Important thoughts you need to absorb!

When Otto Binder created “The Legion of Substitute Heroesâ€? for DC Comics 40 years ago, he understood that, despite the fact that the characters were inept rejects trying to prove their worth, their powers, while unimpressive, had to be as accessible as their personalities. The aesthetics wouldn’t matter if there were great scripts behind it, but time is never spent investing in the personalities or the abilities of the characters in “Freak Show.â€? Unfortunately, all that exists is a series of tent pole incidents supporting a flimsy plot, which I admit, is not all bad: At times, the astute political throwbacks and incessant banter reaches a smirk-worthy pace, but it’s barely enough to fill out an entire episode.

Glenn’s not really an autobiographical stand-in, although his perceptiveness and loopy imagination are obviously a lot like his creator’s. Sometimes he seems more like Carl Barks’ version of Donald Duck: an infinitely durable Everyman in a long-sleeved T-shirt whose life circumstances are whatever they have to be for any given story. Still, one major aim of Huizenga’s comics is to explain the complicated systems that shape people’s lives and emotions — at least as far as it’s possible to understand them. The individual stories here vary enormously in tone and technique and aren’t directly connected by plot threads, but they can be read as the components of a single, elliptical narrative about children longed for, found and lost again, and how people in the world of the living can understand the torments of hell.

This says a lot about the passion that a manga series can elicit among its readership. To those of us with a passing acquaintance with the earlier years of America comics fandom, the dynamics are fascinating and familiar. “Why I remember when I was as excited about superhero comics,â€? the geezerly former fanboy notes, polishing his trifocals to better squint his way through the tinier lettering in a volume of the cooking series Iron Wok Jan. American publishers still have their loyalists, but the numbers clearly favor Japanese comics.

Schilling, a serious video game player, prefers a genre of games known in the industry as massively multiplayer online role playing games, or MMORPGs for short. Such games typically feature huge, persistent fantasy worlds — which exist even when you aren’t playing — and allow gamers to create online alter-egos to interact, and adventure with, thousands of other game players.

“I love games with immersive environments that have a significant social effect and impact,” Schilling said in a recent interview. “There is so much creative room in these games.”
Schilling has hired renowned fantasy author R.A. Salvatore as creative director and Todd McFarlane, comic book icon and creator of the character Spawn, as art director.