The Fassbender And The Furious

The Lil’ Wil Wheaton Plushie Pre-Sale IS NOW HERE in the HE Store. The ONLY way to make sure you get one by the holidays is to order during the pre-sale. They’re $19.95 + shipping. Buy one for you, one for a friend and one to customize with a little fez or horrible spacesuit sweater!

Did you know the Fancy Bastards are keeping each other company over on the new Fancy Bastard Facebook Group? Why are you missing out on the fun? Why would you do that to yourself?

!!!PROMETHEUS SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

This comic was inspired by a conversation with my friend Stepto in which he attempted to convince me that I was too dumb to realize that I was too smart to be OK with all of the structural weaknesses in Prometheus. I was determined to hold on to my geek joy and not sacrifice it to his dead, pedantic spite-gods. Then I actually started to think about some of the… all of the stuff in the movie and the black goo of doubt began to race through my system and infect my very DNA. At one point a little techno-organic worm poked out of my eyeball just long enough to shout, “WHY WERE ALL THOSE SCIENTISTS SO DUMB AND BAD AT SCIENCE!?!” Just before I begged Charlize Theron to bathe me in cleansing flames, I realized he had a point.

Still I enjoyed the movie. And what is the most important question you can ask of art designed to entertain other than “was I entertained?” The weird thing about Prometheus is that it distracts you with pretty, and robots, and pretty robots, and murder aliens for 2 hours and then it’s over. So you don’t really notice all of the problems until you’re totally removed from the situation.

Regarding all the talk of “mystery,” I don’t think the plot actually leaves all that much unanswered. You don’t have to know why the Engineers want to delete humanity in order to understand the story or their role in it. David spelled it out perfectly when he made the “Why did you create us?” analogy. We would deactivate and destroy hundreds of thousands of androids if we decided they were faulty or posed a threat. They’re our creation and thus below us and we can do with them as we please. Same goes for the engineers. Whatever humanity did to piss them off 2000 years ago, was enough to say, “Well that’s enough of that bullshit. Time to wipe them out and mark a check in the FAILED EXPERIMENT column.” The “mystery” isn’t the issue.

The issue is one of characterization and motivation. The list of character problems I could make would be too long and boring to actually get anything out of, but all of the problems stem from the same root cause. Every single character in the movie (excluding perhaps David and the Engineers) establish type then play against it at every possible turn. And not in a clever way. More in a “one guy wrote the first half of the movie, then another wrote the second half without reading the first half” type of way. All of the hired scientists are incredibly terrible at their jobs despite displaying and professing their proficiency early on. We shouldn’t even have to question their merit considering the richest man in the galaxy decided to include them on the most important expedition in human history. Their ineptitude immediately throws their own character and that of Weyland (and subsequently nearly the entire plot of the film) into question. You get the impression early on that none of these people are professionals or even intelligent. Why don’t they follow any protocol on the planet? Why do they take their helmets off? Why do they KEEP TAKING THEM OFF even after shit starts to go real bad? Why does their cowardice overpower their scientific curiosity and why is that tolerated by their superiors? “I’ve decided NOT to contribute my expertise to this trillion dollar mission for which I was hired. Cool?” Why doesn’t main science lady ever tell ANYONE that she just c-sectioned an alien squid monster from her belly? No one even asks why she’s covered in blood, not in stasis and COVERED IN FUCKING BLOOD. There are just too many cases where people don’t act or react like actual people.

Still, I enjoyed it. Considering it was written by a LOST show-runner, I’m not entirely surprised that an excellent premise was confusified into something that posed more questions than it answered. I’m not sure when it happened, probably when LOST got so popular, but why did Hollywood decide that confusing = deep? You don’t get to say “it makes you think” when you really mean “we couldn’t come up with anything so we just left that part out.” Still, I enjoyed it. I just wish it had gone through one more rewrite by someone that wasn’t mistaking ambition for sloppiness or convoluted for thought provoking. Still… I enjoyed it.

COMMENTERS: OK, GO NUTS! Spoilers and all. Get your Prometheus thoughts off your chest.

You’re Killing Me, Buster

Hey, maybe go preorder that snazzy Wil Wheaton plushie if’n you’d like to get one before Xmas.

Blockbuster Video is a Dallas-based entity (I’m not sure that “business” is the right word), so if you are going to see one in operation, you are probably going to see it here. There is actually one not too far from my house. Every time I drive past it, I get this screwed up look on my face that puzzles and posits, “How? Why? And more importantly, WHO!?” Who is perpetuating this video rental life support with their patronage? I mean, we could go on and on debating “quality of life” and what is or is not a “vegetative state,” but surely we as a society must have enough collective mercy to pull the plug.

Considering I haven’t stepped foot in a Blockbuster for nearly a decade, I can only assume that they are but gutted out husks used for staging some sort of Mad Maxian societal apocalypse scenario. Maybe each Blockbuster is seeded with a few employees, a handful of customers and their children and once the doors are locked government officials watch on closed circuit cameras and time how long it takes for everything to go all Lord Of The Flies. My guess is it’s just after the 4th time the in-store tv’s play the trailers for Miss Congeniality.

