Weasel Wordsmith

Sony released a new trailer for their Playstation Move mascot extravaganza, and it plays out like the beginning of a slash fic orgy between some of the most popular furries in gaming.

I’ve been cautious about this game because early demos had some major control issues, but I can’t help but get a bit excited seeing some of my favorite characters together.

Wait is that Dark Daxter? Oh, you motherfuckers.

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After the popularity of the animal based designs in Sony’s new MMO, DC Universe Online, it’s not surprising to find that NCSoft is also letting gamers explore their furry side with the new City of Heroes Animal Pack available February 23.

The pack includes 60 mix-and-match costume pieces, covering Feline, Avian, Minotaur, and Wolf designs. Based on screens and art, the felines and avians include multiple species.

New emotes allow you to not only hiss, but sniff at other players. We don’t suppose “scritch” or “yiff” are included as actions.

There are other new features like additional auras and a Beast Run Travel Power.

And did we mention a Three Wolf Howl t-shirt featuring some buff and busty anthro wolves? Yeah, your furry superhero can pretend to wear shirts ironically while secretly loving them.

The City of Heroes Animal Pack will be available from the NCSoft Story for £5.99 or EUR 8.99.

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Isolation Play
By Kyell Gold
Sofawolf Press

I want to review Isolation Play, and give it a full in-depth analysis because it’s an interesting novel that deserves to be broken down. But I can’t write a review without giving away major spoilers. I just can’t do it. Trying to review it that way dances around the issues and doesn’t do the book justice. So here’s the deal. Follow these simple steps, and together we’re going to give Isolation Play a great review.

1. Buy the book
Do it. It’s good. I swear to you it is. Read it as soon as you can.

2. Come back here and tell me what you think
Let’s start a discussion. I will respond to every single comment in this article.

That’s it! Easy, right? A lot of you preordered Isolation Play, so telling you it’s good and you should buy it is a moot point (I can say that you won’t be disappointed). But for those that haven’t bought it yet, go get it! Whether it’s at Further Confusion this weekend, on the Sofawolf Press site, or in ebook format (but not fucking pirating it!).

I’ll see you back here soon.

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Update: He’s actually winning!

So yesterday, as a joke, I nominated prolific and well loved furry author Kyell Gold for a shorty award, the Internet’s most prestigious award show based around Twitter. Since then, fans have responded and continued to vote, and currently Mr. Gold is in 4th place. Right up there with the likes of Neil Gaiman.

This is, in my professional opinion, totally fucking sweet! Like, holy shit guys. You realize we could potentially win this thing if we put our minds to it?

So I’m telling you: put your damn minds to it!

GO VOTE FOR KYELL GOLD

This is not an endorsement of his abilities as an author (though he is very excellent), this is bigger than that. The furry fandom is a large part of the Internet, and definitely all up in the social media frontier. It’s about damn time someone recognized us.

Seriously. Go vote.

http://shortyawards.com/KyellGold

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Bait and Switch
By Austen Crowder
Anthropomorphic Dreams Publishing

Anyone who’s ever been a teenager knows that those years are full of awkward changes, and not just in a “Peter on The Brady Bunch” way. You’re starting to become an adult, but you’re not there yet. Your relationship with your family starts to warp dramatically. You have a really tough time figuring out what you do and don’t want.

Some of us have even more drastic changes that we go through. In Bait and Switch, our protagonist Fenton Cobbler has to cope with the fact that he’s turning into a cartoon fox.

This isn’t your typical furry book set in a world populated by animal-human hybrids; instead, this is a world where humans live alongside actual cartoons (picture Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and you have exactly the right idea). The twist: the whole toon thing is a fairly recent development, and the toons themselves don’t just spring out of nowhere—regular people turn into them.

The whole toon thing is the story’s obvious LGBT parallel (and admittedly so). A few years back, Fenton’s best friend Benny turned into a cartoon rabbit, and while the rest of their crowd all turned their backs on him, he and Fenton are still good friends. There’s the worry, of course, that continuing to hang around with Benny will cause him to turn into a toon, as well, leading into the societal debate as to whether becoming a toon is something that’s an innate part of you, or just a choice that you make.

