CMX gets a pink slip.

So CMX, manga imprint of Detective Comics Comics, the franchise churn for Time Warner and whatever other media giant they've added to the mix since I've last cared, is closing its doors on July 1st and I'm quite upset by this.

DC and Marvel no longer make comics, they turn out multi-media franchises that fans only tune into to see how much they've fucked them up. I stopped caring which superhero mind-raped or sodomised another years ago. Recently, I was disappointed to read yet another arrogant Mark Millar snark on the imaginary castrated man-children he believes are the only people reading his books.

CMX printed comics though. Certainly, there weren't too many superheroes within those pages and few of the titles appealed to the fairy tale of Comic Dork A, but they appealed to me and considering how often the books seemed to sell out, they must have appealed to someone else. I just picked up Diamond Girl Vol. 1 last week and now I'll never see Vol. 2. Dorothea and Orfina were the best examples of pure fantasy I've read in a long time, not bogged down with all the updated cool factor or self-aware bullshit that plagues nearly anything I experience from the US. Emma makes victorian period drama vastly entertainingly fun somehow! In a comic! Where else but in manga do you even see people trying that sort of thing? Western comics are nothing but rape and muscles and zombies in conveniently transferable packages these days.

I suppose, though, that you just can't crank out some film that will dissappoint fans from that sort of material, or make a shoddy video game or toy designed to appeal only to a parent buyer's vaguest understanding of their child's interests. Comic publishers just don't produce comics anymore.

In light of this, I think I'm just going to refer to all comics as manga from now on since the big two comic publishers are doing such a shitty job of representing the vast majority of what is labeled as comics now. Maybe comics can have its own name again when it actually bothers to be something beyond a cheap prostitute, but until then, they may as well be considered the red-headed stepchild of a sector of sequential art that can actually cover more than one genre with relative success.

If You Meet the Gygax, Kill the Gygax.

And no, not literally; no disrespect intended.

This is a twist on a Buddhist quote from Linji: If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha. If one is told how to attain Enlightenment, if they feel they have reached a plateau, they are mistaken and allowed themselves to be distracted from their true path by a false image or ideal. Doing away with that false image and continuing on without pretence will set them back on their course, or arguably, lack thereof, hee.

Similarily, what is the true way to game? How did Gygax want you to game? Can you pull up one of his quotes to win an argument?