Terrence Marks

Kevin & Kell is runs in color in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Now, I don't claim any credit for this. That goes to Bill Holbrook, the paper's editors, and an Internet campaign. When you contribute to a comic in some way, seeing it in print is awesome. The Sunday comics look amazing in print, and I'm glad to be a small part of the process. (The dailies look ok; there's always a 1mm offset between where the colors are and where they're supposed to go; it's a limitation of the technology).

Secondly, we started doing promotions this year. Santa Blue giving you stolen library books, letting everyone back in for December, the $4/month subscription we had going for the fourth anniversary of NamirDeiter.net. I enjoyed it. I appreciate the turnout and thank everyone who helps support the comics.

We had gotten away from that kind of thing, I think around when we stopped going to conventions. If you look back at my old news (which you can't, easily, because they're scattered throughout a large number of sites [to do: put all my news-updatey things in one place]), you'll see that we've been to a few cons but didn't have too much fun at most of them. A few years ago, we decided that it wasn't them, it was us. Since then we've been fairly quiet online, putting out the comic and letting it speak for itself. I think we're going to take a more active role in promoting the comic next year.

And to follow up with the last Year in Review post, the count in 2008 was 172 - 153, with Isabel in the lead by about 19 (and I say "about" because there are enough times when one of us contributes strips, punchlines, or ideas to the other's stories that there's a margin of error here). In 2007, it looks like around a 2:1 ratio; I'm not sure about all the arcs (there were a lot of 1-2 week stories that year). I know that Some Day, and The New Guy are mine, and there are a few that neither of us are sure about. I think that we wrote A Good Question together, which is fitting since it's the engagement story. Normally, I'd say that it was because I was working on Spare Parts, except that's not much of an excuse. Firstly, Isabel was working on Namir Deiter, herself. Secondly, she wrote more Spare Parts than I did that year, too. 2006 was 145 of mine to - 123 of hers if I'm counting right (with 9 comics that are 50/50 collaborations). But then, I think she wrote all of Spare Parts that year. And, as always, all of Namir Deiter. And most-all of the bonus content on NamirDeiter.net. Now, this is all just trivia to most of you. I'm not asking anyone to pick out what I wrote or what Isabel wrote. But to me, it's an important reminder that I'm (usually) an equal contributor. I mean, Isabel is one of the hardest working women in webcomics. She's not easy to keep up with.

Firstly, we've both been doing the online comic thing for ten years now, both together and separately. Mostly together, and I'm glad for that. I've been thinking a lot lately about how many of the cartoonists I knew back then are still doing it and how many of them aren't. I'm glad we're on the "still doing it" side of the equation.

Secondly, it looks like I'm writing exactly half of You Say it First this year. To date, Isabel wrote 161 comics, and I've got 148. This story will go on for at least two more weeks (we're at about 4 PM on the second day of a three-day cruise), which will put us at 161-162. No, this doesn't mean that I win. Isabel also wrote every single Namir Deiter and a majority of the bonus content at NamirDeiter.net.

(This is a count by story arc; I wrote a few comics in Isabel's stories, and she wrote a few in mine. If we were to go comic-by-comic, I figure it'd mostly balance out)

I'm proud of this - my first guess was that I wrote a third of the comics. I haven't counted up previous years and this may be a high point for me with two big stories, Minervacon/Ten Minutes and Singles Cruise, and I'm proud of both of them. I was hoping that Professor Marvello would have shown up at the convention, but I didn't have any lines for him besides "My oriental magic is powerful,I say! Powerful!".

Thirdly, 2009 saw the rehabilitation of Unlike Minerva and commentary on almost the entire run. Some of it, I genuinely had nothing to say about. I know I'm not the only person who did commentary on their series, and am amazed that others haven't run out of things to say. It was different than I remembered it. Better in certain places than I remembered it, and worse in others. (Or, rather, some of the parts I expected to be horrible were bad-but-fun, some of the parts I had been proud of, I do not regard fondly upon rereading). Anyhow, I like to think that I learned from it, both doing the comic and re-reading it.

used to read comic books. DC exclusively. When I was young, I read an issue of Secret Wars II, got confused, and decided that Marvel wasn't worth bothering with. I mention this because last week we were at the Mattel Outlet and they had packs of Justice League figurines. That used to be my favorite series back during high school. I remember switching to it when Teen Titans tried to explain Donna Troy's origins.

I considered picking up a few of the toys. They had some decent characters. They didn't have my favorite characters, but they had some okay ones. Here's why they didn't have my favorite characters and why I don't read superhero comics anymore.

I remember the second-to-last issue of Justice League that I read. They had introduced a new supervillain.