To further complicate things, Fenton’s father is spearheading the anti-toon movement. A whole lot of people are riled up by toons flaunting their antics in public (and, much like the real world anti-gay movement, most of the reasons they cite are unfounded B.S.), whereas other people find the whole toon thing charming and harmless. There’s even a subculture of people called “painters,” who paint themselves up to look like cartoons and hang with the toon crowd, resulting in something that’s equal part fursuiter and fag-hag.

The story itself is fairly straightforward coming-out material: Fenton in slowly becoming a fox, he’s in denial about how much he truly wants it, and he’s afraid of disappointing his anti-toon father. A small number of friends try to convince him to just give in and be himself, while the rest adopt an attitude of, “It’s cool if you are, but it still weirds me out.” Also, a close family friend runs a program that attempts to “Realize” toons back into humans, though the results are less than reassuring.

For the most part, the whole “toon” thing works pretty well from a narrative standpoint, though the analogy isn’t a perfect one, and the way it fits in with the setting isn’t completely flawless. Even as far as a third of the way into the book, the details on how Toon and Real interact are still subject to further explanation, and in the end, it’s still not completely clear if the toon world exists alongside the real world, or in its own pocket dimension, or possibly both. It is pretty fun, however, and it’s clear that the author has a lot of passion for “old-fashioned” cartooning, which isn’t something that you see much anymore.

Perhaps the most glaring thing is the way that toon antics are handled. The book makes it blatantly clear that toon-style “gags” are both their equivalent and substitute for sex. Sometimes it’s played off innocently, but even the characters still maintain that that’s what it is. This leads to the occasional disconnect, such as in one scene where two toons force each other to (harmlessly) swallow grenades in the living room in front of their human friend, and are then completely surprised by his shocked and disgusted reaction at their having effectively having had sex right in front of him, after it’s already been established that that’s basically what they just did. Also, the main point raised by the anti-toon brigade isn’t that they want to ban toons altogether, just that they don’t want them to be performing gags in public—I still can’t tell if that’s an unflattering portrayal of gay pride, or a brilliant bit of social satire about homophobic fears.

(Also, for some reason, whenever an example of a gag is brought up, nine times out of ten, it involves grenades, which makes me wonder if there are people with a grenade fetish out there.)

Still, in the end, the narrative is a solid one, and the logical inconsistencies that are bound to arise from such a fantastical premise don’t detract much from a pretty poignant story. In particular, the resolution of the main plot is quite satisfying in its non-cheesiness. Folks looking for a unique take on a coming-out story could do worse than to pick up Bait and Switch, especially anyone who might currently be dealing with sexuality or gender-identity issues in their own life.

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A Dirge for Prester John: Volume 1 – Habitation of the Blessed
By Catherynne Valente
Night Shade Books

I have to admit that what hooked me on this book was the book video. I’d read Catherynne Valente’s Palimpsest and enjoyed it, but the myth of Prester John–which I’d never heard of–was really interesting, and Valente sells it well in her video. With Star Wars and comic book figures.

In brief: Prester John is the supposed ruler of a fantastic kingdom which includes the Fountain of Youth, fabulous creatures, and untold riches. A letter, purportedly from him, was sent to the Emperor Manuel I of the Holy Roman Empire. It circulated throughout Europe and fired up imaginations, sparked quests and adventures, and began many religious arguments–Prester John was supposed to be descended from one of the Three Magi, and was a Nestorian Christian (they believed that Christ was a mortal man and that the spirit of God was a separate part of him, to over-summarize it).

So: we have a mythical kingdom that has inspired men for centuries, a sort of Dark Ages version of Shangri-La or El Dorado. And how can an author possibly do this justice?

This is only book one of three, but so far, Valente does an admirable job. In her hands, Pentexore, the kingdom of Prester John, has an element of wonder that is rare in modern fantasy. We expect dragons and wizards; Valente gives us blemmyae and panoti. She takes the various myths of the Prester John stories and weaves them together into an enchanting world where there really is a fountain of youth, where strange creatures live peacefully side by side, where the demons Gog and Magog have been imprisoned, where the ground is so fertile that anything buried in it will sprout a tree: beds, dead bodies, and books.

