Author: Michael Swaim

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Batman Digital Justice 🌭

The year is 199x, like a fucking Megaman game. The city seethes. Deep in its night-guts, young Pepe Moreno works feverishly, putting the finishing touches on a dark magnum opus he’ll unleash like a torrent, like a vision, like the future. It’s done. The comic book sits before him, complete, coiled like an ancient thing of power forged by some half-mad god. How to crown this King of Comics? How do you countenance the divine? Perchance with a pattern lifted from the side of a trapper keeper.

Look at that logo for a second. Every single thing about the word “Batman” that can be batted has been batted. There’s both a trademark AND a registration mark, like two great chains struggling to contain the whirlwind force of what happens when the Dark Knight meets cutting-edge technology. This is the future of comics. This is Digital Justice. Speaking of which, Digital Justice would be a good name for a really rough prostate exam. “Remember me, asshole?” BAM! Jam it right in there.

Hi! I’m Michael!

Today on the column, I got sick of writing about things my Dad gave me or left around the house, so I decided to track down a half-remembered comic from my childhood that I assumed I’d bought or shoplifted somewhere like a certified bad boy. When I found it as difficult to finger as a rough prostate exam, I eventually mentioned to my Dad, among other people, that I was looking for it. He quickly rifled through a stack of comics and handed it over. So today, we’re covering a half-remembered comic from a half-remembered childhood that it turns out my Dad gave me or else left around the house. Someday that well will run dry, but not now.

Batman: Digital Justice is what happens when someone’s nephew explains to them what computer graphics are and, through a series of tragic miscommunications, that results in an executive paying some visionary to make a proof-of-concept for how amazing new tech can eliminate the need for human workers. By using cutting-edge CG (ie, vector art, copy-and-pasting a lot, and applying a handful of Photoshop filters), its creator Pepe Moreno hoped to take Batman, and comics, to their next stage of evolution. This wasn’t just a comic book, it was a movement, and that’s not me saying that, it’s the book jacket.

Key lines in there include “took more than a year to create,” “produced on a Macintosh II with 8MB of RAM,” and “a true visionary…what we’ll ALL be into in ten years.” At this juncture, it’s important to me personally for you to understand that this is Pepe Moreno, posed in a shot he helped stage and with which he’s proud to be associated.

He’s the Joker, baby, with a little Criss Angel mixed in. And with that image, you’ve seen maybe 14% of all the art assets you will encounter in this fairly short comic that took one man over a year to create. Big red flags right off the bat (see what I did there? [see how I belabored it there?]):

1: Batman standing on a circuit board trapped by electricity, implying a story about Batman being sucked into a computer, the most rote take on CG possible.

2: The need to write “COMPUTER GENERATED” on the cover in police tape like it’s a warning.

“Look out! Step back, ma’am, it’s computer generated!” In this standalone comic book produced, illustrated, written and designed by Pepe Moreno, there is a two-page spread that’s a bio of Pepe Moreno. I can’t bring myself to read all the way through it, but I do like the additional image of him as B.J. Novak’s decapitated head floating in a void with two arrows he put there pointing at his own face.

The point is, Pepe really called his shot here. This comic’s going to be visionary, combine cutting-edge art tech in new ways, and pave the way for the kinds of comics we’ll all be reading by the year 20xx. On the other side of the book jacket that he also wrote himself, Moreno says the book will be compared to Brave New World, 1984, the works of Philip K. Dick, and Bladerunner. “Although it has elements in common with some of this,” opines Pepe, “it is something more.” Got it. I’m buckling the fuck in, whatcha got? Shit, it’s another two-page spread where a friend of yours says you’re a visionary, fuck me.

Literally all you need to glean from that is “DIGITAL JUSTICE marks the next chapter in our development.” Pepe isn’t just pointing at the stands, he’s showing the catcher a flipbook he did of himself getting homerun head from the pitcher’s wife.

Anyway, it’s a bunch of circuit board clipart stretched out with some CG blobs overhead:

It looks like Reboot season three, before they got the graphics upgrade and Enzo lost his eye. The next page is a Sonic the Hedgehog Level Start screen with “Chapter 1” written on it instead of “Green Hill Zone.”

And then, at long last, we get to see what it’s all about: humans. Humans rendered in such exquisite detail one must be careful not to fall in love with them.

Somehow, that female police officer’s shirt is showing underboob but also so tight that she has clear cleavage-valley. I feel like her underboob should be way more pancaked out, right? I mean are we using a Macintosh II here or aren’t we?!

Incidentally, please note that Mister Jones is playing a Batman arcade game, despite the fact that the whole plot of this comic is Batman has been completely forgotten by Gotham, and Gordon’s grandson has to revive his legend. My point is, it’s also a bad comic, but you can just trust me on that point. We’re here for terribly rendered underboob and we don’t gain anything by pretending that isn’t the case.

 

If underboob is copy-pasted infinitely, is it really more underboob? Is there a reason they’re using a thicc floppy disc in the distant future? These are questions for the great philosophers, not I. I am but a humble joke-merchant, idly comparing ’90s Batman comics to point-and-click adventure games because I can only tell the truth.

Tell me you don’t look at that image and want to click a little cursor to make the guys walk around and use items on things in sequence until the thirty-eighth item works for no logical reason. But while the wide shots are point-and-click, the gore is decidedly Duke Nuke ‘Em.

