#the entire scene and almost all of the comic uses environmental backgrounds

[romicat]

Semi-Spoilers here is the entire Sophie apology scene. Will never get tired of how Kamala jumps into her arms and the tears and then the bi-color background at the end

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #3 – Monstress Volume One: Awakening by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Monstress is one of about three comics I’ve ever considered myself an unequivocal fan of. I, alas, lost track of things during a hiatus a while back, and got to the point where I barely remembered where I was or what was happening. So, as a palate cleanser between longer books, I’m making it a project for the first chunk of the year to reread this from the start until I’m caught up again.

This is a very high concept series – a matriarchal dieselpunk fantasy world vaguely inspired by 1920s/30s East Asia with a strong art deco aesthetic. The world is divided between the Arcanic Courts – kingdoms ruled by the animalistic ‘Ancients’ and populated by the Arcanic descendants of their half-human children – and the Federation – a human nation-state dominated by witch-nuns who derive their influence from being able to render down the corpses of said Arcanics into magically potent ‘lilium’. Also there are insubstantial projections/ghosts of titanic tentacle-ey monsters that wander across the landscape sometimes. And a genocidal war ended in a stalemate a decade ago after a city was destroyed by something that no one on either side understands. Oh an in addition to the anthromorphic animal Ancients there’s also just normal cats, except they’re sapient and capable of speech and also necromancy. The book really throws you into things and a decent chunk of the first volume is just introducing and establishing the rules of the world.

The actual plot follows Maika Halfwold, an Arcanic who can pass for human except for the giant occult tattoo on her chest. The story follows her abandoning her girlfriend and voluntarily getting herself enslaved and brought to the mansion/mad science laboratory of a powerful witch-nun so she can break out, fight her way through it, and interrogate her at gunpoint for information about the giant gaps in her memory of when as a child her mother worked with the witch on an archaeological dig. Things escalate from there due to a shard of an enchanted mask and an eldritch abomination that had been slumbering with Maika’s body who is awoken by it. The balance of the volume is spent with her, an incredibly untrustworthy cat, and a vulpine arcanic child who she more or less accidentally rescued from slavery as they try to escape the manhunt after them.

So there’s a lot here, and I really do love almost all of it. Most obviously, the art is just gorgeous – I mean, I’m an easy sell on dieselpunk/fantasy 20s stuff, but genre trappings aside the detail and use of colour is just incredible, and even the less detailed panels do an amazing job capturing expressions and emotion. Basically every aspect of character and environmental design is just very deliberate as well – aesthetics reflect character, and scenes are full of little background details that help sell and fill in the world. But fundamentally just very pretty, an aesthetic pleasure to behold.

Of course, one of the things a whole page of artistic flourishing is devoted to is a flashback of Maika – a starving enslaved orphan during the war – eating the stomach of another child who’d died before her to keep herself going. This is a book that just about exults in brutality and brokenness – ‘there is more hunger in the world than love’ is basically the tagline of the entire volume. This is a world on the verge of a genocidal total war, rife with slavery and human sacrifice, and it pulls absolutely no punches about depicting that (so, so many dead children). With, like, one-three exceptions everyone is flawed and compromised and betrays something they care about when their backs are against the wall. You really and truly can’t trust anyone.

You can see this clearly with Maika herself. She’s just, genuinely an incredibly unpleasant person to be around. Responds to feeling unsure or anxious by lashing out, all but incapable of showing affection in any legible way, too wrapped up in her own mountains of bullshit to even notice what anyone around her has going on until it’s shoved right in her face, paranoid and suspicious and more comfortable with violence than uncertainty, has 100% gotten people killed multiple times due to lack of ability to get over her own (mountains, abyssal, soul-crushing) trauma – really the list just goes on. In her defence basically everyone is actually out to get her (sadly the paranoia and suspicion do not in any way actually make her more difficult to deceive or betray). Anyway, I obviously love her, and the supporting cast is very nearly as good.

Just, generally this is not a series where suffering is ennobling – fear and shame and trauma and a desperate need to cling onto what power or privilege you can drive people as much or more as sympathy for or solidarity with others going through the same things they have. The fact that the Federation is run by a bunch of genocidal religious fanatics doesn’t mean the Ancients ruling the Arcanic Courts are good, or even necessarily that they care about the lives of their subjects beyond their own power and pleasure. It could easily tip over the edge into monochrome nihilism, but it actually manages to toe the line very well.

Though like, despite everything I just said, it does do the oddly common modern genre fic thing where there’s brutal unsparing depictions of colonial plunder and oppression but also everyone’s an intersectional feminist. Not as much as some, but the race-war is between humans and arcanics with no one seeming to care on whit about intraspecies ethnicity or race, and the setting is matriarchal in the modern implicit glass ceiling way a modern American corporation is patriarchal, not the way a midcentury warlord state or fascist empire is patriarchal (not that this means there aren’t graphic threats of rape or depictions of what’s clearly sex slavery just that being the one holding the lash isn’t really gendered).

So yeah, overall happy to report that the first volume of this still absolutely and entirely holds up – and considered as a work on its own the first volume really coheres far better than I’d realized when I was first reading this in one mad rush. Very much looking forward to continuing on to volume 2.

[meruz]

once again i am answering asks in a big compilation post. included is... gotham, patrick stump, tips about drawing backgrounds, tips about drawing in general, links to my faq, and infinity train

like.... the tv series? No... I’ve drawn dc comics fanart before, though. But it’s been years since I’ve been really into it. I like jumped ship like 10 years ago when the New 52 happened LOL.

AFJHDSLKGH I’m sorry I (probably) won’t do it again??

