios and game companies are going to come whether or not they get center-of-the-floor space, and some of them could probably make much better use of wall space. Wouldn&#8217;t it make sense to move the small-press area and Artists&#8217; Alley to the middle of the show floor? Put them by the rest of the comics, and let people pass through them if they want to get to the stuff with screens and noises. (More on Techland: The Guy Who Hates Comic-Con: Oh My God Shut Up About Comic-Con) 2. Make sure locals can attend. There&#8217;s very little that feels particularly San Diego-y about Comic-Con these days, and that has a lot to do with the fact that it&#8217;s no longer possible for people who live in the area to decide a<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=37811&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
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		<title>Emanata: The Phone is the Panel is the Page</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/16/emanata-the-phone-is-the-panel-is-the-page/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/16/emanata-the-phone-is-the-panel-is-the-page/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:30:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comic-con]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[digital comics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ipad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[iphone]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=35589</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Just about every comics creator I&#8217;ve talked to recently has been thinking, at least a little, about how mobile digital technology is going to affect their work. For anyone who&#8217;s going to be at Comic-Con International next week, I&#8217;m going to be moderating a panel on &#8220;Comics After Paper&#8221; on Saturday the 24th, with creators Dylan Meconis, R. Stevens, Robert Berry and Joshua Hale Fialkov, all of whom have created work meant to be read on platforms other than print. Despite the current rage for print comics that have been subjected to the Procrustean solution of reformatting for the digital devices lots of people are carrying around with them, they&#8217;re tough to pay attention to for long&#8211;especially on mobile phones. There are lots of people who are excited about the possibility of reading comics on their phones, and those people mostly have to make do with work that was designed to be read page-by-page on paper, and is therefore a chore to read panel-by-panel on a little screen. The most effective comics reprints of the past few years are the ones that respect the salient elements of the format for which the work was designed: the Sunday Press books that reprint &#8220;Little Nemo&#8221; and &#8220;Gasoline Alley&#8221; and now &#8220;Krazy Kat&#8221; strips at their original enormous tabloid dimensions, the collections of Jack Kirby&#8217;s &#8220;Fourth World&#8221; stories on a nicer version of their original newsprint, the oversized &#8220;Absolute&#8221;-style editions of familiar work that preserve its look but crank up its volume. Print, though, is about as flexible a medium as there is, project-by-project; mobile digital devices&#8217; strength is portability, not flexibility. (More on Techland: Emanata: Eight Questions for Comics Creators) All of which is to say that cartoonists who want their work to be read and enjoyed via a mobile phone or touchscreen pad need to design it for that medium&#8211;not for print, and not even for web browsers. If you&#8217;re making comics for an iPhone, both your functional image size and your functional page size are 2 inches by 3 inches,<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=35589&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
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		<title>Emanata: The Black Mass</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/09/emanata-the-black-mass/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/09/emanata-the-black-mass/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:00:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Batman and Robin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[grant morrison]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=34654</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[There are days when I admire people who don&#8217;t have a serious, unkickable superhero-comics habit, and there are other days when I feel a little sorry for people who don&#8217;t get to enjoy things like Batman and Robin #13. It&#8217;s the best episode thus far of Grant Morrison&#8217;s ongoing Batman project: the one in which the dominoes he&#8217;s been lining up for the past year and more are actually starting to fall. Morrison&#8217;s called the current &#8220;Batman and Robin Must Die!&#8221; storyline &#8220;&#8216;Batman R.I.P.&#8217; as farce&#8221;&#8211;not the door-slamming Lend Me a Tenor kind but the &#8220;first time as tragedy, the second time as farce&#8221; kind. When I interviewed him for Techland a while ago, he also mentioned that it was a &#8220;black mass&#8221; for Batman, and indeed it is: a deliberately degraded inversion of all the classic elements of a Batman story. That ritual is signaled by the religious invocation in its opening sequence, which is immediately followed by the filthy communion of the one-panel de Sadean orgy scene and the Satanic &#8220;high priest,&#8221; Doctor Hurt, descending Wayne Manor&#8217;s stairs to approach his (sacrificial) altar, and an inside-out version of the flash-forward from the beginning of &#8220;R.I.P.