Author: david

Hello, this is the second i am david brothers newsletter!

If I’ve rigged it right, replies to these emails go to me directly. How long should these be? Should I pick one subject and stick to it? Is there anything beautiful left in the world? Is the new Danny Brown album good? Did I remember to tick Open in a New Tab for all these links? These questions and others go unanswered below.

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Here’s four things of no particular relation:
–KENTA vs Satoshi Kojima at Wrestle Kingdom 15: I have a lot of affection for Bullet Club KENTA. KENTA is probably my favorite pro wrestler, and this era featured effective heel tactics and backstage promos that have me convinced KENTA took a ton of improv classes while WWE was wasting his time. He was a jerk as a young guy, but in his middle age? He’s a monster. His entrance tune Cicatriz is a good workout tune too. I wore a KENTA shirt to the signing yesterday.
–I have been slacking on finishing painting a model kit for over a month now. I just need to paint Hyaku-Shiki’s chest blue! Get on with it. I’m doing the entire kit drybrushed over black primer, for a nasty metal look. I have a hunch it won’t photograph well but it’s looking good. When I do it.
–Death Stranding 2, (from Hideo Kojima, et al.): I sorta-kinda beat this in the middle of the night on Twitch the other day. I’ll have thoughts on this next time, but my shortest, spoiler-free take is that Hideo Kojima saw what Konami was doing with Metal Gear and decided to show them the limits of imitation. I’m talking David Mazzucchelli drawing Batman: Year One compared to the last time I myself (a fellow David) tried to draw Batman.
–I’ve got just enough Chrome tabs open that youtube videos only play with a choppy framerate. There is no lesson for me to learn here because they play fine on my TV and my phone, so I’m gonna keep on stacking tabs until the sun turns cold. It’s you or me, Google, and it ain’t gonna be me.

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With a Triple Take, my confidence explodes out of control:
I’ve been playing Apex Legends for a few years now, almost twenty of the “seasons” of the game. It started as a solo thing I did during the pandemic to be doing something instead of nothing and eventually morphed into the Monday Night Game With the Trio. Parallel to that, I’ve been learning Adobe Premiere for video editing for various reasons, mostly talking about comics or video games online.

I’ve been merging the two interests by making a little highlight reel—we’re okay, these are just nice bits and wins to celebrate—set to music. It’s not quite full AMV status, but I’m always thinking of anime music videos and (don’t laugh) Koyaanisqatsi (1982) when working on these. “What technique do I need to know to get this idea across?” is heavy on my mind, and that movie really rearranged my brain when I finally saw it.

I finished the video for Apex Legends season 26 a couple days after the season ended, blending my footage with their footage into what’s hopefully a pleasant sequence. Either way, it’s great practice and a good vibe, similar to how editing the Mangasplaining podcast (working on the backlog!) is mostly about listening to my friends laugh while they talk about comics.

Here’s “Apex Legends, season 26 (Showdown): Have you heard iron sound?”, featuring Alafía’s “The Blacksmith.”

“Apex Legends, season 26 (Takeover): Have you heard iron sound?” [embedded video]

On to the next. I’ve been slacking on playing a bit on my own, but seeing how my friends are performing makes me want to start getting reps in again. Luckily there’s 25 hours in a day.

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Tens of people have been asking, what is David genre:
I recently read Victor Santos’s Ginger’s Revenge, a one-shot story published on Panel Syndicate. It’s a story about a teen girl who has turned herself into a killing machine to get revenge on her absent father, who has himself become a major figure in organized crime. It’s set in the United Kingdom, so guns are treated with all due respect, and it is a fairly dense 57 pages.

I think I’d like to write about it at length in the near future, because I had a hoot of a time reading it. A “hoot” is a term critics use when a book keeps pushing all their buttons and they spend as much time laughing as reading a story. Do non-critics know about this? Calling a story a hoot is one of the highest honors.

I’ve been joking about how some stories are “David genre” for more years than I remember now. Enough that friends and readers have brought me books they think might be David genre and been absolutely right, even if not for the exact reasons they imagined. It’s a fuzzy category because I’m a fuzzy guy, but the loose idea is that it’s something like John Wick (2014) or The Killer (1989), but also like Jiro Taniguchi’s A Journal of My Father, or The Wrestler (2008), or Rei Hiroe’s Black Lagoon: Roberta’s Blood Trail. I can do one of those conspiracy wall things when discussing the appeal of any of this stuff.

David genre is about masculinity and growth, complicated father-and-child relationships, and people dying in acrobatic or inventive ways. It’s the end of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” when The Misfit says, “She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

The stories aren’t dumb. They may be direct or unsubtle, or maybe I’m responding to a perceived subtlety in a mostly unsubtle work, but there’s real texture there. Not really a lot of sex, I guess, now that I’m listing things off. Wonder what that’s about…?

Anyway, David genre is a very tongue-in-cheek thing, basically “hey this seems like something you’d like” from my friends, but it’s been fun trying to discover the edges of it for my self, what qualifies as a David genre story and what’s just a cheap holiday in somebody else’s misery. “Writer, know thy self,” right? What do I like and why?