Actually full disclosure I have a truly cringe amount of p stump drawings/photo studies in my sketchbook right now LOL. He’s just fun to draw... hats, glasses, guitar, a good shape... but I don’t think I’ll rly post those until I can hide them in another big sketchbook pdf.. probably Jan 2022. Stay tuned........ (ominous) 

(ominous preview)

These are all sort of related to backgrounds/painting so I grouped them together even though they’re pretty much entirely separate questions.... ANYWAYS

a) How is it working as a BG artist? Is it hard? What show are you drawing for?

I think you’re the first person to ever ask me about my job! Being a background artist is great. It’s definitely labor intensive but I think that could describe pretty much any art job (If something were rote or easy to automate, you wouldn’t hire an artist to do it) and I hesitate to say whether its harder or easier than any other role in the animation pipeline. Plus, so much of what truly makes a job difficult varies from one production to the next, schedule, working environment, co-workers etc. But I will say that I think while BGs are generally a lot of work on the upfront, I think they’re subject to less scrutiny/revisions than something like character/props/effects design and you don’t have to pitch them to a room like boards. So I guess it’s good if you don’t like to talk to people? LOL

A lot of my previous projects + the show I’ve worked on the longest aren’t public yet so I can’t talk about em (but I assure you if/when the news does break I won’t shut up about it). But I’m currently working on Archer Season 12 LOL. I’m like 90% sure I’m allowed to say that.

b) ~~~THANK YOU!! ~~~

c) What exactly do you like to draw most [in a background]?

@kaitomiury​ Lots of stuff! I really like to draw clutter! Because it’s a great opportunity for environmental storytelling and also you can be kind of messy with it because the sheer mass will supersede any details LOL. 

I like to draw clouds... I like to draw grass but not trees lol,,, I like to draw anything that sells perspective really easily like tiled floors and ceilings, shelves, lamp posts on a street etc.

d) Do you have any tips on how to paint (observational)?

god there’s so much to say. painting is really a whole ass discipline like someone can paint their whole life and still discover new things about it. I guess if you’re really just starting out my best advice is that habit is more important than product. especially with traditional plein air painting, I find that the procedure of going outside and setting up your paints is almost harder than the actual painting. There’s a lot of artists who say “I want to do plein air sometime!!” and then never actually get around to doing it. A lot of people just end up working from google streetview or photos on their computer.

But going outside to paint is a really good challenge because it forces you to make and commit to lighting and composition decisions really quickly. And to work through your mistakes instead of against them via undo button.

My last tip is to check out James Gurney’s youtube channel because hes probably the best and most consistent resource on observational painting out there rn. There’s lots other artists doing the same thing (off the top of my head I know a lot of the Warrior Painters group has people regularly posting plein air stuff and lightbox expo had a Jesse Schmidt lecture abt it last year) but Gurney’s probably the most prolific poster and one of the best at explaining the more technical stuff - his books are great too.

e) Do you have tips for drawing cleanly on heavypaint?

@marigoldfool​ UMM LOL I LIKE ONLY USE THE FILL TOOL so maybe use the fill tool? Fill and rectangle are good for edge control as opposed to the rest of the heavy paint tools which can get sort of muddles. And also I use a stylus so maybe if you’re using your finger, find a stylus that works with your device instead. That’s all I’ve got, frankly I don’t think my drawings are particularly clean lol.

f) Tips on improving backgrounds/scenes making them more dynamic practicing etc?

Ive given some tips about backgrounds/scenes before so I’m not gonna re-tread those but here’s another thing that might be helpful...

I think a good way to approach backgrounds is to think of the specific story or even mood you want to convey with the background first. Thinking “I just need to put something behind this character” is going to lead you to drawing like... a green screen tourist photo backdrop. But if you think “I need this bg to make the characters feel small” or “I need this bg to make the world feel colorful” then it gives you requirements and cues to work off of.

If I know a character needs to feel overwhelmed and small, then I know I need to create environment elements that will cage them in and corner them. If a character needs to feel triumphant/on top of the world then I know I need to let the environment open up around them. etc. If I know my focal point/ where I want to draw attention, I can build the background around that.

Also, backgrounds like figure compositions will have focal points of their own and you can draw attention to it/ the relationship the characters have with the bg element via scale or directionality or color, any number of cues. I think of it almost as a second/third character in a scene.

Not every composition is gonna have something so obvious like this but it helps me to think about these because then the characters feel connected and integrated with the environment.

Some more general art questions

a) Do you have any process/tips to start drawing character/bodies/heads?

I tried to kind of draw something to answer this but honestly this is difficult for me to answer because I don’t think I’m that great at drawing characters LOL. Ok, I think I have two tips.

1) flip your canvas often. A lot about what makes human bodies look correct and believable is symmetry and balance. Even if someone has asymmetrical features, the body will often pull and push in a way to counterbalance it. we often have inherent biases to one side or another like dominant hands dominant eyes etc. you know how right-handed artists will often favor drawing characters facing 45 degrees facing (the artist’s) left? that’s part of it. so viewing your drawing flipped even just to evaluate it helps compensate for that bias and makes you more aware of balance.

2) draw the whole figure often. I feel like a lot of beginner artists (myself included for a long time) defer to just drawing headshots or busts because it’s easier, you dont have to think about posing limbs etc. But drawing a full body allows you to better gauge proportion, perspective, body language, everything that makes a character look believable and grounded.

Like if you (me) have that issue where you draw the head too big and then have to resize it to fit the proportions of the rest of the body, it’s probably because you (I) drew the head first and are treating the body as an afterthought/attachment. Sketching out the whole figure first or even just quick drawing guides for it will help you think of it more holistically. I learned this figure drawing in charcoal at art school LOL.

oh. third mini tip - try to draw people from life often! its the best study. if you can get into a figure drawing/nude drawing class EVEN BETTER and if you have a local college/art space/museum that hosts those for free TREASURE IT AND TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT, that’s a huge boon that a lot of artists (me again) wish they had. though if youre not so lucky and youre sitting in a park trying to creeper draw people and they keep moving.. don’t let that stop you! that’s good practice because it’s forcing you to work fast to get the important stuff down LOL. its a challenge!

b) I’ve been pretty out of energy and have had no inspiration to draw but I have the desire to. Any advice?

