Sunday Sunday Sunday I found a few more things.  I got a lot of business cards which time tonight will force into a third entry on MoCCA.  Today's finds:

• Jobnik! an american girl's adventures in the israeli army, and Jewish Memoir goes Pow! Zap! Oy! a drawn essay on autobiographical graphic novels, and why they are so jewy, by Miriam Libicki 
• Fort90 - Summer Carnival '09 zine by Matt Hawkins
• Higher Ground, by Shelli Paroline
• 1-up a video game story (mini-comic) by Mark Thisse
• Lesbians Vol. 1 and vol. 2, mini-comics by Jane Mai

It's late, so ... just links!  These are the wonderful things that Ali and I found at MoCCA today.  There will probably be more tomorrow, though my wallet hopes not.

•  Novasett Island by Zack Giallongo and Stephanie Yue and Grune, by Zack Giallongo
• The Harvest Comic Trilogy, which Ali says that she is going to make me pass on to someone else but I don't think that she can make me do that.  Perhaps I will hide them so that I can read them over and over.
• The Elsewhere Chronicles, Book One: The Shadow Door and Book Two: The Shadow Spies, by Bannister and Nykko 
• Preview copy of The Big Kahn, by Neil Kleid and Nicolas Cinquegrani
• Ofuro, by Hilary Florido, a beautiful mini-comic about a trip to Japan and the Japanese Baths.  I can identify.
• Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China and Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, by Guy Delisle.  I've been wanting to read these for a while, so I'm glad that ali_wildgoose  picked 'em up.
• Never Learn Anything From History, by Kate Beaton
• Bite Me! A Vampire Farce, by Dylan Meconis
• Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: The Manga Edition, by Adam Sexton and Hyeondo Park (interview)
• "Suffering & Death" featuring Talking Guinea Pigs! , by Jeff Mumm

It has been a while since I made a post that was actually a log of things I'd found online lately.  Not nearly as long as it has been since that act coined the term "weblog".  But here are cool things!  And questions!

• I'm looking for podcasts about game design and the game industry.  Recommendations go far with me-- my flist is the editorial board of the firehose of internet content.  I've found the Gamasutra podcast, the Indie Game Developer's Podcast, The DigiPen Podclass, The Bungie Studios Podcast.  Any others?  Are any of those worthless?
• This movie about Prince Vladimir looks awesome, and I need to get my hands on it, even if it does turn out to be a Russian Orthodox proselytization tool.
• My alma mater has a new president, who has written quite an essay on meaning, purpose, and holistic education.  It's quite dense, but parts of it are very eloquent about some points that I think very salient for current discussion of good pedagogy, civic education, and our current educational institutions.
• Have you played my new game yet?  You should, if you're into game design. (And if you can run Flash 10, sorry N.) It's fun.
• The Harry Potter Septet ... not quite wizard rock.  I've got to check this out, and poke my high school friend, the pianist, about it.
• A rant about digital comics, as a digital comic.  Much has been made of this in a few places, but I think he's missed the point. I unfortunately can't rant about this myself, here, because it's getting late, but since it has been sitting on my desktop for a week, I'd better get it out.  The core of my frustration: no one discussing digital comics, including this guy, seems to me to have stepped back to think about what it is that computers really do that print media don't.  Folks have considered "interaction", and that's valid, but the conclusion seems to be that anything that incorporates interaction meaningfully starts to feel more like a game than a comic. (Penny Arcade Adventures...?)  Another answer is "process" or "procedural response", which is a way of burrowing into "interaction" as a term.  This guy considers neither of those very well, and so seems to me to be beating a dead horse, or a straw man.
• Video game developers don't get racism any more than Hollywood does.  Seriously, the arguments happening in both places on both sides, are SHOCKINGLY similar.  I am embarrassed for my industry, AND glad that some people are doing what they can to open eyes and minds.  Those links are to really, really good and clear arguments about what the problem is.

I was pretty reserved at New York Comic-Con this year, both in my time there and in what I picked up. Last year I went crazy, and picked up everything that looked interesting. The Dealers' Room and Artists' Alley were in the same space, which made it all feel like one huge show. This year the two areas were a floor apart, dividing my time; my gut reaction was that there were also many fewer small presses and scrappy rising artists. I'm not sure about that, though. It just felt like there were more big booths,

The end result was that I picked up a small fraction of what I came home with last year. This year, though, I have LibraryThing to help me: Here's my NYC Comic-Con 2007 Haul!

Reviews pending, when I have a chance to read some of them. All I can say now is that I'm disappointed with the Beowulf and that my mind is totally effing blown by The Keepers of the Maser.