I guess even computers hate generating backgrounds, because about 60% of the panels in this book just have circuit board wallpaper behind them. And in case you haven’t caught on, almost every single art asset is juiced for at least two or three panels. That CTRL-C-V loop can become an addiction, man. Ask A.I. No, don’t, it learns more when you ask it stuff, just leave it alone.

 

As for the plot, it follows not-Batman for a whopping third of the story, and instead focuses on Jim Gordon’s grandson, which places this timeline somewhere in, like, 2060, which is pretty quick for us to turn the current Earth into a neo-dystopian surrealscape. But hey, I wouldn’t put it past us; we do a lot of dumb shit.

Gordon’s on the case of a bunch of rogue cop-bots equipped with no other way to interact with the world but a siren and a minigun, because cops. Young Boston Dynamics engineers surely drooled over this panel of what looks like a couple roombas with cigarette lighters on the bottom of them.

The writing is forever burdened by the need to be “futuristic” and prove it’s up with the new hip terms the teens are using, like “email,” whatever that is.

Naturally, it all goes down smoother with some made-up near future lingo as a chaser. What’s funny is without the future lingo, Gordon talks exactly like a ’70s beat cop.

Honestly, for me the use of “trank” isn’t as bad as the decision to spell “dammit” as “damnit,” which is what you say when a nit has wronged you. Blink-182 understood this, why not Pepe Moreno?

This mix of old-speak and new-speak climaxes with an altercation Gordon has with some young toughs in his apartment building hallway. Drown in this gabble of nonsense!

Edi-wa, pixel-puss, neo-surfers, gigo, drafts, beachheads… these terms crash upon my brain’s stupidity gland like a pixelated wave upon a shore of Neuromancer paperbacks. I hope Gordon beats the crap out of those punks, especially the one that looks like Billy Idol, although I pray he’ll go easy on the one that looks like Flea.

As it meanders its way through a pretty generic neo-noir story for the first half, the comic does trip over a few predictions that hit uncomfortably close to home, chiefly the one about a resurgence of laughable Nazis making life horrible for everyone while totally misinterpreting their own dogma like ignorant shitheads.

Of course, it also predicts that the greatest pop star of the future will be this woman Gata, so don’t go calling it Nostradamus.

Excuse me, are your titties wi-fi enabled? I was trying to log onto your crotch but it’s asking me for an assword. Yes, when in doubt, titties and circuit boards are the order of the day. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably wondering what the fuck any of this has to do with Batman. The answer comes in the form of a Joker Virus that secretly controls all aspects of the media, military, and politics of the future from behind a cadre of puppet strongmen.

It’s cold and calculating, patiently accruing power over centuries, managing the day-to-day operations of the city with a stern eye– you know, the Joker! Trying to force the Joker into the Big Brother mold was never going to be a perfect fit, but Digital Justice never thought beyond the wireframe Batman and Joker heads that Pepe whipped up one sleepless night. And I say “one” because I refuse to believe it took anyone longer than that to create these monstrosities.

But worse, much worse than the two CG faces that become the focus of the back half of the book, are Pepe’s attempts at rendering normal human faces, something I thought comics had already mastered long ago. Every single character in this book owns nadir-adjacent real estate in the uncanny valley.

Eventually Gordon dons a futuristic batsuit with the help of a Batman program Bruce Wayne authored before his death. Immediately realizing the point of the book and their lives, every other existing character then takes on the persona of someone from the Batman mythos – Gata becomes Catwoman, a young skate-ninja from Gordon’s building becomes Robin, and so on. The best iteration has to be a little C-3PO droid programmed to act like Alfred the butler, because O.G. Batman demanded his slaves be buried with him when he died. I choose to believe Alfred’s psyche was violently ripped from him and trapped in the machine.

Gordon takes on the responsibility of dismantling his corrupt society single-handedly via a series of low-level street skirmishes. He quite hilariously gets his ass handed to him by two of the floating servo-cops his first night out, and they proceed to STAB HIM THROUGH THE THROAT with electrified spikes of some kind. Batman sleeps it off and this is never brought up again.

Eventually he gets better, and we get a montage of news clips trying to establish that the spirit of vigilante justice is back in a big way. This is accomplished by hitting the paste button more often than a graphic designer trying to add diversity to a college campus brochure.

Ultimately, the new super team goes on a rampage, straight-up murdering the city’s power brokers in a move that can only have thrown the entire society into chaos. First there’s Kabuki-bot –

– then Jukebox Architect –

– and finally the mayor herself, who turns out to be a clone of Gata for no reason whatsoever. It adds nothing to the plot but needless suffering as our newly-anointed Catwoman watches the closest thing she has to family choke to death on green slime.

Digital Batman fights the Joker Virus, who ultimately – you guessed it – sucks Gordon into cyberspace, where it enslaves him with some spiffy digital lightning, then shows him Bruce’s key memory of watching his parents get shot.

This is neither here nor there, but Pepe always writes gunshot sounds with an extra M and it really bothers me, damnit. The fight between the two CG heads is largely a philosophical discussion, in the sense that shit your roommate drools at you at four in the morning after a night of Jäger bombs is a philosophical discussion. The Joker calls himself a true visionary and artist, just like Pepe, then proceeds to show us exactly the kind of art that produces.

That looks like Kid Pix threw up. It makes my eyes bleed little CG cones. Please stop, Joker Virus. I understand that you are the future, just please stop with the graphics.

Finally Alfred hits Batman’s head with some sweet Bat-code and all is well again.