It is to a tree of books that the narrator of this tale, Brother Hiob, is brought by a mysterious woman in yellow. From the tree, he takes three books, which turn out to be Prester John’s own story of how he came to Pentexore, the story of Hagia, the blemmye who becomes his wife, and the story of Imtithal, a nurse to three royal children whose tale has become famous throughout Pentexore. Through Prester John’s eyes, we see the mystery and wonder of Pentexore; through Hagia’s, we see Pentexore’s bemusement and attempt to integrate Prester John into their traditions; through Imtithal’s, we come to understand the history of the land and how its traditions came to be.

Having reached this land of wonder, Prester John attempts to integrate it into his Christian mythology, with varying degrees of success. His quest in this first book is to find the tomb of Thomas Didymus, who supposedly came to Pentexore and died there. That quest carries the story through the first book, but it is really impossible to convey in a short review the sense of beauty and wonder that infuses every page of this book. For a furry audience intent on furry characters, there is plenty to love: a gryphon named Fortunatus who gives wise advice and a red lion named Hadulph who loves Hagia are among the wondrous creatures we meet.

Valente herself is (according to various bios) pretty familiar with various types of fandom groups, though not specifically the furry fandom. But the culture of Pentexore reminds me in some ways of the culture of fandoms in general: diverse, open, accepting to a fault, and fairly unashamed about sex. Into this mix she throws Prester John, the symbol of the establishment, trying to fit the land and its people into the preconceptions he has rather than accepting them as they are. The blemmyae are people who have no heads; their eyes are in their chests, where nipples would be, their mouths in their navels. The women therefore must bare their breasts, of course, and this disconcerts John to the point that he views them as sinful and avoids talking to them. But of course, it is with these most strange of creatures that John eventually falls in love.

Habitation of the Blessed is volume one of a trilogy, and while it tells a fairly complete story, it also leaves the reader anxious to find out what happens next. The tension of the story does not suffer from knowing the eventual end, not one bit. It is a lovely, beautiful story that leaves the reader with a lot to think about, and I would recommend it to any lover of modern fantasy.

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I don’t know if it’s the most brilliant viral marketing ever, or some animator that had too much free time and a sick sense of humor, but the “alternate ending” to Yogi Bear is the most fucked up thing I’ve ever seen.

Despite the fact that it claims to be a parody video, the production value on this looks too good for it not to be involved with the studio in some way.

It’s kind of sad that BooBoo shooting Yogi in the back of the head has guaranteed I’m going to see Yogi Bear when it hits theaters on December 17.

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By coincidence, nearly my entire staff all saw Tangled on the same day. And they all argued over who would have the honor of writing a review for free. So I King Solomoned the situation, splitting the responsibility. And thus we have another mutli-authored review of a family film we were all too old to be seeing together.

Malin
The great Disney movies have memorable songs, interesting characters, engaging sidekicks, strong villains, crisp dialogue, and beautiful art, and by that standard, Tangled is a pretty great Disney movie.

Rikoshi
While not quite “Pixar Good,” Tangled is still a very charming and entertaining animated film, with some very fun characters and good performances, though the songs unfortunately fall a bit flat by Disney standards.

Jakebe
Great movie, if only because it makes you want to call your mother and thank her for not being a completely insane, manipulative asshole.

Tube
Despite the 3D format, this sweet and sincere story is the first Disney movie in well over a decade to really feel like one of the timeless classics I remember from my childhood: tight storytelling, a great villain, and songs that won’t leave my head days later.

Lovejoy
It’s got all the charm and humor you’d expect from a major Disney animated feature, plus it’s got a horse that acts like a dog, so hey, there’s that too.

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Digital Ranch Interactive released a new trailer today for their upcoming multiplayer first-person shooter game. Or rather, make that multiplayer first-person be a dinosaur and eat WWII soldiers game.

Dino D-Day answers that much debated question, “What if Hitler went all Jurassic Park on this shit and we had to blow a dilophosaurus’ tiny brain out?”

