I once felt as though the universe was actively trying to deny my existence as a living, breathing person.

Four, five, however many years ago, when I first moved into a dorm at ETSU, I was the loneliest I’d ever been. I knew only a few people on campus, and of those people I only got to see or speak with one or two. I never spoke with any of my classmates, professors would forget my name, my roommate and I hardly acknowledged each other. Plans with friends would be forgotten by them, canceled after sitting for hours waiting on a phone call that never came. Never picking up when I called them, wondering what was going on.

Things improved, as they tend to do. But that feeling still comes back every now and again, the need to validate myself and prove that I exist, and that, grouped in with a number of other things, is what led to this single page comic.

I get uncomfortable when I start addressing personal issues in my work, and it‘s even harder to talk about them afterwards. I have to try and distance myself from it a little bit, and in multiple cases I’ve found that applying these issues to a female character’s perspective helps me feel more comfortable exploring these issues, and in some cases helps amplify them. But it also feels like the change in perspective could lead to misinterpretation. I was worried that I'd get some ugly backlash for this, but then, I was always worried about backlash for certain part of Other Sleep, which never came.

I'm hoping to do some more comics like this. Let me know what you think!

[Brett]

At last, after nearly two years of work, Other Sleep, my first graphic novel, is complete at a whopping 172 pages in length! The final chapter is now online to read, so go do that!

The work isn’t completely done yet, of course. I’m getting everything formatted and ready for a printed collection, a time-consuming and tedious task for sure. I have yet to determine what bonus goodies to throw in as backmatter, an issue which is also determined by cost. I’m looking at making it about 190 pages total, and well, the more pages you add, the more expensive it gets, and I’ll probably have to sell them for more than I’d like if I want to make any profit at all, 25 dollars or so. Still figuring all of this out, if you can’t tell.

There is also, of course, the art show in February at the William King Museum. That’s something I need to figure out too, picking out what I want to hang, how to hang it, working out an artist’s statement, stuff I did back when I graduated from ETSU and shouldn’t have too much trouble recalling, but still a lot of work.

Right now though I just feel a bit aimless. I’ve been going almost nonstop since August or September, and now that I’m at the end without any pages to draw or color, I don’t know what to do with myself. I want to relax this weekend, but my brain refuses, so I’m already scribbling more and more ideas down for the next graphic novel. I know for sure, however, that it’ll be ages before I start on that. I want to hone my craft a bit more, study more, try my hand at some things I haven’t really gotten around to this year, reassess my work, all those things, before I attempt another graphic novel.

I can’t believe I reached this point. I can’t believe I finished it. There were plenty of dumb delays, I could have finished it even sooner, but that I managed to pull it off at all is kind of crazy. Looking back, I did very little planning. I was just about to graduate when the idea struck me and I started sketching and doing layouts. I just dove in with very little planning. I’d only had the first three or four chapters written when I started drawing, I was just figuring it all out as I went along, and it shows. Painfully, in some cases.

Getting it all together for print has me looking back at the first few chapters, something I haven’t done pretty much since first working on them. The art has me cringing now, but there’s also a lot more going on than I remember doing, oddly enough. I’m rediscovering little tricks I pulled and then forgot about, so that’s fun. I wanted to write more at length, deconstruct what I’ve created, talk about certain choices I made, but…maybe it’s too soon for that right now. I do want to make a list of what I think are failures as far as it's all concerned, things I disappointed myself at, but will I share that? Probably not, it’ll be something to keep for myself and refer to when I start on whatever my next project will be.

If you’ve been keeping up with this thing since the very beginning, you have my gratitude. If you’re just now getting around to reading it, then I hope you enjoy it and tell others about it. I want as many people as possible to see this and read it. Go on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, whatever, and let everyone know, I will be indebted to you if you do.

More than anything else, I hope you stick around. I’m not sure what’s coming next, but whatever it is, it’ll be even bigger and better than Other Sleep.

[Brett]

After posting all three chapters here on the blog, I’ve given Shouting at the Void its own page for those of you who’d like to read the whole thing in one sitting. Go check it out!
Now that it’s over and I’ve had some time to relax and get away from it, I want to sit down and collect my thoughts on the comic. It certainly wasn’t anything like last year’s October Game. I had a few pieces in mind then, but spent most of last October frantically scrambling to do something, anything, and it led to a lot of interesting choices and a good variety of work. On the other hand, Shouting at the Void was planned out more than a month in advance, everything written and laid out and with the basic look of the comic nailed down before drawing a single page. Last minute changes were frequently made, sure, but overall I had a much easier time, never stressing nearly as much as I had done last year.

