Awesome comic scenes: the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Ah, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Alan Moore's Victorian Justice League, made up from characters of famous novels. Personally I love it. But I can also understand people who don't. The stories are really not the greatest you'll find, and sometimes, especially in the third volume, Alan Moore gets... very interested in... referencing 18th century pornography. On the other hand, the endless stream of literary references are great fun for those looking to recognise stuff they know, or looking for new literature to discover. And it's an Alan Moore comic. There is no one alive who has a better grasp of the how to tell a story in this medium. The staging of a scene, the panel-to-panel flow, transitions, parallel storytelling, symbolism... Moore stories have it all. If someone tells you that comics are just stories with pictures, give them something by Alan Moore. That'll show them that comics have more in common with movies than with novels.

Here's a quiet scene from the second volume I particularly like. It's the middle of the night, and Mina Murray can't sleep, so she's wandering through the inn where the League is staying for the night. Then she runs into mister Hyde.

 

Click to embiggen!

So the president of Turkey just said a silly thing...

In short: the prime minister of Turkey claims Muslims discovered America centuries before Columbus. He bases this on Columbus mentioning finding a mosque upon arrival. Some observations.

Observation the first

Let's start with the most obvious point: If we're going to assume Columbus correctly identified everything in his diaries, he didn't actually land in America, but in Asia. And finding a mosque in Asia in 1492 is really not that special.

Observation the second

Perhaps the most persuasive proof that America was not discovered in 1178, is that the world did radically change in the century afterward.

Awesome comic scenes: Lucifer

To properly set up this scene, I'd have to scan the entire comic really. No, even worse, I'd have to scan all volumes of Lucifer leading up to this. Obviously that would be a bit... copyright infringingly. So I'll just try my best to explain it.

Lucifer is about the devil (duh), who has given up on ruling hell. What he really wants is to leave God's domain, to be his own man. He's fought this Chtullu-like thing in the first volume, and is rewarded for it with a portal that exits creation. It's located in his base of operations, but has a strange effect on psychics and other gifted people. They feel that there is something there. They begin to flock to his house, camping outside. And then two actually climb in.

Just noticed this...

I was going through King City to get scans for the Top 10 Cats article below, and then I found this on the inside of the cover. A nice little reference to House to Astonish, my favorite comics podcast. Pretty awesome!

The Top 10 Comic Book Cats!

So far I've put up a bunch of article about comics, and I'm having great fun writing them, but I know what pays the bills here in internetland. Cracked.com-style lists, and pictures of cats. So, to prove that I am not above a little pandering to the audience, here is the list of the 10 best cats in comics!

A little disclaimer: this list focuses purely on proper, catlike cats. A bunch of them are super-powered, some can talk, but all of them look like cats, behave like cats, and most importantly, have the attitude of cats. While Blacksad, Tom Poes and Krazy Kat might be cool characters, they are basically just fuzzy humans, and won't be found on this list. So...

Musings on the Color Wheel

This is a picture of the color wheel (Or color star, or color pie) from Magic the Gathering. But eagle-eye Magic aficionados will notice something strange. Doesn't Wizards of the Coast keep hammering on the fact that white is not good, and black is not evil? And why is the red/blue distinction based on elements rather than on the clash between emotion and intellect?

The answer to the riddle is that this picture is from Wayfarer #1, a Magic: the Gathering comic book published by Acclaim in 1995. In that distant era the color wheel was a bit different than it was now. And I thought I'd take a look on the development it went through over the years.

Fate Reforged spoilers!

So it looks like Wizards of the Coast also realized that Wedge were to cool to be just a one-set thing! This new card spoiled at last weekend's Penny Arcade eXpo in Australia shows that the clans are going hybrid in the next set, Fate Reforged. At the same time it was revealed that the set will have no three-color cards. So why hybrid? At this time we can only speculate, since we only have a handful of remarks and two cards to go on, but speculation is fun, so here I go...

Fate Reforged is supposed to link the sets Khans of Tarkir and Dragons of Tarkir, and thus needs to play well with both. This hybrid card obviously plays well with the three-color cards in Khans. It has all three colors itself, after all. But since hybrid costs can be paid by one color or the other, this card not only works in the three-color decks that Khans wants you to play, it also goes into two color decks. Which makes it seem very likely in my eyes that in Dragons of Tarkir the various clans will have been altered from representing three colors to just two. Since [[name]] is always green, but can be buddies with red or blue (or both), I'm guessing Temur will end up either in GR or GU colors. Which one of those two I'm not quite sure, but I'm betting RG. That would mean that the color pairs will all be allied-color. This is the most strikingly different from Khans of Tarkir or the two options, and would showcase how the world has changed.

This would of course still mean we don't get a full wedge-block, but maybe it will be enough to see the theme in two sets? It would be a nice water-testing for the oncoming two-block paradigm.

PS: For those wondering, the cat article has been slightly delayed, look for it on caturday!