#all ages modern day fantasy comic

[dragonchildcomic]

In preparation for SacAnime, a great convention that starts tomorrow, I finally trimmed up the pages and glued the cover onto my prototype handmade hardcover. I think it turned out awesome, and am looking forward to sharing it with everyone at the con! If you want one of these books for yourself, there are only 7 left up for grabs on my Kickstarter campaign. Join my amazing backers and help support my indie comic project to get Issue # 9 printed!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonchildissue8/dragon-child-1-9-a-modern-fantasy-comic

[notebooks-and-laptops]

Why Fenris could Never Cameo in Dragon Age: The Veilguard

In the run up to Dragon age: The Veilguard, I was almost certain that Fenris would be our main legacy character from previous games. Not only has he been central in the comics released between DAI and DATV, he is an escaped Tevinter slave who's plot revolved around magisters, magic and the structural prejudices surrounding elves in Thedas. Not only that, but he's canonically in Tevinter killing slavers currently so he's geographically in the right place for us to meet him.

About halfway through the game though, it was clear to me: Fenris could never cameo in The Veilguard. Because he'd break it.

How the Veilguard treats Thedas is...odd to me, to say the least. I will be writing another post about how much I adored the expanded big lore in this game (the titans, ancient elves were spirits, where the blight came from etc.) and yet while these large lore expansions worked for me, the actual culture of modern Thedas is entirely softened, its sharp edges filed down until it's a sanitised fantasy world devoid of what made the franchise so vibrant and compelling in the first place.

So let's start with Fenris and slavery. In all three games, the reality of slavery is pushing at the corners of the world. In DAO Loghain allows Tevinter Magisters to enslave elves in order to raise money for his war effort. In DA2 Fenris is fighting to be free from slavers who will not leave him be, let alone the reminders that the city was built by slaves which are everywhere. In DAI one of the two possible mini-bosses is Calpurnia who was a slave, and characters such as Gatt and Dorian both show us how much slavery is tied into Tevinters culture and success.

But DATV the first game actually set in Tevinter where we get to see the famed Minrathous...it's like the game purposefully wants to avoid the issue. I can feel it tilting the camera away to not allow me to see. Slavery is mentioned, but never talked about in depth or as a specifically ELVEN problem in Tevinter. This might have been done to be less problematic, it feels ignored.

We are in DOCK TOWN. We are at the DOCKS. You would think that slaves from all over Thedas who are being smuggled and bought by various groups would be everywhere. You would think that the injustice in dock town would be partly built on the back of ships we've seen in the comics crammed with elves in chains. This is the world Dragon age set up for us. And yet...nothing. zilch. A tiny easily skippable side quest where we free a couple of venatori slaves, but only one of whom is an elf.

None of our Tevinter characters seem to have been influenced by their culture even a little bit when it comes to how they view elves; there is no moment when Neve fucks up and says something prejudiced, no moment when Bellara or Davrin are distrustful of her for being a Tevinter mage.

The same goes for Zevran; a character who epitomised the issues with the crows. The crows have consistently been characterised as very morally dubious assassins who kill for the highest bidder and who buy children on the slave market and torture them as they grow in order to assure that they reach maturity able to withstand torture without giving away a client's name. Zevran is very explicit about the fact that if you fail a contract your life is forefit.

Nobody responds particularly to you if you're an elf. Nobody trusts rook less for it in Tevinter. Nobody treats Rook any differently. Even DAI had better mechanics for this; with nobles in Orlais less likely to trust you as an elf.

Considering one of the main plot points of this game and what makes Solas sympathetic is the fact that he was fighting against the slavery of ancient elves...you'd think the game might want to mirror that in modern Thedas. It might want to show us how characters fighting to end slavery in Tevinter are similar to Solas and how the society Solas fought against was similar to the one that characters we love such as Fenris have fought against in modern Thedas. Maybe we'd want to explore how in a world of slavery like this, how could the answer NOT be to tear it all down? Maybe we should have that option at the end of the game so it really can chose whether we agree with Solas and his plans or not.

Adding Fenris to this game would entirely break the game because Fenris refuses to allow you to look away from this horror. He is a sympathetic character who had to learn to trust mages again because of course he didn't trust them. Of course he didn't. Fenris wouldn't allow the camera to shift focus because he's literally covered in the lyrium scars that show how slaves are used as experiments in Tevinter. Fenris WOULD question Neve on how she feels about elves and slaves. Fenris WOULD have things to say about Lucanis and the crows (let alone the fact Lucanis is an abomonation). So he could never be in this game; he'd drop a bomb on it's carefully constructed blinders to the very society its supposed to be set in.

And yet, in DATV, the crows are presented as...a found family of misfits and orphans? The politician who opposes the crows having absolute power in Antiva is framed as a comically evil idiot who doesn't understand that the crows are ontologically good. Yet...they're NOT. Crows in this game act more like a secret rebel group than an assassin organisation. We see no crow taking contracts with the VERY RICH venatori magisters despite being hired killers. We see crows just refuse to kill people despite having a contract because 'its crueler to leave them alive'. The crows don't feel like the crows here, they feel like a softened version of a cool assassin group who are cool because they wear black and purple.

Our pirate group are also sanitised; the Lords of Fortune are good pirates who only steal treasure that's not culturally significant. Theyve clearly read the modern critiques of the British Museum and have decided to explicitly stop anyone levelling similar critiques at them. There is no faction of the Lords of Fortune who aren't like this, no internal arguments about it. Everyone just. Agrees. And is able to accurately tell what a cultural artifact is vs. what treasure that you can have yourself is. Rather than showing us why a pirate stealing cultural artifacts might be bad (like in da2 where such a situation literally causes a coup and a war) it just tells us it's bad. But also pirates are cool so we still want them in our world.

This issue seaps into Thedas and drains it of any of the interesting complexity and ability to SAY anything that this franchise had before this game. It becomes a game about telling and not showing rather than the other way around. The games have ALWAYS asked questions about oppressive structural systems and their interplay with society, religion and culture and how these things can affect even the most well meaning character. Dragon age at its best IS a game about society and how society functions both for and against it's characters and what happens to societies built on cruelty and indifference. The best bad guys dragon age has given us are those who are bad because they embody these systems or have been shaped by them. Our main characters have had to wrestle with questions surrounding how to exist in these systems, fight against them, learn and grow.

Yet every group you come across in DATV is sanitised and cleaned up to the point of being as non problematic as humanly possible. None of our cast of characters have to wrestle with where they came from or the world that shaped them. None of them have to confront their own biases. They start the game perfectly non-problematic and end it that way too.

And this just...isn't what Dragon Age has been in the past. It isn't why I love the franchise. The whole game just felt, in a way, hollow. And this was a CHOICE and it is why the legacy characters are few and far between. Too many dragon age characters are just too...angry and complex for this game. You can feel them pulling their punches on this one. I have to imagine they did this because they didn't want to be criticised or have too much controversy? But I think it honestly goes far too much in the other direction and just makes it bland.

I can't imagine what I say here will be unique, but it is the basis for a LOT of my other thoughts on this game so I wanted to get it out of the way first. The softened Thedas and characters make this game by far the weakest in the franchise.

[darqx]

Hi I understand if you don't reply, but I was wondering if you have any advice to beginners who want to start making their ocs a reality? (Like in the sense of having Charecters that have been in your thoughts for a while, but it's hard to encapsulate them into physical form?) As I have some that id like to make either into a game or comic but I'm a little stuck..

Also I'm curious if there will be any other content with the best boy himself rire?? : 0

Hullo! Ah, (physically) designing characters, how fun ❤️ - there is part of a reason why I only have a handful of them lol XD; ANYWAY here are three things that help me, so hopefully they can help you as well :)

(I'll use Demon!Rire as an example as unless you are an old guard of mine, he will probably be the most recognisable of my characs.)

--------------

❓What do you know about them?

First of all since you already have your character in mind, congratulations you are most of the way there already! It's helpful to know the general vibe of them. And I don't mean the super detailed things that may arise from like..."Get to know your OC" quizzes - we are more looking for the core feeling of a character here. If you dumped this character into different AUs what things are going to stay the same/similar? Some things you should consider are:

What is their personality like? Why do they do the things they do?

Do I already have any physical traits for them in mind? Hair/eye/skin colour? Body type? Age? Name??

📝 Write a simple paragraph or some dot points about your character with these things in mind.

---EXAMPLE---

Sophisticated and charming, Rire outputs an aura of power and elegance. His pleasing physical appearance and gentlemanly demeanour usually enchants or commands people. Realistically, he is extremely manipulative and sadistic, and finds entertainment in the reactions of others.