And I can think of no more fitting a final image for Pepe Moreno’s cutting-edge, visionary take on the future of comic books than an old man cramming a floppy disc into a computer with a CRT monitor and terrible cable management. In the end, it was less Batman: Beyond and more one man’s fever-dream of a whole branch of terrible edgelord CG comics we could have had. Thank you Pepe. Thank you for showing us what might have been, if only we’d been a little more accepting, and had a little worse taste.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Dusty’s Rad Title, who is currently doing what we’re all going to be doing in 10 years: spending an inordinate amount of money on hot dogs.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Liberation and Let There Be Light 🌭

Do me a favor: close your eyes. I know, I know, but please, just trust me on this. Go ahead, close ‘em. Okay, are they closed? Hey, your mother sucks cocks in Hell and does a really bad job of it. Okay, good, just checking.

Now project into that space, if you will, the future; neither a time nor place, but the very concept itself…the way it makes you feel. For example, a Virtual Boy is from the past, but it is also a chunky plastic goggle that shows you red wireframes in the dusky dark, and that makes it futuristic as all fuck.

Are you imagining the future as hard as you can? Then we are imagining the same thing, for there is only one correct answer in all timespace to the question “what’s most future?” I speak of course of a CD so large its hole begs to be explored, a record so shiny with chrome you can see your face in it and you’re wearing those glasses that are just horizontal plastic bars painted neon. The LaserDisc. See it spinning there, in the showcase of your mind, rainbows playing across its vast unwieldy expanse. Now imagine that you are no longer imagining, and instead listening to me.

My friends, I speak today of a movie-watching medium so dope it has to be flipped halfway through like a record, and whose sleeves were so thin you couldn’t tell which one was which on a shelf. To 1993 me, they were the epitome of science fiction. Consider just the word: LaserDisc. Laser, obviously a strong futuristic offer along the lines of a “cyber” or “A.I.-written.” Then there’s disk, but spelled in a different way, a way they might use when all the Ks run out in, hm, I don’t know, the future perhaps?

This brings me to my new recurring column-within-a-column, LASERDISCS IN THE RAIN, comprising a hodgepodge of memories and meanderings surrounding things in my Dad’s LaserDisc collection I watched as a child. Regular readers (hi Dad!) will know that this whole column is basically for his benefit. I crave his aloof, icy approval.

Hey, here’s one now!

When I was eight, my father would take us on a trip from San Diego to Los Angeles several times a year on what he unironically called a “pilgrimage.” We’d pile into his SUV with three other very weird guys and hit up four spots: Amoeba, Fry’s, the Music Trader where they shot the beginning of the Brütal Legend video game, and fucking Ken Crane’s LaserDisc.

There at KC’s, in a room smelling exactly like a Circuit City, awash in looping trailers on CRTVs stationed throughout, we’d spend hours flipping through Discs like neanderthal hunters of antiquity and pile our pelts high in victory. “Oh look, Wayne’s World 2,” we’d say, veritably frothing at the loins.

On one of many such occasions, once home Papa called me and my brother into the media room for whiskey sours and cigars and we rifled through our bags to find something to watch. Naturally, my brother and I, being young and as yet naive, gravitated to baubles and trifles, your “We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story”s as it were. Dad, on the other hand, wasn’t fucking around. Using his car key to slice open the shrinkwrap on a preem new LD, he proceeded to blow our minds with a kind of media I hadn’t even known existed: COMPUTER GRAPHICS GENERALLY.

Yes, burned onto these wheels of yore, from a time of past-yet-to-come, was the most futuristic thing possible: low–poly jams from the very earliest days of CG. Literally the only other computer graphics I’d been exposed to were, like, Virtua Fighter 1 and the Pixar short that’s just a snowglobe.

It’s important that younger people understand, computer graphics were so impressive to us in the early ’90s that we would make whole LaserDiscs full of anything with computer graphics in it, just whole compilations of NOW! That’s What I Call Computer-Generated!

Many was the Sunday we’d sit there on the black leather couch, freshly puked out from the whiskey and cigars, and watch our way through an entire playlist of shit like:

● POV: Frog Jumps into Radiator and Dies

● The Video they Show in Line for a Six Flags Ride

● POV: Cat Jumps into Blender and Dies

● Spheres – A Study in Texture-Mapping

● Spanish Cleanser Commercial with CG Mosquito

● Japanese Computer Chip Commercial

● POV: Small Meowing Man Jumps into Blender

● Circles – Origins of the Sphere

Naturally, there would also be the occasional music video, but only from artists so forward-thinking that they should be living on the freakin’ moon, if indeed they aren’t (I haven’t looked into it in every case). For the rest of our time today, let us dive deeply into a crystal-clear pool of Mike Oldfield and lap up the sweet nectar of the Pet Shop Boys, pictured here as colorful blobs, which is, let’s be honest, what a lot of early CG can be described as.

The other thing a lot of early CG can be described as? CONES-HAVING, baby. Here we see the Pet Shop Boys singing about sexual freedom as their disembodied heads fly by on golden wings in conical dunce caps, and guess what they’re poopin’? Here’s a hint: you put ice cream in them.

When you need to copy and paste a lot of stuff to prove your computer works but it can’t handle pyramids? Cones. For the computing wizards of 1993, making the colorful Pet Shop Boys face-blobs poop out cones was but a trice. Behold!

I’ll see that miracle and raise you the Pet Shop Boys as neon Party Jesuses glorifying several lightly textured spheres with the cones they poop. This is the OFFICIAL VIDEO for this song.

