Old Man Logan
Old Man Logan by Mark Millar
Illustrated By: Steve McNiven
Format: Trade Paperback Comic
Published: 2008
Publisher: Marvel
The second Mark Miller comic I mooched during my time in Vancouver was Old Man Logan. It’s a ‘what if’ story, set fifty years in the future in a world where the supervillains won. They teamed up for once and managed to kill most of the superheroes in America. Wolverine, who now only goes by Logan, is one of the few left alive, and he’s just trying to live life with his small family on a farm. He hasn’t drawn his claws, or hurt anyone, for fifty years, not since he went through a traumatic experience in the X-Mansion during the attack.
His farm is in an area conquered and ruled by The Hulk and a few generations of his children, green hillbilly thugs that are products of an incestuous relationship. Logan’s late on his rent, and the Hulk kids don’t take kindly to missed payments. Luckily for him, and the plot, Hawkeye picks this opportune moment to come to him with a job. It’s a delivery, so they travel across part of America in what’s essentially a post-apocalyptic travelogue.
One thing that bugged me about this comic, and I know it doesn’t matter at all, was that Miller doesn’t try to explain why Logan is suddenly aging the same as everyone else. I know that any reason he could come up with would be silly, but it just bugs me that it wasn’t addressed. Old Wolverine is pretty great, but huge elephant in the room people! I need some answers!
I really liked this comic. There was certainly fan service, but it was a fun story with some genuinely suprising scenes and some pretty badass moments.
Civil War
Civil War by Mark Millar
Illustrated By: Steve McNiven
Format: Trade Paperback Comic
Published: 2006
Publisher: Marvel
About eight years ago I decided it would be fun to get back into reading comics. I hadn’t read any since I was a kid, so I wandered into the comic book shop and picked up the first thing that caught my eye – the trade for Ultimate X-Men Vol. 1 by Mark Miller. The Ultimate line was a non-canonical reboot of some of Marvel’s most popular books. It was a great idea, as it meant new readers could jump in without needing to know everything that had been happening for the last forty years. The books were big hits, and Ultimate Spider-Man is even still running today (now Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man).
Unfortunately, Ultimate X-Men was an atrocity, a convoluted mess. Instead of invigorating my interest in comics again, it put me off them for a few years. I wouldn’t say I’ve been avoiding his work since, but I certainly haven’t been seeking it out.
A few weekends ago I was visiting some friends in Vancouver, partly to hang out and partly to finally see their cute wee new(ish)born (but mainly to read their comics for free! Mwahaha!). While there I read Civil War and Old Man Logan, both by Miller, and I was somewhat surprised with both.
Civil War was the big Marvel summer event of 2006. At the beginning of the book there’s a reality show following the New Warriors, a group of superheroes in search of villains. They find a group lying low in a house and, under pressure from the reality show’s producers, attack them. During the fight, the villain Nitro lets loose an explosion that levels a couple of city blocks, taking with it an elementary school. There were over six hundred casualties, among them a large group of children. The tragedy prompts a bill to be passed that calls for all superheroes to be registered and their identities revealed as part of a Superhuman Registration Act. The Avengers are of two minds when it comes to this, and it splits the team apart – Tony Stark taking the side of pro-registration and Captain America taking the anti-registration side. Other superheroes choose their sides as well, and a war between the two start.
The Superhuman Registration Act alludes to the way the American government pushed freedom-crushing bills through after 9/11, and the pro-registration side of the team seem to be shown as the baddies. The comparison falls short in my mind, though, as we’re dealing with crime-fighting vigilantes. I’d be calling for them all to be registered if they wanted to fight crime. I wouldn’t want some super-powered dude running around my town attacking people he felt were criminals, not having to be accountable for any mistakes he makes. We already have cops doing that here.
I did like this overall, and it’s made me come around a little on Miller’s writing. The ending wasn’t great, though, and I’m curious if anything in the Marvel universe really changed from this. Spider-Man reveals his identity to the world in this book, which I thought was a pretty cool twist, as that’s something I remember being a big deal with him. I looked up what happened after this event, to him and his family, and he apparently found someone to use magic to erase his identity from the minds of everyone on earth. So…..yeah, that’s a little lame.
