sholio | Entries tagged with comics:misc

I finally got around to reading Lore Olympus vol. 2 recently. I wrote about vol. 1 here - which I really liked; it's a cute retelling of Hades and Persephone in a modern-world version of Olympus with unique, charming art.

Unfortunately I didn't like vol. 2 nearly as much and I think I'm noping out at this point. I just really dislike some of the choices the author has made with the central pairing.

So vol. 1 committed to Hades/Persephone as a cute, sweet pairing where most of the conflict and obstacles came from other people. Which I'm fine with! In doing modern retellings of mythology you need to make decisions like that, and I was perfectly happy with the direction it went (actually, to be honest, at least from the perspective of reader enjoyment, I liked that better than if it had decided to go in a Your Faves Are Problematic direction). Obviously you can do that too, but the first book goes with a "this is our central pairing, you're going to root for them" vibe. Which, great!

Then vol. 2 backs off of that and starts having Hades in particular obsess on problematic elements of the relationship - which I need to emphasize genuinely hasn't been problematic in this retelling. He didn't abduct her or force himself on her, he's actually been a perfect gentleman; most of the issues thus far have come from other people assuming that he's done something which he hasn't.

No, what he completely freaks out about is the age gap, which is ... I just ... THEY'RE IMMORTAL GODS AND GODDESSES. It's true that they're in a version of Olympus that is a sort of pseudo modern world, so it's inherently anachronistic, and a lot of the character relationships are a bit different from the original myths anyway. But honestly, one of the things I really liked about the first volume is that the gods and goddesses approach the world with a cockeyed-left-of-ordinary sort of morality that feels relatively true to the original myths even through the modern filter. They're gods and demigods and weird creatures in Hades' realm; they're different. Having Hades back off the relationship because she's younger than he is feels entirely wrong for characters who don't worry about, for example, eating human flesh or spontaneous baby generation. As well as feeling uncomfortably modern, it doesn't make any sense anyway! She's going to live forever! If you want something to throw a conflict between the main pairing, the actual problematic elements of the myth are RIGHT THERE. And given the number of surrounding complications in , you honestly don't even need that in order to keep the story going for a while!

Anyway, vol. 2 takes a complete non-problem and hammers on it to the point where it actually starts to become a problem. I didn't care about her relative lack of experience and youth until the book spent half its page count TELLING ME AT LENGTH ABOUT IT.

On top of that, the pacing is glacial, and there's only so much introspective angsty monologuing that I can take. There were a few things I liked (Persephone's bonding with Cerberus continues to be adorable; the art and character designs are still super cute) but honestly, the frustration factor heavily outweighs the enjoyment that I'm getting from it at this point.

I went to the comic shop a couple of days ago for the first time in AGES. They still require masks! I was really surprised; you don't see that here much anymore. But the store is also a gaming room where people spend hours in close contact, so I guess that makes sense.

Anyway, it's been a really long time since I just loaded up a bag with interesting-looking TPBs. I also got some new dice and TTRPG supplement books for writing inspiration. A quick report on the books I've read so far:

Lore Olympus Vol. 1 by Rachel Smythe - Easily my favorite of the books I bought! This is a really beautiful, charming retelling of Hades & Persephone in a modern-day setting (but they're still gods - it's just Olympus with cars and cell phones and so forth). It's also on Webtoons if you want to read it there. (I had read a few pages a while back, liked the art, but dislike the Webtoons scrolling interface so thoroughly that I didn't end up wanting to read an entire book there; then I impulse-bought it in the comic shop after recognizing the art.) I considered buying vol. 2 when I picked up vol. 1, decided not to since I didn't know if I'd like it enough to read two books of it, but I definitely do and will be back for vol. 2 soon! The character designs are adorable, and I love the author's take on the various deities. Content warning: contains a very realistically depicted, though not graphic, sexual assault, although not between the main pairing.

Elfquest: Stargazer's Hunt vols. 1 & 2 by Wendy & Richard Pini - Well, I knew what I was getting into here, so I went in with rock bottom expectations and genuinely did enjoy a lot of it. The art is very pretty, and I'm not on board with a lot of the turns that the plot has taken over the years (or the fact that a core feature of this miniseries is one of my favorite characters spending like 200 years moping), but it was nice to see everybody again. Someone on FFA referred to Cutter 2.0 as Chad Cutter and I will never stop thinking of him as this.

