Tagged: game

Review: ‘Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow’

Review: ‘Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow’

Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow
By James Sturm & Rich Tommaso
Jump at the Sun/Hyperion, 2007, $16.99

This is a profoundly worthy book — produced under the asupices of The Center for Cartoon Studies, by two respected, serious modern cartoonists, published by the premier imprint for African-American children’s books, and about possibly the greatest pitcher in the history of baseball. Luckily, it’s not as dry and dull as that might make it sound.

It’s not really a biography of the great pitcher [[[Satchel Paige]]], though it looks like one — it follows the life and very abbreviated Negro Leagues baseball career of an Alabama man named Emmet. (His last name isn’t revealed.) Emmet faced Paige in one of his first at-bats for the Memphis Red Sox, but broke his leg in stealing home — he made the run, but lost his career. Emmet’s life intersects Paige’s again, much later, but he also follows Paige’s career, and compares it to his wn life along the way.

Satchel Paige opens with Emmet’s fateful at-bat against Paige, and then moves on from there, with a few vignettes of Emmet’s life from the late twenties to the early forties. Emmet’s a sharecropper, a poor man in a poor part of the world, and moderately oppressed by the local white landowners. (His son is beaten once, and we see the aftermath of one lynching, but Emmet himself kowtows enough to keep himself and his family safe. Perhaps the correct word for his condition is “terrorized.”) The book makes it clear that those white landowners own everything — at one point Emmet thinks “walkin’ out your door is trespassing if they choose to call it that.”

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NYCC: Photo Gallery – Day One-ish

NYCC: Photo Gallery – Day One-ish

  • News
  • April 18, 2008

New York Comic Con is in full swing… is it a bad sign that I’m already exhausted? Today’s "Changing Face of Online Journalism" panel featuring yours truly seems like it went well. Our "Spot the Slave Leia" drinking game also seems to be going over well — or at least that’s what the police seem to be telling us.

So, while we sort out all of this nonsense, here are some photos from Thursday and Friday (captions to be added at a later sober point):

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William James and the Superbowl, by Dennis O’Neil

William James and the Superbowl, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • February 5, 2008

Big game day. As I sit down to write this, the coin toss that will start this year’s Superbowl is about 90 minutes away. Let a hush fall over the universe. The Pats and the Giants are preparing to vie for godlike supremacy. Who’s your favorite QB – Eli or Tom? Me – I’m going for the Giants, not because I know anything about them, but rather because Marifran likes the Patriots and we have this annual bet. Winner gets to choose the next movie. Call us sports.

Wonder what William James would have thought of the Superbowl?

William James, brother of Henry, as the English majors and philosophy fans among you probably know, launched the concept of the “moral equivalent of war.” Although he was a self-proclaimed pacifist, he recognized that war has its uses – he even declared that history would be “insipid” without it. And it does. It hastens technological development, helps young men understand others who are not of their tribe, offers an opportunity for individuals to test themselves (and maybe learn what they really feel), provides an opportunity to develop managerial skills…You can probably add to the list.

War also kills and maims the innocent and destroys economies and nations and minds and brutalizes the survivors and gives money and power to those least deserving of them, such as men who have never fired a shot except, maybe, at forest animals and who knows? – even then the shooter might miss his target and hit a companion instead. Feel free to add to this list, too.

The trick, then, according to James and like minds, is to find a way to do the good things war does, and omit the bad. It’s a trick nobody has learned how to do. But we have some activities that approximate war that don’t do significant harm and may do some good, and sports is one of them. It allows young folk to obey their evolutionary imperative to engage in strenuous physicality with the goal of beating someone or something and maybe copping some glory and admiring glances and, please, let us not knock that imperative; it helped our distant, burrow-dwelling ancestors to claim a home on the Earth’s surface after a big chunk of rock did in the dinosaurs.

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‘Lost’ Season 4 Premiere: Spoilers, Easter Eggs And Reviews

‘Lost’ Season 4 Premiere: Spoilers, Easter Eggs And Reviews

  • News
  • February 1, 2008

The wait is over, and so is the Season 4 Premiere of "Lost." If you’re anything like me, the first thing you did after the end credits rolled was to hop on the InterWebs and check out the chatter about tonight’s episode.

Here’s a quick roundup of some interesting pre- and post-episode buzz:

It’s nowhere near a necessity for "Lost" fans to play this game, but it made the time between the end of Season 3 and the start of Season 4 go by quickly for those who played it. Now that Season 4 is in full swing, you can jump right to the end of Chapter 5 and fill in the pieces between a few dangling plot points in the "Lost" mythos. My Advice? Navigate back through the Find815.com updates on LostBlog.net and see how it played out.

  • LostPedia’s Episode 4 Spoiler Section has a decent rundown of the episode’s flash-forward segments, as well as a mention of the new character introduced at the very end of the episode, whose name appears to have changed.
  • Last, but certainly not least, keep checking back on LostEasterEggs for all sorts of screencaps and hints about some of the things you might be wondering about in the Season 4 Premiere. At the time of this post, they have a great series of screencaps from the scene around Jacob’s cabin. Whose eye appeared in the cabin? What was on the painting?
Women of Color at MoCCA

Women of Color at MoCCA

  • News
  • November 13, 2007

As mentioned previously on ComicMix, last night’s "MoCCA Monday" panel was held in conjunction with Friends of Lulu and the Ormes Society, and featured three enterprising women of color working in the comics field.  Moderator (and Ormes Society founder) Cheryl Lynn Eaton interviewed Rashida Lewis, Jennifer Gonzalez and Alitha Martinez about their various projects, experiences in comics as both fans and creators, and hopes and expectations for the future.

