Kick-Ass comic review.

Sup Readers, Cody here with a review on a comic book my good friend Josh recommended me. Well it was a strange matter of timing really, I was staying at my friend Sebastian’s house and we were going to watch The Descent. I had got to talking about the second film that was supposed to come out this year (2009) but its already Dec 31 2009, I don't think its happening like that anymore. but it got me talking and I couldn’t recall the directors name, so I grabbed his ps3 controller and went online to IMDB and checked out his profile, I found out that another guy was directing The Descent 2, and was also directing a film named "Kick-Ass". Now of course I had to see what it was. So I read what it was about and then watched the trailer. I got so hyped for the movie when I saw that trailer. Link. When I got home my buddy Josh called me and I asked him if he had ever heard of a movie coming out soon called Kick-Ass. He paused and said, "You mean the comic book right? The one I recommended to you like three weeks ago? Hard to find?" I felt like a dumb ass. So I told him to check out the hella great trailer and I'd see if I could find any of the comics in my local store. I got lucky and got the first and second issues. So now I will Tell you what I thought of the first and second issues.




So, already hyped up from the upcoming film I opened up the comic and noticed, the trailer was a near word for word about the crazy guy in the start, I found it pleasing. The story is simple about a teenager in school that lost his mother at a young age and lives with his father who works night shifts. the first thing I noticed was the writing in this book feels great, very realistic. The talking flows perfectly and its next to impossible to be confused on who is speaking. The art in the comic is really well done. The detail in the shadows really caught my eyes. Nice coloring and interesting style of outlines, nearly what I like to call scratch art. The story of the first comic follows young Dave as he attempts to become a super hero and prove people wrong about super hero being useful in the world, so he makes a costume and picks a fight with his first section of hooligans, which ends rather badly for young Dave.

Before I keep writing I am going to read the second comic so that I may see how Dave gets out of this mess.




Okay, so Dave got his ass kicked, and hit by a car. His body was totaled and he tries to make a fast recovery, while he swears off ever going near that damn costume ever again. Well that didn’t last long as he is back to trying to kick ass and help a man in need, and man does he fight!

This comic has pulled me in more than any other I have ever read, even Uzumaki (Manga) doesn't hold a candle to this, and I stayed up till 3:30 AM one night reading Uzumaki just to finish it, well lets hope that reading all of Kick-Ass doesn't end the same way for me, I hated the ending of Uzumaki.

Bottom line on Kick-Ass is a 5 out of 5. The Style, Writing, Tone, Color, Characters, everything about Kick-Ass is perfect. This is one comic book series I greatly desire having tucked neatly into my custom comic box.

Cody ~ Out.

CRASHED/HAUNT comic review.

Heyo fellow readers! Cody here with three(ish) comic book reviews and some information on why my Christmas animation "Coup's Christmas" will never be appearing upon your frail flickering pc monitors.

I'll get the bad taste out of my mouth now. So the day before my deadline on the animation, I had stopped to take a rest from the animation, I had just finished 11 shots and rendered 5 shots. I was more than half way done while I was updating my information about this to a new Gofio post. Then a pop up flew on to my screen alerting me I had a virus, another came up and before I knew it my virus detector fell for a trap and let a virus right into my pc cutting my animation into a untellable story and my pc into pure trash.

"Coup's Christmas" was all lost in the crash 'cept a mere 5 shots I have rendered on my Mac and a bad voice over of me telling the story. Who knows maybe I'll go all out next year and do what I really wanted to do, make a bundle of render shots and print them into gloss paper and make a hard cover children's book for my family. Maybe I could get it published as well. Funny thought to me.

Now the Comic I'll be reviewing today is called "HAUNT" by Robert Kirkman and Todd McFARLANE

Now I'll be perfectly honest with ya, first thing I thought of when I saw this cover was two things 1: Venom? and 2: Cookies and milk candy bar. You might not get that same feeling from looking at the picture I'm posting with this for a simple reason, the copy I own is a third printing but the one you see is a special edition, though both are black and white, the one I own has shadows on it that give it a, blending kinda look.

Ok on with the review!

Is it just me, or have most new comics been trying to juggle to many characters and story lines at once? So in the first pages we join Kurt, speaking to a priest in a confessions booth about how he killed people due to it being his job as a special forces officer. we see him break into a compound and try to rescue a scientist and his subject so that he may help find a cure for a strange mutation. When Kurt and the scientist find his mutated living subjects, Kurt pops a bullet into the scientist's skull, then proceeds to help free/save the infected people. I'm am unsure of why he killed the scientist, I assume he was making the people worse? Okay so we fellow Kurt as he leaves the booth and has a conversation with his younger, wait no, older, uh, well his brother who looks younger but seems to be older, shit I'm confused.

He has a conversation with his brother(Daniel) who happens to be the priest who takes the confessions of murder from Kurt. He tells Kurt to go speak with his mother and that she misses him. Kurt leaves the church and goes for a walk, he stops at a near by crosswalk where he lets out a deep breath and reaches for his gun, for no apparent reason, but is cut short by a woman who injects him with a knock out drug and is then transported to a holding cell to get a beating of a life time so he will confess about the scientists research.

Suddenly from there we are now following his younger/older brother Daniel. we see him talking to Kurt in the back of a limo about a girl named Amanda, Daniel hates her and would like to avoid her, then he, demands, that Kurt vanish, 'cuz he is dead. Um, okay so I guess Kurt was killed and now Daniel see's him as a figment of his imagination.

