Horrible Modern Skateboard

Seth VS Chris Ware / pathological vangers / alt-ex-proto-voto

In this letter: the full first chapter of Foghorn revised, niche and very-niche cartoonist comics, and ultra-niche Russian videogames.

1. UNCORRECTED PROOF, CORRECTED

I edited, revised and polished the first chapter of Foghorn, my miserable ongoing comic. You can read the whole thing here. Click on the Irma icon for a pop-up character list—helpful if you have the reading retention of a Gen-z gnat.

Currently drafting the second chapter, and I think I won’t serialize it here on Substack—keeping up with 10-pp installments is a lot to ask of the audience, and with the amount of revisions I usually do, might as well release it chapter-by-chapter on the dedicated site (which gives you a much better reading experience, both on mobile and desktop), and focus on shortform stuff here.

we notice you across the room and we dig your grave

I mostly began serializing Foghorn to bully myself into getting started on the damn thing under imaginary deadlines, but now that the difficult first 50 pages are out of the way, hopefully I won’t need that kind of motivation.

2. CARTOONIST’S CARTOONIST’S CARTOONIST

Here’s a dumb comic I recently improvised, a panel per morning. I’ve been very inspired by Masters of the Nefarious by Pierre La Police—don’t know how improvised it is, but the flow is very enjoyable and surprising.

For the record, I’ve nothing but respect for these two, and I’m not making fun of them, or anyone, really. I think I’m pretty much incapable of doing that at this point, especially after over-analyzing comedy in the earlier letters. Satire feels so trite and transparent these days—the only way to arrive at the truth is to circumvent it.

3. FROM THE ANALS OF VIDEO GAME HISTORY

Also, I’ve been thinking of two fairly obscure Russian games, both very challenging, original, and broken. First of, Vangers: a genre/mind-blending cult classic from 1998. The game captured my imagination when it came out, and revisiting it now, I’m amazed by how far ahead of its time it was (and would be, if it came out today—no exaggeration). It’s game is a top-down non-linear RPG where you control odd vehicles, moving very odd cargo through psychedelic looping donut planets. The story is inscrutable, incredibly complex, and mostly told through details and item descriptions. Sounds familiar?

In short, it’s Dark Souls and Death Stranding, long before either of them came out. You travel through three major dimensions, each one increasingly unwelcoming and alien, running errands for weird insectoid creatures who never leave their nests. The dialogue went over my head when I played it as a wean, but now I see it as a brilliantly strange Gogolian cast, rooted in Russian archetypes—you have the slumbering Eelipods, the authoritarian Beeborats, and the manipulative Zeexen, and all of them hate each other.

The game has a truly staggering amount of hidden mechanics and story variations that aren’t in any way required or even suggested. Every element of its design is explored to the limit, or subverted. Vangers runs on custom vector engine that allows for near-total environmental destruction (there’s even an option to keep all the alterations permanent, which soon turns the world into a wasteland). It’s not an easy game to jump into—the controls and physics take some getting used to, the world feels truly alien, in everything from character design to UI, but, much like with Rain World, there’s both joy and misery in the struggle. Also, the soundtrack is absolutely banging:

In its boldness, Vangers is not unlike another obscure Russian title, Pathologic/Pathologic 2—a punishing immersive sim that plays more like a theatrical production. The world is about as dense as Disco Elysium, but the mechanics here are even more intensely intertwined with the storytelling. Fighting is nearly pointless, supplies are scarce, plus there’s a plague. The game gets harder each time you die (save-scumming doesn’t work, the penalty still registers), you will have to make difficult decisions, and there’s no happy end, no matter what you do.

Pathologic has quests of sorts, but there’s not telling if completing them will do any good. Often enough, it might make things worse for you, and/or for the characters you’re trying to protect. Life, etc. If you still want to give it a go, play Pathologic 2—it’s pretty much a reimagining, rather than a sequel. No other game, (except Papers, Please), has made me really feel the weight of in-game decisions.

It’s a very ambitious game that clearly required a much bigger budget and development time (there were meant to be two more playable characters, and the one campaign you get can be pretty broken). Multi-million AAA teams churn out endless sludge, while truly innovative titles have to reign in their ambitions…

Going in, try to avoid the wikis and guides, though I will give you just one word of advice, and trust me, you won’t mind this spoiler—hold on to your candy wrappers. Also, the developers have begrudgingly added difficulty sliders, so the game doesn’t have to be as punishing as intended, and I don’t know how I feel about this. I wouldn’t have been able to complete it, had I not tuned down the hunger/thirst sliders, but it did make everything feel a bit.. unearned. “Strife is life, but you don’t wanna hear it.”

Both of these games fall into that category of more-interesting-than-enjoyable, but I find these kind of rough works particularly inspiring. And I’m still hoping to make a game some day, myself. During the recent IRL plague, I collaborated on a small thing about climbing common objects for a 2-day game jam, and it was pretty fun. If you’re a creative coder with an interest in the kind of games that I’ve been writing about, feel free to drop me a line, I’m always open to new collaborations!

4. CTRLALTALTALTDELCOMICSCOMICS

Beyond the paywall is a comic I made for Quality Pictures #1, which was available from Bubbles, but isn’t anymore—do keep track of their new releases, there’s so much good stuff. Particularly recommending Stories from Zoo by Anand. Anyway, if the Chris Ware/Seth comic wasn’t niche enough for you, this might do it: