#and the second is full comic format but its only 10 pages

[petz5]

most of my art goals for this year are ranma centric BUT i do have 2 small oc projects i’ve already started working on…….. they’ll both get their own dedicated sideblogs bc theyre comic format

[thecomicsnexus]

TMNT: 40TH ANNIVERSARY COMICS CELEBRATION

July 2024

By Kevin Eastman, Edgar Alan Poe, Jim Lawson, Tristan Jones, Gary Carlson, Chris Allan, Erik Burnham, Lloyd Goldfine, Ciro Nieli, Andy Suriano, Tom Waltz, Ronda Pattison , Tom Napolitano, Steve Lavigne, Paul Harmon, Frank Fosco, Adam Guzowski, Sarah Myer, Luis Antonio Delgado, Shawn Lee, Khary Randolph, Emilio Lopez, Michael Dialynas, Pablo Tunica, Freddie E. Williams II, David Petersen, Ken Mitchroney, Aaron Hazouri, Dan Duncan, Sophie Campbell, Jodi Nishijima, Stan Sakai, and Emi Fujii.

Come and enjoy stories that will remind you of the 40 years of turtle history.

SCORE: 10 *

* Assuming you are familiar with these iterations.

This is a strange read, and curiously, there are three or four highlights for me, and they are not exactly the ones you would imagine.

Spoilers after the break...

The first story by Kevin Eastman is in the Mirage section of the book but... well... I'll leave at that... I wouldn't call it the Mirage we knew.

There is a story by Lawson and Lavigne with the Rat King that... it's fun. But, you know... I wouldn't even try to fit it in canon... the amount of continuity physics you need to bend to place this story is not worth the time. Just enjoy as a new story by these two iconic Mirage artists.

This other story by Tristan H. Jones and Paul Harmon requires more analysis. I'll revisit it on my gang wars video and try to give it more context... but unfortunately... it's just too vague. All I can say for sure is that it happens in the future of that incomplete saga, but the narrator just takes too many artistic choices to be taken at face value.

Also... I believe this is the first official (frontal) appearance of Agent Bishop (unless I got the character wrong, but Jones already tried to introduce him in this saga). I think he is still holding on to it, and I really hope he gets to tell his story. I wouldn't mind a mini-series... just saying!

The Volume 3 story was... not for me. The dialogue alone felt tired.

The Archie adventure was short, eventful, and funny... and it looks amazing too!

In just four pages a new character was introduced and... a new love story was implied! And it's not just a gratuitous cameo... this is a funny sequence.

The Saturday Morning Adventures (the de facto 87 story) looks amazing as usual, but I didn't find the story that interesting. However, it started a theme that would run across most of the stories in this special after this one: Master Splinter.

The 2003 story is a... loose canon?

Hun is Slash, and Shredder is back... so make of that what you want. All I'm going to say is that this felt a lot like watching the beginning of a 2003 episode, with the narration setting the tone.

The 2012 story was one of the least interesting in the previews, but I have to say... it was probably one of the best. It brought back a villain and it technically serves as an excuse to continue the series?

But to me the best thing about the story is the art. I am surprised Ciro Nieli didn't do more comic book work for the Turtles all these years. In fact, if they somehow decided to continue the 2012 universe in 2D in this style... I'm all in. Well, who am I kidding... I would be in anyway... but this looks amazing.

Andy Suriano did probably the most interesting story in the book. Now, I am not sure if his style doesn't translate well to static panels or what the problem is with the comic format... but it doesn't matter... this small story brought in a lot of things that ended on the editing floor after the show's second season was reduced to a few more episodes. There was a rumor about a female turtle, and not only it is here in all its glory, but there is also a brother?

And come on... it's so Lou Jitsu to die with a cliffhanger.

There are two IDW stories. One is another Splinter story, but the other one is perhaps one of the best in this book.

The Ronda Pattison story takes place just before the Armageddon game, and it shows the five turtles in full sibling dynamic (even Jennika). It was refreshing to see these turtles having fun for a change.

There are no stories by the new team, but... well... that's just starting.

[blindrapture]

a union-mandated break post

(okay, let’s see if I can type this all over again after losing the post. gotta remember how it all went.)

Hey there, the few mutuals who Like all of my posts, the lurkers who occasionally make their presence known, the lurkers who I also hope are there, and all you folks who come across this post naturally before scrolling on (that’s fine too, please have a nice day! remember to take a deep breath and unclench!). I wanted to make a post giving a casual update.

Things have been going. You know how it is. Time proceeds onwards at a pace that is a crawl to some and fleeting to others, depending on relative perspective. The average of all these observations may be Objective Truth, a hazy mythical and abstract prospect which to this day no living human has ever known (due to the nature of perspective). We still try to know it for some reason, an endeavour which may be “a good thing” or “a condemnation of our species,” but that’s relative too. See above. Still, it is possible to take an approximation of what we figure this average to be and find ourselves (mis)balanced on a knife-edge in between all perspectives. This narrow path, the knife-edge between fast and slow, between good and bad, between ecstasy and despair, seems precarious at times, yet at other times is like a garden, wide and spacious enough to sit awhile. Our perspectives cover this garden from us with the shrubbery of Can’ts and Shouldn’ts, and the way to the garden is fraught with the misty cloud of Look-Like. And yet, ultimately, these shrubs and mists are but prismatic scenery colouring our time on this Earth, a perspective which is easy to see from within the garden. The Earth is brown and grey and immortal, though wearing an impermanent coat of blue and green. One day, we will slip out of our perspectives and return to the Earth, join her mounding’s mass, and that will be death.

So that’s the weather. Sometimes cold, sometimes mild, sometimes wet, sometimes dry, sometimes bothersome and sometimes the only backdrop I could ever want. I’ve been up to the usual, cycling between interests like a bat between haunts.

- The other day I got around to playing Smile For Me, an experience which took me about three hours to more-or-less complete 100%. Really cute game, I fell in love with all the characters, and the budding horror elements made me excited to see where it’d go.

- Currently I’m playing A Monster’s Expedition Through Puzzling Exhibitions, a game often cited in the same breath as Baba Is You and Stephen’s Sausage Roll. I think those two games are puzzle masterpieces, and A Monster’s Expedition is hitting me in the right spot. It frequently fills me with awe, which is impressive considering the game is just a long series of oblong block-pushing puzzles. It has scope, though, and it has the guts to hide that scope from you until you’re able to discover it for yourself. I’ve played for about 10 hours so far, beaten over 200 islands, and yet I feel I’m only getting further away from the end goal. Hard to describe. It’s a good game.

- When I’m done with that game, next I’ll be checking out Spelunky 2. I’ve wanted to try the original for a long time but never got around to it; I picked up the sequel. I know very little about the games (with a rough idea of what gameplay is like), and I intend to keep it that way for as long as I can. I like games that rely on discovery.

- Book-wise, I’m, y’know, reading Finnegans Wake as I fall asleep, occasionally inching through other books too, but my main reading focus at the moment is The Familiar. I went and picked up a new copy of Volume 5, and I found the Volume 3 I had kinda lost for a while, so now I have the full Season 1 again. And it’s been long enough since I read any of them that it’s finally time to reread them. As a unit this time. I am... so happy to be in their headspace. I’m currently in the second act of Volume 1, taking in a lot more details this time (and I do still remember a sense of where the whole plot goes), really cherishing the commitment to physicality and aesthetic. There’s not many authors out there like Danielewski. House of Leaves kickstarted my book obsession, y’know. And The Familiar is about as grand as a project can be. It’s supposed to be 27 volumes, each one 900 pages long, and the design of these books is goddamn sublime. The publisher only let him do the first 5 volumes, which is sad, but luckily those 5 volumes make up a “Season,” so they’re still a whole thing, a complete story arc for each of the nine protagonists, and plenty of secrets and details that give a good sense of the true scope. And did I mention the series is fucking scary? Profoundly so, each new volume weaving you deeper into its conspiratorial web of eldritch coincidences and patterns. The story is full of cats, immortal cats, God-cats. There’s a scientist who keeps a freaky magic orb and is known as Wizard. There’s an Armenian taxi driver who’s one of my favourite characters. And you can probably get all the volumes Used for fairly cheap on Amazon now. ........please, somebody join me in loving this series.

- Creative-wise, I’m working on music as always, putting notes next to each other until I get a result I can do something with. There is one piece that’s definitely done, a collaboration between Lindsay and I, but it’s going into Nine Is God so you won’t hear it just yet. Speaking of, that’s coming along. I haven’t even started making any codes or cool connections yet; I want to finish the... Core of this update first. Let’s be deceptive and call it the Main Blog. I have proven to myself that I definitely can do this; I keep stumbling on new mechanisms I can add, and I have a pretty vivid idea of what the whole thing will look like. It’s gonna be maybe a decent size for a Blog, all told, but it’s the form of the thing that mandates a lot of care. Luckily I have made Viceking’s Graab, so this isn’t the first time I’ve done something this mechanically ambitious. ...look, just. Of course I’m excited to Actually Talk about this thing, but like with the Graab, its nature requires me to keep it secret until players finally discover it for themselves. I like making that kind of thing, I want the sense of discovery, of climbing up a hill only to reach the summit and see an even bigger mountain looming over you that you hadn’t realized was there. Like Frog Fractions, or its sequel, even if you know there will be more than meets the eye you still get surprised and filled with delight. This concept fits neatly into an ARG format.

