everyone who likes comics is mad at everyone else who likes comics all the time

Random Review #3: Sleepwalkers (1992) and “Sleep Walk” (1959)

I. Sleepwalkers (1992) I couldn’t sleep last night so I started watching a trashy B-movie penned by Stephen King specifically for the screen called Sleepwalkers (1992). Simply put, the film is an unmitigated disaster. A piece of shit. But it didn’t need to be. That’s what’s so annoying about it. By 1992 King was a grizzled veteran of the silver screen, with more adaptations under his belt than any other author of his cohort. Puzo had the Godfather films (1972 and 1974, respectively), sure, but nothing else. Leonard Gardner had Fat City (1972), a movie I love, but Gardner got sucked into the Hollywood scene of cocaine and hot tub parties and never published another novel, focusing instead on screenplays for shitty TV shows like NYPD Blue. After Demon Seed (1977), a movie I have seen and disliked, nobody would touch Dean Koontz’s stuff with a ten foot pole, which is too bad because The Voice of the Night, a 1980 novel about two young pals, one of whom is a psychopath trying to convince the other to help him commit murder, would make a terrific movie. But Koontz’s adaptations have been uniformly awful. The made-for-TV film starring John C McGinley, 1997′s Intensity, is especially bad. There are exceptions, but Stephen King has been lucky enough to avoid the fate of his peers. Big name directors have tackled his work, from Stanley Kubrick to Brian De Palma. King even does a decent job of acting in Pet Semetary (1989), in his own Maximum Overdrive (1986) and in George Romero’s Creepshow (1982), where he plays a yokel named Jordy Verril who gets infected by a meteorite that causes green weeds to grow all over his body. Many have criticized King’s over-the-top performance in that flick, but for me King perfectly nails the campy and comical tone that Romero was going for. The dissolves in Creepshow literally come right off the pages of comics, so people expecting a subtle Ordinary People-style turn from King had clearly walked into the wrong theatre. Undoubtedly Creepshow succeeds at what it set out to do. I’m not sure Sleepwalkers succeeds though, unless the film’s goal was to get me to like cats even more than I already do. But I already love cats a great deal. Here’s my cat Cookie watching me edit this very blog post. 

And here’s one of my other cats, Church, named after the cat that reanimates and creeps out Louis and Ellie in Pet Sematary. Photo by @ScareAlex.

SPOILER ALERT: Do not keep reading if you plan on watching Sleepwalkers and want to find out for yourself what happens.

Stephen King saw many of his novels get adapted in the late 1970s and 80s: Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter, Christine, Cujo, and the movie that spawned the 1950s nostalgia industrial complex, Stand By Me, but Sleepwalkers was the first time he wrote a script specifically for the screen rather than adapting a novel that already existed. Maybe that’s why it’s so fucking bad. Stephen King is a novelist, gifted with a novelist’s rich imagination. He’s prone to giving backstories to even the most peripheral characters - think of Joe Chamber’s alcoholic neighbour Gary Pervier in the novel Cujo, who King follows for an unbelievable number of pages as the man stumbles drunkenly around his house spouting his catch phrase “I don’t give a shit,” drills a hole through his phone book so he can hang it from a string beside his phone, complains about his hemorrhoids getting “as big as golfballs” (I’m not joking), and just generally acts like an asshole until a rabid Cujo bounds over, rips his throat out, and he bleeds to death. In the novel Pervier’s death takes more than a few pages, but it makes for fun reading. You hate the man so fucking much that watching him die feels oddly satisfying. In the movie, though, his death occurs pretty quickly, and in a darkened hallway, so it’s hard to see what’s going on aside from Gary’s foot trembling. And Pervier’s “I don’t give a shit” makes sense when he’s drilling a hole in the phone book, not when he’s about to be savagely attacked by a rabid St Bernard. There’s just less room for back story in movies. In a medium that demands pruning and chiseling and the “less is more” dictum, King’s writing takes a marked turn for the worse. King is a prose maximalist, who freely admits to “writing to outrageous lengths” in his novels, listing It, The Stand, and The Tommyknockers as particularly egregious examples of literary logorrhea. He is not especially equipped to write concisely. This weakness is most apparent in Sleepwalkers’ dialogue, which sounds like it was supposed to be snappy and smart, like something Aaron Sorkin would write, but instead comes off like an even worse Tango & Cash, all bad jokes and shitty puns. More on those bad jokes later. First, the plot.

