If you're here in the Panel Discussion programming block, you might be a lapsed comics reader, trying to find a way back to the JLA Satellite. Or you might someone killing time until you pick up your weekly Wednesday pull list. Or maybe you've said goodbye to dozens of longboxes to embrace the promise of digital comics. Whichever it is, you're still interested in the good stuff.

Welcome, then, to the Panel Discussion Dozen. Each installment, I'll be picking out twelve just-released or out-soon comics that I think are worth paying attention to. Ready? Here are more comics to read than you have fingers to count with. Or something.

---

1. Batgirl #7
Our preview of this issue showed Barbara-freaking-Gordon holding her own against a super-strong psycho, but the rest of the issue promises to show at the unrevealed story of the heroine's miraculous recovery from being shot by the Joker. Gail Simone usually delivers stellar character portraits and I'm looking forward to seeing her sketch out Batgirl's psyche some more

---

2. Batwoman #7
Gotham's other Bat-wearing redhead continues with a new look under artist Amy Reeder. What's great about this book is how Kate Kane and the other cast members have to face down both physical and psychological demons. The occult crime mix in Batwoman walks a fine line—where weird quasi-mystical cultists mingle with real-world street crime—but does so fantastically, all experienced through the eyes of one emotionally complicated ass-kicker. Keep reading this one.

---

3. Demon Knights #7
The motley-crew concept in superhero comics should feel like a hoary remnant at this point, but guys like Paul Cornell keep breathing fresh air into it. The assemblage of medieval warriors in this book really, really feel like they don't belong together yet you don't want to see them part ways. One element of this book that I really like is how Cornell makes the rough-hewn era of the Middle Ages feel alive. Things were dirty, smelly and melodramatic, then, especially with a fire-breathing hellspawn on the team. And yet you root for them.

---

4. Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE #7
There's a mutinous revolt in the organization that history's most re-animated corpse works for and that just means more cold-blooded combat for Frankenstien. Jeff Lemire's work on this monsters-meets-military series reminds me of some of the Cohen Bros.' film work, where absurd yet dreadful situations are met as everyday occurrences. And sometimes there's screaming.

---

5. Saucer Country #1
Paul Cornell's got a particular talent for showcasing the sharks that fly when cultures clash, as seen in his work on Superman, Knight & Squire and Stormwatch. This new creator-owned book—about a Mexican-American governor dealing with immigrants of the extraterrestrial variety and trying to run for President of the United States—seems tailor-made for his proclivities and the sleek kinetic art of Ryan Kelly should help things moves along in interesting fashion.

---

6. Womanthology: Heroic
This anthology of stories by women creators got its start as a Kickstarter project and deserves a look not just for its noble intent but also for the roster of killer talent attached. Ann Nocenti alone is worth the price of admission.

---

7. Thief of Thieves #2
Nick Spencer's comcs work has run the gamut from conspiracy/high school mash-up to political superhero adventures. But this great crime book shows another facet of his talent, with a great family drama at its heart. Shawn Martinborough's art is amazing, too.

---

8. Saga #1
All you need to know is that this book marks the return of Brian K. Vaughn to comics. The guy who created Y The Last Man and Ex Machina. Yeah, that guy. Go get this.

---

9. Mega Man #11
The Blue Bomber takes on Quick Man in this issue of the series that manages to capture the humor of the Capcom mascot's early adventures. Best place to see Mega Man right now, probably.

---

10. Dead Man's Run #2
From the guy who made the Hulk a hero on a faraway planet comes the story of Hell as a super-prison, ripe for a breakout. Great high concept that gets cracking dialogue to boot.

---

11. Adventure Time #2
The wacky cartoon series has a comics tie-in. Who knew? C'mon, grab your friends!

---

12. Peter Panzerfaust #2
This comic puts Peter Pan in World War II. I'd read that. Hell, I'd play that!

Part of Panel Discussion's mission is to look at the ways and places where comics and video games intersect and here in Crossover, we'll be talking to game creators about the comics stories and creators who've shaped their sensibilities.

