Always go for the easy jokes, that's what I say.
It's been... nearly a week since I got back, which is long enough to have decompressed a bit and gotten back into the swing of things, although when I say "the swing of things" I mostly mean "dear god is it the weekend I can't go to work anymore, I am so tired." These con deals wear a body out, and with the added stress of actually being on a panel during the con--an academic one attended by maybe 50-60 people if we're being generous, which ain't much in terms of stress--my tolerance for speaking to people has basically eroded into a fine powder suitable for snorting, if you're into that sort of thing.
My first SDCC experience was pretty relaxing, all things considered, because I went to the places where the crowds were thinnest (i.e. the places that were about comics (no, don't worry, I'm not going to rant about how SDCC used to be about the comics, man, before all these fucking poseurs moved in)). Specifically I wandered over to the small press areas, because, as in video games, it seems like the small presses are doing the really interesting stuff. I managed to pick up an enormous quantity of books for an only slightly enormous amount of money, including one SDCC SPECIAL EDITION EXCLUSIVE copy of Meredith Gran's run on Marceline and the Scream Queens, because that was the only thing Meredith Gran had for sale that I had not already bought. Sidebar: Meredith Gran's Octopus Pie is one of the best comics currently running in print or online and you should probably give it a read. The publisher that really impressed me, however, was Fantagraphics.
I know, I could be doing this over on Comic Vine, but I promise it will come back to games eventually.
So here's the thing that Fantagraphics does which is super-important and amazing: They pick up all the stuff that's fallen into public domain or the stuff that hasn't been printed in ages--the old EC horror comics and Jack Kirby's romance comics, and Walt Kelly's Pogo, and Prince Valiant (from back when Prince Valiant used to get a full page of the comics section in your local newspaper), and if the artist/writer is/are still alive, they hunt them down and say "hey, what's the best way to present this material to the people?" and then they spend lots of money in order to do just that. Tony Millionaire, of Maakies fame, was approached to collect some of his comics and put out a very thin, very long book that makes each strip fit to a single page; which works well, because his strips are insanely detailed and also long. For example:
They printed a bunch of erotic French comics of the 60s and 70s in a book that is just about as large as a coffee table, if not larger, because the linework was so detailed. Most impressively, they approached Don Rosa and put out his Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck books with his input, so that everything is full size and in absolutely gorgeous color. When they reprinted Prince Valiant, they used the original color plates to make sure it looked as good as it was supposed to. There's an archival attention to detail that larger printers don't have the inclination for, because the margins on such an undertaking aren't great (and who can blame 'em? Well, I can, but whatever).
When I look at Fantagraphics, I can't help but think about GoG (remember when that stood for Good Old Games? I don't think it does anymore, I think it's just GoG). You have the same love lavished upon the older games in the catalog, shined up so they work as well as you could hope on newer systems. The community, and sometimes the creators, have helped out on this. GoG's been focusing more and more on new games, and that's really cool--I like their carefree DRM ways, especially because the last few Steam updates have gone poorly for me--but I hope they continue to find old stuff and port it. It's fascinating to read older comics and see how things were done back then (old horror comics especially have a particular shine to them that time has failed to dim. These days you're lucky to stumble across a collection like Sleep of Reason, or Snyder's The Wake (which is a horror comic for the first few issues, anyway), but most of it's unimpressive), just like it is good to see older games and dig into those systems. I'd never played Planescape Torment until it showed up on GoG, just like I'd never seen Don Rosa's work until last week (it looks incredible, not that you asked). The problem of archiving old games has been on my mind for a while, and this week's Bombcast briefly touched on it--when it comes to old consoles, it's getting harder to play them "as they were meant to be played," but the only people striving to preserve them at all often seem to be pirates. Systems like the Retron provide an imperfect experience, and unlike a book or comic strip that you can always find the archived print plates for (or you can if you're lucky), the amount of tube TVs and functioning NES/Atari/whatever out there continues to decline.
I don't know if there's a good answer for this problem. Short of building a new version of an old system, there's not much to be done--and in many cases the original owners of the tech might not be wild about someone doing that. Maybe it's the sort of thing that only a museum could get away with, acting as an official preservationist, but that's boring. The thing I love so much about Fantagraphics is that their books can be bought, and similarly it would be much better to be able to have everyone able to see these older games. There are a lot of older games you can buy, of course (Nintendo's Virtual Console, those crappy little Atari sticks with like a billion games pre-loaded on 'em, etc.) but there's a sweet spot of games which have merely been left to rot (alas, Xbox games! I knew them, Horatio). To say nothing of a game like Too Human, which while maybe not the best game, has also been officially disavowed. What a shame it would be to see that particular turd vanish completely, relegated to the realm of myth as more people clear out their closets.
Then again, maybe I'm just worrying over nothing. The pirates will figure it out, as Jeff said, and if other companies have any good sense they'll capitalize on whatever the pirates come up with and sell 'em. I hope.
Oh fine, here's another comic.
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