The decision to draw everything on small 6x9 inch paper was largely a time consideration. Unlike last year, I wanted to be able to keep working consistently on Other Sleep while doing this. I knew it was possible, having seen online that Moritat’s pages for Elephant Men, the Spirit, and All-Star Western were drawn just a little bit smaller, 8.5x5.5, two pages crammed onto one sheet of typing paper, basically. Within the first week, though, it was made clear that I couldn’t quite do what I was wanting to do. Stubborn as I am, I stuck with my decision to work with this paper and I think I eventually got the hang of it. Will I ever do it again, though? Eh, no, probably not. Even with everything planned in advance, I quickly realized I still had maybe a bit too much going on with the plot, and a simpler story with plenty of big panels for breathing room probably would have worked better. That’s something I’ve fought with in plenty of other comics, maybe I’ll eventually have it nailed down.

There were two big inspirations for the comic. The first was Philip K. Dick. I was just finishing reading Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said when I came up with the idea. As many of his novels as I’ve read, I always think most about Dick’s short story, the Electric Ant, about a person who finds out after a terrible accident that he’s not human at all, but a robot. And of course Rachel in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, who doesn’t know she’s a replicant until Deckard gives her the Voight-Kampff test. There’s something that really appeals to me about that, finding out that you’re something you’re not, but for the comic, I kind of wanted to invert that, with Mint the android becoming human. Or maybe finding out that he’s been human all along and didn’t realize it. 

The second big influence was Seijun Suzuki. Shortly after getting that basic idea of a robot turning existential and human, I watched three of his crime movies in a row and got inspired to do something similar. Mint’s suit, that light blue which informed the rest of the visual look of the comic, is taken almost directly from Tetsu’s outfit at the end of Tokyo Drifter. I had drawn that Daft Punk inspired android assassin a month or two before, but Suzuki’s films were what drove me to take it further. The way those movies are paced informed how I wrote the comic too, especially the latter half of chapter two, where each page is a new, different scene, with some of the connective tissue ripped out. I never showed characters traveling from location to location or whatever, I just jumped from scene to scene as a way of translating to comics the kind of fractured narratives Suzuki was known for. Did it work? I think so, maybe. It was another way of cramming more into the 30 page limit, rather than, I don’t know, simplifying the story, which could have possibly been a smarter choice.

Other things that seeped into the creation of this comic: Battle Angel Alita, Machine Man, some Sergio Leone and Brian De Palma, probably some other stuff. Of course there’s a ton of tokusatsu in the android designs. And Nothing? A character who emerges from a portal in the desert, whose intentions are never made clear? He was inspired directly by Welcome to Night Vale.

I’m a little disappointed in how I handled Ester. She had more going on originally, but that stuff got cut for space, as did the final showdown with Nothing. The 30 page limit sucked in those regards…

Despite being easier than last year’s desperate groping for ideas, I kind of missed that chaos this year. I missed being able to just do whatever, draw however I liked rather than striving for a more consistent, unified look. The constraints I laid down for myself started to get a little stifling, and it didn’t help that my only real escape from it was to work on Other Sleep, which had its own rules to follow. Between the two, I didn’t really have time to do much else, and I was really starting to get burned out by the end there. I’m not sure how well it shows in Shouting at the Void, but some of the pages of Other Sleep that I drew during this last month definitely suffered for it. Note to self: don’t take on two big comics projects like this at once.

All that said, it was still fun and I’m proud of the work I did. There’s nothing else like it, which may be why hardly anybody seems to have bothered reading it even though I was posting the pages everywhere. And I definitely want to do more existential android hitman comics somewhere down the road, make it a genre into itself.

Hope you guys enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed drawing it. Thanks for checking it out!

Here we go, the final chapter! I'll be setting up a page for the whole thing later as well, and a big blog post unpacking the past month and stuff, so be looking forward to that.

Just 10 days and 10 pages to go! Here's the finished second chapter!

We're now a third of the way through the October Game, and a third of the way through my existential android hitman comic. When the whole thing's done, I'll give it its own page, but for now, here's the finished cover and complete first chapter.

