Variant Covers: guaranteed to aggrandize superpowers, outside the pants underwear, and splash pages. I spent a lot of last week catching up on the ridiculous backlog of comic books that I hadn’t touched in a while. And I remembered something: good god damn, I fucking love comic books. Seems a bit obvious, dunnit? Alas. Sometimes I get so overwhelmed with the concept of ingesting the funny mags that I forget that at the core of them are the same tireless themes that I could read ad nauseam. Aristotle rocked out in the Poetics stating that not only do us wacky monkeys with self-awareness love narrative, but we can never get full, and we seem to gravitate towards the same concepts over and over again.

I think the dude is on to something. I’ve watched Magneto get his ass owned so many times, and yet his ironic struggle towards fascism born out of his own oppression still gets me. Bravo Aristotle, we may keep you around yet.

Superman #700
Superman turns 700 this week. Good lord, that’s a lot of dialogue bubbles. Superman hits its 700th issue, and of course, like every comic that hooks a something-hundredth milestone, the issue is packed to the brim with stories, artists, blah, blah blah.

I’m bored with Superman. And I love him. That’s the tragedy really. Everyone seems to dog on the dude, and even I, who loves the guy, can’t stand him. 700 issues. Let’s do something new with him. J. Michael is coming aboard with #701, and I’m hoping he uses it as a springboard towards something new.

Maybe I’m alone in this, but can we stop jerking off a 32 year-old movie? Am I the only one who is tired of seeing Clark Kent/Superman drawn to reflect Reeves? There’s so much homage paid to it, that it feels creatively stifling to me. I’ll take Kingdom Come’s Superman, or All Star-Superman, or Superman: For All Season’s depiction of the Man of Steel any day. I get it – we all love Reeves. It’s fantastic. But I prefer the beefy bumbling Clark Kent as a farm boy to the sexy grin of Reeves as Superman that Gary Frank loves penciling.

It isn’t about a disrespect for the movie, it’s about turning the page.

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Elsewhere in the DC Universe:
I’ve spent a good amount of time masturbating to Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, and perhaps its because it does everything that Superman doesn’t do in comics today: something new. The third issue comes out this week, and if it is as ballin’ as the first two, I’m fucking sold. As well, the newest issue of Green Lantern Corps is coming out, and you can get your sexy magician fix in Zatanna #2.

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Here we go. More super awesome talented people with a penchant for the dorky. Japanese beat boxer Hikakin takes the classic themes of Super Mario Bros. and drops them into a tub of beat boxing awesomeness. Hit the jump and get your hip-hip Mario groove on.

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[click to enlarge]

Fuck yes. Counting down to the return of my favorite show currently airing.

Welcome to the dance. In the corner you’ll find the teenage boys and girls awkwardly writhing against one another while their genitals engorge. Two teachers married to spouses they can’t stand are echoing the teenagers’ awkward behavior. modified slightly by decades of distaste and ennui. Don’t pay the $2 for the lukewarm cans of Coca Cola, okay? We’ll walk down to the local gas station and buy ourselves some for cheaper and cut in around the back. The police officer can be sort of a hard ass, but if we swear, pledge, take an oath, to never leave in the middle of the dance again, he’ll let us in.

He’s a sucker. But he’s sort of a nice guy.

Monday Morning Commute. Every Monday I’m going to detail the various things I’m either currently or will be watching, reading, playing, and listening to in the next seven days. It’s Monday. You’ve got a long week of school, work, or compulsive masturbation to get through. Tell me the arts that you’re indulging in, to stave off suicide.

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[legend has it that Ernest Hemingway wrote a six-word story to win a bar bet — For sale: baby shoes, never worn. leading to the author’s birthday, I’m going to offer a daily post of my own six-word story. readers are encouraged to respond with their own]

Who says bus drivers can’t drink?

[photo]

[Search Engine Terms come from an app in the Word Press dashboard. It tells you the terms that people are using in google to lead to your site. Most of ours are ultra depraved and horrible. And amusing to sick people like me.]

Ah, grandparents. Why not cook them? I mean, doesn’t their flesh occasionally look like perfectly-seasoned, extremely well-cured beef jerky? Welcome to Omega Level.

[via sarcastically, i am : click to enlarge]

Yeah, I ain’t got any words. Just check it out.

Rez is one of my favorite video games of all time. Trippy, hypnotic, filled with surreal visuals, butt-clenching gameplay, and a ridiculous soundtrack. And this week it was announced that its creator, Tetsuya Mizuguchi has created a spiritual sequel to Rez, called Child of Eden. Fuck to the yes.

via kotaku:

Child of Eden, published by Ubisoft and crafted by Q Entertainment, the development home of Mizuguchi, shares much of the trippy synaesthetic stylings of Rez. They share similar sound effects and play styles. Line up shots that will destroy abstract enemies in an abstract environment by positioning a reticule and then letting loose with musical bullets.

Rez was a third-person musical shooter controlled with a Dreamcast, PlayStation 2 or Xbox 360 controller. Child of Eden, named after the artificial intelligence that lived inside a futuristic supernetwork, does away with the dazzling avatar of the original, putting the player in a first person perspective. The game is also optionally controlled with the PlayStation Move motion controller or Kinect for Xbox 360. But we also saw the game played with a regular Xbox 360 controller at E3, a chance to experience the vibrating feedback so instrumental to the original experience.

Fuck yes! Initially I didn’t cover this, because it was wrapped up in a Kinect promo, and let’s be clear – almost anything Kinect related can siphon the methane out of my farts by sticking its intake valve in my ass, but apparently you can rock out with standard controls.

Trippy visuals? Check.

Awesome Music? Check

Boner? Check.

Now let’s hope they let you use the trance vibrator. In Rez, it throbs with the music. It’s called a vibrator. Figure it out.

The first estimates of BP Spill had it leaking 25,000 barrels a day. Some intrepid dude decided to take the Unreal Engine to show what 25,000 barrels look like. Stacked, and then falling. It’s fucking bananas. Hit the jump and have your mind blown.

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