Over ten years ago I was in business with Irrational Games and its creative guru Ken Levine. I liked Ken and I liked his company. We were trying to bring a comic book project to life. It didn’t work out but such is life. Years passed and I did my thing and Ken and Irrational Games did theirs.

Then Irrational Games launched Bioshock.

Fuck. That game was a game changer.

I sent Ken a note congratulating him on the success of the game. I never heard back from him. That’s fine; those things just don’t bother me. I don’t dwell on why people do what they do or don’t do. He could have just ignored me because he’s such a big shot now or he may never have seen the email or another 50 thousand reasons why he did not respond.

Bioshock is still one of my favorite video games and that’s true rather I heard back from Ken or not. When the second Bioshock game out I loved that game as well. It seemed to be to be a bit harder than the first one and truth be told I’m still not done with it.

In fact I’ve been stuck on the same level for… let’s see…about two years.

No. I have not been playing the game constantly for two years. I pull it out every few months to try and beat that level, fail, then put it away for another few months.

More than a year or so ago I hear about a new Bioshock. Bioshock Infinite.

Some time after that I see some of the screen shots from the game and start to hear some of the hype surrounding the game.

I’m all in. Man, I’m all the fuck in.

I can’t remember the last time I was so jazzed over anything. Oh wait, I can remember. I was dating this Asian girl and…wait, now that I think of it, Irrational Games treated me just like that Asian girl.

They both promised something great yet that greatness kept being delayed. Over and over again. Bioshock Infinite was delayed then delayed again and frankly I got a little pissed waiting for it.

Then I thought that might be a great way to reconnect with Ken. I’d send him a funny email making light of the delays. After a little thought I decided not to do that. I realized I didn’t think the delay was funny so the odds of the guy who was sure to be taking some flack over it thinking it was funny was slim to none.

So I just waited.

Then the wait was over. For only the 3^rd time in my life I went to a midnight release of a video game. When I arrived back home I started to play and at first I was not happy. The game starts with some puzzles, which I just hate.

I hate puzzles in fucking video games. I’m not buying a shooter so I can figure out how to unlock a door so I can start shooting.

Fuck that, I just want to shoot mofo’s. I don’t mind a level where I face a challenge as long as that challenge is how to survive not how to figure how many turns it will take to unlock a door and the only way you can do that is by finding a piece of paper that has the correct number of turns on it but first you have to decode that fucking paper.

Fuck that.

This is not 1993 when video games had to be clever, no it’s 2013 and I want my video games simple. George Bush simple, that means no puzzles! If George Bush had to deal with puzzles we would have had World War III…twice.

As is my policy I at least try and figure puzzles out so that’s what I did. I gave it a try and-son of a gun-I did it! What, you ask, would have been my alterative to trying to solve the puzzle? Looking up the solution on the net would have been my next move.

Duh.

No, whenever I’m stuck in a video game I don’t run to the net. If that was the case I would not still be on the same level on quite a few games as I am now, Bioshock 2 being just one of them.

I’m done with the puzzles but I’m still not shooting anyone. Now. I’m starting to get really pissed. And then, as if an answer to my prayers, a gun appears in my happy little hands.

Now I’m happy!

No, I’m really happy! This game is turning out to be worth the wait and living up to all the hype.

Then I see something that makes me want to get on a plane, fly to Boston and put my foot up the ass of Ken Levine.

Irrational Games is playing the race card.

There is an element to this game that deals with racism. In case you have not played the game I won’t say anymore than that. I’m not a dick so regardless of how I felt when first seeing that backstory I won’t go into detail.

I’ll just say I saw an image that made my blood boil. Fortunately for me I realized that more than once I’ve assumed the wrong thing regarding race so with that in mind I decided to continue shooting people until more of the backstory was revealed to me.

I’m glad I did.

I no longer want to put my foot up Ken’s ass which would most likely be a mistake as Ken does not strike me as anyone’s Bitch. That said – I love this game. Irrational Games pull off something remarkable and I’m not just talking about gameplay. That is not to say that some people of color won’t have a problem with the game (they will) but I’m not them and I love this game.