- Oh, also, I’m super excited for the Braid remake. It’s gonna have a comically thorough amount of developer commentary, and that’s all I want from this world. It’s even coming to Switch!

Media can be used as a tool to assist with the experience of life, and that is the way I want to approach things. I have spent time adapting myself to feel comfortable in these boring aesthetics (of understated puzzle games, thoughtful pretty books, blogs as art) because this means I am less susceptible to getting burned out during contemplation and self-examination. It may seem like a matter of taste, but taste is relative too; it’s not hard-wired, it can be adjusted, it does adjust all the time under the hood. ...I don’t know where to go with this one, other than that I should be careful not to condescend. I am not above anyone, I am confused too. I just.. like confusion and mazes, and I try to speak these aesthetics in an approximation of how I see others talk about theirs.

Right. I think that’s the bulk of it, that’s what I wanted to say today. I hope you are holding on, reader. It’s a wild and lonely world out there, and it’s our world; it’s yours just as much as it’s anyone else’s. You are important to it.

I leave you, mysteriously, with an old Genesis song. It’s called “Can-Utility and the Coastliners,” which is a silly way of saying it’s a song about the myth of King Canute. Sick of flatterers claiming he was equal to God, he went to the sea shore and said “If I truly am equal to God, then let the waves halt at my feet!” They didn’t. An astute demonstration, but it just prompted his flatterers to praise his ingenuity. “But he forced a smile, even though his hopes lay dashed where offerings fell.” I’m not really sure how the story ends. But it’s a wonderful song, starts off very folks-y but quickly takes a left turn down Mystery and Beauty. And it’s freaking Genesis.

See ya.

[comicteaparty]

June 10th-June 16th, 2020 Reader Favorites Archive

The archive for the Reader Favorites chat that occurred from June 10th, 2020 to June 16th, 2020.  The chat focused on the following  question:

How does poor web design affect if and/or how you read a particular webcomic?

carcarchu

it's a huge factor. if a comic is amazing in every way but the website or app makes it difficult for me to read i'm simply NOT going to read it. there are a lot of great series that i've put on the back burner just because the website is so annoying to navigate

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

i've honestly never run into a website so bad it stopped me from reading a comic i was interested in

carcarchu

FYI the worst comic app i've ever experienced is Aqua Kiss which I downloaded to read a single series. it's the most barebones app imaginable with no search bar. if you want to read something you actually have to manually load each calendar week to find it and some stuff are buried dozens of pages back. and to make matters worse it doesn't have a "history" or "bookmarks" feature either

Deo101 [Millennium]

The worst things with sites that I see often are 1: huge headers, and 2: laggy sites (not really site design, but its adjacent I think) Another is if the pages are too big on the screen, so you can't, for instance, see some panels all at once. Those kinds of things can really ruin a reading experience for me

carcarchu

One example of a website that is hostile to the reading experience is ZMYK which for some reason hosts vertical scroll comics but cuts them up into little pieces as if they were comic format so you can't actually scroll through the entire chapter as it was intended to

That kind of thing grinds my gears so much how can something you have to pay for be that incredibly bad

Deo101 [Millennium]

I've also seen some sites that have graphic design issues, where elements are illegible due to their color, and some have very busy and distracting backgrounds. Those kinds of things won't necessarily ruin it, but they're distracting

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

forward comic's website was doing this weird thing where the further I read the longer pages took to load. Near the end it seemed they were taking 10 full seconds. Still read the whole thing though. Reading manga on shady sites with terrible internet connection as a kid has desensitized me

Oh one comic I was interested in but didn't read because of the site: I was kidnapped by lesbian pirates from outer space. It doesn't have a website. To read it you have to pirate (hehe) copies of the archive.

It's a pretty sad story- the author was young and tricked into giving up the rights to her series

She ended up taking the site down to prevent the company from getting any more money off of it

https://rosalarian.tumblr.com/post/65353128180/its-with-extreme-sadness-that-i-announce-that-my

Here's her post about it

I think it can be a good warning message to us

Cronaj (Whispers of the Past)

For me, the biggest thing that deters me from reading a comic is if the website isn't well optimized for mobile (as someone who reads a lot on the go). This includes the images loading bigger than the page, or navigation being hidden on mobile, or glitchy scrolling, or any number of ungodly things. Also, too many ads. That'll turn me away in a heartbeat.

Deo101 [Millennium]

Yeah ads are definitely a huge turnoff for me too

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

FYI the worst comic app i've ever experienced is Aqua Kiss which I downloaded to read a single series. it's the most barebones app imaginable with no search bar. if you want to read something you actually have to manually load each calendar week to find it and some stuff are buried dozens of pages back. and to make matters worse it doesn't have a "history" or "bookmarks" feature either

@carcarchu okay i just digested this comment and wtf

no search bar is laughably bad omg

how did you even find out about it

Deo101 [Millennium]

Yeah that's ridiculous hahahaha

carcarchu

it's a shame because there are genuinely good comics on there you can't read anywhere else?? and i found it because an artist i adore did a series for it but it got AXED after only 2 chapters and after that was pretty much scrubbed from the internet. i think it's a shame because it really had so much potential and it ended before the story was really able to start

it's a screenshot from the app. you can see that it is categorized reverse chronologically by week

the point of aqua kiss is to emulate monthly/weekly style manga magazines but in app form. however i think the execution of this idea was horrendous

SteffieMusings

Oh no! It must make reading there so challenging. As for me, if the navigation is so hard to understand/pages don't load properly when you click a link or when the website's colours hurt my eyes so much I can't stay there for too long.

Shizamura 🌟 O Sarilho

Honestly nowadays most of the CMS's out there share the same basic functionality and adaptability, so it's getting harder to screw up on that. Most sites are OK, if only a bit laggy. If the site takes less than 2 seconds to load and it's not so crowded that I have to look for the comic, I'm generally good.

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

How much bad/inaccessible web design I'll tolerate is directly proportional to how much I care about the comic.

I've dropped a couple series in the middle of the archive just because they changed the site design to screw up the tracking of bookmarking sites, so I would've had to figure out an alternate way to keep track of it, and it didn't seem worth the effort

mariah (rainy day dreams)

Oh yeah, I've totally had that happen too where I was deep into an archive, had taken a reading break for a month or two, and came back to find the urls had been updated and my spot was lost it isn't so bad if a comic also has an archive page, but ive stopped reading a few stories that it would have been too hard to track down where I was.

DaeofthePast

I haven’t had to experience weird websites in a while, but I do sometimes go to an unknown website to read the comic/manga I’m looking for. Mostly what I’ve had trouble with is unnumbered chapters, of that it’s unclear where/how to start reading in general.(edited)

Like, I get to the page for that specific comic and then there’s no easy “start reading here” button anywhere

And when I do find the chapters list, I don’t know which end of the list is the beginning bc it’s unnumbered

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

Is a "First page" button enough or are you looking for a "new readers start here" button? (<- is redisigning her page)

DaeofthePast

Is there a difference? :0

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

hm, sometimes yes.

Some old running comics have different jump-on points (schlock mercenary for example).

DaeofthePast

Ooh I see

Well when I first go on the site, I just want to start reading so idk

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

So, I always try to read every comic that's featured in the book club all the way through. Like even if I don't particularly like the opening, or if the comic is thousands of pages long, or I don't have time to meaningfully discuss the comic, I do try to at least give the comic a fair shake by reading through the entire archive. There have been four exceptions. One was because of content (it was a gag a day comic, and the content was SO horrible for SO long that I just couldn't stand it anymore. real "punching down" type of humor). Another was because the comic was literally deleted before I could get to it. The remaining two were because the site design/organization were so awful that the comics were unreadable. One of the two comics had a custom built, hand-coded site (I assume), and it just... didn't work properly. Like the "previous" button seemingly took you to a random page, the "next" button and the "latest" button led to the same place, etc. I'm not sure the creator ever bothered to test the site. The other one used some pre-built stuff, so it was ok... but you had to scroll to the top of the page to go to the next page. Not only that, but the author was posting all their comics to the same archive - which means one page would be the comic that was actually meant to be read for the book club and the next few pages were a completely different comic entirely. And this wasn't a gag-a-day either - it was a story based comic, so the three action minimum to get to the next page made things absolute hell to keep track of.(edited)

DaeofthePast

Wow

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

Uff, yeah, that sounds horrible.

Nyx+Nyssa's page is currently a barebone mess, but I made at least sure the navigation works. :/

DaeofthePast

Having the comic be deleted while you’re reading it sounds like such a weird experience lmao

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

i mean, it wasn't thanos snap style lol

DaeofthePast

Was the website gone too or?