Dude, take a walk or something.... Or a nap? Low energy is going to effect everything else so you gotta hit that problem at its source.

If you’re looking for inspiration though, I’d recommend stuff like watching a movie, reading a book, playing video games etc. Fill up your idea bank with content and then give yourself time/space to gestate it into new concepts. Sometimes looking at other art works but sometimes it can work against you because it’s too close. 

Also something that helps me is remembering that art doesn’t always have to be groundbreaking... like it’s okay to make something shitty and stupid that you don’t post online and only show to your friend. That’s all part of the process imo. If you want to hit a home run you gotta warm up first, right? Sports.

I should probably compile everytime i give tips on stuff like this but that’s getting dangerously close to being a social media artist who makes stupid boiled down art tutorials for clout which is the last thing i want to be... the thing I want to stress is that art is a whole visual language and there are widely agreed upon rules and customs but they exist in large part to be broken. Like there's an infinite number of ways to reach an infinite number of solutions and that’s actually what makes it really cool and personal for both the artist and the viewer. So when you make work you like or you find someone else’s work you like, take a step back and ask yourself what about it speaks for you, what about it works for you, what makes it effective, how to recreate that effect and how to break that effect completely, etc. And have a good time with it or else what’s the point.

for the first 2, I direct you to my FAQ

For the last one, I don’t actually believe I’ve ever addressed artwork as insp for stories/rp but I’ll say here and now yeah go ahead! As long as you’re not making profit or taking credit for my work then I’m normally ok with it. Especially anything thats private and purely recreational, that’s generally 100% green light go. I only ask that if you post it anywhere public that you please credit me.

(and I reserve the right to ask you to take it down if I see it and don’t approve of it’s use but I think that case is pretty rare.)

a) @lemuelzero101 Thank you!!! I haven’t played Life is Strange but actually  that series’ vis dev artist Edouard Caplain is one of my bigger art inspirations lately so that’s a really high compliment lol. And yeah I hope we get 5-8 too...!

b) Thank you for sticking around! I’ve been thinking about Digimon and Infinity Train in tandem lately, actually. They’re a little similar? Enter a dangerous alternate world and have wacky adventures with monsters/inanimate objects that have weird powers... there’s like weird engineers and mechanisms behind the scenes... also frontier literally starts with them getting on a train. Anyways if anyone else followed me for digimon... maybe you’d like Infinity Train? LOL

c) @king-wens-king I’M GLAD MY ART JUST HAS PINOY VIBES LOL I hope you are having a good day too :^)

a, b, c, d) yessss my Watch Infinity Train agenda is working....

e) aw thank you!! i think you should watch infinity train :)

[comicaurora]

aaaa this is not technically a question, but I love how you draw fight scenes/action in both the comic and in all the legends/myths summarized videos!! It's so goodddd even tho you like to say how much you get tired of the process of choreographing fight scenes i think you really pull them off spectacularly!! do u perhaps have any tips... besides the usual looking at a bunch of refs and such- do you take inspo from action movies maybe? id love to know because like ur just so skilled red how

!!!! this is such a sweet question!

I’m so glad the choreography works! It’s difficult for me to gauge how engaging they are to read - I’m usually just focusing on making sure the movement makes sense from panel to panel. I’ve read a lot of manga where the fight scenes are beautifully drawn but frankly incomprehensible, because I have no idea how the characters are supposed to be moving in relation to each other. Because of this, when I choreograph a fight, I try and make sure the movement is clear from one panel to the next.

When drawing fight scenes for videos, I tend to exaggerate the movements a bit more than I might in a comic, since I’m usually trying to communicate the entirety of a fight scene in only one or two frames. Especially in the Journey to the West videos, I tend to give the characters very stretched poses - legs bent all the way up to the chest or stretched all the way back, arms completely extended, etc. In real life, overextending a limb is a very bad idea in a fight, but in the wonderful world of visual art, it usually looks a lot better than the more safe and realistic partially-bent option. I try to make sure the poses are all plausible, but for me, that stretch component is very important. It gives the illusion of effort - you can almost feel how the character would feel.

This frame demonstrates the stretch factor with Monkey’s entire pose, but it also demonstrates another important factor - flow. Anywhere there’s movement, I want there to be something flowing to show it. Monkey’s tail and sash and Tripitaka’s robes are very useful for this, and having a lot of characters with long hair or flowing capes also makes my job a lot easier.

Stretch makes the poses feel lively and full of movement. Flow makes it clear to the audience how the characters in this still image are supposed to be moving. Between those two factors, it becomes pretty intuitive to communicate a lot of energy in any given panel.

Of course, chaining panels together to make sure the movement is actually coherent is a different skillset altogether, and one I’m still working on. In my experience, the easiest way to make that work is coherent direction of movement.

This post is getting long, so I’m gonna try putting in a “read more”:

Using that fight scene as an example, the direction of movement shifts at the top of the page when Kendal rounds the tree. In the first panel, movement is from right to left. He pivots in panel 2, and then in panel 3, he’s abruptly attacked in a sudden burst of left-to-right movement. This is a new action; it’s fine that it’s moving in a new, opposed direction.

Kendal catches himself as he falls forward - this is still a left-to-right movement, because he’s still falling from the events of panel 3, so continuity of movement is to be expected. But the middle panel shifts focus again, because something new and unexpected is happening - his attacker is about to get kicked in the face.