Dino D-Day releases on the Steam service for PC on March 1, 2011.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 (2010)
Directed by David Yates
Written by Steve Kloves
Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint

Director David Yates has taken the Harry Potter franchise a long way from the Sorceror’s Stone. In the opening moments you get just a small taste of what’s ultimately the darkest two and a half hours yet — the Dursleys nervously moving out of their home at 4 Privet Drive because it’s “not safe,” Hermione erasing all traces of her existence with her muggle parents, and the torture and death of one of Hogwarts’ teachers. All this before the credits. What the hell is going on here? It doesn’t feel like all that long ago we were first looking at Diagon Alley.

Most of the old familiar places are nowhere to be found, however. Harry is whisked from Privet Drive to the Weasley Burrow, and the trip proves a lot more difficult than it should be for everyone involved. Death Eaters ruin everything. Another Death Eater attack disrupts a wedding there, and just like that Harry, Hermione and Ron are all but cut off from the wizarding world, their circle of reliable friends shrinking constantly as Voldemort solidifies his stranglehold on their society.

The story is exceptionally tense. The three young wizards are forced out into the world to find and destroy Voldemort’s remaining horcruxes, but they have no clue how to do that. In the book, the first half is bogged down with Harry and company wandering around, discovering clues and backstory by sheer luck most of the time.

Yates and writer Steve Kloves deserve credit for being able to take the first half of the story and inject it with all the fear, hopelessness and confusion that Rowling wanted while conjuring a narrative momentum that the novel lacked. Yates has proven to be an exceptional director for the latter half of the franchise because he’s able to get to the heart of Rowling’s intentions far more capably than she was able to do in the novel. Remember the Ministry of Magic throwdown in Order of the Phoenix? Yates was able to take the worst-written action sequence in all seven novels and make it one of the best scenes in all eight films. That, my friends, is talent not to be overlooked.

It helps that Radcliffe, Watson and Grint have turned into such capable actors. We’ve watched the cast and crew grow to meet the story’s demands, and by this point they’ve nailed everything they’ve been asked to do. Daniel needs to wear a bra so he can play Fleur Delacour pretending to be Harry Potter? Done. Need Radcliffe and Watson to kiss passionately for Ron’s jealous fever-dream, even though it’s (by all accounts) like making sweet love to your sister? No problem. There are a few other difficult sequences that Yates manages to pull off simply by giving enough of a damn about telling a good story, making sure the feel is exactly right. He gets his three young leads to jump right in with him, and the results are quite impressive.

Not quite everything lands, though. The movie is perhaps a little too long, and Ron’s jealousy of Harry and Hermione comes on a little too quickly even though you’re given all the pieces you need to explain it. And even though pains are taken to bring meaningful emotional beats on-screen, there’s still far too much that happens away from the camera. There’s a lot of death and tragedy that don’t have as much weight as they should. Even still, when tragedy is focused on, it’s really effective. I’m not ashamed to admit I teared up in a spot or two.

By the end of this first part, Harry and company have found their way at least. They know what the Deathly Hallows are and why Voldemort is looking for them, they’ve discovered how to destroy the horcruxes, and they’re slowly enabling themselves to put up a defense against Voldemort. The weakest part of the story has already been told. If the craftmanship behind it can make it this good, I can only imagine how kick-ass part two is going to be.

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Universal Pictures just released the teaser trailer for their upcoming Easter family film, and it’s cuter than real furries could ever be at anything.

Check out the trailer, featuring a bunny rocking out to Blur.

We don’t know much about the movie, Hop other than that the rabbit, who is in fact the Easter Bunny, is voiced by Russel Brand. It also stars James Marsden as the live action lead. According to the trailer, Hop is being done by the Despicable Me creators.

Hop hits theaters April 1, 2011.

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During a Midwest Fur Fest panel for SofaWolf Press, author Kyell Gold finally revealed the title to his Out of Position sequel.

The sequel, Isolation Play, releases January 14, 2011 during Further Confusion.

The story picks up immediately after the events of the first novel, following Dev and Lee as they try to balance their relationship and football career. Not to spoil the ending of the first book, but the first chapter includes crossdressing, a coffee shop, a swift fox reporter that smells like scotch, and one groan worthy pun.