Ginger’s Revenge is a great example of a David genre book, from the storytelling on down. I’m the son of a single mom, so there’s a real charge to fatherhood revenge tales, even if my own relationship with my father is good. It’s not a clear-cut good versus evil story, a conceit I think is pretty lousy in stories about normal people. Ginger isn’t perfect and her father isn’t Lucifer. She is tremendously competent though, a power fantasy I truly enjoy. She came to do a job and is focused on the job. There are other bits and pieces throughout here that click with me, elements of hard boiled storytelling and more extreme action stuff.

The visual storytelling is extremely David genre. Santos is working with a limited palette, making Ginger’s shock of orange hair a compelling design element. Other colors squeeze in as needed—blood red, moody yellow, a very appealing tracksuit green—but the comic feels great, like a speedy black & white comic even with all the color. There’s something special about black & white comics that really play with spot blacks and contrast, and Santos has an excellent grasp on both. The color isn’t icing on the cake or a flourish. It’s something more substantial than that that I haven’t put my finger on yet. It’s like a spoiler on a car, maybe. It has great aesthetic appeal that sometimes obscures what the functionality it brings to the total package…? I’m figuring out how to say how much and why I like this still.  That’s not quite it. To be continued.

Ginger’s Revenge is an excellent example of the David genre, and I’m probably gonna have more to say about it soon. Please start using David genre in conversation with friends and family so that I can get some leverage in Hollywood and wherever it is they make comic books these days. I want to curate something.

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I don’t have a good subtitle for this one but it’s a pleasant anecdote:
In the last newsletter, I mentioned having a signing with some fantastic artists. James Harren ended up not being able to make it, but Nick Dragotta and Daniel Warren Johnson came to Oakland’s very own Cape & Cowl Comics for the signing. Getting a face-first look at what Absolute Batman means to people was really enlightening. There were new readers, lapsed readers, and ones who were just like, man, this is the perfect escalation or evolution.

Absolute Batman was definitely a huge deal at the signing, but it was nice to meet readers of Time Waits and Good Devils while I was there, and especially people who picked up All-Negro Comics. A few of them mentioned that I’d talked them into it back in August, which is amazing. Variants and cape comics are buzzy right now, so independent, creator-owned work can be tough to market. It really means a lot when someone walks up and say that they catch what you’re throwing. I was one of several people who told DWJ that Do A Powerbomb! made me cry over the course of the day. (I don’t write tearjerkers, but people said nice things to me too.) A good story is better than just about anything, is what I’m saying. Connecting via art.

The signing ended up being seven hours, from 1400 til just after 2100. I’m typing this on Sunday evening and I’m still beat. (I did technically go for a bike ride earlier today though.)

My first signing ever was the Image+ release party at Cape & Cowl ten years ago, and I’ve done a few cons and a couple signings since then. I’m still working with single digits here, and more than anything else, it’s always really nice talking to people about comics and things they like. I was really feeling it by the end, and I really need to do a better job of remembering I have an occasionally bum knee in the moment, but man, the good vibes were off the charts. I drew a lot of Snoopy heads for a lot of people. (You gotta be a real brave soul to draw Batman next to these dudes.)

Another reason I feel fortunate in life in general is that I’ve made friends with people who are ludicrously good artists but still very free with their time and experience. I’m always mooching tips off people, and I like seeing them work with readers too. A highlight of the signing was seeing a ten year old girl with a sketchbook held close to her chest and getting to flip through it. That’s the stuff that gets me and keeps me hyped up about comics.

We hit the Art of Manga exhibition earlier that, my second time seeing the exhibit at the DeYoung and first time since it opened. It was medium-high packed at ten in the morning over a month after it opened, which was great to see. I was trying to profile the crowd, seeing if younger readers were responding to Jiro Taniguchi or who was blown away by Mari Yamazaki. I didn’t learn anything though. It was really mostly just looking at people and making up stories about them in my head. “Oh that kid would probably love Hotel Harbour View. That old lady, she seems like a real One Piece fan.” Bad methodology but I saw a bunch of people with sketchbooks walking around.

I had a good time on Saturday. Please buy one hundred thousand copies of Good Devils: Don’t Play Fair With Evil at your earliest convenience so I can do it again.

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Here are some quick hits for you to check out:
–Claire Napier’s Cosy Witch Book (Brutal) chapter 1: I’m a Claire Napier fan. There’s a drawing of a house in here that’s great, and “It was a dark and normal night” is the kind of caption that makes my eyes narrow and makes my interest pique.
–Robert Wilson’s “Dreamhouse”: The Kickstarter for Robert Wilson’s graphic novella “Dreamhouse” is a good one. Get in there. A24 is a good point of comparison for fans of that lane of scary stories. Unrelated to “Dreamhouse” beyond a craft level, I bought this screenprint of the best mecha in Gundam from Wilson a long while back and got it framed. I really dig it and like his work. Please give the “Dreamhouse” Kickstarter a long look.
–Giannis Milonogiannis’s sketchbooks & new game: Artist and game designer Giannis Milonogiannis has been a creator to watch for years. Old City Blues is a favorite. Such clean, cool designs. You can download his sketchbooks if you scroll down here a bit and you can download Birdcage, a story-driven arcade shooter, on Steam a little later this month. Wishlist it. It looks dope. I am very bad at these kinds of games but I’m gonna cop this.
–Lupe Fiasco’s “WAV Files”: “WAV Files” is a song where the sea, stars, and trees apologize for their role in being slave ships, carrying them on their waves, and twinkling on them from above. Listening to nature apologize and beg forgiveness is a nice train of thought. There’s a roll call of slave ships in the middle of the song that made me feel pretty bad (complimentary).