Sleepwalkers is about a boy named Charles and his mother Mary who travel around the United States killing and feeding off the lifeforce of various unfortunate people (if this sounds a little like The True Knot in Doctor Sleep, you’re not wrong. But self-plagiarism is not a crime). Charles and Mary are shapeshifting werewolf-type creatures called werecats, a species with its very own Wikipedia page. Wikipedia confers legitimacy dont’cha know, so lets assume werecats are real beings. According to said page, a werecat, “also written in a hyphenated form as were-cat) is an analogy to ‘werewolf’ for a feline therianthropic creature.” I’m gonna spell it with the hyphen from now on because “werecats” just looks like a typo. Okay? Okay.

Oddly enough, the were-cats in Sleepwalkers are terrified of cats. Actual cats. For the were-cats, cute kittens = kryptonite. When they see a cat or cats plural, this happens to them:

^ That is literally a scene from the movie. Charles is speeding when a cop pulls alongside him and bellows at him to pull over. Ever the rebel, Charles flips the cop the finger. But the cop has a cat named Clovis in his car, and when the cat pops up to have a look at the kid (see below), Charles shapeshifts first into a younger boy, then into whatever the fuck that is in the above screenshot.

Now, the were-cats aversion to normal cats is confusing because one would assume a were-cat to be a more evolved (or perhaps devolved?) version of the typical house kitty. The fact that these were-cats are bipedal alone suggests an advantage over our furry four-legged friends, no? Kinda like if humans were afraid of fucking gorillas. Wait...we are scared of gorillas. And chimpanzees. And all apes really. Okay, maybe the conceit of the film isn’t so silly after all. The film itself, however, is about as silly as a bad horror movie can get. When the policeman gets back to precinct and describes the incident above (”his face turned into a blur”) he is roundly ridiculed because in movies involving the supernatural nobody believes in the supernatural until it confronts them. It’s the law, sorry. Things don’t end well for the cop. Or for the guy who gets murdered when the mom stabs him with...an ear of corn. Yes, an ear of corn. Somehow, the mother is able to jam corn on the cob through a man’s body, without crushing the vegetable or turning it into yellow mash. It’s pretty amazing. Here is a sample of dialog from that scene: Cop About To Die On The Phone to Precinct: There’s blood everywhere! *STAB* Murderous Mother: No vegetables, no dessert. That is actually a line in the movie. “No vegetables, no dessert.” It’s no “let off some steam, Bennett” but it’s close. Told ya I’d get back to the bad jokes. See, Mary and Charles are new in town and therefore seeking to ingratiate themselves by killing everyone who suspects them of being weird, all while avoiding cats as best they can. At one point Charles yanks a man’s hand off and tells him to "keep [his] hands to [him]self," giving the man back his severed bloody hand. Later on Charles starts dating a girl who will gradually - and I do mean gradually - come to realize her boyfriend is not a real person but in fact a were-cat. Eventually our spunky young protagonist - Madchen Amick, who fans of Twin Peaks will recognize as Shelly - and a team of cats led by the adorable Clovis- kill the were-cat shapeshifting things and the sleepy small town (which is named Travis for some reason) goes back to normal, albeit with a slightly diminished population. For those keeping score, that’s Human/Cat Alliance 1, Shapeshifting Were-cats 0. It is clear triumph for the felis catus/people team! Unless we’re going by kill count, in which case it is closer to Human/Cat Alliance 2, Were-cats 26. I arrived at this figure through my own notes but also through a helpful video that takes a comprehensive and complete “carnage count” of all kills in Sleepwalkers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmt-DroK6uA

II. Santo & Johnny “Sleep Walk” (1959) Because Sleepwalkers is decidedly not known for its good acting or its well-written screenplay, it is perhaps best known for its liberal and sometimes contrapuntal use of Santo & Johnny’s classic steel guitar song “Sleep Walk,” possibly the most famous (and therefore best) instrumental of the 20th century. Some might say “Sleep Walk” is tied for the #1 spot with “Green Onions” by Booker T & the M.G.’s and/or “Wipe Out” by The Surfaris, but I disagree. The Santo & Johnny song is #1 because of its incalculable influence on all subsequent popular music. 