Daniel is then visited by Amanda where she tells him that she is a pill junkie and has trouble sleeping, so she pops a pill to sleep but she can't wake up without someones help. So he sleeps on his couch and she takes the bed. Kurt shows up again to help warn Daniel that two men are breaking in. They open fire on Daniel but as the bullet zings towards his face, Kurt leaps toward Daniel and becomes one with each other causing a milky white substance to halt the bullet in front of his face(Not joking, milky white liquid that spews from his mouth.) and Daniel transforms into Venom a monster that looks like venom and rips the heads off of the two intruders(FBI agents?. End of Issue #1.

I feel like I wasted $3.00 on this comic. The art is good, lots of color and well placed panels, but all the guys look the same, and made it hard to tell who I was reading about. the story juggles too many things at once bringing many holes to the plot and no real reason to enjoy the story. I felt like Kirkman and McFARLANE got together and said, if we toss a half naked girl into the start, lots of gore, mutants, dual personality's and a pill popper into one comic, we might have a hit.

Now the first issue of a comic is made to give a taste of what the line of comics will prove to give us, and with that being said I am rather unsure about reading another one. I feel like this comic has promise, but only if the story line becomes more solid. I want to know why Kurt is a ghost/figment following Daniel. Why does Daniel suddenly have powers? Why should I care about Daniels pill junkie ex-girlfriend?

I do think I will pick up the next issue soon and give it a chance, but I suggest if you are interested in reading this one that you buy #1 and 2 or all 3 at once, #4 will be out soon.

Okay so on a scale of 1-5 of this comic I'd rate it a 2 and a half. Art style and paneling was nice to look at but lost points in being uncreative with the design of our brothers and hero. He looks like a Oreo remix of Venom (O_o) . the comic loses mad points on the fact that it juggles more than it can handle for a first issue. The writing in the comic flows alright but every now and then it gets confusing with how they would be saying something to the other person.

Walls

So, I got a chance to play Playstation: Home over at Cody's house, and it's pretty insane. Really insane, maybe, but further exposure to the product is needed before making that judgement. It's pretty much Second-Life, but with the visual chaos replaced with conceptual chaos. Everything looks clean and nice, and I must admit, it's pretty cool to be able to casually walk around the environments of popular games (Resident Evil 5 especially). But the chaos comes when you attempt to take advantage of the goods and services offered.

We entered into a virtual haunted house promoting the game "Siren: Blood Curse", wherein we joined 20 or so similarly inclined players all attempting to do the same thing: actually explore the haunted house. It was not to be though, as the only way to gain entry was by gaining the favor or some A.I. controlled nurse positioned behind a glass podium, who was eternally stuck in a bad animation loop. The sick joke of a rogue Sony employee, I must say.

Quickly realizing that entry would require a combination of luck and a desire stronger than we had, the best choice of action soon became clear: create anarchy within the lobby.

We learned that one player must "register" with the nurse, therein becoming a "party leader" and given the ability to select five other people to take along on the tour. Of course, only one person can be registered at a time. So only five people can go inside at a time. And this is all happening in real time. In a world where there are potentially hundreds of people on the server with the desire to partake in the experience. Sony has in effect, created a space where people line up to be advertised at, and to them I must say: good show. I'm sure Microsoft is slapping themselves on the forehead; "you've won this round, Sony".

Anyway, realizing that no one is really capable of knowing who in the teeming masses is a registered user, we decided to tell everyone that we were registered, and that the first five people to the corner would be coming along with us. We quickly got more than five people at our side, waiting eagerly to come along, their thirst for digital scares/marketing/possible free shirts, about to be quenched.

After stretching out the time for awhile ("hold up, controllers not working… it's loading… waiting for one more guy", etc), we decided to finally reveal that, indeed, we were no more a registered user than the player in the creepy bunny costume over there in the corner.

We then proceeded to dance.

So, while your enjoyment of Home depends entirely upon how much you wish to spend on digital items and/or exploring rendered game environments as a creepy doppelganger of yourself, there is fun to be had, if you like finding the walls. Doing the things that the designers didn't intend for you to do. In that way, it's a sort of mental exercise; how can I fool the other guy, how far can I reach outside the box? It's a place where you make your own fun, which I'm actually more than ok with. Because at the end of the day, Sony is the who's dancing.

Christmas short film update.

Yo, Cody here with some updates about what I'm doing and whats going on in my life.

I'm currently hard at work with putting the finishing touches on the textures for my upcoming short film, "Coup's Christmas"
I should be finished today (Dec 5th) with the full set design and lighting, after that on Monday I will recorded the voice over and then begin animation. The video Needs to be finished by the 18th so Tim can add his own background music to make the film flow better. My deadline is Dec 22nd for the whole video and sounds.

I am also working on my GED(much harder now) and am going to try to meet a dead line of being finished before June(More than reasonable).

As for my time burners, I have been playing lots of Resident Evil with my good friend Sebastian where we plan on shooting every blue plate in order to get a achievement-Trophy, while I also snipe the heads off zombies from a mile away! And Seba' runs up to a zombie and breaks its neck, yet still ends up with 30 more zombie kills than me, every time!

I have also been playing lots of games with Bre(LittleBigPlanet, Monster Madness, and she beat Uncharted but I haven't.). I'm enjoying my December a lot this year. Also last night Tim, Bre and I went out and got some food, some coffee from starbucks and spent some time at Castles and Coasters, where we played "Deal or no deal" over and over till we won enough tickets to buy Bert and Ernie.


We never gave up! We saved them from their cold plastic cages and placed them in new much larger places, know as our bedrooms where they sit in our windows and are, currently, Tim and I's default picture on our fave-5 plan from T-Mobile... I'm Ernie.

Okay, Cody~OUT!