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Actually I want to zoom in on that one a little bit:
I liked the trees portion of “WAV Files” a lot, actually. There’s something about the apology here that’s really stuck with me, and Lupe’s delivery throughout the song is great, but really clicks here for me.
Summon the forest
Talkin’ to trees, “Now, how could you be in the chorus
With something so horrid?
You became boards for the floors and the doors of the warships”
Anthropomorphic, the forest returned with a match
Made from itself and said, “Burn us with that”
Then left again and came back with a axe
“We can serve you as furniture or furnace us black,” ayy

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If you haven’t had enough, here’s a few thousand more words:
–I wrote about Jorge Jimenez & Matt Fraction’s Batman #1 for Steve Morris at Shelfdust. I take what feels like a big swing but your mileage may vary if you aren’t an ’80s baby like me.
-I’ve been doing letterboxd as a way to warm up. I started with a rigid format and now I kind of just do whatever, like a thousand words on a few aspects of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025). I’m usually good for a couple reviews a month.
–I mentioned Mon Oncle (1958) last week. I forgot that I said it could momentarily cure depression when I wrote about it. It’s true though.

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A medium-length bike ride the day after a long signing…I did this to my self:
The new Danny Brown is good btw. He’s the latest rapper I enjoyed when I was younger who ended up finding some kinda peace as they got older. It’s great when black dudes get to a stage where life is good.

That’s it.

Hello, this is i am david brothers’s newsletter!

An awkward name, but is it a memorable one? Will I be able to hit a weekly pace? What kind of newsletter will this be? How stripped back and lo-fi can I make it? Let’s find out together.

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Here’s some stuff I liked recently:
–Mon Oncle (1958). Banger comedy. Wish I heard of Jacques Tati as a kid.
–Friendship (2025). Banger comedy for completely different but also similarly awkward reasons.
-David Byrne’s American Utopia concert film, directed by Spike Lee. Team Beloved stays winning.
-Shinsuke Nakamura’s King of Strong Style: 1980-2014. Please…please…let Nakamura be Hiroshi Tanahashi’s final opponent.
-Charlie Huston’s Catchpenny. This guy’s prose is really pleasant. I’ve been a fan for ages.
–Death Stranding 2. More on this soon.
–Absolum. Someone said “influenced by Streets of Rage 4 and Dragon’s Crown” to me and I woke up a week later with hours of co-op time logged with a friend. Great game. Had to make myself put it down at one point.
-Katsuyori Shibata vs Yuji Nagata during New Japan Pro Wrestling’s 2014 G1 Climax 24. Black trunks forever, but Nagata really brings it.
-I got a bike, after eight years without one. Turns out the wind in your face is still a great feeling!

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This is some stuff that’s been on my mind:
The ways we experience video games and difficulty is something that’s really interesting, in part because the specific ways we usually discuss it online are kind of insufficient to me. It makes for a strange experience as a reader, with tomfoolery like arguing against an essay you vaguely agree with because the way they approach the subject is repellent. Crossing your arms, “Not like that.” And so forth.

As an example (with peace and love!!), I didn’t much like this essay on the Innerspiral blog by Alli, titled “Difficulty Isn’t Everything.” It sorta lost me by the end of the first paragraph, but I saw it through to catch the perspective and follow the conversation. I did like this essay on a tangentially related wave by Chris Person on Aftermath, “I Love Silksong Even When It Bugs Me”, which is about a friction in game I don’t even plan to play. (I didn’t really play the first one.)

I think “I Love Silksong Even When It Bugs Me” succeeds by drilling down into specific experiences in Hollow Knight: Silksong, while the other essay falters due to being so broad that it just barely coheres. “Difficulty Isn’t Everything” has an aside about how difficulty is the result of capitalism and we shouldn’t prize it so highly accordingly, and that’s not wrong, but it ain’t exactly right enough to be true, either. It feels a bit like arguing against the worst possible person’s points on a subject, like a weird detour in an argument I’d like to understand better.

I liked one, disliked the other, and sharing both of them with friends who share a variety of perspectives with both pieces led to an hour or two of good conversation about disability-related accessibility and basic access, elitism, difficulty, personal capabilities, and the importance of arguing your points well, rather than trying to cover everything in one big whack. I came away feeling the same away about the pieces and their perspectives, but bouncing those ideas around with my own and those of my friends for a while made for a very enlightening and good time.

I think these two were a good point of comparison because they aren’t talking about the same thing at all, outside of the general idea of a conversation about difficulty. It’s more like, these two are tackling difficulty from different angles, and one was successful than the other for me in ways I didn’t expect, due to my lack of familiarity with Hollow Knight.