&#8221; (More on Techland: Exclusive Interview: Grant Morrison on Batman Times Three) Even more than Morrison&#8217;s writing, though, the aspect of this issue that&#8217;s knocking me flat is Frazer Irving&#8217;s artwork. Irving has worked with Morrison before (on Seven Soldiers: Klarion the Witch Boy and the second issue of The Return of Bruce Wayne), but he really gives this issue a look of its own, carving out silhouetted shapes in space against backgrounds that dissolve into garishly toned fog. The first page is a restaging of David Mazzucchelli&#8217;s classic cover for Batman #404, of course, but Irving turns it into a sort of decadent Gustav Klimt image&#8211;Martha Wayne&#8217;s body angled just so against the delicate but consistent white texture of her coat, the blood running along the sidewalk at neat right angles, the blackness out of which Thomas emerges at the top of the<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=34654&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
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		<title>Emanata: Cheer On the Bad Guys</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/02/emanata-cheer-on-the-bad-guys/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/02/emanata-cheer-on-the-bad-guys/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:00:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iron Man]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lex luthor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[matt fraction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paul Cornell]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[villains]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=34028</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[&#8220;The awful thing about life is this,&#8221; as Jean Renoir&#8217;s The Rules of the Game put it: &#8220;everyone has their reasons.&#8221; That&#8217;s the premise behind two excellent superhero comics published this week, neither of which actually have any superheroes in them. Action Comics #890, Paul Cornell and Pete Woods&#8217; first issue of their run, and Matt Fraction and Carmine Di Giandomenico&#8217;s Invincible Iron Man Annual #1 respectively star Lex Luthor and the Mandarin; they&#8217;re both about (beringed) villains who want most of all to be understood as heroes, trying to rewrite the narratives of how they&#8217;re understood. In the case of Fraction&#8217;s story, that&#8217;s literal. The plot involves the Mandarin kidnapping a famous film director and forcing him to make a hagiographical bio-pic about his life and times. The director, naturally, discovers that nearly everything the Mandarin insists on including is a lie to cover up a horrible or embarrassing reality&#8211;which also patches up the character&#8217;s messy past continuity. Fraction&#8217;s Mandarin is unequivocally a monster, a Stalinesque maniac, a craven bastard whose delusions of grandeur have no basis in reality, and who is only obeyed because he can kill everyone in the room with a thought. He has no particular ideology other than his own greatness, and he sees rewriting history as his prerogative and everyone else&#8217;s duty. (More on Techland: Scott Pilgrim&#8217;s Precious Little Book Club: Volume 1) You can read the Iron Man Annual as a commentary on making art for a patron who insists on controlling the work at every step: &#8220;being told how to play in the sandbox,&#8221; as Fraction recently put it. (There&#8217;s a pointed scene where the Mandarin is viewing daily rushes of the film, and making impossibly vague demands, on pain of death: &#8220;There should be more people. It should feel bigger. The whole sequence should be more elegant.&#8221; Anyone who&#8217;s ever done creative work for a frustrating client knows how that one goes.) But it&#8217;s also a story about how power shapes stories about itself, and suppresses or absorbs counter-narratives. Fraction&#8217;s entire Iron<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=34028&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
		<media:content url="http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/9d70ec92cd6988f33f755995786e3e60?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
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		<title>Emanata: What&#8217;s a Digital Comic Book Worth?