Since Action Comics released “Superman” in the 1938, super powered beings who fight crime and rescue damsels in distress have been an integral part of American culture. Today comic book sales rake in close to 10 million dollars, and the box office numbers for super hero movies average 300 million. With all of the lore and drama of these heroes penetrating our lives, why hasn’t anyone ever tried to be one in real life? That is the question that teenager Dave Lizewski asks his friends in Kick Ass. What follows is a light hearted, yet all too real look at the reasons why you shouldn’t try this at home.

Kick Ass was originally a comic created my Mark Millar in 2008. The comic was unique as not only did his main character not have any super powers, but he rather sucked at the whole crime fighting business to begin. The comic launched with a viral campaign with a YouTube video of a costumed hero defending some poor sap. Later a MySpace page was launched telling viewers that Millar was writing a comic book based on the vigilante’s adventures. Comic book stores that sold the most copies of Kick Ass were actually featured in the later issues and even a charity auction was held to determine the name of Kick Ass’ secret identity. The winner, Dave Lizewski chose his own name. (Figures. I woulda). The series lasted only eight issues and fans everywhere were hungry for more. Scriptwriting for the film began almost immediately and rumors have it that Millar plans a sequel that will be released in 2011.

The movie centers on Dave Lizewski, (played by Aaron Johnson) your typical geek teenager; he spends most of his days reading comics and fantasizing about his busty math teacher. One day Dave asks his geek friends why no one has ever tried to be a real life super hero. They laugh at him and explain that such a person would definitely get his ass kicked. Dave continues to explore his fantasy by purchasing a green scuba suit and parading around as a masked vigilante named Kick Ass. However his first foray into crime fighting ends quite poorly and Dave is sent to the hospital for major surgery.

In a way, his misfortunes give him some new advantages to fighting crime. He now has several metal plates throughout his body (To which he gleefully compares to Wolverine) and his nerve ending have been dulled. Dave also gains the sympathy of the fetching and longtime crush Katie Deauxma, who is surprisingly interested in him. Katie thinks he is gay and she wants to take care of him. Dave goes along with this in an effort to spend time with her.

Bound and determined to be a crime fighter, Dave dons his costume once again and hits the streets. One evening while trying to rescue a cat, Kick Ass stumbles onto a mugging. Armed with two steel pipes he manages to fight off the attackers while onlookers grab video and pictures. One such video is uploaded to YouTube and quickly gains over 4 million hits. Excited about his new found fame, Dave sets up a MySpace page for his alter ego and soon Kick Ass is an overnight sensation.
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Welcome to another edition of TF Flashback, where we revisit some old content from our early years on the web. In this series, we’re reposting issues of an old webcomic we used to do that “chronicled” John, Moe and Hilden’s year of living together in college.

1125 Fremont #5-Upstairs

Trying to steer things away from the Dave jokes, I decided it was time to introduce the last of us in this issue. I’m not sure why I felt the need to give John a build-up. I guess the joke just came to me and I went with it.

I remember liking this one a lot. In fact, it may go down as one of my personal favorites. One of the things I struggled with in being a “web-comic guy” was the weekly writing of a four panel joke. I just never felt I was very good at it and most of the material ended up going for the cheap laugh or the outrageous sight gag.

This issue, however, I felt I had written a joke that had an actual set-up and a payoff in a nice visual and comedic way. I freely admit that it’s not the funniest thing in the world but it was a milestone in comic creation for me.

When I look back at this one, I do notice how much I was trying to figure out the look of the characters. For as much as I liked the joke, I remember hating the look of the Hilden character. The beard always looked too “elfish” for me. Anyway, it would take a LONG time before I was happy with the design of the characters and they wouldn’t be drawn consistently for a good year or more.

Oh, and this was my first real foray into drawing chicks. I was pretty proud of my dreaded out lady in the third panel at the time.

1125 Fremont #4: Trick or Treat

WARNING: For reasons that will become obvious when you hit the jump, this one is NSFW.

From the original blog post at TeamFremont.com:

“Yeah, so this one is a bit over the line. I know this.
However, it seems that our motto here at TF is:

‘If you’re easily offended, you should really be somewhere else right now.’

I honestly don’t want you to leave, but I understand. Seeing a guy in a penis costume can have that effect. What can I say? We found it funny. “

Okay, so this one still makes me laugh. This was an idea that just popped into my head at one point and was so outlandish that I just had to use it. Please don’t ask why a guy in a cock outfit popped into my head. I just don’t want to go down that road.

Anyway, this is one of those “Dave is Gay but Not” jokes that I feel actually worked the way we had envisioned the whole thing. Completely over the top and funny because of how in your face it was. I also remember laughing at the thought of Moe dressing up as Brian Boitano because he’s the last person who would idolize a figure skater. As always, any time we get the opportunity to take a jab at each other around here, we do it.