In our first installment, we hear from Remedy Entertainment's Mikki Rautalahti, who—along with the dev studio's Sam Lake—puts words and ruminations into the head of Alan Wake. Given how the light-wielding writer battles a shadowy evil, you'd figure that Rautalahti would prefer his comics dark and gritty. But Rautalahti enjoys a broad variety of sequential art, including upbeat superheroics from writers like John Byrne and Mark Waid. Here's the writer describing his likes and dislikes in his own words:

I'm a big fan of the form. Don't get me wrong, I love video games, but if I had to pick just one of the two, there's a good chance that in the end, I'd end up with comics. To quote Harvey Pekar, "Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures."

In general, superhero comics are a kind of a safe bet, no matter what era we're talking about. I can be picky about which titles I like at any given time, and I do have standards of quality, but it's a safe bet to assume that a good superhero comic is a thing that I enjoy. I'll mention a few specific titles below, but whether it's Mark Waid's Flash, the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League or Peter David's Hulk, chances are I'm game.

This list could be endless, and my problem with something like this is always that I go, "OH GOD I'M LEAVING SOMETHING IMPORTANT OUT," so I've tried to just list things as they pop into my head.

---

So, some past favorites in no particular order:

• Will Eisner's Spirit (I love his other work like A Contract With God too, but man, I just love the Spirit).
• Peter Bagge's Buddy Bradley stuff.
• Joe Matt and Chester Brown
• Love & Rockets
• The work of Hugo Pratt.
• John Byrne's Fantastic Four
• Usagi Yojimbo
• Bone
• Mage, Grendel and almost anything by Matt Wagner.
• Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson.
• Like most comics readers of my generation, I grew up on the Chris Claremont/John Byrne era X-Men.
• Cerebus, until the rampant misogyny just got too ridiculous.
• Brian K. Vaughn's Ex Machina.
• Daredevil by pre-nutcase Frank Miller — the "Born Again" arc in particular.
• Most anything by Alan Moore, for kind of obvious reasons.
• Harvey Pekar's American Splendor, which is quoted above.

---

Some current favorites:

• Locke & Key by Joe Hill.
• Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead, of course.
• Mike Carey's The Unwritten from DC/Vertigo.
• Hark! A Vagrant! by Kate Beaton
• Morning Glories by Nick Spencer (not sure if I really like it, but still).
• Almost anything that Ed Brubaker writes.

---

I'm not a big fan of:

• The Image stuff from the 1990s. A lot of the ‘90s superhero stuff in general, actually. It just was not a great decade for that kind of material.
• Comics by people who are intent on creating art but don't understand anything about comics, which generally results in an unreadable mess.
• Mark Millar and Garth Ennis. Preacher? Great fun, until you realize that it's nowhere near as ironic as you think at first. Stupid shit.

It's oddly fitting that a movie focused on the fracturing and rebuilding of the Justice League will be the last of Dwayne McDuffie's work to make it onto the screen. Long a proponent of diversity in the comics medium, McDuffie frequently wrote stories that showed how people from different racial, psychological and philosophical backgrounds can come together and accomplish great things.

A little more than a year ago, the comics and animation writer/editor/producer died suddenly. The Detroit native managed to excel at nearly every avenue of superhero fiction, with acclaimed runs at Marvel and DC. McDuffie's crowning glories were being the co-founder and chief visionary of the multicultural Milestone Media and being a writer/producer on the pitch-perfect Justice League series which ran for multiple seasons on Cartoon Network.

That manifestation of the World's Greatest Superheroes won praise for being dramatic, poignant and funny all at the same time, while dipping deep into the DC Universe's deep pool of characters for a wide-ranging ensemble cast. Justice League: Doom re-assembles most of the voice actors from that series and combines elements from Mark Waid's acclaimed Tower of Babel storyline with the Injustice League arc from McDuffie's own tenure with DC Comics' premier super-team.