Bastion Soundtrack
Here’s a quick selection from the Bastion OST I mentioned earlier, available free to stream or $10 to buy from their website:
Dawkins on Religious Indoctrination
Finishing up The God Delusion, and this jumped out at me as being very true.
I think we should all wince when we hear a small child being labelled as belonging to some particular religion or another. Small children are too young to decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, of life and of morals. The very sound of the phrase ‘Christian child’ or ‘Muslim child’ should grate like fingernails on a blackboard…
Our society, including the non-religious sector, has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them – Catholic child, Protestant child, Jewish child, Muslim child, etc. – although no other comparable labels: no conservative children, no liberal children, no Republican children, no Democratic children. Please, please raise your consciousness about this, and raise the roof whenever you hear it happening. A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a ‘child of Muslim parents’ will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose – or reject – when she becomes old enough to do so.
– Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Bastion
Genre: Action Role-Playing
Published: 2011
Platform: Xbox 360
Developer: Supergiant Games
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Time Played: ~10 hours
Achievements Unlocked: 200/200
In Bastion you play as Sebastian, a kid who awakes after the world has been ravaged by an apocalypse refered to as The Calamity, which left the land crumbled and infested with creatures. It falls on him to try to rebuild the world.
This is a game that strikes gold on all levels. I feel like a lot of the games I’ve played lately have one or two things really going for them and everything else is acceptable enough not to ruin the good points, but the developers for Bastion really seemed to spend time on everything to do with the game.
The first thing I noticed when I fired it up on my Xbox was the music. I started playing this a few months after release, so I had heard about the soundtrack for the game before I even picked it up. The track In Case of Trouble plays during the title screen, and it’s great. It starts off with rhythmic guitar strumming and builds up to include a heavy beat with backing violins. The whole album, which I downloaded for $10, is awesome, and you can stream all the songs from their site. It’s amazing how much of an effect the soundtrack of a film can have on the viewer’s experience, literally making or breaking it for them, so it’s certainly nice to see video games starting to embrace music as a key piece of the story-telling.
The art in this game is beautiful. The characters are done anime-style and everything is bright and hand-painted, as you can see in the trailer:
That voice you hear in the trailer is the narrator. I guess if anything, that’s what the gimmick of the game is, although it comes across as anything but gimmicky. He provides real-time, third-person narration based on your actions during the game, as if he’s telling your story as you live it. For example, if you spend a bunch of time smashing boxes at the beginning of the game he’ll say something like “The Kid rages for a while”. It sounds like that would be annoying, but they don’t overdo it or repeat themselves at all, so it always feels fresh. It’s also a cool way to tell the story without breaking up the action at all with bloated cut scenes.
Usually when a game is heavy on the atmosphere the gameplay can suffer a bit, but that’s not the case with Bastion. It’s an action-roleplaying game, but much heavier on the action. You can upgrade weapons and equip spirits that will give you bonuses, but during each level the action is fast-paced and interesting. The weapons act very differently from each other, each one providing a varied experience that allows you to switch up your play-style.
This is an awesome little game, and you should probably be playing it right now.
Richard Stark’s Parker: The Outfit
Parker: The Outfit by Darwyn Cooke
Format: Original Graphic Novel
Published: 2010
Publisher: IDW Publishing
This is the second Donald E. Westlake novel that Darwyn Cooke has adapted. The previous book was great, and this one is just as fun. Both follow Parker, who is essentially James Bond as a ruthless criminal. What could be better than that? Very little.
In The Hunter, Parker was left for dead after being betrayed and spent the book hunting down those responsible. Since then, he’s recieved a new face through surgery and has been anonymously enjoying the rich life. Unfortunately, someone blows his cover and squeals to the Outfit, a mob-like organization he crossed paths with in the last book. They decide to come after him and learn pretty quickly that you don’t try to shoot Evil James Bond.
Parker’s dropped the lone wolf act in this book and uses a small team to pull off multiple heists against the Outfit, costing them an awful lot of money. I love me some heist action, and that was one of my favourite things about this book. Cooke details a few of the hits, using a unique art style for each one.
This book is a lot meatier than the first, story-wise, but it’s also not quite as tightly plotted, which is maybe to be expected. He experiments a little more with the art this time around, always keeping a cool, retro-cartoony feel. I’m looking forward to the third installment of this four book series, which is due to come out next year.