The more I think about this comic, the more I find it to be pretty representational of Team Fremont and the whole Drunken Gamers thing overall. I mean, let’s think about this one for a second. We START with a guy dressed like a figure skater and somehow we have to top that. How do we do it? Well, we take Dave and put him in a penis costume. I’m not sure why we find crap like that so damn funny, but that in-your-face, over the top humor has really become our staple over the years. At any rate, it makes me laugh.

What I remember about this one from back in those days is that I was struggling to do this comic thing every week, as we had promised. It ended up being a lot of work and I fell behind a lot. So, this one was a mid-week comic and I wanted something to celebrate one of our favorite holidays and this was it. I also remember being slightly uncomfortable with the idea of having to draw a penis. That was the first, but sadly not the last, male organ I would draw in this series. I’m a little unnerved at how well it came out.
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Welcome to another edition of TF Flashback, where we revisit some old content from our early years on the web. In this series, we’re reposting issues of an old webcomic we used to do that “chronicled” John, Moe and Hilden’s year of living together in college.

1125 Fremont #3-Orientation

So, here we go again. Issue 2 simply hinted (okay, maybe hint is the wrong word) that Dave was gay. Issue 3 was supposed to set up the joke that, while he appeared gay, he was in fact straight. Like I said last week, it’s a joke we would beat to death.

What’s notable in this issue is that we get introduced, however briefly, to Dave’s girlfriend Kate. I’m not sure why I didn’t use her more in the series. We have a ton of stories about her, some of which you heard on After Hours a few weeks ago. She was a total character and that bee-hive hairdo was the real deal. From telling me I should turn my room into a dance area complete with disco ball to asking Moe for Double A batteries to power her vibrator in the middle of the night, she was one in a million. Sadly, she appears in just two comics and only in a minor role. Wasted opportunity, that.

Welcome to another edition of TF Flashback, where we revisit some old content from our early years on the web. In this series, we’re reposting issues of an old webcomic we used to do that “chronicled” John, Moe and Hilden’s year of living together in college.

1125 Fremont #2-By the Boo

From the original blog post that accompanied this comic on TeamFremont.com:

…At any rate, I had fun with this one. It lets me introduce one of the more interesting characters we’re going to have on 1125.

Dave was one of our music major friends and he had some interesting personality quirks. One in particular that I’m taking extreme pleasure in exaggerating. They’ll be more to come. Oh, yes. More to come.

As I look back on this series of comics, I find that Dave became more than just an “interesting character”. The guy became a MAJOR aspect of the comic and I have to embarrassingly admit that the gay humor we derived from Dave may be the centerpiece of the whole 1125 Fremont series. Most of the Dave jokes that come later were derived from the funny idea that Dave wasn’t gay but he continued to do “gay-type things”. As we would sit around talking about the stories and jokes for the comic, we’d just hit on another funny and over the top thing that fit the Dave character and it made us laugh so much that we just kept using them. I guess they were easy jokes because we used them a ton over the 50 issues.

I remember showing one of Jennifer’s gay friends the series of comics when he was over, not thinking that they were in any way focused on a singular topic. As I was giving him a synopsis of the various issues, I remember finding myself repeating the same line of “here’s another one about Dave…who’s gay…but not gay. It’s funny”. As I kept stumbling on more Dave comics and laughing (alone I might add), I suddenly started feeling guilty and embarrassed. Like I’d stupidly gone too far into crass-land without thinking about it, only to come to the realization way later while showing the comics off to my wife’s gay best friend. Not one of my finer moments.

About the title: I was in the early stages of dating my future wife at the time of this comic. She had a roommate and a gay friend (not the one from the paragraph above) who had a sort of second language. When the three of them got together, I seriously needed a decoder ring to translate all their abbreviations and inside slang. For instance, the phrase “By the way” got transformed into “By the boobs” for whatever reason. Not content to leave it at that, and having a penchant for abbreviating everything, the phrase morphed one more time to “By the boo”. I found that particular phrase so absurd and strange that I ended up using it as Dave-speak.

And I still find the clenching ass line hilarious.

Seven or so years ago John, Moe and I created a website called TeamFremont.com. Some of you who read Robot Panic may have been around during that time, but chances are even better you have no idea what I’m talking about. TeamFremont had a number of different things that were regular features for awhile. None of them lasted very long but what managed to get put out had its moments.

In our last episode of After Hours, some stories about our year together at 1125 Fremont St. were told and somewhere in there we referenced a webcomic we used to have up on the site called 1125 Fremont. Its purpose was to share some of the stories of our college days in a funny and exaggerated way. Thanks to Brian Pederson, John started browsing through some of those old comics the other day and called me up with the idea that it might be fun to post them here.