Legion of Superheroes: Millennium & The Trial of the Legion (written by Bendis; various artists) - So I haven't picked up any LSH in a looooong time and decided to see what they're up to these days, and these collections, which are chronological with each other, looked like a little bit of a reboot/jumping-on place for new readers. And the art's nice. Unfortunately ... it's absolutely incoherent. I realize there are a kajillion characters, but let me just say, as a longtime reader of superhero team books, it is possible to handle a large cast without being nearly this confusing. It was sort of a perfect storm of plunging us IMMEDIATELY into a group scene with about 40 characters, frequent timeskips/location skips all over the place for no reason, AND a general tendency to switch back and forth between a verticle and two-page-spread panel layout with the result that I often lost track of where I was supposed to be reading on the page. Adding insult to injury, the Legion members all have little holographic pop-ups showing their superhero names and symbols, which was a great idea (in-universe and also for readers) ... rendered absolutely useless because 90% of the time the art is structured in such a way that you can't read them.

Let me give you an example of the timeskipping. In book 2, there's a sequence in which various characters are testifying at a mass trial involving like 50 participants. Then, apropos of nothing, there's a caption "30 seconds later" and now everyone is yelling at someone who, up to that point, had done nothing wrong. Next panel is captioned "12 seconds ago" and you see him punching down someone in the courtroom. WHY. WHY WOULD YOU NOT JUST SHOW THIS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER. It's so stupid. And large parts of BOTH books are structured that way.

Other questionable writing choices: the first volume opens with AT LEAST one individual issue, possibly two, that are an endless series of timeskips following an immortal from modern-day Earth to the Legion's time period. She doesn't even end up being a major character in the rest of the series! I sort of see what they're going for - showing the passage of time - while also finding it excruciating to actually read; it's just an ongoing, absolutely endless series of vignettes in which she spends a page or two in one time period, then it skips to a new setting some unspecified time period later. It gives you very few cues as to how much time has passed or where she is now, and as soon as you get oriented in a new location, it time-skips again. And sometimes it skips backwards in time too? I think? Thought it's sort of hard to tell, but it would abruptly whiplash from her being alone in space to back in Gotham fighting a Batperson, or whatever. WHERE ARE WE? WHEN ARE WE? WHO KNOWS?

So that was definitely A Choice, and then she finally catches up with the Legion in the aforementioned establishing group scene involving ALL OF THEM, and then there's a timeskip 1000 years backward to the Justice League and ANOTHER giant group scene with all of THEM (which matters to the rest of the book only in that it's how Superboy gets to the LSH's time period), and .... look, I have read MANY superhero team comics, including a number of older LSH ones, and I can't remember off the top of my head anything that handled a large team this badly.

It's not until a couple of issues after this, which continue to be an absolute blitz of characters and fragments of plot, that it FINALLY gets around to introducing them one by one and actually doing some origins stuff in which you get to know them individually and see how several of the mains joined the Legion in this timeline. WHYYYYYY not lead with this?! Especially since other aspects of the comic seemed to be aimed at introducing new readers to it! Except VERY BADLY!

Oh well. Things I liked: the art was nice, and several of my faves (including Saturn Girl and Brainiac 5) got a lot to do. I like some of the new character designs a lot; the tri-colored Triplicate Girl in particular is really nice. (Although Element Lad's modern design looking so much like Brainiac 5 bothers me; he basically looks like Brainy on a bender.) And Mon-El actually has a nice little mini-arc, and also kids?! So parts of it were fun. But seriously, it would have been so much better if more of it was more linear with less jumping around and more character introductions front-loaded. I get that it's a little dated to do this, but seriously, there's a reason why so many superhero comics for so many years told you who everybody is up front. It's because if you don't, you have to keep several dozen characters in your head all at once and who has time for that!

The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor, by Shaenon Garrity & Christopher Baldwin, is an adorable YA-level graphic novel gently and affectionately poking fun at Gothic tropes. I really enjoyed it.