Well done, Irrational Games. And Ken don’t worry about returning my call, it’s only been a bit more than a decade. Bioshock Infinite took a while and look how good that turned out.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

The buzz on the massive third-person shooter video game and TV show, DEFIANCE, has been generating for almost a year. Now with the premiere days away (Monday 4/15 on SyFy), we get more details from the set, by way of actress Julie Benz (“Amanda”) . Also 42  THE TRUE STORY OF AN AMERICAN LEGEND opens in theaters this week, and breakout star, Chadwick Boseman along with Harrison Ford, talk about how they helped bring Jackie Robinson back to life. Oh yeah, and another good month in the  comic stores – thanks to Marvel!

Take us ANYWHERE! The Point Radio App is now in the iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! Just search under “pop culture The Point”. The Point Radio  – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any other  mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Ditko Monsters – Gorgo!, stories drawn by Steve Ditko, written by Joe Gill, designed and edited by Craig Yoe. YoeBooks!/IDW Publishing. 224 pages, $34.99 retail hardcover.

I realize I’m jeopardizing my Geekcred here, but when I was a kid I never was much of a monster movie fan. After I got past James Whale and Ishirô Honda, it was pretty much “if you’ve seen one slimy green tail, you’ve seen them all.” Of course, this was prior to the proliferation of porno.

My pathetically mature attitude kept me away from Marvel’s monster comics prior to Fantastic Four #1 (the first one). That changed with Fin Fang Foom and Strange Tales Annual #1, and it changed with Steve Ditko’s Amazing Adult Fantasy. (Memo to self: define “adult.”) It became impossible to pass up any Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko effort, be it superhero or monster. Hell, I even bought Ditko’s Hogan’s Heroes adaptations.

So, like many Baby Boomer Doctor Strange fans, I first encountered Gorgo in the 1966 Charlton reprint Fantastic Giants. The giant lizard shared the cover with a big ol’ ape named Konga, a bizarre caricature of the artist, and the legend “A Steve Ditko Special! 64 pages!”

I’ve waited almost fifty years for Fantastic Giants #2, and thanks to my pal Craig Yoe, it finally arrived in the form of a 224 hardcover, Ditko Monsters – Gorgo! He reprints a ton of Ditko Gorgo stories shot from the source material but painstakingly restored and fronted by a wonderful and highly informative introduction by the editor.

These stories are fantastic fun, which is exactly what they should be. Mystery Science Theater 3000 could riff the Gorgo movies, and they did, but these comics stories co-star such notables as John F. Kennedy, Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev. Communism be damned; evidently, Castro and Khrushchev had licensing agents.

If I have one complaint, and it’s a minor one, the book could have used a table of contents and an index. Bitch, bitch, bitch.

So, you might ask, what happened to Konga? Where’s Ditko Monsters – Konga!? That would be next month. One good turn deserves another.

Last week’s column didn’t happen because I received a phone call at about 10 A.M. last Sunday from my mom. My dad was having another “episode,” his third. Meaning his brain was short-circuiting once more. It’s called “complex partial seizure disorder,” for the medically less-literate out there.

No one really knows why this is happening to him; before this started last Christmas Eve, he was in remarkable health for a man of 90. The only drug he took on a regular basis was one of the statins –anti-cholesterol drugs – and that was on a preventative basis. His blood pressure runs about 110/70, his heart rate about 65; his only major medical problem has been the deterioration of his eyesight because of macular degeneration and he was responding remarkably well to the treatment. Yes, he had had prostate cancer, but that was 30 years ago, and when his Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) level rose, he started the androgen deprivation therapy and it dropped to 0.003 or something, i.e., normal.

So this week once again my dad lay in a bed in the ICU at Cooper University Hospital – big kudos to the staff there!!! – only this time he was intubated because the ambulance didn’t take my mom with them and I was driving like a bat out of hell down the NJ Turnpike and my brother (an MD at “the Coop”) was vacationing on Puerto Rico so there was no one to tell the trauma team that my dad is DNR and the protocol when a patient comes in having seizures is to intubate to ensure a patent airway.

