Category: Comics

It’s interesting to see the path a night of well-intentioned writing work takes. Once the Pringles “pop” (and consequently “don’t stop”), the clock strikes an hour that makes the eyes heavy, lowering slowly to ‘changy chong’ slits fit only for retinal Pringle insertion like a bound and gagged obese man’s very own flesh vending machine.

Solution: Energy drinks; but not too little or just right– too much. Can’t concentrate on writing anymore, it’s too low on visual stimuli. Pop in some crusty movies. Watch Lamberto Bava’s Demons (which is pretty fucking wild) and follow it up with a 1am showing of the half-directed by Lucio Fulci semi-pile Zombi 3.

I shit you not, dreams yielded a zombified Michael Winslow getting blood on our script as he thumbed through and drooled teeth all over it.

Kamen Rider Kabuto better be awesome, because I’m spending a hell of a long time downloading it. Boukenger is still rad as hell. I’ve watched the first 11 episodes and the only bad one was the fifth. The latest story arch involved two monsters destroying and stealing the Daibouken, after which Boukenger brought in more armaments to make Super Daibouken and completely maul them (sounds like some garbage I would write, so I love it). Lots of action and CG is only used when necessary.

Despite Patrick’s early warning, I’m almost done downloading the Kamen Rider The First movie. I expect something terrible, but I couldn’t resist.

In other news, my enchantment with the Simple 2000 PS2 series is waning. I love Chikyuu Boeigun 2 and Zombie Vs. Ambulance is fun to pick up for a few minutes when I’m bored, but Onechanbara 2 just sucks all kinds of Zimbabwe elephant ass. The premise is almost indestructable: you run around the city as a hot biker broad slicing up zombies and crows with your katana or blasting them with a shotgun. There’s even this cool feature on the side; a sword meter that builds up the more you kill. I’m not sure what effect it has, but as you cut through the masses your sword drips more and more, and you can clean it off by air-swiping it Lone Wolf & Cub style.

Too bad the game controls like your enemies shamble. It’s hard to accurately run around and slice, you have to be standing still to shoot, and there’s not much incentive not to stand back from a horde and just target them all with your shotgun. A game like this should have some sense of urgency and move at a fast clip. Still, I guess that’s what you get with budget titles; rubber fucking biscuit.

Here are some quick-ease:

• Onechanbara 2 came in the mail today. Much to my surprise, I haven’t touched it yet. Why?

• Well, I spent most of today in some kind of stupor, which involved sleeping, cutting grass or reading “the funny books.”

• On the bright side, I finally finished my long-awaited (by millions) review of the first volume of Baian: The Assassin, the 90’s made for TV movie versions of the acupuncturist assassin story starring Ken Watanabe.

• Super Script with Wesley Woo Woo is going well.

• John and I have two more episodes left in the second season of 24, which is awesome. The best part of this is that it means we get to rent and play through the semi-recent PS2 game that takes place between this and season three.

• Number one thing I learned today: In the mid-70s, when HK comics were at their height of basically pirating Japanese comics in either the form of translation or reimagining, Doraemon was presented to the ding dong kids as who else, Ding Dong.

There’s nothing like a new sentai series to make me want to eat cocoa puffs and buy toys. The latest addition to the tradition is Go Go Sentai Boukenger… and it’s pretty awesome!

Much like but not necessarily to the extent of old British men, Japanese people love to go on adventures. This holds true for the multi-colored boys and girls of Boukenger as they help Toei launch a series that adds tomb raiding and treasure hunting to the expected mecha action.

The team hunts after special hazardous treasures known as “Preciouses” and usually ends up engaging in battle with whatever dead civilization they’ve just awakened as a result.

Okay, true confessions: At the time I originally wrote this I had only watched the first episode, but that seemed like the formula to me (for the record, I was mostly right). The special effects are in the typically awkward late 90s-present style of CG/traditional models mish-mashing, but are pretty good overall. There’s enough tangible FX action to keep the dream alive. This also seems to be the first series shot in 16×9 (as opposed to the widescreen stretching that TV-Nihon started inexplicably doing with some of their previous projects).

I think I’ll keep up with this one, but if you want to watch it, there’s already a handful of episodes out (I’m a little behind). You can get them here.

Farting around trying to come up with scenes for the script. 3:32am: Not much luck so far. What’s that temporary cure for writer’s block? Oh yeah, ordering another Simple 2000 PS2 budget title!

Today’s culprit is Onechanbara 2. Although most would have added it to the cart because of the zombie-slashing japper-nese chickadee on the box, I was sold per usual at NCSX’s typically elegant write-up. Specifically:

A B-movie song plays in the background where a woman occasionally moans out, “Yeah, C’mon” and wails “uuuhuuwooah”

The mailman also finally brought me Zombie Vs. Ambulance and Sega Ages 2500: Gunstar Heroes Treasure Box (including Alien Soldier and the JP and EU versions of Dynamite Headdy). I’m still pretty obsessed with Chikyuu Boeigun 2 for the moment, though.

I don’t think energy drinks work on me very well, though I’ve come to really enjoy the taste. I guess I just need to drink a lot of them. I think I’m going to pop another can of Monster and see what happens. I’d love to actually get a scene done tonight, but I keep trashing what I write. I have to constantly tell myself that the deadline is sooner than it really is so Wes and I can crank this shit out like the golden, beautiful egg it is and spend a lot of time polishing it (the turd).