Off Topic tuesday!

[icon_uk]

It's "Off-Topic Tuesday" time!

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.



And away you go!

Comments

[informationgeek]

So since it is October and we are in the middle of the Halloween season, here's a fun topic: Name of some your favorite creepy, scary, or disturbing scenes from comics or manga that you have read.

A personal favorite terrifying scene for me was from Umineko: Episode 3: Banquet of the Golden Witch. Warning some slight spoilers.

The new Beatrice (the Endless Witch) has confronted Aunt Rosa and her daughter Maria after gaining her new powers. She has decided to test them out on the two of them. Her first act is raise them into the frickin sky and then let them drop, splattering them against ground.

Then she resurrects them and then proceeds to warp reality around them, drowning and crushing Rosa within frickin' gealtin until she bursts and having Maria cooked alive in a stove by gingerbread men. And then yet again, she resurrects them and this time turns Rosa into a butterfly, who then captured by a spider. Not graphically shown, but Beatrice proceeds to discuss what a spider does to its victims as we see a silhouette in the background of spider devouring Rosa.

Easily the creepiest and most horrifying part of this episode of Umineko with just how vicious this villain is, how terrifying her abilities are, and the way the art depicts. For those wondering, yes. Beatrice does end up getting defeated and dies... I think (Umineko is a mindscrew of a series as good as it is).

[janegray]

Not one scene in particular, but I'd say the entirety if season two of Princess Tutu. Which came with one hell of a mood whiplash. Season one was the stereotypical sugary sweet magical girl anime (well... I guess it was stereotypical back then. These days, it feels like cynical subversions are the norm). It was cute and fluffy and innocent, so sweet it tasted liuke honey covered in sugar dipped in butter.

Season two was... Well. Hum. The best description of it I have ever heard is "darkfic of season one."

Turned out that the real villain of the story was neither Princess Kraeru nor the Evil Raven, but the effing' NARRATOR. The guy who had been breaking the fouth wall and narrating the story since the first episode, the cool old guy who gave Ahiru her magic powers, starting the series to begin with, and kept counselling her. HE WAS A FREAKING PSYCHOPATH.

So, this guy used to be a writer. A writer who had the power to make everything he wrote in his stories come true in real life. Also a guy who fully believed in the True Art Is Angsty trope. He was convinced that only tragedies made for good stories of literary value, while happy endings were junk for the rabble. So naturally he had terrible things happen to the characters in his books, and if those terrible things then happened to real people in the real world, oh well, you are supposed to suffer for art!

People naturally disagreed with him. And since asking him to stop was met to a steadfast refusal, they just went "fuck it" and grabbed a giant axe to break down his door Shining-style and cut off his hands.

Unfortunately this guy was a stubborn motherfucker, so he kept writing using his bloody stumps as pens. And before he bled to death, he managed to write a story where he was a narrator who held the lives of people in his hands, as the whole world was his canvas. And he oh so loved portraying tragedies.

As the undead fourth-wall-breaking narrator, he couldn't be killed, and he could make anybody do whatever he wanted simply by narrating about it. One scene involved him thinking that it would be delightfully tragic if a girl killed herself in a fit of nervous breakdown after failing to save the ones she loved, so he gleefully narrated the scene while on the screen the girl walked towards a lake and got pulled underwater and started slowly running out of breath.

Don't worry, they do save her by managing to temporarily stop the narration. But the point is, how creepy is it that a guy can kill you simply by talking about it, and moreover is torturing and killing you and your loved ones simply because "it makes for a good story!"?

[q99]

-Name of some your favorite creepy, scary, or disturbing scenes from comics or manga that you have read.-

I'll just link a creepy body-horror comic story I like and posted here awhile back:

An old Scans Daily entry

[lego_joker]

"Just say Uncle."

"We're going to take TURNS."

"He knew I'd ask, "Are you really fat?""

"Well then, good night... I'm taking my card back..."

[alicemacher]

Okay, I know the first quote is from Saga of the Swamp Thing #29 "Love and Death," and the second from Sandman #14 "Collectors." (Good choices.) Where are the other two from?

[lego_joker]

Eheheh. I hope I'll be able to post them for everyone to enjoy throughout October.

But if you really want to know, here's a hint:both their sources hail from the East.

[baihu]

This was in an issue of Power Pack back during the Inferno saga. The Inferno effects were already pretty horrific across the board, but I remember this whole story really playing out like some kind of psychological and supernatural thriller.

The comic starts off with showing how the supernatural heat was affecting the city. Trash has piled up on the streets, reeking from the heat and decay as the roads are too clogged for the garbage trucks to get them.