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

it was in between days

nah the website was still there, it's just that the author had decided to reboot their comic and forgot that they had submitted it to the book club

DaeofthePast

Oh okay I imagined Thanos snap style

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Not really a design but a site thing: I can't do comics without an archive of some sort. On platforms like Tapas or WT, the episode list serves that purpose perfectly fine. I personally need to be able to see how many pages there are, and I need a way to go to specific pages easily. It might sound like a small complaint, but it's a big thing for me! There have been comics that piqued my interest, but once I saw that there was no archive of any form, I left forever. Sure, I might be missing out, but there are also lots of good comics out there that have accessible archives. My life isn't long enough to read them all, so I'm letting myself be very picky.

copperine

I can manage a very basic site just fine. But if a site is hard to navigate, or just makes reading the page/getting to the next page difficult - I'd be likely to give up eventually. Doesn't matter about the quality of the comic, but if it's a chore to just read it, it's going to put me off after a while

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

I will note - if you want me to actually discuss your comic in the book club, please do have an archive link, and probably a cast page too. Like the lack of one doesn't stop me from reading entirely, but I can't discuss anything without being able to look back at specific moments. (and one of those archives that just has dates doesn't count - lemme know what the chapter is!)

copperine

For example - when I read webcomics on dA, I was absolutely fine with either the author having a dedicated folder with the pages in order. Another option was to link next and prev pages in the description. But if I had to go find each next page, I just wouldn't.

DaeofthePast

By an archive do you mean kinda like a chapters list?

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

A list of all the pages, ideally

That also list the chapters somehow

copperine

Short version: if I feel like I'm spending half as much time navigating the site as I am actually reading, it's gonna get old real quick

DaeofthePast

And same copperine. As long as it’s organized well, I will probably read it

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

Like maybe you click on a chapter link to get to a list of the pages, or maybe it's just a list of the pages with the chapter names as headers

some sort of organization

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Yeah! (I admit my own comic's archive page isn't the prettiest, but it's 100% functional.)

DaeofthePast

I only have a chapter list so far ^^; idk how to go about getting an archive

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Chapter list is totally fine if your chapters tend to be on the shorter side

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

I like having chapter lists around, although coding them can be a handful Not sure if to go for an archive with thumbnails or just with page numbers though.

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

It's also workable if you also have like... a dropdown menu for individual pages on the actual pages? So it only takes 2 clicks to go to a specific page (first click to go to the chapter, second click to go to the page)

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

OH yeah, there was also a dA comic in the book club once that didn't have any next/previous buttons. However, it was a short comic - the bare minimum for getting into the book club - so I still read it all the way through. But it was pretty annoying to do so. (it was also pretty obviously a fetish comic, but that's not really relevant to the discussion XD)

DaeofthePast

I want to post by scene so I’ll be dividing chapters like “chapter 3 part 1” to hopefully that will be better

copperine

I'll always take functional over pretty

DaeofthePast

Haha I’m not sure if I want to know the comic for that one

Also what is “punching down” humor?

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

Like, the author was a straight man, and nearly every joke was making fun of people who weren't those things.

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

it's like making fun of people but

copperine

Yikes

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

you're intentially trying to put them down

that's punching down in my imo rip

DaeofthePast

Oh

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

yeah....

DaeofthePast

Well at least I know what to call it when I see it in the future ._.

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

Like, occasionally I see a shitty joke in a comic and I keep reading because maybe the author improved (we do sometimes get comics with archives that date back decades in here) But this comic was just so consistently awful for so long that I couldn't stand it

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

oof that aint good

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

Though that's kinda off topic lol

DaeofthePast

Oh yeah

So bad site design...

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

Anyway, I don't really wanna post the examples of the comics I talked about in here cuz I don't wanna call anyone out

Actually, hold on, lemme check something

DaeofthePast

I feel I haven’t had too much experience with bad site designs, but I might have just forgotten(edited)

K

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

ok yeah

so, the comic where you had to scroll up to the top of each page to click to the next one, and the site was multiple comics alternating pages that made the story rough to follow

copperine

Oof yeah having to scroll up to click next won't stop me but it is a bother

DaeofthePast

I like having the next button both on top and the bottom, even if they update page by page(edited)

It just feels convinient

copperine

Yeah same

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Re: punching up/down, here's an overly simplistic set of examples: billionaires making fun of poor people is punching down. Poor people making fun of billionaires is punching up.

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

's good webdesign pattern for everything with continous content - e.g. blogs, web-novels, webcomics.

Ideally you have one on top, between content and comments and under comments

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

the comic that alternated storylines & required scrolling back up to go to the next page was Antibunny: http://vinnied.comicgenesis.com/d/20061002.html if you see that page I linked and click next a few times, there's no obvious distinction between the main story and the spinoff story (no, like, header change between the two, and the art style looks similar), so you can see how it'd be confusing to follow and the scrolling is just icing on the cake (it used to be even worse) the only reason I feel comfortable sharing that is because the author uploaded the comics to new sites, and fixed all those issues in the process: http://antibunny.net/

DaeofthePast

Oh nice. So they realized the problem

copperine

Aren't they in this server? Or am I thinking of another one

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

Yeah, the author is in this server

copperine

I thought so

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

Hence why he realized, because we told him that there was a problem during the book club

copperine

I'm not gonna take anything said here as a comment on anyway btw

DaeofthePast

It’s cool that submitting their comic to the tea party resulted in some good feedback :3

copperine

You love to see it!

It always makes me happy when webcomic community stuff helps people out, that seems like the ideal outcome

DaeofthePast

Yess

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

i agree on that yeee

DaeofthePast

It’s like having a friend point out a spelling mistake. Embarrassing but you can live with the knowledge that your work is now a little bit better(edited)

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

Yeah kinda off-topic, but I love it when the author of the comic for the book club joins the server. Like not only does it mean that the author could join in on others' discussions in the future (pay it forward 'n stuff), but... it's just really sad when I see a comic pop up in the book club and the author seemingly forgot they submitted it.

DaeofthePast

How long does it usually take to get to a comic? :0 that they would forget they submitted it?

copperine

I always hope I can help others out or support them, and I hope they feel the same

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

The book club had a very very long wait list in the past. These days, not so long.

DaeofthePast

And I guess if you submit a comic with a website, the people here can be your beta testers

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

what's odd is that five months ago, the wait list was six months but now, the wait list is two months y'all need to submit/resubmit your comics

DaeofthePast

I tried going to submit mine yesterday and the site doesn’t let me v.v says you’re booked for July

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

oh yeah, so it is

DaeofthePast

Maybe later :3

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

i guess Rebel doesn't want the queue to get too long

copperine

I would submit mine but I'm only at 10 pages and I believe you need to have 20 to submit

DaeofthePast

Ooh they have a minimum?

Gotta count my pages now

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

I mean it makes sense. Hard to discuss a comic that only has the cover for chapter 1

DaeofthePast

XD

Tru

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

"Let us dissect this cover image for an entire week"

DaeofthePast

It would be a hilarious April fools challenge

copperine

Idk I think it was 20 minimum?

DaeofthePast

shrug

copperine

@snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights) can you shed any light on this

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

The sign up form is where you would normally find that information.

copperine

... very good point

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

But the form is currently unavailable, and it's possible that Rebel might change the requirement when it becomes available again

copperine

Ah

Thank you for the heads up

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

FYI, https://comicteaparty.com/ is where the form will be available eventually

Shizamura 🌟 O Sarilho

They accept resubmissions now?

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

I def like arrows on the top and bottom of pages for sites to be more of a thing, as well as clicking the image for the next page too! Honestly there hasn't been a make or break, mainly preferences, and the most complaints i have are with the mobile formatting. I think most comics have been pretty solid in functionality that i've read, and it's clear that having their own website is becoming mainstream enough for there to be help, tips, and tricks to making it work!

mariah (rainy day dreams)

I definitely prefer if I can just click on the comic image to go to the next page especially for mobile.

copperine

Agreed!

Idk about resubmissions tho

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

... Wow. I absolutely HATE clickable images on mobile, because they usually mess with the pinch-zoom.

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

i've had sites that didnt have image click throughs and the arrow..... was like SO TINY XD

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

Didn't think anyone would actually like it, so... huh.

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

i kept going back and forth

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

yeah, navigation needs to be bigger on mobile for safe tapping.

mariah (rainy day dreams)

Oh, re:resubmissions, I'm pretty sure you can if it's been long enough? I think @snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights) mentioned it recently as an option. But maybe a tangent for #general

boogeymadam

i dont mind the pinch zoom being a little more difficult from time to time cause usually the clickable image is worth it to me

mariah (rainy day dreams)

Same

boogeymadam

am also fond of sites that allow left/right arrows to let you move forward and back on desktop

mariah (rainy day dreams)

Mainly it's just for like Krispy said, reading on mobile and tiny next/previous buttons.

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

ye my dummy thicc fingers prefer the click through image for sure

ohh yes Boogey that too

boogeymadam

it took me hours of googling to find the very simple comicpress option to just turn that on on my site

copperine

Mmm I do like sites that allow pinch zoom though

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

I also prefer clicking on the image to go to the next page

mariah (rainy day dreams)

My fingers small, but still dummy T-T

copperine

It makes it easier to get a better look at the page

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

iweudhweiu Mariah XD

copperine

Especially if it's got smaller font

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

nyxandnyssa has a seperate navigation for mobile that's much bigger and skipping scene select to make tapping easier.

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

I've had the hover text def bum me out for some comics, where you click the image and it just displays the text, then you gotta click the tiny next bar def killed me there

copperine

I've never had issues with pinch zoom affecting clickable images but I can imagine it would be annoying

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

but! never breaks me out of a comic for me to stop reading-! i persevere in the face of adversity XD

boogeymadam

i've never encountered a site so bad i couldnt continue reading. maybe stuff where i'd stop reading until i was less frustrated but i'd come back later.