Fuck it, here’s CONES pooping cones. Have you been New Aged yet? Are you not coned?

But I see that you’re discerning consumers, unimpressed by cones alone. I know what you’re thinking: the true benchmark of computer generated imagery is that perfect form, the human body. Six hundred muscles, enough vascular material to stretch around the Earth, lousy with bones, the human body has long been the standard by which artistic renderings are judged. To that end, we the Pet Shop Boys proudly present you this tube made of gray potato chips filled with blobby stick-men.

If you’re not picking up on the subtle theme of videos like this, it’s “We purchased computer graphics.” At no point does a narrative any more coherent than that surface. And yet, all the CG videos from this brief period share a shocking number of elements. Case-in-point: Mike Oldfield’s head presented here as a colorful blob pooping cones.

In case you’re not familiar with Oldfield, he’s the chap who brought us “Tubular Bells,” better known as the Exorcist theme. In the late’ 80s and early ’90s he was busily dismantling any and all creep cred he may have earned by producing soft-rock dreamscapes with the exact vibe of a Lisa Frank dolphin Trapper Keeper. The premise of “Let There be Light” seems to be “What if stuff flew? Wouldn’t that just be swell?”

Heck, everyone’s flying! We got cherubs hanging out on a couple lightly textured spheres, presumably just about to diarrhea some serious cone-age.

We got those same cherubs but grown into adult angel-men, now sporting wings too structurally unsound to achieve flight but majestic enough to flabbergast a vagrant.

We even got giant flying manta rays being ogled by a guy repairing a plane, as if to say “Wait, maybe fly? Maybe that’s what planes should do? Thanks for the inspo, mantas!”

And of course, there’s the issue of the rogue Pet Shop Boy:

Quick! Lash the beast to the Earth lest he drown us all in his powerful stream of cone-shit! I kid. Actually, this was just one of many subtle references to the longstanding Oldfield-Boys beef, the most notorious battle in early ’90s West Coast New Age. Tragically, the feud wouldn’t end until the infamous Yanni and Enya hits, now believed to have been carried out by that indigenous guy in the Enigma song that goes “Ayyuh haiiii oh haiwaiyuh.”

Not to be outdone, Oldfield got his own uncredited indigenous guy, who does a dance that makes dragons fly out of the sewers, surprising a work crew. This is the OFFICIAL VIDEO for this song.

Ultimately, the angel-men decide to stand on the flying dragons to reach their beloved skies again, then tool around downtown a while before crashing into a skyscraper. Remember, this was 1994, so no offense was intended except to your taste.

Another wonderful thing these early-days CG music videos do is feed you imagery of people being absolutely fucking amazed by lightly textured spheres, in case you didn’t know that was the level of awe and delight you were supposed to be experiencing.

Honestly, if you aren’t sitting there reading this article with your eyes closed and your jaw on the fucking floor, I can’t help you, and neither can any number of cubes, even this many:

Oh, right, and you can open your eyes now. You passed! This was one of many trials that will determine if you are ready to join the Swaim Swarm, where we’re taking back our masculinity one paint-your-own-ceramic at a time. As for closing out this edition of LASERDISCS IN THE RAIN, all I can say is that my heart still aches for that simpler time, a time when all it took to impress me was to have a very serious black dude roll aside to reveal bikes in the ocean.

Next time on LASERDISCS IN THE RAIN, I get sidetracked and end up doing a capsule review of Rock-a-Doodle on Hi8 Tape, then the glue in the discs starts to rot so now all our movies have static in them. Coooooooones!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Badger, the winged cone-pooping sphere who represents the human soul!

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Bad Mojo 🌭

Look, I’m not a complicated man (although “man” is strong, lately I’ve been trying to discover a sense of gender identity inside me that really rings true, and wondering if in fact I’m one who doesn’t feel gendered at all, in the conventional sense, and what the appropriate pronouns might be for someone in that boat). Simple. I only operate in two modes: fucking and upsetting. Perusing all the topics I soon plan to force down your eye-gullets to harvest the sweet foie gras of your pop-culture-ruined livers, I was struck by the fact that every single one falls into one of those two buckets, and indeed at least eight of them qualify for both, like some impossible dream-shape able to fall into two buckets at once. And while I don’t apologize for my two-track mind, I do apologize for it. It’s a sorry not sorry situation. Let’s play a cockroach game now! Do you get to fuck it? Only if you choose the correct romance options throughout!

Bad Mojo came out in 1994 and was a way for Pulse Entertainment, founded by Bill Woodward and Young Harvill, to show off some of their proprietary animation tools. It’s the only game they ever made, as they instead went on to make stuff that makes the Internet work, like embedded web video and publishing tools. In short, boring. So who’s idea was it, I wonder, to try and sell their new tech to a bunch of other software developers by making a game where the art assets include a dead rat filled with razor blades?

My money’s on Harvill, because he has a more interesting name. Incidentally, that’s the same reason I know Sirhan Sirhan is guilty but have my doubts about John Booth. The official description of this game starts with the sentence “Roger was about to do something bad. Unfortunately, he can’t remember what it was because he has been transformed into a cockroach.” It’s so bad he can’t remember what it was, you guys. This game posits that being turned into a sentient cockroach was the preferred alternative to whatever it was “Roger did bad.”

