Off-Topic Tuesday - Ready! Set! Go!

[icon_uk]

Welcome to the first of a new feature on scans_daily, "Off-Topic Tuesday"!

In the comments to these weekly posts (and only these posts), it's your chance to go as off topic as you like.

Talk about non-comics stuff, thread derail, and just generally chat amongst yourselves.

What does the current economic situation in China mean to the chances of the world's financial recovery?

Is this the funniest joke you've heard this year?

Is anyone else looking forward to Disney Infinity 3.0?

So in terms of topic, anything goes, but please remember that the other community rules do still apply.

Comments

[thatnickguy]

My second novel drops sometime next month. To say I'm excited would be an understatement. My first one came out two years ago and I'm ready to show off this new baby.

In THE CITY OF SMOKE & MIRRORS, we met Dilbert Pinkerton, a mutant armadillo private detective (he digs for the truth). While investigating a missing pearl necklace in Nevermore Bay, he runs afoul of the city's vigilante, The Buzzard. Except there's something more sinister about The Buzzard than the city realizes.

THE DAME WAS A TAD POLISH is the next Armadillo Mystery. Dill is hired to protect mutant frog actress Lily Pad. Someone wants her dead, but Dill thinks she's not as innocent as she proclaims. And with anti-homoanthropomorphic sentiment higher than ever, Lily's stalker could be anyone.

Check out Larry Nadolsky's amazing cover for DAME:
https://nickpiers.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/dame-was-a-tad-polish-cover.jpg

I like describing The Armadillo Mysteries as Mickey Spillane meets Ninja Turtles. They're a lot of fun, with plenty of one-liners and action. Above anything else, its humour has been praised.

I'll probably make a [No-Scans] post when the new book drops. If you haven't already, I recommend checking out Dill's first adventure:

http://www.amazon.com/The-City-Smoke-Mirrors-Armadillo/dp/148261300X/

[baihu]

I'm currently making an interactive novel for my Master's. I'm not telling them it's basically an expansion of some fanfic I was planning some years ago. They must never know...

[janegray]

Congratulations! :D

[janegray]

You know when you find a fanfiction you really, really like? It has a very interesting and original premise, it focuses on your favourite character and on your OTP, you enjoy the characterization, it has an actual plot, it's long and multi-chapter, it's going to interesting places.

You know when you read that fanfiction, and you get to the last chapter, and it ends on a cliffhanger, and you check the date and it says "last updated two years ago" and the author hasn't posted anything else since and has completely disappeared?

You know that feeling?

[icon_uk]

Know it, I not only know it and have felt it, I'm told I've been responsible for it!

There's one quite long fic i want to finish, but it's a very hard one to write as the villain HAS to be grotesque and horrible, and it whilst I CAN write in that vein it makes me very VERY uncomfortable to do so (especially considering the villain in question), to the extent that when I know a scene with him has worked it also makes me wonder where the hell I channelled that stuff up from and that frankly worries me a bit. I was going through a sort of tough time at the time I was writing it, but not THAT tough.

It's been years since I last updated it, and it may be years before I do again, if I ever do, but I still get fanmail for it, which is, y'know, flattering, but guilt trip inducing, and does make me wonder if I could write like that again and even moreso if i would want to.

[notlowercase]

New to this community. Am I glad to see that I am not the only one writing their Master's thesis here. ;)

[icon_uk]

An unusual, but valid, application of one of our golden rules; "It's NEVER just you"

Community newb saying hello

[notlowercase]

New to the community. I've been a comic book reader on and off since the late 90s. Nice to meet you all! :)

[notlowercase]

It never really is just you, is it? Haha.

Re: Community newb saying hello

[icon_uk]

Welcome to the second happiest place on Earth. (We'd say the happiest, but MouseCorps would probably sue our asses off... and though they have more happy, we have more kink so I say we come out ahead on points)

Re: Community newb saying hello

[cainofdreaming]

Welcome! And don't worry, we only bite to show affection.

And suck blood.

Re: Community newb saying hello

[tugrul]

Tee hee!

[trooper924]

Long waits between chapters in general are always murder. I mean, it's understandable given that most fanfic writers aren't professional writers and have their own lives to live, but still the anticipation can be excruciating, especially if months go by before a new chapter appears.

[janegray]

So true!

But, at least when you know a new chapter is coming, you can take comfort in that. When the story has been abandoned, it's so much worse :(

[stubbleupdate]

That wasn't even the best Kanye West joke at the Fringe

[zapbiffpow]

He-hey, congratulations! Went on Amazon for a bit and read part of your first novel: so did the Dodge Shadow come from personal experience, or was that like a Bluesmobile thing?

[zapbiffpow]

Man, I wonder what Arkham Knight's story would've been like if Paul Dini had stayed on the writing staff.