DaeofthePast

That’s something I’ll have to consider for my site then

mariah (rainy day dreams)

I feel like Smackjeeves had a really obnoxious auto pitch & zoom before they updated most recently. I like when I can turn it off on my phone. I'd rather do it myself most of the time and let my phone try to auto it X')

DaeofthePast

I usually read on desktop more often than on mobile so it’s good to hear from other’s experiences

copperine

Idk I've never used a custom site yet

boogeymadam

same dae, except on tapas and webtoons!(edited)

comics with their own website i'll boot up my computer for a single update of

DaeofthePast

Even on webtoons I read on desktop

boogeymadam

omg your power, webtoons feels so choppy on desktop to me

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

im definitely lucky that our site got a mobile friendly version i remember the 'ol pinchy zoomz was tiresome on our site for sure

DaeofthePast

I get headaches from reading on my phone unfortunately :/

Idk what the difference is between reading mobile and on a desktop but my brain doesn’t like it

Like, I can text fine???? But reading a comic for some reason is like “no”

So yeah, comics on desktop for me

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

ohh!! it could be the close proximity!

DaeofthePast

Ooh :0 maybe?

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

i know i get motion sickness depending on how close/ far i am from screens

DaeofthePast

Maybe it’s something like that... :O

boogeymadam

whatever the reason sorry you get headaches and motion sickness from comics :'0

DaeofthePast

Every once in a while I’ll try again to read on mobile I never learn

boogeymadam

the only reason i dont like mobile is sometimes comics text is a combination of too small there and the font is hard on my dyslexia

DaeofthePast

Rip

boogeymadam

so i see if zooming in on my computer helps

DaeofthePast

The lesson here is that it’s good to have both mobile and desktop options

boogeymadam

yep :'D

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

ohhh yea def agree. I know that feeling and i sometimes ... have a Time reading my own work XD (i admit it lol!!)

boogeymadam

sometimes my own comic is hard on my dyslexia for The Effect so i never have hard feelings with other comics

copperine

(brb)

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

ewiudhiwue the things we do AT WHAT COST XD

DaeofthePast

Asdfghjkl

Meanwhile I use the same font for everything

boogeymadam

wait im gonna generalize this more so it can be a party

DaeofthePast

Please post that on pillowfort so I can reblog it

boogeymadam

you can post it for yourself if you want dae!

i'm having a hard time logging on asdfgjh

DaeofthePast

Rip sure

copperine

Ah see I have both

Because hand lettering

It's great for feeling right for a comic but also eternally wondering if it's readable

DaeofthePast

Ooh yeah I guess that would count as both

What’s your comic btw :0

Wait, we’re supposed to be talking about website design right

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Yep! If it gets too off topic, you can always continue in another channel that's more fitting.

copperine

Ah sorry! Sure thing

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

Mobile is too small for me

DaeofthePast

Yeah

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

(oHHMYYGOSH BOOGEY XD)

boogeymadam

mm archives were mentioned already, and how it can really turn readers away to simply not have one at all? my favorite archive is https://www.vaingloriouscomic.com/comic/archive 's but i've seen some where they attempted an all picture archive and it backfired by just being a page of all empty boxes. this didn't deter me from reading it and it got fixed pretty quick tho~ mine is one of these and its a very chonky slowmoving page cause i uploaded the first 90ish as fullsized pictures. nobody's ever complained so idk if it's ever deterred anyone from reading but i know i gotta fix it someday.(edited)

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

I really dont mind any kind of web design in particular though tbh. I prefer desktop sites but it’s fine if the design isnt great

DaeofthePast

Have you guys ever gone to a comic website (for a single comic) and the colors used in the background were so bright that it felt like they were blinding you to the point it was hard to read the actual pages?

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

My archive is down right now becayse it broke and I dont know how to fix it lol

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

i def want a fully view-able archive but we're gonna be hitting 800 pages and i dont know how well that will work XD

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

But I have a navigation bar now

boogeymadam

u could have multiple pages of archive, krispy!

i'm starting a new page for chapter 2

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

Or dropdown menus

boogeymadam

but its probably important to have a dropdown if u have more than 1 page, yeah

mariah (rainy day dreams)

I want to switch to picture archives, but I haven't found a good plug in/way to get my word press to do it :( if anyone has recommendations...

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

I wish I knew how to make dropdown menus

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

i'll have to bring that up ! we dont do the tech work for our site ( thank gosh seriously) but i love archives that show full pages

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

If I could make dropdown menus I would be unstoppable

copperine

I miss the drop-downs on SJ

boogeymadam

i feel like dropdowns are smth i pretty much only exclusively see on hiveworks comics

i wonder what their secret is,,,

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

I’ve inspected the elements on so many hiveworks sites lol

I want to know

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

they use word press I think

for their comic sites

just have to do some digging with the site html and csss

copperine

Right click and inspect maybe...

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

Php stands for my Personal hell pit

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

if i could go undercover for yall i would XD

boogeymadam

also!! @mariah (rainy day dreams) i use elementor for mine

its not perfect and breaks like every time i update it but it works asdfg

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

... I'm currently writing a sparkling fresh wp-plugin for my page (comic easel wasn't doing what I wanted), but I am also a software dev who enjoys coding.

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

My template I use functions in mostly php and xml and its gibberish to me but functions so well I dont know how to improve it to have specific things I want

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

my knowledge with site design is basic at best lmao

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

wordpress is a bit special in that it does most things more complicated than strictly necessary.

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

but I do like fiddling with stuff

^that too lmao

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

I know Shiza of osarilho is really good at web designing? she's made some beautiful work with her site!

boogeymadam

i want to ask shiza for more help but not before i have some money to pay her :')

she's helped me a lot already

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

I can do html and css at the babiest level

mariah (rainy day dreams)

I'll check that out Boogey, thanks! Even if it does break X') And I guess I'll just make a note to start stashing money to hire shiza XD im definitely at the point where my site needs a general face lift, but I don't have the spoons for it.

boogeymadam

imo i've made some really pretty pges with it. it's a drag and drop that's excellent at galleries, but it doesn't like when you don't have even rows for some reason

the wordpress plugin, Elementor, i mean.

copperine

I've been wanting to try comicpress for ages

I just don't know where to start

mariah (rainy day dreams)

I'm gonna move over to #shop_talk for my response

copperine

I had someone who was gonna help me out but we lost contact so it's on the back burner

boogeymadam

OOPS yeah

copperine

But for websites in general I prefer to have one that feels very basic than one that feels too busy or crowded

I'm not a graphic designer at all lol

If I do try an independent site I'm planning to pay a coding friend to help me

DaeofthePast

yeah i have no idea what I'm doing when working on my site, it's kinda basic, but at least it looks nice

copperine

I just use a premade theme on my ComicFury site

It works and that's good enough for me so far

Oh I guess the other thing that would put me off reading a comic is if the site isn't formatted for mobile, and/or particularly if the site doesn't have adaptive formatting

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

same, but editted it hard core so it looks like it's own thing lmao

copperine

I usually read on my phone because my computer is where I work so I like to get off it for hobbies

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

but for me uh i guess mobile i try to read it either on tapas, webtoon or its own site

I find just clicking the page to the next one helps me a lot lol I don't do a lot of zooming

copperine

Mmm

copperine

It's personal preference a lot tbh!

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

I like my comuter because its big

copperine

Valid

Mine is not

Shizamura 🌟 O Sarilho

did anyone talk about paying me please you don't have to do that

copperine

Idk but you can pay me

Idk what for but

I'll take money

mariah (rainy day dreams)

I absolutely would have to if you made my site awesome X') work is work, and you should be paid for it

Shizamura 🌟 O Sarilho

fair enough

Just send me a DM whenever you're up for that and lemme take a look at what you already have

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

I would hire someone to do web design for me but I dont have the funds & I dont wnat to make someone do work for me for free

sierrabravo (Hans Vogel is Dead)

I've been meaning to set up my own website for a while now, since the collective i was originally hosting my webcomic with kinda fell apart, but it's so much work and i'm hella intimidated :'''D

copperine

@sierrabravo (Hans Vogel is Dead) there's been some related discussion in #shop_talk and I believe @boogeymadam might be able to advise (I'm sure others can too but I'm going off the convo from earlier)

Shizamura 🌟 O Sarilho

@sierrabravo (Hans Vogel is Dead) depending on how much it is I can help you out

RebelVampire

Admin Reminder Remember this channel is for experiences as a reader first and foremost, so #shop_talk and #general are better if you want to discuss your own stuff.

DaeofthePast

thank you for the reminder :3

RebelVampire

I would say poor web design is something I have a complicated relationship regarding webcomics. On the one hand, outside of a site being 100% completely broken, I'm willing to sit through a lot to read. So in terms of affecting whether I read a comic the first time or not, there isn't much to say there. But it does affect how engaged I am with the comic. Cause if I can't easily go back to re-read a page, easily find things like character names, have to deal with extreme lag cause the host is garbage, have to deal with eye bleeding color schemes, etc. you can bet your bottom dollar 1 time is all that comic is going to get in terms of reading it. I can only subject myself to so much, and if I don't feel like reading a comic again because of the site itself, I'm going to quickly forget it in favor of comics whose sites don't make me cry. I do give more leeway to sites created by creators in many respects. But professional bigtime hosts like Tapas or Webtoons literally have no excuse for some of their garbage design choices. And some of their design choices are super duper garbage.

