The First of Many Posts Where I Yammer On About Batman

So I recently read the trade paperback Batman: Ego and Other Tales by Darwyn Cooke and other artists. Collected within are various Batman and Catwoman stories by Cooke, either stand alone stories or ones collected from Batman: Black and White.  Darwyn Cooke is a master illustrator who's works include the excellent DC New Frontier, and Richard Stark's PARKER, so Cooke knows how to tell great stories, it's just that the ones printed here aren't all that great. Sure Cooke's art is phenomenal, the guy worked on Batman the Animated Series for crying out loud, he knows how to make things look good, his writing here just isn't very good.

Let's start off with the title story EGO. Ego begins with an injured Batman failing to save some lowly thug caught up in the battle between Joker and The Batman. This leads Batman to question if his mission is ultimately pointless and whether or not he should hang up the cape and cowl. Nothing new for a Batman comic. This is where Cooke decides to have Bruce talk to The Batman face to face as a sort of ego/id argument; with The Batman, calling itself "Fear", arguing that Bruce should let go and let Batman take over and finally start killing the villains that deserve it; all the while Bruce fighting to gain control of his subconscious.  This is where the story goes off the rails.  The idea of Bruce and Batman being two separate personalities/entities has been done to death, even by the time this story was written, and it just doesn't work. Bruce is Batman and Batman is Bruce. Batman is a tool that Bruce uses to fight crime, not some split personality that was born from his parent's death. They're the same dude, albeit a very complicated dude with many faces, but the same dude nonetheless.

The other problem I find with this whole Batman/Bruce sit down is The Batman's willingness to cross the line and kill criminals if Bruce was out of the way. This is the biggest failing of this story because BATMAN DOES NOT KILL. EVER. Even if Batman were some split personality separated from Bruce Wayne, he still wouldn't kill. The Batman is many things, Caped Crusader, Dark Knight, Vigilante, but Murderer isn't one of them. After a long discussion and "Fear Batman" tries to get Bruce to shoot him with the gun that killed his parents (of course it would be that gun) to free himself from Batman forever. Bruce refuses and convinces "Fear Batman"to accept the no killing clause of what they do and goes on being Batman. The whole thing comes off heavy handed and weak.

The smaller filler stories from Batman: Black and White are decent, but just that filler. Nothing to write home about.

Where this book does shine is Darwyn Cooke's Catwoman story Selina's Big Score.  It's a fun, globe trotting heist story set in Selina's early days of being Catwoman that is filled with all the things that make a hard-boiled noir story great, tough guys, cold dames, and lots of dead bodies. The story follows Selina returning to Gotham after laying low for a while and organizing a train heist with some old colleagues. It's a great of example of what drives Selina as a character and how she can manipulate men to get what she wants. After the job goes wrong and stuff hits the fan, we see that Selina does feel for other people, but doesn't hesitate to put herself above all else. It's a great story that would have been worth the cover price without all the mediocre Batman stories surrounding it.

The last story collected in the book is Deja Vu based on a Batman story from the 70s called "Night of the Stalker".  This tale opens up with a family being in the wrong place at the wrong time to witness a robbery where the mother and father get gunned down in front of their son. Of course this sets Batman off and he spends the rest of the pages silently stalking the crooks taking them out one by one letting their fear build the entire time. Batman as the silent, inescapable, pursuer is always fun, but if I ever have to read another Batman story where he's too late to stop another kid's family getting gunned down it will be too soon. Just like the "Bruce is Batman's mask" idea it's just too easy. Of course seeing another kid silently sobbing while his parents lay dead in an alleyway would set Batman off or make him even more resolute or doubt himself but it's been done. To death even.

Other than those not so minor gripes, it's a great trade worth checking out for the art alone. There's also a nice Catwoman short with Tim Sale on pencils and Dave Stewart on colors which looks as good as you'd expect. I'll link the book and some of Darwyn Cooke's better work at the bottom of the page.

Batman: Ego

Absolute New Frontier

Richard Stark's Parker The Hunter

Digital Identity through Blogging

            So you want to expand your digital identity and brand but you don’t know where to start. Have you tried one of those new-fangled blog contraptions? They were all the rage in 2004 and have now become ubiquitous with the internet. Blogs are a great way to get your message out there and expand your web presence and help define your digital identity.

            Unless you’ve been living under a rock with poor wifi signal for the past decade, you should be pretty familiar with blogs. But, just because you’re familiar with blogs doesn’t mean you can just jump right in and start blogging about who-knows-what and expect to be getting the kind of traffic that makes servers look back on the digg effect fondly; you’ve got to have a message!