---/EXAMPLE---

🤔 Make informed choices

Ok cool, you know something about your charac! Now build upon what you know to make them real - it is important here to try and match your design choices with the characterisation and "why"s of the character, and less with what you personally think will be cool/cute/whatever. What I mean by this is just pretend they are a person you are describing to a forensic sketch artist - you are giving "facts" as to what you think they look like not making stuff up (eg you would NOT be like "oh yeh she was totally a punk rocker however i'm going to say she wore a long flowing gown cos I think she'd look prettier in it?"*)

*Note that designing a character with opposites in mind can work out if you can at least answer the cursory "why" of it being a part of the character design. For eg maybe the punk rocker is secretly the alter ego of a socialite - flowing gowns and high fashion by day, grunge by night. Like Batman.

📝 Feel free to use dress up doll games and image searches for particular types of clothes/hairstyles/etc if you need inspiration. Thumbnail a bunch of different designs and see what works.

---EXAMPLE---

In my prev example paragraph I highlighted a few things in red. Here I'll break down how they can help craft a physical appearance:

Sophisticated and charming / elegance - to me, these combined make me think of ballrooms and black tie functions and nice suits. A well tailored outfit and someone who knows how to wear them.

Gentlemanly demeanour (well to some degree lol) - since I already know he's hundreds of years old (973 to be exact) I decided that an aristocratic Victorian-esque aesthetic would suit him. Somewhere in between a modern look and something with a bit more fantasy steampunk flair. He smiles quite genially until he's doing it with all his teeth.

Aura of power - he's got to be a bit of an imposing character so he's quite tall (or at least taller than all of my other characs) and carries himself confidently. Hooray for the ability to loom. Dark colours for this character, to cut an impressive figure.

Pleasing physical appearance - kinda stereotypical type of good looks that aesthetically most people would be like "yeh he's pretty". Athletic build - muscular but not bulky, broad shoulders, tapered waist etc etc.

Extremely manipulative - first of all, he looks rather human, for a demon - his entire species is designed very particularly like that. Then there's the sunglasses. The "why" [does he wear them] is they function to hide his eyes (one of the main parts of him that give away his demon-ness), but also as a bit of a red flag to the audience that something isn't quite right with him. I mean, look past his charm and he wears them all the time. The black and yellow colour scheme also ties in as warning colours ⚠️

Put them all together and this was one of my first sketches of Demon!Rire.

*Note that I already more or less knew how he looked other than his outfit; you will probably have a lot more sketch duds as you figure out what your character looks like.

---/EXAMPLE---

🔐 Don't lock yourself in

Despite the fact I've just said "pretend your character is a person", remember you're still their creator so obviously you have final say over them. Sometimes you'll find that they grow and change from what you initially thought of them (or you just evolve in how you draw them). Don't be afraid to make the tweaks and changes that enhance these - whether they be physical or core characteristics - and you'll get closer to the true character you always had in mind.

---EXAMPLE--

I now draw Rire with a more pronounced V-shape, longer, wavier hair, and somehow he ended up with way more pronounced eyelashes than I usually draw on my male characs. Which works out quite well considering how I tend to draw his eyes. Anyway the point of this is that these things developed over time as I kept drawing him.

---/EXAMPLE---

🍀 Try it out with your own characs! Have fun and don't force yourself to try and get it "right" on the first go.

[serahlink]

‼️EMERGENCY COMMS OPEN! || HELP A HOMELESS ARTIST ‼️

Reblogs are greatly appreciated!! :")

Making another commissions post since things have been getting worse as the month goes on. For those who are just coming across this, my name is Link and I'm a 22 y/o homeless artist. My family and I (father and younger sibling) have been in this situation for about three years now since November 2021 and I've been doing commissions to support us until something changes. We don't have anywhere to go or anyone to really turn to financially or housing wise, so we've been on our own since then. My father has managed to get his ID but with no transportation and jobs being too far out, it's made job hunting more difficult and we've yet to find anything.

This month has been one of the toughest with us owing 100$+ due to not being able to pay the daily rent. We do get extensions here but they're hard to keep up with when they double so quickly and work is becoming more hard to come by, and bumping posts on my other socials hasn't done much for us. Sadly, tonight isn't any different. We owe 190$ for tonight and for the last three days, we've been unable to get anything for it. If we can't pay tonight then we will be forced to leave, and I'm not sure what we'll do if we can't cover it.

My commissions are open for anyone interested in supporting us that way, but reblogs/shares also help us a ton since it helps spread the word to possibly get us the help we need :") I'm a fantasy oriented artist, mainly surrounding fandoms like DND, Baldurs Gate 3, Skyrim and Dragon Age, but I've done non fantasy related things as well like furries, feral creatures, comic or modern characters, I'm welcome to pretty much any fandom or request! My only donts are anything excessively violent or sexual (nonsexual nudity is okay), proship/all around that sorta content, and anything hateful (homophobia/transphobia/racism/etc.) if you have any questions about what I will do/wont do that isnt listed here, feel free to ask!

My turn around time can ranged from four weeks or shorter to a month or two given the complexity and how my situation is going at the time. I only take payments upfront with no refunds since we use the money immediately for the room or food and are unable to give proper refunds. My prices will be below and my messages will be open for anyone interested in supporting us that way, thank you so so much if you do help or reblog, I can't tell you how much we appreciate it. Especially with how things are going now.

~Prices~

Sketch (price depending on type of sketch) - base price of 15$

Sketch page - 15$ per sketch

Headshot - 25$ (+10$ if shaded)

Bust - 35$ (+10$ if shaded)

Expression Sheet (minimum of 3 heads per sheet, 10$+ per extra head) - 45$ (10$+ if shaded)

Half body - 50$ (+10$ if shaded)

Full body - 70$ (+15$ if shaded)

Couples Commission (a commission that includes two people) - 90$ (+15$ if shaded)

Group commissions (commission that includes more than two people, price dependant on the details) - 60 base price(one character, unshaded; each extra character is +75% to the original price) (40$+ if shaded) 

Paintings

[the-kr8tor]

Thank you for voting for the name Octobie! Now for the themes! I've combed through every single suggestion you gave me and categorised all of them into 12 themes.

So what I'm gonna do is post the 12 (right here) and from that 12 the 5 most top voted will move up for another poll until the top 3 wins! (Reasons/ and where I got the themes from your suggestions are listed below the poll/cut. W/ brief descriptions also)

Note: Theme names aren't finalized but the meanings will still be the same. (They'll have a cooler name once they get picked!)

Wondering why there will only be three themes? Well the third week theme is called wild card where anything goes! So if your chosen theme doesn't win you can always wait for the third week of octobie to come around and you can do whatever you want in that week as long as Hobie's in it!

Fantasy— fairy! Hobie, Dragon tamer! Hobie/Dragon rider! Hobie, Mythical creature, Sailor/Pirate! Hobie x deity! R, Time-looped historian! Hobie, fae, Mermaid. (Literally anything to do with the fantasy genre)

Halloween- Cloak Hobie, Witch R & familiar! Hobie, Witch! R and demon! Hobie, accidental summoning, pumpkin, Demon! Hobie and angel! R, death reaper! Hobie and target! R, vampire! R and human Hobie, serial killer! Hobie and detective! R, zombie! Hobie, pirates, thriller! Hobie, (anything spooky or scary!)

Eras swap/ through the decades- Modern! Hobie x 1970s! r, modern au, 1800s, different au Hobies meet and different au readers meet, aged up meet cute (they meet in their 60s), decades, (time is the main gist of it, whether it's hobie through the years or some decade specific scenario)

Music- guitar, record play, music lessons, backstage, concerts, rival bands/musicians, band practice, battle of the bands, (anything that has to do with music!)

Comfort- stray cats, nicknames, arts and crafts, london tings, hate the am (mornings), flowers, cats, snow, cozy/chilling at home, library, favourite au/trope, cottage core, (anything that wakes the butterflies in your stomach or makes you feel the ooeygoeey feeling fluff!)

Anarchy- ACAB, battle vests, protest, punk. (Anything that Hobie would be proud of doing)

Slice of life/ family life- swing date, the twins, first dance, just cozy things, cozy/chilling at home, morning/nighy routine, handsy, date day/night, meet cute, sick day, childhood friends. (Cozy or family related!)

Crossover- villains and/Vs heroes, magical girl! Hobie, tokyo ghoul au, DC Crossover, Hobie meeting batman, android! Hobie and human r, baldur's gate 3 au, hobie and mutant x-men! R, hobie and deadpool!, deadpool! Hobie, gambit! Hobie, ghost rider! hobie, spy family au, nightcrawler! Hobie (whether it's a video game, anime or a different genre of comic, that goes here!)

Medieval- royalty, royal! R and rebel! Hobie, (anything that makes you sing the game of thrones opening lol)

Villain au- black cat! Hobie, deadpool! Hobie, mystique! Hobie, prowler! Hobie x villain! r (evil! Hobie? Evil! Hobie! Or any au pertaining to villainy!)

