05.13.2010 - Terrence Marks:

The You Say it First Survey is over. Thank you very much for participating.

05.10.2010 - Terrence Marks:

Happy Belated Mother's Day!

What did I do today? Work. And played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. There's no way I'll beat it this weekend, but I managed to beat miniboss Dark Priest Shaft today.
Y'know. Because he's one bad mother.
Sorry.
We went comic shopping this weekend and picked up Knights of the Dinner Table, Usagi Yojimbo, Tiny Titans, Uncle Scrooge, Scott Pilgrim, a Blue Beetle trade, Wizards of Mickey, Groo, Peanuts, and Shazam. Hopefully I'll have a chance to read them soon. Also, I watched seven episodes of Batman: The Animated Series and spent a lot of time outlining You Say it First. It's been a good weekend for comics.

The new Uncle Scrooge comics are, it seems, reprints of foreign Disney comics. It gets complicated and I don't have many details, but in addition to the American comics, Disney published comics overseas. Then the American non-superhero comic market dwindled and they stopped publishing. They kept on printing in other countries. Then, apparently, they brought it back to the US, reprinting foreign stories or older American stories.

Interesting bit: I was reading Critters, an old anthology series and I thought one of the features, Gnuff, bore a more-than-passing similarity to Carl Barks' duck stories. Then I found out that the artist, Freddy Milton, drew for the Danish edition of Donald Duck.

So you're wondering...did the foreign issues include translated American stories or were they all original? How many countries had their own Disney comics? Are those $8 Uncle Scrooge paperbacks by Gemstone reprints and/or translations? Do they have the same stories?

Yeah. Those are all good questions. I have no idea.

Anyhow, I also saw The Seven Samurai. So far, I've found that I really like Akira Kurosawa movies. Not in a "I sit through this so I can act cultured around other people" kind of way, but I genuinely like it. It's three and a half hours long. It's in black & white. It's in Japanese, with subtitles. It, reportedly, invented half the stuff it does - and I suppose I could watch the action movies of the 1940s and pay attention to what they don't do, but I'm not going to. It's kind of how Bugs Bunny, when first appeared, was radically different from everything that came before him. But now, if I say "acting like a cartoon character", that's the first thing you think of. But that's not my point. Good movie. Watch it.

05.02.2010 - Terrence Marks:

I had a brilliant idea.

Roger Ebert says video games aren't art. I say he's wrong - you can scroll down to see the exact details of how I said it.

Rather than engage him in Internet Debate (which is like regular debate only pointless and with image macros), I'd do one better. The best form of revenge is living well. So I'd find out what games were art - by my definitions - and play through them all.

The first part of the plan was to make a list. There were a lot of games I've already played that I think count (Grim Fandango, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Twilight Princess, Planescape: Torment, Starcraft, Star Control 2, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and a number of games that I own that I'm meaning to play (Ico, Beyond Good and Evil, Planetfall, Monkey Island 1-3, Final Fantasy 6, Majora's Mask, Ocarina of Time, most of the Super Mario series).

So I was going to ask you which games I should play, then go through and play them. Heck, maybe see if the rest of the internet wanted to get in on the selection process. Write something up, send it around to various gaming sites, and see if they bite. I write a slice-of-life/romance comic strip with anthropomorphic characters. There aren't going to be many times that slashdot reports on what I do.

I'd play through the games and review them. Maybe film something. Tell you how awesome they are and why. Celebrate the high points of gaming.

Then I realized exactly how long it would take me to do this. It'd be awesome. And I'm going to play through those games sooner than later. But someone ought to do this right, and I'm not that guy. That's why I wrote this up - in the hopes that someone else will. So, brilliant idea, out there for the taking. Want it?

04.27.2010 - Terrence Marks:

We've got our first-ever You Say it First reader survey up! What's it about? Merchandise, site design, and a bunch of other stuff. If you read You Say it First, we want to hear from you. If you read Namir Deiter, but not You Say it First, we want to hear from you. If you don't read either of our comics, well, you're a potential reader and we still value your opinion.

We get a lot of feedback, but there are a lot of folks we don't hear from and this is your chance to be heard.

