KakuJomics

155-Crooked Character

03/27/2015

Comic:

I might have accidentally conditioned her for this. Now she’s all butt jokes… It’s a phase, right? She won’t grow up to be Tom Green or something, right?

Video Games:

I was finally able to take a break and play Batman: Arkham City. When I got Arkham Asylum for the PS3 a while back, it was one of a few games in recent years that I couldn’t put down. I marathon’d that game until I had every Riddler trophy, until I knew every facet of Arkham Island. B:AC is clearly better, mechanically, but it didn’t capture that Tim Burton-esque feel that I loved about B:AS, it didn’t feel intimate, the world didn’t have an identity. I still finished it, because I really did enjoy it, otherwise. The ending, however, blew. It was the type of ending where the credits roll and you’re like “…NO FLIPPING WAY. IT CAN’T BE OVER.” All the elements were in place for another round of boss bashing, but it just… ended. Like they ran out of time and just released what they had.

I promptly booted up Arkham Asylum and played the first 30 minutes to see if I was just having a good ol’ case of the nostalgia goggles, but it was all as I remembered it. The combat felt slightly more clunky than Arkham City, but that and maybe two other tiny gripes were all that I could fault B:AS against B:AC. 30 minutes turned into 3 hours, and here I am, all back into the Batman craze. Watching the movies, reading the comics, wanting the figures. And apparently, the last entry in the trilogy, freaking Arkham Knight is coming out in June. I’ll end this blathering with one word: HYPE.

Life:

I hadn’t been into making comics long before I read somewhere, from some person, that any writer who is any writer has a few Moleskine notebooks lying around and on hand. If you’re unfamiliar with Moleskine notebooks, they’re those tiny little black notebooks you see a private detective writing in when they’re on a case, or you might see an oily man hastily scribbling his latest book twist in one in a coffee shop. I’m quick to become wary of any implement that people claim you “need” or else you can’t do _____. So I put it off and used other tools: Evernote, notepad on PC, the “note” app on my phone, a spiral. These all worked well enough, but the spiral was too large for me to make any sense of the giant mess of 30 ideas per page, and all the digital methods were too easy to lose track of and only added to the already WAY too much time I spend on the computer/on screens.

Flash forward to last Wednesday: Lily’s preschool is out for Spring Break for the week and I’ve taken her out to a big mall in a nearby town. I hate malls. They’re where people go if they wanna feel like they’re in school again, and I also happen to hate school. But I love the kid, and we’re both going stir-crazy. Anyway, we’re in Barnes and Noble and there’s those god fracking Moleskine notebooks on a display at the front. They’re a ridiculous $12 for two tiiiiny notebooks. Why in anything’s name would you buy one of these!? “Because they’ve got a hiiiistory. They go back more than a ceeeeentury. Freaking Moses wrote down that he was gonna part the seeeaaaas on one.”

I mean, I bought a few. Because literally what else do you do at a mall? Turns out they’re actually pretty handy.