Movie mashup- scream killer! Hobie and caller! R, freaky friday/body swap, rom-com, will they/won't they?, swan lake au, mad hatter! Hobie, phantom of the opera au, the greatest showman au, avatar au, (general movie au or theatre au)

Runway ready- patches, runway, hair, piercings, braids, dress up/ fashion show, draw in your style. (Fashun!)

[wander-wren]

sometimes i wonder about what fandom is going to look like in 5 or 10 years. i think we might have already started to see a shift.

because, look, most of the oldest, biggest fandoms are from tv shows and movies, in particular ones that go on for years and scores of episodes. star trek, star wars, stargate (is everything star?), doctor who, supernatural…even sherlock really got its biggest popularity boosts in the modern day from tv adaptations. marvel and dc were comics first, too, but movies made them more accessible; their “cinematic universe” tags are the biggest on ao3 by far.

but what tv shows are we getting now? short, 8-episode things that get canceled two or three seasons in, that are usually less-than-faithful adaptations of other media anyway.

what movies are we getting? well, marvel turns more to slop every day, and everything else is remakes and sequels no one asked for. the general populace will still go see them and find some good movies that they like, but there’s not much really for fandom to grasp onto.

the best shows for fandom that we’ve had recently, that i can think of, are stranger things, game of thrones, and maybe our flag means death. stranger things is dying off, especially since they’re looking at a 3-4 YEAR gap between s4 and s5. game of thrones’s popularity plummeted after its final season, we all know that. our flag means death is still chugging fairly okay, but after that second season a lot of the fandom dropped it, and with it now being cancelled, i don’t see it sticking around.

yes, we can chalk part of this up to a new generation to of fans having this growing idea that fandom is super temporary, to be abandoned as soon as its not on trend. but media used to be on trend for a whole lot longer than it is now. seasons were longer, we had filler episodes, things were lower quality sometimes but at least they came out on a consistent schedule. i don’t mind if supernatural isn’t an artistic masterpiece, but if i was a stranger things fan waiting until 2026 for the final season, i would be annoyed if it wasn’t damn near perfect. that’s assuming i watched it at all—we’re all so used to not getting endings and moving on, so why would i bother?

i think there are two types of shows doing sort of okay about this. one is procedurals—9-1-1 is a popular one i’ve run into, and it started in 2018, around the beginning of the decline, but it’s managed 7 seasons in those six years, most of them with 18 episodes. the other is, honestly, anime—though we can and SHOULD talk about the terrible working conditions that make the fast turnarounds there possible. look at how big some anime fandoms are.

judging by the relative fandom popularity of other procedural dramas (grey’s anatomy, law & order, criminal minds), i think that’s going to remain sort of niche. fandom likes fantasy and scifi best, and they just don’t tend to have as strong of an overarching arc to dig into. at least, that’s why i wouldn’t watch them. i think there’s also a good chance these will start to die out in the coming years as well.

anime could also die out a little bit. better working conditions would necessitate less/slower content, and it’s true that most of the popular anime fandoms have been around for years, even decades.

so, what, no new, lasting tv show or movie fandoms anymore?

what will the biggest fandoms be in 5-10 years?

podcast fandoms have a shot. the magnus archives is still going strong, and i’ve been seeing a lot about dungeons and daddies. i think we’re kind of almost past the golden age for podcasts, but i am an outsider, so maybe that will change.

book fandoms seem like a kind of obvious choice, but they just don’t get as big without, you guessed it, a movie or show adaptation. and the downsizing has hit them, too—can you think of anything from the last 5 or 10 years that rivals harry potter, percy jackson, warriors, lord of the rings, hunger games, acotar…even game of thrones (asoiaf) again? i can’t. the collapse of the publishing industry is another post entirely.

2020 is really what cemented these changes, though they were starting in the late 2010s, at least. with actual industries shutting down, there was room for indie creators making things alone in their houses to pop up, and people had more time on their hands to try new things out and get into them.

the two things that have really been on the rise since 2020 is rpf and video game fic—often both combined. we’ve got genshin impact, call of duty, minecraft of course being huge, rpf of various youtubers, and k-pop rpf. now, i think rpf is contentious enough that it won’t really become the main fandom, but video game fic…might be it.

even video blogging rpf can often be a blurred enough line that people are more comfortable with it. and the thing is…youtube creators are actually more reliable than mainstream television these days. they need to be, to maintain their platforms. they need to not cancel series and to live up to their own hype as best they can and to not abandon the channel for 3 or 4 years at a time. and again, you can talk about burnout and unrealistic expectations and all of those things, but it’s still true.

maybe i’m completely wrong. maybe in 10 years the film and publishing industries will all sort themselves out and we’ll go back to the status quo. but i think this position fandom is finding itself in is interesting, and i wouldn’t necessarily be surprised if what’s most popular (both in the specific source material sense and the medium/genre sense) is different some time down the road.

[turndecassette2]

I do remember those magic knight people! Every once in a while I go back on your blog to try to track down those drawings because I like them and the concept in the description so much. I would love to hear more about them. Do you have a story planned out?

yeah, vaguely. so for the cosmology; there's this dystopian city I desperately need to draw a map of built above the fossilised remains of an ancient hell. the city mines the hell for 'hell-flesh', a semi-sentient magical substance that's kind of the physical container of the souls of the damned. I suppose this is like fantasy rare earths for fantasy compute or w/e. this has been going on for a while and the city is, kiruna-style, gradually falling down the pit. also as more of the hell is laid bare, semi-autonomous demonic creatures are let loose, maybe as a kind of immune response against human incursion.

(imagining this sort of thing + branching passages. but in the middle of an italian intra-feuding city-state w a population ca modern day singapore)

a kind of grid of bridges and fortresses has been built above the pit to protect the fancier, upper parts of the city from the decaying/descending bits below. the lower city is mostly miners etc & due to the fucked up mutagenic influence of living near a hell & touching hell stuff all day the people in the upper city treat them with suspicion. there's a 'join the US navy-army-whatever to get health insurance & education & basic human dignity' or like french foreign legion situation where by joining the elite magic army manning the little fortresses, ppl from the lower city can gain some access to the upper. in the reverse I guess for the upper city ppl it functions a bit like 'the wall' in asoiaf where criminals, noble bastards etc go to maybe redeem themselves or die horribly.

the fire magic used by the guards to fight demons etc is derived from the burning corpse of a god that is said to have been there since before the founding of the city (presumably the entity responsible for the hell situation in the first place). by swearing fealty to this dead(-ish) god one gets the ability to summon his divine flame but you forfeit your chance at an afterlife, or maybe you go to hell (no-one is quite sure). everyone kind of assumes once the body is fully burned the god will return/reincarnate (and either save or destroy the city, depending on who you ask).

the politics part; at its founding the city was part of some empire that has since collapsed (pretty recently). the city is dependent on trade to stay viable/fed and to appease the new warring states/mini-empires that have sprung up around it. the current ruler is a reclusive young queen & she has her favourite lord/advisor, an ageing academic who is sort of trying to liberalise the place or make it superficially less fashy. other lords dislike this & are working to either find her a proper king or hasten the return of some deity or other that will return the place to its former glory.

I guess the story? has this noble child bastard protagonist from a shady family* of word-mages who is sent to the 'centre' fortress & works her way up to become the apprentice of some hero-knight demon slayer guy with a possibly shady past (I think rn the name I have for the guy is Chaimé & idk if this is a good name? like the spanish jaime but w more e, & the tiny bastard is Myia I think). I imagine her being the sasuke to a happier, more popular girl who saves her from a demon (embarrassing) then is outed as a half-demon herself (she's the redhead in the drawings) & Myia warms up to her as she (demon girl) becomes increasingly isolated from the outside city (being supposedly dangerous or too powerful? I don't think Myia has much natural magic or w/e in her aside from being a nerd & very persistent).

sorry there's a lot here that would be SPOILERS if I ever actually made this into something coherent enough to be an actual comic ha ha. the knight/mentor guy gets dragged into a kind of fantasy 'business plot' & I guess part of that would be like, seeing to what extent he goes along with it & if he's actually a good person ha ha. + there's a bunch of other characters w stuff going on that I haven't figured out the looks of yet but. they're important in my head. the big bear-ish bf guy who gets sent on an expedition down the pit etc