Seeing Batman take a beating from superpowered villlains early on sets up the film's core conflict, which is that a merely human Dark Knight has to stockpile strategies for dealing with people who are more powerful than him. Sometimes, those people are his own teammates. When Batman's contingencies for neutralizing Superman, Wonder Woman and the other members of the League fall into the wrong hands, it's up to him to rally his fellow heroes against the supervillains that the immortal Vandal Savage has formed into the Injustice League.

Doom puts all of McDuffie's unique skills on display. He knew how to showcase tension in team dynamics while highlighting the moments that showcased members' individual strengths. So, while it's Batman's paranoia that creates the threats take that the Leaguers out, it's his belief in his teammates that enables them pull through, casting the Dark Knight as both a figure of hope and fear.

The action in Doom can be surprisingly visceral and the drama is shockingly adult. Each Leaguer's shown to have a blind spot that makes them fatally vulnerable. Spotlighting the Martian Manhunter's loneliness, Wonder Woman's battle-lust and Superman's trust in others makes the characters feel more three-dimensional than they generally do. And Batman's guilt is palpable for most of the film. Whether it's Cyborg's insecurity or Flash's cockiness, Doom showcases McDuffie's deft touch at making metahumans relatable.

Cynical viewers might see the inclusion of Cyborg here as just a diversity move meant to mirror the current roster of the New 52 Justice League. It's not. The young hero's presence gives an outsider's-eye-view as to what it's like to watch the this iconic team kick ass, quarrel and overcome internal and external threats.

And perhaps trickiest of all, McDuffie wrote scenes that communicated what was cool about characters who are more than six decades old. Superman isn't boring in his hands. All of this writing comes to vibrant life courtesy of the great voicework provided by Tim Daly, Kevin Conroy and the other actors portraying the Justice League and their archenemies.

Overall, Justice League: Doom stands out as a shining example of a creator who knew how to tap the power of superheroes as aspirational metaphors while sussing out believable behaviors out them. The "A Legion of One: The Dwayne McDuffie Story" featurette included with the release shows his impact on comics and the people who made and read them. Though his absence will be felt for years, McDuffie's legacy stands as some of the best interpretations of superheroes that fans young and old will ever enjoy.

Are we still pretending that comics and video games don't have anything to do with each other? Not anymore, we're not. Welcome to Panel Discussion, where the focus will be on comic books and sequential art, whether they connect directly to video games or not. Confused? Read this.

Are we still pretending that comics and video games don't have anything to do with each other? Not anymore, we're not. Welcome to Panel Discussion, where the focus will be on comic books and sequential art, whether they connect directly to video games or not. Confused? Read this.

Reports began to surface last year from players whose Xbox Live accounts were hacked after they played FIFA 11 and FIFA 12. Players' accounts were being activated on Xbox 360 consoles that were not their own, at which point their credit cards were charged for large amounts of Microsoft Points, then used on FIFA downloadable content.

As Kotaku reported last month, when asked about all the claims of hacked accounts, EA responded that the problem was not a FIFA hack directly, but, "some phishing experiment that uses FIFA as the end game because it's an attractive game."

EA is now releasing a patch for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT) and EA Sports Football Club (EAS FC) areas of FIFA 12. The Xbox version is released today, March 13; the PS3 patch arrives in North America on March 13 also, and on March 14 in all other regions. While the patch includes several gameplay and bug improvements, it most notably promises security enhancements to all FIFA accounts:

We're committed to doing everything we can in our game to help keep you safe from phishers and scammers, and our March game update is key part of that commitment:

• It will now only be possible to send trade offers to people on your friends list.
• On entering FUT on your console for the first time after the update, you will be required to provide a unique answer to a security question.
• If anyone else attempts to enter your FUT account from a different console, they will be required to enter the answer to your security question.

While these measures will certainly make life much more difficult for those attempting to compromise others' accounts, it's still vitally important that you protect your information.