Yesterday, exactly one week later, Dad woke up again. He was extubated this morning. He’s very weak, but he knew where he was, and he knew all of us. He also ate ice chips, a cup of Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream, Jello, and a ¾ of a bowl of chicken broth. The plan is to get him out of bed tomorrow. We’re going to take it from there.

So driving home I thought about my dad and this column and I thought about the portrayal of infirmity and illness in the super hero world. I had plenty of time because I again got stuck driving north on the Turnpike between Exit 7 and Exit 8A – a stretch of about 21 miles – in bumper-to-bumper, crawling traffic. It’s a section of the iconic NJ Turnpike that has been undergoing reconstruction for the last three years or so, which makes it prone for Delays Ahead: Be Prepared To Stop alerts, and I swear I think people slam on their brakes just to read the signs. What is it about one fender-bender that causes miles and miles of back-up?

Anyway…

The first picture in my mind was of Silver Age Superman gasping and choking and weakened as the radiation from Kryptonite, usually held or manipulated by Lex Luthor – poisoned him, finally turning him as green as the Wicked Witch of the West, indicating that death was near, just in a few panels. Kryptonite worked fast, unlike what happens to ordinary humans when exposed to radiation. Ordinary humans, exposed to radiation, don’t even feel it at first. The amount of time between exposure and the first signs and symptoms depends on the amount of radiation that has been absorbed. The first thing that usually happens is nausea and vomiting; headache and fever can also occur. After that, an individual with radiation sickness can have a period of remission, in which there is no apparent illness and the individual feels fine. Then the more serious problems start: hair loss, weakness, dizziness, bloody stools and vomit, weight loss, low blood pressure, fucked-up blood counts, cancer….a slow, painful, and debilitating death.

I guess Superman puking and having bloody diarrhea and going bald, getting infections and cancer and dying a slow, painful, and debilitating death wouldn’t have gotten past the Comic Code Authority back in the day.

Barbara Gordon, a.k.a. Batgirl, shot by the Joker in Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke (1988), was paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair – but through the talents of ComicMix’s own John Ostrander and his late, wonderful wife, Kim Yale, we watched Barbara go forward with her life: although initially (and realistically) portrayed with a reactive depression, Barbara comes to see that her life is not over. Gifted with a genius level IQ, a photographic memory, and possessing expert computer skills (including hacking) along with graduate training in library sciences, Barbara transforms herself in Oracle, an “information broker” to law enforcement agencies and the super-hero community. She also hires Richard Dragon (co-created by ComicMix’s own Denny O’Neil), a martial artist, to teach her combat and self-defense skills.

Gail Simone took the ball that John and Kim handed her and ran with it in Birds Of Prey…until, after DC’s 52 reboot, Oracle never existed and Barbara was mysteriously back on her feet. This – rightfully, im-not-so-ho – pissed off a lot of fans, because Barbara Gordon as Oracle was the preeminent role model for those living with disabilities. However, Gail has done a magnificent job with the post-Oracle Batgirl, allowing the character to go through PTSD secondary to her disability and recovery – although, as we all know, DC seemed to have a problem with that a few months ago. Luckily, DC recovered from that particular illness.

And now Power Girl, a.k.a. Kara Zor-L, a.k.a. Karen Starr, has breast cancer. Although I’m sure the intentions of the creative team are good and positive and totally above-board (and I do hope none of the creative team has had any kind of personal experience with breast cancer), somehow the cynic in me is smirking. Maybe because Power Girl has always been drawn with gi-normous bubble boobs that burst out of her costume like Mt. St. Helens blowing their tops? It’s like Sharon Tate’s character in The Valley Of The Dolls getting breast cancer. (Google or read the book or stream/rent the movie to get the reference.) It’s saying that the one thing that lifts (pun intended) Power Girl out of the crowd of super heroines are her mammary glands, so let’s mess with those.