Blotch returned to do the cover for Isolation Play. Lee is on the cover, though Dev is technically not. There is, however, a young tiger cub. What does it mean? We’ll get a copy of it to show as soon as we can.

The novel is just a couple months away from release. We’ll have a review up before Further Confusion.

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Microsoft’s motion gaming device for the Xbox 360 is finally here. Included among the dozen or so launch titles are a handful of game starring talking animals. But before you go buy everything with fur, check out the breakdown on which games are actually fun.

Kinectimals
Microsoft
There’s no denying that these cats are cute. But honestly unless you’re under 10-years-old and are obsessed with wild cats (see: me in the early ’90s) then you’re not going to be into this somewhat clunky virtual pet game. Still, many people can probably get a solid day and a half of adorable good times here, which is enough for a rental.

Adrenalin Misfits
Konami
I know that wolf and dragon look kind of cool. Trust me, they aren’t. If listening to the dumb ape announce refer to you as “my baby” isn’t enough to get you to turn the game off, the slow, boring gameplay will finish the job. You’re not missing anything here.

Sonic Free Riders
SEGA
I’m not sure why so many people are into the Sonic style of talking animals, but yeah. If what you want in a video game is to stare at Tail’s butt as he leans forward to turn on his hoverboard, then this is the game for you. It’s actually a pretty fun little hoverboard kart racer, assuming you can get the controls to work properly, which take a good deal of patience.

Dance Central
Harmonix
I know, it’s not actually a furry game, but I’ve been to enough fursuit dances to know you people need some new moves. And this game actually teaches you some pretty cool (and some pretty lame) dance moves. If there is any reason to get Kinect, this is it.

Note that most of these games work pretty well even in fursuit. Yeah, I do my fucking research for you people.

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Cartoon Network has a CGI movie that is sure to spark an idea in the hearts of young scalies-to-be. “You’re not my real dad. My real dad is a dragon!”

From the press release: “Directed by Peter Chung (Aeon Flux) and based on the comic book series by Phil Hester and Andy Kuhn, Firebreather delivers fierce action in the clash of two worlds where monsters roam the Earth and past secrets are exposed. At the center of it all, a teenage boy named Duncan struggles to find his place as half-Kaiju and half-human.”

It’s cool to see Cartoon Network taking smaller comic series and turning them into a movie that I can only assume is just a really long pilot for a potential TV series (see: Star Wars: The Clone Wars).

Also, there are like a ton of paws and stompy parts, so you macros are probably already setting your Tivo to record.

Firebreather premieres on Wednesday, November 24 at 7 p.m. (ET/PT)

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Kinect, the motion controlled add-on for the Xbox 360, launches next week, and included in the lineup is the sickeningly adorable, Kinectimals. We’ll have full reviews of the numerous furry games that uses the peripheral, but for now, check out these amusingly questionable shots from the opening cinematic (these are in order, no trick editing).

Looks like the lion has some blackmail fodder. Serves cheetahs right for being such sluts.

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Heathen City Vol. 3: Joker to the Thief
Written by: Alex Vance
Bad Dog Books

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you liked Heathen City Volume 1: Always on the Run. It had action, it had suspense, it had a lot of gay sex. It even ends on a cliffhanger! So you wait a year for Volume 2: Paved with Bad Intentions, to find out what happened to all these characters you’re interested in, only to find out that the second issue is going to be all flashbacks and origin stories. Well, ok… I mean at least Malloy is in it a bit, even though the story takes a very different turn, going from a shallow, but action packed conspiracy thriller to an overly complicated supernatural tale.

So now it’s 2010, and Volume 3 is finally out, and you’re going to find out what destroyed that city. Or maybe what was up with those cowboy ghosts. Hell, at the very least we’ll find out what happens to the protagonists that have been missing from the entire second volume.

Oh wait, no. Nevermind. None of those things happen. And here are no less than 12 new characters for you to wonder about.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this story is not near as interesting as the author thinks it is. The real strength of these books are the characters, but they never quite get the treatment they deserve. There’s only so much ham-fisted dialogue I can stand before I begin to feel ill. For me, it was when the panther, who is Italian I guess, really hammers in that he is both a tough-as-nails cop, and bilingual, with a thank you that reads like a parody of every bad cop film: “Molto-fucking-bene.”