</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/06/25/emanata-whats-a-digital-comic-book-worth/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/06/25/emanata-whats-a-digital-comic-book-worth/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 25 Jun 2010 13:24:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[digital comics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=32794</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The most interesting element of DC&#8217;s announcement this week that they&#8217;re entering the digital-comics sales fray is that they&#8217;re trying out tiered pricing: selling individual full issues of serial comics for 99 cents, $1.99 or $2.99. The question of what a digital comic book is worth&#8211;and whether its value to a reader is correlated with the value of the same thing in print&#8211;is wide open right now. As proof of that, over at DC&#8217;s own site, you can download copies of Fables #1, The Losers #1, The Sandman #1 and The Unwritten #1 for free, in PDF form. Alternately, you can pay $1.99 for each of them on the DC/comiXology app. (To add to the confusion, Vertigo just published a $1 print edition of The Losers #1 in April.) So what&#8217;s the going rate? There&#8217;s not a standard yet for how much money a name-brand digital comic commands, and part of the reason is that there&#8217;s a crucial distinction between what you as a customer are paying for and how that payment is actually allocated. The specifics of where your three or four dollars go for a new print comic book&#8211;editorial and production costs, risk, profit, the distribution chain, and so on&#8211;are semi-opaque, and publishers like to keep it that way. It&#8217;s safe to say, though, that half or more of the cover price goes to the retailer and distributor, and that another sizeable chunk of money goes to printing the comics and shipping them to distributors. The editorial costs of a print comic&#8217;s digital incarnation are identical, but its &#8220;duplication&#8221; and &#8220;shipping&#8221; costs are comparatively infinitesimal, and it&#8217;s a safe bet that the &#8220;middleman&#8221; costs are significantly less. (By way of comparison, the iTunes Store is reputed to collect about 35 cents on the dollar for music it sells.) (More on Techland: DC&#8217;s Digital Participation For Creators: New Or Not?) What you&#8217;re actually paying for, on the other hand&#8211;where the value resides&#8211;is different for physical and digital comics. Here&#8217;s how it breaks down. For both physical and digital comics,<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=32794&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://techland.time.com/2010/06/25/emanata-whats-a-digital-comic-book-worth/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
		<media:content url="http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/9d70ec92cd6988f33f755995786e3e60?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
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		<title>Emanata: Something Something Oranges Something</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/06/18/emanata-something-something-oranges-something/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/06/18/emanata-something-something-oranges-something/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:01:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alan Moore]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=31529</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Here&#8217;s the flip side of what I wrote about last week: there are certain serial comics I adore that I&#8217;m happy to see ended and don&#8217;t ever want to continue. Comics readers are used to the idea that any character or scenario they like can go on forever&#8211;that there&#8217;s always another first-rate story to be told about Earth-X or Blue Beetle or Donald Duck. In some cases, that might be true. But it&#8217;s not necessarily the case, and it&#8217;s worth considering the idea that there&#8217;s a middle ground between an endlessly fertile concept and a self-contained story that would only be cheapened by a sequel. Some great premises, in fact, have a limited shelf life. Exhibit A here is The Complete D.R. &#38; Quinch, newly reprinted in America: a collection of a 1983-1985 series by Alan Moore and Alan Davis that ran in the British weekly comic book 2000 A.D., with a bit of related ephemera. For its first eighty pages, it&#8217;s one of the funniest comics I&#8217;ve ever read; after that, it&#8217;s not. Moore and Davis were on a roll when they started the project: they&#8217;d already been collaborating on more serious strips like &#8220;Marvelman&#8221; and &#8220;Captain Britain.&#8221; Davis notes in David Bishop&#8217;s history of 2000 A.D., Thrill-Power Overload, that he&#8217;d found himself &#8220;categorised as a gritty, realistic artist. I really wanted to do something different, just to show that I could do it.&#8221; They ended up doing a six-page, one-off story about (alien) teenage ne&#8217;er-do-wells on a rampage, &#8220;D.R. &#38; Quinch Have Fun On Earth,&#8221; which went over so well that it soon became a regular feature. &#8220;D.R. &#38; Quinch&#8221; began as a riff on National Lampoon&#8216;s &#8220;O.C. and Stiggs&#8221; stories about a pair of delinquent teenagers, right down to its diction, but quickly became much broader and daffier, although Moore kept some of his inspiration&#8217;s rhythms in his dialogue: &#8220;We will also need a monstrously huge government loan in order to fund this utterly heart-wringing venture.&#8221; &#8220;&#8216;Sright.&#8221; This edition includes a couple of pages of Moore&#8217;s typically<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=31529&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
		<media:content url="http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/9d70ec92cd6988f33f755995786e3e60?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