I think the crux of my dissatisfaction with the overall difficulty argument is that, for the most part a lot of it feels like jabbing at easy targets or strawmen, as if normal people don’t play these games too. It doesn’t always feel like a real argument online so much as a bloodletting where two sides take aim at the worst of each side. It’s good to get granular on this conversation. I think difficulty as a concept is frequently so broad or personal that we aren’t always talking about the same thing either, but I’m grasping the argument better than I have been. I plan to keep reading essays from both sides and seeing how things go, because I heard once that if you keep touching a hot stove, you eventually develop an immunity.

Me, I just think it’s good if there’s games for everybody, including games that are made for people who need to be punished in order to have a good time (sickos, with peace and love). That game Absolum that just came out, it has an Assist Mode with some pretty nicely varied options for making the game easier/more exciting for yourself, which was cool to see even though I mostly just play with default settings on almost every game. It does a good job of cleanly expressing what kind of game it is and who it’s aimed at, even if it doesn’t scratch the same sicko itch as, say, Sekiro.

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Picking this thread up again a few weeks later, because I started writing this newsletter in the summer when I watched Mon Oncle and am finally finishing it in the fall:
After spending an hour streaming Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice for the first time in a while, just running through some familiar challenges and exorcising a long day, a different difficulty-related question came to mind: what makes the difficult games still fun once you’ve learned the fight that was so difficult in the first place? Sekiro is still a challenge, but now I fight Isshin Ashina on purpose for fun, not because I’m trying to climb his mountain and complete the game. There’s something that draws me back to this game in particular.

FromSoftware is good at making fights that are always a threat, but once you grasp the threat, you can dance around it. Ten, fifteen minutes into my stream, I was remembering old tricks, taking big risks that would mostly pay off, and making things harder on myself with different items. I mostly play without buffs and just swordplay, but I wanted to mix it up and play with some effects more. I kept falling back on old tricks or finding out that my big idea was actually just a good way to get triple smacked by the Corrupted Monk.

It’s still punishment, but punishment of a different stripe, right? The risk of taking a big L is always going to be there, but the nature of the achievement when you win has changed. I don’t think you can separate the knowledge check and DPS check aspects of these fights. “Do I know what’s going on enough to survive the fight?” and “Can I do enough damage to kill the boss before they kill me?” are still the foundation. But completion adds a third pillar.

Honestly, it’s probably similar to the ghosts in Mario Kart or something. “Here’s what I did last time. Can I do better this time?” Doing a 5K again and again, shaving time. It doesn’t quite feel like that, but it’s gotta be in the ballpark.

Anyway, it turns out Sekiro is comfort food, similar to Tekken. I felt good after playing in a way that I usually don’t even after playing other games that I enjoy greatly. Great games to toss on for five, ten, twenty minutes or a few hours after work on a Friday night. Speaking of, my, look at the time…!

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Okay, here’s some more stuff to check out:
-I like Ben Passmore’s work, and his new book looks good. Cheryl Klein speaks to him at PW in brief about his new book.  Check out his Instagram too, he does this weekend culture Q&A bit that I try to catch each week.

–Final Fantasy: The Ivalice Chronicles came out recently. It’s great, a worthy remake/remaster of an all-time favorite game. I’ve been playing it on Tactician difficulty, less for sickos reasons and more because I think FFT is probably my all-time most-played game outside of the Madden franchise circa ’94-’08 and NBA 2k ’10-’16 or so, and switching it up sounded nice. I breezed through Dorter Slums, a notorious early difficulty spike, and then got bopped in a random battle right afterward. I’m having a great time. It’s like putting a puzzle together in a new configuration but still quite achievable. I hate grinding, so I’m really discovering the limits of my cleverness. I don’t think I’ll get spoiled on this one, so I’m really spacing this one out, just doing a couple battles a week.

Do me a solid and pick these up:
–Good Devils: Don’t Play Fair With Evil one-shot: Since 2021 or so, Nick Dragotta and I have been doing little comics, homages to our faves and fresh tales both. We put them together in a package called Good Devils, named after the opening story in the mix, and Image Comics published it. We’re grappling with Fist of the North Star and ducking Hajime no Ippo in this one. Get it from your comic shop, as an ebook, or on the Hoopla library app, my main way of reading comics. I chatted with James Boyce of the FAQs Project about it, and Nick and I both talked to fellow Team Beloved MVP David Harper for Off Panel.
–Perfect Crime Party: This one is a collection of stories about the perfect crime. Not a murder you get away with—softer stuff than that. It has a short story that was drawn by Alissa Sallah and written by me, and comes via Iron Circus Comics. You can check out more of Alissa’s work on the VIZ one-shots platform. She did one called “Sun Tribe: Waffle Shack Index” that’s a lot of fun. Our two stories are very different from each other, too. She’s got range! Follow her on instagram.
–All-Negro Comics: This one was edited by Chris Robinson, and published via Image Comics. I contributed an essay to it, and I’m thrilled to be a part of it at all. You can listen to a podcast conversation between Chris Robinson & James Boyce of the FAQs Project here.