04.23.2010 - Terrence Marks:

You Say it First has been going through some minor remodeling lately. As you can see, the Twitter feed is back up. There's a bar separating the comic section from the news section. Like most webpage changes, it involved making a lot of adjustments, seeing that they didn't work, and changing them back. (The news/blog is two columns of uncertain and varying length. I'd like to fill that blank space with stuff, but it's a different amount of space every time, and automatically calculating which column would be inaccurate and difficult).

I've also made some adjustments to the RSS feed, so that the news and blog entries will show up separately. There were some issues with the previous system. There are, I'm sure, different issues with the new system, but that's life.

Relatedly, I realize that I don't really have a title for my blog. It's currently "Terrence Says", which was put in as a description (so you don't think it's news). It didn't really need a title until I updated the RSS feed, and had to create a tag for it. I was going to call it "Stupid Stuff", after one of my favorite AE Houseman poems, Terence, this is stupid stuff.

It's a clever reference. For a lapsed highbrow like myself, it's perfect. Except if you've never heard of the poem, it looks really bad. It's like naming your karate school "Marshall Arts". Your friends know that your name is Joe Marshall and it's clever. Everyone else just thinks you can't spell.

So I need to come up with something that doesn't look like I'm calling myself stupid. It's a tough job.

04.19.2010 - Terrence Marks:

So, are video games art?

Roger Ebert (still) says no. But they might be, eventually. But not in any of our lifetimes. Now, this is a medium that has gone from Space Invaders to LittleBigPlanet in 30 years. When I first started playing video games, it would slow down if there were too many items on the screen. I've gone from games where the story only appears on the side of the arcade cabinet to games with real-time cutscenes and fully integrated stories. I don't feel comfortable predicting the future of gaming.

The reaction to this is (still) a mixture of outrage and dismissal. Why? Why does it matter to me whether or not video games are art? Why does it matter to me whether or not Roger Ebert says so?

To deal with those questions in reverse order: Roger Ebert is a very good movie critic. He is insightful, writes very well, and I believe he's right more often than he's wrong. I'm sure we disagree on some things - I say that Up is the best movie ever made. He'd probably go with one of those "safe" picks like 2001 or Citizen Kane.

He knows about art. I'm less certain that he knows about video games; he seems to have played around ten of them. I'm not certain that I could speak definitively about movies after seeing ten, even if they were the ten best movies of all time. A genre either builds on or subverts expectations created by previous works in the genre. I'm also of the opinion that, perhaps, he has played the wrong ten.

On the other hand, this totally reminds me of when I tried to convince my English teacher that Pink Floyd lyrics were too poetry*. I forget how that one ended: either they weren't poetry for reasons I couldn't understand or, less likely, that they were poetry but not relevant to the course curriculum. To me, art has always been something defined by other people. Something that is declared "worthy of attention" for reasons I either don't understand or don't agree with, the implication being that the other things I devote my attention to are less worthy. I suppose I'm overreacting a bit. I work in webcomics, which get even less respect than newspaper comics, which get even less respect than comic books, which don't get much respect at all.

Why does it matter if games are art or not?

Well, there I was thinking that maybe I should stop listening to the hippy-dippy nonsense** I usually listen to and get some real music. I went to the library, took out some John Coltrane albums, and listened.

Three albums later, I realized that I didn't enjoy a minute of it, and couldn't tell brilliant free jazz apart from random noise. I tried. I wanted to wear a beret and tell people that I really dug jazz***. It was art, as defined by the relevant art-defining authorities. It meant absolutely nothing to me.

So I went back home, put on a Monkees album, and never looked back. I'm sure people think that if I listened to the right jazz albums, I'd get it. It's not that I don't care for art. I don't care about art. When I tried to put all the good songs on my playlist, it was impossible. When I tried to put the songs I liked, it was easy.

Now, Ebert cites wikipedia's definition of art. For various reasons****, I do not feel that it is an appropriate resource to define so nebulous. I cite my own work - art is what gets assigned to precocious tenth-graders so they can misunderstand it. By that definition, video games are not art. Tenth graders will find and understand video games without help.

By that definition, pre-calculus is also art. This was not my intention, but is tolerable and does not invalidate the definition. Pythagoras would say that it strengthens it*****.