In that center panel, the direction is no longer left-to-right - it’s out-to-in. We’re essentially zooming along the movement to accentuate its suddenness. Even if you can’t quite make out the detail of the boot, the movement is still pretty clear. The next panel brings us back to our familiar arrangement from panel 3, but this time, the movement has been reversed and is moving right-to-left again, as Kendal kicks back and gains the upper hand.

Finally, in the last panel of the page, the movement becomes a bit more directionless. His attacker is still moving right-to-left, continuing the flow from the impact, but the focus has shifted. The movement and overall flow is unclear, which reflects the fact that, at this point, the fight has become a stalemate.

Chaining movement together like this is tricky, as is representing clear movement in a single panel. You know it’s tricky because a lot of otherwise good media kinda sucks at it. For instance, I quite like My Hero Academia, but I’ve been keeping up with the manga for months and I have literally no idea what’s happening in these protracted superhero fights.

This next bit is going to contain spoilers from the most recent chapter, but it demonstrates my issue way too well for me to leave out:

This image has a clear direction of movement, but I have literally no idea what’s happening, except that someone might be about to get punched. (The next set of panels is not someone getting punched. It’s a flashback that lasts eight and a half pages.) The next panel that continues this action is this one:

It follows through on the clear right-to-left direction of movement established from the earlier panel, but it’s (a) still totally unclear what just actually happened, and (b) interrupted by eight and a half pages of other stuff. The panels individually look phenomenal (if a little speed-line-heavy for me) but it’s hard to know what’s actually happening. All we know is that movement happened; we can’t actually tell what happened in that movement.

In contrast, for a comic that does movement INCREDIBLY well, I recommend Usagi Yojimbo. It’s a comic about a wandering samurai who happens to be a rabbit, and all the Kurosawa-esque antics he gets into in his wanderings through ancient funny-animal Japan.

Uh oh! A setup for a fight scene! And that’s a lot of left-to-right movement I’m seeing! Even the swords in shot are all pointing that specific direction!

Oh, never mind. He’s fine. See all that right-to-left movement our hero is doing? See how the bad guys are suddenly pointing in all different directions and their movement has become chaotic and uncertain? That’s how you know the fight’s literally going our hero’s way.

This is a random encounter from a random issue of the comic. Fights happen frequently, and most of them follow the same structure - right down to the direction of movement. Bad guys move in from the left, good guy fights back from the right.

And when the fight proper starts, the background usually vanishes into a vague white void so the characters can take center stage - no visual cluttering, not even any speed lines.

These fights aren’t important. These random background mooks aren’t plot-relevant except as temporary roadblocks. As such, most of these fights play out roughly the same - no background, page-wide panels, minimal dialogue. But the serious fights? Those look pretty different.

Environmental shots! Close-ups! Banter! Backgrounds! The direction of movement is even reversed from the norm! This immediately sets the fight apart from the standard. Characters move around each other, the environment come into play, and each panel is a very clear beat in the progress of the fight.

Usagi Yojimbo is probably my favorite comic ever. But it’s also not the only very useful resource when you’re looking for media that does well-choreographed fights. Comics are good (even if a lot of them are just good bad examples), but animated media is built on a lot of the same principles as comic art. While they have an easier time showing movement (since they involve actual movement, rather than static images) they still need to chain shots together in a way that’s coherent and gives the audience enough information to understand the movement and progression of the situation. Movies and tv won’t help you much with drawing individual static images that communicate dynamic poses, but they can help a lot if you’re figuring out how one phrase of the fight should chain into the next.

While I’ve seen plenty of media that does this well, rather than making you analyze this stuff from the ground up, allow me to recommend a youtube channel that can do the analysis for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mACKHGfdLlo&ab_channel=JillBearup

Jill Bearup has a wonderful channel with a criminally small subscriber base. I only found her within the last month and I think she’s amazing. Everyone should watch her videos about fight choreography.

This answer got much longer than I expected, but I hope it was helpful!

[segadores-y-soldados]

(Original post)

@freckledmccree I don’t believe it’s every been formally stated when the actual Petras Act was made official. My guesstimate is that it occurred soon after the Swiss Base explosion. TL;DR: I personally tend to put the Swiss Base explosion near the end of the calendar year of 2070, and the Petras Act “shortly after”, either in late December 2070 or at the very beginning of January 2071.

(source)

I do my best to interpret things that are “in-game canon” based on their seasons or other “real world events” that occur near or around the map.  For example, Dorado + the Sombra ARG puts that the Festival de la Luz (in the year 2076) occurs very shortly before Día de Muertos, which is when Sombra launches her official statement on the LumériCo website:

(Source)

Festival de la Luz is (canonically) a festival celebrating the end of the Omnic Crisis and the official end of Mexico’s “La Medianoche” blackout period.  So the official end of the war occurs sometime in October, in 2050-ish.  The objective of the map is to get the last fusion generator/fusion core to the LumériCo Power Plant: the defenders are siding with Sombra, trying to stop it, and the attackers are trying to help LumériCo get the core there.

Similarly, the Hanamura map and “Dragons” animation occur during cherry blossom season in Tokyo, which is typically late March or early April.

Maps are usually “set” around specific timeframes or reference specific important moments - which is legitimately the reason why the dev team won’t “fix” the Numbani airport, even though the museum and payload have been updated.

But now we cross into speculation territory.

For the sake of ease, I tend to place the actual explosion of the Swiss Base late in the calendar year, probably October - December of 2070.  This could be wrong, obviously, but it kinda sorta depends on how you interpret Ana’s comic “Legacy” and possibly the Practice Range:

(More under the cut.)

A lot of people automatically assume that Mercy’s “base of operations” represents where she worked for Overwatch.  This is not true.  For almost all of the Hero Profiles, “base of operations” represents where the character is currently.  When a hero does NOT currently live/work there, the profile says “(formerly)”.

