Gobblin.net

I’m sorry to interrupt Dragonlance Week with non-Dragonlance news, but this is just to good not to share:

The year is 1988. The place –Santa Maragarita, California. The time—recess. Paperback in hand, I set forth on a quest of discovery. My destination—Krynn! In the village of Solace, beneath the branches of a Vallenwood tree, I met my companions: Tanis, Half-Elven, the Majure brothers Raistlin and Caramon, wily Tasselhoff Burfoof, Goldmoon the Barbarian Priestess, and many many more. Our fellowship would take us to many fantastic places across the continent of Ansalon, but alas, it was a journey bound by the limits of imagination. I could not hear the grumblings of Flint Fireforge, nor feel the mustache of Sturm Brightblade with my pre-teen fingers. At least not with any earthly senses.

Meanwhile, a continent away in the forests of Brazil, a young man had a dream. If he could not himself travel to Krynn himself, he would bring Krynn and its questing heroes to our world! Three movie trailers did he and his friends forge!

This first trailer introduces us to the cast of characters:

The second… well, it’s usurped by 1 and 3.

The third focuses more on the journey:

And so Dragonlance Week begins…

Wired presents a great behind-the-scenes look at how Coraline is being adapted from Gaiman’s original story. To be honest,  Coraline the book didn’t make much of an impression on me, despite being a big fan of most anything Gaiman, but the more I see of Coraline the film, the more wonderful it looks!

On a related note, anyone read The Graveyard Book? I should probably put that on my library queue.

UPDATE: It must be animation day at Wired, as they just posted an interview with the makers of the new Batman: The Brave and the Bold animated series. As a huge fan of the 90s Animated Series, I’m excited by this new take. Campy, yes, but it’s nice to see some American action animation that’s not trying to be like anime. Plus, Batman vs. Gorilla Grodd!

Junior novelizations are an odd breed of book. I mean, does one really need to read a 200 page prose version of Adventures in Babysitting? (If you were me in 1987, then the answer is a resounding yes, but I pray that I’m in the minority). Over the years I’ve collected quite a few gems of dubious literary spin-offs—everything from a Where’s Waldo/Street Fighter mash up to the Star Wars Question and Answer Book About Space, which poses such questions as “Are there such things as Moon Creatures?” and “Can Lasers kill people?” (the answers are no and sometimes respectively–sorry, spoilers). One of my favorites is the novelization of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (hint, it’s not by Bram Stoker).

Today let’s look beneath the cover of a real head-scratcher: Blade Runner: a Story of the Future. Is this heavily illustrated 90 page chapter book meant to appeal to the 7-year-olds coming off of The Empire Strikes Back and itching for more Han Solo space adventures, or is it intended to be a low-cost art book for older fanboys? We’ll let the book speak for itself.

He sat alone, looking at the snakes decorating the bar walls, crawling upon the floor, and wrapped around women who were wearing little else. The snakes were replicas, of course – otherwise they would have cost a fortune. But the showgirls were clearly real, their flesh warm against the snakes’ cold scales. Except for one, thought Deckard. One who looked even more enticing than the others. She was billed as Salome, and when she finished her act and went backstage, Deckard couldn’t wait for Rachael any longer. He had a job to do. A skin job.

Actually, that sounds more like the start of a very naughty fan fic.

Skin jobs aside, the author takes a decidedly chipper approach to adaptation. For instance, take Roy Batty’s final lines, perhaps the most poignant point in the film. This:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.

Becomes this:

“You have courage,” Batty said to him. “You are the only human I have met with as much courage as I. Perhaps you have even more. Even I was tempted to beg not to die.” Batty paused as his mind turned feelings into words. “I could not destroy courage like that. It would be like destroying what is best in me.”

Deckard sat beside Batty as Batty stared up at the star-filled sky.

“You know,” said Batty,” I have never spared a life before. I am glad I was able to do it now. I am glad I have been free not to kill at least once before I die.”

Okay, granted the author probably had to write this before the final script, and Batty’s final line was improved, but that sounds more like “Frog and Toad are Replicants” than Blade Runner.