Author Alex Vance has a nasty habit of raising questions and never answering them. Vance has said in interviews that he’s teasing the story out on purpose, but this is absolutely the wrong way to do it because it looks like he’s confusing vagueness for subtlety. Every page reads like he made it up on the fly. Twists and betrayals and some crazy-ass shit are thrown in here, but I still don’t know what the motivation is for anyone, even after an entire volume that tried (and failed) to provide exposition for the major events of the story.

Malloy is really the one character I can do without. He’s one of the most egregious Mary Sue characters in literature. At one point in the story (spoiler alert, kids!), Malloy realizes he can’t carry all his friends out of a building about to explode. It’s totally set up for Malloy to lose someone he cares about, the first tragic death of one of the heroes. Then on the next page you find out he managed to save them all anyway, and even had time to write a mean note to one of the villains. Nevermind that one of said friends seemingly died from being riddled with bullets 10 seconds prior. Nope! He survived somehow.

This has been an unfortunate motif through the entire series. Vance sets up these “How will Malloy get out this time?” situations, then he just breezes through it, no sweat. It makes him boring to follow because he’s apparently invincible.

But what makes Joker to the Thief even worse is that Malloy doesn’t really get out of shit. He pulls out some grenades in Volume 1, ends up killing dozens of people (cause he’s a bad dog, get it?), get’s rescued by somebody, gets sold out, then gets captured by the very same people he tried to escape at the end of Always on the Run. Plotwise the story hasn’t progressed an inch, and none of these new characters got enough to development for me to figure out if they’re important or just throwaway side characters.

I haven’t even mentioned how off the rails the story gets with the main villain and his mom. Actually is Caufield even the main villain? Who the fuck knows! It’s clear that Vance just wanted to write a story about him, though, which makes sense because he’s the only character with any development. That alone automatically makes him the most interesting character in the series, and I actually found myself getting intrigued by him. The supernatural element gets spiked up to a serious degree, and it makes the story go a bit too crazy. Make that a lot too crazy. Honestly if I could have Vance answer any question about his story it would be, “How did Caufield’s ghost travel in time to kill his mother and take her through alternate realities, then merge with her soul then travel in time again and do it all over as a single hermaphroditic entity?”

I’d also throw in, “WTF dude? Seriously.”

If these books were coming out every couple months, this ridiculously drawn out plotline would just be annoying, but for an annual series, it’s unforgivable. Volume 2 was already really annoying in that it about faced, so this was Vance’s chance to get the series back on track. The fact is, the entire graphic novel can be summed up with “Malloy gets captured, but escapes again. Caufield dies, but then doesn’t”.

The book is illustrated by a team of 14 talented artists of differing scales and styles. Each of them illustrates a different part of the narrative thread, or sometimes a splash page. It’s jarring to keep turning the page and have the art style significantly change, and I felt like I wasn’t able to fully appreciate each artist because I kept having to switch around every time a scene changed. Still they all do a good job, and I wish it was easier to figure out who did which part because some of the art in here is very good.

At this point, my professional advice to readers is to abandon ship, unless things turn around drastically. My advice to the author is to take this story, sum it up in, oh, eight pages, and really work on tighter storytelling. Figure out who the protagonist is (Owen, Malloy, Italian Stereotype Cop? …Caufield?), and work on strengthening the core characters. Figure out the end game. Write one more volume, stop wasting our time, and just finish the god damn story.

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Funimation has released the trailer for the English release of one of 2009′s most critically acclaimed animes, Summer Wars. Hey all you people that think Digimon is the best shit ever: this is what that guy is doing now.

Yes, it looks like the exact plot of Digimon: The Movie, only with allusions to Second Life. Director Mamoru Hosoda was a bit ahead of his time with this concept back then.

One of the cooler things about the film is the lack of any big name celebrities in the cast. It’s all voice actors known for their work in video games and other anime.

Summer Wars hits theaters in December of this year, and gets a DVD release in Spring 2011.