Blackened Sesame Salmon
When I was sick last month and confined to a liquid diet, I watched the food network about eight hours a day, just to remind myself that there was indeed still food out there somewhere. I became slightly obsessed with Diners, Drive-ins and Dives and eventually picked up Guy Fieri’s cookbook. This is the first recipe I’ve tried from it.
- 1 tsp chili powder
- 1/2 tsp wasabi powder
- 1/2 tsp ground ginger
- 1 tbsp sesame seeds (he calls for half black and half white, but I just went for white)
- 1/2 tsp fine sea salt
- 2 tbsp fresh lime juice
- 2 tbsp chili-garlic paste
- 1 salmon fillet, skin and pin bones removed
- 1 tbsp canola oil
- In a small bowl, mix the chili powder, wasabi powder, ginger, sesame seeds, and salt.
- In a shallow bowl, combine the lime juice and chili-garlic paste. Dredge the salmon through the mixture and then coat with the spice and seed mixture.
- In a heavy skillet over medium heat, heat the oil. Add the salmon and cook for 3 to 4 minutes. Flip and cook for 2 to 3 minutes on other side for medium-rare. I went for 4 – 5 mintues on the second side as mine was quite thick.
– Guy Fieri Food, p. 270
This was really, really good. Mine didn’t blacken very evenly, but it tasted great. Really juicy and flavourful, and certainly the best salmon I’ve ever prepared. I’ll definitely be making this one again.
The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living by Dalai Lama XIV
Published: 1998
I should start this off with saying I’m not religious at all. I don’t believe in the supernatural (though I do find the whole idea fun), and while I would like to read more religious text at some point to understand these stories that have helped shape society, I’ve never been particularly interested in the teachings. I have always been of the mind that we developed our morality in spite of religion and we’d all probably be better off without it.
So, with that out of the way, when a friend dropped this book off while I was in the hospital I was obviously a little skeptical, but I’ve always been interested in learning more about Buddhism and have often thought about picking up one of the Dalai Lama’s books, so I decided to give it a a go.
The Art of Happiness is actually co-written by Howard C. Cutler, an American psychiatrist, with transcripts of discussions he’s had over the years with the Dalai Lama. The focus of the book was to take Buddhist principles, examine them in the context of western psychology, and look for supporting scientific evidence.
I love that this book looks at the psychology and science behind Buddhist ways and doesn’t focus on past lives and other such ideas. They come up occasionally, and it is interesting to read about, but you don’t need to share the Buddhist beliefs to get anything from this book. From my limited knowledge of Buddhism (ie. this book), you don’t really need to share the Buddhist beliefs to get something from Buddhism either. They spend years training their minds and shaping their world outlook in a way that anyone can, nothing magic about it. They focus on the internal, learning to react positively to situations, rather than depending on external forces.
One thing that caught my attention right away was this:
The key questions is: Does Buddhism have anything to contribute to the scientific investigation of happiness?
In considering this question, it is important to understand the Buddhism is not a faith-based system in the traditional sense. In fact, when the Buddha first began to teach, he advised his disciples not to blindly accept his teachings out of faith, but rather to investigate the validity of his theories and test his methods for themselves. The reliance on empirical investigation, the uncompromising commitment to truth, and a total dedication to discovering the nature of reality are things that both Buddhism and science have in common. In fact, the Dalai Lama has demonstrated his total commitment to these principles , stating, “If science was to conclusively prove that some part of the Buddhist scriptures or basic beliefs turned out to be untrue, then the Buddhist scripture or belief would have to change.”
I was somewhat shocked to read this from a spokesperson of religion. This is really the opposite of what is seen from other religions, who are usually dragged fifty years behind modern science and morality. Just a couple of years ago, for example, we had Pope Benedict telling dying Africans that condom use would make the HIV epidemic worse, so it’s incredibly refreshing to hear someone in the Dalai Lama’s position who seems to be more interested in finding truth than increasing the power of his religion.
Maybe I was just in the right state of mind for this book (I was in the hospital after all), but I thoroughly enjoyed it and found it quite useful. I’ve actually found myself thinking back to this when I find myself angry, self-conscious, or self-pitying, and I do find it helps. They’ve written a couple of follow-up books since this was released, and I’ll be picking those up soon.
