Babble On #28: "The Geometry of Shadows"

Ivanova receives a promotion to Commander, and is immediately dispatched to resolve a civil dispute among the reptilian Drazi. Meanwhile Ambassador Mollari entertains the manipulative Lord Refa, who encourages him to join a coup d'etat against Centauri's ageing and ineffective Emperor. The mysterious technomages, who use science to simulate magic, are gathering on the station before departing - and no one knows where they're planning to go.

Londo Mollari is faced with another moral challenge this week, and fails once again - now not only is he in bed with the mysterious Shadows, he's now participating in a planned coup d'etat. It's a pretty effective character arc, given how much he was used for comic relief in Season 1. He's still being used for comic relief for a lot of this episode too, but there's a dark edge to things now.

The Pull List: 17 October 2012

September sales figures have made it very clear that, as irritating and underwhelming as I personally found it, DC's Zero Month was a big hit with readers. Every New 52 title saw a bump in sales. For some titles it was relatively minor: Aquaman sold an extra 17 copies, at best estimates. For others it was surprisingly huge: Batman jumped 25%, The Savage Hawkman 27% and Green Lantern 16%, for example. Sales of Frankenstein jumped from 14,700 to 18,100 - sadly that still wasn't enough to save it from cancellation come January.

Of course the real test will be to see how many of these new readers stay on for October - those that do may be in for a shock, given how many cliffhangers will be getting resolved this month. To fully exploit the sales potential of the Zero Month stunt, DC really needed all of its titles to have strong jumping-on points the following month - and very few books do. It smells, as does much of the New 52, like DC editorial is running things off the tops of their heads, improvising the creative direction as they go.

One thing the success of Zero Month pretty much guarantees is another sales stunt in 2013. Minus One Month? A return to DC One Million? A month of issues devoted to the villains? There are a lot of ideas, but I would bet all the money in my pockets that we're going to get something around September next year.

Under the cut: reviews of Batwoman, Cyber-Force, Daredevil, DC Comics Presents, Hawkeye, It Girl and the Atomics, Legion of Super-Heroes, Sword of Sorcery and Wonder Woman.

I love the Sega Dreamcast

I'm a big videogaming fan, but of all the various home consoles released over the decades by a multitude of manufacturers I will always have the most affection for Sega's final console: the Dreamcast.

This affection is for a number of reasons. First of all, it was a console that unfairly died before its time. The Dreamcast's release was derailed by a series of strategic press releases and conferences by Sony, each one making successfully grandoise claims about the power of their upcoming Playstation 2 console. Jaw-dropping demonstration videos (which were faked) and hyperbolic descriptions of the PS2's hardware (what the hell is an "emotion engine"?) led many gamers to hold off on buying Sega's very real console in favour of Sony's then-unreleased competitor. Not only was this strategy by Sony both distasteful, it led a lot of gamers to overlook and underestimate the sheer quality of Sega's machine. The Dreamcast boasted great sound and graphics, in some cases visibly superior to anything Sony would go on to produce on the PS2.

More importantly, the release of the Dreamcast co-incided with an unparalleled burst of creativity and innovation within Sega. Take another popular console, the Nintendo SNES. Its most popular and best games are all sequels: Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, Final Fantasy VI, and so on. Conversely, the Dreamcast's lineup of games was rich in new concepts and characters. It came up with numerous new wrinkles on gaming genres, many of which continue to be popular today. Developers of modern racing games owe a debt to Metropolis Street Racer, for example, just as rhythm action developers owe something to Rez and adventure/action developers owe something to Shenmue. Sure there were still plenty of sequels (notably two enjoyable Sonic the Hedgehog instalments) but the focus of the Dreamcast was the future. New ideas. New franchises.

The Dreamcast was released as part of a generation of hardware that included the Playstation 2, the Nintendo Gamecube and the Microsoft Xbox. It sold 10.6 million units, compared to Nintendo's 21.7 million, Microsoft's 24 million and Sony's 154 million. It sold the least, but it remains - hand on heart - the best console of the four.

Under the cut: my ten favourite Dreamcast games.

It's Cold Outside #2: "Fathers and Suns"

It's Father's Day, which leads Lister - who due to a time travel incident is his own father - to realise that he's a disappointment as a son and a failure as a father. Rimmer and Kryten install a new shipboard computer to replace the now-departed Holly.