So, once a week, I’ll post up a comic from the 1125 Fremont series. It runs about 49 comics in all and as a fun end to the run, I’ll create and post the Issue 50 that I had always planned but never put out. In addition, I’ll give you some thoughts on the comics now as well as what I was thinking then. Could be fun. At the very least it’ll be fun for us and isn’t that why we do this thing anyway?

1125 Fremont #1-Deep Thoughts

This comic was supposed to set up the fact that I was a much more innocent and low-key person before I started the year at 1125 Fremont. I thought that a series chronicling my gradual change from the “quiet kid” to the loud an obnoxious guy you all know from Drunken Gamers Radio would be fun and a decent way to structure things. It also set the potty humor style that would continue through the series and become the Drunken Gamer standard. Joe needing help finding his pants really wasn’t that far off from reality. It really was a bit of a shock for a guy like me. But the shock didn’t last too long and I managed to fit in after awhile.

The only thing I can remember in making this is trying to figure out how it would look. I remember hitting on the whole grey background thing and thinking it was an interesting visual touch. Mostly, it was rather quick and easy to do. I used to do another comic over at GamingWorldX.com that had full-on painted backgrounds and I always hated the time it took to do those. I never liked how it looked either so this ended up working. Over the years, I ended up using some shading and different shares of grey to give the background more depth and interest. For what it’s worth.

Oh, and that tiger robe was 100% real. Joe actually did wear one all the damn time.

Anyway, it’s a pretty typical beginning to a webcomic series and they get a little more interesting from here. I think.

“How’re you feeling about the PSP comic store/digital comics in general? Me? I think I’m sticking with paper. I’m fuckin old school!”

-John via Twitter

I think publications on PSP are a great idea. I’d totally get into books and such again if they were actually available on devices I’m always carrying on me. Does the iPhone do ebooks? Probably some kind of rigged app or a few standalone apps, but on no universal book reader, right? I can settle for comics. One thing on comics is I like to sit there and examine the art in great detail. The PSP comic viewer let’s me do that. I can zoom out or in as I please and pan the page around to study every which way. There’s even this Autoflow thing where mashing L & R Buttons automatically zeroes in on all the relevant screen placements, making reading these things as lazy as you wish. Button config is even available.

A massive plus is the custom soundtracks function that somewhat works with this comic viewer. Too many times I’m walkin’ somewhere with my PSP music goin’, then when I go to sit down and switch to a game, I have to stop the good sounds for crappy game music from R-Type Command. Say I’m in a podcast I want to listen to but don’t want to sit there and stare at the wall, I can whip out a comic instead without holding up my audio. The music player is limited though. There’s no fast forward function for picking up where you left off in a long track and it doesn’t support PSPgo very well, so the player can only read from the system storage but not from the expandable cards (where I keep all my music). I’m not even sure it supports playlists. Thanks Japan!

Either way, the big draw for me on PSP comics is portability and hiding what I got. I work with baby boomers. They’re not very smart. I got the heavy stink eye when I sat in the public commons and had a lunch while reading Watchmen. I’d much prefer masking what I’m looking at and maintain the privacy. Sure I’m 20-something years old and it’s not a big deal for me to defend what I’m into, but I also value solo downtime above most things, so avoiding possibility of needless conflict with nosy old people idiots with high judging and poor listening skills is a selling point. Since I don’t do a lot of reading when I’m at home, I pretty much have to bring whatever I intend to read with me somewhere else. At home I’d prefer the music, gaming, or time with the pre-wife, so books are right-out. I’m not owning a man-purse ever, so that leaves me with whatever fits in my pocket. PSP works, a tube hanging out a foot above my back pocket doesn’t.

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Before I knew about the Lord of the Rings, indeed before my geek flame began to burn brightly, I was introduced to Elfquest by my childhood friend Kevin. He had a stack of full-color Elfquest trades sitting on his bookshelf that he never really talked about. I only noticed them by mistake while digging through his back issues of Rolling Stone and Metal Edge magazines. Yeah, we were those kinds of kids; poring over metal mags with dreams of someday being featured in the pages with ripped jeans, long hair, and ridiculously-shaped guitars. The Elfquest books were out of place in that stack of hair metal mags, and I pulled one out and began to page through it.