* I have a distinct image of these people living hidden away in some gormenghast-style estate. they've habsburged themselves into being mostly deaf but the only ones around who can fully read/write the divine language that lets them do word-based magic & the other houses kind of have to put up w their weirdness. also scheming nobles in dune using sign language is 1 of my favourite things in the new film adaption & I like the idea of outsiders being forced to learn to sign (or else being cut-off from higher level magic) as some sort of power move? I don't think they involve themselves that much in politics since that's below them but are def part of the 'bring the gods back' thing, for better or worse. anyway after 'avas demon' (GUILTY PLEASURE I know it has such pretty colours but comes from such an unhinged part of the internet, will never stop apologising for this) started posting again I realised it had a character w the same look & vibe so will try and re-design protag girl to look more like this cute person I saw in a fashion post on IG

... let's see how this goes. came up w all this BS after some viz lady at comicon asked me if I wanted to make them a manga but it's grown from being too little to being too unwieldy to pitch. will see after I finish up my current projects. how much blood, swearing & genocide can a story have before it stops being YA. I think chainsaw man is sort of YA but dorohedoro isn't

[lightdancer1]

Speaking of that bigger discussion:

One of the elements that makes Buffy simultaneously superb when it's good and mediocre to awful when it isn't is that each of the main characters goes through very different arcs. Spike is the Anne Rice vampire, Angel is a heroic version of Konrad Curze, Buffy has the classical hero's journey, Giles is the Obi-Wan who never quite dies, Dawn is the Lovecraftian monster who's equal parts adorable and annoying (so the ultimate little sister), Xander has the reliable and unfortunately human aspects of being the normal guy who normal guys. Anya is the unrepentant murderous sadist who's charismatic and effective with her powers and a dork among dorks without them.

Willow, OTOH, has the arc that is at the most radically divergent with everyone else. Everyone else to a point fits in neatly with the genre conventions here, Willow fits straight into the DC or Marvel kind of setting of higher-powered superpowered being who had to be downplayed in Season 7 for the same reasons the DCAU struggled to write Superman. Everyone else leads a horror-comedy where the two poles of their lives grind against each other like icebergs in the Arctic or Antarctic Sea.

Willow lives an arc rooted in a much more direct superhero element, but where other people might expect Superman or Batman (and Angel is closer to Batman than anyone here, hence the Konrad Curze joke), she is unknown to herself living Jean Grey going Dark Phoenix and being both easily forgiven and avoiding the Dark Phoenix problem thanks to the comics of being given a pass by her actions being completely separated from her.

Each of the main characters in Buffy has at least three major genres overlapping and shaping their lives. Giles, Faith, Buffy, the Potentials turned Slayers, and the monsters they fight, as well as Tara and Amy Madison are all living the life of urban fantasy, deeply rooted in that old order as direct embodiments of its ideals (The Master and Kakistos for the villains, Kendra and Quentin Travers for the heroes), or rebelling against it (Buffy and Tara), or going down the hero to villain path, either with a way back or not (Faith and Amy Madison).

Xander is living the most direct Kolchak the Night Stalker kind of urban fantasy life. Perfectly normal dude in a world of demonic monsters out there trying to erase all human life and even demonic life as well, who goes out there to fight the good fight.

And then there's Willow, whose life is straight out of the X-Men arcs.....including the one where the hero went nuts and tried to kill a bunch of people and had to be brought down by her own side. As characters in a work don't know the genre they're in, this is IMO the ultimate reason some form of Dark Willow was always inevitable. Willow being who she is and what she is, with her brilliance and all, was pretty much assured to go straight into magic as soon as she knew it existed. With her brilliance she would grasp power without understanding precision or all the nuances of using it.

Insofar as the characters know they're living any kind of genre experience, it's urban fantasy. All the trappings of modern life with vampires and dragons in the shadowy alleys of a modern urban region. So when one of them is living an iconic superhero arc and perhaps under the impression it's one of the more classical goofy Silver Age ones, failure to understand that or how swiftly things go wrong is perhaps the biggest single reason why Willow's path to the dark side, even temporarily, is likely to happen.

Almost nobody human would take access to the kind of power she discovers she has well. As she's the most powerful sorceress on Earth, at minimum, her capacity for fuckups are correspondingly bigger. And as long as her friends just thought of how cute she was it was never going to occur to them that her small fuckups which are humongous deals by the standards of other sorcerers might one day be less handwaved and funny and more 'bring the brown pants' tier terrifying.

Admittedly this is why 2020s me likes Willow even more than 2000s me did, woman gains enormous power but is entirely human about wielding it is my jam, writing-wise, and it makes writing Willow a lot more fun as she's one of the few canon characters that comes closest to the kind of vibe I like to work with.

[mandatory-blog-stop-asking]

Weird thing, but I miss Alfred.

It's shaping up to be one of the longest "deaths" of a famous, legacy secondary character, at least in modern DC history. And in that way, it served the narrative pretty well, subverting the usual problems with death in comics. Sure, it was all over an ego trip some bad former Editor in Chief decided to have on a whim; King didn't really plan to kill off Alfred so nonchalantly and it wasn't meant to stick. People know that, it's well documented and they even had foreshadowing that he was Clayface being a part of the plan. So the fact that it sticks should be lauded, right? This is, after all, how death works.

And, sure, it made some characters grow. Bruce, specifically, moving to a brownstone and taking care of his son all by himself is a genuinely cool idea and I'm enjoying seeing him bond with Damian in ways he never bonded with the others. Dick as a billionaire philanthropist dedicating his newfound fortune to Alfred, his late sponsor, is a genuine stroke of genius. Actual change and progress in comic books, holy shit. A feast Spider-Man fans don't even remember how it tastes!

Yet it sometimes feels like you're reading a Batman book in an empty house, because Alfred is gone, and it was over nothing. An unplanned death that took him suddenly with no real gravitas or preparation. Not exactly the same -- okay, not the same by a wide margin, -- but it kinda reminds me of how Buffy fans reacted to The Body.

The character was here, and now they're not, and it genuinely feels empty and real in a way you're not really expecting popcorn media to feel. There's no power fantasy or melodrama or anything. Someone broke his neck and threw his body on the floor, and that's the end of Alfred Pennyworth.

And like, yeah, man, people obviously write stories about other versions that are alive and flashbacks. Nobody is literally gone from comics, things don't move forward *exclusively*, Alfred is a brand unto himself and will never be truly gone. It's the same reason why aging up Jon Kent isn't that big a deal; Super Sons will release as long as someone gets the approval, it's just going to be a flashback. It's fine. But to see the world having to move forward without him has been quite something, you know? People have had big personal moments that he's not there for.

Dick and Barbara got back together, Jason moved to the Hill, Tim got a boyfriend -- it's the kind of stuff these kids could rely on Alfred to talk about, or to help out with, or to simply Be There as a zealous figure for them, and he's just. Not. And the story moves on all the same, yet now it feels like there's a panel missing, somewhere.

Albeit they had like two or three individual times when the actual fucking ghost of Alfred Pennyworth came to say goodbye and peace out to Bruce, I still think it's a pretty solid guess that he'll come back before the end of the decade. The nature of comics means sometimes you need a back from the dead story to keep things fresh, and those can be done extremely well -- Resurrection of Magneto might be the best thing released in the Krakoa era, as far as fully realized minis go. But...

Shit, Alfred missed Damian going to school, you know? That's really sad. I miss Alfred. In a way I'll never miss Uncle Ben or the Wayne couple, I really miss opening a monthly and reading the latest wit out of Alfred's mouth at his silly son and his funny crusade. The nature of comic books being infinite until they're cancelled means this sort of relationship just doesn't get cut like this very often, and I can't recall the last time I *cared* when they tried cutting it.

It will be an awkward day when he comes back and it's back to normal business again, honestly. There's now an understanding of what Batman is without Alfred that I feel they don't have a great way of addressing. Don't really envy the writer who gets the job.

[saltineofswing]

Hello! I'm the person that made the rant post about my dislike on the lack of natural dichotomy of the Pyramids and Traveler since the introduction of the Veil that turned into a whole thing. You mentioned a lack of pulp in your reblog and it's stuck with me since then. I wasn't familiar with the term and did some research on it, but I still don't think I get what it is. I tried looking it up but a lot of articles and videos I could find explain the history of pulp and its influences in modern day sci-fi but not necessarily what it is, especially in a way that would give me context to better understand your reblog. If it's not too much trouble, can you explain a little more what the "pulp" is that destiny is lacking?

I’d be happy to try and give you a little more insight into what I feel are important tenets of pulp as a genre/concept! I decided this might be a good opportunity to talk a little about it generally because I am really feeling its absence generally in the past couple years, so I included some historical backing which you’re probably already familiar with – hope that’s OK.

I did a little digging personally, for some good places to familiarize oneself with the basics of pulp as a concept and/or genre. It was nice to re-affirm some info that I’ve felt secure in holding as true without a ton of evidentiary support, and I also learned some cool new stuff as well! I think a good place to start would be to link to the TV Tropes page about pulp magazines, which does a pretty good job of explaining the origins and foundational aspects of the concept in a way that is easy to digest. It also has a lot of examples available to peruse. I also found this cool article on the golden age of pulps, which is an interesting read.