I was inspired to make this comic upon remembering a photo that I had seen online of a “Blockbuster wasteland.” A little research showed that it was posted on Tumblr by none other than my friend Wil. Once I realized that, I changed the alt text, which had previously said: I was 30, going on 31 the first time I saw a dead former retail giant. Spooky.

COMMENTERS: When was the last time you remember regularly using a Blockbuster? Do you STILL?! What happened to you? Are you OK? Remember walking all around a store for sometimes an hour only to go home empty handed? That is how people used to live ! Any other particular stores or services that you used to use every day that have since been totally replaced by technology?

Feel free to add to the mythos of “what goes on inside a Blockbuster.”

The Harsh Light Of Day

Check out the Serenity/Star Wars themed art I did for the Edmonton, Alberta “Can’t Stop The Serenity” charity Auction. If you’re going to the event, it could be yours.

I don’t even know what to believe any more. No one seems the like Prometheus. The warmest review I’ve heard from a trusted geek source is “I enjoyed it well enough, but there were some MAJOR problems.” I’ve so been looking forward to this movie for months, and now I don’t even know if I want to see it in theaters or wait for home video. It seemed like it had everything the perfect ME movie should have. Spaceships, robots, space, creepy robots, a lady, aliens, space murder, convulsing, space suits, cryo-sleep, a thing trying to kill everyone, space accents… quite literally EVERYTHING I look for in a movie. Now I’m hearing about character problems and a story that doesn’t quite come together. I really hope this is another Avatar situation, where I LOVE it and all the haters can go suck on a plasma exhaust port.

COMMENTERS: Feel free to give you TOTALLY SPOILER FREE thoughts on Prometheus in the comments. Rest assured that, despite my warning, I will probably read none of them until after I see the movie. I’m still holding out hope.

The Final Countdown

The Lil’ Wil Wheaton Plushie Pre-Sale STARTS TODAY HERE in the HE Store. The ONLY way to make sure you get one by the holidays is to order during the pre-sale. They’re $19.95 + shipping. Buy one for you, one for a friend and one to customize with a little fez or horrible spacesuit sweater!

Responding to this tweet from @NicaRedHead gave me the idea for this comic. You see, my friend Wil has what science doers call “Hockey Brain.” It is a horribly debilitating condition that causes one to flail about uncontrollably, run around the house screaming and gesture incomprehensibly at the television. As of right now there is no cure and no one is currently working on a cure or doing any research on the subject. Luckily for sufferers and their families, symptoms seem to subside… oh, about right now. Science doers can not explain this sudden onset total remission, because they don’t know what channel the NHL is broadcast on and chances are they probably have it deprogrammed from their cable box anyway.

COMMENTERS: Do you or someone you love suffer from Hockey Brain? Can you explain it to me? How many downs are in an inning? Is the goal master allowed to throw his ice mallet like a javelin? Wouldn’t it be easier to play on grass or concrete? Ice seems like it would be quite slippery. I wonder if the Mayor of Sports Puck called to congratulate The Le’ Kings (must be a french team) on their victory against the Othertown Differentcolors.

And The Bartender Says, “Why The Long Face?”

The Lil’ Wil Wheaton plushie is going to go on presale this coming Monday (6/11) at midnight (Tuesday morning 6/12) HERE in the HE Store. The ONLY way to make sure you get one by the holidays is to order during the presale which I believe is going to be one week, maybe two. They’ll be $20 + shipping.

So as I got ready to abandon the recent comic continuity and write a gag NOT involving the E.F.E. and his transition into a new phase of evil, I naturally found myself following up with the characters right where the last plot(ish) point(let) left off. I still got the gooey, nougaty Bladerunner gag in that I wanted, but I sort of accidentally wrapped it in a hard candy shell of continuing canon. It’s like continuity has infected my brain like a brain disease! I’m not saying it’s always going to be like this, but I felt like voicing my mini-revelation as I experiment more with the new format.

All that aside, if Harrison Ford IS in Bladerunner 2, it better be because someone is saying, “Hey, old man! You look just like this robot I used to know who died like 30 years ago. You know, if he had lived to be old like you, which he didn’t because he was a robot and robots aren’t allowed to live that long. Anyway, give you all your money before I shoot you with a gun.”

COMMENTERS: If Harrison ford is in the sequel, how can they do it without betraying the fact that Deckard WAS a replicant? HE WAS! SHUT UP! WHO SAYS HE WASN’T!? TELL THEM TO SHUT UP FOREVER! Maybe he could have a cameo has the “old guy who Deckard’s face was based on.” Otherwise they’d have to CGI de-age him like Jeff Bridges or Snape, which we all know has SUPER creep-tastic results. Why are there glowing patches of smoothness where your eye bags are supposed to be? WHY!?