It would have been more interesting to me if Sue Storm got breast cancer, or Lois Lane (isn’t she dead?), or even Wonder Woman.

Or what if Reed Richards, or Johnny Storm, or Bruce Wayne, or Hal Jordan, got breast cancer? Men get breast cancer, too, you know. More and more frequently, by the way.

I just hope the creative team does it research. And not just solve the problem of “how do we treat a woman who has breast cancer if she’s indestructible?”

That’s just so comic-bookey.

Breast cancer is real. People can end up in the ICU, hoping to get better, fighting to get better.

Just like my dad.

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Michael Davis

“Something Awesome”.  Seems an easy thing to ask for from a fellow who can go to any moment in time and space, and allows for lots of interpretation.  So Clara asks for that, The Doctor is happy to provide, whisking her off to…

THE RINGS OF AKHATEN
By Neil Cross
Directed by Farren Blackburn

The Doctor takes Clara to Akhaten, a group of worlds inside a series of asteroid belts orbiting a huge star.  It’s the time of a ceremony that will supposedly keep the god which created their worlds asleep.  Young Merry is elected to sing the history of their civilization, and is naturally skittish about getting it right.  It’s made plain as time passes that this is more of a sacrifice than a simply ceremony, forcing The Doctor and Clara to take a hand in saving young Merry, and to keep the very real god from eating the system.

The episode serves two purposes; to serve as a BIG info dump for Clara’s backstory, and to really let The Doctor show off to her. As to that second half, it’s very much a parallel to The End of the World, Rose’s first foray into space.  Both feature a bevy of new aliens, including the Face of Boe, and both feature am enlarging sun threatening to engulf them.

The story is solid, and Jenna-Louise Coleman does wonderfully in the common spot of the companion’s first exposure to the rest of the universe, but I thought the direction on Matt was a bit lacking.  In comparison to the magnificent bombastic speech he gave in The Pandorica Opens, his monologue to the sentient sun was somewhat lacking.  It may have been a decision to make him seem sadder, or tired, weighed down, but it came off weak for me.  I’d have much rather seen him almost daring the sun to take it all, as opposed to the more resigned tone he had here.

Also, we’re once again seeing a story where the companion saves the day when The Doctor’s plans come up lacking.  That’s been happening a LOT more with Moffat’s run on the show, and while I enjoy seeing a strong character, as I’ve said before, I wouldn’t mind seeing The Doctor save everybody on occasion.

THE MONSTER FILES – The sentient sun of Akhaten reminds one of the antagonist in 42, a living sun fighting back after the mining ship accidentally stole her children.  This one is clearly more belligerent in its attitude.

The production team went to great lengths to create a wide range of brand new creatures in this episode.  We’ve had a couple of big collections of aliens in the new series, like the aforementioned party on Platform One, Dorium’s place in A Good Man Goes to War, and even the bar where Captain Jack met Alonzo.  Save for the last one, they’ve gone out of their way to create new aliens, as opposed to grabbing stuff off the rack.  One race breathed though some sort of filtration device, somewhat reminiscent of the Hath, the fish-creatures from The Doctor’s Daughter.

GUEST STAR REPORT Neil Cross (writer) Created the series Luther, for which we are all rightly thankful.  He also wrote the script for Mama, Guillermo Del Toro’s recent presentation

Farren Blackburn (Director) last worked on Doctor Who when he directed The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe, last year’s Christmas Special.  He’s had a long career in directing TV, including an episode of Luther and two of the remake of Terry Nation’s Survivors.

BACKGROUND BITS AND BOBS – Trivia and production details

A TALE THAT GROWS IN THE TELLING – There’s been a number of stories in the series that center around a grand festival that serves as a way for an old threat to return.  The most memorable are the twin tales Kinda and its sequel Snakedance.  The actions of the villain in those stories were more deliberate; here it’s more a case of time being up for the dormancy of the sun.

