Blame the Pornorgraphers

All right- Now, I'm the farthest thing you can get from a prude, (And that may be too much information, admittedly), BUT, as much as I love hearing from anyone and everyone, due to a recent influx of porn-related spam comments (now deleted) scuzzing up the blog, I've got to enforce comment moderation from now on. Boo hiss! Go peddle smut somewhere else.

Like here.

New addiction: Pirates and Booty

Ok, I admit, I'm a sucker for this sort of thing. They got me back in the old days with Legend of the Five Rings, and now, I have to admit, I'm really starting to like the Pirates of the Coast game since picking up a few packs of their Pirates of the South China Sea edition.

I'm not that keen on the fantasy editions that are currently coming out. It seems like we're about a year or two from jumping the shark, if we're not already there, but I have to say it's pretty sweet taking a fleet of Chinese Junks against, oh, just about everyone else.

Still, I'm also going to say that I'm getting sick of games that make me hunt and hunt for the pieces that I need, like, oh, the Dungeons & Dragons Miniature Games.

I'm not even going to go into how many boxes it took for me to finally get my weretiger figure to use for my module "Yer and The Tiger" based on the traditional Hmong folklore story.

This creep cost me about $160 looking for him, and he's supposed to be 'uncommon.'

Yeah, right. Jerk.

Look, people, there WAS a time when you could play a game the way you wanted to with all the pieces you need right in the box. This hunt and buy approach gets really old after the first $100.

But hey, I'm ranting now.

New Art Books On My Shelf

While Barbara Jane Reyes is busy wowing us with her hip collection of comics, chanbara and high lit, I might as well take time too to give some nods to some books that actually made it home with me instead of just getting thumbed through at the bookstores.

First up, while kind of macabre for the holidays, I've been meaning to get my hands on it for quite some time: Barlowe's Inferno and Brushfire Illuminations.

Frankly, it's captured my imagination and awe a great deal more than many full-fledged novels, graphic or otherwise, with the suggestion and implications embedded within the accompanying text.

They're two really stellar books if you can find them. It's next to impossible these days without going online, but it's worth it.

I'm also poring through the collection The Art of H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos that I'm going to classify as pretty close to a classic, but not perfect.

Frankly, I'm going to have go on the record of saying the big C is way over-exposed now, and has fallen far from the initial monument of mind-blasting madness he was when H.P. Lovecraft first wrote about him.

And while Chaosium, Fantasy Flight and so many other great companies have done the world a great service in keeping his work, controversies and all, in the public eye, the problem is that it's also rendered these unstoppable, cosmic horrors as something defeatable by ordinary humans.

These days, my wife has a hard time seeing Cthulhu as anything more than just a giant walking squid. Sigh. Really, he's quite a scary entity when you encounter him in context... oh, never mind.

My other quibble is extremely subjective, and it's merely that some artists clearly understand the material, and what is horror in fantastic art, while others sadly, miss the boat by miles and would be better off apprenticing themselves to shopping mall caricaturists. But I'm not going to name names.

It's the holidays. :)

Girls Read Comics And They're Pissed

Now seems like a good time to give a plug to Karen Healey's exceptional blog Girls Read Comics And They're Pissed that provides a great voice for understanding contemporary issues and concerns for women and the comics industry.

One of my favorite posts from her so far has been when she takes artists like Greg Land to task for crappy photo-referencing and a propensity for giving characters 'porn-face'

I mean really. This is supposed to be Sue Storm of the Fantastic Four?

Give it a read, make it a regular stop.