I mean, he wrote "Heart of Ice" - but then again, he also wrote "Heart of Hush."

[lego_joker]

IMO, Dini's writing steadily went downhill after BTAS. Even the stories he contributed to the TAS tie-in comics couldn't really stack up to the stuff from Templeton or Puckett.

I can remember about two and a half stories from his 2000s Batman books that didn't put me to sleep, and I desperately WANTED to like them.

[beardedjellybean]

It may just be a matter of taste, but I didn't hate the story overall. It wasn't as good as Asylum or City, but it still wasn't terrible just prehaps more average then what people expected.

And while I pretty much expected it from the get-go, I rather liked the Arkham Knight's identity when it was revealed and they took the backstory in a interesting fashion rather than the very dumb one in the comics.

[cainofdreaming]

I just wish I could play the game. The first patch broke it for me. Crash after crash during the first sighting of the Knight.

Though, you know, that might be fixed by now. Kinda drifted to other games because of that. Need to finish Shadowrun: Hong Kong before I have time to try again.

[trooper924]

Though, it is heartbreaking when a story you were following abruptly dies. You spend months waiting an update that is never coming...

[janegray]

ARGH! THE WORST OF BOTH WORLDS!

[deh_tommy]

I preferred Arkham Asylum's story to Arkham City, primarily because the latter felt like a series of random events before just stopping (though i did like the ending). I really liked Arkham Origin's main plot as well, and I like this game, but the Joker's blood acting as some sort of transformative virus confuses me to no end (and it's not like the Joker Toxin in Death of the Family or Endgame (2015) since that only turned people Joker-esque, these people become near identical copies of Joker in everything except physical traits).

[zapbiffpow]

There were a lot of good parts to his Batman run: new villains like the Broker, the Carpenter, the Director and the Globe, Private Investigator Riddler,plus this massive, overarching story spanning from Gotham Detective Comics to Streets of Gotham (which had some great issues).

Maybe the problem was that the main villain of that super-story was Hush, and he's kinda one of the hardest Bat-villains to write.

[zapbiffpow]

Nah, no worries: just because City's still my favorite doesn't mean I hated Arkham Knight. The 'what ifs' really intrigue me, is all, especially the possible foreshadowing stuff we could've gotten with that reveal.

Oracle, though. A lot of weird stuff happened to her this game.

[zapbiffpow]

Apparently they're releasing a patch soon. I hope. Maybe.

To be honest, I just put off playing and watched the cutscenes on YT. Someone made a movie out of them, and the editing's pretty deece.

[beardedjellybean]

I was talking in general, as the overwhelming opinion from people seems to be that the story either sucked or was ok, but not on the par of Asylum and City. But no, the mind does boggle when you think of how Dini could have wrote Knight, and they could have taken it in much different directions.

City is easily my favourite too, I probably liked Origins the least not so much for story (which was lacking in some areas but not bad in others), but the gameplay wasn't that amazing.

I do agree about Oracle, I understand they had to get her out of the way so that she couldn't solve most of the challenges of the story in about 5 minutes. But then you just have bad things happen to her without allowing her to really demonstrate much character and making her into angst for the male heroes, which really is just not a good image.

[zapbiffpow]

Yeah, the Joker blood transformation is kind of weird. I'm not sure exactly how to explain it, but it's on a different plane of pseudo-science than Joker's regular toxin shtick or Project Titan.

Loved the outcome, though. Like Reverse Captain Planet, except Joker.

[lego_joker]

I don't really know where Dini's obsession with Hush came from, either, but he was far from the only thing that went wrong.

A lot of Dini's characters were decent concepts, but the execution was utterly forgettable and his dialogue only seems to have gotten clunkier from his BTAS days. PI Riddler was, again, something I desperately WANTED to like, but there was virtually nothing distinctive to his personality or dialogue; with a few tweaks, he could've been any sufficiently smart ex-con.

(Lemme put it this way: had he not been wearing his old costume all the time, I seriously doubt people would've been able to tell he was meant to be the Riddler.)

The Carpenter - once again, decent concept (even if she started out as a one-note joke), but nothing terribly memorable in terms of dialogue or deed. Her best story (the Li'l Gotham issue) had pretty much nothing to do with Dini.

The Globe - interesting design courtesy of Dustin Nguyen, but he's even more of a joke character than Carpenter was.

I probably don't need to rehash how ridiculously contrived Gotham City Sirens was. Streets of Gotham was slightly better, but the Zsasz arc felt off (the child tournament thing felt simultaneously too highbrow AND too lowbrow for him).

And he should seriously be kept away from Zatanna, for his own good as well as everyone else's. Even back during BTAS, his Zatanna episode was far and away the least remembered, Everyday Magic pales in comparison with most of the other Vertigo stuff I've read, and "Trust" honestly made me want to bang my head against a wall.