This got long, so below the cut!

To reiterate, the original ‘pulp’ terminology and vibe comes from early/mid-20th century magazines, which were cheap and easy ways to access genre fiction and action/adventure stories before comics, paperback novels, and TV/movies were really on the scene. Pulp magazines spanned a very wide array of genres, but because of a lack of appreciation for the medium, a majority of pulp magazines and aspects of what I would consider to be pulp as a genre have been allowed to fall into obscurity. There are places where I feel it is particularly obvious, especially the superhero genre (don’t get me started we’ll be here all week) but also in fantasy and science fiction – a term which was, in fact, coined by Hugo Gernsback, an editor for pulp magazine Amazing Stories.

They were cheap to make, cheap to buy, and easy to serialize; they could be really schlocky, crass, and unpolished. They could also be fucking incredible! The Shadow is a good example of an early pulp property with screaming highs and frankly peat-bog lows. Lovecraft published a lot of what is considered to be his ‘best work’ in Weird Tales! Conan the Barbarian, too! They kind of came out of the gate with a somewhat negative connotation associated with ‘low-brow’ forms of literature like dime novels, but where other magazines of the time tended to incorporate non-fiction articles and photography, pulp mags tended to be fiction stories only – short stories, or longer stories split into serialized chapters. Early on, not many of them had art, though with the advent of comic books that changed (you could argue that books like Creepy and Eerie are direct offspring of early pulp mags). Similar to what Weekly Shonen Jump does with manga.

If you think of a genre as a toolbox, pulp is a box full of tools that function fine alone, but excel at assisting the function of other toolboxes. I would almost liken ‘pulp’ to the concept of ‘camp’, which are also two concepts that can and do overlap with a high degree of synergy. Pulp has its own foundational attributes that are distinct from camp – for example, camp is gay relies a lot more on its self-awareness, at being able to wink at the viewer or participant, and telling you ‘yeah, we know it, but isn’t it fun?’ Pulp, on the other hand, is the (no pun intended) straight man counterpart to this aesthetic sensibility; pulp is at its best when it is being completely earnest. The quippy lines and dramatic proclamations are meant to be taken on their face. Nowadays it’s the kind of stuff that memes are made of – ‘That Wizard Came From The Moon’, ‘I don’t have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain’, ‘Whether we wanted it or not, we’ve stepped into a war with the Cabal on Mars’. Saying shit that has no explanation with your whole chest. Trying to be cool on purpose, the ultimate cringe move.

Nowadays I think that this kind of thing has mostly died out of modern media, but the counter-motion is still prevalent in mainstream superhero movies. A good example is the ‘Would you have preferred ~YeLlOw SpAnDeX~’ line from the OG X-Men movie. Hey dickhead! The yellow spandex is cool if you, the guy making the movie, believes its cool! Crucially, while a lot of modern superhero stuff is quippy and irreverent, it often uses these tropes in a self-aware or cynical manner – afraid of being earnest, committing the aforementioned cardinal sin of trying to look cool on purpose.

(God damn it, I’m talking about superheroes again. Sorry. Before I get back on task this is why I loved the recent Moon Knight run so much; Jed MacKay is NOT afraid to have the characters say some absolutely batshit thing but it comes off as so, so cool. And yes, a little cheesy.)

And then, where modern sci-fi typically has an ultra-detailed explanation on-hand, I think a lot of early pulp stuff just… didn’t. Ask a sci-fi property for an explanation on, oh I don’t know, ‘where did these super-humanoid sapient machine warriors come from’ and it will likely have a molecule-deep explanation of how those unnamed machine people were created. Ask a fantasy property for an explanation on the same and it might say, ‘no’. It’s not that a pulp-leaning property won’t give you the answer to that question… it just might not have it. The ‘why is it/how is it’ is not as important as the ‘what is it’ and ‘how is it relevant’; a writer had a limited amount of page real estate, as multiple features were typically crammed into a single magazine. Even if a feature was serialized, much like television episodes (before the binge trend), one had to keep information digestible, and not too reliant on a prior or later edition that a reader might never see.

Explanations tended to be in service of an emotional beat, or to a theme, versus as a grounding agent to immerse a reader in the world. For the record I don’t necessarily think of either method as being better or worse, and heavy worldbuilding can still utilize pulp as a veneer or filter to engage audience expectations in different ways. Pulp stuff relies a lot on suspension of disbelief without utilizing a rigid lore-based framework to – though, you know, your story/setting still has to have its own internal logical consistency.

(I feel that it is important to note, as a partial consequence of the time period in which these magazines were being made, and when pulp fiction was most heavily consumed, xenophobia and racism are also heavily present in pulp works. I think everybody knows at this point about how much Lovecraft sucked but it’s a valuable example of how a lot of ‘fear of the unknown’ in that time was transliterated into ‘fear of the different’, in general but especially relating to genre fiction. If you decide to explore material in this genre, in this time period, be forewarned! Some of it was pretty glaring!)

So, let me tie some of this stuff to my previous statements about Destiny. I think that Destiny is an excellent example of how pulp tropes, aesthetic, and genre conventions can be used to enhance and streamline a setting… and how stripping too much pulp away can have a detrimental impact on the depth of a narrative.

The original narrative and worldbuilding of Destiny drew very heavily on pulp aesthetics to create a foundation, both in its appearance and its lore. The ‘Golden Age of Science Fiction’ was a period of time in the mid-20th century that sort of transitioned sci-fi out of pulp magazines and into its own thing, but the foundational structure of science fiction at this time was still heavily pulp-influenced. I think this is very well-represented by the portrayal of Venus as a ‘garden’ (jungle) world, very lush and with sulfurous and sometimes acidic rains. Before advancements in astronomical technology went and fucked everything up for us writers, Venus’s opaque cloud-covered atmosphere was impenetrable enough that there could be anything under there – and a popular portrayal of Venus was a muggy, humid, rain-heavy world that sometimes also included lush jungles. In Bradbury’s short story The Long Rain (WHICH ran in Planet Stories, a pulp mag, by the way!) this portrayal is a central obstacle to the narrative; it’s also used in Heinlein’s novel Space Cadet.

The color scheme that Destiny uses for Venus also matches a common color scheme for Venus in this era – see this cover for Fantastic Adventures. Visually, I think that this comparison between the postcard that went out with the D1 limited/collector’s edition and this Planet Stories cover for The Golden Amazons of Venus demonstrates the influence, at least regarding terrain and biome.

In fact, I think that you can see from this Eververse postcard – which could have been peeled off of any era-appropriate paperback novel – that the influence goes bone-deep. Destiny even refers to humanity’s halcyon age as ‘The Golden Age’.

(Below: Is this image from Destiny dev, or a science fiction paperback from the 60s? Who knows! I know. It’s Destiny.)

In the modern era of Destiny storytelling, though the visual elements of the universe remain largely rigid relative to this early framework, the pulp underpinning of the narrative has been largely left behind. The original game’s story, and the stories of subsequent DLCs, felt very pulp-inspired – this ranged from ‘sort of effective’, like in House of Wolves, to ‘game-savingly effective’, like in The Taken King. Pulp lends itself to straightforward conceptual executions, and brisk narratives, because of its roots as short-form literature. The narrative of D1 was simple and to the point; Light good, Dark bad, humanity is in the shit, think you can kill a god? The surrounding world scaffold was rich but not deep. As I like to say, sometimes a river can be wide but shallow. This is not a commentary on its quality – something can be good but not complex, and IMO, sophistication is not necessarily synonymous with complexity. Destiny managed to pull off a trick that many high-quality pulp stories employ: it made the river look deeper than it was. This is the whole reason that Lovecraft’s oeuvre has the staying power it has: other writers got to play in the space because it felt very deep, even though the stories themselves were fairly straightforward.

I also don’t mean to say or accidentally imply that ‘morally grey storytelling cannot exist within pulp stories’, because that would probably get me torn apart; that’s just not the kind of straightforward foundation that the original Destiny was built on. ‘It is what you see, but what you see could be anything’, you know? The problem that began to muddy the waters in the Destiny narrative is that they started to say, ‘You know, actually, it ISN’T what you see’.