Here we are kids, with the fifth and final post. 30 Criterion Collection films watched, over 4000 words written, and I'm shocked my girlfriend hasn't left me yet. Here are the previous four posts:

"Life is a messy weapon."
"I'll smash through this hell or there's no future for me."
"All these people's vitality irritates me."
"I want to extinguish every light in the world...or gouge out all of humanity's eyes."

Pitfall (1962): A couple of years back I took a class on film genres. The genre in particular for that semester was absurdist film. This movie made me feel like I was back in that class, wanting to bash my head into my desk. Not surprising, really, since this is from the same people who made Woman in the Dunes, which I watched in that class and, as mentioned before in my review of the Face of Another, I hated. I didn’t hate this one, but, I was just…confounded? You want to know what the hell is happening, who the man in the white suit is, why he killed that miner, what the point is of it all, and you get zero answers. It does exactly what these types of movies do, which is to make you ask a bunch of questions and not even attempt to answer any of them. Shit just happens, and you’ll never know why, that’s how it is. Depressing, yeah? And, weirdly enough, it makes me want to watch Woman in the Dunes again. Never thought that’d be possible.

F For Fake (1975): The whole time watching this, I was thinking of Banksy’s excellent Exit Through the Gift Shop. A documentary (but not really) where you just don’t know what’s the truth and what’s Orson Welles taking the piss. Rapidly edited, the movie is dizzying, with even Orson himself seemingly sped up and his words cut together breathlessly in some parts. It took a few minutes to adjust, like being thrown into the deep end, but after that keeping up was no problem. Like the title suggests, the movie is all about fakes, forgeries, hoaxes, with Howard Hughes and Picasso thrown in for good measure. Definitely a classic, and damn fun to boot. I may have enjoyed the 9-minute extended trailer even more. Also? I am sexually attracted to Orson's voice, damn.

Rashomon (1950): Another of Kurosawa’s classics, maybe one of my favorites next to Yojimbo. Kind of perfect to watch next to F For Fake, come to think of it, since the movie is all about lies and embellishments, man's nature to stretch the truth to make himself look better. I don’t know what to say about this one, it’s beautiful, the story is fantastic, it’s visually rich, and if you haven’t seen it yet you really need to remedy that soon. I hate myself for having not watched it sooner, it’s such a perfect movie.

The Naked Kiss (1964): Another one from Samuel Fuller, who brought us the ultra-pulpy Shock Corridor, which I didn't write TOO favorably about, but has grown on me over time. This movie is similarly done, with a great opening of our heroine, Kelly, beating the crap out of a dude with a shoe as jazz music plays. Kelly is a prostitute looking to reform. She moves to a small town, becomes a nurse at the local children’s hospital, and falls in love. Things aren’t all great though, as everywhere she looks Kelly finds corruption in this otherwise perfect little place. Very moralistic, and just as pulpy as Shock Corridor, they make a good double feature.

Diabolique (1955): So apparently the director of this movie, Henri-Georges Clouzot, spent much of his adult life in and out of sanitariums? Yikes. Filled with nice little twists, a lot of gut-wrenching tension, and a pretty ugly (for its time) murder, this is a nice, dirty little movie. Hitchcock's Psycho was heavily influenced by this one, and it's easy to see why.

House (1977): Better known by its Japanese title Hausu, I love this movie so damn much. A horror movie from a director of TV commercials, with a story filled with ideas that his 11-year-old daughter thought up, House is strange, delirious, and delightful. Pretty young girls named after their personalities (Gorgeous, Fantasy, Sweet, Mac, Melody, Prof, and my personal favorite, Kung-Fu) bouncing through the woods to an old mansion in soft light and warm colors with an all-too-cheerful theme, it feels less like a horror movie and more like, well, a bubblegum commercial for children. The special effects, editing, and camerawork are all dizzying, and even though you may think the movie is bonkers from the very beginning (it is), nothing will prepare you for the final act, when the titular house has eaten three of the girls and goes nuts in trying to devour the others. Reminds me of some of the zanier parts of Evil Dead 2, only taken so much damn further, making that movie look tame in comparison. It’s visually overwhelming, the audio is equally off the wall, and, well...just watch it. Words can’t do this movie justice.

Thus ends a wonderful journey into film snobbery, which didn't really turn me into a big snob like I imagined it would. Probably because I was more into the genre stuff like Genocide and turned off by stuff like L'Avventura. I still didn't manage to watch everything I'd intended to, but maybe I'll throw some money at Hulu somewhere down the line and cram in six more movies. 

