Stuff We Like This Week: September 4 Edition

Stuff We Like This Week: September 4 Edition

Sep 04

In an effort to combat our occasional…okay, okay, near-constant negativity, we give you a regular feature full of nothing but love — Stuff We Like This Week. Appearing every Friday, SWLTW will recap the things that have set our little nerdly hearts aflame within the past seven days.

Matt: My buddy David Brothers over at 4thletter! recommended a fantastic artist to his readers, Amy Martin, and so on his suggestion I ordered a copy of her Bachelor Girl minicomic. (Well, it’s actually not a MINIcomic, per se; it seems wider than yer average comic, but shorter too, like the Danny DeVito of minicomic shapes, if you will.)

Bachelor Girl collects both sequential and standalone gag-type strips revolving around the life of a single woman in today’s modern society, a subject I have absolutely no personal experience with which to discuss, so I will completely ignore it. Martin’s work does capture the emotional push-and-pull of being a young urban single person, which requires constant hope that life’s fulfillment is just around the corner, and constant terror that it will never arrive at all.

I love the content of Martin’s comics, but more than that, I love her style. It’s equal parts Al Hirschfeld and Charles Schulz, with this beautiful curvy endless line that explodes into expressive gestures and facial contortions to match the mood of the characters it depicts. I love that it’s not flat caricature work too; there’s these fleeting moments where even her most exaggerated illustrations achieve dimension, rising just slightly off the page toward the reader. It’s great stuff. Get yourself one!

Chris: I’m in PAX-mode, so that’s what I’m enjoying right now. Having at least dropped in for a day at every PAX since it was 50 people in a Burnaby arcade parking lot (which wasn’t technically a PAX now that I think about it — a proto-PAX if you will), I’m thoroughly looking forward to sticking my head into this one, which is currently estimated to be 75K people for the weekend. That’s huge. That’s world-class convention status. That’s so many people, PAX is legally not allowed to let more people in, or they’re breaking fire codes for the building. For comparison:

– Comic-Con (140,000)
– CES (130,000)
– Obama’s nomination DNC (84,000)
– E3 (50,000)

How mind-boggling is that?

Jeff: I’ve been sinking more time into my Xbox than I should. If you’ve not played Batman: Arkham Asylum and are capable of doing so, I don’t know what the hold-up is. It’s definitely a game of the year contender and a legit Batman game (not like, say, the Rise of Sin-Tzu or that kart racer) at the same time, which is pretty impressive.

And I can say this because I’m in the company of nerds here, but I also finally snagged the XBLA version of Magic: The Gathering and have been positively loving that. It reminds me of my high school Magic-playing days, when the game was innovative and uncomplicated, as opposed to the last time I seriously played it, which was the Mirrodin block and which followed (and then precipitated) a years-long hiatus from the CCG hobby. There’s been a learning curve — I’m an old-school Blue player, and the new Blue decks available to me in the game don’t work the way I’m used to (and what’s with turning the Flying Man into some kind of pixie and making it only able to block other fliers?).

Sarah: I like that this product exists. And that I took a picture to prove that this product exists. And that I can’t figure out which joke to make first, but you can bet the words “faster than a speeding bullet” will be in there somewhere.