I’m not saying “Wipe Out” didn't inspire a million imitators, both contemporaneously and even decades later…for example here’s a surf rock instrumental from 1999 called “Giant Cow" by a Toronto band called The Urban Surf Kings. The video was one of the first to be animated using Flash (and it shows):

So there are no shortage of surf rock bands, even now, decades after its emergence from the shores of California to the jukeboxes of Middle America. My old band Sleep for the Nightlife used to regularly play Rancho Relaxo with a surf rock band called the Dildonics, who I liked a great deal. There's even a Danish surf rock band called Baby Woodrose, whose debut album is a favourite of mine. They apparently compete for the title of Denmark’s biggest surf pop band with a group called The Setting Son. When a country that has no surfing culture and no beaches has multiple surf rock bands, it is safe to say the genre has attained international reach. As far as I can tell, there aren’t many bands out there playing Booker T & the M.G.’s inspired instrumental rock. Link Wray’s “Rumble” was released four years before “Green Onions.” But the influence of Santo and Johnny’s “Sleep Walk” is so ubiquitous as to be almost immeasurable. The reason for this is the sheer popularity of the song’s chord progression. If Santo and Johnny hadn’t written it first, somebody else would have, simply because the progression is so beautiful and easy on the ears and resolvable in a satisfying way. Have a listen to “Sleep Walk” first and then let’s check out some songs it directly inspired. 

The chords are C, A minor, F and G. Minor variations sometimes reverse the last two chords, but if it begins with C to A minor, you can bet it’s following the “Sleep Walk” formula, almost as if musicians influenced by the song are in the titular trance. When it comes to playing guitar, Tom Waits once said “your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they’ve been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places. You have to break them of their habits or you don’t explore; you only play what is confident and pleasing.” Not only is it comforting to play and/or hear what we already know, studies have shown that our brains actively resist new music, because it takes work to understand the new information and assimilate it into a pattern we are cogent of. It isn’t until the brain recognizes the pattern that it gives us a dopamine rush. I’m not much for Pitchfork anymore, but a recent article they posted does a fine job of discussing this phenomenon in greater detail.

Led Zeppelin’s “D’Yer Maker” uses the “Sleep Walk” riff prominently, anchored by John Bonham and John Paul Jones’ white-boy reggae beat: 

Here it is again with Del Shannon’s classic “Little Town Flirt.” I love Shannon’s falsetto at the end when he goes “you better run and hide now bo-o-oy.”

The Beatles “Happiness is a Warm Gun” uses the Sleep Walk progression, though not for the whole song. It goes into the progression at the bridge at 1:34: 

Tumblr won’t let me embed any more videos, so you’ll to travel to another tab to hear these songs, but Neil Young gets in on the act with his overlooked classic “Winterlong:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV6r66n3TFI On their 1996 EP Interstate 8 Modest Mouse pay direct homage by singing over their own rendition of the original Santo & Johnny version, right down to the weeping steel guitar part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT_PwXjCqqs The vocals are typical wispy whispered indie rock vocals, but I think they work, particularly the two different voices. They titled their version “Sleepwalking (Couples Only Dance Prom Night).”