Whether the accounts are compromised through a phishing attempt, as EA and Microsoft assert, or through an account vulnerability, as many players believe, the additional layers of account security should help to protect FIFA fans.

FIFA 12 Game Update: EAS FC and Ultimate... [EA Forums, via LazyGamer]

Starting next week, game developer Jeremiah Slaczka will answer your questions here on Kotaku.

He just needs your questions, which you should ask him in comments section below.

Here is his official bio, so you know who you're talking to: "Best known for his multi-million unit selling franchises, Scribblenauts and Drawn to Life, Jeremiah focuses on creation of innovative new titles. His latest project, Hybrid, is due out this summer on XBLA."

So, yes, he makes games. Maybe you do, too! Or maybe you don't and just want to ask a game developer something. He suggests you ask about development, deals with publishers, how to break in to the industry, what/where to study, that kind of thing. Stuff aspiring game developers out there might want to know about.

Jeremiah will be answering questions monthly, starting next week with his debut column on Kotaku. Ask away... He'll pick the three best questions to answer.

First-person melee combat ain't an easy thing to pull off in a video game. Anyone who's played an Elder Scrolls game—from Arena to Skyrim—knows what I'm talking about.

In Skyrim, the less you see, the better things look. It's one of the reasons I suggested playing with a shield—the combat feels punchier if you can't see how disconnected it actually is.

But that's mostly cosmetic—janky first-person combat is passable in a single-player game, but what about a competitive multiplayer game? Skyrim's combat system is far too imprecise to ever work in multiplayer, where fairness and balance are paramount. And that, indie developer Torn Banner Studios is hoping, is where Chivalry: Medieval Warfare comes in.

Chivalry: Medieval Warfare is based on a popular Half-Life 2 mod Age of Chivalry. Medieval Warfare is a brand-new game built on the Unreal engine (as opposed to Half-Life's Source engine). They've been working on it for a little while, and the game should be finished sometime this year.

I met with Torn Banner president Steve Piggott and lead level designer Justin Pappas last week at the Game Developers Conference to talk about the game. So of course, the first thing I asked was, "I've played a lot of Skyrim. How is this different?"

Piggott answered by explaining their detailed hit-detection system, which you can see running in the video here. It sounds very cool. Each blade has a unique vector that it traces as it slices, and the mouse allows players to arc and redirect their attacks mid-swing. As a result, swords can bounce off of one another, and the game's three main attacks can be tweaked and adjusted on the fly. Swordplay will be fast and responsive, and will be tracked across multiplayer servers to keep everything fair and good-looking.

Medieval Warfare's maps are designed around objective-based play (though there are also other traditional FPS game-modes). There are 6-8 different campaigns, which play out over 2-3 maps apiece. For example, attacking soldiers will first have to to breach a castle's walls, then fight their way up to through courtyards, before finally killing a king to win. There are four main classes: Archers do as you'd expect, using bows and arrows to kill at range. Men-at-arms are the harassment unit, and are fast on their feet and lightly armored. The Vanguard have a deadly lunge attack, and use long-ranged pikes to keep enemies at a distance. Knights are heavily armored and slow-moving, and are basically an armored tank.

Everything Piggott described sounded pretty cool to me—in his words, the intensity of having to get in close with your foes will make for an intimate, exhilarating experience. Chivalry: Medieval Warfare doesn't have an exact release date yet, but it is nearly complete and should be out sometime in 2012.

Chivalry: Medieval Warfare [Official Site]

He starts with a statement that is as true or false as you want it to be: "Nobody is seriously accusing any website or writer of accepting money from publishers in direct exchange for positive reviews."

He ends with quotes from Metal Gear Solid.

And, in between, in a post tagged with such words as "IGN," "Journalism", "Kotaku", "8.8" and "Bribe", whoever YouTube user Instig8ive Journalism is damn near blows the lid off this whole game-reviewing racket.