DaeofthePast

that's true yeah, there's a big distinction of the quality expectations between sites by small creators and those of big companies like Webtoons

RebelVampire

At the same time, though, I know from first hand experience that poor design choices are literally influenced by user data for bigger companies. So for every decision I consider stupid- at the same time they probably did the AB tests that showed crappy design A had better results for their conversion rates than user friendly design B.

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Which boggles my mind

I wonder if there's some kinda causation-correlation thing going on that the A/B tests could not detect accurately

boogeymadam

Rebel mentioned sites that have eyebleedy color schemes and I'm in the same boat; will read the comic, just will be turning down the screen brightness a looot. Sites that have a huge space of extremely neon background that distracts from the comic make me reluctant to read on the site, and I'll look for a mirror before trying. That white background of the 2 big comic hosting sites can at least be affected and turned dark by nightmode when needed, while nightmode doesn't work on half the bright comic sites I've tried it on. u-u

[talesofshance]

FAQs

This is a very, very long post. FAQs are consolidated after the cut!

Feel free to send in more enquiries via the askbox. This FAQ will be constantly updated.

About this anthology

This will be a PG-13 anthology comprising of comics and short stories with illustrations.

The cover is in full colour, and the interior of the anthology will be in gray scale. We’re looking to have a book of maximum 144 pages of content. It could very well be smaller, if we end up having drop-outs.

How are we going to do this?

The running theme of the anthology would be ���that moment when Shiro and Lance think “I love him”. This is open to various interpretations, it could be pre-relationship or while they’re already a couple. The only criteria is that Shance is in mutual love.

We’re open to any variation of Shance: Svance / Luro / Luron / Pikashi / Pyro, in any world / AU / timeline, as long as it has a self-contained plot and includes Shance being in love.

Stories can be submitted in 2 formats:

Comic - Page counts must be in even numbers, up to a maximum 8 pages.

Short story with illustrations - 1-3k words, that fits about a maximum of 8 pages. Minimum amount of artwork for stories should include 1 cover art, and as many insert artwork as you like. Story illustrations can be 1 page or half a page.

What are the zine specs?

7” x 10” - B5 size, 132-144 pages, content will be grayscale.

How many participants will the anthology have?

We’re looking at about an estimate of maximum 16 stories for the anthology.

Stories can be authored by an individual or a collaboration between a writer and artist.

Participants can sign up as an individual comic artist or a writer-artist pair. Writers and artists can sign up individually and we will try to form teams for comics or illustrated short stories.

That would mean potentially anywhere between 16-32 content creators, and 1 cover artist.

What if you don’t get enough people to sign up?

Well, if that happens, then we’ll have a smaller zine, depending on how many pages the people who signed up would like to contribute. We’ll play by ear then.

Who is behind all this?

I will probably be the main and sole mod for this entire project. I understand that there’s a chance people don’t trust zines anymore, given how much zine drama the fandom has been through, but this zine will be kept small and minimal in scale so that it can be seen through production no matter what.

Hello, I’m Seki, @rustdust and mousousousou on Twitter. I haven’t organised any group zines before but I’ve helped out with the I love you Shance wedding zine, made some personal zines and some fan merch of my own.

I understand that it’s hard to trust fanzines these days, and all I can offer is to be as up-front and accountable as possible. The DMs and askbox are always open and I will do my best to answer any queries.

I just really want an anthology for the shance community, and I welcome any suggestion, tips or advice on how to run this project better :)

How will sales proceeds of the zine be used?

This will be a for-profit project. Participants will be given USD10 as a base sum, and if there is any surplus after production costs are accounted for, the net profit will be divided equally among all participants.

Having the zine break even would include production costs of the zine, extras for the pre-order bundles, and enough to cover paying the participants as well as shipping of the participant copies.

How will participants get paid?

Here’s how payment will go so that it can be fair to everyone participating:

$10 will be paid out to all participants via PayPal on the final submission deadline.

A final breakdown of profit/loss will be provided through email and discord when the pre-orders and contributor copies are ready for shipping. By that time, we would know how much total shipping is going to cost as well. That’s when we’ll know if there will be a second pay-out.

If we’re not in the red, a final sum will be paid out after the leftover sales period.

Can you tell us how participants will be selected?

Participants will be selected with these in mind:

The plot can be told within the zine itself. You can have it as an introduction to a world that you are building if you like, but it should be able to be read on its own without context.

Variety of content. This is to avoid having multiple stories that are too similar in plot.

Quality and a cohesive standard for the zine as a whole.

This zine has very limited spaces and I just wanted to say that it is not a slight at anyone’s quality of work if you don’t get selected. Also, I’d be more than happy if someone wanted to take the idea of this zine and made another Shance stories zine so that more people would get the chance to do the same if they so wish. I will never say no to more zines for Shance.

Great! How do I sign up?

Sign-up period starts 03 June - 07 July. Applications can be edited up till the deadline, so take your time to think it through! We will require idea pitches for the comic and writing applications.

There are 4 ways to participate in the anthology:

1. Pitch a comic idea:

You can sign up as an individual comic artist or a writer/artist team-up

We will require you to briefly describe at least 2 story ideas you have in mind.

APPLY HERE

2. Pitch a short story idea:

You can sign up as an individual writer.

We will require you to briefly describe at least 2 story ideas you have in mind.

We will find an artist to collaborate and draw for your story.

APPLY HERE

3. Sign up as an artist partner:

This is for individual artists who want to work with a writer partner to draw insert illustrations for their story.

We will do our best to match you up with content that are to your interests!

APPLY HERE

4. Sign up as the cover artist:

This is for artists who would like to draw the cover of the anthology. This will be a front-to-back spread, full colour.

(Form will be linked here on 10 June).

How do I apply if I’m a writer who is already working with an artist?

The team application only applies for comics only, but if you’re a writer who already has an artist to work with, and would like to apply for short stories instead of comics, please do this:

- As the writer half, fill in the solo writer’s application.

- As the artist half, fill in the solo artist’s application.

- In the last question about feedback, please indicate that you have an artist / writer partner already and let us know who they are.

Will there be merchandise?

In line with keeping production costs low, we won’t be making fancy merchandise like pins or charms for this zine. There will be a free print that comes with pre-orders. 

We’ve included in the applications to see if applicants are willing to contribute for more print merch. Extra merch like stickers can be up for discussion if participants are keen.

[ggmarvelous]

10 INDIE COMICS YOU NEED TO READ

Not only of giant publishing houses lives the comic and for that reason I made this list of the best of the independent comics. Because they are there even if we don't see them and we know they deserve our time, with themes beyond the common super hero, and characters that are marked in our memory. (In this list I will not include Vertigo since it is a subsidiary of DC so it does not make sense, in addition i will make a list of those vertigo comics that you can not miss)

10. PALESTINE by Joe Sacco (Fantagraphics)

Palestine is a graphic novel that highlights the experiences of its author at the Gaza Strip in the early 90s, focusing on the history and personality of the Palestinian people. The story is highly contextual to the temporal period, but it usually makes some flashbacks to inform the reader about the reason of the situations that occur. WHY DO YOU HAVE TO READ IT?: Palestine is without a doubt a political content, but its intention is not to dig into that, but to make the cut of the human story and the details of the people who have to pay the price for the actions from third parties that live far above them. At the same time, the author is part of the work not only as an impartial observer, but as a human being who is affected by the situation.

9. BLACKHOLE by Charles Burns (Kitchen Sink)

Is the story of a small town in the middle of the United States at the 70s, we follow the lives of some teenagers who run away from their homes to live in the forest, after being infected with a disease that produces horrible deformations. Without authority to guide them or a prospect of life, they relax between drugs and debauchery, in addition to being used as "the Bogeyman" for normal adolescents to behave. WHY DO YOU HAVE TO READ IT?: Black Hole is a deep analysis of life in general, but focused on adolescence, diving into the problems of socialization, self-discovery and perception of the reality that surrounds those who are in that moment of life, represented from a fictional, dark and melancholic angle, but no less concrete and real.

8. LOVE & ROCKETS: PALOMAR by Gilbert, Jaime and Mario Hernandez (Fantagraphics)

Love & Rockets is a cartoon of the eighties, which moves within the genre of magical realism and is developed in a world that seduces between Latin and punk, with a twist of science fiction. Palomar, specifically, is a series of stories within this world located in a Latin American city, where its people develop their daily life until they are confronted with extraordinary events. WHY DO YOU HAVE TO READ IT?: Love & Rockets is not only one of the raiders in the independent comic movement, but in addition to its captivating stories, the technique with which they are developed is unique in terms of time management. Fans of superheroes may feel out of place at first, but it does not take long until you end up identifying

7. GHOST WORLD by Daniel Clowes (Fantagraphics)

Ghost World tells the story of two friends recently graduated from high school, who mired in the stupor of a small American town, spend their days wandering, analyzing popular culture, judging the people of their city and theorizing about their future, as the arrival of it distances them. WHY SHOULD YOU HAVE TO READ IT?: The darkness and mild bitterness of this story makes it stand out from others of the genre, thanks to his analysis of adolescence.

6. SEX CRIMINALS by Matt Fraction (Image Comics)

It is a comic cataloged as a sex comedy, starring a couple who stops time qhenever they reach an orgasm (more precisely during the refractory period, but that is very well explained in the story), and take advantage of this to commit thefts Sex and crimes, as the title of the collection indicates. WHY SHOULD YOU READ IT? who introduces Suzie (the protagonist) is herself speaking to the readers, playing to break the fourth wall and declaring from the beginning that this series will alter and take advantage of the possibilities offered by this medium as much as the authors can with their creativity. With this not only get the attention of the reader, but also achieve some pages with excellent composition, ways to narrate different from the traditional but used in a useful and not capricious ... and more.