It's been a week and a half since Comic-Con, so it's time to finish up the links I gathered there. I've got a stack of stuff, some great and some not-so-great, to look over.

First off, there's Jax Epoch (and the Quicken Forbidden), which I have mentioned several times before. I got the first two collected volumes a while ago, but haven't had the final issues because the third-and-final volume isn't out yet. yaytime and crypticpress passed me the last three individual issues, though, so that I can finish off the story. The ploy worked-- now I'm rabid for the epilogue story that will be coming out only in the third collection. After all, with an ending like that ... ! Most unusual, and it certainly did not decrease my interest in the series merely by ending it. It is like a chocolate with a nutty finish.

I stopped by the Wizards of the Coast complex several times, each time hoping to catch someone to speak to about FMA d20. No luck there, though I did get a name to contact this week. Instead, I sat in on a few of their demos and got in on their fun giveaway-- each demo you go through gives you a +1 on a die roll; once you have +2 or more you roll a huge fuzzy d20 and get to pick anything 'below that number' from a wall of stuff. Alas, I rolled as my character Lleryn has been rolling lately, and picked from the low end of the stack. I still got the d20 DM Screens, the Deluxe Character Sheets, and the mousepad that ali_wildgoose's desktop has needed for so long. The character sheets are supremely insipid, but the DM screen is handy.

Tales From The Pimp looks interesting. Nice style, nice tight well-written short stories. The studio, Digital Pimp comics, takes its name from The Matrix. That's unfortunately about all I can tell about them from issue #0.

I spent a long time at the Archaia Studios Press table, initially because it was across from my 'home table' with Combination Platter. It was a fortunate coincidence. I think I saw their feature comic Artesia in Million-Year Picnic in Cambridge a while ago. It looked like a rich fantasy setting, but it wasn't quite enough to pull me into a military-themed comic. However! Author and artist Mark Smylie has come up with a role-playing game set in the world of Artesia, and I was hooked. Half of Saturday became about scrounging up the $30 for the sourcebook and talking to Mark Smylie about designing an RPG (esp. a non-d20 one), the restrictions of placing a collaborative multicharacter story in the setting of a single-protagonist linear story, getting it published, community involvement, and more. The game is based on Fuzion, which I know nothing about, but it features a very organic advancement system (really more of a growth system) and advancement rewards that actually seem to encourage narrative rather than hacking. Another highlight of that table was Mouse Guard by David Petersen, an excellent (short) comic about the adventures of some forest mice. Not terribly anthropomorphic in form, though of course they walk and talk and carry tiny daggers.

Action Philosophers were another highlight of the weekend. I was attracted by the board game of Campbell's Hero Journey, and stayed because their comics are excellent. Very much in the vein of the Cartoon History of the Universe, the comics depict real figures and philosophical history in a very accessible, funny manner. They depict the humanity of the people involved, and present the warts with the genius.
( This is typified by their response to a letter in Issue 3... )
It would be fun to make icons from the figures in the issues I got: Jefferson, St. Augustine, and Rand; Freud, Jung, and Campbell. You can catch some previews on their site.

I also stopped by Colleen Doran's table and chatted with her as she signed Ali's copy of Sexy Chix and my copy of The Sandman: Dream Country.

I'd like to note two things about the wrap-up of the con. First, the "I don't want to carry this inventory home" sales were great. I picked up a biography of Hayao Miyazaki for well under half the cover price, and a friend scored me a copy of Tales Before Tolkein: The Roots of Modern Fantasy. Secondly, the Javits Center staff were absolute jerks about kicking out everyone who wasn't clearly showing an exhibitor badge the moment the floor closed, even dimming the lights before the floor had closed. They were rude to everyone they came across, actually yelling at me until they saw my badge under my coat, and actually made it more difficult for the people who were supposed to clean up to clean up. Why doesn't New York have more conventions, I wonder?

As for the more personal side of the weekend, I had a great time but somehow barely saw any of my non-exhibitor friends who were there. I must've been on a different track, and there were a lot of people there. Still, I only ran into bhanesidhe on that first day, and not again; I bumped into oneangryrabbit and samgrrrl a few times, but erinfinnegan might as well have been at a different convention. People did have a hard time getting in, so I suppose I should just be glad that the folks with tables were pinned down by them!