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		<title>Emanata: Ten Comics That Should Run Forever</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/06/11/emanata-ten-comics-that-should-run-forever/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/06/11/emanata-ten-comics-that-should-run-forever/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:13:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kurt Busiek]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=30546</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A few weeks ago, Tom Spurgeon offered a juicy challenge over at The Comics Reporter: &#8220;name five past or present comics titles you think should always be published, just because it would please you to see them on the stands.&#8221; I liked thinking about series I&#8217;d want to go on forever (as opposed to going on longer than they have): there&#8217;ve already been over 1500 Judge Dredd stories in 2000 A.D., for instance, but part of the reason I enjoy &#8220;Judge Dredd&#8221; so much as a serial is that it&#8217;s building toward a conclusion that will come eventually. Kurt Busiek followed Spurgeon&#8217;s challenge with his own list of fifteen comics that he&#8217;d want to see run forever, noting specifically that they&#8217;re comics he likes in serial form. Since Kurt Busiek always wins, he inspired me to make my own list of ten candidates for permanent serieshood&#8211;but to poach one of his picks (that would be #5). 1. Frank, by Jim Woodring. I&#8217;ve read all of Woodring&#8217;s wordless stories about the sort-of-innocent catlike creature Frank, his reprehensible nemesis Manhog and the world of frog-creatures and whirling rainbow souls they inhabit at least half a dozen times; I sometimes think my single favorite comic book ever is Woodring&#8217;s early Frank one-shot Tantalizing Stories Presents Frank in the River. A new, superb Frank book called Weathercraft came out a few weeks ago, but I treasured Frank as a periodical, and I&#8217;d love to sit down with a few hundred issues of it when I&#8217;m an old man. 2. Age of Bronze, by Eric Shanower. Technically, this is probably going to have to come to an end at some point, since Shanower&#8217;s recounting the Trojan War. But it&#8217;s a terrific comic and a really effective serial, and the Trojan War did go on for a really long time and there are plenty of stories to tell about it, and any week this comes out is a good week. (And what do you know: there&#8217;s an issue coming out next Wednesday!) 3. Sugar &#38; Spike,<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=30546&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://techland.time.com/2010/06/11/emanata-ten-comics-that-should-run-forever/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
		<media:content url="http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/9d70ec92cd6988f33f755995786e3e60?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
		</media:content>
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		<title>Emanata: Draw What You Know</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/06/04/emanata-draw-what-you-know/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/06/04/emanata-draw-what-you-know/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Jun 2010 14:00:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=29633</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Jesse Reklaw is probably best known for &#8220;Slow Wave,&#8221; the weekly strip he&#8217;s been drawing for 15 years, in which he adapts his readers&#8217; dreams into comics (and has more recently been connecting those dreams into an odd kind of extended story). In mid-September 2008, as he prepared to head off on a tour to promote the Slow Wave collection The Night Of Your Life, he started a second strip: a daily four-panel diary cartoon that he resolved to draw every day for a year. A few months into it, he added a little diagram at the bottom of each page, mapping his mood, his energy level, his various kinds of chronic pain, and how many alcoholic or caffeinated drinks he consumed that day. Reklaw did indeed complete the year&#8217;s worth of daily strips, incorporating a few format experiments&#8211;a five-day stretch of &#8220;24-hour diary comics&#8221; (with 24 tiny panels, one per hour), as well as a few weeks&#8217; worth of &#8220;guest comics,&#8221; in which other cartoonists from the small-press scene used Reklaw&#8217;s format to examine what they&#8217;d been up to that day. The result was initially published as a six-issue minicomic, and now the whole thing&#8217;s been compiled as a self-published collection, Ten Thousand Things to Do (you can buy it through Reklaw&#8217;s site). It&#8217;s a splendid little chunk of a book, a collection of tiny, trivial autobiographical cartoons that are often very similar to one another but add up to something that&#8217;s surprisingly entertaining. Mostly, it&#8217;s a detailed portrait of American bohemian life in the late &#8217;00s&#8211;the day-to-day existence of an artist who&#8217;s just getting by on his art, playing in a couple of bands, hanging out with his many friends, traveling a little bit, and usually sleeping from early morning to early afternoon. It&#8217;ll be a priceless historical document a few decades from now, even though Reklaw&#8217;s thorough attention to quotidian details often means that not a lot happens on any given page. (One caption: &#8220;I decided to eat leftovers and sleep, but then we started watching The<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=29633&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