Here’s something that really blows my mind:
Years ago, I was on staff at Image comics, and one duty I ended up with was running a magazine called Image+, sort of a catalog/preview/hype machine. We did a launch party for it at the then-newly founded Cape & Cowl Comics in Oakland, California. It was a nice time, and certainly the first time I was the center of attention in that specific way.

Years later, ten of ’em in fact, and Cape & Cowl is celebrating their anniversary on November 8th, and I’m re-invited! Nick Dragotta and I released Good Devils: Don’t Play Fair With Evil via Image Comics in October, and it seems like people dig it. (I’m hoping we eventually do Absolute Batman numbers, personally.) Nick’s coming to town to celebrate the release, and Daniel Warren Johnson and James Harren are coming with him.

Cape & Cowl puts on a good show. I’ve been behind a table at two of their Cape & Cowl Cons, been to a couple drink & draws, and did a big signing there with Chip Zdarsky for Time Waits. (We wrote that one together. Marcus To drew it.) I’m looking forward to the event and hanging out over there a bit more. It’s an easy bike ride for me.

I’m saying, check out these promo posters:

 

Look, ma. I made it. Sometimes life is good.

Does helping people make you feel better?
The Alameda County Community Food Bank is going to be pretty crucial in the Bay Area this winter, I think. Check them out here and look around for a local org that serves a similar purpose. Somebody out there is helping, and can help you help others.

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That’s it.

I’ve spent the past month shilling a project by me and Nick Dragotta (please preorder Good Devils: Don’t Play Fair With Evil one-shot, Lunar code, before 9/8! on sale 10/1!) but the October release I’m most excited about is the release of All-Negro Comics: 75th Anniversary Edition from Image Comics in late October/early November in a new softcover edition.

Three quarters of a century ago, Orrin C. Evans lead a team of cartoonists to create the first comic book anthology of original Black characters created by Black talent, with the expressed purpose of entertaining while rejecting harmful stereotypes and pushing boundaries in the industry. This was only 8 years after Action Comics #1, 6 years after Captain America #1 and a whole 19 years before Black Panther hit the pages of Fantastic Four.

All-Negro Comics #1 should be among those revered moments in comic book history, but the original print run was quickly removed from newsstands and faded into obscurity, remaining largely unknown for 75 years…until now.

All-Negro Comics 75th Anniversary Edition (an Eisner Award-winning collection) preserves that history for generations to come, containing All-Negro Comics #1, in full and digitally remastered for clarity, several essays for historical context and contemporary reflection, as well as new stories by Black writers and artists of today, featuring the original characters.

I first wrote about the project back in 2010, and I’ve been hoping for a reprint of it ever since. From the moment I heard about it, I knew it was special…and out of reach. There were scraps online, roughly scanned or photographed panels from a pretty rugged edition, but nothing resembling a proper cover to cover scan. It was a book I knew about but figured I would never see, a lost bit of Black history. I can tell looking back at the old post that I was really looking for something to connect some dots for me, and this book felt like it would have been a help, if I could find a copy.

Fortunately, editor Chris Robinson is way smarter than me. He went out and fulfilled what I’d been dreaming about. He ran a Kickstarter to put together a nice hardcover. The new Image Comics edition is an affordable softcover version of that project. He commissioned a few new tales alongside the old ones, and I even got to write an essay for the project, “Hip-Hop and Comic Books was My Genesis.”

The reprint of All-Negro Comics isn’t my project, not exactly, but I really do feel weirdly proud and thrilled that it’s coming out. I think it’s something you should pay attention to. I tabled at Cape & Cowl Con in the Bay Area a couple weekends ago, and brought the All-Negro Comics hardcover with me to show people and try to talk the book up a bit while selling comics. I live in Oakland, Berkeley is just over there. This is Black History Country, you know what I mean? And I was still surprised and thrilled at just how into the book people seemed to be, how energized people sounded. It’s a remarkable project.

If you work at a library or school especially, please check this book out. I spoke with people who are a part of various local library systems and they all saw the vision, but every voice helps in a chorus.

I’ve got some preview pages courtesy of Chris to close this out, and in lieu of a proper conclusion, here’s a bit from my essay that may help convince you:

The point about artists really sticks with me, though. The original sin of comics is the exploitation of the people that make them, and the American comics industry has lurched toward and away from different levels of fairness ever since. All-Negro Comics #1 was meant to open doors that I like to think are getting closer to wide open now. Today, the playing field has leveled some, though of course not all the way. But still, a lot of artists who would’ve once been marginalized by the gatekeepers in their chosen field have found an audience of people who are eager to hear what they have to say, and some have gone on to incredible success, by speaking directly to the people who are eager to be spoken to. In a very real way, All-Negro Comics was meant to do a very similar thing.

All-Negro Comics: America’s First Black Comic Book (ISBN: 9781534331150, Lunar Code 0825IM0457) will be available at local comic book shops on Wednesday, October 22 and independent bookstores, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Indigo, and Waterstones on Tuesday, November 4.

I finally beat the last boss of Elden Ring: Nightreign a while ago.

