What, Scientifically, Does Iron Maiden Have to Do with Disappearing Female Aviators?
I'm not sure what the attraction to video game comics is. If anything, it seems to me that the time for supplemental comic adventures of these characters would have been back in the early days of video games, when the computers were incapable of giving anything beyond a poorly rendered four color version of the story in the same sort of splash images that comic books still depend on. Now that the backstories and cut-scenes of video games have left the succession of static images behind with an often-miserable attempt at making two minute climax movies alongside Quicktime events, the comic book style of imagery seems a bit of a throwback.
This is not to dismiss their inherent value. Obviously, comics can and should tell stories about anything, and they can operate on a completely different part of the audience than a film. But it is to say that video games have made their choice--barring the casual game market or the random throwback, video games deliver backstory and plot in animated or filmed cutscenes when they can't do it in-game.
At least, that's my experience. I don't play a lot of video games, but the ones I do rarely look like the old
Ninja Gaiden series, where the chapter breaks were filled with wide panels of a ninja named Ryu, a weird FBI agent, and a girl who kept dying. I still remember those images, and while they utilized a bit of animation—mostly just dragging the images across the screen—they had a lot more in common with comics than they did the standard animation crossed with live action I find in current video games.
I realize that my attraction to the way
Ninja Gaiden II's in-game plot worked is probably tangled up with my love of the game at the time I played it. Although I'm certain that my memory for the quality of the game itself - as well as how its story was parceled out like crumbs after hours of work at what I remember being intensely difficult gameplay - is nostalgia-ridden, but finding a youtube video of that game's story sequences actually reinforces my positive opinion of it.
Despite some of the minor animation and the dots and whistles music score, the story is defiantly comic based--none of the in-game graphics are as strong as the cutscenes, and the players are all clearly defined in the same sort of cliffhanger-heavy tangled soap opera that makes a strong serialized super-hero comic exciting to wait on. While it's clearly hearkening to the sort of imagery found in both late 70's cop shows and ninja movie boilerplate, what that game ends up looking most like isn't a film, but a comic book. (Less interestingly so, it's actually reminiscent of the recent
Watchmen "motion comic", once again pointing to the overall silliness of a 2009 product utilizing decades old technology to no great artistic benefit.)
Anyway, that's all done now. Nowadays, you hire Liam Neeson for
Fallout 3 or the torture expert from the middle seasons of
24 for
Black, you get an HD camera and you shoot some bad dialog to sandwich in between missions. That's fine, I've got no complaint with that, and I think there will probably end up being a video game that has a great and moving story told in cutscenes--there could be one already, but I don't really care. Comics are my preferred version of time-killing--video games are just something that occasionally fills a few minutes here and there while I wait for Batman to punch something. (Hitler?)
Licensed video game comics have to do something that nobody seems to want, which is take the character of the video game--the one that any player is used to treating as his or her own self, their second skin, their place in the world--and directing it without the user's control. Isn't that
totally opposed to what the user wants? It's one thing to see the film version of
From Hell and be irritated that Johnny Depp is neither fat nor mustached--but when the main character of a story is someone that the reader is normally used to being in almost absolute moral and physical control of--it's quite another.
The solution sought out in Wildstorm's latest
Resident Evil comic, one of the wide range of licensed stories they are releasing following the apparent huge success of the similarly themed
Gears of War, is to focus the story on a couple of characters that apparently have no connection to the previous games at all. Whether they have any connection to the other arms of the
Resident Evil merchandising empire--the novelizations, the spin-off adventures, the Milla Jovovich films or the role-playing game--I'm not altogether sure, although it doesn't appear so. Either way, it isn't something that is dealt with in the comic, and I'd imagine that means it's sort of unimportant.
Maybe these characters--the abysmally-named "Holiday Sugarman" or the more tolerably dubbed "Mina Gere"--show up in one of the varied
Resident Evil games that have been released. I don't think it matters. They aren't the main characters of any games, so by using them Wildstorm skirts the problematic aspect of trying to entertain a reader who presumably comes to the
Resident Evil world not as an audience member, but as the normally active protagonist--unlike regular super-hero comics, where the line is strict and a fan's relationship with Batman extends to watching Batman do things, the
Resident Evil universe is one that's built its audience by serving as a playground of terror constructed and designed by game designers, but ultimately controlled by the gamer.
While they aren't the sort of "sandbox" games that allow the player a sort of disguised form of omnipotence that allows them to do anything, as long as "anything" has been coded in, my experience with these zombie kill-festivals are that the gamer is pretty much free to kill zombies however they'd like. The in-story aspects of the game are delivered as they're programmed, so yes, those are out of the player's control, but they're also periphery to the player's interest.
Resident Evil isn't a game where the story is the primary mover: killing zombies is.
So why do this, you'd probably ask?
(Okay, I hope you don't actually ask that, because the answer is pretty obvious: because video games reach a huge audience, popular video game franchises even more so, and no matter how many terrible video game movies are released, it's obvious that there's some kind of audience for these things. They didn't make three live-action films and one animated tale because it was a fun romp on the soundstage, they put this stuff out there because somebody buys it, and that somebody is enough to make it a profitable enterprise. There's no concern with brand dilution of video games the way there might be with other creative enterprises--regardless of how bad films of games like
Bloodrayne,
Wing Commander or
Super Mario Brothers are, it's had little to no negative effect on the games themselves in the same way that a Matthew McConaughey vehicle might have on the works of Clive Cussler. The games are the thing. The comic--bad or good--isn't going to hurt the franchise.)
It would be interesting to find out how many video game comics go this storytelling route, actually. To see how often a comic book--or, for that matter, the also-available paperback books that fill up these various universes--chooses to focus on characters that are only secondary to the primary gaming avatars. Wildstorm also publishes a comic that works to expand the world of the
Resistance: Fall of Man series, and that one also focuses on a non-player character, thus escaping the worry that the reader might find himself reading a comic book writer's version of how they choose to control
Resistance's main character, Nathan Hale.
It would be interesting, yes. Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily translate to being something that's all that entertaining. While it's become clichéd, possibly to the point of skull-bleeding irritation, to refer to a non-video game piece of fiction (book, comic or film) based on a video game as being akin to watching a clumsy moron struggle at the arcade, that's exactly what
Resident Evil ends up reading like. Video games are rife with bad dialog, and this comic is no different: "Holiday Sugarman" motivates himself and his team of soldiers (all of whom are, unsurprisingly, as incompetent as every team of space marines in every story space marines have ever been in) by quoting fictional metal singer "Maximus Killgore", the very real Amelia Earhart, and, for the hat trick, ancient Greek playwright Euripedes.
The art is serviceable comic art, suffering mostly due to the decision to have such a wide variety of beasties and creepies that it's difficult to grasp exactly what it is that the various characters are supposed to be fighting--from this first issue, the answer would appear to be absolutely everything that they come across that isn't them. Without heavy analysis, one can probably assume this is the case--my limited experience with
Resident Evil is that you're pretty much in the business of killing everything you see, and everything you see is gross. Here's the thing though: is this supposed to be horror? It's not scary. Is it supposed to be an action movie? It's not exciting. Is it supposed to be science fiction?
Or is it just supposed to be something that carries the same title that is carried on something that's really popular? Because if that's it, and that's all, than brother: you and I have already spent too much time thinking about it already. Next time, I think I'd rather just shoot these things myself.
Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
