Heat: The Space Age of Pro Wrestling

Well, nothing related to the comic, anyway. Y’know how 90% of webcomics are about nerds playing video games, so the authors talk about video games a lot? Yeah, this post will probably seem at home on one of those sites.

I’ve got every Call of Duty game that has come out on the Xbox 360 (except for the downloadable COD 1), and yet I kind of suck at Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer mode. I mean, I’m not terrible, but my overall kill/death ratio is minus a lot and sometimes I want to throw my controller at the screen when the same jackass kills me five times before I even know where the hell I’m going. Once in a while I’ll be one of the better players in the game, but usually I just hope to get enough kills to help my team out a little bit.  More often than it should be, it’s stressful instead of fun. The single player campaign is full of white-knuckled-full-auto brilliance, however, and special ops is pretty sweet.

Killzone 2 on the PS3 is kind of the opposite. The single player campaign is fun, but lacks the pulse-pounding intensity of MW2’s story, but I’m inexplicably pretty good at the multiplayer. I’m usually one of the top players on my team/in the game, and don’t get stressed like in MW2. It just seems way more fun, especially with the mission structure that lets you tackle multiple missions within the same match so that things don’t just boil down to “shoot as many dudes as possible while preventing them from doing the same to you”. Although that does tend to make most of the missions easier to accomplish.

So, uh, yeah, not a ton of relevance to the comic here. Just the information that I find Killzone 2’s online mode more fun than MW2’s, and thus am some kind of heathen in the eyes of video game geeks everywhere.

It took a while, but I’m finally getting around to continuing the tale of my epic journey… to a city three hours away that I was only in for like, a day and a half.

– After leaving the first day of the convention, Dan, his cousin, and I headed back to Dan’s cousin’s cousins’ house, where we would be staying while we were in Cowtown (which is actually Calgary’s nickname, by the way). They were apparently off somewhere, so we would have the place to ourselves. We had to drop off Dan’s cousin because he wasn’t old enough to come out drinking with us, which we felt kind of bad about… until we saw the house, then we were jealous. The house was a mansion in something like a gated community (it was basically a conglomeration of rich people, but there wasn’t a physical gate). This was the kind of house that was so huge and fancy that you could pick any room in it, and it would probably be worth more than the average person’s entire house. There was a man-made lake in the backyard that was so big that there were islands in it… and they owned one of them. My favourite room in their house was the TV room, which also had it’s own kitchen built into it and an air hockey table. Their TV was one of those projection ones, with a gigantic screen that descended from the ceiling (I’d guess it was a good 70-some inches). The walls were decorated with autographed photos and paintings of Wayne Gretzky, and the carpeting was complemented with a very classy dog turd. Which wouldn’t have been overly surprising, were it not for the fact that the family took their dog with them wherever they had gone, which meant that the dog had crapped on the floor before they left and nobody had bothered to clean it up. Which was… ew.

– Dan and I eventually (and somewhat reluctantly, because oh god that house was awesome) headed out to the bar for the drink ‘n’ draw after Dan scrawled the route to the place on a sticky note. By this point, the rain that had started just after we left the Roundup Centre had turned into a fully fledged storm. At one point on the trip we began to swear extensively at whoever Calgary’s urban planner was because we turned from one 1st street… onto a different 1st street. We eventually parked a block away from the bar, but at the time we weren’t aware of that, so Dan phoned our friend Nick (of Vicious Ambitious fame) and left a long, rambling message asking for directions, and only ended when we had already gotten inside of the bar.

– The drink ‘n’ draw took place in the Unicorn Pub, which had a fantastically named house beer… which I couldn’t even remember long enough to verbalize it to the waitress. It was something like “The Unicorn’s Twisted Magical Horn Potion”. I ordered it because it was a buck cheaper than everything else on the menu, and because it’s name was awesome. Mostly the first part.

– The first bit of the drink ‘n’ draw was spent hanging out with Bob Prodor (artist of The Duchess Ranch of Old John Ware, written by James Davidge), his girlfriend, and other Edmonton comickers, because most of the other drink ‘n’ draw folks were at another table with no room left. Awesome.