Tentpole narrative additions to the Destiny 2 game employ varying levels of pulp. As I said in the other post, the Hive have a potent pulp influence built into their foundational coding, and so subsequent portrayals of the Hive as a main antagonist have higher degrees of pulp genre naturally present in the narrative – it’s hard to separate the two of them. Shadowkeep and The Dark Below draw strongly on the ‘sword and sorcery’ convention, a subgenre of fantasy that is a heavy (perhaps 1:1) blend of fantasy and pulp; think Conan, or Elric of Melniboné (who, hey! Showed up in a novella feature, in an issue of Science Fantasy magazine, named… THE DREAMING CITY). The Witch Queen leaned away from pure sword and sorcery and more towards noir/detective pulp – though, I think, TWQ is a good example of the pulp slippage in its narrative, resulting in some more bland moments and things that feel ham-fisted in a bad way. Part of it, I think, is the need to make these expansions ‘long’ and complicated without making the player feel like they’re slogging; in a more pulp-forward TWQ narrative, the reveal that Savathûn is actually NOT evil-aligned and is a potential ally would come much earlier in the story, and the central mystery would be MORE about ‘what the fuck is she trying to do/prevent’, leading to the Witness reveal as the centerpiece of the finale and the ‘solution’ to the central mystery.

The decision to start retroactively appending more complex connections between disparate pieces of content naturally leads to a reduction of pulp prominence, in my opinion. If you imagine Destiny as a vessel that is mainly full of three component liquids – Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Pulp – you can say that adding more of one genre pushes out another to make room. You can always pour more of one genre in to re-balance, but in response to increasing levels of sci-fi the narrative seems reticent to reintroduce pulp back into the mix, instead favoring fantasy. But another problem is that once you take it out, Pulp is really hard to put back; once you solidify and unionize world-lore, every subsequent retcon risks diluting and destabilizing that world-lore until a) nobody cares about it anymore and b) it stops being mutable at all, and becomes sludge.

The lore behind the existence of the Exo was originally very pulp, with no real explanations given for exactly what they were and where they came from, and how they attained sapience. Early hints that Cayde and a few other Exo having once been human didn’t preclude other Exo from having other origins – for example, implications that Exo war-frames eventually achieved sapience as a result of the ‘Deep Stone Crypt’, and that they were originally simple AI-equipped warriors designed and overseen by Rasputin to minimize human casualties. This early mystique around the origins of the Exo is classically pulp: we don’t need to know how the hyper-advanced robots were made, we just need to know what they are, why they are relevant to the story. It allows You, The Player, to engage with it at whatever level you want. In a game where You, The Player, are also being asked to step into the role of You, The Protagonist, this is beneficial to engagement for people (like me!) who like to think too much about the backstory of the your-name-here protagonist on-screen. It is also beneficial to not distracting the player with conflicting information, or accidentally contradicting previously-established lore.

Enter Big-Head Bray. The Beyond Light-era explanation of why Exo were created and how they were made is a retroactive nuclear strike on the Exo lore; it strips away a lot of flexibility and thematic richness from the concept of the Exo, shoehorns them into a single narrow use case, and directly conflicts with early-game Exo lore implying their connections to Rasputin (which they then had to go back and hastily shoehorn back in later) or existence as war machines for the Collapse. If D1 lore is wide but shallow, the D2 lore is narrow but deep. Just because something has a lot of ‘depth’, I.E. many layers to traverse before you reach foundational bedrock, it doesn’t make it good.

Same thing with the Fallen. Season of Plunder felt to me like an attempt to reintroduce pulp genre back into the setting, but it fell flat because of two reasons: it didn’t really want to be pulp, and it was more concerned with its tethers to the science-fantasy exterior world than it was with creating its own cohesive narrative. Why was Mithrax doing evil pirate shit when he was young? Because he comes from a race of fucking evil space pirates! It Does Not Need To Be More Complex Than That! But the exculpation of pulp from the D2 narrative means that if Mithrax doesn’t have a good enough reason, WRT the larger narrative, it would be a glaringly obvious plot hole. By Plunder, Destiny had already undertaken the task of filling out the Eliksni lore with sympathetic science-fantasy excuses for why they were trying to exterminate humankind – the more earnest, pulp-forward explanation would just be that desperate, hurt, suffering people will do desperate things, hurt people, and may perpetuate the cycle of suffering.

Oy. There’s a lot you COULD get into. How the Destiny macro-narrative seems to be decaying the rigidity of good and evil in its original lore vs. how the micro-narrative is obsessed with trying to recapture that good/evil dichotomy in order to give players a reason to like the main characters. How the determination to connect and explain everything has resulted in a general flattening of the background lore, and the subsequent trivialization of many things the game included in earlier iterations of the narrative/lore. How the narrative has basically nothing to do with the Vex because they wrote themselves into a corner by trying to explain them too much while simultaneously not altering the foundational lore of the race, meaning there were too many things they can no longer do without retconning again.

Overall, I guess I will just end by saying that many of the things that Destiny is CURRENTLY doing, feels like the game is straining to rip the part of it out which proudly asks its audience not to think too hard about sweeping, dramatic statements that built a lot of the things people love about the game’s setting and narrative… and in doing so, is just ripping itself to pieces.

[dragonchildcomic]

Final day of my final show of 2024 at Bakersfield Comic-Con. Join in the fun at the Kern County Fairgrounds and find us in the artist building. I’m manning a two table setup today, so the art has more room to breathe. This is your last chance to pickup Dragon Child comics, coloring pages, and handmade plush toys in person in 2024, so get here before 5pm!

[yukidragon]

I always wonder about the time-line in mafia au with Bo and Jack

I know in aphrodesia they have cellphones but what about the mafia au?

What year do you think it is?

I think the year itself is meant to be ambiguous for Aprhodesia, as well as the other series by SnaccPop Studios. That's likely why we don't get exact ages for the male leads in their bios, and only Jack is given a birth year due to the year of his death playing an important part of the story.

I'll admit I don't know a lot about the lore of Aphrodesia yet, but I do know it definitely takes place in an alternate version of Earth. There's a lot of fantastical and sci-fi elements, including robots and angels becoming crime bosses in the city of St. Valen's. I don't think it's meant to really reflect our Earth's timeline, but instead be its own thing based off aesthetics, kind of like fantasy worlds tend to be based off of medieval aesthetics.

In that spirit, I don't bother trying to give the Mafia AU an actual year. This is an alternate Earth, with alternate events that mean the timeline as we know it on our world no longer really applies.

I mean, the clothing that Bo and Jack wear in the original piece of art Sauce made that started this AU is pretty timeless, in my opinion.

Isn't it so nifty? Full credit to Sauce as always for their stunning art and being cool with me using them in my rambles. In the spirit of supporting them and the rest of the team who makes such awesome visuals and ideas for us to play with, why not consider joining the SnaccPop Studios patreon? There's a whole bunch of artwork there that you can only see by joining.

Remember, don't share anything privately posted on the patreon. Doing that only hurts the team. Instead, just encourage others to sign up as well, or just spread word about these fun games and audio dramas they're making.

Anyway, this picture, as I recall, was inspired by this comic drawn by Rain over on twitter. As you can see, it's a different sort of crossover, but it has the same vibe of the Mafia AU.

Sauce then did something of a genre swap with their characters. Here we have Jack and Bo as a crime boss and wise guy respectively in an Aphrodesia-esque setting. This picture's sister image was Jambee wearing a kids-show appropriate thief costume, complete with a black and white striped shirt and domino mask, as if he was an antagonist character to the SunnyTime Crew.

While this AU is a crossover between Something's Wrong with Sunny Day Jack, DachaBo, and Aphrodesia, I don't worry too much about sticking close to whatever timeline any of the three actually have, or their original continuities. This crossover is about being inspired by some stylish art and letting whatever urge feels fun to me when it comes to pulpy mafia crime drama indulgence, with a nice splash of sci-fi and fantasy elements thrown on top.

As such, the timeline itself isn't all that set in stone yet. Even the original ramble's timeline of events when it comes to Alice's influence on the world isn't completely solid, as expanding the King family's lore changed some things in this follow up post. This universe, as well as its timeline, is very much a work in progress.

Also it's an excuse to have Jack be touch starved and need to have very intimate (and especially spicy) contact with his sunshine as often as possible.

In essence, the year is modern day, only modern day in this world isn't the same as our world. We have cell phones, computers, and the internet, but also some classy retro-style aesthetics for clubs and the like. Or at least that's how it is in my version of this AU. Others might take it a different way.

On that note, why don't I give a shout out to some of my fellow artists who have also played with this particular crossover?

Glassy Shards over on twitter has a really cool take on this AU, giving Bo this creepy "glitch" ability that allows him to no clip through realities. Her take on Bo is pretty creepy and intense, as you can see in this delightful art here and here.

Fun fact: it was actually Glassy's audio dramas that made me inclined to have Bo be more promiscuous, violent, and rebellious in my version of the Mafia AU. The audio dramas are really well done, which makes sense considering she was Bo's original VA. I suggest giving them a listen here, here, and here if you want to hear Bo be a very scary alpha on the hunt.