After being told by her teacher that she can't write yet another book report on Wuthering Heights, the Gothic-romance-obsessed teenage protagonist falls through a rift in reality into a place where the tropes are all true, from the gloomy castle to the brooding lord of the manor and creepy housekeeper and near-constant rain. The house is indeed hiding a dark secret, and she has to use her genre-trope savviness figure out what it is and find her way home.

What's actually going on is one of those twists that doesn't ruin the book but makes it even more fun, namely ( Twist which is spoiled in the back cover copy )

I went into it expecting it to be more critically deconstructive than it is, but I was pleasantly surprised by how sweet and fun and affectionate it is towards its subject matter. It's clear that the creators expected and welcomed readers who genuinely like this kind of books and don't want to be told that they're bad and wrong. I really liked everyone, including the characters I was expecting to be set up not to like, and it's very funny and sweet and enjoyable, with extremely cute art.

Crossposts: https://sholio.livejournal.com/1029530.html

I took a recent dive into the Cable side of the X-Men comics and I regret nothing.

I've been reading X-Men comics for nearly my entire life, starting with the Claremont version in the mid-80s. But I never actually had any interest in Cable, who was introduced around the time that my interest in superhero comics took a nosedive (the early to mid 90s were not a good time for comics) and started reading mostly indies and manga instead. I remember him as basically a walking testosterone fantasy in the form of a large slab of muscle with a giant gun, usually depicted via Rob Liefeld's special brand of art (muscles! pouches! tiny feet!).

So imagine my surprise to find out that this dude is pure fangirl catnip. He was raised to be a sort of savior/messiah by a cult 2000 years in the future (which is part of the reason - but only part of the reason - why one of his nicknames in the fandom is G.I. Jesus); he suffers from a "techno-organic virus" (don't ask) that forces him to constantly use his telekinesis to keep it from overwhelming and killing him (hence his default state is "in constant pain and exhausted"); throw in a highly conflicted relationship with his "we didn't meet until I was older than you because you sent me into the future to be raised by a cult" dad Cyclops, a snarky-affectionate bond with his arguably-best-friend Deadpool, and a loving-yet-difficult relationship with his adopted daughter Hope (who he raised in a post-apocalyptic wasteland while being pursued by a time-traveling killer; long story, but you haven't lived 'til you've seen Cable, who is basically 400 lbs of solid muscle and guns, running around with a baby strapped to his chest); plus, he's actually a genuinely sweet and surprisingly laid-back guy (when he's not going partial-supervillain and trying to take over the world with the best of intentions, and/or coming up with plans that involve his own death - seriously, I've been reading these comics for a week, and he's already died THREE TIMES), and a lot of the Cable-focused comics are really good, particularly the X-Men Messiah Complex/Second Coming storyline (this is the one that introduces Hope), and the entire run of Cable & Deadpool, which is both hilarious and adorable.

... so yeah. I'm having fun! And since he's been in almost everything Marvel puts out on the X-Men side of things since the early '90s (except when he's dead), there's plenty to read. If you haven't read any of his comics, the Cable & Deadpool series from the early '00s is actually a really good place to start (collected as Deadpool & Cable just to make things more difficult). It's funny, sweet, and both the writing and art are really solid. If you, like me, have a thing for gruff reluctant mentor/dad-figures and their adopted little girls, the Cable series from the late '00s has the Hope storyline (it starts in X-Men: Messiah Complex and finishes up in X-Men: Second Coming, but in between there's like 50 issues of solo Cable comics which are mainly focused on Cable and Hope running around in the desert while he raises her from a baby and teaches her to shoot big guns and survive in the wilderness, and various people they meet along the way.

A side note on that storyline: one thing I absolutely love about it is that there's not even a whiff of Mr. Mom-type, guys-can't-take-care-of-babies nonsense. He's actually good at it! The things he doesn't know are things you legit wouldn't know if you hadn't been around small babies (like the finer points of what to feed them), but he's completely dedicated to this kid from day one, he's competent at taking care of her, and he works his ass off making sure she's fed and protected and safe. It's great.

