Sunny, high in the upper 80s, 70% humidity, with a 90% change of collateral damage.

It was somewhere in the middle of my fifth or sixth sortie of the day, wiping out government facilities and terrorizing the populace of the small archipelago nation Panau that it hit me: Just Cause 2 is perhaps the ultimate interactive expression of America’s terrifying older-brother stance towards smaller countries that possess resources we desire. Sure, there are games that throw you into the middle of recent middle eastern conflicts for the sake of shooting people in different ways, but this game was different. In it, players control the actions of Rico Rodriguez, a CIA operative who is given carte blanche to create chaos (something that is literally used as a metric in gameplay,) and sway a small island nation towards a more US-friendly stance. I first attempted to stick to military targets — the mission parameters were vague enough that I thought I could advance by being somewhat honorable in my intentions — while helping various gangs gain more territory and further mire Baby Panay’s administration in woes that could further the American agenda with the country. While it was on a bigger scale, the general idea was close to how I played Grand Theft Auto IV: honorable, even if there was the occasional unnecessary explosion. That didn’t last.

While between missions and assignments, I found myself planting explosives on water towers in small desert villages and randomly destroying oil pipelines that kept the population employed; collecting powerups wasn’t doing it for me anymore. I needed to see more devastation, more destruction. I would drive past soldiers patrolling an area, minding their own business, and hop out of my car just to use a grappling gun to attach one to the bumper and drive down the road. I drove to an airport, stole an ersatz 747, and crashed it into massive fuel tanks at a working harbor just to more spectacularly tick that location off my “places to visit” list. The more I upgraded my weaponry by picking up units scattered across the map, the better I could explode things that offended me. The game’s mechanics aren’t perfect, but there’s enough of a visceral thrill to doing ludicrous amounts of destruction that I soon forgave a lot of the quirks and start to learn how to use the system’s ridiculous (if oddly consistent) interpretations of the laws of physics to my advantage.

This is your character in the process of using his grappling hook to hijack a helicopter while skydiving.This is something you can do without snapping at least four bones in your arm and shoulder.

The game’s mechanics and playability aside, what’s truly fascinating is how Just Cause 2 doesn’t even couch the “America does bad things because it can” message in flowery rhetoric: the CIA operative that you make contact with explicitly states that you are wreaking havoc on the general populace and working with drug dealers and revolutionaries all for the sake of Jed Clampett’s cash crop, and it’d be really great if you kept doing more of that, thanks. While your opponents are overblown cartoons and your character’s Spanish accent is unforgivably close to Triumph The Insult Comic Dog’s, the central truth of the game is actually kind of chilling, even as it’s played with just enough spin to act as a satirical goof on film and video game tropes: America isn’t really a great neighbor to other countries; our government does pretty horrible things in our national interest, particularly when it comes to petroleum.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to base-jump off a skyscraper for points before destroying a propaganda trailer and starting a firefight on an oil rig. Go USA!

Curiously, there are a couple of very nicely-done pieces that seem to be from another book entirely – Danny Fingeroth (!!) and Bob Hall (!!!) (with some very polished lettering from Janice Chiang) handle Rip Torn and Steve Hamilton’s stories) and seemed to show what this book could have been in many places. I also should point out that even if I’m not fond of the aesthetic, comix vet Sharon Rudahl acquits herself very nicely in the several pieces contributed. For the most part, though, this book is a failure; a dismal, lifeless piece that misses the vibrancy of the original even as it reverently recreates most of the text. If you’re going to include 90% of the original text in the pieces and just use illustrations to buoy up the original content here and there, then you’re missing the point of doing comics.

However, Darwyn Cooke’s much-ballyhooed and anticipated comics version of Richard Starker’s The Hunter is pretty much a master course on how to do this kind of thing. Cooke’s taken the original novel and stripped it down even further, letting the reader savor the interaction between a plot that never stops and vibrant, two-tone art that actually tells the story versus providing illustrations for the narration. I was 90% sure this was going to be a success when this was announced — Cooke’s one of my favorite comics creators and his 2005 issue of DC’s Solo and subsequent run on The Spirit showed that he knew how to do comics noir without falling back on the familiar Sin City-isms — but I was honestly surprised at how enthralled I was with the book.

In my first reading, I devoured the whole thing in one sitting and then rereading it several times over the next few days, going over my favorite sequences: pages 34-37 of my review copy feature a suicide and subsequent disposal of the body in a sequence that is part storyboard, part elegy to a dead romance, notable for its near silence; the end of Book Two with its bang-up set of splash pages and the opening of Book Four, a darkly funny sequence where Parker handles some goons even as he speaks to one of the people responsible for his current plight. All of these highlight how effortlessly Cooke plays to his strengths as well as those of Richard Stark/Donald Westlake’s original narrative.

If you can’t tell, I think this is the book to beat so far this year, not just in its genre, but as a definitive example of the medium. There’s a preview up at IDW’s site, and it’ll be on shelves in July.

The new release The Chronicles Of Riddick: Assault On Dark Athena is a stealth-heavy first-person-shooter for the XBox 360, Playstation 3, and Windows. In a move that I highly approve of, the 360 and PS3 versions come with both the newer game and a remastered version of the 2004 release The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay.

Pro: Vin Diesel, Ron Perman, Michael Rooker Lance Henricksen, Michelle Forbes and…uh…Xzibit provide strong voice talent. (Forbes in Dark Athena as the pirate captain stands out with a wonderfully throaty, no-nonsese intonation that makes me want to hire her to record my voicemail message.)