		<media:content url="http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/9d70ec92cd6988f33f755995786e3e60?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
		</media:content>
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		<title>Emanata: Eight Questions for Comics Creators</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/05/21/emanata-eight-questions-for-comics-creators/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/05/21/emanata-eight-questions-for-comics-creators/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 May 2010 12:52:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=27822</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I declare today that the creators of every comic book must be able to answer these questions, or at least make work that shows they&#8217;ve considered them all. 1. Why is this a comic book? Does it want to be a movie instead? A video game? A piece of prose? (If so, you should probably go make whatever it&#8217;s supposed to be instead. I have no interest in looking at your proof-of-concept movie proposal.) Is there a reason it has to be drawn as a series of still images, rather than photographed or filmed or animated? 2. What is it going to look like? How does it look different from every other comic book out there, including others drawn by the same person? There are no great generic cartoonists; first-rate cartoonists treat style and design as integral elements of every individual project, and it&#8217;s generally true that the more premeditated a particular comic&#8217;s look is, the better it comes out. (The Dark Knight Strikes Again doesn&#8217;t look like Sin City, which doesn&#8217;t look like 300&#8230;) This also extends to coloring, of course. Think of Patricia Mulvihill&#8217;s work on 100 Bullets, say, or what Frank D&#8217;Armata&#8217;s been doing on Invincible Iron Man lately: they&#8217;re distinctive, carefully thought out, and hugely important to the way both series work. (More on Techland: Exclusive Preview: Moving Pictures) 3. What is it going to read like? How is its writing different from the writing in every other comic book out there, including others written by the same person? Again, style is everything in comics, and good narrative writing doesn&#8217;t just tell a story, it fits the story. Final Crisis and Joe the Barbarian and Seaguy are all written by Grant Morrison, but even apart from their visual differences, they&#8217;re very different from one another in their mood, their pacing, and their language. 4. What is the first thing I&#8217;m going to see on the first page, and why should that convince me to keep reading? The first page of a comic book is a compact<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=27822&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://techland.time.com/2010/05/21/emanata-eight-questions-for-comics-creators/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
		<media:content url="http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/9d70ec92cd6988f33f755995786e3e60?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
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		<item>
		<title>Emanata: Three Versions of Bendis</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/05/14/emanata-three-versions-of-bendis/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/05/14/emanata-three-versions-of-bendis/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 12:38:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[avengers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brian Michael Bendis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=26778</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Thanks to a scheduling pile-up, all three parts of Brian Michael Bendis&#8217;s conclusion to his part of the Siege crossover&#8211;Siege #4, Dark Avengers #16 and The New Avengers Finale&#8211;came out this week. (Spoilers for all of them follow.) Bendis is a fascinating and occasionally frustrating writer to follow: he&#8217;s incredibly prolific, he tends to stick with projects for a long time, and he effectively rules the most popular franchise at Marvel right now. He also tends to push himself way outside of his home territory of crime stories, character interaction and peppery, vernacular dialogue. For the past decade, he&#8217;s been writing a lot of comics where those strategies don&#8217;t necessarily work, and few of them have failed creatively as badly as Siege. The final issue of Siege is pretty much the definition of bad Bendis&#8211;an issue that has to work as outsized cosmic spectacle, which is not one of his strong points, and also has to cram in a whole lot of plot developments, which runs smack into his habit of building slowly toward character revelations. Characters don&#8217;t really get to talk to each other; they speechify and wisecrack. The Norn Stones allow Loki to give a bunch of heroes an arbitrary video-game-style power-up (they actually get new powers temporarily, although Olivier Coipel&#8217;s artwork is unclear enough that a clunky bit of expository dialogue has to communicate that). Then the Sentry kills Loki, which he is able to do because that&#8217;s what happens in the plot. Then Thor kills the Sentry, which he is able to do because that&#8217;s what happens in the plot. Then Steve Rogers announces that Bucky is going to be Captain America, because&#8230; and so on. (More on Techland: Exclusive Preview: Moving Pictures) A gigantic change in the operating premise of the Marvel mega-plot&#8211;the Superhuman Registration Act is overturned, all the enmity of the Civil War/Secret Invasion/Dark Reign era is over, everybody can be friends and hang out and party again, etc.&#8211;is shunted into position in two panels. (It&#8217;s hard to imagine why the now-nameless-in-Marvel-comics President<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=26778&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://techland.time.com/2010/05/14/emanata-three-versions-of-bendis/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