Come to think of it, the book’s final words also have a Frog and Toad vibe:

Deckard had one hand on the controls, the other was around Rachael. “They’ve left it all behind for us,” he said. “We’re heirs to all the earth.”

“But for how long?” asked Rachael.

“How does that old-fashioned vow go?” said Deckard. “For as long as we both shall live.”

My obsession with Star Wars action figures probably began on Christmas 1981, or at least that holiday yielded the first photographic evidence. Looking at 4 ½ year old me, sitting by the tree with my AT-ST walker and Hoth playset, cherubic cheeks aglow, it seemed like such an innocent hobby, and for the next 5 years or so, it would be. It wasn’t until some years later, when I found myself flush with cash from part time bookselling, that the playthings of my youth transformed from toys to commodities.

Stage 1: Take Stock of Current Holdings
Like any sensible kid, when I received an action figure in my youth, I’d rip open the packaging and toss it, take the figure down to the creek on a makeshift zipline, sink it in some “quicksand” mud, and lose any weapons or accessories in the process. In spite of this, I still had some 40 or so action figures (with about 10 blasters between them), but with all the dings and wobbly limbs, these weren’t exactly museum quality. My vehicles looked worse than Luke’s X-Wing when he lifted it out of the swamp. Still, these toys were pushing 15 years old! Surely they were still valuable? After ordering Steve Sansweet’s collector’s guide (2nd edition!) I ran the numbers. Sentimental value: priceless. Collector Value: around $200.

Stage 2: Make a Fresh Start
$6 an hour, 15 hours a week–no rent, no car, no interest in clothes (and no sense to save for college)–I was rich! If I was going to be serious about Star Wars collecting, then nickel and diming it with those sad little played-with pieces was going to have to go. It was time to start tracking down the “MOCs” and “MIBs,” unopened toys kept away from kids by savvy collectors or retailer screw-ups. That’s where the REAL money is. Empowered by my 14.4 modem and an AOL account, I soon found sellers willing to part with vintage “12 Backs” and Sears exclusives. I learned about the bargains to be had with tri-language packaging, and the importance of checking the material of your Jawa’s cape. For my first purchase, I ordered a MOC Yoda with the original Empire Strikes Back packaging – and for the modest cost of a month’s work. It wouldn’t be long until I had amassed a collection any future child of mine would be proud to inherit.

Stage 3: Reality Sinks In
After about a year of collecting, I had managed to track down a 12-Back Princess Leia (pristine card, but a slight crack in the blister, alas), a Power of the Force Obi Wan, a MIB Max Rebo Band set (something I coveted but never got in my youth) and a mail-away Anakin figure still in baggie. A fine start, but it was growing too slowly to sustain my compulsive collecting bug. Around this time, I started second guessing the soundness of Star Wars toys as an investment. There were just too many variables…

Stage 4: A New Hope
Then it hit me. Rather than try to collect one of each of the hundreds of Star Wars toys out there, what if I instead focused on collecting a single one. I’d have to pick something with low demand so I could get a lot of them for cheap, then keep buying them and taking them off the market. Eventually, people would catch on to the sudden scarcity of this figure, and I’d be sitting on a goldmine! It was a brilliant plan, totally without flaws. First I had to pick a figure to take the starring role in my market fixing adventure. It was an easy choice—I went with the Wampa. You remember, that yeti thing that tries to munch on Luke in the beginning of Empire? Now it was time to corner the market on the things. Mint-in-Box, loose, C7-C10 – I wanted them all. Hitting the usual channels, I managed to get two with packaging (one opened, one not) and a couple more loose. Nothing could stop me now!

Stage 5: Denial
I don’t know if it was common sense of the limitations of a pre-ebay internet that cut my endeavor short. For whatever reason, I never went beyond those first four Wampas. Scanning ebay now, I see that my efforts did little to skew the market value of the snow beasts, as a dozen auctions list the figure loose for 99 cents (ouch! I was paying $20, 13 years ago). The fateful four are currently living under my grandma’s house, where the carefully preserved packages have probably turned soggy with mildew, which when you think about it, does more to increase their rarity than my hoarding them in a safe, dry closet ever would have done.