And hey, last week Criterion had a flash sale, where all their movies were half off? I snagged that When Horror Came to Shochiku set and Sisters, so now I can force those movies upon other people!

Here we go, part 4 of Brett's Criterion Binge, this one's an all-Japanese film edition!

Here are the previous posts:
"Life is a messy weapon"
"I'll smash through this hell or there's no future for me"
"All these people's vitality irritates me" 

The Living Skeleton (1968): From the same DVD set as Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell. A revenge tale with a neat pseudo-supernatural vibe to it and a few neat twists thrown in. Shot in black and white, it is of course a very good looking film, but it isn’t nearly as outrageous as Goke was, or as insane as the next movie is, so it isn’t quite as memorable for me as those two.

Genocide (1968): Also from that same DVD set. Utterly, completely bonkers. This is a very low budget, nonsensical horror film of the killer animal variety. As far as “NATURE ATTACKS!” movies go, this one is probably my favorite just for how madcap it is. The first scene of the movie (after the colorful pop art opening titles) is a man on a military plane having a PTSD breakdown, hitting some switches which open the bay doors…which a nuke is hanging over. As two more men on the plane try to calm him down and sedate him with drugs, the plane flies into a massive cloud of insects and EXPLODES. They never tell you what kind of insects they are, but they’re definitely bees. Why not just say they’re some superviolent breed of bees? Everyone knows what bees look like, you’re not fooling anyone, Genocide. Still, watching this was a lot of fun, definitely give it a shot.

Sword of the Beast (1965): Not tied to Sword of Doom, sadly. Not as awesome, either, but still pretty enjoyable and nice and grimy in all the right places. I should’ve watched it before Sword of Doom and Harkiri though, it just doesn’t quite reach the same heights as those two and I feel I’m not being fair at all in comparing them…

Throne of Blood (1957): I hate Shakespeare. The only interpretation of his work I’ve ever enjoyed is Ronald Wimberly’s graphic novel Prince of Cats, a crazy take on Romeo and Juliet which was released last year. I have little to no familiarity with Macbeth, on which this film is roughly based, but hey, it’s Kurosawa, it’s Toshiro Mifune, hopefully the Sharkespeariness of it won’t bring things down for me, right? Err, well, it almost does. The first hour did nothing for me. I was bored. But once an air of doom truly sinks in, when Mifune starts losing his mind in the castle, I was enthralled. That final act makes up for the rest of movie to me. His downfall is incredible…but I still hate Shakespeare.

The Face of Another (1966): I knew nothing about this movie going into it. I’d never even heard of it before, I was just browsing through Criterion’s website, reading up on some previous movie I’d watched, when I saw it in the Related Films sidebar. What a discovery it was, this movie really held my attention and wouldn't let go. A man’s face is severely disfigured in a work-related accident, and he’s forced to wear bandages all the time. He and a psychiatrist decide to craft a mask for him to wear in public, forging a new identity as some kind of odd experiment. It feels a bit indebted to the old western horror films like the Invisible Man and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it’s entirely its own beast, not really a horror film but definitely more unsettling than any of the actual horror movies I’ve watched in this crusade.  The movie is all about identity, the things about ourselves that we hide from one another, which permeates through the dialogue and especially the visuals. You can’t look away from it. It’s maybe a bit too on-the-nose and obvious, yes, but for some reason I’m fond of movies in which people sit around in interesting places discussing philosophical things. I feel like this would also make for a good double feature with Eyes Without A Face. I learned that this is from the same writer and director of Woman in the Dunes, a film which I HATED when I watched it in a class on absurdist film a couple of years back. This movie is only available in a DVD set with that and another film by the same people called Pitfall. How I feel about that movie will determine whether or not I’ll be getting that set…

Gate of Flesh (1964): The fourth Seijun Suzuki film I’ve watched, about a gang of prostitutes living in the rubble of post-WWII Tokyo and a former Japanese soldier who shacks up with them. While the story and its themes are quite different from Suzuki’s crime films, his stylistic choices remain intact. More lonely harmonicas, bright pastel colors, and frenzied editing, as well as quite a lot of superimposed shots and other neat visuals I haven’t seen in the other films. There’s a great dose of anti-Americanism, certainly, but it’s mixed in with quite a lot of self-loathing as well. The ruthless girl gang and their guest are equal parts hateful and charming. You can’t really root for anyone as they spit in the faces of those around them and turn on one another, only watch as they live out their rough lives in these brutal ruins. I was expecting it to be more titillating than it was given the subject matter, but this is no pinku film. Even when the girls spend most of the movie in brightly colored, loose, translucent slips, it’s hard to be turned on by anything in this movie. This isn’t erotica, it’s horror.