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Good news all you 20-30-somethings that are still lamenting the glory days of ’90s animation. We’re making cartoons now! That generation is now old enough to have graduated CalArts, be practically homeless for a few years, and have now gotten their breaks. The latest in the success stories of goofy dorks that remind me of my Elementary School friends is JG Quintel, and his not so subtly ironically named Regular Show.

The show follows Mordecai and Rigby, a couple of talking animal best friends, who work as oddjobbers on an estate owned by a talking aristocratic lollipop, and maintained by a surly gumball machine, a yeti, and a ghost that gives high fives.

Did I mention it’s wacky?

Mordecai proves that all blue jays are assholes (including our own staff writer, Corvi). Rigby proves all raccoons are crazy dumbasses. But despite both of them promoting stereotypes I just made up, they manage to be lovable in that way that you think the stoner kids in high school were funny in 15 minute intervals only once a week.

The show pushes boundaries that I haven’t seen animated shows do since the ’90s. I hesitate to say mature, since jokes about another character’s balls are certainly not, but there’s definitely a reason it’s on right before Adult Swim.

Cartoon Network has finally realized that less is more, and the 15 minute episodes of Regular Show and Adventure Time just strengthen both series. It’s a small taste of the humor that keeps me craving more, instead of drowning me in the show by having multi-hour marathons every week (see: every other show on Cartoon Network).

Regular Show finds the right balance of crazy, off the wall humor, without being totally random or full of non sequiturs. Also the raccoon knows how to hambone!

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Amulet
by Kazu Kibuishi
Scholastic Books

If there’s anything my partner and I have learned from repeated visits to comic conventions, it’s that there are a whole lot of comics out there featuring animal-people that do not identify themselves as “furry” because the creators don’t. We’ve long been aware of Kazu Kibuishi’s beautiful and charming webcomic Copper, the story of an adventurous boy and his more cautious canine companion (also available in collected form from Scholastic—just sayin’). A few years back, we picked up the first volume of Kibuishi’s new story series Amulet, and were hooked.

Amulet is the story of Emily and Navin, who are moving with their mother to an old family home after the death of their father puts the family in financial stress. The house was the property of Emily’s eccentric great-grandfather Silas, so it’s not long before the kids discover an old workshop where Silas built his many toys. And it’s not much later before a creepy monster that looks like the offspring of an octopus and a lamprey swallows their mother, leading them back through a magical passage in the house’s basement to a strange world.

If it weren’t for the odd amulet Emily found in the workshop, the kids would not have survived their fight with the octolamprey (technically called an arachnopod). But the amulet speaks into Emily’s mind and gives her the power to fight off the creature, if not to free her mother. The amulet then leads them to a house and a strange collection of friends, and the quest to recover their mother becomes something much greater.

The furriest thing in volume 1 (“The Stonekeeper”) is a stuffed pink rabbit named Miskit, who’s been built by Great-Grandfather Silas to be Emily’s companion and guide. But in volume 2 (“The Stonekeeper’s Curse”), the kids arrive at the city of Kanalis, and meet its inhabitants, who, Miskit explains, “are very slowly being altered by an ancient curse. It is what gives them the appearance of animals.” Emily says how terrible that is, and Miskit replies, “I don’t believe they see it as anything quite so negative. This curse has affected them for so many years that the new generations see it as simply a fact of life.”

And yes, the book is full of animal-people. Mammals, birds, even mollusks and other, odder creatures. But it is not spoiling anything to tell you that the most important one is a fellow named Leon Redbeard, who is a fox (he’s on the cover, see, not just of the second book, but also of the third, “The Cloud Searchers”). He understands the power of Emily’s amulet and knows much more about the shadowy figures now hunting her because of it.

Even without the furry element, these books would be recommended. Kibuishi has a good sense of storytelling and an even better sense of art and design. His style is a lovely, simple fusion of Japanese and European comic styles—think Moebius drawing manga. The simplicity of the characters makes them appealing and distinctive, and although his art tends to simplify, Kibuishi is certainly capable of rendering lush, gorgeous backgrounds.

The coloring really stands out as well. Like the art itself, it’s deceptively simple. Kibuishi is a master of light and shadow, in which even the simplest panels take on life. Though the story is worth reading, I often found myself just flipping through the comic to look at the art in some of the more detailed panels.