Everyone in the Power Pack family is suffering from the heat. They try to use ice cubes and such to keep cool, but it doesn't work.

Mildew grows at an impossibly fast rate in the toilets. Alex tries to burn away the mildew when he uses the toilet, only to have it grow back almost immediately and even starts to climb up his leg!

I admit, I don't remember the in-between parts so I'll skip to the big confrontation.

The Bogeyman aka Douglas M. Carmody. A simple villain who thinks the Power Pack caused him to lose his position as a researcher prior to the Inferno saga, he becomes a far greater threat during the event.

I remember the scene of how he became the Bogeyman very well. N'Astirh simply picks him out of the many humans, and decides to 'chew away the fat' to get to the 'monster within'. The panel shows N'Astirh beginning to bite down on a roll of Carmody's fat chin, before cutting away and we only hear screaming.

When N'Astirh is done, Carmody has become a full demonic creature, and he's still out for revenge on the Power Pack.

Jumping ahead, the next scene I remember from this is Carmody succeeding in driving the Powers family into their building's elevator, where he then rips apart the top of the lift to peer in. His plan is to finally force the Power Pack into revealing their powers to their parents, which in the situation, they have no choice.

Due to the Inferno's influence, the sight of Carmody, and the danger they're in, their parents start to break down at seeing Carmody, and their kids fighting him with their powers. They begin thinking how they could protect or guide their kids when they have powers, against threats like The Bogeyman.

The fight eventually reaches the top of the building, Carmody keeps taunting the Powers family, mostly telling the kids their parents could never love 'mutants' (that's what he thinks the Power Pack are) like them and that they're monsters.

But finally their parents snap out of it, and say they love their kids regardless. Their mom then confronts Carmody, and grabs him to force him to at himself in a nearby window, saying that there's only one monster there. At the sight of himself, because he never knew just how far the demonic transformation had gone, Carmody wails and throws himself off the building.

This was an amazingly well-written and drawn story that if you took out the superhero powers, could be a legit horror story of a demon/devil terrorizing a family. It was stories like this that still makes me a big Power Pack fan, and also firmly believe that the Inferno saga was one of the best events Marvel ever had, because it really let them cut loose into some very dark stories.

[icon_uk]

Oooh, good question!

I'd possibly have to pick another scene from The Sandman's Collectors, where the child murdering Funland describes, in rhapshodic terms, how much he loves operating out of a Disneyland expy.... Just thinking about it makes my flesh crawl and my gorge rise.

[lego_joker]

I find that rather interesting from a generational standpoint, since most of "Collectors" is too over-the-top for my irreverent millennial brain to find that scary. Funland in particular almost feels like a Family Guy/Simpsons parody of a stereotypical serial killer - overweight, vaguely effeminate, snatches kids from theme parks... all that's missing are some mommy issues...

But I have the feeling that back in the '80s, serial killers hadn't *quite* congealed into the easily-dissected and mockable stock horror villains they are today. I remember being vaguely confused when reading Swamp Thing's "American Gothic" arc, for one, because the "Bogeyman" chapter seemed to *just* be about a stock horror villain with no social commentary whatsoever. It wasn't 'til I went to Sequart that I realized the serial killer bit *was* the social commentary; the stock horror villain was supposed to be the bogeyman legend.

[icon_uk]

That may be a thing, just as masked horror movie monsters were already pretty stale by the early 90's they serial killer thing, whilst still around, still hadn't had to recover from Anthony Hopkins incredible overacting in "The Silence of the Lambs" et al.

I've also posted from the Boogeyman story before and it was quite well received; Think of a number

[dr_archeville]

Note: the following contain a gendered slur.

Lois Lane: "Do you accept that I'd just let go gracefully?  To you?"
Wonder Woman: "Whether or not you let go is irrelevant.  He's made his choice."
LL: "I see.  So I should just... move on with my life?  Find someone else? Well, there is no one else!  No one even comes close.  There' s no life after Clark."
WW: "And that is your problem.  There is no Clark.  Clark Kent is a lie.  There is only Kal-El."
LL: "If you knew him as well as you claim, you would know that Clark doesn't lie."
WW: "We need not be enemies, Lois."
LL: "Well, we sure as hell ain't gonna be friends, sister!  Do you really think I'm going to let you steal Superman away from me without a fight?"
WW: "I am an Amazon Warrior.  Princess of Themyscira.   I respect your desire to fight, but I suggest you choose your battles more wisely.
LL: "Well, I'm the queen of Metropolis, and an unscrupulous reporter.  So I'm telling you, bitch: watch your back."
WW: "I have never lost in single combat.  And in Hera's name, I don't intend to start."