The final day of my Hulu subscription is October 6. Will I be able to cram in six more movies before then and squeeze out another of these blog posts? Will I watch something that ISN'T Japanese this time around? LET'S FIND OUT.

In roughly 10 days, the Bill Counts October Game will begin, and I’ll begin drawing Shouting at the Void, my existential android hitman comic. The story is plotted out, I have half of the pages thumbnailed with dialogue scribbled out, most of the design work is done, and I’ve got a pretty good idea of how I want it to look. Here’s another test page I did this week:
 

I had oral surgery Friday. It was supposed to just be a biopsy on the cyst that had developed in my jaw, but once they’d gone in, they saw how big and infected it was and just went ahead and yanked it out rather than wait. Since then, my days have been spent largely in a painkiller haze, being unable to do much of anything outside of holding an ice pack on my face and watching dumb movies in bed. So I’ve had a lot of time on my hands lately to just sit and think, and I kept thinking about this comic, and one nagging little anxiety, a thing I’ve always dealt with before, managed to become more amplified alongside the spikes of pain in my jaw:

Who is the audience for this thing?
 

The October Game is kind of a local thing, and the majority of the people participating are painters and photographers, work that‘s kind of what one comes to expect in southern Appalachia. While my own work last year was all over the place, I was still kind of the only one doing weird sci-fi stuff most of the time. It didn’t really raise awareness of my work in the way I had kind of hoped it would. And this year I’m just taking it even further into obscurity, not just by doing a comic, but a comic about a city populated by androids, all colored in blues, with the plot revolving around a mysterious portal and a man with no face? Who the hell wants to read that, especially when it’s surrounded by landscape photos and charcoal portraits? I doubt I’ll be getting any new fans out of that Facebook space.

I’m feeling like I’ve already failed on some level before I’ve even begun drawing the comic, basically. This is a weird thing I’m doing, even by my own standards. My two big reference points for the book are Philip K. Dick and Seijun Suzuki, with maybe a dash of Welcome to Night Vale. As for visuals, hell, I don’t even know. Power Rangers and Kamen Rider, sure, Blade Runner, maybe some Kirby, and I’ve been looking a lot at Moritat’s art on Elephantmen and All Star Western, because he draws his pages just a little bit smaller than what I’m using for this. This is not an easy sell at all, and I’m not good at that sort of thing to begin with. Other Sleep has been online for over a year now and only really registers with maybe about a few dozen people tops? Most of whom are my friends. Shouting at the Void just doesn’t strike me as something anyone will really be all that into.

That’s kind of where the title of the comic comes from, actually. Any time I post my thoughts on the internet, write or draw something, and I get no response, I feel like I’m just shouting into this empty expanse. Fitting, isn’t it?
 

I don’t get much negative feedback on my art and comics. I mean, I don’t really get much of any kind of feedback at all, really. It’s kind of a good thing that I don’t have throngs of haters gnashing their teeth at me, because that shit isn’t cool. But, you know, our brains are wired to seek out and focus on anything remotely negative, so I mostly just feel like I’m being ignored, and Shouting at the Void isn’t really going to do anything to change that, is it?

One thing I do hear from time to time, that’s not necessarily negative criticism or whatever, but really does irk me…people tell me my art is weird all the time. And that’s cool, I like that, I’m into weird things and I like making weird things, good to know I’m succeeding at SOMETHING that I’m striving for. But occasionally I get someone who uses the word in a kind of derogatory manner. “Your weird-ass comics.” “Why are you so weird?” That kind of thing that I was so used to hearing in high school, “why do you like this weird shit?” Like, the fact that what I’m doing is different, not like other work, is offensive to these people. Taking one of the things about my art and about myself that I really enjoy and trying to use it against me? I hate that, that’s just…I don’t know.

I guess I’m just struggling here to come to terms with the fact that when I start putting everything I’ve got into drawing Shouting at the Void, into telling this bizarre little story that I’m proud of, that just like nearly everything else I do, it’s largely going to go unnoticed by the people that I’m trying to put it in front of.