For example, Zenyatta’s profile lists the Shambali Monastery, but also says (formerly).  Interestingly, Genji’s does not, which is indicated by his room in the Village map.  As another contrast, Brigitte’s says: “Gothenburg, Sweden (formerly)” - this is because she’s currently traveling with Reinhardt.

It is certainly possible that the “Swiss Base” was located in Zurich.

But I have defended - and will continue to defend - that the “Swiss Base” was located near the real world United Nations regional headquarters in Geneva:

Though this map is very small, the dot of an “active investigation” on Jack’s situation display appears closer to the French border than Zurich. 

(Before people ask, no, it is not referencing Chateau Guillard.  Widowmaker did not live at the estate, she was a ballet dancer in Paris.  In fact, she did not purchase the estate until “very recently” (post-Recall, likely post-“Masquerade”).  Chateau Guillard has one of the missing Aphrodite statues from Ilios as well, making it mostly contemporary in time with Ilios, Rialto (post-Masquerade), Petra (the map), and Ayutthaya).

As another intriguing detail:

Between the open beta period and the final live release of Overwatch, the developers specifically changes the environment of the Practice Range. During the beta period, it used environmental assets found in Watchpoint: Gibraltar, including depicting what appears to have been an open sea or open ocean.

The current practice range is now on a land-locked, semi-frozen lake surrounded by high mountains.

The practice range currently has Winston’s log in set up on the “active” PCs in the Hero selection room.  The Hero selection room also appears to be in a state of semi-disarray, and has a wide-variety of “official” Overwatch documents scattered on the ground:

The practice range also has what might be the most obscure little “environmental story-telling detail” in the entire game:

Someone has brought what appears to be several bottles of hard alcohol - maybe whiskey - and a magazine about current events to the very top of the left-most tower.

...I’m gonna take an educated guess and say it’s NOT Winston or Tracer.

It IS the exact same “bottle of whiskey” and exact same magazine that can be found in Soldier: 76′s room in Necropolis:

Closer shot:

...Interesting.

As an aside, the practice range is - as far as I know/am aware of - the only map with a “weight room.”  And Soldier: 76 somehow has a dumbbell with him in the Necropolis of Giza, of all places.  

As part of his entire “renegade vigilante” backstory, Soldier: 76 is also actively raiding old Watchpoints for supplies - he even took his new Heavy Pulse Rifle from Watchpoint: Grand Mesa.

Soldier: 76 has not joined Recalled Overwatch.  In fact, he actively thinks the entire concept is a bad one, and expresses this in his interactions with Winston and in his voicelines on Watchpoint: Gibraltar.

What exactly is he doing in “the practice range” of an unknown Watchpoint while possibly getting drunk (or attempting to do so) as he reads about the current state of global affairs?

And lastly - whether it is simple oversight from when the beta practice range was part of the Watchpoint: Gibraltar map or not - all the boxes and crates are labled:

WP-G.

A lot of details points to Jack entering whatever Watchpoint the practice range is set in, possibly getting full-on drunk as he reads about how crime is getting worse and his former agents are being targeted by Talon and governments alike, and then taking a ton of supplies from the remains of the base.

The Soldier: 76 Origin video shows what appears to be the complete destruction of the main part of the headquarters, but obviously, some buildings and other parts are still standing in the background.  If the practice range IS part of the base, then it may have been sheltered from total destruction by being built into the side of a mountain.  Granted, the video itself was made in 2015, and likely existed before the developers fully conceived of the practice range itself.  The final “layout” of the Swiss Base might be completely different at this point.

While the practice range is obviously set at or around Recall, it’s interesting that the emphasis is on how cold and frozen it is, especially when it is contrasted with the scenes from Uprising, where it is clearly warmer, possibly in the springtime (wherever it is set).

There is a time-span between Ana’s “death” in “Legacy” and the explosion of the Swiss Base where we know effectively nothing about what was occurring inside Overwatch.  We don’t even know if Genji and McCree left before or after Ana’s “death”, nor do we know when Reinhardt was pressured into retiring (possibly as a consequence of his leadership during Uprising).  We also don’t know when exactly Akande’s arrest occurs, but it is before Genji leaves (but possibly after Reinhardt retires, since Winston is on the Strike Team).

I continue to hope that an eventual Archives mission will be a co-op mode between Jack and Gabriel as they attempt to flee before the Swiss Base explodes.

Asymmetric gameplay has actually been experimented with by Blizzard in the Yeti Hunt mode and the different Deathmatch modes: it would be relatively interesting to have a few small teams of “allies” (e.g. Jack and Gabriel (??) vs Talon agents (??)) attempting to either smuggle the bomb in (Talon side) or attempting to get out (Jack and Gabriel).  A major constraint to this concept is that if it occurs inside the Watchpoint, it would be very “linear” in physicality, which is something Blizzard disliked about Uprising.

Something major occurred which Blizzard is not yet ready to reveal: whether that is Gabriel’s “betrayal” or a “super plot twist” where he and Jack attempted to flee the explosion together (or some other twist), I would actually much rather see it in gameplay than in a comic or animated short.

[undertheinfluencerd]

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Warning: Contains SPOILERS for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

While Marvel’s Phase 4 has been mostly backward-looking for its first outings, in terms of reusing character, Shang-Chi is finally here to change things up. The MCU’s first martial arts fantasy epic is certainly different and unquestionably bold, but does it work, and will Marvel fans take to it as one of the strongest origin stories so far? How does it stand as a new branch for the MCU to nurture in other words?