"Please download and mirror in case this video is censored and taken down," our truthteller writes below his YouTube post entitled "Paid Reviews: Critics or Conmen? Gaming's Ad-verse Situation." (It's embedded above. Watch it!)

Who would censor these truths?

From the video: "To say there isn't at least something going wrong would only call further into question one's honesty, particularly when there is such an abysmal track record."

Ok, ok. I'm an honest man. Therefore I must yield and say, sure, at least something is going wrong.

• The problems, as delineated in this video:
• Video game publishers see game reviewers as marketing tools.
• Publishers sometimes allow positive reviews to be published before negative ones.
• Publishers sometimes require game reviewers to not mention certain plot or technical details in exchange for being furnished with an advance review copy.
• Publishers might not want to advertise on an outlet that slams their games.
• Critics are often "at a loss for insightful ways of describing what they found objectionable" about a game they don't like.
• Reviews are banal checklists.
• Game reviewers may not know that they're biased, but "if they knew they were biased, would they tell us?"
• All these positive reviews from biased reviewers lead the public into accidentally playing bad games.
• Legislators are happy when this mess results in pro-American games topping the charts.
• "War has changed. When the battlefield is under total control, war becomes routine."

Some of these things are true and worth a drubbing. Others are hilarious. But now you know.

(The embargoed-details one sticks in my craw, because it's on-point. We need to find a better way to address when, say, Nintendo tells us that our early copy of Super Mario 3D Land comes with a prohibition against launch-day reviews mentioning the game is only halfway over when the credits roll. Of course, the fact that Nintendo was trying to bar reviewers from mentioning the best part of the game doesn't fit our current conspiracy theory. Konami's old prohibition on mentioning the length of cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid 4 does. Funny how after I reported that several years ago, Hideo Kojima suddenly wasn't able to attend an interview we had planned. Almost as funny as how that didn't appear to stall my career.)

Don't let this video be censored!

Paid Reviews: Critics or Conmen? Gaming's Ad-verse Situation [YouTube]

After a game is finished and released, it's always interesting to get a glimpse into what might have been, had not someone in the development process spoken up at just the right moment.

Early in development, Super Mario Galaxy 2 contained a number of ideas that didn't make the final cut. One such idea was to feature Pikmin or Donkey Kong in cameos. Speaking to GameTrailers at this year's Game Developers Conference, Super Mario Galaxy 2 director Koichi Hayashida explained that Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto, a producer on the game, shot down the idea early on. The reasons, Hayashida explained, had in large part to do with art styles of the properties simply not meshing well.

"In the Pikmin games, you'll notice that all the Pikmin are very thin - tall and narrow for their frame," Hayashida explained. "Mario enemies tend to be on the short and squat side and there's a functional reason for that. They're easier to stomp on. They're lower so you can get above them and broader so you can land on them. In that sense, Pikmin are just not well suited for the Mario universe."

Miyamoto's dismissal forced the Mario Galaxy 2 team to "focus on the functional again."

Drawing the game back to its fundamental self worked out well for the title. Scrapping other series' cameos seems to have been the right call. But does that mean the idea is dead forever, or could crossovers come in a future game? When asked if Donkey Kong could ever again make an appearance in a core Mario game, Hayashida hedged, but ultimately seemed negative.

"If we encountered a situation with a proper gameplay context, we would consider it," Hayashida said. "Let's say if we were building a level and functionally it called for someone to throw barrels at you, then Donkey Kong would be appropriate."

"But now that I think about it, maybe we have a situation where, at the end of Super Mario 3D Land, Bowser throws fireballs at you from the end of the stage. And we didn't use Donkey Kong there… so…"

It seems likely, then, that Donkey Kong's barrel-throwing ways are unlikely to take Princess Peach away from Mario's not-so-safe embrace anytime soon.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 Could Have Featured Donkey Kong and Pikmin Cameos, But Miyamoto Said "No" [GameTrailers]