But, you know, if you turn out to be one of those people who DOES read it, who even enjoys it, do me a little favor and spread the word, okay? I’m going to be posting it online EVERYWHERE, there will be no shortage of ways to find it. Just speak up, post a link on Facebook, Tweet it, let people know that you’re reading and enjoying this comic by this guy. Every little bit helps and it means a lot to me, too.

Okay, that’s enough bitching for now. Back to work.

There’s something to be said about how Grasshopper Manufacture has been able to put out a new console game every year for the past three years, something that feels a little unusual for a developer with their track record. There’s also something to be said that every time they do release a new console game, that’s my personal game of the year. And while I’m still struggling to collect all of my thoughts on the game, I think it’s safe to say that Killer is Dead has done it again for me this year. I mean, a friend of mine gave me his copy of the Last of Us which I haven’t touched yet, but I don’t think you have a mechanical arm with a drill attachment in that game, nor do you get to fight a giant alien kaiju. How could it top that?
 

What is it about Suda51 and his company’s games that keep me coming back for more? I think David Brothers nailed it pretty well in his own write-up on KID just a couple of weeks ago. It’s style as substance. I can’t think of a single triple-A title from the past few years that has the same punk rock swagger as No More Heroes, you know? Yet I was getting a little worried for a bit there. Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw aren’t QUITE as far out as NMH and Killer7 were, and that’s possibly due to the collaborative process involved, with Shinji Mikami on Damned and James Gunn on Lollipop. Still, I was concerned that my favorite screwball developer was being seduced by more mainstream sensibilities, however ridiculous that sounds. I realize it makes me sound like a dumb hipster, but the fear was there nevertheless.

Killer is Dead more or less puts those doubts to rest. It’s definitely their most stylish game to date, with the visual sensibilities of Killer7 and No More Heroes realizing their full potential. The graphics still aren’t necessarily the best, but a little bit of art direction can go a long way. Everything is bathed in shadow here, very much like Killer7, only not quite. The shadows aren’t deep black as you’d expect, but more of a blue/purple gradient. Occasionally irritating, but I’ve never seen anything like it before and am very tempted to give it a try in my own art soon.

The story is where most of my frustrations lie, but at the same time, it’s where I had a big sigh of relief. Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw barely had stories, and were pretty straightforward, whereas Killer is Dead recalls the obscurity and disjointed confusion of Killer7. Dark matter from the moon which is possibly malice given physical manifestation infects people (and on one occasion, a machine), turning them into cybernetic demons called Wires. A very body horror kind of thing, come to think of it, flirting with some of the ideas Shinya Tsukamoto tackled in his breakout movie Tetsuo the Iron Man.

(speaking of body horror: the first “boss,” Tokio? He’s definitely based off of James Woods as Max Renn in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. The brown leather jacket and button up shirt are practically the same, and the gun arm he has is fused to him in a similarly creepy fashion, especially in the concept illustration that’s in the art book which comes with the game)

Our hero, Mondo Zappa (Mondo=World, and I’ll bet Zappa is a reference to rock legend Frank Zappa, though I‘m hardly familiar with his work and how it could tie into the game) is an assassin who is hired to kill targets, typically people who have been changed by the dark matter. He’s an amnesiac, but in an interesting twist he’s also the kind of guy who doesn’t care that he can‘t recall his past. You don’t even know he has amnesia until Dolly shows up, screwing with his dreams. Also unlike previous Suda51 protagonists, while he’s great at killing, it’s not something he has any passion for. All he cares about is seducing women. He has no real charisma, which is frustrating, and yet that also makes him interesting in how it permeates through every aspect of the character. I’m still figuring him out, especially because, as things are revealed through the story, they only bring up more questions.

And that’s good, because, even if it doesn’t give you any satisfying explanations for anything, it still makes you think, unlike nearly every other videogame coming out these days. I feel the same way now that I kind of did when playing Killer7 (to which this game is frequently referred as a “spiritual successor”), where nothing really makes sense and you’re just along for the ride. Not a single character is particularly fleshed out, but that feels intentional. Again, Mondo doesn’t give a shit about anything except looking at girls in their underwear, so it makes sense that that’s how he’d see people, right? He doesn’t bother getting to know anyone, even those who live with him.