I went through several more collecting obsessions, including signed first editions of Hugo/Nebula winning sci-fi and Batman animation cels before I managed to cast off the bug, but that is another story and will be told at another time.

I’m no stranger to fan fiction and even slash fiction, but after seeing the pairings in this article, even I winced. Lance Bass and the Weasley twins? Surely the Weasley Prankster need a firmer male hand to break them. Someone like Iggy Pop, who also happens to be a dead ringer for Filch, and would make for much better sparks!

With that in mind, here are three Labyrinth fan fic pairings which, to the best of my knowledge, remain untapped. Why?! These scenarios practically write themselves! (Were it not for certain disapproving glances, I’d write the first one right now!)

Read more…

Last weekend I attended the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) in Seattle. What started as a small centered on a popular webcomic has become the single biggest video gaming convention in the US and the place for publishers to go to generate buzz. Right now I’m working for a new games startup (working on stuff that’ll be ready to talk about in… 2010?), so I was very excited to get a hand-on look at what’s in the video games pipeline for the next year. What I saw, though… not too exciting.

Penny Arcade the site, I really enjoy. Sure, not every comic strip’s a winner, but once or twice a week I get a good laugh. More importantly, though – I enjoy Tycho’s maximum verbosity discourses and I trust his tastes in games. It’s thanks to him that I first ordered Puzzle Quest and Bookworm Adventures and more recently, CorspeCraft. I know that Tycho will stand up for a good game even if it’s too kid-friendly or casual for gamingdom’s target demo, and he’ll call bad games out in the face of hype. Reading Penny Arcade, I feel a contented connection to gamer culture.

After reading Tycho’s utopian descriptions of PAX over the years, with the beanbag lounges of gender-equality and Wil Wheaton’s life-changing speeches, I expected more of that gamer optimism to come through in the show. What was on display, however, was thoroughly uninspiring. Penny Arcade the website might succeed at creating a voice slightly to the left of mainstream gaming, but at PAX, the games on display mapped perfectly to the hype meter on IGN. Zombies, tactical shooters and sequels ruled, with only a scant few booths displaying anything not engineered to pander to the 16-30 male demographic.

Spending a weekend around these games and watching people queue up to play them (myself included), made me a little depressed about being a gamer. Is yet another game about lining up headshots with your futuristic rifle worthy of such excitement? Sometimes I wish someone would just stand up, like in the old 1984 Mac ad, and throw a chair at the big brother face of gaming and really shake things up. Then I realize, that’s just what Nintendo did with the Wii… and it fell cold on me. I appreciate the appeal it has for groups and families, but as someone who mostly plays alone, I seldom touch it. It’s not so much a revolution that I want, but better guides to what’s already here.

In film and books and music, I have no problem seeking out the titles I want, whether I learn about them from mass media sources, word-of-mouth or recommendations from Netflix/itunes, etc. With games, however, the mainstream hegemony is too loud and omnipresent to ignore. Games for “gamers”—as defined by young males who love some combination of Mega Man, Sepiroth and Master Chief—are easy to discover, follow and discuss because the culture of reading and writing about games grew up with that “mainstream” and still talk about little else. Against my better judgment, I continue to buy sequels to games I never really enjoyed the first time because that’s what “the conversation” is about (I’m looking at you, Metal Gear Solid & GTA!). The rest of the video game industry, including Free-2-Play MMOs and hidden object casual games are raking in dough, but aside from articles about their success, they never get a fair shake in the gamer press. I know there have to be better sources for finding games than IGN and kotaku. Are there any game fans among my readers who can recommend a better way to find the gems among the countless games that fall off the gamer radar?

My PAX experience wasn’t a complete bust, however. I did discover one game that pressed all my nerd buttons and tickled some I didn’t know existed –BattleForge! It’s a RTS (real time strategy) and CCG (collectible card game) mash-up that plays like a dream. As someone who sunk more than he’d care to admit on Magic cards back in the day (and even dabbled with the well-designed Lord of the Rings game from Decipher a few years back), I am quite susceptible to the appeal of deck building strategy and tournament premiums. Throw in controls that feel like Warcraft 2 and units reminiscent of all those ornately-painted Warhammer miniatures that I was never patient enough to recreate, and this game is an uber-nerd’s dream come true. Whereas most games in the RTS genre have been getting progressively more complex with tech trees to rival Civilization and headache-inducing micro-management, BattleForge opts for a minimalist approach to real-time complexity. There are no resources to gather, no half dozen special powers on a single unit. It’s closer to Tower Defense games, only with 200+ cards to build an army from.