I've been doing a lot of subway reading lately. I'm not travelling with enough regularity to get into a substantial book... I could read Imajica when I was on the bus for 40 minutes everyday, but once a week for gaming plus a trip here and there isn't so conducive to a great work unless you're reading outside, too. So I've been reading shorter things, quicker things, and catching up on the indie comics scene since goraina and yaytime got me started at AnimeBoston last year. I've been reading correllendor fiction (squee!) and articles on GNS rpg-design theory as research for FMA d20 as I print all that out, but I've also been reading some stuff that's easy for you, dear friend, to read if you are so inclined.

And what better way to celebrate the good stuff I'm reading than to share it with friends? I am going to start posting quick reviews of this stuff whenever I've read enough to make it worth looking up links and writing.

Oooh, fine print! By the way, as a matter of disclosure: the links and the images and whatnot, when they lead to Amazon, include a referral to me so that Amazon kicks a few pennies my way if you buy the item from my link. Also, they'll give me images to use. That's why I'm always linking to Amazon, though I like supporting small presses and distributors more directly and will link to them whenever I can find a reasonable way to do so. And, heck, I only get a kickback if you buy right then, not if you put it on a list for later and so on, so it's not like this is a greed thing on my part.

Full Metal Alchemist manga, vol. 1-4, by Hiromu Arakawa. Obviously I love Full Metal Alchemist if I am going to the length of building a wiki and a game around it. This was 'research', but it was train reading, so here it is. For those unfamiliar, the series follows the Elric brothers, two boys in a world parallel to our own, but where alchemy of a sort works. A few years before the books begin, the brothers committed a high sin by trying to resurrect their dead mother. Ed lost an arm and leg (It'll cost you...) and Al's soul was trapped in a suit of armor. The story follows their adventures seeking the Philosopher's Stone, an artifact which may let them bend the laws of alchemy to get their normal bodies back. There are so many different kinds of manga at this point that I suspect that everyone that reads has some kind of manga they'd love, even stereotypically concrete types like lawyers, doctors, or real estate agents. This is my manga... a rich world with gaps for the imagination, a strong and epic plot, an array of rich characters, some complex and some delightfully shallow, and great art. Very importantly, Hiromu Arakawa has the trick of mixing drama and comedy while giving both their due, which lets the story tackle some philosophical issues without getting bogged down (Ghost in the Shell) or ridiculously in over its head (Chobits). The series does not pull punches with treasured characters, which I respect. It is a great story in a great setting, told well. There you go. Too bad we're only up to Volume 4 here in the US, and will have to go online for the rest.

The theme of the rest of these, I have realized, is "things I didn't think I'd like but really did." Hopefully this is a sign of broadening horizons and not a lack of discrimination.

Blacksad 1 and 2, by Canales and Guarnido. I picked this up because it was on ali_wildgoose's oddsized comics shelf, and then read it because the art looked good and, I'll admit, I got a chuckle out of the "anthropomorphic noir" angle. I understated both qualities just now-- the art is drop-dead gorgeous, and while I generally feel like artistic is undermined by the half-assed side of anthropomorphic art (why not do humans or animals loyally?), these guys could sell me on more 'anthro' work. Their talent for expression, posture, and gesture is only enhanced by the animal qualities they give the characters, rather than what seems to me to be the anthro status quo of humans-with-snouts-ears-and-feet. And the stories are good! I'm not usually into noir detective stories, but these are pretty good and complex. The art is gorgeous, did I mention that? And no, I'm not a furry.

Girl Genius Volume 1: Agatha Heterodyne And The Beetleburg Clank and Volume 2: Agatha Heterodyne And The Airship City, by Phil and Kaja Foglio. (Direct from Airship Books: Vol 1, and online for free) I have had very visceral reactions to the Foglios' work in the past and felt that the style was too extreme, too stylized, too bulbous, too chaotic. It took me a while to get past that for Girl Genius, and I'll admit that there are several panels which I still haven't parsed. On the other hand, all of that extremity means that when GG works, it works. There are places where the characters' expressions are exactly right, in amongst all the places where I think characters are exaggerated and emotionally going from 0-60 in a panel border. The story is fun. I don't know how much more I can say about that. There's no deep message, plot anticipation rarely seems to reach further than the next few pages, and physics has been thrown as far out the window as it usually is with steampunk (though can you call it that without a 'punk' sensibility? They call it 'gaslight fantasy', and that seems right if unwieldy.). So I enjoyed it, and am ready for the next installment, but it's definitely in the 'fun diversion' category rather than 'life-changing'. It also feels good to check off the Foglios on my geek-cred checklist, since they are comic book artists who have done columns for Dragon Magazine and toss obfuscated D&D in-jokes into their author bios.