I’ve read a couple of wonderful comics lately, Christophe Blain’s Isaac The Pirate (thanks, Aaron), and Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha (thanks, Rich).

You’ll probably be aware of Tezuka already – he’s the man that helped to kickstart manga and anime in Japan in the 50s with Astro Boy and other such fusions of Disney and earlier Japanese visual arts, like kibyōshi. Blain‘s not so familiar to British shores, but he’s a stalwart of the French comic scene, having worked on the Dungeon series.

Obviously, then, these two creators are utterly different, and these comics are too. Buddha is an eight-volume epic that explores Buddha’s life, from his birth as a prince to his enlightenment and death, and as it does so, tells various stories about the people around him, from reformed bandits to clairvoyant babies. Isaac The Pirate, meanwhile, is a dark two-volume tale about an artist that takes to the seas, joining a band of pirates and meeting master thieves and thugs while he wends his way back into the arms of his beloved wife in Paris.

What they absolutely share, however, is irresistibly heady combinations of lightness of touch and unflinching gazes upon life’s cruelties. Both feature as a natural part of their courses death, torture and suffering, with characters mercilessly despatched while others act in ways that you really wish they wouldn’t.

For example, there’s a scene in Isaac The Pirate’s first volume, To Exotic Lands, in which the pirates encounter in the frozen seas of the Arctic a drifting ship with starving Swedes on-board. The events that follow are harrowing and shocking, coming as they do after a long sequence in which you develop a respect and affection for many of the crew. Isaac’s love, meanwhile, is in constant threat of being extinguished – through his death, hers, temptation or the distraction of the waves – a sombre kind of tension, given that it’s one of the only purely good things any characters have.

And for all Tezuka’s Disney doe-eyed animals, exaggerated expressions and the way he often inserts characters from his previous comics into the stories – and himself – he doesn’t hesitate to depict the other side of his world. Genocide, fathers persecuting their children, bloody revenge: his Buddha is a man forged by violence and horror. Other characters go on terrible journeys of discovery, the brutality behind the things they do only mitigated by Buddha’s teachings of forgiveness and that behind everything lies a reason.

In both comics, the humour and levity all this is contrasted against seems utterly casual. Their balance of light and dark gives them a sense of consequence and truth that so many books, films – and other comics – lack. It’s got to have something to do with their visual style, I think. Both are brilliantly expressive, Tezuka in particular spanning from beautiful and detailed panoramas to goggle-eyed cartoon exaggeration.

So, yeah, I can’t recommend these two comics enough.

You can smell films that are based on plays a mile off. It must be difficult to take a story made for the stage and perform it in front of a camera without theatre’s static nature and wordiness making itself obvious. It’s certainly a clear part of Rope, Hitchcock’s 1948 flick about Nietzschean Ivy League gays attempting to commit the perfect murder. The film is great fun, mixing high tension with a sharp sense of humour, and as such comes highly recommended.

Rope was heavily adapted from its original, a play by Patrick Hamilton based on the Leopold and Loeb murder, in order to transplant the story from its roots in the British upper classes to the flatter class system of the US. But despite all the work, Hitchcock decided to film it in single takes of around 10 minutes, with the cast navigating a set that had to be at least as cleverly designed as any for the stage and the camera sporting an unflinching gaze like that of a theatre audience.

It’s ironic that the film that’s been called Hitchcock’s most experimental has the air of something as ancient as theatre. But Hitchcock brings in one or two little tricks that only film can achieve. In a couple of places, he has conversation go on as the camera remains fixed on a certain element for dramatic effect – for instance, the box in which the victim’s body lies, which is being fussed around by the housekeeper even as the dinner party guests discuss where the victim could be.

As with many Hitchcock films, Rope wears its cinematic technique heavily, with takes spliced awkwardly into each other by zooming into a character’s back, fading to black and then brightening out again into the next, but, heck, we’re talking about 1948. And its staginess feels quite exotic now, a relief from today’s unrelenting action and movement.

Theatre’s need to concentrate on character, dialogue and plot can remind film of some of basic tenets that many recent releases seem to have forgotten. Yes, films should always be built using technique and artistry specific to film, but Rope reminds that other narrative arts, such as theatre, still have a lot to teach them, too.

