My comics knowledge is made up of modern weirdo auteur shit and whatever my friends were reading back in the oughts. World War Hulk I kinda sorta know about but not really, mostly because aspects of the lead up were parted out in other movies and my brain demanded that I spend a lot of time on wikis. So I didn't know until we were writing the strip yesterday that Red Hulk is called Rulk. Rulk! Okay, sure.

I'm always willing to accept "perfidy" as a reason for why something unpleasant has happened, especially when it happened to a small team in Seattle where I am from. But the Marvel Rivals thing, where a local R&D team lost their jobs, is incredibly confusing. What I read first was that the Game Director had been let go, and certainly the person in question has Game Director as their title on LinkedIn. But now NetEase has tried to quell things saying the game is still being developed by the same team and their producer and director are still the same guys.

I don't know anything that isn't public, though I could probably track one of these locals down and ply them with our resinous northwestern IPAs until they revealed all. The main thing I would say is that the last time I saw NetEase in the news, it was because - connected with the TikTok ban - Second Dinner's Marvel Snap was also sent to the Negative Zone. Chinese companies have made profound investments in US talent over the last decade or so, though NetEase has been pulling its arms, head, and tail back into their shell recently. I wonder if it's part of the overall economic chaos that's been around since, oh, about January. But I also wonder why you would take your foot off the gas if you have a tiny skunkworks out this way whose primary job is to make your game feel better than other people's games. Because that's exactly what they did.

(CW)TB out.