[thatnickguy]

Thank you. :)

[thatnickguy]

Heh, it actually started as a running joke between me and an old friend. We'd threaten to run to Mexico and sell one of our mutual friends for $75,000 and a Dodge Shadow. I think it was one of those jokes that started when we were drunk. =p

[icon_uk]

his Zatanna episode was far and away the least remembered

Oh I beg to differ there, I'd say "It's Never Too Late" or, ironically, "The Forgotten" are both ranked way less memorable than the rather charming Zatanna episode, and which was the first place, IIRC, where it was suggested that Bruce might have gone to old DC heroes for some of his training.

[lego_joker]

I should've clarified that. I meant to say that "Zatanna" was the least-remembered DINI-scripted episode of BTAS. "It's Never Too Late" and "The Forgotten" were both written by other people.

I mean, okay, it's kind of a high bar to ask that people mention it in the same breath as "Almost Got 'im" or "Mad Love", but this is honestly the first time I've seen anyone comment on it beyond "Wow, that waaaacky Paul Dini sure loves his hot magician chicks, huh?"

[icon_uk]

Oh if you're limiting it to that then I'd say "The Worry Men" is one most people forget even existed.

[lego_joker]

By the way...

I've recently become interested in the Spider-Woman/Ms Marvel friendship. Can anyone point me to stories that illustrate/expand on it, excluding the issue where Jess saves Carol and KSD's Captain Marvel run?

[zapbiffpow]

Very good points, especially the one with PI Riddler and Zsasz.

There is one very, very good story with Riddler and Selina in one of the 30 Page Giants, but it wasn't Dini who wrote it, and I realize they probably didn't do as much with the concept as possible. (Was he in Gotham City Sirens?)

It was an interesting direction, though, while it lasted.

[zapbiffpow]

Truth. When Babs getting [spoiler] married to Tim Drake [/spoiler] becomes a second-priority bone to pick, you must've really done something that put her characterization through the wringer.

Still love the Arkham series, though. Finding flaws != total hate, and all that.

[silverhammerman]

How does this community feel about the general direction of Marvel's upcoming relaunch?

Between the general feeling that it doesn't actually mean anything, the familiar creative teams/lack of new voices, and a whole slew of diversity issues (both on the creative side and in terms of characters *cough* straight Hercules *cough*) I'm finding myself distinctly unimpressed by the whole of Marvel's current direction. And I say that as someone who actually got pretty excited about the goofily named DCyou stuff.

[aeka]

To be honest, I feel pretty indifferent to it, probably due to relaunch fatigue. I'm not reading Secret Wars and all of the Marvel books I was buying every month ended last month. At this point, I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Not sure which titles I'll be picking up--I guess I'll just pick up whatever looks interesting to me and see what sticks. At the moment I'm more excited for Marjorie Liu's and Sana Takeda's new series Monstress from Image.

[baihu]

Well I stopped reading Marvel for a decade. The rumble about Secret Wars and MCU made me come back. You know what I found out? That frankly nothing really changed in the decade I left. Oh I heard about mega big mess-ups like OMD, but still, when you get down to it, nothing really changed.

So I'm looking at the post-Secret Wars line-up and thinking. Are you really going to change, Marvel? Would you really let your characters organically grow and let them stay matured, or stick them on the status quo merry-go-round over and over again?

Like I like the Scarlet Witch solo synopsis, it sounds exactly what I was hoping for. Yet I can't get it out of my mind that at the very end, we'll be back on the 'she's insane from the magics' refrain again. Because after all these years, Marvel has never broke that pattern. Why should I trust them to break it now?

[deh_tommy]

Indeed, I really liked the ending hallucination with Joker (unfortunately, his Batmobile is unplayable in the main story).

[deh_tommy]

I've begun reading 'The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya', and am intrigued by what happens next. I don't really remember the anime series too well, so the twists are still surprising. Has anyone else read the book(s)?

[cainofdreaming]

Has the limit for the out of cut pics been changed? Just asking because the front page seems to be full of pics larger than 400x300.

[thezmage]

I've been midway through the first short story collection (sigh, I think) for awhile now. Plan to pick it up again soon.

[thezmage]

I preferred Arkham Asylum to Cuty pretty much all around. After that first Ra's Al Ghul scene I was almost glad that the Xbox erased my save

[thezmage]

Disney infinity doesn't excite me much, but I am super looking forward to Lego Dimensions. DC superheroes, Lego movie, LOTR, Back to the Future, Simpsons, Wizard of Oz, Ghostbusters, Scooby Doo, Portal, and Doctor Who all in one game? I'm excited to waste my money on that.