(The one thing I do kinda wish is that they hadn't made Hope yet another red-headed Jean Grey type. For one thing, since her costume is strongly reminiscent of Jean's, it makes her difficult to recognize in pictures. Making things even worse, there's an entire subplot in the Cable comics where he romances a woman who is ALSO a red-haired Jean Grey type and basically looks like a grown-up Hope. It's not that there's even a hint of anything inappropriate in the relationship that he and Hope have - they're completely adorable, and have turned into one of my favorite things in Marvel comics from the last decade - but c'mon, X-Men writers, there are more looks for women than "long red hair", y'know.)

Crossposts: https://sholio.livejournal.com/816713.html

Last night I finally got around to doing something I've been meaning to do for ages, which is reading through the archives of the Prohibition-era noirish webcomic Lackadaisy. I've probably set a world record for procrastinating on reading it, because I've been aware of it for almost the entire time the artist has been doing it (... it started in 2006), and in fact have been following her on Tumblr for the last couple of years because her art's really pretty and I wanted the reminder that I need to sit down and read this thing, since I figured it would be 100% my cup of tea.

And it really is. It's gorgeous, funny, bleak, and sharply characterized -- a lot more of all of these things than you'd realize from the first few pages, which are Looney-Tunes-esque hijinks with a hapless, incompetent bootlegger going through various mishaps trying to get a shipment of moonshine for the stylish boss he's got a crush on. (Just FYI, the characters are all cats, but you get used to that pretty quickly.)

And once the plot starts to kick in, it turns out that these aren't sanitized bootleggers; they're really awful people. We first meet one of the main characters drenched in blood and wielding a hatchet after coolly chopping up an informant to be fed to pigs. One of the characters can't climb stairs because his knees don't work; we later learn that this is because one of the other protagonists kneecapped him (probably in self-defense). One of the sweetest, nicest characters in the comic goes axe-crazy when threatened and backed against a wall, and the others actively encourage this despite the horrendous psychological toll it's clearly taking on him and the fact that he doesn't even want to be in the gang, because they're cash-strapped and need cheap muscle.

So basically it's not feel-good, edges-sanded-off noir, but it's also got that thing I fall for every time, with a broken group of people being each other's family and scrambling through the wreckage of their lives and the fallout from their own poor life choices trying to put something together that's better than what they had before. (Though in this case, it's more of a broken, dysfunctional family than a happy one.) I really loved all of them by the time I caught up with the newest updates, even the ones I didn't really like at first.

And the art's just gorgeous. I mean, look at this. Or this. Or here.

Being as it's noir, and there's also a hurtling-towards-disaster kind of feeling overall, I suspect that no one's going to come out well; I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing ends in a blaze of glory shootout or something like that. I fully expect to have my heart ripped out by the end. But I loved it enough to go and pledge to the artist's Patreon just to see the behind-the-scenes bits and process art. I recommend it highly, especially if you like period stuff.

Once you've read the main story, definitely read the side comics and character bios too; they're hilarious.

The comic archive starts here.

Crossposts: https://sholio.livejournal.com/813958.html

So I picked up the first tpb of the Mark Waid/Fiona Staples Archie, and it's actually ... good?! In a very homagey kind of way -- having read a lot of these comics when I was a kid, I like how Waid is incorporating a lot of the old comics' tropes (such as the JD-on-Scrubs-style dips into fantasy, or the asides to the reader) and yet somehow manages to stay on the "cute and funny" side of the line instead of tipping over into "embarrassingly cheesy." I liked it enough to go ahead and get the second of the collected volumes as well. I think that was about all I can handle for awhile; I've reached my limit for semi-pointless teen love-triangle shenanigans for the time being -- especially knowing that it's unlikely to ever be resolved in any way, because it's Archie comics -- but I did have fun and I don't regret buying them. I particularly like the new take on Betty, who was always my favorite character back in the day, and is even more so now.

(They only have Staples for the first 3 issues, but the later artists are pretty good too.)

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/748592.html

... which is not actually about the movie. It's about the previews before the movie and the kids sitting next to me.

