The new Superman Red?

Over at Newsarama, J. Caleb Mozzocco speculates with tongue in cheek whether Mon-El is Superman Red. At first glance it seems geeky funny. Now he's got me wondering...

Will Mon-El run off with Lana Lang? Stay tuned!

For those of you who need a refresher on SupermanRed and SupermanBlue, here you go.

"They keep pulling me back!"

Those COH folk make it harder and harder to stay away.

Dang it.

It's been a couple of months. Was it really as dull as a I remember it...?

Characters worth saving: A clarification

WARNING!! OLD-TIMER ABOUT TO START RANTING!!

I'm a long-time comics reader, so I remember reading the X-Men first time around. One of the things that used to amaze me was how Chris Clarement would "borrow" a character from another comic's run (say, Belasco from "Kazar the Savage"), do a little hocus-pocus, and boom!, a new character is interacting with the X-Men. This was the way crossovers and such used to be done. I remember this happening most often in the team-up books like Marvel Two-In-One and Marvel Team-Up (which, incidentally, Claremont used to work on, including a memorable run with John Byrne).

Anyway, one thing he'd usually do (but not always, as Rachel van Helsing can attest) is that he'd leave the character in a state where the original character was left intact and could be picked up by another creative team and used in their stories. Thus Dracula would harass the X-Men or the X-Men would travel to Asgard and met Loki and when the story was done, Dracula was still undead and loving it, and Asgard was still intact.

Nowadays, the Avengers travel to Canada and meet Alpha Flight to fight some menace, and Alpha Flight is wiped out by said menace! What the...?!!?

Now the next creative team who wants to use Alpha Flight has to jump through hoops to explain how they've returned? That's just ridiculous...

One thing an old time editor (I think it was Julie Schwartz, but don't hold me to it) used to tell his writers was: "If you're going to wipe out an old character, you've got to create a new character to replace him." There's none of that going on, especially it seems at Marvel. Old characters are removed and then resurrected, with no new ones being created. Characters like the Owl and Alpha Flight are going through their 3rd or 4th re-conceptualization. New characters don't last long enough to make an impression before they're wiped out.

Sigh...

Anyway, this rant is long-winded way of describing "Characters Worth Saving from Oblivion". Some of these characters been done wrong. They need to have their Reset button pressed so they can start over and get back to basics.

Characters worth saving from oblivion: Nebiros

Full bio in the Rogues Section at Justin's Honest to Goodness Blue Devil Page.

My brother was so moved by Nebiros and Blue Devil that he developed sprites for a Blue Devil video game. A project he never finished. I still remind him of that once in a while.

COH: WoW Envy

I wanted to address something that'd been bugging me for years while playing on COH.

WoW Envy.

Serious WoW Envy.

See, I was raised on a steady diet of "The Mighty Thor" and Thor was simply amazing. He was a mythological character engaging with a modern world setting of superheroes and supervillains. In one issue, he'd be duking it out with the monstrous troll Ulik, then in the Avengers he'd help take down Zodiac or Kang the Conqueror. He'd appear with Spider-Man in Marvel Team-Up, but would help out his pal Hercules against the hordes of the god Pluto. There was just no limit to the places he'd go and the villains he'd defeated.

So, flash forward X number of years later. COH is out, but so is WoW. COH was my first MMO and I only played WoW long enough to do the 14-day trial but that was an eye-opening experience.

In COH, I'd have to beat criminal gangs like the Hellions and the Skulls for a long time before I ever saw my first costumed supervillain. Or a slightly different in-game model. See, from working in the game industry for even the short amount of time I did, I knew that the folks at NCSoft used the same 3D character models for the gang members but used different texture maps to differentiate between gangs. Nothing wrong with that. It's just that I knew enough from animation that I was looking at the same silhouettes over and over again. Sure, different texture maps, but the monotony of got really discouraging after a while. In WoW, the variety of shapes and creatures and opponents was really varied and exciting. Even at the lower levels, my characters ran across wild boars, wolves, and all sorts of bandits and such to keep me interested. COH by contrast is a world without animals of any kind; no cats, dogs, birds, elephants or anything.

Not even a robotic dog.

Just those stupid Rikti monkeys.

So I looked at all the cool creatures in the WoW universe. I thumbed through the guide books and RPG supplements. I scanned through the screenshots and captured movies.

And I developed a healthy case of WoW envy.

Which didn't mean I wanted to play WoW. I just wanted to set my CoH characters against some of those WoW opponents. I wanted to go up against a huge freakin' dragon with my electric blaster. I wanted there to be a lich causing all those zombies to rise in Dark Astoria. COH just seemed so... dull. Meanwhile WoW really seemed to live up to its initials.

To be continued...

Shape of things to come?

I was doing some wistful dreaming, browsing through the Paragon Studios' job postings when I came across the listing for an Animator. The job description was pretty much up my alley... maybe about 7-10 years too late, but that's another story for another time.

Anyway, I came across this line in the description:

Experience with unique or non-bipedal rigs

That sounds extremely... evocative. Especially for a game like City of Heroes which has resisted adding quadripedal creatures. Granted the Arachnos spider robots have more than two legs, but it sure sounds extremely... evocative.

Late for the party again...

Once again, I'm the last one to know about something cool. It's one of the joys of getting older.

The amazing Dial B for Blog website.

Head over there and enjoy.

'Nuff said.