Dwight Yoakam’s “Thousand Miles From Nowhere” makes cinematic use of it. This song plays over the credits of one of my all-time favourite movies, 1993′s Red Rock West feat. Nicolas Cage, Lara Flynn Boyle, Dennis Hopper, and J.T. Walsh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu3ypuKq8WE

“39″ is my favourite Queen song. I guess now I know why. It uses my fav chord progression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE8kGMfXaFU 

Blink 182 scored their first hit “Dammit” with a minor variation on the Sleep Walk chord progression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT0g16_LQaQ

Midwest beer drinkin bar rockers Connections scored a shoulda-been-a-hit with the fist-pumping “Beat the Sky:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSNRq0n_WYA You’d be hard pressed to find a weaker lead singer than this guy (save for me, natch), but they make it work. This one’s an anthem.

Spoon, who have made a career out of deconstructing rock n’ roll, so that their songs sometimes sound needlessly sparse (especially “The Ghost of You Lingers,” which takes minimalism to its most extreme...just a piano being bashed on staccato-style for four minutes), so it should surprise nobody that they re-arrange the Sleep Walk chords on their classic from Gimme Fiction, “I Summon You:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teXA8N3aF9M I love that opening line: remember the weight of the world was a sound that we used to buy? I think songwriter Britt Daniel is talking about buying albums from the likes of Pearl Jam or Smashing Pumpkins, any of those grunge bands with pessimistic worldviews. There are a million more examples. I remember seeing some YouTube video where a trio of gross douchebros keep playing the same progression while singing a bunch of hits over it. I don’t like the smarmy way they do it, making it seem like artists are lazy and deliberately stealing. I don’t think it’s plagiarism to use this progression. And furthermore, tempo and production make all the difference. Take “This Magic Moment” for example. There's a version by Jay & the Americans and one by Ben E King & the Drifters. I’ve never been a fan of those shrieking violins or fiddles that open the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bacBKKgc4Uo The Jay & the Americans version puts the guitar riff way in the forefront, which I like a lot more. The guitar plays the entire progression once before the singing starts and the band joins in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKfASw6qoag

Each version has its own distinctive feel. They are pretty much two different songs. Perhaps the most famous use of the Sleep Walk progression is “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers, which is one of my favourite songs ever. The guy who chose to let Bobby Hatfield sing this one by himself must have kicked himself afterwards when it became a hit, much bigger than "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiiyq2xrSI0

What can you say about “Unchained Melody” that hasn’t already been said? God, that miraculously strong vocal, the way the strings (and later on, brass horns) are panned way over to the furthest reaches the left speaker while the drums and guitar are way over in the right, with the singing smack dab in the middle creates a kind of distance and sharp clarity that has never been reproduced in popular music, like seeing the skyscrapers of some distant city after an endless stretch of highway. After listening to “Unchained Melody,” one has to wonder: can that progression ever be improved upon? Can any artist write something more haunting, more beautiful, more uplifting than that? The “need your love” crescendo hits so fucking hard, as both the emotional and the sonic climax of the song, which of course is no accident...the strings descending and crashing like a waterfall of sound, it gets me every fucking time. Legend has it that King George II was so moved by the “Hallelujah” section of Handel’s “Messiah” that he stood up, he couldn't help himself, couldn't believe what he was hearing. I get that feeling with all my favourite songs. "1979." "Unchained Melody." "In The Still of the Night." "Digital Bath." "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?" "Interstate." "Liar's Tale." “Gimme Shelter.” The list goes on and on. Music is supposed to move us.

King George II stood because he was moved to do so. Music may be our creation, but it isn't our subordinate. All those sci-fi stories warning about technology growing beyond our control aren’t that far-fetched. Music is our creation but its power lies beyond our control. We are subordinate to music, helpless against its power and might, its urgency and vitality and beauty. There have been many times in my life when I have been so obsessed with a particular song that I pretty much want to live inside of it forever. A house of sound. I remember detoxing from heroin and listening to Grimes “Realiti” on repeat for twelve hours. Detoxing from OxyContin and listening to The Beach Boys “Dont Worry Baby” over and over. Or just being young and listening to “Tonight Tonight” over and over and over, tears streaming from my eyes in that way you cry when you’re a kid because you just feel so much and you don’t know what to do with the intensity of those feelings. It is precisely because we are so moved by music that we keep creating it. And in the act of that creation we are free. There are no limits to that freedom, which is why bands time and time again return to the well-worn Sleep Walk chord progression and try to make something new from it. Back in 2006, soon after buying what was then the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, I found myself playing the album’s closing track over and over. I loved the chorus and I loved the way it collapses into a lo-fi demo at the very end, stripping away the studio sheen and...not to be too punny, showing its bones (the album title is Show Your Bones). Later on I would realize that the song, called “Turn Into,” uses the Sleep Walk chord progression. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exqCFoPiwpk