It also calls itself “Kafkaesque,” but they mean it only in the sense that Kafka has a story about a cockroach, which is kind of like calling the O.J. Simpson trial Kafkaesque because it’s a trial. You’re not wrong, you’re just introducing eight-year-old Swaim to concepts like karmic reincarnation and what it is to be eaten alive. Bad Mojo opens with a monologue from a disaffected loser who sounds like a cross between the new Riddler and an incel Tim McVeigh complete with a mysterious truck on its way to a state building in the pounding rain.

Oops! Did we just zoom in past a CG window to reveal some full-motion video shit? I think we did! This is some Night Trap Tully Bodine Sewer Sharks shit right here, bitches! I urge you to comprehend the fact that this game was made to prove the tech for taking real photographs and putting them into games as discrete objects that could respond to game logic. It’s similar to how games like Mortal Kombat and Pit Fighter operated at the time. So these guys were trying to show off their amazing video-gaming-hybrid technology, and their second thought was “we should take some pictures of dead rats and stuff, I bet that’s cheap.” Their first thought, of course, was “hybrid? Why, that reminds me of a story about a man turned into a cockroach I once imagined and definitely jerked off to!”

Bill and Young immediately reveal their true colors as our anti-hero Roger pauses both his plan to rob a bar and desperate need for a different haircut to pick up a cat and look at it very sternly while his inner monologue says “Now I was in control.” We get it, killing animals gets you off! Us too but you’re not supposed to talk about it!” is what I imagine you saying. The collective you, as well as the specific person reading this sentence now. Hello.

After Roger straight-up fondles his stolen money…

…he’s quite predictably struck by purple lightning from a magic locket his mother gave him that’s carved to look like a cockroach.

You, as him, ew, then wake up metamorphosed into a roach and transported to the little system of tunnels with Bioshock valves but cockroach-sized that we all keep under the floorboards of our house. Seriously, who is that for? Even in Bad Mojo, cockroaches can’t use valves.

The music is, incidentally, so heavy on the bass that YT autocaption thought it was people applauding. That’s how you know this roach fucks. Speaking of which, it’s time for Romance the Roach Question #1! Please keep your own score and tally at the end.

What’s a legit okay pickup line for a cockroach?

A. “It’s a miracle I’m not up in those spiracles.”

B. “Is your eye compound? Because I just came. Pound?”

C. “I’m like Andy Cercus, cuz I’ll gollum that pussy. Cercus is spelled c-E.”

D. “I am a cockroach with sentience and who can speak. Hello.”

E. “My coxa ‘bout to get up in your labial palp.”

So since you can’t use valves, you must instead set off on a quest through a series of levels that, I cannot stress enough, are collages of photographs of dirt and grime and the death and decay we all must someday face. You encounter awesome stuff like rusty drains, cigarette butts and bottle caps. Do you want to buy our FMV backend games production software now?

As if that wasn’t upsetting enough, every time you talk to an NPC roach you’re treated to a closeup shot of a real cockroach.

All the roaches are mystical and speak in cryptic rhymes and snatches of visions, like Rafiki if he helped you do stuff like start the pilot light on a stove and trick a rat into a mousetrap.

Ah yes, “Music,” that’ll help this go down easy. Speaking of the Lion King, here’s Bad Mojo’s equivalent of Pride Rock.

“Behold, my son. Soon you will hold dominion over all the adhesive touches.”

So anyway

OH SHIT IT WASN’T DEAD IT WASN’T DEAD! Yes, unlike almost all other games of this nature, Bad Mojo featured a limited number of lives and tons of ways to get killed, all of which were both designed as jump scares and to give young Swaim as disturbing a nightmare as possible. Fun Fact: my mom took Night Trap away from us because she heard it had scantily clad ladies being abducted by men in it, which is not untrue. Bad Mojo is the video game standing beside me at Night Trap’s grave to whom I whisper “She took the wrong one.”

Here’s a rat skeleton being used as a bridge, which is a great example of basic meat-and-rat-skeleton puzzle design. You also traverse a roach motel by using the still-struggling bodies of your fellow roaches as death-bridges, which I believe is either the fourth or fifth circle of Hell. I forget, but it’s the circle with all the advertising executives.

Through a series of flashbacks unlocked by interacting with certain objects, you come to develop empathy for your landlord, which is a feat that was apparently fanciful even at that time. The first of these memories is when his wife died in childbirth. Okay, grim, but that can be shown a lot of different ways. What do you think, twitching rubber baby with surgery being done on it? I do, I do think that.

This flashback also reveals that your landlord’s name is fucking Mr. Potato and that he overacts just as hard as Roger, something they can now bond over.

You also find out more about Roger through found objects and learn both how scuzzy he is and that, deep down, he’s not such a bad guy. You know, story.

But who gives a shit about that? Here is a real photograph of a dead cockroach in some mashed potatoes.

NOW do you want to buy our FMV game software?!

No? But you wanna answer another question to hopefully get you closer to banging this cockroach? Deal!

How do you tempt a roach?

A. “Hey kid, want to eat a dead body?”

B. With a pile of shit, just human shit.

C. By opening your wings up and pumping that tergal gland, G.

D. I don’t know, probably the last one because I can tell from context that the tergal gland is something.

E. Yeah, D.

No, you’re all wrong, the answer is to roofie your landlord’s beer and listen to him say the saddest thing anyone’s ever said out loud in a room alone.

This causes him to spill his loose change when he passes out, see, which lets you use a coin to form a circuit to make a radio work so the ghost of his dead wife can tell you that flesh is only a shell, a pale reflection of the abyss within.