“I came here a long time a go with my granddaughter” – This is, in fact, the first mention of Susan in the new series.  Clara’s double take on the fact that a man this young-looking can have a granddaughter is not followed up upon, but will almost certainly be referred to again.

Also, did anyone else find it odd that they refer to their god as “Grandfather”?

“What’s happening, why is it angry?” – The TARDIS translates foreign and alien languages automatically for those traveling within it.  But there’s almost always a scene where a companion is faced with an alien it can’t understand.  Now, there’s any number of explanations that could explain such a thing, like they haven’t been on the ship long enough for all languages to process, or some languages are more differnt from English (or too simplistic, such as more animal -like speech like Doreen’s) to be immediately legible.  But it all comes down to the fact that a scene where a Companion misunderstands a situation due to not knowing the language, resulting in a comedic moment, is just plain too comedic a moment NOT to do.  And any attempt to inject import into it is just plain Looking Too Hard.

“Not money….something valuable” – The big theme of the story is that of experiences and memories having an intrinsic value.  For the people of the system, they’re used as currency, a system which I have to admit sounds cooler than it would be in actual use.  I can imagine any number of problems with having to part with one’s cherished belongings in order to buy the groceries.  In the case of the god at the center of the system, those memories and experiences are its literal bread and butter.  Clearly it merely reads those memories as opposed to draining them, as The Doctor isn’t reduced to an empty shell.  In the case of Clara’s leaf, it’s absorbed entirely as it doesn’t have any memories itself, but represents potential existence, a life un-led.  Need I mention that this is also the chosen food of the Weeping Angels?

“Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax, and Cabbages and Kings” – The Doctor quotes Lewis Carroll, specifically The Walrus and The Carpenter.  While his work has never been mentioned in the TV show, it’s been referenced in the other media a few times.  The Doctor met the author in an prose adventure called The Shadows of Avalon, and in a fan-made video adventure called Downtime (which features the Great Intelligence, but that’s likely just a coincedence), it’s revealed that he photographed a young Victoria Waterfield. (Those who know a bit about the kind of photography Mr. Dodgson liked to take of young girls may find a moment of thought there)

BIG BAD WOLF REPORT –

CARLOTTA VALDEZ I WILL MAKE YOU HER – It wasn’t until The Doctor said out loud that the reason he was so keen on spending time with Clara is because she “remind[s] me of someone who died” that I realized that The Doctor is in a similar situation to Scottie in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.  Like in the film, Scottie loses Madeline after she falls from a high place.  The Doctor doesn’t fall into a depression over it (that was from the last one) but does become very excited about meeting her again, or at least another close approximation.  Clara’s bold statement that she won’t be a “replacement” for the other Clarae shows an independence that Judy never had in the film.  And just to keep the pot stirring, Scottie was the target of a con job, and Judy was only pretending not to know him, when in fact (SPOILERS) she had been posing as Madeline to use him as a patsy in her “death”, (END SPOILERS)

“She’s not possible” – But it’s clear that The Doctor is fascinated by Clara, not in the way Scottie was of Judy, but more as trying to figure out how she can appear at three moments of history.  It’s more than spatial genetic multiplicity, which is how Gwen Cooper looks so much like Gwyneth from The Unquiet Dead – here it seems much more like it’s the SAME person, with so many “Clarallels”.  He follows her through her whole life, from the moment her parents met to the time of her mother’s passing, which serves to reveal the secrets behind both Clara’s book, and the leaf which she called “page one”.  The two years she skipped in the progressive numbers on the book were 16 and 23 – 23 was the year the Maitland’s mom died, and she was simply too bust thinking about them to write in the book, and 16 was the year her own mom died.  This also serves to explain how she couldn’t bear to leave her friends on their own when their mom died.

NEXT TIME ON DOCTOR WHO – What’s big and hard and full of…OK, it’s a submarine, and there’s a bunch of very nervous Russians trying to stay alive against one The Doctor’s oldest enemies. A return to the Cold War, seven days hence.