The event was so well-attended that MoCCA volunteers were putting out extra rows of chairs to accommodate the crowd.  This seemed to speak to comics fans’ need to see and support images represented in their favorite hobby, both on the page and behind the drawing board, that aren’t always the white male default.  Even so, the very talented women seemed to want to keep an arm’s distance from the mainstream comics scene.  Lewis has a nice portfolio of work for Marvel Comics but felt constrained by corporate dictates, and is following her muse by painting and working on her upcoming manga title Yume and Ever.  Gonzalez takes her inspiration from Mad Magazine, underground and even horror comics to continue in the alternative world with Too Negative and her other dark humor works.  And Lewis has expanded her Sand Storm series into a downloadable game soon to be available for mobile devices, and is intrigued by the world of animation in general.

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Graphic Novel Review: Del Rey Manga Round-Up, Part One

Graphic Novel Review: Del Rey Manga Round-Up, Part One

Let me be honest: I don’t know all that much about manga. I’ve read a few series (going back to Area 88 and Kamui, twenty years ago during the first attempt to bring manga to the US), but I’ve never really gone really deeply into the field. Well, I’m hoping to remedy that now. I’ve got a big pile of first volumes of various manga series, and I’ll be doing weekly reviews of about four of them at a time. (I’m aiming for Fridays; let’s see if I can hold to that schedule.)

We’ll start off with some books from Del Rey (all originally published by Kodasha in Japan), mostly aimed at young teenagers. (At least, all but one of these is marked “Teen: 13+,” but, from the content, I suspect the real Japanese readership, and possibly the American readership as well, is tweens to young teens.) This week’s batch also are primarily aimed at girls — I think.

First up is Shugo Chara!, which translates roughly to “Guardian Characters.” It’s by two women who work under the name Peach-Pit, and it’s about a fourth grader who discovers three eggs in her bed one morning.

Okay, I have to back up already. Amu, our heroine, is explicitly in fourth grade — we’re told that several times — though the structure of the school, and the maturity of the characters, would seem to put them more naturally in middle school. (Trust me; I’m the father of a fourth grader.) And, from an American perspective, it’s really bizarre that a story about fourth graders would be marketed to teens – or even tweens, as I suspect is actually the case here. In the US, kids generally only want to read about other kids their own age (maybe) or, preferably, a few years older. Fourth and fifth graders read stories about middle schoolers, middle schoolers read Sweet Valley High and the like, and high school students either stop reading for pleasure entirely or read stories about people in their twenties. Maybe, like so much else, that’s different in Japan – there is the well-known love of the small and cute there

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BIG BROADCAST: A Girl and Her Dinosaur

BIG BROADCAST: A Girl and Her Dinosaur

The Big ComicMix Broadcast starts our Second One Hundred with an exclusive preview of another Phase Two Project cooking up FREE from ComicMix. You take a cute girl, toss in a cartoon dinosaur and stir up a lot of wacky adventures and out pops Andrew Pepoy’s The Adventures of Simon & Ajax!

Plus Superman has the Deadline Doom, the Top Ten Comics & Graphic Novels are revealed and we play a game of "Where Did I Hear That Before"??

Simone likes people who PRESS THE BUTTON

Addicted to videogames?

Addicted to videogames?

  • News
  • April 2, 2007

A new Harris Survey suggests that video games are truly addictive and this addiction is increasing.  The report states that, in the United States, 8.5% of gamers between the ages of eight and 19 can be classified as "pathological" or clinically "addicted.  At the same time, 23% say they have felt "addicted to video games" including 31% of males and 13% of females.

Nearly four fifths (81%) play video games at least once per month, including 94% of all boys.

The survey was conducted online between January 17 and 23 this year.  Harris reports that 1,178 children and teenagers participated.  Among the findings:  The average 8- to 12year old plays 13 hours of video game per week, while 13- to 18 year olds play 14 hours per week.  Girls play about a third less than boys.

Dr. Douglas Gentile, Director of the Media Research Lab at Iowa State University and the director of research for the National Institute on Media and the Family, states, "It is important that people realize that playing a lot is not the same thing as pathological play. For something to be an addiction, it has to mean more than you do it a lot. It has to mean that you do it in such a way that it damages your life. This is why we based our definition on how pathological gambling is diagnosed in the DSM-IV. Almost one out of every ten youth gamers show enough symptoms of damage to their school, family, and psychological functioning to merit serious concern."

The last Spidey 3 trailer

The last Spidey 3 trailer

One more trailer to go… and it’s debuting today. You’d think there was another comic book movie premiering in theaters today.

The fourth and final movie trailer for Spider-Man 3 debuts today on Comcast’s VOD service, online at Comcast.net, a broadband site, and on a custom movie website, http://www.spiderman3oncomcast.com.

Comcast viewers will also have access to additional exclusive material about Spider-Man 3 and the upcoming Activision Publishing video game based on the movie on Comcast’s platforms, with new content debuting each week, blah blah blah. Comcast’s GameInvasion.net will feature a range of videos and interviews providing details on the Spider-Man 3 video game, including exclusive Spider-Man 3 Game trailers, game play footage and character vignettes.

And yes, this time we finally see ol’ snaggletooth in the trailer. Booga-booga!

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