We were sitting next to a row of really young kids (grade school age). They were perfectly well-behaved throughout the movie -- I hardly even knew they were there. But one thing that got them excited was the preview for Batman v. Superman. Obviously they knew these characters well! They were chattering about it throughout the preview and at the end, I heard one of the kids -- a little girl, I think -- say firmly to the others, "This would never happen in real life because they're friends!"

You tell 'em, little kid.

(Also, we went to Avengers on a Saturday matinee and that movie, as long as it is, was FULL of captivated little kids. DC, why aren't you making kid-friendly movies? Your audience is RIGHT THERE!)

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/646019.html

.... and I have a comics-related squeeeeeee.

( Kinda spoilery - okay, now it got more spoilery as I added stuff )

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/640618.html

A couple of brief, vaguely spoilery comments on the new issue of Saga ...

( Spoilers )

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/630512.html

This is nothing like a coherently thoughtful post, and more like disconnected thoughts that I had while reading the comic.

( Spoilers through the fourth GN, i.e. through Saga #24 )

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/629913.html

I recced this on Tumblr but not here - I read Saga by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples this past week (comic book series from Image, 4 graphic novels so far), and it is amazing. I think the last thing I read/watched that made me have this overwhelming I WANT TO REC THIS TO EVERYBODY urge was Orphan Black.

The caveat: It is very graphic (explicit sex/graphic violence). Despite this, I'm having trouble thinking off the top of my head of anything that might be specifically triggery for common triggers; there is a character who is a victim of childhood sexual abuse, but it's not dealt with in detail. However, be aware that this comic really doesn't pull punches and lots of awful things happen. Graphically.

Okay now, having said that: I really think this is one of the best comics I've ever read, and I have read a LOT of comics. The writing, plotting, dialogue, worldbuilding, and characterization is top-notch. The art is absolutely gorgeous. The world/universe is fantastically creative (I think of the various stuff I've read, it reminds me the most of Ian M. Banks's stuff, in its amazingly creative weirdness) and it runs the gamut from funny and sweet, to exciting, to heartbreaking and awful. I have a terrible suspicion that it's going to break my heart in the end, but I still think the ride will have been worth it.

I absolutely love the characters, and the way that, even though the actual plot of the comic is an action-packed thing about war and space battles and assassins, the whole thing is really about love and family at heart. All kinds of love. Romantic love is definitely a thing, but there's probably even more of an emphasis on the parent-child bond (birth children and adopted children; babies and grown-up children). There are siblings and families of circumstance and people uneasily teaming up for a common goal. The cast is so casually diverse that it's not even really a thing -- like, at one point there's a subplot involving three female characters off on a quest (four if you count the giant semi-sapient cat), none of them conventionally pretty white women, one canonically bisexual and one probably some sort of queer based on her androgynous gender presentation (this is what she looks like), and it's not even something I really thought about except in retrospect while writing this rec; it's just what the comic is.

Right now the four GNs contain all the story that's out so far, but there's a new issue coming out on Feb. 4, so I feel like I picked exactly the right time to jump on.

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/629689.html

It doesn't come out 'til next week, but there's a 5-page preview out now for Bucky Barnes: Winter Soldier #2. I am still absolutely adoring this comic (and it looks like the art is getting a little easier to follow compared to last issue).

Also, I'm pretty sure it manages not to joss the tag scene I wrote for the previous comic, so there's also that.

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/610018.html

Not precisely part of the DVD commentary meme, but I was asked about Elaine (from Kismet) and her timeline in the comments to this Kismet page, so I got to ramble about the difference between the Elaine short stories vs. her appearances in the comic.

I think one thing that's been really interesting (and surprising) to me since I started up the webcomic again is how MUCH Kismet is lurking in my brain. I haven't actively worked on it since 2009, but it's pretty much all still there, in detail up to and including everyone's birthdates and the dates of important events (though some of it I have to work backward from the current date to remember) and, of course, an absolute shitload of detail on characterization, the current political situation, etc. The point, I guess, is that so far I haven't actually had to look up anything -- I've occasionally had my memory jogged on random bits of canon as I've been going through the old stuff (and I do have to look back at the Hunter's Moon pages to remember some of the minor visual details of the comic, like where the patches on Fleetwood's jacket are located), but it's really fascinating to me because it's all been buried in my brain so long and now that it's resurfacing, I don't feel as if I've lost any of it.