Years ago, I worked a job that meant getting off work around 8pm or later every Friday. The nature of the job meant that Friday was a long day, and one way we coped with that at the gig was with basketball. We went to a lot of Warriors games on their championship run, but that wasn’t the only special treat. To mark the end of a long day at the end of a long week, a couple of us would get into a car and drive to a gym one or two towns over. In that gym were a bunch of other workaholics and basketball sickos, all of them waiting for enough people to show up (2, 4, 8, 10!) to get a real game in instead of endless warmups.

Pick-up basketball is a beautiful thing. There may be a couple people who might as well be in NBA shape for how good they are compared to everyone else, but generally, you’ve got a lot of folks who are medium-good, but maybe have a specialty that gives them confidence.

People pick teams based on experience and vibes. People play their positions, but are otherwise hard to consistently predict. You’re golden when you see familiar faces wearing jerseys. But you don’t always get to have that experience, so you gotta be willing to put the ball in the hands of randos, too. Maybe the short guy can shoot, maybe the tall guy has handles. I’ve met monster centers at pick-up games, dudes who are maybe 5’8″ but have practiced nothing but rebounding and boxing out regular degular guys like me for thirty years. The LeBron Jameses of boxing out.

Playing with randos is fun in a different way than with the homies. You know what the homies can do, and you have a shared language to lean on. Aaron Accountant is great from outside, Gary GameStop is good at drawing double teams, and Bobby Burger King isn’t good at shooting but is good at setting picks. You can plan around it. With randos, you gotta trust them, and the revelation that comes from that trust can be a lot of fun.

Can this guy actually drive when he calls for the ball? Can the cat who called point thread the needle and feed you when you’re open? Is this 6’4″ dude ever gonna dunk or is he here to hold up the ceiling?

It’s a gamble, and when it pays off, it’s beautiful. We might as well have been the Dream Team for how good some of those games felt when you’re all exhausted, trying to figure out where your ball went, and trying to wipe off all the sweat before you get back into the car.

We usually went to In-n-Out after that. Perfect Friday night.

Youtube embed: “HOP ON NIGHTREIGN” by Keith GarcesSomething about the extended time you spend together in FromSoftware’s Elden Ring: Nightreign, and the limited communication options available when playing with randos or full voice chat when playing with friends, makes the game feel similar to pick-up basketball to me. If you don’t play basketball, imagine the doubles table tennis dynamic, and that’s basically close enough for government work. If you don’t know table tennis…er…Mario Kart Double Dash?

Part of the fun of sports is giving myself over to the team and trying to get us all over the finish line, and Nightreign is very much that kind of game. You have to be aware of what your teammates’ characters are capable of, in addition to their actual human skill at performing those actions. If you try to play it alone instead of joining the team of three, you’re probably going to ruin the experience for everyone. Sometimes you get hard carried by the neighborhood Steph Curry, who is always down to run up the score or splash a Guardian ult on both downed teammates from across the map, nothing but net to rescue the run. That’s a different kind of thrill, a rare experience, but I do prefer the “all in it learning together” struggle.

Sometimes you don’t mesh and the games suck. Your team gets off to a weird start or prioritizes awkwardly-placed locations, so your weapons and levels are out of whack when you get to the boss fight at the end of the night. Life happens. You’re still presenting a united front against the enemy, whether that enemy is a formidable opposing basketball team or the red-eyed Bell-Bearing Hunter, but you’re not enough of a team. You’re moving as three, when you should be moving as one.

But most times out of ten, at least in my experience, when a bunch of people get together to accomplish a shared goal, there’s a level of submission to the team involved, of figuring out the best way to belong instead of the best way to lead. Being open to playing with randos in this game means being surprised when they go off on their own, but also being surprised when they show off great game sense or a really team-oriented kind of gameplay. Runs are up and down, but mostly, they’ve been up, and I think that makes for a really pleasant time. The game is still 45 minutes of hard focus and then back to zero, but when you’re cooking, you’re cooking as a unit.

Youtube embed: “ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN: we take those” by David BrothersThere’s nothing like cooking when playing with friends as a duo or trio, though. Being able to chat with a friend changes how much strategizing you can do, and also how much nonsense you can get away with. If your friend is money from three (an expert at dodging boss attacks), then yeah, maybe a reckless pass out to the perimeter (reviving you right underneath the boss without an ult) is actually a good idea. Getting a third that’s down to clown is great too, because you can be sure to include them via pings and playing close, while simultaneously figuring out ways to take advantage of your efficiency over voice chat.

Elden Ring: Nightreign is a banger of a game. The first night boss felt insurmountable on week one, but now that we’re a few weeks in, I’ve gone on a few dozen runs, taken down the last boss of the game, and had the time to come up with some good relic presets for my Duchess character. Next for me is helping another friend through the game like I was helped through the game, sharing the knowledge I picked up playing duos and getting closer and closer to being the Nightreign equivalent of the guy who spent thirty years boxing out.

(If you follow this metaphor to the logical end point, the Bell-Bearing Hunter at the bottom of the castle is the guy “who tried out for the G-League” who shows up every now and then and ruins things for everyone. Sure, it’s possible you could take him. But you’d have more fun turning around and going home instead of suddenly being a supporting character in somebody else’s single player game.)

