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Some time ago, I succumbed to an impulse and got a Livejournal account again so I could comment on entries with anonymous commenting disabled. Since then, despite my doubts about the extent to which LJ's administrators are liklely to adhere to good faith in keeping protected entries actually protected, I've been using it to view protected entries on a few journals.
So if there are any protected entries you want me to see, feel free to add oh6.
Continuing from yesterday, after I started the Roomba on my bedroom:
Bizenghast vol. 4, M. Alice LeGrow, Tokyopop:
This volume sets aside some of the game level orientation of the previous episodes, giving Edrear and Edaniel more of a role in dealing with the various wayward spirits. I was taken aback by Vincent's departure at the end, as it seemed to come out of nowhere.
Kimmie 66, Aaron Alexovich, DC:
Almost all of this story takes place in the virtual reality environments, or "lairs", of the 23rd century, where one of narrator Telly's best friends, known to her only as "Kimmie66", sends her a suicide note. Then people start spotting Kimmie online, and then Telly starts hacking her Navi- oh wait no sorry.
OK, for real, Telly shares Kimmie's note with other best friend Nekokat, and now they both get to be tormented by their ignorance and the difficulty of finding out if anything's actually happened to her in the real world. Then they do indeed encounter ghost-like manifestations of Kimmie, at school or in their home lair of Elysium. Telly feels compelled to find out what's going on, and gets the attention of a hacker on another lair ("Welcome to Citadel. Home of punching." — Telly's description, in case you were in doubt.) who is curious enough to go searching on his own, and then things start to get pretty weird, even after it's all explained in the sequence leading to the tragic climax, which is sort of an inversion of Haibane Renmei.
My favourite part is the evolution of Telly's dealings with the hacker Coil, who goes from aloof, amused indifference to being sincerely concerned over the course of the middle part of the story. I'm a little unsure how many of the themes people play with online will still be current 200 years from now. As it is, that Elysium is goth-themed seems like an arbitrary hangover from Serenity Rose. Strangely enough, Coil's part-time home of Citadel is the most 3-dimensional one, just because we get to see a bit of everyday life there. I guess I am not actually demanding to see a half-dozen brand spanking new cultural tropes made up out of whole cloth, though.
The Claws Come Out, Pat Lewis, IDW:
This is a collection of humorous B-movie horror stories all featuring women as the protagonists, drawn somewhat similarly and written very similarly to the comics of Carol Lay. Fun stuff.
Life Meter 2, Various:
I picked up this video-game comic anthology after discovering that Josh Lesnick had a comic in it. Plenty of other artists appear here, such as Dave Roman, David McGuire, and Michael Vega, whose take on River City Ransom I found particularly diverting.