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		<title>Emanata: The Future of Digital Comics and the Past of Digital Music</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/05/07/emanata-the-future-of-digital-comics-and-the-past-of-digital-music/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/05/07/emanata-the-future-of-digital-comics-and-the-past-of-digital-music/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 07 May 2010 12:50:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[digital comics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[digital music]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=25848</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Here&#8217;s a thought exercise. Imagine a world&#8211;let&#8217;s call it Earth-45&#8211;where pop singles have had a decades-long tradition of only being in print for a day. After a store ran out of the new Beatles or Madonna single, it was gone, and until recently the only way to hear old songs was to scour used record stores. At some point about twenty years ago, the idea of the album finally started to catch on; LP collections of singles stay in print for a while, although most old songs are still impossible to find without lots of luck and money. Now imagine that it&#8217;s 2010 on Earth-45, and everyone&#8217;s listening to new and old music on computers and MP3 players, getting songs from blogs and torrents and so on. But they&#8217;re all files that fans have ripped themselves, from vinyl. The music industry is freaking out, stomping on music blogs and file-sharing services&#8211;but there&#8217;s no such thing as an iTunes Store, no eMusic, no Rhapsody. The big record labels refuse to sell their weekly single releases in any form except vinyl. (Well, one of the major labels offers in-browser streams of a bunch of randomly selected songs from the past for ten bucks a month, but not the new stuff, and certainly nothing downloadable.) Sales keep dwindling, so they&#8217;ve resorted to schemes to make their singles more collectible, like pressing one copy in 100 on colored vinyl that stores can mark up, but that doesn&#8217;t seem to be working too well. Guess what? Substitute &#8220;comic books&#8221; for &#8220;pop music,&#8221; and that&#8217;s exactly what&#8217;s going on in our world. You can buy a new issue of Brightest Day or Siege in the same format the comics industry has been selling for 70 years, but you can&#8217;t buy them for any price in any digital format, even though that&#8217;s the way a lot of fans prefer to read them. It&#8217;s as if Marvel and DC had carefully studied every mistake the music business has made in the past 15 years, and resolved to make<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=25848&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://techland.time.com/2010/05/07/emanata-the-future-of-digital-comics-and-the-past-of-digital-music/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>6</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
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		<title>Emanata: Where to Start With Love &amp; Rockets</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/04/30/emanata-where-to-start-with-love-rockets/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/04/30/emanata-where-to-start-with-love-rockets/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:41:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=25027</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In the last month or so, there have been three new books by the Hernandez brothers, the brilliant cartoonists responsible for Love &#38; Rockets: Gilbert Hernandez&#8217;s High Soft Lisp, Jaime Hernandez&#8217;s Penny Century and a big hardcover called The Art of Jaime Hernandez: The Secrets of Life and Death. Los Bros, as they&#8217;re sometimes called, have been responsible for some of the smartest, best-drawn, most indelible comics of the past 30 years, and way too many people that I suspect would love them have explained to me recently that they haven&#8217;t read either Gilbert&#8217;s or Jaime&#8217;s work because there are dozens of books and they have no idea where to begin. This situation must not stand. Fantagraphics actually has a guide to navigating the various overlapping reprints of the three Love &#38; Rockets series (and assorted associated projects) to date, since everything&#8217;s been repackaged and reformatted so many times. That&#8217;s useful if you want to read everything in chronological order&#8211;but I&#8217;d actually suggest that you don&#8217;t. Both Jaime and Gilbert took a while to find their voices in