Lilith Rose on twitter made a fun comic, which really pops in her colorful and distinct art style. It's just another day in the city of St. Valens with some goons getting pummeled, and Bo falling for his puppy. Check it out here, here, here, here, here, and here. Oh, and a cute piece of art that isn't part of the comic, but Bo in suspenders and Lilith in a dancer outfit are just so cute.

CheriiHoney on twitter and here on tumblr also has an adorable comic for this crossover. Jack is lovestruck, and Bo is just dumbstruck. There's also this very delightfully spicy follow up picture of Jack being so yandere for his sunshine and Bo is still annoyed by his boss, hahaha.

I'm sure there's plenty more takes on this crossover out there. If you have any favorites I missed, feel free to tell me in a reblog. Also, consider checking out these awesome artists and leaving a kind word or two. It was Cherii's birthday yesterday, so you could also consider giving her a belated happy birthday as well.

One thing that always tickles me about this AU is how much we've inspired one another when adding to it. It's almost like a community project. Rain inspired Sauce who inspired so many others. We're paying it forward artistically, which is why I wanted to shout out so many of my fellow artists in this post who have given me so much inspiration. You're all awesome. Keep on creating. 💖

@channydraws @earthgirlaesthetic @sai-of-the-7-stars @cheriihoney @illary-kore @okamiliqueur @kurokrisps

[moltengoldveins]

hi molten!

could you tell me something you think is cool?

Uuuuuuuuhhhhhhh……… the hollow ache of lost magic and wonder that plagues every single classic and epic fantasy story ever written, starting with Jirt himself and continuing through to the modern day in stories like Arcane, Harry Potter, and the Pirates of the Caribbean.

Down to their bones, all of these are stories about loss. ‘We have lost the magic,’ LaGuin says, quietly, a whisper behind every Earthsea book. ‘Once, in the old days, there was something great and beautiful, shining and perfect, but we have lost it now. Only the sand remains, spread out around Ozymandias’s feet, and the few remaining fragments of dragon’s speech writ large on his pedestal. The elves are fading into the west. The time of Narnia is at an end. Magic is a lost thing. We are without wonder, now.” 

It aches, doesn’t it? It aches like an open wound. “Wizard society was once great and beautiful,” says Harry Potter, “But now the Muggles and their satellites see everything, and our world is so small.” “The gods were powerful, once.” says Percy Jackson. “The sea was endless, and the world was flat, and adventure was something to be grasped in the palm of your hand,” says the Pirates of the Caribbean, “but now the East India Company has come with books and cheques and quotas, and the magic has been driven off the edge of the maps.” 

At first, I thought maybe it was the War. It’s hard to find wonder and magic in the world, hard to believe that the modern day is in any way as glorious as the ancient times, when you are crouched in a trench with a thousand other starving boys, or cleaning an abandoned concentration camp. Perhaps it was the age of information as a whole, the sudden clean edges on every map as ‘Here there be Monsters’ was crossed out and replaced with ‘Here there be Haiti, and then on a little bit to Nicaragua.” Perhaps the Internet killed our wonder so stone cold dead we cannot bring it back, not when any new exciting discovery can go from jungle, to satellite, to Instagram Reel in the same amount of time it takes me to cook dinner. 

But then I started really looking, really thinking about these stories. I see the Bible in everything, I see Christ in every fairy tale, obviously, but what about Revelation?

Revelation is a controversial book. I never read it as being post-millennial, I.e. supporting the belief that things will get worse and worse over time as Christians become more and more persecuted until one day Christ returns in glory. That never made sense to me. When someone grows up, the challenges they face grow larger. God allows struggle in accordance with how much you can handle, or how much you could handle if you put your trust in Him. It made perfect sense to me, at least, that Revelation is the story of a Church grown stronger and brighter and kinder, and the Church’s enemies grew alongside it, fighting ever more viciously against the work of the Lord.

But the mentality of a post-mil is still incredibly common. the idea that the world is corrupt, and our efforts cannot truly ever make headway against that corruption. That nothing will ever bring back the glory of the Good Old Days, not even Christ, that the only way to fix things is to wipe the slate and start over. And that mentality frightens me. I don’t know what I believe about our ability to conquer sin and death in this world but I DO know we are obligated to try, and the mentality of “well, we can try out best to make the modern age tolerable, but it will never compare to the wonder and magic of Ye Olde Times.” Is…. Really gross.

So, I started writing. I guess I’ve been wrestling with this my entire life, because looking back, it’s everywhere in every story I’ve ever written. But recently, an irl friend and I have started making a comic with the plan to release it online, and I’ve been the one writing it. And this is the biggest thing I’ve been working towards, this idea of the New Jerusalem, not in any weird Zionist let’s-make-a-new-city-where-the-old-one-is way, but……. I dunno. I dunno how to explain it.

What would it feel like, to see the Elves return to middle earth? To see the two trees replanted, their light shining out to men and dwarves and hobbits all alike? What story would it take? What would it say about the world, about us, about how our choices matter, and how we can bring light and wonder and magic back into the world. It would take an immense amount of hope, I think, to write a reunion between the ents and the Entwives. It would take the steadfast, heartfelt belief that such reunions are possible in our world, too. It wouldnt be a Christ allegory, not in the way we tend to think about it: it would be a Revelation allegory. A second coming. That’s what I want to write about, that hope, that certain knowledge that we CAN have it back. We can wake the Ents. We can have dragons, again.

…… yeah anyways I’ve been thinking about that and I think it’s cool 👍 :|

[ijustkindalikebooks]

With one of my favourite modern celebrations coming up next week, Galentines, I wanted to recommend some books about friendship and empowerment that I have loved.

Alexa start playing Perfect Night by Le Sserafim*, it's time to recommend some books!

(*or any other empowering anthem you know of)

Girl Squads: 20 Female Friendships that changed history by Sam Maggs - a graphic novel that explores different famous friendships in history, this book is a fantastic read that delivers everything you ever wanted to know by so many women in history. Spanning the arts, activism and science and diverse, this is definitely perfect for Galentines.

Empress & Aniya by Candice Carty-Williams - a YA short read that sometimes stretches your disbelief to breaking point but charming nonetheless, this book is definitely about friendship and being there for your friends when they are going through terrible situations. If you have Audible you can listen to this book for free as part of their plus catalogue, I'd recommend you do if you want a charming cosy read for a couple of hours.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott - I mean, they are sisters I guess, but they are supportive of one another and that's what friendship is, like a good bra, supportive. The story of the March sisters and their lives, my favourite is Jo but I think anyone can relate to all of these women as they grow up, get married and live their lives. A very accessible classic with some beautiful editions, it's a must have for your bookshelf.

Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades - A poetically book about young brown women growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Brown Girls is a fantastic read as this group of friends come of age in a city that never stops and has a look into the inequalities these young women face as they find their space in their world.

The Strange Case Of The Alchemist's Daughter by Theodora Goss - The story of The Athena Club, who are all daughters of fictional villains, be that Doctor Jekyll or Van Helsing later on in this series, this book is extraordinary fantasy and a fantastic book on a group of friends brought together in strange circumstances, plus a dash of Sherlock Holmes, literally.

Giant Days by John Allison - This comic covers the years of three girls as they figure who they are at university, be that Susan, Daisy or Esther, these girls are some of my still favourite characters and all of them have their relateable moments to laugh, cry or cringe at. One of my favourite graphic novel series, these three are some of my favourite friendships in ficition.

What would you recommend? I'd love to hear what books you love!

Hope you have a wonderful Galentines!

Vee xo

[imperiuswrecked]

hello :) i have very recently gotten into namor comics and i wanted to know, what are your favorite arcs/solos hes had? i hope its not too much of a bother. thank you and i hope youre doing well. ^_^

Hello and welcome. It's always a pleasure to speak with Namor fans ❤️ Thanks for asking, I'm well and I hope you are too.

Series:

King in Black: Namor - It's wonderfully written and gives us great lore and character moments. It's written by Kurt Busiek who really knows the character. The artwork is amazing, drawn by two different artists but I have to point out how much I really enjoy the colorists' work. The way they chose to make present day Namor scenes all muted colors, like the ocean is sick and dying, meanwhile his past scenes has such vibrant color.

Sub-Mariner: The Depths - I'm a big horror fan so this was a perfect combination of horror and Namor. I wish this would someday be adapted into a short animation or live action film. Ribic's art carries the whole comic, you could understand it just by the art alone, tho the writing is great too.

Sub-Mariner (2007) - Honesty I feel this series is criminally under rated, it's one of my favorite modern takes on Namor. I do have a couple of criticisms of the plot/ending but overall this series is favorite, love the artwork, love the premise and Namor's characterization.