I spent most of my video game time these past few weekends on playing duos with friends and the occasional full rando game, and even on runs that went south or had someone quit out, I still ended up having a great deal of fun. I’m hooked, and it has me wanting to get back to Elden Ring and even more excited for The Duskbloods.

Youtube embed: “ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN | Bring Me to Life Trailer” by Bandai Namco Entertainment AmericaElden Ring was directed by Junya Ishizaki, along with Lead Programmer Yuki Kido and Lead Battle Designer Takuya Miyazawa. I still need to get the achievement for beating a boss with all the characters, but I’ve got everything else. This game hit me like a ton of bricks. I had two bad runs against Everdark Gaping Jaw on Sunday night, hit a friend on Discord, and then we re-enacted the “Hop On Nightreign” video above and cruised to a win. They’re adding solos this week. It’s over for me.

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I used to be the panel moderator for Image Comics, a fair number of years ago now. It was a nice gig because I had minimal oversight and talking about art is a great pleasure, so I got to sculpt the conversations and panels in a direction I enjoyed, which ended up being a direction that the crowd responded to, which in turn gave me more freedom. I used to think of it as “live comics criticism.”

Anyway, I met and chatted with a lot of comics creators in that gig. I got to see how they moved with their fans and what pain points there were in the relationship for them along with the benefits. Some responded to the fan-creator relationship by running from it and avoiding their own discomfort with the imbalance or connection. A few cultivated a fandom around them, and others simply tolerated it as a necessary but maybe awkward part of the game. There’s a variety of ways to deal with having fans (or followers, or friends online, or whatever whatever you would like to plug in here), and I always appreciated seeing and working with the people who had clearly put some thought into the relationship between fan and creator, who thought about that maybe-gentle/maybe-not power imbalance and made it a point to move very carefully when interacting with people in general, not just fans.

It’s very easy to show up somewhere new and break it with your mere presence. Think of a group of kids playing card games for quarters, and an adult rolling up with a ten dollar bill for their buy-in. The game is broken. The adult can lose a quarter, and none of those kids can match their bets. Sometimes, showing up somewhere as a creator has a similar effect, whether it’s a chilling one or an energizing one.

The folks I learned the most from had clearly taken a moment to think about the terrain of comics and fandom and their place in it before pushing in and building a place for themselves, by themselves.

A moment’s care goes a long way, right?

—

In Monster Hunter Wilds, directed by Yuya Tokuda and written by Shino Okamura, you play as a hunter who is part of Avis Unit, the vanguard of an expedition force to the Forbidden Lands. These lands are harsh, have been isolated for over a thousand years, and were presumed uninhabited until a young boy named Nata was found there, telling a story about a “white wraith” that attacked his people. The Guild, an organization which oversees hunters, sends a research expedition to the Forbidden Lands to both return Nata to his home and learn exactly what’s going on.

In terms of gameplay, once you’re inside the Forbidden Lands, you’ll hunt monsters to make armor and weapons to hunt tougher monsters until you eventually save the day through the power of hunting monsters.

The Monster Hunter franchise has a couple of my favorite styles of gameplay, both the traditional hunting gameplay loop of “stock up, go fight, use your rewards for more” and a more ad-hoc system for answering requests for assistance from other hunters. I fell in love with the franchise with Monster Hunter World, and was greatly looking forward to Wilds. I figured the worst case scenario was that I’d have just another Monster Hunter game to play alongside Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak and Monster Hunter Now. “Oh no, don’t throw me in that briar patch!”

What I found really pleasant and remarkable about Wilds was how it presents exploring an inhabited area in an interesting, thoughtful way. Contrary to how it’s gone just about every time in real life, Avis Unit makes it a point to not just get in there and murder monsters, but to speak to the villagers who are affected by the rampaging creatures or may be adversely affected by your actions. Many quests come from villagers themselves, and in a nice bit of ludonarrative consistency, the Guild oversees your actions. Hunting things you’re not supposed to hunt—a rare opportunity once you’re past the story mode, but gamers will find a way—means that you don’t get any rewards for that effort.

Hunters are assisted by handlers, who serve as the eyes and voice of the Guild in the field. Alma is the handler in Wilds, and after you hunt a monster, you can find her quickly taking notes and making sketches of the monster in her journal. At the top of each hunt, she grants you authorization by saying “By order of the Guild!”

You hear it so often it almost becomes cliché. When you speak to her at base camp, Alma almost always lets you know that a new quest has come in for you, or someone has requested your services, or that there’s something only you can handle. You can’t play the game without receiving marching orders, similar to how Call of Duty games occasionally place you in a unit rather than commanding one.

Alma is our oversight. Many games rev you up and set you loose to save the day, even ones with a military command structure of some type. Monster Hunter Wilds reminds you again and again that you are part of a unit and you are fulfilling a role. There are elements of a Lone Man story in there—look at what kinds of things you beat single handedly, for instance—but the narrative always circles back to your hunter being part of a larger whole, to your hunter being needed, rather than moving as they desire.

—

Seeing comics creators that cared about their fans enough to be intentional about their interactions meant a lot to me. That job exposed me to a lot of people from a lot of different walks of life, and many, many of them were vulnerable in one way or another. It isn’t that people are fragile, I think, but more that you never know what kind of effect you’ll have on someone, so it’s better to aim for a good one than to not care at all, maybe. It’s still a work in progress.

