And now, the terrible, terrible ending to something that wasn’t particularly awesome to begin with.

My original concept for the Pokémon review that I didn’t write was to mimic the format of Green Eggs & Ham quite carefully. A Seussified version of myself would gripe about not wanting to play the game, a Seussified version of our editor (whose name is, in a crazy collision of indescribable literary convenience, “Sam”) would iterate why this version is so much better than previous installments (therein providing the meat of the review), and I would eventually give in, try it, and decide I like it enough to play it on a boat/on a goat/etc. A sample Sam-I-Am verse:

The battle system
Is adjusted
Skills sets are
No longer busted!

I even had him waxing rhapsodic about online play:

Its heart is in
The multiplayer
And online adds
Another layer

Or maybe two
Or even three!
Compete with friends
Across the sea

Or strangers too –
That also works.
(And friend codes mean
You’ll meet no jerks.)

But of course the idea was ultimately put to rest, and I sort of expected as much; while I was totally in love with the idea of this review format just because of its amazing fit in the Green Eggs & Ham format, I also figured the game needed a more substantial analysis. So… it became GameSpite. And of course Igor is basically the polar opposite of myself, so that meant a totally different, totally anticlimactic, and totally crass resolution. The end.

Also! I hope you managed to pick up this year’s Free Comics Day comics! Well, the good ones, anyway. You can skip the crappy superhero crap. My selections were the “Unseen Peanuts” from Fantagraphics — sure, I have all the Complete Peanuts collections to date, but having grown up reading my aunt’s dogeared Peanuts collections it’s really nice to have all of these “missing” comics in a single volume — and Oni’s Comics Festival. The latter was, of course, awesome, the highlights being:

  • “The Alex,” Darwyn Cooke’s surprisingly touching story of towering creative ambition (enhanced by beautiful, subdued colors and wonderfully retro artwork);

  • Hope Larson’s simple but charming snow poems;
  • Aaaand of course the two Scott Pilgrim features. These were much more compact than last year’scomic, and all the better for it — O’Malley’s artwork is fantastically crisp and looks really great in color, and the panels pack in as many jokes as before while feeling tighter and more purposeful. Did I mention I really enjoy Scott Pilgrim? I should also mention Bryan Lee O’Malley also appears to be a noble human being, at least in that he didn’t punch me in the face when I dropped by his table at Alternative Press Expo and was all DUR HUR YOU DID ART FOR MAISON OTAKU!? That, my friends, is restraint.