... as opposed to the often short-term way that I load information for fanfic when I'm in a fandom. I think this is maybe one of the key aspects of how my brain deals differently with my original worlds versus fan worlds, because while I'm actively reading/writing in a fandom, I have a tremendous amount of canon information front-loaded -- it is definitely all there, all the characterization stuff and the backstory and everything. But it starts to slip and get overwritten once I leave the fandom. I noticed towards the end of my time in SGA fandom, particularly, that I was failing at some of the canon details in the last couple of fics that I wrote for it. (Someone pointed out a detail in the comments to one of my very last SGA fics that made me realize I'd forgotten Rodney's lemon allergy. Um. Yeah.) I think I could still write for my old fandoms, but in most cases it'd be a struggle and I'd have to re-familiarize myself with canon first.

But the original worlds -- even the (absolutely ridiculous) fantasy-romance novel I wrote when I was a teenager is still all there, and without even looking at it, I bet I could sit down right now and write a conversation between any two of those characters that's still totally in character and has all their backstory intact, even though it's been 20 years since I wrote them or even thought about them. They still live in here.

Random link of the day: here is a nifty-looking comics anthology that is taking submissions on the theme of exploration, colonization and contact, if you are into that sort of thing!

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/607015.html

I'm pleasantly surprised at how much I like the new Ales Kot/Marco Rudy Winter Soldier comic. I was kinda expecting to dislike it, or at least to be unhappy with the new direction of the character, and instead I love it and I'm really looking forward to the next issue. I think partly this is because it has a nice indy vibe -- the overall feel of the comic is much more like an indy sci-fi comic than a superhero comic; some of the reviews compared it to Heavy Metal which I think is also accurate -- but also, I was honestly expecting wall-to-wall angst, darkness and manpain, and instead it's entertaining and fun and even funny at times, with gorgeous (if confusing) art. I'm not familiar with Daisy Johnson as a character, but I like her a lot so far, and her dynamic with Bucky is a lot of fun.

Also, the comic pretty much had me when ( Spoilers, I guess )

My only real complaint is that I wish the art wasn't so hard to follow -- although I love the actual look of it. And it's complex enough that you have to go back and reread pages to pick up details you missed the first time, which is always a plus for me.

But yeah, ever since this was announced I've been thinking it was going to be very much not my cup of tea, and instead it very much is, so I'm really happy about that. (And now I need to track down some of the other comics with Daisy in them. THE COMICS RABBIT HOLE, IT JUST KEEPS GOING DOWN.)

In completely other news, Tim DeKay was cast on Agents of SHIELD ... playing Grant Ward's brother. *cries* Among other things, it means that the TDK tag on Tumblr is now full of AoS stuff from the Grant Ward side of the fandom, which I had been doing so well at avoiding. Thanks a bunch, casting gods.

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/604424.html

I FINISHED MY NOVEL EDITS. This calls for a glass of wine and some relaxation. (I think I'll give it a final pass before sending it in the morning, but I am done, done, DONE! \o/)

And I keep meaning to make more posts about the comics I am reading lately, so I guess I will do a quick roundup on that topic. Some of what I've read in the last few weeks:

Black Widow #1-6 and #8 - Really great, with absolutely gorgeous art! ( Spoilers and speculation )

Winter Soldier: The Bitter March #1-5 - Not precisely good (especially the art, ugh) but a lot more fun than I was expecting, except for that WTF trainwreck of an ending. ( Spoilers )

Young Avengers vols 1-3 (the Gillen run) - I am SO glad that various people on my flist turned me onto this, because it's great and I love it! ( Mild spoilers )

New Invaders #1-5 - Not entirely my cup of tea, but not bad. ( Further comments, not really spoilery )

Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Avengers - Meh. I picked this up mostly to get to know the characters in advance of the movie, but it didn't really engage me much. I hope the movie is better. On the bright side, it has mini-origin stories for each character, so it does make a pretty good introduction for someone (like me) who has no familiarity with them at all. And Tony is in it. So there's that.