It’s just like, what Waits said, our hands goes to where we are familiar. And so do our ears, which is why jazz often sounds so unpleasant to us upon first listen. Or Captain Beefheart. But it’s worth the effort to discover new stuff, just as it’s worth the effort to try and write it. I recently lamented on this blog that music to me now is more about remembrance than discovery, but I’m still only 35 years old. I’m middle-aged right now (I don’t expect to live past 70, not with the lifestyle I’ve been living). There’s still a whole other half life to find new music and love and leave it for still newer stuff. It’s worth the challenge, that moment of inner resistance we feel when confronted with something new and challenging and strange sounding. The austere demands of adult life, rent and routine, take so much of our time. I still make time for creative pursuits, but I don’t really have much time for discovery, for seeking out new music. But I’ve resolved to start making more time. A few years ago I tried to listen to and like Trout Mask Replica but I couldn’t. I just didn’t get what was going on. It sounded like a bunch of mistakes piled on top of each other. But then a few days ago I was writing while listening to music, as I always do, and YouTube somehow landed on Lick My Decals Off, Baby. I didn’t love what I was hearing but I was intrigued enough to keep going. And now I really like this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMnd9dvb3sA&pbjreload=101 Another example I’ll give is the rare Robert Pollard gem “Prom Is Coming.” The first time I heard this song, it sounded like someone who can’t play guitar messing around, but the more I heard it the more I realized there’s a song there. It’s weird and strange, but it’s there. The lyrics are classic Pollard: Disregard injury and race madly out of the universe by sundown. Pollard obviously has a special place in his heart for this track. He named one of his many record labels Prom Is Coming Records and he titled the Boston Spaceships best-of collection Out of the Universe By Sundown. I don’t know if I’ll ever become a Captain Beefheart megafan but I can hear that the man was doing something very strange and, at times, beautiful. And anyway, why should everything be easy? Aren’t some challenges worth meeting for the experience waiting on the other side of comprehension or acceptance? I try to remember this now whenever I’m first confronted with new music, instead of vetoing it right away. Most of my favourite bands I was initially resistant to when I first heard them. Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss, Guided by Voices, Spoon, Heavy Times. All bands I didn’t like at first.  I don’t wanna sleepwalk through life, surrounding myself only with things I have already experienced. I need to stay awake. Because soon enough I’ll be asleep forever. We need to try everything we can before the Big Sleep comes to take us back to the great blankness, the terrible question mark that bookends our lives.

im kinda want to get into this sort of thing so is it okay to ask u a few questions? if not just delete this, but here goes? would u reccomend game maker studio 2, and how hard is it to use in ur opinion? and is there anything u wish u knew at the beginning of making ur fangame?

aw anon you’re so sweet! don’t worry about asking about this, its really exciting to make games and trying new things! i would not say i’m an expert, and i wouldn’t even say i know gml like. at all. i just understand a how the code is used, but now what the code itself is or what to type exactly. like, i understand the theory more so than actually doing it. which is, eh, fine? i’m getting by, and i’m still learning. i’ve only been using gms 2 for 2 months now.

also, i’m using a fangame engine! i feel its kinda like cheating lmao, but its just meant to be a framework to build your own thing off of. and i still need to learn gms2 to use it, and i plan on doing more advanced and complicated things (ie: changing how battles even work structurally.) so. i’m not good at gsm2 yet, but uh, really once you understand coding its not any harder than i’d imagine w/ other professional game engines. compared to unity, i like this better because it seems built on the idea of making 2d sprite games. its SO much more simpler and the userface (while. i’m not a fan of how it has its workspace but whatever) is simple and easy to grasp.

