2008 December | the Captain's JLA blog

Google Image filters for comicbook art

Google Image search is the visual equivalent to the usual Google web search. Originally it used the keywords and text around an image to estimate what it showed, but their engineers are beginning to add analysis of the image itself. Read Write Web pointed out that they’ve now added clip art and line art setting. On the surface these aren’t too interesting if you’re looking for photographs, but for comicbook fans looking for scanned art they’re really useful.

Take the example search of “batman”. The default response (first 4 images) looks like this:

So that’s a set of The Batman cartoon, the World’s Finest fan film, what looks like a computer game promo art, and the death of Jason Todd from the cover of A Lonely Place of Dying.

This is how it changes as you apply the various drop down filters:

Line Art: – tuned for black and white art (pencils or inked comic art prior to the colouring).

Clip Art: - Clip art is normally taken as art free from copyright, but that obviously isn’t true for images of Batman. What it does seem to be tuned for is the equivalent of traditional comicbook colouring – line art coloured with flat blocks of colour – as opposed to the more modern form of shaded, almost painted colouring.

Photo Content: - the title is fairly obvious, but the result is actually rather broader than just photographs. It seems to be tuned for images with a full range of colours, as opposed to the limited number of colours in line and clip art. So that includes modern photoshop coloured comicbook art and Alex Ross’s paintings.

These Batman results have been heavily influenced by the presence of various cartoons and live action movies, but in general the three filters of “line art”, “clip art”, and “photo content” will respectively find uncoloured pencilled/inked images, traditional flat coloured images, and modern painted or computer coloured art. These three look to be the best ones when searching for comic book art, but there are also two additional filters,

Faces: - tuned for the human face (generally finds photographs or photographic like paintings)

News: – finds images associated with news stores. In this case it’s picked up the rumour that Eddie Murphy will play the Riddler in the next Batman movie.

These searches were done with moderate safe search on and while I was logged on to my Google account. I have heard of users being served different results depending on how Google has has tried to tune its results to their past activities so your milage may vary.

Mortal Kombat Vs DC Universe

Much like anything else arcade fighting games have their own traditional and adherents with the biggest franchises including Tekken, Street Fighter, and Mortal Combat. Personally, I’ve nearly always preferred the Tekken games as I find them to have a more interesting range of characters and fighting moves/styles. I’ve played the Streetfighter series a bit and I enjoyed the old Marvel Heroes games that spun out of it. However, Mortal Kombat was always a distant third preference for me. Therefore I wasn’t particularly excited by the news that Midway Games was going to release a crossover title between the Mortal Kombat characters and those from the DC Universe. Nevertheless I haven’t bought a new game in a while so I thought I may as well give MK Vs DC a go.

MK Vs DC is effectively three games in one. You can play the arcade version as either pure-Mortal Kombat, pure-DC Universe, or a mix of both sets of characters. This does give a little bit of interest if you have a preference for one set of characters over another, but it also means that you get half the number of characters you would in a standalone game. There is also a story mode that explains how this set-up has come about. A simultaneous event, the defeat of a powerful evil, in the Mortal Kombat and DC Universes has caused a rift to open between them. The two evils have merged into Dark Khan, a new entity, and the incompatible worlds are beginning to collide. A small group of heroes and villains from each world is swept into the chaos and a malign energy, “the Rage”, begins to infect each of them.

The Rage is a plot device used to explain why characters, who should be perfectly reasonable and friendly, are beating the snot out of their friends and the natural allies from the other universe. The thematic differences between the Mortal Kombat and DC characters are acknowledged in the story mode in a way that might seem familiar to readers of the JLA/Avengers comic crossover. However, most of the story is as contrived as any other video game adaptation that has to line the characters up in specific pairs at certain regular intervals.

In terms of realisation of the DC characters themselves: some definitely work better than others. The Joker is is real blast and I’m impressed that they managed to make Captain Marvel so different from Superman. Heaven knows what happened to Green Lantern and the Flash’s costumes – they seem to have suddenly become all detailed and multi-textured. It’s almost as if somebody was trying to show off in hi-def. I know some drawings of the Catwoman can make her look like she’s got silicon implants, but those have to be the most unnatural looking appendages I’ve seem in a computer game for quite sometime.

As I mentioned at the start I’m not a particular fan of the Mortal Kombat series. The blood and fatalities always came across as rather childish and that doesn’t change in this game. For me the normal move list feels fairly short and rarely gives much additional flavour to the character. The special moves are more varied, but provide nothing that special (DC Heroes made far better use the character’s powers). All of this is coloured by my preferences. If you’re a Mortal Kombat fan you’ll probably love it, but I was neutral at best on the actual fighting system. It doesn’t reward the casual gamer and I actually found some of the repeat fights to be quite uneven.

MK Vs DC was interesting because it had characters from the DC Universe in it, but it doesn’t have enough staying power to hold me for long. I’ve played through the DC Universe storyline and the arcade mode a few times, but I can’t say I’ll be spending the entire weekend playing it. It looks nice, its professionally and beautifully put together, and I certainly don’t feel like I wasted my money. However, they could have done so much more. Just having half the characters open to begin with and making you unlock the rest would have added a considerable amount of replay value. There is talk of download content, but I’ll take that on its merits as, when, and if it arrives.

2.5