            What topics do you like? What subjects do you feel confident talking about day after day? Do you actually know what you’re talking about or just typing the first thing that comes to your head? If not, save it for youtube comments.  When people visit a blog they want to read an article or post that covers a topic that interests them, and they want to feel like the person writing said post is a reputable source who knows what he or she is talking about.

            Writing about a subject that you are passionate and knowledgeable about builds ethos, or credibility, and readers feel comfortable gleaning information from your blog. The more people trust you, the more traffic you’ll get.

            If you become a trusted source of info on a particular topic you could call yourself an expert, and everybody loves experts! Being an expert helps your digital identity immensely. You’ll be on guru level. Pretty soon you’ll be on all the “who to follow” lists and hobnobbing with all the other web-leberties at whatever kind of events web-leverties hang out at (SxSW? SDCC?).

            So go forth young person! Find your voice! Blog!

Intermediate Web Design Week 5 Work.

This week I was charged with the task of making a form for submitting recipes to our groups site iGarLikeIt.com. Jenna composed a mock up to for me to use as an example along with a similar form at Tasty Kitchen. Since we are coding our site in HTML5 I used this Smashing Magazine and diveintohtml5 guide for references.

The form is fleshed out but the options have no value or javascript attached to them at the moment. I will work on making the form fully functional this week. It can be viewed here.

Intermediate Web Design Week 3

This week in class we settled on a name for the site igarlikeit.com (which the project will be referred to from here on out).  We also fleshed out ideas on content and features. After a brief discussion our group split into two teams, the design and content team and us code monkeys on the other.

Our discussion time was spent figuring out how to best implement HTML5 and video. We also delegated roles for the research. My assignment was to build a site map for the site and figure out how users would navigate through the site. Here is the current site map. I will revise it after I receive feedback from the rest of the team.

I envision the navigation will be displayed inline below the header or to the left of the content with drop down menus or breadcrumb navigation to help the user keep track of where they are within the site.  I believe we are also planning on implementing a jQuery slider on the Home page that will link to certain recipes or articles on the site.  We are also planning to add secondary navigation in the footer that leads the user to all the main pages listed in the nav bar as well as sending them to a contact and user agreement/terms page.

For my research on HTML5 I decided to focus on the <video> tag as well as finding useful reference pages and cheat sheets. ilovecolors had a great article on video in HTML5 with links to third party video players as well as tutorials on using the <video> tag.  The W3C provides a nice, in-depth guide to HTML5 while webresourcesdepot.com and webhostingsecretrevealed.com provide links to many more HTML5 tutorials and resources. 

Intermediate Web Design Week 2

In the second week of class, our group discussed how to better define and narrow down our goals for the site and we reached the decision to create a site that would assist users in creating tasty dishes centered around, or using garlic.

My task for the week was researching jQuery and how it may be implemented in the site. In my research I found many plugins  that could enhance everything from layout to data. All these resources were found at The official jQuery site and Smashing Magazine. From simple image sliders and drop down menues to The possibilities are endless with jQuery. It all depends on what the content and design teams come up with.

My Role as Production Developer

Intermediate Web Design Week 1:

We formed a group to work on a stie that will be completed by the end of the class. Our group has decided to make a site catering to college students and other young single adults to help them create a tasty meal with whatever they can find in their kitchen by having users input a list of ingredients and generating recipes based on said ingredients.

I have taken up the role of Production Developer.  I will be working alongside Oscar Barajas to make sure the designs and ideas put forth by our group look and work properly.  A large part of my duties will include coding and researching and implementing database technologies to help users find recipes based on the ingredients they provide.

I foresee facing chalenges in the implementation of the database(s). I've never coded php or other database languages so that aspect may be quite a challenge. The eleven week time frame may also be a challenge. Everyone in the group will have to be on top of their game to meet deadlines and make our final product the best it can possibly be.

Process Page

Oh what a process it was to finish my css Zen Garden Page.  I originally wanted it to look like an old Atari 2600 box such as this:

but it just wasn't feasible/readable/visually pleasing so I went a different route.  I still went with an old Atari theme, but used a Space Invaders sprite I found and designed a banner to go with it.

I used a bunch off css3 tricks such as drop shadow and text shadows so I couldn't submit it to csszengarden, but it looks cool.

The biggest challenge was not messing with the html code and making new divs to make positioning and formating easier. Many headaches were caused by trying to get it to look presentable on all browsers, but such is the nature of web design... The biggest lesson I've taken away from this experience is not to wait until the weekend before a project is due to troubleshoot it.