5. SECONDS by Bryan Lee O'Malley (Ballantine Books)

Katie, a 29-year-old girl who is about to take that important step of taking charge of her life now that things are going well: she is a beloved chef at the Seconds restaurant and everything goes according to plan to have her own restaurant called Katie's But a word leads to a gesture, a gesture to a moment and that moment throws you in the opposite direction towards your dreams. WHY SOULD YOU READ IT? Bryan Lee O'Malley gets a comic suitable for all audiences because despite its youthful appearance gives full on topics which sooner or later we will weigh and is to accept our mistakes and try, somehow to move forward.

4. I KILL GIANTS by Joe Kelly (Image Comics)

Barbara is a pretty headstrong young high school girl who loves Dungeons and Dragons, dislikes school, isn't interested in friends or other people, and is obsessed with giants - more accurately, killing giants. But in our everyday world, is Barbara just a weird kid because we all know giants aren't real. Aren't they... WHY SHOULD YOU READ IT?  This coming of age story is also about friendship, courage, bullies, allies, family, and the power of the imagination, this is a wonderful, touching story that should not be missed.

3. PERSEPOLIS by Marjane Satrapi (L'Association)

Is the autobiographical story of the Iranian Marjane Satrapi, the story of how she grew up in an Islamic fundamentalist regime that would eventually lead her to leave her country. The comic begins in 1979, when Marjane is ten years old and from her childhood perspective she witnesses a social and political change that ends more than fifty years of the reign of the Shah of Persia in Iran and gives way to an Islamic Republic. WHY SHOUL YOU READ IT? With this work, Marjane Strapi has managed to show at a stroke that the comic is capable as can be literature or cinema to reflect with crudeness the less sweet episodes of History. Persepolis is a complaint of religious fanaticism and more specifically of the repression exercised by fundamentalists against Iranian women.

2.FROM HELL by Alan Moore (Eddie Campbell Comics/Top Shelf Productions)

From hell tells in his own way the story of Jack the Ripper. It focuses on the figure of William Gull, a magnificent doctor, first assistant of the English Royal Family. He is a doctor who is certainly respected and professional. On the other hand, it belongs to the well-regarded by the sect of The Masons. With the passage of time and the events that are spinning in their environment, something inside William breaks down. WHY SHOUL YOU READ IT? A story in which fiction and reality can not be better mixed. There are no dividing lines here. Very few people today would know how to differentiate what was truly true in everything that happened. Moore was commissioned with From Hell to provide us with his version of events. Who knows if we are not facing the best illustrations of a tragic event that marked a whole era.

1. MAUS by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon Books)

The son of a holocaust survivor in World War II, interviews his father in order to make a story that relates his father's struggle to support his family and his sanity at the same time. Likewise, the mere fact of remembering all these events, cause father and son to be involved in so many moments of reunion and family tension. WHY DO YOU HAVE TO READ IT? Maus is not just a post-modernism clinic in comics but also must be the most accurate, sensitive and coherent human story that has ever been made in cartoon format, even after his successful decision telling everything with anthropomorphic animals, in order to alleviate a little the historical tension. At the same time, the accuracy of the historical recapitulation of the hand of a survivor and the metanarrative of the author describing the process of creating the same comic, generates this impeccable hint that won the Pulitzer Prize.

BONUS: Because there is a lot out there you should check those too. they are a good mix of art and narrative

SAGA (Is a must read)

REVIVAL

THE INCAL

BERLIN

HABIBI

[jamesgraybooksellerworld]

Author INDEX

1) 415J #779 . Anon.), Waring, Robert

2)  342 J Attributed to James Wright

3) 346J   J.B.  

4) 377J Mary Barber 377J

4)  Mary Barber

5) 347J Susanna Centlivre 

6) 357J Susanna Centlivre

7) 849G#780  Etherege, Sir George

8) #257J   Jacques Ferrand, medecin

9)  515F#784 Huet, Pierre-Daniel (1630-1721)

9) 122F Mary De La Riviere Manley 122F

10) 103G Katherine Philips 103G

11) 376J Mary Pix  

12) 331j.#781  Polwheile, Theolophilus

12) 323J Madeleine Vigneron 323

•)§(•

      1) 415J #779 . Anon.), Waring, Robert, 1614-1658. Translated by John Noris.

Effigies amoris in English: or the picture of love unveil’d.

Oxford: London : Printed for James Good in Oxford, and sold by J. Nut [i.e. Nutt, London], 1701. Second edition of the English translation by John Norton. ¶ Duodecimo; A-E12, F11 (A1, half title, present) Bound in original full calf, missing some leather from spine but cords are very strong. Some wonderful quotes for this book: The Answer of R. W. to his Friend, importunately desiring to know what LOVE might be?

I Acknowledge the wanton Ty∣ranny of imperious Love, that is always requiring the most diffi∣cult Trials of the Affections. Now though it be a kinde of an Hercu∣lean Labour it self to Love, considering those severe duties, those toyls, and hazards appendant to it; as if Cruelty were its sole delight: Nevertheless we believe it reasonable, what names so∣ever we have given to Love, that he should exercise his Soveraignty, which is certainly very great and puissant; and by the Severity of his Commands, that he should augment the glory of his high Rule, and our obedient Sub∣mission.

“However, this is the supreme Office of Reason, to make a right choice of Disposition and Conditions; to choose a Companion with whom we are sure to live with more delight than with our selves; whose judgment we may be sure to follow as our own: or else to stay till we can finde a proper Ob∣ject of Love. Then also so to love, like one who is guided by Judgment, not carried away by Passion; like one so far from ceasing, that he is always beginning to Love. This is to joyn Patience with Constancy. This is to receive the Idea more fairly imprinted in the Minde, than in Wax, and to preserve more stedfastly. ‘Tis the Of∣fice of Vertue, to determine upon one measure of wishing; to covet a dispo∣sition and inclination like his own, through all the changes of Fortune; and so to make two of one, that they may act the same person.”

ESTC Citation No. N1243

The “Amoris Effigies (anon.), London, 1649, 1664, 1668, 1671. In 1680 appeared a loose English translation, by a Robert Nightingale, which deviated in many points from the Latin original. John Norris, under the pseudonym Phil-iconerus, published a fresh translation, London, 1682; 2nd edit., 1701; In his introduction, Norris wrote of Waring’s “sweetness of fancy, neatness of style, and lusciousness of hidden sense”. Waring also wrote Latin verses, including in Jonsonus Virbius [playwright Ben Jonson.](1639), reprinted in the 1668 and subsequent editions of the Amoris Effigies, under the title of Carmen Lapidorium.” (DNB).

Price: $1,150.00

  II

2) 342 J Attributed to James Wright

The Humours and conversations of the town expos’d in two dialogues : the first, of the men, the second, of the women.

London : printed for R. Bentley, in Russel-Street, in Covent-Garden, and J. Tonson, at the Judge’s-Head in Chancery-Lane, 1693.

First and only edition. Bound in speckled calf, recently rebacked, with the signature of Jane Modgford on the title and page 1. Wright, James 1643-1713, antiquary and miscellaneous writer, “A versatile writer with a lucid style and a genuine touch of humour, especially as an essayist…” [DNB]. The attribution first appears, in Brice Harris’s facsimile of this edition printed in 1961. The work itself is written as a dialogue between Jovial and Pensive who have visited London and wish to return to the country. Jovial’s cousin, Sociable, enjoys the London social whirl. They argue about the various pleasures of the city versus the country. Dryden is discussed at one point: “the company of the author of Absalom and Achitophel is more valuable, tho’ not so talkative, than that of the modern men of banter; for what he says, is like what he writes; much to the purpose, and full of mighty sense…” This is followed by another, shorter, dialogue between Madam Townlove and Madam Thinkwell.

The original form ‘to a T’ is an old phrase and the earliest citation that I know of is in James Wright’s satire The Humours and Conversations of the Town. “All the under Villages and Towns-men come to him for Redress; which he does to a T.”

The letter ‘T’ itself, as the initial of a word. If this is the derivation then the word in question is very likely to be ‘tittle’. A tittle is a small stroke or point in writing or printing and is now best remembered via the term jot or tittle. The best reason for believing that this is the source of the ‘T’ is that the phrase ‘to a tittle’ existed in English well before ‘to a T’, with the same meaning;

for example, in Francis Beaumont’s Jacobean comedy drama The Woman Hater, 1607. we find: “Ile quote him to a tittle.”

In this case, although there is no smoking gun, the ‘to a tittle’ derivation would probably stand up in court as ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Very nice condition. Item #736

Wing; H3720; Cf. Macdonald, Hugh. John Dryden; a bibliography. Oxford, 1939, p. 275-276. :Brett-Smith 305.

ESTC Citation No. R31136

http://estc.bl.uk/F/2Q5SSI4SVQHNH367AHEBKYI48ERDGNF97DX5TJXJ4GXQH4BJ72-07782?func=full-set-set&set_number=005564&set_entry=000001&format=999

https://wp.me/p3kzOR-4dl.

Price: $2,200.00

III

     346J J.B. Gent.