It went like this:
The bad guy teleports the heros onto his space station. They're trapped in some kind of power-nullifying chairs.

Bad guy: I have a Space Chess set. You heroes are going to be my chess pieces or I'll kill one of you.

Hero: No, bad guy. We refuse to play your game.

Then the bad guy kills Ice, to show everyone that he's serious and for-real. Then the heroes play the game. It was one of the most anticlimactic, pointless deaths this side of Tasha Yar. It'd be as if the microwave really exploded, killing Brisbane and Kimberly, ending You Say it First. I got the next issue in the hopes that it would be a regular comic-book fake death. It wasn't. She is, as I understand it, still dead.

Every few years I get the urge to get back into comics. I poke around a bit on what's happened. Invariably "what's happened" means that a few more of my favorite characters died. It's not just that they died, but that they tended to die pointless deaths in arcs that got very bad reviews. The deaths weren't stories. They were punctuation in other peoples' stories, like putting an exclamation point in the middle of a sentence! in the hopes that it would make the paragraph containing it more exciting.

So right now, if they made a set with The Blue Beetle, Max Lord, The Elongated Man, Sue Dibny, Rocked Red, Ice, Crimson Fox, The Martian Manhunter, and Mr. Miracle and called it "We're sorry about killing these guys, honest", I'd still wait until it went on sale.

I understand that to establish dramatic tension, something needs to be at stake. I understand that superheroics is a dangerous job. I understand that DC isn't selling us a static, unchanging world - they put out hundreds of pages each month. It's just that being a former member of Justice League International puts you at the top of the hit list. I don't intend to start reading comic books again any time soon. If I found a series I liked, it'd end eventually. Then they'd start killing off the characters when other stories needed a bit more drama.

Firstly, I recently discovered PS238. It had been highly recommended to me several times in the past and I finally got around to reading it. It's a superhero comedy comic book that's being brought onto the Internet, one page at a time. I enjoy it very much and highly recommend it to you.

Secondly, I've been a bit busy for the last month or two. Working a lot of overtime. If you emailed me and I didn't get back to you, it's because I pretty much didn't get back to anybody. I'm taking a break from my game search for a bit. I still have about five reviews to write and post.

I know the tone of things has been a bit negative lately. I fail to mention most games' good points. I'm trying to find the right game for me. This is why they aren't it. If you enjoy the game, I hope you continue to enjoy it, and aren't waiting for my validation. Also, I enjoy listening to myself complain.

I've been thinking more about what I want in games. Like an automatic camera. I like the option of adjusting it manually, but when I turn I want the camera to turn with me. I want the camera behind and above me about 98% of the time when I play, so why do I have to move it myself every time I turn? It's 2009. Computers should be able to do this on their own.

Noob Island is a fairly clever idea. I had overlooked how clever it was because it seemed completely obvious to me. I keep finding games that don't give you much any tutorial or instruction. I want a quick walkthrough of the controls, what classes there are, and such. I want to have stuff to do at least until I hit level 10.

A lot of games dump you in the hub city. There's the NPC for that level 50 quest standing by the gate asking if you have any copper marbles. You, being new, don't realize that they're only dropped by greatly huge dragons who can kill you as a free action, so you're trying to figure out if you have any, and where you get them. There's 30 mostly-identical NPCs standing around, so finding the five that you actually need is hard, and making the game hard isn't condusive to keeping me as a player. Give me a small area with five NPCs, free healing, and nothing that can kill me in one hit until I decide to leave Noob Island.

I want a tutorial that explains things concisely and as I need them. If there's a green bar in the upper right that I'm not going to use until I hit level 15, don't even show it to me when I'm on noob island. I want to be able to pull up a cheat sheet that tells me what an enchantment does and how it's different from an inspiration, especially if one is difficult to obtain and/or permanent. Maybe I wasn't paying much attention the the tutorial. I do that sometimes. And don't just show me the tutorial again. If I didn't sit through it the first time, I probably won't sit through it the second time.

One of the design principals of Final Battle Adventure Online is that you don't have to make decisions before they're relevant, and that very few decisions are immediately permanent. (Gender is, for instance, because it doesn't affect gameplay, and because you should know which one you want to play as). Don't make me start out the game and decide if I want a bonus to magical defence or physical attack before I do anything else. I don't know if, say, there are only three enemies that use magical attack, or that you can buy attack boosters at any shop in town.

If I'm an archer, I want to start out shooting things with arrows. If I'm a cleric, I want to start out healing things. Don't make me spend the first four hours hitting rats with a stick, as if I'm some kind of incompetent fighter.

Anyhow, that's what I'm looking for in a game. I'll let you know when I find it.