Things get extremely Kafkaesque when three discarded wedding rings form a Triforce of bitter regret and open a magical portal to the back of a refrigerator.

That naturally segues into watching a decapitated fish spew cockroaches where its blood should be, but there is also blood as well.

The dead wife appears once more to reveal that you ARE the son that killed her just before you were going to try to murder your landlord/father by staging a gas leak, and hits us with the moral of the story: “Love can flourish even in the soil of death, and this is the key to life eternal.” You know, like Kafka might posit.

Which of these things is the least Kafkaesque?

A. You wake up and you’re a swan.

B. You wake up and you’re a human but you were a swan before.

C. You go on trial for metamorphosing a stranger.

D. I think Stranger was Camus, actually.

E. Michael, you should try harder than this.

I could spend all day pulling horrors out of the Bad Mojo sack like Satan Clause and dispersing them to the children, but I don’t want to gild the urinal cake. Suffice to say the rest of the game is a cavalcade of mystical nonsense, suicide, disgust, and a talking plate-clock haunted by your mom.

In the end, instead of blowing up the bar and killing your sleeping Dad, you turn off the gas and are rewarded by being made human again so you can make up for lost time. Just kidding! You let the old bastard burn, get arrested, plead insanity and spend the rest of your days in a straitjacket trying to kill yourself but you can’t even do that because the walls are padded and they feed you with a funnel.

Okay, last chance, NOW do you want to buy our software? Maybe I’m being overly grim. There is a good ending you can get, in which the roach bravely sacrifices his life to warn the landlord of impending danger. Of course, since he and his money are destroyed in the explosion, the landlord never finds out about his son and ends up homeless because of the debt incurred in trying to rebuild.

There’s another ending where they find out they’re father and son and escape to Belize together with the money, but that one also reveals that the kid’s full name is “Hitler Potato,” so I don’t think we’re moving a lotta units here on this software deal.

That’s just my opinion as a comedy writer commenting on its successful conclusion twenty-nine years after the fact.

Now let’s tally up those scores!

0 – 2 – BAD MOJO: You remain a cockroach and Will Smith steps on you to taunt an alien.

3 – 4 – MEDIUM MOJO: You got more points than the quiz implies are available. Good job!

5 – 6 – GOOD MOJO: You wonder how it’s possible to tally up scores when it was never revealed which answers are correct or how many points each answer is worth. You lose.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Thomas Cavazos, who answered all of Swaim’s sexual roach questions correctly and has earned a terrible prize.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Jan Ĺ vankmajer’s Alice 🌭

Well met, my precious hotdog flavored readers! Call me a chocolate starfish, because I’m about to make your biscuit limp.

“I’m late! I’m late! For a very important AAAAAAAAAAAH!” Yes, in a radical and unforeseen pivot, I’ve Swaimaranged you yet again by promising to discuss nothing but sex and then slapping you with prescription-strength boner-killer mid-thrust! Damn-that’s-a-lotta-hyphens! Sorry for the jerkaround, but the only thing that overpowers my horniness is my urge to be a certified Bad Boy. What am I rebelling against? Whatcha got? But also mostly this:

That’s a still from a 1988 film that reimagines Alice in Wonderland, the classic tale of a child’s imagination and also whatever the fuck that thing I just showed you was. It was set like a pack of hyenas upon our misbegotten world by the unholy hands of a dark wizard known only as Jan Ĺ vankmajer.

Ĺ vankmajer is a Czech stop-motion animator, filmmaker, theatre director, all-around weirdo, and man whose last name wears a little hat. With this banger, originally titled “Something from Alice,” he perfected an art form so cool and accessible that no one’s ever replicated it before or since except right after having sex with a corpse they tortured. I’m talking about STOP-MOTION TAXIDERMY BABY, and as perhaps its greatest only practitioner, Jan has much to teach us. Primarily what going mad must feel like.

As will become a recurring theme in this column, I was exposed to Jan Ĺ vankmajer’s work by my dad, because my childhood was a very specific kind of dojo preparing me for this job and this job only. At the tender age of four, FUCKING FOUR, I was cordially invited into the sitting area for tobacco pipes and gin. Once we had supped and discussed the news of the day, dear old Dad put on a laserdisc of what he called “an Alice in Wonderland movie.” What then transpired has shaped me from that day forth, or at least the part of me that likes to find small animals in the woods and make them wear human teeth. It is an “Alice in Wonderland movie” only in the sense that the My Lai Massacre was “a game of hide and seek.”

Let’s pause here to note that as a stop-motion movie, the creation of this piece of singular art required touching and wiggling all of the taxidermied animals’ little parts around thousands of times an hour. Like, this guy has quite possibly handled more dead animals than anyone in human history outside of Bob Barker (spaying and neutering just wasn’t enough for you, was it Bob?! I hope they nail your ass someday). My four-year-old self also enjoyed imagining Jan laboriously wedging glass eyes into each and every one of their heads, because he didn’t like to sleep very much.

Now that I’m an adult and know a bit about how filmmaking works, I’m honestly even more fascinorrified. For each of these monstrosities, I know there’s a pile of discarded animal parts and stitched-together homunculi that didn’t make the final version. This is the only movie in existence whose cutting-room floor was a bunch of loosely intermingled bits of what were once living things, and also scraps of film. Jan doesn’t make deleted scenes, he makes missing pets. “Sorry Timmy, Scout isn’t going to be around anymore. He went to a big farm upstate to be dismantled for a children’s horror movie.”