Con: They say some amazingly ridiculous shit. Being the tough-guy star of the two games means that Diesel is saddled with dialogue that’s a string of clichés punctuated by plot points. (The man seems to have a downright fetishistic relationship with the dark.)

Pro: Both games feature designs that fit easily in the amalgamated Dune-meets-Star Wars-meets-The Fifth Element look of the film whose license they’re based on.

Con: They also have the same nonsensical approach to story as the movie. For the most part, there’s no real reason for the gamer to care about what they’re doing, a problem I have with most game writing.

Pro: The player is able to kill the enemies in a truly astounding number of ways, with sneakiness playing a key role. Sneaking around, grabbing someone from behind, and snapping their neck is a pleasure each and every time you do it, and the implementation of Riddick’s “eyeshine” is very nicely-handled.

Con: Boy, there’s a lot of “Get this and this and then you can do this,” which is something I’ve never quite cottoned to in first person shooters. These recursive, repetitive calls to action dull some genuinely interesting game mechanics.

Short version: When all of these factors are combined with a heavy dependence on trial and error at some points and AI that’s glitchy, you get a pair of decently-made games that swing wildly between exhilarating and frustrating. If you’re an avid player of FPS games, this is a bundle you’ll likely want in your library, but a more casual gamer may want to look for a more balanced experience.

Please note that I actively avoid playing with the unwashed masses on XBox Live and so I can’t give any impressions about the multiplayer aspects of the game. I presume they involve flailing around in the dark with knives and cursing at other people, sort of like Hell Night at any given industrial club.

Negatives? Well, three stories about animal welfare in a single book sort of blunt the impact of each one, especially as the book’s best piece, “Roadtrip” is a fine example of wordless comics storytelling to get a message across, but the reader might honestly be a bit tired of the issue by the time they get to it. Also, that cover. That cover is awful. You can’t tell what the title of the book is and while I’m normally all about minimal color palettes, that particular shade of pink is…certainly something.

You can view pages from the book on Yost’s site or order it from Birdcage Bottom Books.

Edited To Add: Check out a rebuttal to this review by creator Joseph Larkin.

I’d somehow missed this during my freshman and sophomore years of college¹ and for years, a certain subsect of comic fans have been telling me that the X-Men cartoon stood up to the Warner Brothers-produced Batman animated series that also aired on the FOX network, and I’d always quietly suspected that the haze of nerd nostalgia had prevented them from being objective about the matter. I’m sad to inform them after sampling a dozen episodes from the confusingly named “Marvel DVD Comic Book Collection” of the 90s X-Men cartoon, it’s all as bad as these clips would indicate and the series surely can’t hold a candle to its contemporary from another studio.

Where Batman was sleek and sharply written, effectively using decades of continuity and minimal, easily animated designs to get the most from a tight budget, the X-Men cartoon is a bloated mess that seems to revel in its fiscal and storytelling shortcomings. There’s overblown dialogue forced into the mouths of voice actors who seem more desperate than talented, animation that seems to be missing every other frame, and an intensely dispiriting take on the X-Men mythos that lacks any sort of joy, stripping away the themes of tolerance and education in exchange for hamfisted plotting and poorly done fight sequences. In a lot of ways, it’s emblematic of much of the comics being printed at the time, all cheap gloss with no substance and an ugly veneer that seems designed to attract teenage boys with more money than charisma.

There’s a reason that this cartoon has been buried in the past until Disney secured the rights to release it on DVD: if the Batman cartoon was frequently a night of passion with a fantastic partner, something you’d want to revisit again and again, X-Men is closer to ten minutes with a tube sock that you’d then bury in the laundry, hamfisted groping that is embarrassing after a certain age..

¹You can speculate why in the comments. I’ll tell you that it rhymed with “girls, music, and some more girls, almost like a Jeffrey Brown book.”

The body horror in Worms #3 is muted in a few places by some pretty dodgy art from Kimberlee Straub, but Mitchell’s strong first-person narrative compensates nicely; it’s deceptively simple and displays a keen ability to use the text space on each of the tiny pages to great effect, building suspense very nicely. Despite actually quite enjoying this, I immediately wanted to see how the writer would make use of a larger format, where this form factor’s limitations are removed and his scripting would get more room to breathe.

Unfortunately, I was a bit underwhelmed by Mitchell’s autobiographical Lost Kisses comics I was given (issue 7 and 8.) I think a good deal of this is because I’m just past the whole stick figure thing at this point, especially as Matt Feazell and Randall Munroe make almost every other comic using the technique moot. Points for exposing some nasty truths about himself and his toxic relationships, but haven’t we crossed the event horizon for comics of that ilk?

You can read (and order) issues of Lost Kisses and Worms on the Silber Records site, where they’re linked at the bottom.

Well, Box Brown is very, very self-aware and willing to pillory himself for a laugh pretty thoroughly as he takes snapshots from his life and assembles them in thoughtful, thematic stories that run the gamut from “I’ve found the love of my life and am having difficulty settling into the new town that we call home” to discussing his fucked-up relationship with money.

I also found that this book had a surplus of that oft-missing element known as charm. Ben and Ellen are people you want to spend time around, not hipster ciphers with punchlines and references instead of dialogue. Ben’s willingness to joke about himself and his circumstances instead of treating everything as a relevatory moment reminds me of a less-deadpan version of Jeffrey Brown. Obviously, none of this would work without Brown’s artwork, a helps underpin everything very nicely, using incidental details and a minimal, cartoonish aesthetic that reminds me of Ivan Brunetti without aping him beat-for-beat.

This self-published work is available in the current issue of Previews. You can see more from Brown on his own website as well as Top Shelf 2.0 and in the rather-excellent Harvest Is When I Need You The Most minicomic.