And the story complements the art well. Emily’s rapport with her family is shown very nicely in a few pages, and although her story is somewhat reactive at the start (her mother is kidnapped and she must give chase), Emily is given plenty of choices to think about and make along the way. The amulet promises power, but makes no secret of its price (though it does not tell the whole story all at once, of course). And the mysterious stranger stalking the children as soon as they arrive in the new land has his own story, which proves to be intertwined with theirs.

Amulet is accessible to children, but the stories are complex enough to be enjoyed by adults, too. If it takes a heroic fox to get you to look at the book, so be it. You won’t be disappointed.

(You can still find Copper online, as well as Kibuishi’s other projects, at http://www.boltcity.com/. )

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Basecraft Cirrostratus
Justin Lamar
FurPlanet

Even by themselves, the terms “amateur,” “adult,” and “furry” can all give one pause when it comes to fiction; when all three apply to the same work, there can be even more reason for hesitation. Still, when it’s only a mere ten bucks to see whether someone’s debut novella is any good, it can be worth it to gamble from time to time, and in this case, for the most part, that gamble has paid off.

Basecraft Cirrostratus tells the story of Elor Kaya, an esteemed professor who is wanted for sedition and indoctrination against a totalitarian regime. Fleeing the country with the secret police hot on his tail, he escapes into self-imposed exile aboard the titular Basecraft Cirrostratus, a massive flying machine that operates in international airspace. Once there, he seeks out the only connection he has left: Vinz, his ex-lover from a decade prior.

Problem is, Vinz doesn’t want anything to do with Elor anymore, having moved on both personally as well as romantically. Instead, Elor is forced to turn to the organized crime syndicate that acts as the true power within the decks of the Basecraft Cirrostratus, which, as it turns out, is home to many a political refugee aside from Elor.

The plot itself is actually quite solid and very breezy. The pacing is good, with events never dragging and the story never going off the rails. Lamar clearly has a good handle on the setting, and the political backdrop and behind-the-scenes machinations play very well into the events of the book as they unfold. Things get a little heavy-handed at some points, but only very occasionally, and it’s never bad enough to induce eye-rolling. The ending lacks some emotional punch simply because the emotional framework didn’t have time to develop thoroughly enough during the course of the plot, but the plot itself does have an arc (as do the characters, to be fair). On two notable instances, dumb luck sees things through where it would have been preferable to have direct action on the characters’ part, but for the most part, the plot itself stays together fairly well.

When it comes to amateur writers, one of the biggest pitfalls one usually comes across is the author belaboring points too much, or taking too long to say what needs to be said. Here, though, I had the opposite problem: much of the time, I wanted the author to slow down and take some more time to build on things, especially as they related to the characters and their relationships. For example, there’s a love triangle that serves as an emotional focus for much of the story; I definitely bought into one of the relationships, but not the other—we’re told that they’re in love, but it never really comes across on the page. A bit of a textbook example for the caution of “show, don’t tell,” which might have been avoided if more time were taken to develop things.

This is also an adult story, with the erotic aspects being entirely male/male. Sex, though, happens on page as something that’s important between the characters, and (with one marked exception near the very end) it’s never gratuitous, and it serves itself as part of the story and not a goal of it. Most of the sex scenes are actually pretty tasteful, and, like much of the rest of the book, never slow things down at the expense of the plot.

The best thing I can say about the book is that it’s very cinematic. With the right special effects (and maybe a little less on-screen sex), this would actually make a fairly decent action thriller flick, the kind you watch with a big tub of popcorn without needing the story to shatter and rewrite your world.

In the end, Basecraft Cirrostratus bears some hallmarks of amateur writing, but when taken as a whole, it does more things right than it does wrong. It’s good—not great, but certainly not bad, and Lamar certainly shows promise for future offerings. If it were maybe half again as long, with some more time spent making some of the character relationships a little more believable, and if the point of view were a bit tighter (it gets kind of loose in some points), Basecraft Cirrostratus could have been better. Still, as-is, if you’re the kind of person looking for a dieselpunk action thriller and don’t mind some gay sex and relationship drama thrown in along the way, you could do worse than check this book out.

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