Are these lines from a new issue of the Superman/Wonder Woman comic?  A flashback scene in the Injustice: Gods Among Us tie-in comic, or new DLC for the game itself?  A scene in an upcoming JLA animated movie?  No!  These are actual lines from Wonder Woman XXX: An Axel Braun Parody, which released last month.  Shockingly, the scene ends in Wonder Woman just wandering off, and not her and Lois banging like a screen door in a hurricane as one might expect.

The actual sex scenes are between Doctor Fate/Maddy (she's a supporting character who ran an occult bookstore), Angle Man/Killer Frost (Angle Man?!?!?!), Batgirl/Wonder Woman/Ares (oddly, their Batgirl is blonde, so should be Stephanie, but her outfit doesn't have any purple, or a utility compartment on the thigh, but is much closer to the outfit Barbara wore on the cover of 1998's Legends of the DC Universe), Lois Lane/Cheetah (named Barbara Minerva but wearing Priscilla Rich's Superfriends-era costume), and Superman/Wonder Woman (he's in a Man of Steel-esque outfit).

(These few costuming oddities are particularly noticeable because these adult parodies usually get the costumes to look much more comic-authentic than the mainstream movies do in their superhero blockbusters!)

Also, as entertaining and impressive as Axel Braun's adult parodies have been, I feel he really dropped the ball by not having his Wonder Woman flick feature more of her female villains -- like Baroness Von Gunther, Circe, Doctor Cyber, Doctor Poison, Giganta, or Silver Swan -- or any bondage scenes.  (She only uses her lasso once, on Angle Man, trying to get him to reveal why he'd broken into a museum, but he was teleported away before he could reveal anything.)  No scenes where WW shows her villains a better way to live via her "Amazon training and its tenets of discipline and love," the power of "obedience to loving authority"?  William Moulton Marston must be spinning in his grave!

[janegray]

So it has apparently been the 20th anniversary of Gargoyles.

I know they are never going to make a sequel since Disney went out of its way to kill the comic, and I wouldn't trust a remake given that the remake of thundercats was cancelled after just a dozen episodes.

But at the very least it would be nice if the show ended up on Netflix or something :/

[baihu]

Just hope that Disney never makes a live-action remake starring Kanye West as Goliath!

[janegray]

I managed to hold it together until Xanatos XD

Oh, btw, whatever happened with your project? Did you get my message asking if there was a limited time?

[baihu]

I got exactly 9 days to finish the prologue LOL. You can check out my WIP thread here: https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/rook-medieval-story-somewhat-inspired-by-got-wip/12059

I'll be updating it sporadically as I'm writing over the next week and a half, so you can check it out. One route is more or less finished, I'm writing the ending for it right now.

[janegray]

Ok, I'll try to play it within the next two days :)

[baihu]

Appreciated! Just message me here if you don't want to sign up for a forum account there just to leave feedback.

[janegray]

Ok, played it :)

One thing I noticed... I wish the story had given me more of an option to characterize the protagonist. You could choose his plot-definying responses, but the ability to choose smaller personality-bond responses would have helped greatly with immersion even if the plot had remained unchanged.

For example, even if technically the maid was right, when she started yelling at me and openly insulting me and patronizing me and generally being a total dick, my response would definitely have been less sheepish and more something along the lines of FU. So that part felt pretty immersion-breaking.

Grammar wise, there should be a space in "hungrysenses."

There is an extra ] here: "mindful of your every step, each one ] you take."

I chose to change the name, but the guard still greeted me with "Rook, is it?" when I brought the tea to the Chancellor.

Overall, this looks promising, I think you did a good job :)

[baihu]

Much appreciated for the feedback! As I'm writing up the ending for the first route, I've gotten into the mindset of adding more personalized reactions/options in as I go along. The ending originally was one note, and now has branched out to at least 2 more options before an 'end'. I'll work on incorporating that earlier into the first confrontation with the maid as well.

And thanks for catching those errors, I'll need to remember to replace a lot of set names with variables before copying into the code.

[icon_uk]

That's just so... so... horribly plausible

[jeyl]

I thought Frictional Games' recent release, SOMA, did something unique in the gaming community for having deep, morally driven choices that in no way affects how the storyline progresses.

I also felt the WAU should have been more animated. The sight of a room, hallway or person being slowly infected by the WAU's structure gel and steadily growing was a sight I was dreading that alas never came.