For the most part, Marvel’s MCU origin stories have been particularly strong. Even ignoring the usual issues with over-emphasis on exposition, comic book movie fans love to see new superheroes take up the mantle. It’s traditionally been in MCU sequels where struggles have been more obvious – apart from Captain America’s seemingly bullet-proof sub-franchise of course. In that respect, Shang-Chi had reason to be confident, even with a vastly different focus to the other MCU kickstarter projects. But at the same time, with the expectations of fans built on 24 movies and billions of dollars, aiming for something different was never going to be completely straightforward. Particularly with the issues presented by the industry at the moment.

Related: Why Shang-Chi’s Avengers Cameo Looks Different From Endgame

Early box office results suggest Shang-Chi is going incredibly well and a 90%+ Rotten Tomatoes review score into opening weekend is always a very good sign. That is a testament to what Simu Liu and director Destin Daniel Cretton have achieved. That said, though, Shang-Chi has some teething issues, even for a movie that is very good overall. In the interest of balance, here’s everything that worked incredibly well in Shang-Chi and the few areas where it perhaps missed the mark.

As with any MCU origin story, there’s a lot of necessary exposition in Shang-Chi. The majority of this is conveyed via flashback, which works, and could have been a little jarring was the narrative importance of the past not been handled well. That typically means there is less space for character, which is often particularly true of a movie with such major fantastical elements and action set-pieces, but not in Shang-Chi. Simu Liu positively radiates charisma, even as he guards his character (to protect his secrets), promising an awful lot more in the MCU’s future. Awkwafina’s Katy is not just the audience’s eyes in Shang-Chi’s world, but she’s also the breakout character (the same way Ratcatcher was in The Suicide Squad and Michael Pena’s Luis was in Ant-Man). The fact that she returns in future, as set up by the end, can only be a good thing. Add to that, the performances of legends like Tony Leung and Michelle Yeoh – not just in combat, but in quieter moments – and it’s a truly great group.

Speaking of Tony Leung, his Wenwu – wrongly named The Mandarin or “The Real Mandarin” throughout the marketing – makes a strong claim to be one of the best human MCU villains alongside Michael B Jordan’s Killmonger. Even faced with being overshadowed by a colossal winged demon in the final act, Leung’s dramatic chops back up his stunning martial arts work to create a bad guy who is not only empathetic but compelling in his cause. He is in pain, haunted by his own part in his wife’s death, and corrupted by the power of the Ten Rings and what lies beyond Ta Lo’s portal. Though he also had a more traditional hunger for power before meeting Shang-Chi’s mother, he puts that one-dimensional motivation aside to be a man pushed to desperate, catastrophic measures by his grief. To contrast that with how Iron Man 3 originally portrayed the supposedly same character is night and day.

While the dynamic between Wenwu, Shang-Chi, and Xialing is great, Shang-Chi is best when it’s examining their personal story. Unfortunately, the shift in gears in the third act that sees them arrive in Ta Lo and face the impending arrival of the Dweller-in-Darkness feels like a similar situation that undermined how good The Avengers was. Suddenly adding the Dweller as the final act “big boss”, plus an army of otherwise unmentioned flying soul sucker drones is very much like Whedon’s use of the Chitauri army to escalate matters for the heroes in his final act back in 2012. That’s not to say there aren’t impressive moments in the battle – and who doesn’t want to see what amounts to the MCU’s first kaiju on kaiju battle? – but there’s not quite enough tension when the personal story is ripped away.

Related: Is Shang-Chi Officially An Avenger Now?

The benefit of adding a martial arts master to the MCU is immediately obvious as soon as Shang-Chi gets into its combat groove. The opening fight sequence on the bus careening down San Francisco’s famous hills is remarkable and it’s far from the best. Elsewhere, Tony Leung, Simu Liu, Andy Le, Fala Chen, Meng’er Zhan, and young Arnold Sun (a revelation as teen Shang-Chi in training flashbacks) all put together gravity-defying martial arts set-pieces that are unlike anything seen in the MCU. So far, the MCU brand of martial arts has looked more like the bruising style of Florian Munteanu’s Razor Fist, but here there’s balletic grace mashed up with the physical drunken boxer humor of Kung Fu Hustle (referenced lovingly not only in a poster in Shang-Chi’s wall, but also in the casting of Yuen Wah as Ta Lo Master Guang Bo. The slow-motion can get a little over-indulgent, but there’s no doubting the obscene skill involved.

Despite the mastery of the fight choreography and the incredible environmental designs that go into Ta Lo in particular, some of Shang-Chi‘s CGI is on a par with the worst moments of Black Panther‘s notorious early trailers. There’s more than one regrettable ragdoll sequence, including part of the otherwise excellent bus fight, and while the Great Protector battling the Dweller-in-Darkness is a fun spectacle, some of it is too muddied by an attempt to presumably hide the heavy effects work involved. The moment that sees Shang-Chi run up the otherworldly beast, in particular, is near-impossible to follow.

The MCU has been accused before of being too focused on shoe-horning humor in to meet the expectations of the lucrative family audience, and even some of the best Marvel movies too have clunking gags in them. Shang-Chi, though, brilliantly balances humor and heart and drama. Awkwafina’s Katy and Sir Ben Kingsley’s return as Trevor Slattery take care of much of the leg work, but Simu Liu’s comic background helps a great deal, though his jokes come less frequently than his “sidekicks”. There’s never any attempt to really undermine heavy, dramatic moments with humor, which is where Marvel stumbles a lot and crucially, Shang-Chi being an insider on his lore means there’s no reductive mockery of the mythology behind his powers and his family.