If the premiere left any doubt that Red Dwarf has improved considerably with this new season, this second episode completely erases that doubt. I compared "Trojan" to Red Dwarf around its fifth or sixth season. "Fathers and Suns" is for the most part much more akin to the series back in its third season. The characterisation is razor-sharp, the gags are mostly based on character rather than situations, and the overall vibe is much more akin to the likes of "Balance of Power" or "Marooned" than, say, "Gunmen of the Apocalypse" or "Back to Reality". I'm slightly shocked to admit it, but this is the first Red Dwarf episode in quite a while to be genuinely good.

The Pull List: 10 October 2012

Since DC launched the New 52, cancellations of comic books have received more attention than ever before. It's odd when you think about it: the primary reason for cancellation is that no one is reading the book, so why should we care when the book ceases publication?

So four books have been confirmed to end in January: Blue Beetle, Grifter, Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE and Legion Lost. Two of these are not a surprise: Grifter and Legion Lost simply haven't been very good or popular comics since they debuted, and in the case of Grifter I'm surprised it's taken this long for it to be cut.

Blue Beetle is a bit more surprising: while the comic hasn't been selling very well, DC has shown a very dogged intent to make Jaime Reyes a major character. Certainly he has a lot of potential for use in other media. I can easily imagine a Saturday morning cartoon or a Summer blockbuster based around Blue Beetle. I can imagine DC continuing to try and find ways to make the character work - I don't think the problem this time around was the character or the setting, it was simply that it wasn't a very good book.

Even more surprising is Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE. It's been declining in sales, but issue #0 received a 23% bump and for the next four months it's crossing over with the more successful Animal Man and Swamp Thing. I honestly expected DC to give it a few more months.

Apologies for being late with last week's comics: I was in Hong Kong and only picked up my pull list from the comic shop on Monday.

Reviewed this week: Batman, Batman and Robin, Demon Knights, Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE, Halloween Eve, The Massive, Monster Turkey, Red She-Hulk and Uncanny Avengers.

It's Cold Outside #1: "Trojan"

Way back when it started I was an enormous fan of Red Dwarf. It was a ridiculously cheap BBC2 sitcom set on a spaceship with a small cast. It was low on production values and used the science fiction as a backdrop for some classic character-based comedy. I watched both seasons and raved about it to my largely uninformed friends, for whom the series has come and gone without crossing their pop culture radar.

Some years later I was amazed to discover the series lasted beyond two seasons, and watched as Red Dwarf went from strength to strength, gaining mass popularity as it went. Sadly, the longer the series went on the less I enjoyed it. The science fiction stopped being a background for the comedy and started becoming a source for it. Smart dialogue got replaced by more visual gags. The characterisation went south: by introducing the android Kryten the series rendered another character (the ship computer Holly) utterly redundant, while the three regular characters Lister, Rimmer and Cat slid into stereotypes and stock running jokes. The nadir seemed to hit around the sixth season: the two subsequent seasons shook things up by introducing Chloe Annett as new regular Kochanski, but the series was still a long way from the quality of those first 12 episodes.

A Random Photo of a Panda

The panda: an animal so lazy it can't even be bothered to wake up when it poops. (Taken at Ocean Park, Hong Kong, in October 2011.)

The Pull List: 3 October 2012

Thank goodness DC has finally completed its Zero Month and we can all return to a normal schedule of monthly superhero comics. All that I'm left with now is a vague sense that September cost me unnecessary time and money for the most part, and a growing concern that in September 2013 we're going to get a return to DC 1,000,000 or some other randomly contrived sales stunt.

Of course the next big comic sales stunt is Marvel Now, where most of Marvel's comics are getting relaunched with new first issues. I doubt this relaunch will be anywhere near as impactful as DC's: firstly, they're not rebooting but simply relaunching; secondly, they've already relaunched so many of their titles that a new #1 doesn't seem particularly special. There's a hilarious advertisement in this week's Daredevil: End of Days advertising the final issues of Captain America and The Mighty Thor with the slogan "The end of an era!". Yeah maybe, but when those last issues are #19 and #22 respectively, that's a really short era indeed.

Reviewed this week: Action Comics, Animal Man, Batwing, Daredevil: End of Days, Detective Comics, Green Lantern, Non-Human, Stormwatch and Worlds' Finest.