This movie isn’t even nightmare fuel, because once you’ve seen it you don’t sleep, you merely close your eyes and relive Jan Ĺ vankmajer’s Alice each night in a mindless fugue-state. What made Jan do these awful, awful things? My theory, without looking into it even a little bit, is that he was shunned growing up because his name is only two letters away from “Spankmajor.” Only the animals of the woods would play with little Jan, and when they passed away he missed them, so he decided they would be thrice immortalized: once as a stuffed animal, once on film, and then again at the one-man after party in a cave near the freeway where you know he had sex with that rabbit.

But please don’t think of my dad as the villain in this tale, even though I previously admitted to him owning an imported laserdisc, which most these days consider a beating offense. The true miscreant is whoever let their human daughter stumble through what could only have been a baffling ordeal. The movie’s only actor, she is also shot in stop-motion, which means making this, for her, was a process of being meticulously posed by a strange man with his dead animal collection more times than Milhouse had to shoot his scene in the Radioactive Man movie.

See, Dad?! We could have been watching The Simpsons and shit! But no, you had to ruin me, just like Alice’s parents ruined her by giving her over to the machinations of one who has seen beyond the veil and returned to tell us there is nothing after death but diamond dust and the screams of those still dissolving. Here’s Alice crawling across a cracked wasteland so she can painfully cram herself into a tiny drawer:

Here she is being turned into a doll…

… and if this doesn’t replace that meme of the monkey puppet looking to the right I don’t know what possibly can:

Later she becomes not-a-doll again by ripping out of herself chest-burster style and it’s somehow much much worse:

Here is a jar with some bread with some nails in it:

Alice actually finds a lot of jars with a mix of food and metal shavings in them, because Ĺ vankmajer didn’t think the people who put fentanyl-dipped razorblades in candy on Halloween were going hard enough.

The funny thing is, those people don’t actually exist, but Jan does. He’s out there somewhere, wiggling stuff around and taking pictures of it, flensing squirrel skulls and buying glass eyes by the sack. What was crafty on the set of this movie, herringbones and sawdust? Jellied aspic? Hotdog flavored water? All good guesses, but it was actually big bowls of scabs. Got that off of IMDB* trivia.

Here is a flat of eggs, each of which hatches a little (real) rat skull that then slithers away on a trail of its own fetid yolk:

One soon gets the impression that the filmmaker didn’t read Alice in Wonderland so much as beat himself in the groin so hard with a hardbound copy that he hallucinated and dictated everything he saw to an assistant who wrote it down and then hanged themselves in a fit of insanity. Here is Alice being screamed at by the corpse of a frog lacquered and dressed up like Beethoven. FYI, the scream is the recorded sound of a baby crying.

I think that scene is actually supposed to mirror the Mad Hatter tea party sequence, but it’s a little hard to tell because the action is a frog slapping its hideous tongue around and busting up all the china like some kind of reverse Qin Shi Huang (fuck you, look it up, that’s how jokes work).

They do later have some tea, and by “they” I mean the velveteen rabbit that didn’t find a happy home plus a wooden man with three clocks nailed to his chest who refuses to let you see his eyes.

Not to say that the entire movie is just a random cavalcade of off-topic horrors. Ĺ vankmajer presents his own versions of Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, the Queen of Hearts as a literal playing card, and the caterpillar, who is played by two glass eyes and dentures inside a sock that was definitely cummed in and looks like a prototype mockup for the baby from Eraserhead.

And of course, no retelling of Alice in Wonderland would be complete without everyone’s favorite scene, when the white rabbit joins forces with three bone-creatures including a dead pregnant fish:

My point is (and kudos to the stalwart few of you who masturbated to this column anyway), I wasn’t the only casualty of this movie, although I was the most important and internet-famous one. Alice herself is left profoundly twisted by her experience, as showcased in the final line of the film.

Is that…is that how Alice in Wonderland ends? Does she decapitate the rabbit? I always thought they ate crumpets and learned to fear the Christian God.

None of this shit would be nearly as scary if Ĺ vankmajer weren’t actually talented, which he definitely is. His shot selection and attention to detail is awesome, it’s just pretty weird that he’s chosen to do this with it. It’s like a world-renowned theoretical physicist designing a perpetual motion machine that only slathers mannequin parts in mayonnaise.

In other words, I love it, and you should go watch it right now for free on Youtube. Considering the original Alice in Wonderland was written because Lewis Carroll thought British children needed a dose of pure imagination, I think he’d like Jan’s take, especially the shot where Alice looks like the girl from The Ring.

Anyway, you now have seven days to live. I’ll see your tortured corpse in two weeks for my next column, on the topic of The Muppet Babies performed by cadaver marionettes!

* Insane Madness Death Batshit

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Rhia, the only Hot Dog Supreme who has a plan to defeat all of these little skeleton monsters. Vote Rhia!

Categories
FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: XXXenophile 🌭

That’s right fuckers, ya boy is back, with the all the attitude of a kid in a music video telling their dad Meat Loaf to fuck right off and die please, Dad, could you do that for me huh?! Regular doggers will recall that my last piece was about pleasuring myself to VR sex games. Well, this one is about pleasuring myself to comix, long thought to be the VR of last millennium. Brace yourself for a bi-monthly (the good kind) NSFW Swaim column that is exclusively about products for horny people who can’t get laid. Hey, here’s one now!