comics, and their more recent stuff is generally better, and more immediately engaging, than the early stuff. So here are suggestions for starting points for both brothers&#8217; work. With relatively few exceptions, Jaime Hernandez&#8217;s comics have been devoted to his &#8220;Locas&#8221; stories, also known as the Maggie and Hopey stories, which track three decades or so in the lives of two women who grew up in the L.A. punk rock scene. It began as a sci-fi adventure series, a mode it moved away from very quickly and has only occasionally touched on since, but if you start at the beginning that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re going to get. For a relatively inexpensive introduction to the joys of Jaime&#8217;s good stuff, though, I recommend Perla la Loca, a paperback reprint of a 1990-1996 sequence that kicks off with the fantastic ensemble tragicomedy &#8220;Wigwam Bam&#8221; (there&#8217;s a preview of it at Fantagraphics&#8217; site), throws in a bunch of wrestling and decline-and-fall-of-punk business that he draws with<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=25027&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://techland.time.com/2010/04/30/emanata-where-to-start-with-love-rockets/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
		</media:content>
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		<title>Emanata: Brendan McCarthy&#8217;s Fever Dreams</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/04/23/emanata-brendan-mccarthys-fever-dreams/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/04/23/emanata-brendan-mccarthys-fever-dreams/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:07:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[captain america]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[matt fraction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[spider-man]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=24209</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[There are certain comics that are really just meant to be looked at, and Brendan McCarthy&#8217;s Spider-Man: Fever is one of them. McCarthy makes images that lunge for whatever part of the brain feels the tremor of the uncanny. His most spectacular pages elicit a giggle, then a slow stare, and then (if you&#8217;re really lucky) nightmares. The color schemes he favors are garish, blister-bubbling and hypersaturated, so bright and heavy they seem to bend space around them. And his work has a weird, very prominent sense of humor about it; his favorite joke is making things look surreally not-quite-right. That makes McCarthy&#8217;s art great for gazing at&#8211;he had a memorable run as the cover artist of Shade the Changing Man in the early &#8217;90s&#8211;and sometimes less than optimal for a reader who&#8217;s trying to follow a story. Following a small flurry of comics projects in the mid-&#8217;80s (notably a few Judge Dredd stories and his short-lived Paradax project with Peter Milligan), he&#8217;s largely been keeping busy elsewhere. Before this month, the only complete comic book he&#8217;d released in the the past 18 years or so was 2006&#8242;s final issue of Solo, a backwards cartwheel through the look of DC&#8217;s go-go-checks era. So it&#8217;s a pleasant surprise that he&#8217;s resurfaced; in the last three weeks, two new comic books have featured his work, with at least three more to follow by July. If the premise of Spider-Man: Fever&#8211;a Spider-Man/Dr. Strange team-up&#8211;doesn&#8217;t immediately suggest what McCarthy is up to, then the first page&#8217;s resemblance to the non-Euclidean landscapes of certain panels from old Dr. Strange stories makes it clear: this project is a straight-up tribute to Steve Ditko&#8217;s &#8217;60s-era artwork on both characters&#8217; comics. (More on Techland: The Secret Comics History of &#8220;The Losers&#8221;) For an artist as in-your-face as McCarthy can be, though, he&#8217;s surprisingly subtle about it: this is a homage, not a pastiche, and it looks much more like McCarthy subsuming some of Ditko&#8217;s tricks into his own unmistakable repertoire than like McCarthy doing Ditko. His story makes<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=24209&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://techland.time.com/2010/04/23/emanata-brendan-mccarthys-fever-dreams/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
		<media:content url="http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/9d70ec92cd6988f33f755995786e3e60?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
		</media:content>
	</item>
		<item>