Videogames give players choices. That’s because they’re interactive. Some people say a good game is a series of interesting choices. And games are beginning to give players a lot of choices to choose from.

Over the last few months, in my winding, amateur sort of way, I’ve been playing through Fallout 3. A role-playing videogame set in an alternative, post-apocalyptic future US, imagined as if the 1950s never quite went away, one of its big features is a great number of scenarios designed to allow players to decide how they tackle them. An often discussed, and probably the most interesting, is the Tenpenny Tower quest. For those wishing to avoid spoilers, you’d probably best not read on.

Tenpenny Tower is a luxury hotel left standing alone in the wasteland just outside what remains of Washington DC. Its rich occupants have gated it and posted guards to ensure no one undesirable can get in. And when you arrive, there’s a ghoul, called Roy, outside, demanding to be let in. Irradiated and mutated humans, ghouls are Fallout 3’s underclass, and the inhabitants of Tenpenny Tower definitely don’t want to let him in. In fact, the chief of the guards asks you to kill him.

On travelling to the dingy, underground home that Roy shares with his partner and friend, you realise how militant he is against those in society that have turned him and his kind aside, and he asks you to help him invade Tenpenny Tower with a pack of feral ghouls, mutated humans that have gone homicidally mad. But in your conversation with Roy, you realise that you also have a chance of convincing him that there might be a way of negotiating with Tenpenny Tower’s inhabitants so that he and his gang can move in peacefully.

So there are three possible and far-reaching outcomes: you can choose to kill Roy, you can choose to help him kill the occupants of Tenpenny Tower, or you can try to negotiate a non-violent solution. And, by God, you’ll find yourself wanting to try it all. You can save and reload at any time in Fallout 3, and I often find myself saving at a point where I can make a choice in order to experience each outcome and choose the most beneficial. And, in the case of Tenpenny Towers, the outcomes, particularly the peaceful one, are fascinating. If Roy moves in, you can go away and revisit to find that both sides are getting along well. But if you come back once again, you’ll find all the humans dead and stripped of their clothes and possessions in the basement because of a ‘disagreement’. Though much of Fallout 3 is pretty simple and morally predictable, sometimes it likes to give you a big surprise.

So I’m playing all this with multiple saves, Fallout 3’s carefully engineered storylines and choices fractured and displaced as I zip between them, sampling and testing to find the one I like, and profit from, best. I’m essentially thumbing my nose at an artificial world that’s designed to be naturalistic, with its sunsets and sunrises, its flora and fauna, its crumbing tarmac and crackling swing music, its attempts to provide believable reactions to my pluralistic actions. And I feel slightly cheap for it.

That’s why I respect and love Shiren The Wanderer. Gleefully anachronistic, this game is a Japanese take on the Rogue-like RPG. Don’t worry about what that means – all you need to know is that it’s extremely complex, with a great number of different items and monsters that have a vast array of different effects. To understand how they all work, and how you can survive, takes a long time, and in Shiren The Wanderer, death means your adventure is over. With the game’s world randomly generated each time you play, every attempt you make is different, and filled with serendipity and chance – and you can’t save. You’ll slowly learn tactics and techniques – choices – that will help you survive longer and longer, but you’ll die crushing deaths over and over again.

But as frustrating as each death fleetingly is, it’d be meaningless without its finality. In Shiren The Wanderer you can’t erase your choices. But just the chance to have had a really stupid death (for funnies), a really tense and exciting death (for kicks), or, most importantly, a really instructive death (for experience), can make a death a means in itself.

That’s not really true for Fallout 3. Though its creators have attempted to make sure there’s something of value – and something negative – in every outcome, there’s always a niggling sense that you’re missing something, that you’ve failed in some way, that there’s something better if you do things another way, and you can always rewind through your saves to try and fix things. And as you do so, you’re splintering its story and diluting the clarity of the choices it offers.

My question, then, goes back to that moment I’m standing before Roy as I try to decide whether to kill him, help him kill others or try to make everyone get along. Would it be more interesting and meaningful if whatever I choose is final? Or does Fallout 3 gain something from allowing me freedom to hop around it, spatially and temporally, as if it’s some sort of 4D hypertext?

I’m going to have a good think about that, and write about it in another post very soon.