Shang-Chi is a stand-alone almost to the same degree as a Phase 1 movie, and that’s great, but there are obviously expectations to tie it back to the rest of the MCU, and – as ever – use its end as a stepping stone to what comes next. Had that ended with Wong’s recruitment of Shang-Chi and Katy and the impromptu, hilarious karaoke sessions, that would have been perfectly fine, but then Shang-Chi‘s mid-credits scene goes too far. Captain Marvel and Bruce Banner’s inclusions feel too much like big-name appearances for the sake of familiarity, particularly because both add very little to the discussion on the Ten Rings other than a bemused shrug. They’re there so that Marvel can remind the audience that there’s always something bigger coming, but it didn’t need to be done this way when Wong’s mysterious tease of what he needed Shang-Chi for was satisfying enough.

Related: How Marvel Retconned Its Iron Man 3 Mandarin Controversy

Now that there are 25 MCU movies and a number of Disney+ Marvel shows to throw into the mix, the requirement to do Marvel homework before each release is getting to the point where casual audiences simply will not do it. Luckily, Shang-Chi exists on its own merit strongly and without the crutch of the rest of the franchise, meaning any pre-watching is limited. Yes, there are nods to the post-Endgame world in posters about Snap Anxiety, and Wong and Tim Roth’s Abomination appear, but the only substantial link is to Trevor Slattery’s arc in Iron Man 3, and he is played in such a way that he’s no more than a jester brought along to help Morris become the next most memeable Marvel character. His arc is entirely explained within Shang-Chi anyway, so that serves as all the required reminder. The reason this is such a big plus for Shang-Chi is that it has to be how Marvel moves forward when establishing new MCU IPs, like X-Men, Fantastic Four, Blade, and whoever else comes along: not everything has to be tied to the nostalgia machine. Shang-Chi proves it’s still possible to strike out onto a new branch without everything being a set-up for when the next cameo will happen.

While Tony Leung’s Wenwu is great (particularly in how he retcons Iron Man 3‘s Mandarin mistake), and the fight sequences involving both are hugely entertaining, it’s difficult not to feel that both Razor Fist and – even more so – Death Dealer aren’t rather undernourished. The former’s complexity is as limited as you might expect from someone who drives around in an SUV with his own name spraypainted on the side (even when it’s achingly hinted for about two seconds that he fears for his master’s mental health), and the latter is a plot device killed off for effect. Neither is given anything like the charisma to hide their lack of development and backstory and it’s a real shame. At least Razor Fist’s likely return might afford more of an opportunity.

Not only is Shang-Chi a great stand-alone, but it is fundamentally different from what MCU fans have seen over the past decade. While it has the same hallmarks of familial conflict and daddy issues as lots of previous Marvel movies, it balances that with martial arts, new mysticism, a dragon, a giant kaiju-like demon, and the suggestion that more lands like Wakanda can exist beyond portals to other realms. There can be no accusations of deferring to type or Shang-Chi being somehow formulaic, and after 24 films, that is an impressive thing to be able to state. It also makes forthcoming new creative endeavors – like Eternals – that have a similar burden of expectation to be new and exciting a lot easier to back to succeed with the audience. The start of Phase 4 has looked backward a little more than some may like, but Shang-Chi is bold and unafraid to be wildly different to its stable-mates, and that should give future MCU creators cause for confidence.

Next: Every Upcoming Marvel Movie Release Date (2021 To 2023)

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Black Panther * 2018 * Rated PG-13 * 2 Hours 14 Minutes

😸😸😸😸½ Rated 4.5/5 Happy lap cats

After a long wait (for the audience), the King of Wakanda has finally returned home to be crowned. The country he returns home to is a glorious place, a perfect blend of environmental preservation and cutting edge technology. The people are strong, beautiful, and intelligent. The traditional culture is thriving as technological updates improve the quality of life. Women are front and center in Wakanda, in positions of importance. The King’s teenage sister is even the main inventor and scientist for the country. Imagine that- a teenage girl who acts like a normal girl, but is also one of the smartest people in the room at all times, and given the respect of everyone around her.

But Wakanda isn’t actually a utopia. It just appears to be, because it’s so much closer to it than almost any place else on earth, other than maybe some of the Scandinavian countries. And those are too cold and dark for most of us.

The seeds of civil war have been brewing for generations in Wakanda. King T’Chaka also made some mistakes when he was young that inevitably come back to haunt the royal family and the nation. In the end, Wakanda ends up in crisis when various rivals from inside and outside the country decide that the transition in rulers is a good time to exploit the country’s weaknesses.

Black Panther, directed and cowritten by Ryan Coogler (with Joe Robert Cole) is the latest big budget feature film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (in case this is the first time you’ve been on the internet in a year). The film has been hyped and highly anticipated since it was announced. Thankfully, it largely lives up to the hype.

Prince T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) and his father, the king of Wakanda, were introduced in the 2016 film Captain America: Civil War. While attending a UN summit, King T’Ckakka (John Kani) was quickly killed by a bomb, making T’Challa the uncrowned king and sending him on a quest for revenge for the rest of the movie. He completed his mission, discovering who was responsible for the bombing and catching them. But he also realized that due process was better than personal revenge, because violence just leads to more violence, and in the end it doesn’t solve anything.

Black Panther picks up where Civil War left off, with T’challa arriving home for his father’s funeral and his coronation ceremony. This film forces him to face the difficulties that a ruler must face- what do you do to protect your people when violence is inevitable? He can’t simply pass the problem on to a court system as he did with Zemo in Civil War, or murder his opponent as a matter of personal justice. Now his decisions affect a nation, and potentially the world, and he still needs to protect his people without unnecessarily escalating conflicts.

He also needs to face the legacy of his beloved father’s decisions. His father kept secrets, and made hard choices of his own that weren’t the choices T’Challa would have made. Now T’Challa has to come to terms with learning that his father wasn’t always the man T’Challa thought he was.

Black Panther is the story of a nation that’s deciding what it’s place will be in the modern world, and a king who is figuring out what kind of king he is. It’s also a coming of age story for T’Challa the man, as he has to learn to stand on his own, without his father, and the origin story for Black Panther, superhero.

Like the best of the MCU movies, it has layers of meaning, sometimes stated straight out (one character’s dying words really go for it) and some metaphorical. It’s also has multiple levels of storytelling, which we don’t always get in the MCU. In that sense, it’s the equal to the Captain America movies, which all included larger MCU or real world stories, Avenger level stories, and multiple subplots for the many supporting characters.

Black Panther does pretty well by its female characters, too. There are women everywhere, in the background and foreground, in positions of power and as everyday people. They are main characters and supporting characters who are pivotal to the story. There are women ranging in age from T’Challa’s 16 year old sister Shuri, played by Letitia Wright, to his mother, Queen Ramonda, played by Angela Bassett, who is 59. She wore a silver, waist-length wig with the hair rolled into dreadlocks for the film. She and the wig were both regal.

One of the other important female parts is played by Danai Gurira, as Okoye, the head of the Dora Milaje, T’Challa’s all-female special forces and bodyguards. The fourth main female character is Nakia, played by Lupita Nyong’o, a spy, freedom fighter and T’Challa’s former girlfriend. They all have substantial roles and are treated with respect by the script and the other characters.

But there are some crucial moments where Black Panther the film drops the ball, because, as usual, while women can be scientists and generals and spies, they can’t be the ones who finish the being strong and decisive in battle. When they are responsible for something decisive, it will be because they used their feminine side instead of their warrior or technological skills.

There are a couple of moments during the climactic battle scene that rang hollow for me, because the women involved simply wouldn’t make those choices, based on their professional skills and knowledge, and the quick thinking we’d seen them use in other situations.

If the writers didn’t want to give a big moment to that character, then they should have written the scene a different way, instead of making a woman suddenly look dumb with a weapon and like she needed to be rescued by a man. Those were the moments when I knew I was watching a Disney film.

There were a few other moments where a character’s actions or a plot device didn’t really make sense but were crucial to the plot, which is the reason I took half a star off the rating. But as comic book stories go, it’s pretty darn logical, overall. Coogler and Cole wrote a fast-paced, fun, funny, meaningful script with fully realized characters that I look forward to seeing in future Black Panther movies and MCU movies.

The cast and their acting are superb. This has got to be one of the most attractive casts of a film, ever, and the costume design goes out of its way to show that off without sexualizing the characters, which is refreshing. But these are almost all actors that are already known for their acting chops, so it’s no surprise that they’re amazing here. Their chemistry together is also wonderful.

Martin Freeman as the lone white guy in Wakanda, CIA agent Everett Ross, is as sincere and cute as ever, a great counterpart to the richness of the Wakandan culture. He’s a very by the book, bland, company man, who is confronted by the city of the future in a country that loves color, patterns, rhythm, and bold stylistic statements. He’s a long way from the land of gray office cubicles, and he does his best to follow along.

The cinematography (by Oscar nominee Rachel Morison) and production design (Hannah Beachler) of the film, which creates the culture of an entire country, including five separate tribes, is another of its major strengths. It blends futuristic technology like mag lev trains and spear-shaped, hand-held rocket launchers with the natural environment and designs inspired by those traditionally found in Africa. As a whole, it looks gorgeous, and serves as a template for cities of the future on how to maintain natural spaces and unique cultural flavors while incorporating technological advances.

The score (Ludwig Göransson) also blends modern popular music with African rhythms and some of the themes more typically heard in an MCU movie, helping to firmly ground it in-universe.

The action sequences are many and varied, ranging from hand to hand combat at the top of a waterfall, to the required lengthy car chase, to a major battle on a field that includes soldiers riding rhinoceroses. They are all well-done, though I personally preferred some of the Black Panther fight choreography in Civil War. Metamaiden tells me I’m being too picky, so I concede that point. I just really loved the way Black Panther leapt from car to car during the chase in Civil War, and this one had fewer moving parts outside of the cars.

One unusual thing about this film is the lack of cameos by other members of the MCU. (I thought Tony Stark was showing up in everything these days. Stan Lee does show up, obs, and the entire audience made noise.) We get clips from Civil War to remind us of how T’Chaka died, with a photo of Zemo, and Andy Serkis’ Ulysses Klaue (first seen in Age of Ultron) plays a major part in the story. (Andy Serkis plays his role with relish.) That’s about it for cast members that we’ve met before, besides T’Challa and Ross.

The major tie-in with the rest of the universe comes in the second post-credits tag (so stay until the very end of the credits, trust me), with the development some us have been waiting for since the mid-credits tag at the end of Captain America: Civil War. Which still begs the question- where are the Avengers during this movie? In universe, it’s only a few days since half of them found refuge in Wakanda. Have they moved on already? Are they all taking a nap and staying out of Wakanda’s internal affairs? Will Infinity War have time to answer these burning questions?

Overall, Black Panther is one of the best superhero films to come out in a long time. It has a unique, hopeful and appealing creative vision for what the future could be, which is unusual in the midst of the current film and television landscape that’s devoted to dystopias. King T’Challa and his people are complex characters with exciting, interesting lives. With any luck those lives will continue to unfold in the MCU.

  Michael B Jordan also stars as Erik Killmonger, Forest Whitaker plays Zuri, Daniel Kaluuya plays W’Kabi, Sterling K Brown is N’Jobu, Florence Kasumba is Ayo, and Winston Duke is M’Baku.

Description of the tags, for those who want spoilers.

  Marvel Studios’ BLACK PANTHER L to R: Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) and Shuri (Letitia Wright) Credit: Matt Kennedy/©Marvel Studios 2018

Movie Review: Black Panther Black Panther * 2018 * Rated PG-13 * 2 Hours 14 Minutes 😸😸😸😸½ Rated 4.5/5 Happy lap cats…