– Later on, drinking and drawing actually happened, and then people started coming over to socialize with us. Fiona Staples, Stephanie Chan, Dean Welsh, Andrew Foley, some of the guys from VA, Julie (of Free Comic Book Day blog fame), Robin and Catherine, and Bob were all there. And probably other people that I’ve forgotten. Sorry other people (who probably aren’t even reading this, and thus won’t be offended to begin with). Fun was had, the specifics of which I don’t really recall, aside from the fact that Bob came up with a character called Dragon Man. Which which I think was a parody of Nemesis, the protagonist of Mark Millar’s new book who sports a godawful design that’s basically Batman without any of the elements that make Batman look cool. So Dragon Man has a dragon logo on his chest, and pointy dragon horns on his mask, and dragon spines on his gloves, and a dragon-like cape… also, he’s a black dragon. Did I mention that? Yeah, he’s a black dragon with pointy ears and spikey gloves and a dragon cape and a logo on his chest. He’s super rad looking.

Free Comic Book Day was today, and was awesome. It seemed like the amount of drawing I did and the amount of people present didn’t really sync up, since there didn’t seem to be a ton of people (or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention because I was busy), but I drew A LOT.

My drawings: portrait of some girl’s sister as an elf wizard, Batman, a little girl riding a dragon (which looked more like a tyrannosaurus with tiny useless wings to complement his tiny useless arms), Nightwing, the Flash, a blobby alien guy (who I had originally created as a used car salesman for a long-abandoned comic project), my friend Roger getting hit in the face with a dodgeball, punk rock Jesus, an exploding octopus, and Blue Beetle fleeing from a giant cake.

One of Happy Harbor’s promotional ideas was a scavenger hunt, which encouraged customers to visit all three stores. Customers could get an art board with a signature sheet taped to the back, then get artists from each of the three stores to add panels to the pages. All of the completed pages will be put online for people to vote on their favourites, and the winner will get a $250 Happy Harbor gift certificate, and each artist involved will get a $25 gift certificate. The first one I got to be part of only had the first panel, which was an octopus cozying up to a depth charge. The guy who had brought me the page mentioned that he interpreted it as a love story. I chose to draw the last panel instead of the next one, and drew the octopus, scorched in classic cartoon “I’ve just been blown up” style, being flung into the air by the charge’s detonation, which displaced the water into the shape of a heart. Ah, love. The next one I got had the Blue Beetle eating cake. I again drew the last panel, with a gigantic version of the cake that was being eaten smashing through the wall and yelling “OH YEAH” in his best Kool-Aid Man impersonation while the Beetle fled in terror.

Fun stories from FCBD

– A girl was waiting to get her sketch scavenger hunt page finished. While waiting, she was talking about various intersting costumes she’d like to attempt, one of which was Squirrel Girl. “I’d make an awesome Squirrel Girl!” (puffs out cheeks) “I can totally fit nuts in here!” We all burst into hysterical laughter, which confused her for about a minute when she finally realized what she had said. It would remain quote of the day, although it was challenged a few times (I don’t recall most of the challengers, unfortunately, but a different girl provided most of them).

– Dan is a really good artist. Julie was pretty sleepy and I’m just kind of lazy when it comes to sketching. This resulted in us trying to pass work off to Dan while we conversed with passers-by. At one point, quote-of-the-day challenger girl presented us with a sketch scavenger hunt art board. She wasn’t planning on heading to the other stores, but wanted the board to have all of our art on it. Julie quickly concocted the scheme of getting Dan to draw the entire thing, then her and me just signing our names on the aritst sheet taped to the back. I liked that plan, but it was eventually shot down by Dan, who was already like two drawings behind (he’s a popular guy at these things). That eventually turned into the Blue Beetle page I mentioned earlier.

– Dan tends to get the requests for sexy women. I’m happy to let him have them, because I’m not very good at drawing them. He was drawing a request for Wonder Woman, and the kid of the guy who requested it comes up and expresses his disappointment that she’s wearing a skirt. At first Dan thought it was because he was drawing his redesign of Wonder Woman, which features a militaristic-looking skirt instead of her usual gigantic belt and granny panties. “Oh do you want the shorts?” The kid answers “No.” Dan “Oh, well I’ll keep doing the skirt then.” “No, no skirt.” “So the shorts?” “No, no shorts.” At this point both Dan and I realized that the kid wanted her to be naked. Later, his dad (or at least an adult accompanying him) asked for a sketch of Sin City’s Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba’s character from the movie). Dan started plugging away, drawing the musculature and, of course, boobs. Dan’s drawing style involves outlining all of the musculature and limbs (which, with female characters includes the breasts) before he adds clothing and details. The guy, seeing the naked boobs, leans in and mentions that “you can draw her naked, y’know, if you want.” Dan sort of just kept on drawing, then turned to me after the guy had wandered off and said “Wait, that pretty much means he wants me to draw her naked, doesn’t it? ” Least subtle attempt at subtlety of the day.