So after all my complaining about more of the same, my game of show is possibly the nerdiest of all. I guess it’s not so much the lack of ideas that bothers me about my PAX trip, but the insistence on a common culture that gamers seem to have. Perhaps I shouldn’t protest too much, though, as my geek obsessions are all that keeps my tastes from mapping 1-to-1 with stuff white people like.

So my next writing project has finally showed up on Amazon. Guess it’s not a secret any more! A few months back I penned a “Choose Your Own Adventure” type book for Penguin Books as a tie in for the upcoming Clone Wars movie and TV show. Unlike the rest of the bevy of books Penguin is releasing with this license, “The Way of the Jedi” features a cast of original characters, with the protagonist — a nameless Padawan — being anonymous so as to let you, the reader, cast this role as you wish. Readers of the site know this isn’t my first dabbling with Star Wars books, or my first stab at a choose-your-own-adventure story, but to write one on this scale, and for such a respected publisher… well, it was an amazing opportunity. I hope that kids will enjoy this book as much as I used to enjoy reading and re-reading the works of Edward Packard and R.A. Montgomery back in the day.

What made writing this so much fun was coming up with all the semi-gruesome “bad endings.” Yes, your Jedi-in-training can be eaten alive, turned into a cyborg, tempted to the dark side, among a couple dozen other possible fates. Not quite so simple was trying to write for what Star Wars canon is now with a personal vision from another era. Timothy Zahn and even Republic Commando have little bearing on Clone Wars. If I was an encyclopedia of nerdery before, I came out of this experience with a whole new tome of obscure jargon.

Thanks to my editor, Rob Valois (who was also the editor who got Return to Labyrinth going!) for the opportunity.

So one week later, I’m far from the only person attempting to create 80s film icons with the spore creature creator. I collected a few other noteworthy creations that I found, some Henson-related, some not. Plenty more if you search on you tube.

Keep in mind that right now the Spore Creature Creator just allows you to create creatures on an empty stage. Come this fall, these creatures will be populating planets and galaxies and building civilizations. I wonder if EA thought through the legal ramifications of all these copyrighted characters appearing in their game. Should be interested to see if anything comes of that.

Another take on Ludo (Hair is a nice touch, but I like mine better. )

Fiery! (with unfortunate music)

Skeksis

Gonzo

And here are a few others Labyrinth-era creatures that look pretty snazzy:

Gizmo:

Unicorn! (We’ll pretend its from Legend):

And my personal favorite, FALCOR!

A few years back, I did the adaptation and image selection for Tokyopop’s The Empire Strikes Back “Cinemanga” (aka film comic). For licensing reasons, could only be sold by Tokyopop in the UK. It was a fun exercise in abridgment, trying to cram the best of the Star Wars films into 90 pages of screen grabs and word balloons, and given the parameters of the project, I thought it turned out pretty fun– a nice gift for your 7-year-old Star Wars fan who just can’t get enough of Han and Leia’s screwball banter (was I the only only one who learned the ways of love from watching those two in the dirty passages of the Millennium Falcon?). Anyway, not something I would ever by myself, but one of the most enjoyable freelance assignments I ever worked on, in a “popcorn” sort of way.

Now it appears that Dark Horse, who has the exclusive license for Star Wars comics in the US, republished it last week under their branding for North America: Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back Photo Comic. Sadly, they don’t credit me or the original graphic designer for our work! As we were work-for-hire, we are not guaranteed such rights, but still, I kinda wish I’d got my name listed in the credits, if only so that I could say I’ve been published by Dark Horse.

At least I still get credit for my stellar adaptations of Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams and That’s so Raven Vol. 2. Hey, a guy has to pay the bills.