Also, my uncle John would, when he was teaching Computers, would send students to my website in the hopes that they might learn something from it. Hopefully they did, but I won't speculate as to what. This means that Unlike Minerva is also art. Does that invalidate my definition? Of course not. Or not very much, I hope.

Are videogames art? Is art necessarily great? Ebert says no (because if there the player influences the game, that lessens the statement made by the artist. If the player does not influence the game, it is not a game), and yes, to these questions. I say yes (because subjective interpretation is all we've got; how you perceive any art is influenced by your perspective; games can merely make that explicit.), no (because that would mean that it's my fault for not liking Coltrane [or any other designated artist], rather than me making a valid decision to reject a work whose difficulty exceeds its reward).

Do videogames have to be art? Not to be enjoyable, they don't have to be. I think that Super Smash Bros. Melee is a well-crafted fighting game, but I'm not sure it communicates anything beyond "Damn, this is awesome". But I think some of them - Grim Fandango for instance - definitely are art.

So, where am I going with this? Every time Ebert does this, people list a variety of games that are art - Ico, Planetfall, Mother 3, and a number of other games I haven't played. So I'm going to play them. I'm going to make a list of the games that are, for artistic or other reasons, essential and, for as long as it takes, play through them. Maybe they are art. Maybe they aren't. But

I want you to help me make that list. Not the good games. Not, perhaps, the great games. The masterpieces. Games that it would be an injustice if nobody got to play them again.

*: Phil Ochs lyrics? Totally poetry. If I had "Tape from California", I would've won that argument. Take that, My-tenth-grade-English-teacher-whose-name-I-probably-should-remember.

**: I'm not just saying that Pink Floyd is hippy-dippy nonsense. It's just that that genre was seriously over-represented in my music collection at the time. Still is. But I like it, and I try not to give anyone guff if they like things different.
But seriously, listen to "It Would Be So Nice" and tell me the label doesn't fit.

***: Not all the time. Just once. Maybe for Halloween. But I wanted to be able to talk the talk if someone called me on it. The Soft Machine, Volume 2 is precisely as free as I care for my jazz to be. I can't predict it, but I understand it. It makes sense to me. It is, as they say over at Writing Excuses, "surprising but inevitable"

****: I don't believe the people moderating wikipedia are any more entitled to define art than I am. Possibly less so. Too lazy to provide proper links here. I mean, I have five footnotes.

*****: Yes, here I am putting a reference to Pythagoras and Ancient Greek mathematical mysticism in an essay about rejecting cultural shibboleths. I think even putting the word "shibboleth" in here invalidates my argument a little. I'd say something about being large and containing multitudes, but that'd just ruin it.

04.10.2010 - Terrence Marks:

I've mentioned Mitsuru Adachi before. Cross Game, his most recent manga, is licensed in the US. This is cool.

He's very popular in Japan, but the only manga that got officially translated was two volumes of Short Program, a collection of short stories. They've also been out of print for several years.

I haven't read Cross Game. It's a lighthearted story that centers around high school romance and sports, much like his other mangas, Nine, Touch, H2, Rough, Katsu, and Slow Step. He's been working in that field for a long while and has gotten very good in it. (I mentioned short stories earlier - those aren't them. He's had about a dozen major series, depending on how you count).

I recently finished reading Touch, one of his earlier series. It is slow and deliberate. All his work is like that, but Touch is moreso. The storytelling is extremely decompressed - at 20 pages a week, he's allowed to be. It reminds me of Debussy, in that it's not about the individual notes, but about how the collections of notes interact with each other. It's a story where the default unit of storytelling is not the panel or the page, but the chapter.

I explain that poorly, I suppose. I enjoyed it, but felt the secondary characters were underused.

Anyhow, I read all 5000 pages in the last few weeks. When I write You Say it First, the first draft of each comic takes up about two pages of glances, counter-glances, establishing shots, and pauses. Then I cut it down to five panels, and, finally, to three.

Also, he makes sideburns look awesome, but that's neither here nor there.

I enjoyed it. I liked his manga, Rough, more, but he did that a decade later and it's good that he gets even better. Rough is one of the best mangas I've read

What I'm trying to say is that I intend to buy it when it comes out in October and if you like You Say it First, you'll probably like it.