The young lovers guide,

 or, The unsuccessful amours of Philabius, a country lover; set forth in several kind epistles, writ by him to his beautious-unkind mistress. Teaching lover s how to comport themselves with resignation in their love-disasters. With The answer of Helena to Paris, by a country shepherdess. As also, The sixth Æneid and fourth eclogue of Virgil, both newly translated by J.B. Gent. (?)

London : Printed and are to be Sold by the Booksellers of London, 1699.             $2,700

Octavo,  A4, B-G8,H6 I2( lacking 3&’4) (A1, frontispiece Present;            I3&’4, advertisements  lacking )    inches  [8], 116, [4] p. : The frontispiece is signed: M· Vander Gucht. scul:. 1660-1725,

This copy is bound in original paneled sheep with spine cracking but cords holding Strong.

A very rare slyly misogynistic “guide’ for what turns out be emotional turmoil and Love-Disasters

Writ by Philabius to Venus, his Planetary Ascendant.

Dear Mother Venus!

I must style you so.

From you descended, tho’ unhappy Beau.

You are my Astral Mother; at my birth

Your pow’rful Influence bore the sway on Earth

From my Ascendent: being sprung from you,

I hop’d Success where-ever I should woo.

Your Pow’r in Heav’n and Earth prevails, shall I,

A Son of yours, by you forsaken die?

Twenty long Months now I have lov’d a Fair,

And all my Courtship’s ending in Despair.

All Earthly Beauties, scatter’d here and there,

From you, their Source, derive the Charms they bear.

  Wing (2nd ed.), B131; Arber’s Term cat.; III 142

Copies – Brit.Isles  :  British Library

                  Cambridge University St. John’s College

                  Oxford University, Bodleian Library

Copies – N.America :  Folger Shakespeare

                  Harvard Houghton Library

                  Henry E. Huntington

                  Newberry

                  UCLA, Clark Memorial Library

                  University of Illinois

Engraved frontispiece of the Mistress holding a fan,”Bold Poets and rash Painters may aspire With pen and pencill to describe my Faire, Alas; their arts in the performance fayle, And reach not that divine Original, Some Shadd’wy glimpse they may present to view, And this is all poore humane art Can doe▪”  title within double rule border, 4-pages of publisher`s  advertisements at the end Contemporary calf (worn). . FIRST EDITION. . The author remains unknown.

)§(§)§(

 An early Irish female author

2) 377[ BARBER, Mary].1685-1755≠

A true tale To be added to Mr. Gay’s fables.

Dublin. Printed by S. Powell, for George Ewing, at the Angel and Bible in Dame’-street, 1727.

First edition, variant imprint..[

Estc version : Dublin : printed by S.[i.e. Sarah] Harding, next door to the sign of the Crown in Copper-Alley, [ca. 1727-1728]    most likely a typo.  7pp, [1]. Not in ESTC or Foxon; c/f N491542 and N13607.                         $2,500

                [Bound after:]

John GAY

Fables. Invented for the Amusement of His Highness William Duke of Cumberland.

London Printed, and Dublin Reprinted for G. Risk, G. Ewing, and W. Smith, in Dame’s-street, 1727.  

First Irish edition. [8], 109pp, [3]. With three terminal pages of advertisements.             ESTC T13819, Foxon p.295.

8vo in 4s and 8s. Contemporary speckled calf, contrasting red morocco lettering- piece, gilt. Rubbed to extremities, some chipping to head and foot of spine and cracking to joints, bumping to corners. Occasional marking, some closed tears. Early ink inscription of ‘William Crose, Clithero’ to FEP, further inked-over inscription to head of title.

Mary Barber (1685-1755) claimed that she wrote “chiefly to form the Minds of my Children,” but her often satirical and comic verses suggest that she sought an adult audience as well. The wife of a clothier and mother of four children, she lived in Dublin and enjoyed the patronage of Jonathan Swift. While marriage, motherhood, friendship, education, and other domestic issues are her central themes, they frequently lead her to broader, biting social commentary.

Bound behind this copy of the first edition of the first series of English poet John Gay’s (1685-1732) famed Fables, composed for the youngest son of George II, six-year-old Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, is Irish poet Mary Barber’s (c.1685-c.1755) rare verse appeal to secure a Royal pension for Gay, who had lost his fortune in bursting of the South Sea Bubble.

Barber, the wife of a Dublin woollen draper, was an untutored poet whom Jonathan Swift sponsored, publicly applauded, and cultivated as part of his ‘triumfeminate’ of bluestockings. She wrote initially to educate the children in her large family. Indeed this poem, the fifth of her published works, features imagined dialogue of a son to his mother, designed to encourage, specifically, the patronage of Queen Caroline:

‘Mamma, if you were Queen, says he, And such a Book were writ for me; I find, ’tis so much to your Taste, That Gay wou’d keep his Coach at least’

And of a mother to her son:

‘My Child, What you suppose is true: I see its Excellence in You.                                          Poets, who write to mend the Mind, A Royal Recompence shou’d find.’

ESTC locates two variant Dublin editions, both rare, but neither matching this copy: a first with the title and pagination as here, but with the undated imprint of S. Harding (represented by a single copy at Harvard), and a second with the imprint as here, but with a different title, A tale being an addition to Mr. Gay’s fables, and a pagination of 8pp (represented by copies at the NLI, Oxford, Harvard and Yale). This would appear to be a second variant, and we can find no copies in any of the usual databases.

Mary Barber was an Irish poet who mostly focussed on domestic themes such as marriage and children although the messages in some of her poems suggested a widening of her interests, often making cynical comments on social injustice.  She was a member of fellow Irish poet Jonathan Swift’s favoured circle of writers, known as his “triumfeminate”, a select group that also included Mrs E Sican and Constantia Grierson.

She was born sometime around the year 1685 in Dublin but nothing much is known about her education or upbringing.  She married a much younger man by the name of Rupert Barber and they had nine children together, although only four survived childhood.  She was writing poetry initially for the benefit and education of her children but, by 1725, she had The Widow’s Address published and this was seen as an appeal on behalf of an Army officer’s widow against the social and financial difficulties that such women were facing all the time.  Rather than being a simple tale for younger readers here was a biting piece of social commentary, aimed at a seemingly uncaring government.

During the 18th and early 19th centuries it was uncommon for women to become famous writers and yet Barber seemed to possess a “natural genius” where poetry was concerned which was all the more remarkable since she had no formal literary tuition to fall back on.  The famous writer Jonathan Swift offered her patronage, recognising a special talent instantly.  Indeed, he called her “the best Poetess of both Kingdoms” although his enthusiasm was not necessarily shared by literary critics of the time.  It most certainly benefitted her having the support of fellow writers such as Elizabeth Rowe and Mary Delany, and Swift encouraged her to publish a collection in 1734 called Poems on several occasions.  The book sold well, mostly by subscription to eminent persons in society and government.  The quality of the writing astonished many who wondered how such a simple, sometimes “ailing Irish housewife” could have produced such work.

It took some time for Barber to attain financial stability though and her patron Swift was very much involved in her success.  She could have lost his support though because, in a desperate attempt to achieve wider recognition, she wrote letters to many important people, including royalty, with Swift’s signature forged at the end.  When he found out about this indiscretion he was not best pleased but he forgave her anyway.

Unfortunately poor health prevented much more coming from her pen during her later years.  For over twenty years she suffered from gout and, in fact, wrote poems about the subject for a publication called the Gentleman’s Magazine.  It is worth including here an extract from her poem Written for my son, at his first putting on of breeches.  It is, in some ways, an apology and an explanation to a child enduring the putting on of an uncomfortable garment for the first time.  She suggests in fact that many men have suffered from gout because of the requirement to wear breeches.  The first verse of the poem is reproduced here:

Many of her poems were in the form of letters written to distinguished people, such as To The Right Honourable The Lady Sarah Cowper and To The Right Honourable The Lady Elizabeth Boyle On Her Birthday.  These, and many more, were published in her 1755 collection Poems by Eminent Ladies.  History sees her, unfortunately, as a mother writing to support her children rather than a great poet, and little lasting value has been attributed to her work.

•)§(•

3) 379J   BARBER, Mary 1685-1755≠

Poems on Several Occasions

London: printed [by Samuel Richardson] for C. Rivington, at the Bible and Crown in St. Paul’s Church-Yard 1735                            $2,000

First octavo edition, 1735, bound in early paper boards with later paper spine and printed spine label, pp. lxiv, 290, (14) index, title with repaired tear, very good. These poems were published the previous year in a quarto edition with a list of influential subscribers (reprinted here); this octavo edition is less common. Barber was the wife of a Dublin clothier and her publication in England was helped by Jonathan Swift, who has (along with the authoress) provided a dedication in this volume to the Earl of Orrery. Constantia Grierson, another Irish poetess, contributes a prefatory poem in praise of Mary Barber.

  ESTC Citation No. T42623 ; Maslen, K. Samuel Richardson, 21.; Foxon, p.45. ;Teerink-Scouten [Swift] 747.

    5) 374J [ Susanna CENTLIVRE,]. 1667-1723

The gamester: A Comedy…

London. Printed for William Turner, 1705.                           $2,000

Quarto. [6], 70pp, [2]. First edition.Without half-title. Later half-vellum, marbled boards, contrasting black morocco lettering-piece. Extremities lightly rubbed and discoloured. Browned, some marginal worming, occasional shaving to running titles.