If you know Phil Foglio’s artwork, it’s probably from the Magic: The Gathering cards that you’d trade away to your friend because the art kind of sucked. I’m not sure who at Wizards of the Coast Phil was fogling, but his decidedly cutesy style always felt out of place for a game about epic-level spellcasters shooting plains at each other’s swamps or whatever. They were less “fantasy book cover”, more “painting on a commemorative juice glass.”

Hey, here’s one now!

As a kid I didn’t know what “basal” meant, and I guess I still don’t. Tied up? The Grimace tied up? The Grimace and his friends tied up for some BDSM shit? Isn’t “thrull” that industrial pink slime McNuggets are made of? Also, please note that Mr. Foglio signs all of his card art real big and proud, so when his Mom magnets this sucker to the fridge for all to see, people will know what the score is.

For comparison, here are two variants of the same card:

Although the BDSM Grimace concept seems to be repeated here, I think I’ve made my point. Growing up, I would always marvel at Phil’s cards like one might at a puffin chosen to throw out the first pitch of the World Series. They’re clearly not suited to the task at hand, but it’s adorable that they’re giving it a shot. Speaking of the task at hand and giving it a shot, let’s get to the porno. Mana is far from the only thing being tapped today, my incel friends.

Because if you thought Phil’s art was out of place on a Magic card, you’re going to love the stuff he drew that he thinks will make you orgasm. For example:

That is a pretty cute drawing of an alien explaining how each of his two belly-button penises has a separate function (if you count the one that expels his breeding scent, natch). That image is just one of hundreds from Foglio’s multipart comix series, XXXenophile, which I found just sitting there on my Dad’s bookshelf like it wouldn’t warp my perception of what’s erotic for the rest of my life. Did I cum to this image when I was fourteen? Who’s to say? Whom amongst us can recall? What I remember most is the friends I made along the way, chiefly my penis.

The concept underpinning this Foglio folio of imbroglio is that every short story features human people boning or being boned by something…”other.” Rather than being xenophobic, we’re going the other way, get it? It’s a pretty simple premise for stringing together a bunch of fuck comix, and one that dead-ends at having sex with a dog just as quickly as you might imagine.

He’s just…so ANGRY. Let’s not clutch our pearl necklaces here, though, folks, especially because in this instance they are probably made of cum. If you’ll notice, the dog fucking this woman can talk and also loves her. Does that make it okay to draw and publish and buy and leave out for your pubescent son to find? Allow me to answer that question with a man fucking a centaur which turns him into a centaur so he can fuck again but with a horse’s dick. I think the kids call “reverse cowgirl.”

You can tell they really love each other because they’re both willing to lie during sex, see. The guy pretends he likes the feel of his girlfriend’s voluminous horse-vagina by mustering an enthusiastic “Yeah! It feels–different, but good! Yeah, good!” Then after they reverse roles, she politely pretends his massive dong isn’t tearing apart her insides with a hearty “AAaaaaHH!!!”

Other XXXenophilic interludes that will be rattling around my brain until the day I die include someone fucking a broom, someone fucking a robot, someone fucking an incomprehensible cthulu-monster, someone fucking a bunch of tribbles from Star Trek, a robot fucking someone, and someone fucking a panther, which is kind of like the dog one again, I suppose. Not until Titane would we again see one artist so dedicated to the age-old credo: “Let’s see, what else can I fuck, what else can I fuck…?”

XXXenophile’s answer to that question is the same as Kevin Spacey’s to the question “Who is Kayser Soze?” By that I mean both that it’s clearly just based on stuff Phil Foglio saw while idly looking around his office and that it’s now widely considered a sex crime. The sheer number of sentient objects at play leaves the series wide open for a PiXXXar joke that a comedian far hackier than I can make someday should they find the time.

If you’re looking for further reason to cancel Phil, he draws all the ladies basically alike, but it’s hard to tell if that’s latent sexism at work or limited drawing ability. That said, like most old media, XXXenophile does feature some problematic stuff, most notably relying on the tired old trope of Mexicans as noseless frog-men who eat you out with their dozen wriggling tongues.

Through adult eyes, what’s honestly funniest about the series is that by Volume Four, Phil has run out of ideas to the degree that most of the stories are either repeats or about normal humans having a threesome and other such vanilla bullshit. I mean sure, even late-series XXXenophile has some innovative stuff, like these two chicks fully inhaling a double-ended dildo with their asses to impress their coach at the Analympics, who is also their father…

…but the bulk of the tales descend into mundanity. Run-of-the-mill crap like fucking a demon on the front lawn of the White House became the norm, and the series, having lost its way, was forced to wind down.

By Volume Five, wherein a bunch of dudes gangbang the shit out of Shiva, they were even printing stories with empty speech bubbles. The XXXenophiliacs themselves were now expected to write their own dialog to then read back and jerk off to, presumably. The resulting comics, like nine-year-olds playing MAD Libs but slightly less filthy, are objectively awful and should be inflicted upon nobody.

Hey, here’s one now!

So that’s the end of the article, but again, PLEASE tell your local comic shop that you demand more XXXenophile. I’m sure if we make enough noise, word will get back to Phil and we can get this seminal series back on its feet. Naturally, I’m referring to that rubber foot with the vagina on the bottom. Enjoy the refractory period between this article and my next column, a deep dive into goatse.

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Neku104, who is programmed to destroy all Fascist Zeppelin Peg-bots.