Oh, yeah. The Gigolo Missions, which the internet has kind of gone nuts over. Awful. They’re a kind of weird inversion of No More Heroes. Travis Touchdown loves killing, but needs money for the execution missions with the awesome boss fights, and in order to get that money you have to do dumb job minigames like mowing lawns and picking up litter. Which makes sense, slog through the shitty stuff to get to the good stuff, and it served as a nice commentary on gaming in general, working your dumb job to make money to buy an awesome game that lets you kill people. But here, it’s different: Mondo takes on awesome assassination jobs in order to make money to spend on stupid gifts to give to girls in order to seduce them, but you have to work up the “guts” to give them these presents by…ogling them in their underwear? Suda has said these missions are supposed to be like when James Bond seduces ladies for information, but, but…it just isn’t the same thing. I don’t feel like some swank lady‘s man, I feel like some dumb nerd who doesn’t know how to talk to women, and makes up for lack of communication skills by buying them things and staring at their chest when they’re not looking. And then the game rewards you for that?

(Scarlett is the only exception: first you have to find her in each stage, then you have to do a certain number of her somewhat difficult combat challenges, THEN she decides to sleep with you. Presents don’t work, she wants you to tear shit up first, only violence turns her on, and I can actually get behind that…)

It’s degrading towards women, yes. It’s sexist and stupid. But…it’s just so goddamn dumb that it feels intentional? It’s lowest common denominator bullshit, appealing to creepy basement dwelling nerds who can only get off on anime girls or whatever, but it’s just so obvious that I feel like he’s trying to simultaneously point the finger at those people, trying to insult them, but it isn’t quite working?

I don’t know. No matter how you try to look at it, those missions are a total failure. Hopefully Suda and Grasshopper are aware of this and will do better next time.

Aside from Suda51 himself, Grasshopper also has another big personality among their ranks: Akira Yamaoka, who left Konami and the lucrative Silent Hill franchise (made popular largely due to his music and sound design) to join them. I always liked that he basically abandoned the series that made him a huge name in the gaming industry in order to be a part of a scrappy little team that cranks out weird games that will never sell as well as even the worst Silent Hill games. Like leaving a multi-platinum world famous rock band to join some punk band that nobody’s heard of. Since defecting to Grasshopper, he’s done some amazing soundtrack work, with Shadows of the Damned probably being his best to date.

The soundtrack to Killer is Dead, however, doesn’t quite feel like his stuff as much as that game does. I feel like it has way more in common with Masafumi Takada’s soundtrack to Killer7 more than anything else, which makes sense. The collector’s edition came with a CD that has 25 tracks from the game on it, and while it’s all good, none of it really stands out or does much for me outside of the game itself. When I’m playing, it’s perfect, it suits the game beautifully, but removed from the gameplay and visuals it loses a lot of its power. Still, it does what it needs to, and I love the softer, jazzier tracks, which I’ve never heard from him before.

This write-up is already way too stupidly long, so let’s just touch on some other things that I like about the game really quickly: while the bulk of combat is you mashing one button to hack things up with a katana, there is quite a lot more going on, with dodging and blocking being super important, and it feels a bit like God Hand in some ways. The way things go slow motion when you dodge at the last second is lifted straight from No More Heroes, but at least here they actually tell you about it and explain it. Moon River looks EXACTLY like Anne Hathaway, I think. Bryan was my favorite character. Nobody writes dialogue like Suda, and it felt good to have those talks between Mondo and each boss, even if they weren’t quite as engaging as the conversations in NMH. The one thing that amused me about the Gigolo missions was the whispered “MAGNIFICO!” you’d hear if you gave the girl a really good present, a callback to Shadows of the Damned. I liked Scarlett’s challenges, even though I couldn’t beat half of them until after I finished the game. They reminded me a lot of the side challenges in God Hand. Oh, and the “Please Stand By” cut in the Russia level on the train. Not the Zaka TV reference that’s in Killer7 and NMH, but I laughed so hard at that. Also breaking the fourth wall a good three or four times in the most casual way, I love Grasshopper for that.

I feel like if I replay Killer7 soon, I’ll be able to make even more connections between the two, because Suda emphasized that they’re close, but no one else has really brought that up in other reviews, so who knows whether there are more connections or not?

Someone on Tumblr did a nice batch of articles about this game too, one involving a couple of Freud’s psychological theories and how they apply to Mondo and David, and two about how the game’s characters relate to chess pieces. Way smarter than anything I’ve written, check them out if you’re interested.

Also if you're interested, I've written on this website about No More Heroes, first impressions for Shadows of the Damned, and Lollipop Chainsaw.