		<title>Emanata: Forward-Looking Statements</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/04/16/emanata-forward-looking-statements/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/04/16/emanata-forward-looking-statements/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Apr 2010 13:23:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brightest Day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Geoff Johns]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the flash]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=23436</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The two Geoff Johns-written or -cowritten series that launched this week, Brightest Day and The Flash, both feature one of Johns&#8217; signature tricks. A few pages before the end of Johns, Peter J. Tomasi and Fernando Pasarin&#8217;s Brightest Day #0, the story&#8217;s narrator is suddenly surrounded by visions of the future: ten panels, each drawn by a different artist or artists, and each showing one or two of the series&#8217; principals in a situation that it&#8217;s safe to assume will happen at some point in the next year. (There are two instances of lovers-turned-enemies, one of frenemies-turned-lovers, and one involving a vast and legless trunk of stone.) Likewise, at the end of Johns and Francis Manapul&#8217;s strangely pokily paced The Flash #1, there&#8217;s a two-page teaser for a 2011 Flash project, Flashpoint, by Johns and Andy Kubert, involving &#8220;the past, present and future&#8221; and what look like alternate versions of Wonder Woman and Batman. As it turns out, there was already a Flash/time-travel/alternate-reality miniseries called Flashpoint back in 1999. So much for institutional memory. Another kind of flash-forward turns up in three of this week&#8217;s Spider-Man comics. There wasn&#8217;t an issue of the thrice-monthly Amazing Spider-Man this week; we did, however, get a new issue of the monthly here&#8217;s-some-extra-stuff-guys series Web of Spider-Man, the one-off Spider-Man: Origin of the Hunter, and the freebie Spider-Man: Grim Hunt &#8211; The Kraven Saga. They&#8217;re collectively a big push for a storyline in Amazing, involving the villain Kraven the Hunter, which begins six issues from now in #634. Between them, this week&#8217;s three issues include four new Kraven-related stories. The lead feature in Grim Hunt, besides quoting the only William Blake poem comics ever quote, is built around a cryptic, awful vision of the future; it actually foreshadows pretty much the same stuff that was previously foreshadowed in Amazing #600 last July. That&#8217;s followed by two pages of Michael Lark&#8217;s pencils for #634 (which reveal a major plot point), and a 12-page clip show of Kraven&#8217;s history, which also sketches out the evolution of<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=23436&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
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		<item>
		<title>Emanata: A Sense of Where You Are</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/04/09/emanata-a-sense-of-where-you-are/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/04/09/emanata-a-sense-of-where-you-are/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:50:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Douglas Wolk</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emanata]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jonathan Hickman]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=22539</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The first issue of Jonathan Hickman and Dustin Weaver&#8217;s S.H.I.E.L.D. is one of the most visually spectacular mainstream comics of the last few months. The premise of Hickman&#8217;s story is that Marvel&#8217;s espionage organization S.H.I.E.L.D. isn&#8217;t just a relic of the Cold War era: it&#8217;s actually a secret society of scientists that&#8217;s been protecting the world since it was founded by Imhotep, around 4600 years ago, and Galileo Galilei, Leonardo da Vinci, Zhang Heng, and the fathers of Reed Richards and Tony Stark were all S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. (How former WWII sergeant/scientific nonentity Nick Fury got in there is anyone&#8217;s guess.) It&#8217;s a fun idea for a series, but the really exciting part is Weaver&#8217;s obsessively detailed drawings of its settings. In the course of this first issue, we get cityscapes of mid-twentieth-century New York and Rome (as well as an invented, Moebius-esque &#8220;immortal city&#8221; beneath Rome), second-century Luoyang, and a two-page spread of sixteenth-century Florence so gorgeous and imaginatively precise that it takes a moment to register that it&#8217;s also got Galactus in it. The idea of S.H.I.E.L.D. seems to be that its protagonists are the great inventors of history, and every city Weaver draws looks like a fantastically complicated machine. There&#8217;s not a lot of empty space in Weaver&#8217;s compositions&#8211;these are drawings to be stared at and puzzled out, evocations of eras when elegant complexity rather than elegant simplicity was the greatest goal of architecture and design. The black-and-white edition of this issue that Marvel also published is worth tracking down; it doesn&#8217;t read as smoothly as the standard version, in which colorist Christina Strain gives Weaver&#8217;s fine-lined filigrees a much clearer sense of depth, but his linework and ink-wash shading are pretty fantastic on their own. James Sturm&#8217;s splendid new graphic novel Market Day also makes a great deal of its sense of place and time, although it doesn&#8217;t specify exactly when and where it&#8217;s set&#8211;it&#8217;s a fable, rather than a piece of invented history&#8211;and Sturm takes a radically different approach from Weaver in drawing its settings. It&#8217;s<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=22539&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://techland.time.com/2010/04/09/emanata-a-sense-of-where-you-are/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">douglaswolk</media:title>
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