Enjoy! There’s no minimum bid set, so hopefully it’s affordable for whoever wants to use it.

Woops I coloured Alucard’s eyes wrong last time and forgot to write his accent in. I guess that’s what happens when I make all these things at 3AM.

Anyway yeah, Mirror of fate had a pretty spectacular cast including one Robb Stark as Alucard and Mister Robert Carlyle himself Dracula. And also some other Scottish dude I’ve never heard of as Simon. But it really made me reflect on how we just kind of accept that kind of Queen’s English proper London accent as the all purpose “translated into English” accent if you watch a movie set in a place where the characters would not have any reason to be speaking English, but if they’re speaking any other accent it’s like “hey wait a minute…” Like imagine they all had super thick Texas accents or Brooklyn accents or North Dakota accents or soemthing. When you think about it, really is makes about as much sense for a Wallachian to have as a London one or a Scottish one, even though if that actually happened it would seem even more absurd.

I had a conversation with a friend about this once and she blamed Shakespeare

My dad did used to tell me I had to learn a new thing every day, though.

Castlevania Mirror of Fate was pretty fun gameplay-wise but I couldn’t help but feel like the explanation for all of Alucard’s magical vampire powers seemed a little like it was perhaps invented by a five year old and programmed into the story by their thirty year old brother.

As much as everyone complained that this Castlevania reboot “ruined the franchise” I enjoyed it overall. The three main characters were kind of overly-samey for my tastes to the point that I kept accidentally attacking Alucard instead of Dracula because frankly he looked more menacing but I dug that kind of toon-shaded comic book style thing they had going on.

My friend Mikie told me to draw it like two years ago.

It has been a month full of watching 3D dinosaurs and hanging out with Jeff Goldblum.

Yeeeaaahhhhh that’s pretty much the whole joke.

I hit up Monsterpalooza this weekend and took photos of some of my favourite creature sculpts, if you’re interested, mosey on over to the Monsterpalooza tag on my Tumblr! All the cool sculpts and people willing to share advice and tools of the trade inspired me to put my hands in some clay for the first time in a decade.

I figure they’d have a hard enough time differentiating all the snake clones and Kurt Russell macho men they probably just keep them all in an underground bunker somewhere.

I’ve officially hit the point where my work ethic has surpassed the physical limitations of my body, because between comics and crazy work hours and con appearances I am quite literally falling apart. After I managed to catch an incapacitating eye infection (don’t stare at a cintiq for twenty hours and wear contacts and rub your eyes a lot, kids) and a head cold (don’t work twenty hour days, kids) within two days of each other, the amazing and wonderful Scott DeWitt of the fabulous webcomic, Fanboys came to my rescue so I didn’t have to stress out over how to draw a comic while simultaneously being a blind puddle of goo and working overtime. So check out Scott’s comic! And his Tumblr! And hell, check out his brother’s Tumblr while you’re at it because he’s a cool dude too!

And to offer my apologies for abdicating my duties of a webcomicist, here is a Commander Mii I made that you can pal around with on your 3DSes or WiiUs or whatever will scan this.

Oh no another half-assed Kratos comic, you know what that means! Yep, I had an insane work week and my only respite was the new God of War.

Anyway, I’m of the opinion that Kratos is a bit of an anomaly in the world of Macho Action Dudes, in that he is just a bottomless sieve of emotions. Like, usually action dudes have their moment of unrestrained rage at the end of the story o prove What A Badass Dude they can be, that Super Saiyan “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” moment where they let it all out. Kratos, on the other hand is like… perpetually exhaustingly angry. And when he runs out of angry, he’s sad. He’s just this constant torrent of unrestrained heart-on-his-sleeve emotional whiplash. He’s never the cocky, aloof, too-cool-for-school emotionally distant robot you expect to play in a macho action dude game, he just kind of exists in this cycle of getting all angried out and trying to kill himself until someone on the suicide watch crew can find him a new thing to be angry about. He’s the only game hero I can think of who’s like “Oh man, I checked everything off my to-do list and now I’m out of things to be mad at, I am so drained I think I’m going to kill myself now”

I don’t doubt that others like him exist, they’re just pretty rare in a world of Duke Nukems and Commander Shepards and Solid Snakes and Jack Caymans and Grayson Hunts and Macus Fenixes and Dantes and Chris Redfields and all those other action dudes who are capable of speaking with indoor voices.

We discussed this on Tumblr with fun screen shots and everything.

Oh! And if you’re in the Massachusetts area, next weekend I’ll be at ConBust over at Smith college in Northampton!

One of my favourite things about Kratos is that as much as he might seem to fit the bill of a meat-head action anti-hero stereotype, he’s really fairly crafty and resourceful when you think about it.

I know it might seem rude of Commander to be offering unsolicited Sudoku help, but really, what’s more of a powder keg than a guy who does a lot of puzzles but also flies into a violent rage every time he gets frustrated?