The Sub-Mariner (1968) - I'm a big fan of Silver Age Namor and this series has lots of great comics but some do drag on at point. Personal favorites, Namor vs The Thing and Namor meeting Betty again in #8, Dorma being possessed by the Serpent Crown in #9. Gonna stop there before I go digging to find every issue I loved, bc there's just a lot there, like I love Tigershark's introduction/stories and Namor and Diane's friendship, and the quest for Namor's father etc.

Arc's:

Tales to Astonish: The Quest for Neptune's Trident #70-76. (To be fair I do love a lot Tales to Astonish but I'm just trying to pick out arcs that I reread alot.)

Namor goes insane in space: Uncanny X-Men (1963) Annual 3 (2001), Steve Rogers: Super Soldier Annual 1, Namor: The First Mutant Annual 1

Suma-Ket & Artys-Gran Arc - Namor, the Sub-Mariner (1990) #30-40. Dark Undersea High Fantasy arc, love it.

Solo Comics:

Marvel Fanfare (1982) #16 & 43, both these are solo adventures

Marvel Snapshot: Sub-Mariner (2020) - I can never get enough of this comic, told from Betty's pov, its wonderful.

Avengers: Emperor Doom - I love every time Namor and Doom team up or interact but if I had to pick one time it's this.

What if? Sub-Mariner (2011) - Love love this story by Greg Pak of Namor growing up on land.

The Judgement of Namor - Dark Reign: The Cabal - Namor takes court and deals with his subjects. An excellent look into Namor's role as the monarch of Atlantis.

Marvel (2020) #3 - I loved the sketch arts of the comic that was unfinished, it had been around for decades but when Marvel finally printed it in full I was so happy. I still prefer the sketchy art but I thought this was a fun adventure and Namor is in a suit, lol.

Marvel Comics Presents: (1988) #33 - All time favorite Namor comic, #1 spot in my heart. (2007) #7 - Namor mourns Nita's death (2019) #1 - A heavy story by Greg Pak about WWll

Tales of the Marvels: Inner Demons - a look at Namor while he was an amnesiac

I haven't even started on character team up comics or team books and if I start on those I won't stop. lol. I'll put a link here to my 2019 comic reading guide that can help you find most major arcs. I hope you enjoy reading!

[sunsoakedhighhopes]

Amazing Fantasy #15

This is Spider-Man's origin story, which, I think, we're all pretty familiar with by this point. So, for me, this was just kind of interesting to read from the standpoint of seeing what was the same and what was different from the movies. I have seen every (modern) Spider-Man movie except for Amazing Spider-Man 2, though it's been a while since I've seen the non-MCU ones, and I'd say I remember the first Spiderman movie the best, so that's what I'll be comparing to.

As a side note, even though I kinda knew it was coming, I was a little bummed to see just how boring the layouts are for these silver-age comics. Pretty much every page is the same layout, two panels in the top row, three in the middle, and two again in the bottom row. I miss the way that the art used to sometimes kinda escape the panels in Steve's original run.

Okay, so we're introduced to Peter, who is a bit of a loner and a wallflower, and we see that he is teased and picked on by his classmates.

Not to defend bullying in any way, but I think if you looked at this panel out of context, without the speech bubbles, you would think that Peter was a teacher, rather than a student.

Then we're introduced to May and Ben Parker, who absolutely adore their nephew. And gosh, why are they so old?? Like, as an uncle, shouldn't Ben be somewhere around the age of Peter's parents? I get that a lot of artistic choices in early comics was more about differentiating different characters, and making things pop (that's why there are so many red-headed sidekicks) but it's still a bit jarring.

I do like that we're shown that Peter has a really great relationship with his aunt and uncle.

Then we're told that Peter gets along with all of the teachers at his high school and I guess participates in running science experiments, maybe? Idk, he's got a bunch of test tubes and a guy in a lab coat tells him to keep up the good work.

Peter asks a girl names Sally out on a date, and she reiterates to him "for the umpteenth time" that he's not her type, then drives off with "dream boat" Flash Thomson.

Then he invites a group of students to the "science hall", and they, predictably, make fun of him for being a nerd.

One of the things that I was kind of surprised by was how angry Peter is throughout this comic. You almost get the sense that if a certain event didn't happen so soon after he got his powers, kinda veering Peter back onto the right path, that we could be reading a villain origin story here.

Also, I don't know how I feel about these radio-active experiments being open to the public. That kind of seems.... a little irresponsible. Actually, as it turns out, Institutional Review Boards didn't exist until the 1970s, so.... I guess Peter has a lack of overall regulations to thank for his super powers.

The scientists are demonstrating how they can control radioactive rays, just shooting beams of radiation right in front of the general public, no protection anywhere in sight -- they must not have Godzilla movies in the Marvel universe.

Anyway, you know the story. There's a spider, though the spider is not actually part of the experiment, it's just a regular old spider trying to live it's own life, about to have just a really terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. So, the spider drops down from the ceiling, accidentally going through the radioactive beam, and then landing on Peter's hand -- because Peter (once again, a high schooler and member of the general public) was standing close enough to the radioactive beam for this to happen. The spider, in it's last agonizing moments of life before dying from, presumably, radioactive poisoning, bites Peter on the hand.

Peter notes that the bite burns, and either the bite itself or the spider -- it's not really clear which -- is glowing. He does not mention this seemingly quite important detail to any of the adults in the room.

Speaking of the adults in the room, they make fun of Peter for looking ill following the experiment, because everyone except for May and Ben are dickheads apparently. Literally no on checks on him.

Outside, Peter's standing in the middle of traffic, feeling... honestly, probably high as a kite. It says he feels like his entire body is being charged with some sort of fantastic energy.

He misses the car that's barreling towards him until the last moment when it nearly runs him over -- again because it's New York, I guess, and everyone's a dick. He jumps out of the car's way....

And then scales the wall, because he can. A small child sees him climbing the wall and tells his mother and she says, "That's the last horror movie I take you to, young man!" which is just hilarious. She doesn't even look at what he's pointing at.

At the top of the building he grabs a steel pipe and crushes it as though it were paper. At this point he figures that the spider bite transferred the spiders powers to him.

The spider watching all this from the afterife:

He tests his powers a little in the city, then heads to the wrestling match to fully test his powers. As we know, he beats the strongman with his powers, then he catches the eye of a TV producer, who gets him a slot on the Ed Sullivan show.

This is our first look at Spiderman

He becomes very popular by climbing around on the walls and ceiling on TV, and shooting webs.

Then we get to the part where he chooses not to stop the escaping thief, and he doesn't do it because he feels ripped off by the person being robbed like in the Sam Raimy trilogy, or whatever was going on with the chocolate milk in the Andrew Garfield one.

I actually think this one is worse than either of those two. Like he does it out of pure teenage angst and selfishness.

And like, look, I don't think random citizens should feel obligated to help the cops arrest people, or feel bad about it if they don't, but he says he's doing it for selfish reasons. Plus, he's at this place (The Ed Sullivan show?) not as Peter Parker, but as Spiderman, so his identity is safe and people already know that he has powers, cause five minutes ago he was climbing around the ceiling.

We get another wholesome scene with Peter and Ben and May where they gift him a microscope that he's been wanting. Spiderman gains in popularity, winning accolades and awards for his television appearances.

And then.....

And then Peter comes home one night to find a police care outside his Aunt and Uncle's home, and Peter receives the terrible news that Uncle Ben is dead, having been murdered by a burglar. Hmmm.

I was very confused by this at first, because the scene hadn't happened. You know the one. With the line. How the hell is Uncle Ben going to impart his final words of wisdom if he's already dead??

Peter runs off to the warehouse where the robber is hiding out. The cops are standing around outside doing nothing because "...he'll pick us off like flies if we charge in there," which.... okay... sure we'll go with that. Actually this pretty much tracks with reality.

So Spiderman goes in, confront the robber, then *gasp*, sees his face, and it's none other than the exact same robber that he previously let escape. He wraps him up in a web, leaves him for the cops (who are still standing around outside) and goes home to cry, knowing that he is, at least partially, responsible for Ben's death.

But what about the line?? You know the one.

Wait, oh...

So, wait, Ben doesn't actually say this line in the comics?? The narrator says it? I swear there were a number of Marvel fans screaming online about how not having Ben Parker say this line to Peter in the MCU was hugely disrespectful to both Peter and Ben as characters.

Huh....imagine that.

Okay, so this was fun. it wasn't super exciting, as I knew pretty much everything that was going to happen (thank you MCU for not rehashing this yet again), but it was nice to see the original take on it. I imagine the big reveal was very impactful for readers at the time.

I've never actually been a huge Peter Parker fan, but I plan to give it shot, along with all my other faves, see how his story developed over the decades. I can't say this issue really swayed me, but then, there wasn't a lot new here for me, so we'll see.

I will say, I missed the dry humor and sassiness of Steve. I really think people sleep on how fun the Cap comics were, even in their original incarnation.