Similarly, Monster Hunter Wilds is on sale in a world where taking is the rule on a large and small scale. Does Silicon Valley become what it is now without Ellis Act evictions altering the face of San Francisco? Does America become what it is without the blood of basically  everyone? This could very easily be a story where you swoop in and save the day, and in a way, it still is. You’re still the key component of the story, Player 1. But I really appreciate the narrative leaning so hard on the idea of you existing as a part of a whole that is itself part of a whole, like nesting eggs of responsibility.

You aren’t Chris Redfield or Dante or even 2B. You’re closer to one of the Dolls from Street Fighter in that you’re not the only show in town. You’re a member of Avis Unit. You are a hero, not the hero, and even that is situational. Sometimes you’re the guy that needs to spend half an hour fishing or picking plants to craft into consumable items later.

—

This narrative focus tied together what I understood about Monster Hunter’s gameplay and settings for me. It isn’t that the other games don’t make sense in some way—it’s just that this one made the mindset of the Guild crystal clear in a way that really clicked with me. It’s a small part of the story, backgrounded enough to almost be considered setting unto itself in some ways, but it resonates.

“What does a hunter do?” is a question that rings through much of Wilds. And, you know, the answer is basically “be strong enough to protect everyone and beat the last boss,” but delivered in a typically hype video game-y way. (I cried.) But it’s a more interesting question when you apply it to the rest of the game, too. If you are the quintessential hunter, the prototype who does everything right more often than not, what are you doing?

Hunters are there to learn about the area first and to hunt second. You meet a ton of people in Wilds, and as the story progresses, your relationship grows to the point where they’ll invite you to a group meal, which will in turn supercharge your stats for a bit. You can barbecue food alone in the field, too, but it’s different with people.

Hunters put people first. You frequently meet monsters which have grown enraged or sick and pose an imminent threat to the locals or environment itself. While you, as a gamer, can go out and hunt basically whatever you want, whenever you need it, you, as a hunter, are given a good reason for the hunt first.

Hunters understand the terrain, literally and figuratively. Monster Hunter Wilds encourages you to take advantage of the environment. You can use mushrooms to heal yourself, and you can create traps and offensive advantages by knocking down vines, breaking rocks, or starting floods. Narratively, learning about the people who live in the land you’re exploring is not optional, and in fact the point of the entire thing.

Your character in Monster Hunter Wilds is there specifically to learn, not conquer or kill, and everything else follows from that. Monsters are hunted when they’re a threat to the villagers or their surroundings. Knowledge is shared for the good of all, with your perspective providing new solutions that the inhabitants may not have been able to reach, and their perspective providing ways to move and operate safely and efficiently.

—

Similar to my experience with Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, though not really as intense, I found my self driven to play the game as if I were subject to the rules of the world, rather than the rules of the game. What does my hunter do? How does my hunter behave? Examining those questions and embracing the answers made Armored Core VI extremely fun and thought-provoking.

The effect on me is a bit different in Monster Hunter Wilds. It’s more like satisfaction instead of revelation, maybe, or appreciation rather than being enthralled. I think that they made a lot of small narrative decisions in Wilds that were absolutely the right choice to make for the story that they’re telling. They’re choices that weave the gameplay into the setting and vice versa, constantly reasserting themselves when you do things that range from picking up a new quest to beating the low rank storyline. It’s like watching Steph Curry and Klay Thompson drain three after three after three. You’re seeing something special, even if you don’t quite grasp the shape of it yet.

At the end of the low rank campaign, there’s a moment where Nata, the boy you’ve been traveling with and protecting, is faced with destroying a vital part of his culture in order to save the whole. He makes the decision of his own free will, but under great duress. He’s the only representative from his people present at this pivotal moment, and thus the only person qualified to make the choice he’s making. The weight and fate of an entire culture rests on his shoulders, and you can see it in how he shuffles forward toward destiny. This is beyond anything anyone has been asked to do thus far, your hunter included.

Then your hunter places a hand on his shoulder, stopping him. (Think about that image—when do you put your hand on someone’s shoulder? To get their attention, sure, but what about a friend?) “We don’t have to do this,” you say. “There’s…one other option.” The other party members gasp in surprise, but agree that whatever the hunter has planned is worth a try. “Leave this to me, you say,” and wake up the final boss.

“By my own order…” you say, an intentional and incredibly successful contrast to “By order of the Guild,” “I will slay Zoh Shia” and proceed into battle, accepting all of the risk and danger onto yourself in place of Nata.

It isn’t going rogue, not exactly. You aren’t disobeying the orders of the Guild. It’s just that this time, playing it safe means annihilating a way of life. This moment works because of that. It sings. This is heroism. You can tell by how the fandom has latched onto it. A number of people have fairly seen it as a hardcore action movie moment, the one-liner before the crowd-pleasing rampage. But there’s another angle too, one that really works for me in the context of how I understand the game. Your hunter implicitly expresses a very simple and beautiful position in that particular moment.

“I will protect you. Or I will die.”