i can’t say for certain if i recommend game maker. its very pricey and doesn’t go on sale often. (big sales i mean, it goes on 15% somewhat frequently) i really, really recommend doing your research first. 

so here i talk about what game engines i’ve used over the last year. (also i hear Godot is good!)

at the end of that post i said this: “TLDR; figure out what kind of game and story you want to tell/make. i could of saved a year’s worth of work if i just sat myself down and realized i wanted to make a completely new fangame separate from my old blog stuff. and that i wanted to make an rpg specifically.“

and so! past me has good advice. figure out the scope and what story do you want to tell. with AL, I know it has 2 chapters, and rn i’m only concentrating on chapter 1. chp 1 has 7 nights and one area where you fight enemies. its very story/character driven and is more so like. a deconstruction of the rpg genre than an actual rpg game. (i know that the word deconstruction is over used as hell, but it is what this is.)

it builds off the themes of the original, while focusing on things that i want to focus on and develop. ut, at it’s heart, is about stories and grief, i’m just taking it to a different extreme and angle.

uh, anyway, i really wish i knew what i wanted to make and understood the source material more and what i wanted to make. i’ve. thought really really hard over what UT means, what message toby was trying to convey, how he did it and what I thought about it. understanding what YOU want from and for your project is the most important thing. WHY do you want to make this? WHAT do you want people to feel and think about when playing? or even, after playing? it doesn’t have to be super deep either.

so, figure out what you what to make, and then you can work on the how. really plan your story, but honestly i wouldn’t recommend planning it in super big details right off. also, super helpful to have a friend help you brainstorm and plot check things for you. (shout out to my friend the sniffer

anyway, don’t plan things TOO detailed because things are GOING to change no matter how well you plan! just try to get get an outline done, then rewrite it 5 more times and then MAYBE you’ll be ready to tackle a more detailed version. then write it 5 more times. i can’t stress enough how important planning is, and how you shouldn’t expect everything to work out even on draft 10! things will work, and when they do, draft 10 is going to look like bad awful nonsense cause you’re at draft 20 now and everything is much more coherent and better. games aren’t written or consumed all at once on the fly. its not a piece of fanart, a fanfic, a comic. its not updated more than once. its out, and then its just out. plan for it.

and real quick, don’t worry about art assets! depending on how you do the art, that’s most likely going to change and its going to be polished LAST. i could go more into how you should think of art when game developing, but thats another topic. just. honestly use shitty art assets and worry about it later.

kris’ place holder sprite for deltarune ^ it don’t need to be pretty, it needs to be practical.

second advice: start SMALL!!! i feel i should of done this, and frankly i probably will have to sit down and do this lmao, basically, you should make boring small games to learn the basics. I know, i know, nobody really wants to recreate asteroid when you got big ideas of making stories and animations u wanna make. but like. you really need to figure out how the program works and how the code works in theory and practice.

ok so like, think of coding like this. i got this from a skillshare video series, so uh. i’m going to retell this but in a shittier and likely less nuanced way. sorry

ok so imagine. you’re telling this guy who is trying to get to Gary’s house. now, Gary’s house is just down the road, few houses down, now, you can tell this guy that and he’ll likely find the house just fine. but if you’re telling a robot it’s not going to understand what “down the road” means. what road? how long? it needs instructions that are simple and work in a language it understands.

so you tell the robot “go down two houses, stop at sign until x seconds pass, turn right, go forward 1 house, turn ect. stop at house, ring doorbell. IF Gary answers, go inside; ELSE: do not go inside, wait;

so this what i mean by understanding the theory behind the code rather than the code itself. yes there’s complexities and differences in each language, but they’re ALL based on the same concepts. different program languages are less like different speech languages, but rather different dialects of the same. (uh, like us english vs uk english) its just different rules and “spellings” of the same core concepts.