I’m not sure if Kevin was embarrassed by my find, but he didn’t say much when I asked, “What are these?” He said he saw them at the bookstore and thought they looked interesting and left it at that. As I fingered through the pages, the artwork caught my eye. I was never much of a fantasy buff as a kid, and was generally scared off by those quiet loners who sat in the corners reading Forgotten Realms and working on their D&D campaigns. The whole swords & sorcery thing intrigued me, but by that time I was far too interested in chicks and music to give it much thought. But something about Elfquest captivated me and I quickly asked Kevin if I could borrow the books. He seemed surprised, but agreed, and over the next several weeks we would both hang out and talk Elfquest nearly as much as we talked metal.

Over the years, my familiarity with the series would ebb and flow with me rediscovering the books in earnest while I was in college. I began picking up the trades in black & white (their original format) gradually until I had a healthy collection, losing interest once the tribe’s quest took them to some crazy space/future combination. It’s fair to say that Elfquest’s strongest run is in that first handful of adventures when young elf chieftain Cutter has to lead his tribe across the desert in search of a new home. As the forest-dwelling elves discover the elves of the desert, a whole new world is opened up to them. Cutter, followed by his friend Skywise, thrusts his tribe on a mission to search for more of their kind around the world while trying to bring peace between elves and humans. It’s a gripping tale and one of the best pieces of fantasy fiction I’ve ever read.

Elfquest is now available to read online for free over at the Official Elfquest Website. You’re able to read those very stories that sucked me in twenty years ago and check out some further adventures as well. Also, the Elfquest movie is apparently still in the works, so check out the info on that as well.

Familiar with Elfquest? If so, let’s geek it up in the comments section.

In what is quite possibly the best news for zombie fans in years, Variety reports that AMC is working on adapting The Walking Dead for a television series. The series is being developed by writer/director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), and Gale Anne Hurd of Valhalla Motion Pictures.

Why is this great news? Simply put: The Walking Dead is the pinnacle of modern zombie tales. Robert Kirkman’s series is consistently gritty, authentic, and oftentimes heartbreaking. And while gory zombie kills are plentiful in The Walking Dead, it’s really a story about human interaction and what would happen if everyone on Earth was in a fight for survival.

According to Variety:

Joel Stillerman, AMC’s senior veep of programming, production and original content, said the project appealed to the cabler because of “the quality of the storytelling” in Kirkman’s work. The series will stay faithful to the tone of the original novels, he said.

“This is not about zombies popping out of closets,” Stillerman said. “This is a story about survival, and the dynamics of what happens when a group is forced to survive under these circumstances. The world (in ‘Walking Dead’) is portrayed in a smart, sophisticated way.”

Stillerman noted that the cabler’s annual “Fear Fest” movie showcase around Halloween is one of AMC’s most popular programming events of the year.

“We’ve got an audience that loves this kind of material,” he said.

I’ve been dreaming of a television adaptation for ages now, but always assumed that if The Walking Dead did make it to the small screen, it would be via HBO or Showtime. However, given AMC’s recent track record with Mad Man, and having a high-caliber writer like Frank Darabont, my hopes are high.

Article By: Ryker XL
As I scoured the booths at my local Spring comic book convention in search of “Walking Dead” trades, I found this little novel by James Farr called “Xombie.” On a whim I picked it up for light reading on flights for work. I honestly wasn’t expecting much from this little book, and yet I will full admit to being very surprised by it. In the end Farr’s tale is both fun and dare I say heartwarming (something I never thought I would ever say about a story concerning zombies).

The premise is a unique one. What if a zombie was self-aware and even had fleeting memories of once being human? What would that zombie do, where would he live, and most importantly, what would he do if he heard the cries for help from a lost six year old girl?

Thus is the lot of Dirge, a conscious zombie purely content to live the remainder of his existence near a graveyard. His days are spent listening to old records and taking care of his zombie dog “Cerberus.” One day his peace is interrupted by a young girl named Zoe who has been separated by her parents in an evacuation. In that moment we see the human part of Dirge slowly come to the surface as he struggles with how he should respond to the situation. Ultimately he grabs his trusty shovel (which he affectionately calls “Faust”) and zombie companion and goes to kick some zombie ass!

What follows is a fun, action filled journey as Dirge and Cerberus make their way through a zombie wasteland in an attempt to reunite Zoe with her parents. Along the way we see the relationship between this zombie and a little girl grow; and more of Dirge’s humanity rises to the surface.

The end of the book is simply fantastic and all the while I was thinking to myself, “this would make a great PIXAR or Dreamworks movie.” While we wait for the powers to be to recognize the awesomeness of such adventure, you can watch Dirge’s adventures in an animated Flash movie on DVD. There are also rumors that Farr is in negotiations on a script for a live action version of “Xombie” as well.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The exciting zombie fights are coupled with tender moments between Dirge and Zoe as she begins to see her rescuer as more than the monster that the rest of the world see’s. Which does beg this question, if a zombie risks his existence to save a little girl, is he really a monster after all?