Lumberjanes #1-2 - It's a good comic but not really for me. I wanted to read it because it's drawn by Gingerhaze, of Nimona (if you are not reading Nimona you should check it out; it's great!), and is all about girls at summer camp having adventures. I think this would be a great comic to give to a kid in the grade-school-to-young-teen age range, and it has a lovely diverse array of female features and body types. But it didn't really engage me enough to keep reading it.

Comics I plan to try next: Saga (which I would actually have bought on my last comic-shop run, except they'd just sold out of volume 1), She-Hulk, and maybe the next volume of Daredevil.

I also appear to have tripped and ordered the Winter Soldier movie art book on Amazon as a birthday present to myself. Oops.

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/593181.html

(Also posted on Tumblr)

I've been working my way through New Avengers lately. I admit that I started reading it mostly for Bucky (he's a team member during his Captain America phase) but I've really fallen for everyone; I have a longstanding love of Luke Cage dating back to the '80s, and everyone else is pretty great too. I really enjoy the characters, the domesticity, and the overall second-string-superheroes vibe of the team.

I picked up Siege: New Avengers the other day, and to my surprise and delight, got both Captain Americas and a little bit of Bucky-Steve h/c.

( A few scans under the cut )

In conclusion, who do I have to bribe at Marvel to get Steve in black commando gear in the next Captain America movie?

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/585793.html

I mentioned a bit earlier that I'd do a post comparing the movie and comics versions of the Winter Soldier storyline. And this is that post!

( Abundant spoilers, obviously )

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/580697.html

The Captain America comics, you guys.

I am losing the ability to can.

( CA comics spoilers and general squeeful flailtastic incoherency; you know what I'm like when I have a new shiny )

P.S. On a completely different note, there's a total lunar eclipse tonight! It's visible mostly from North America and will be at maximum eclipse for the next hour or so. If your skies are clear, look to the southeast; it is very red and cool. It looks like a moon on an alien planet.

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/579232.html

http://marvel.com/news/story/21476/disneys_marvel_and_netflix_join_forces_to_develop_historic_four_series_epic_plus_a_mini-series_event

Marvel and Netflix are developing four new Marvel-themed miniseries to be broadcast as Netflix original series starting in 2015. Namely:

Led by a series focused on "Daredevil," followed by "Jessica Jones," "Iron Fist" and "Luke Cage," the epic will unfold over multiple years of original programming, taking Netflix members deep into the gritty world of heroes and villains of Hell's Kitchen, New York. Netflix has committed to a minimum of four, thirteen episodes series and a culminating Marvel's "The Defenders" mini-series event that reimagines a dream team of self-sacrificing, heroic characters.

The two '80s Marvel comics that I was most addicted to as a kid were "X-Men" and "Power Man & Iron Fist". I have wanted live-actions versions of Luke and Danny (and Misty and Colleen, pleasepleaseplease) FOREVER, and one of the specific aspects of the comic I always really loved was that it was mostly about ordinary people and very low-powered superheroes/supervillains rather than dealing with the big world-saving stuff. I know this is still a long ways out, and it could fall through or the casting could suck or who knows, but it would be wonderful if this works out!

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/554654.html

I picked up Part 1 of The Search today (the new A:tLA tie-in comic).

... these are canon, right? At least that's my understanding -- that they're being written with input from the original creators, and everything that happens is creator-sanctioned and canonical.

( Spoilers for part one of 'The Search' )

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/518724.html

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Life in a Northern Town

Entries tagged with comics:misc

Lore Olympus vol. 2

Comics haul!

The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor

Things I'm into: X-Men and Cable (and Deadpool)

Lackadaisy

I'm reading Archie comics again; how did this happen

One more thing ...

I am watching Daredevil 1x02 ...

Saga #25

A far more spoilery Saga post

Saga (the - mostly - non-spoiler post)

squeeeeee

Maundering on Kismet and general creative stuff

Comics and fandom stuff

(no subject)

Unexpectedly relevant to my interests

Winter Soldier comics storyline versus the movie

Just keep moving, nothing to see here

squeal of nerdly glee

Avatar comic: The Search