next advice: don’t be afraid to ask for help! but also! do so within reason! if people are OPEN for helping, be sure do so in the right environment and within what time works for them. compensate people for the time and effort if you can. ALWAYS try to figure out the solution yourself first. often with coding, it can be a simple solution that you could of thought of yourself if you took the initiative to. google is your friend, youtube is your friend! (ok, youtube isn’t, but in this case! yes!) the answer might not always be easy to find, and its perfectly fine to look for help but its good to at least try on your own first!

speaking of which! LEARN LEARN LEARN! be ready to devote A LOT of time to watching and reading about game development. this goes to every game making program, not just gms2. i watch. so many videos on gms. i rec having the video play at 1.5x or 2x speed to cut down time. obvs you still need to retain the information, so speed might be not a good idea then. and its REALLY GOOD to pause and type out the code and follow along. but its also good to just understand the concepts, and theres no harm in rewatching once you’ve understood it  better at a different speed.

things WILL click and work out for you, and its going to be a very time consuming and long journey to get there. i LOVE making this game and telling this story but I also had no idea what i was getting into! and i probably will have more advice once i’m further in, (i’ve only used gms 2 for 2 months!) but thats the best i can say for now! i hope you pursue your dreams and start making things!!! you can do it!!! 

the best time to start is yesterday, the second best time is right now! even if you put a little effort into it everyday, you’ll  build up progress and you can learn SO MUCH over time and theres this whole world of possibilities out there! the world NEEDS your story and your perspective, and i think creating it in anyway you can is necessary for humanity! your work will mean something to someone someday, and i am so excited for you to start your journey!

Batman #440

Look at this beautiful cover! I don't know why I even read modern comics.

But don't worry! He's The Batman! He doesn't know what the word "mortal" means!

Some kid on a bike stood off in the distance taking pictures of Batman battling Ravager. At least I'm assuming it's a kid simply because he rode their on his BMX. He might also be a DUI. Whatever, the kid slash drunk with a suspended license rides seems to know Batman is actually Bruce Wayne and that Dick Grayson is Robin and/or Nightwing. Hopefully he captured the moment Batman kicked Ravager off of the dam and into the churning water below so that when The Ravager's body turns up, Batman can finally be exposed for the fraud he almost certainly is! Nobody fights crime for years, beating the shit out of everybody he meets, without killing a couple of criminals! Batman just can't admit that he's killed anybody at this point because Superman would have a field day lording it over him.

Oh! I wonder if the little girl spelled the name of my blog?! Good for her!

How is a conservative supposed to enjoy this Batman comic book after Wolman takes that shot at George Bush?! Ha ha! That was a rhetorical question. I don't really care if a conservative can't enjoy this comic book now. Get fucked, snowflakes! Some guy's radio convinces him to kill Batman. Again, I guess, since it looks like he's the one who sent Ravager after Batman. Is he also the guy on the bike? I don't know! It's possible I'm supposed to have figured out who this guy is six pages in but I'd hate to truly believe that because then I'd have to admit I'm stupid. And there's one thing a stupid person will never admit to being is stupid! Just try it! Call somebody you know is stupid stupid and see how quickly they retort, "I am not! I'm smart!" Then call a smart person stupid and watch how they just smugly laugh in your face and go about their business. It's the easiest intelligence test in the world! By the way, I'm not stupid! Batman crawls back to Wayne Manor where Alfred is ready to give him a good doctoring.

Oh, did I say "doctoring"? I meant "buggering".

Look, I said I wasn't stupid! I know Alfred isn't really fucking Batman in the ass in that picture. It's actually just Batman vomiting up the bed sheets he ate earlier. Alfred looks on at Bruce sleeping after the "doctoring" and thinks, "He looks so tired. He has since Jason passed away." "Passed away"?! Jason was brutally murdered by The Joker! Stop being so passive in your language! I mean, you even say "he looks so tired" instead of admitting the man is fucking exhausted! Fuck, why do I expect anything but passivity from the man who allowed a traumatized child to turn into a violent, obsessive, death-wish holding, bat-cosplaying maniac?! Send that kid to counseling, you idiot! My version of DC's Zero Hour would have led to a Batman had counseling as a child and became more noble and non-violent than even Superman. A man who used his money to help his community to actually get better rather than reliving the pain and trauma of his youth night after night. And Superman would been found by the Kents who wouldn't have taken him illegally into their family. They would have run him through the system where he would have become a bitter and cynical child of the American foster program. He'd be even grimmer than Return of the Dark Knight Batman! Wonder Woman would still be Wonder Woman but instead of using the invisible technology for her jet, she'd have used it for her costume. Oh! I just realized the stupid kid on the bike is Tim Drake! I think I remember him getting his Robin series with the fancy covers during my first year of college. I probably would have remembered this earlier if it hadn't been thirty years since I read this comic book and also I was better at retaining DC history!

This was the clue that made me remember Tim Drake!

If I scan all of the panels where Dick Grayson's first name is used innocently in a way that makes me laugh, I won't have time for any inciteful commentary! And yes I spelled it that way on purpose. I've been doing this gig for eight years and I'm fairly certain I can take credit for five different riots.

Sometimes?! SOMETIMES you wonder?! You should be kissing Alfred's ass every fucking morning you wake up alive, you ingrate!

Alfred lectures Batman about how careless he's become since Jason's death. Instead of responding by saying, "No, you're right, Alfred. I've been a wreck," or "It might be twenty years too late but maybe I should look into therapy," or even, "Alfred, I know you care. But somebody has to protect the people of Gotham," he doesn't say a thing. He just sits there grinding his teeth angrily pouting. Alfred must not have perfected his tough love approach pre-Zero Hour. Alfred's words have an effect on Batman. He slows down the next night and thinks with his head instead of whatever he was thinking with before. He said that, not me! He was looking at his fists when he said it but you know what his head was thinking about. Using the detective part of his repertoire, Batman finally realizes that Two-Face is behind the attempts on his life. He curses himself because it should have been obvious. But it's only obvious after you realize Two-Face is behind it! I mean, I almost figured it out on the second (2nd!) page when Batman thought, "The Ravager, in the past two weeks he had killed as many policemen." If only I had gone on the rant I was going to go on about that only being two cops (which, obviously, is two too many! Whew! Good thing I said that before the Blue Lives Matters bullies descended upon me!). Maybe I would have been all, "Only 2 cops! Over 2 weeks! And this clue on the 2nd page. OH MY GOD! Two-Face!" Tim Drake decides to hunt down Nightwing because he knows how much Batman needs Dick. But he doesn't find him at Titans Tower nor at his apartment which he shares with Starfire. Although Tim does remain on stakeout watching Kory through his binoculars until after she's showered. I think Tim Drake just discovered a dick he hadn't been looking for! Is that inappropriate? He's like twelve or something right? I think making a boner joke about a twelve year old is okay. I just thought, for a second, he might be eight or nine. That would be crossing some kind of imaginary line that I can't see but everybody else seems to notice for me all of the time, judging by all of their judging. Batman #440 Rating: A. Yeah, I know, right?! I gave a comic book written by Marv Wolfman an A! But it was co-plotted by George Perez who probably had all the good ideas, like the Alfred lecture and the Two-Face reveal and keeping Tim Drake's identity a mystery by having the reader look through his eyes and avoiding putting him in rooms with a mirror. Not that anybody would recognize him! I mean, they might. I think he was introduced a few issues prior to this. But who pays that close attention to comic books?! Fucking nerds, that's who! I'm using the term "nerd" in the 80s sense where it's a devastating insult that means your head is about to be shoved into a toilet bowl hopefully devoid of urine or feces and not the modern use of the word nerd where people use it as some kind of cutesy brag that they're into nerd culture. "Oh, I'm such a nerd! Tee hee!" Man, I wish every ticket to Avengers End Game came with a surprise swirly on the way to the theater! Just for the, you know, authenticity! People should have to remember the actual consequences nerds had to once deal with!