The first edition of playwright and actress Susanna Centlivre’s (bap. 1667?, d. 1723) convoluted gambling comedy, adapted from French dramatist Jean Francois Regnard’s (1655-1709) Le Jouer (1696). The Gamester met with tremendous success and firmly established Centlivre as a part the pantheon of celebrated seventeenth-century playwrights, yet the professional life of the female dramatist remained complicated, with many of her works, as here, being published anonymously and accompanied by a prologue implying a male author.

CENTLIVRE, English dramatic writer and actress, was born about 1667, probably in Ireland, where her father, a Lincolnshire gentleman named Freeman, had been forced to flee at the Restoration on account of his political sympathies. When sixteen she married the nephew of Sir Stephen Fox, and on his death within a year she married an officer named Carroll, who was killed in a duel. Left in poverty, she began to support herself, writing for the stage, and some of her early plays are signed S. Carroll. In 1706 she married Joseph Centlivre, chief cook to Queen Anne, who survived her.

ESTC T26860.

)0(

  5) 849G#780  Etherege, Sir George

The comical revenge, or, Love in a Tub. Acted at His Highness the Duke of York’s Theatre in Lincolns-Inn-fields. Licensed, July 8. 1664. Roger L’Estrange

London: Printed for Henry Herringman, and are to be sold at his shop at the Blew-Anchor in the Lower Walk of the New Exchange,1669,

Quarto 8.75 x 6.5 inches. A-I4, K4.(In this edition, there is a comma after title word “revenge” and leaf A2r has catchword “hope”. Another edition has a semi-colon after “revenge” and leaf A2r has catchword “the”.). The first work of Etherege was The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub. It was published in 1664 and may have been produced for the first time late in the previous year. This comedy was an immediate success and Etherege found himself, in a night, famous. Thus introduced to the wits and the fops of the town, Etherege took his place in the select and dissolute circle of Rochester, Dorset and Sedley. On one occasion, at Epsom, after tossing in a blanket certain fiddlers who refused to play, Rochester, Etherege and other boon companions so “skirmished the watch” that they left one of their number thrust through with a pike and were fain to abscond. Etherege married a fortune, it is not certain when, and, apparently for no better reason, was knighted. On the death of Rochester, he was, for some time, the “protector” of the beautiful and talented actress, Mrs. Barry. 63  Ever indolent and procrastinating, Etherege allowed four years to elapse before his next venture into comedy. She Would if She Could, 1668.

“The reputation of Sir George Etherege has risen considerably in the present century, and although there is now some danger of his being given an importance that he would have been the first to disown, he undoubtedly stamped his own unemphatic image on the Restoration theater. The comic world of his first two plays, although it is almost as unreal to the modern playgoer as the world of Edwardian musical comedy, is still young and fresh; it has the cool fragrance of those early mornings in the sixteen-sixties that Etherege knew so well as he went rollicking home after a night of pleasure. […] His gentlemen never do anything that he and his friends would have been ashamed to do themselves. Whatever his moral standards may be, we have at least the satisfaction of feeling (as we do not with Dryden) that he is not consciously lowering them to make an English comedy. […] (Sutherland).

Wing E-3370; W & M 546; Hazlitt, page 45.

Price: $1,500.00

   #257J  Ferrand, Jacques Ferrand, medecin

EROTOMANIA or A treatise discoursing of the essence, causes, symptomes, prognosticks, and cure of love, or Erotiqve melancholy. Written by Iames Ferrand Dr. of Physick

Oxford: by L. Lichfield to be sold by Edward Forrest, 1640,  First Edition in English. This copy is neatly bound in 19th century calf with a gilt spine. it is quite a lovely copy.

This book is filled with details chosen on account of the personal motives and life ex- perience of the author. A close reading of Ferrand’s treatise (in particular a careful comparison of the two editions) reveals that he had to deal with criticism from both the religious establishment (the Catholic Church) and the academic establishment (his colleagues in the Paris medical faculty)

“Climate, diet and physical activity (three of the six “non-natural IMG_0893causes”) were the main elements controlling an individual’s health8. However, a reading of descriptions of the lifestyle which is most likely to lead to being infected by love melancholy makes it clear that the disease was characteristic of a specific social class. Wine, white bread, eggs, rich meats (especially white meat and stuffed poultry), nuts and most sweets were thought to be prob- lematic. Aphrodisiac foods such as honey, exotic fruits, cakes and sweet wines were considered to be extremely dangerous.

SMALL OCTAVO (5 3/4 x 3 5/8″). a-b⁸ c⁴ A-Z⁸.. Translated from the French by Edmund Chilmead.

Price: $4,500.00

  515F#784 Huet, Pierre-Daniel (1630-1721)

The history of romances. An enquiry into their original; instructions for composing them; an account of the most eminent authors; With Characters, and Curious Observations upon the Best Performances of that Kind. Written in Latin by Huetius; made English by Mr. Stephen Lewis.

London: printed for J. Hooke, at the Flower-de-Luce, and T. Caldecott, at the Sun; both against St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleetstreet, 1715.

Octavo. 5 1/2 X 3 3/4 inches [8],xi,[1],144,143-149,[1]p. ;

First Edition ESTC Citation No. T126113(O, CSmH, and ABu report the [8] preliminary pages with two dedication leaves after the tp. Some copies have 2 inserted dedication leaves between the title page [A2] and the Preface [A3], not present in this copy, as in some other copies we have traced, e.g. University of Michigan, [see Google Books-on-line], and they were certainly never present in this copy. )

This copy is bound in full modern panelled calf, it is a very nice copy. Huet translated the pastorals of Longus, wrote a tale called Diane de Castro, and gave with his Traitté de l’origine des romans (1670), his Treatise on the Origin of Romances the first world history of fiction. On being appointed assistant tutor to the Dauphin in 1670, he edited, with the assistance of Anne Lefêvre, afterwards Madame Dacier, the well-known edition of the Delphin Classics.

“I shall not undertake to […] examine whether Amadis de Gaul were originally from Spain, Flanders, or France; and whether the Romance of Tiel Ulespiegel be a Translation from the German; or in what Language the Romance of the Seven Wise Men of Greece was first written […]. It shall suffice if I tell you, that all these Works which Ignorance has given Birth to, carried along with them the Marks of their Original, and were no other than a Complication of Fictions, grossly cast together in the greatest Confusion, and infinitely short of the Excellent Degree of Art and Elegance, to which the French Nation is now arrived in Romances.” The History of Romances […] Written in Latin by Huetius; Made English by Stephen Lewis (1715), p.136-38. Item #784

Price: $ 950.00

122F         Mary de la Rivière Manley        1663-1724

Secret memoirs and manners of several persons of quality of both sexes. From the New Atalantis, an island in the Mediteranean. 

London: Printed for John Morphew, and J. Woodward, 1709    $1500

Octavo      7 1/2 X4 3/4 inches I. A4, B-Q8, R4.  Second edition.          This jewel of a book is

expertly bound in antique style full paneled calf with a gilt spine. It is a lovely copy indeed.

The most important of the scandal chronicles of the early eighteenth century, a form made popular and practiced with considerable success by Mrs. Manley and Eliza Haywood.

Mrs. Manley was important in her day not only as a novelist, but as a Tory propagandist.

Her fiction “exhibited her taste for intrigue, and impudently slandered many persons of note, especially those of Whiggish proclivities.” – D.N.B. “Mrs. Manley’s scandalous ‘revelations’ appealed immediately to the prurient curiosity of her first audience ; but they continued to be read because they succeeded in providing certain satisfactions fundamental to fiction itself. In other words, the scandal novel or ‘chronicle’ of Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood was a successful form, a tested commercial pattern, because it presented an opportunity for its readers to participate vicariously in an erotically exciting and glittering fantasy world of aristocratic corruption and promiscuity.” – Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson.

The story concerns the return to earth of the goddess of justice, Astrea, to gather information about private and public behavior on the island of Atalantis. Delarivier Manley drew on her own experiences as well as on an obsessive observation of her milieu to produce this fast-paced narrative of political and erotic intrigue.   New Atalantis (1709) is an early and influential example of satirical political writing by a woman. It was suppressed on the grounds of its scandalous nature and Manley (1663-1724) was arrested and tried.   Astrea [Justice] descends on the island of Atalantis, meets her mother Virtue, who tries to escape this world of »Interest« in which even the lovers have deserted her. Both visit Angela [London]. Lady Intelligence comments on all stories of interest. p.107: the sequel of »Histories« turns into the old type of satire with numerous scandals just being mentioned (e.g. short remarks on visitors of a horse race or coaches in the Prado [Hyde-Park]). The stories are leveled against leading Whig politicians – they seduce and ruin women. Yet detailed analysis of situations and considerations on actions which could be taken by potential victims. Even the weakest female victims get their chances to win (and gain decent marriages) the more desperate we are about strategic mistakes and a loss of virtue which prevents the heroines from taking the necessary steps. The stories have been praised for their »warmth« and breathtaking turns.

Manley was taken into custody nine days after the publication of the second volume of Secret Memories and Manners of several Persons of Quality of Both Sexes, from the New Atalantis, an island in the Mediterranean on 29 October 1709. Manley apparently surrendered herself after a secretary John Morphew and John Woodward and printer John Barber had been detained. Four days later the latter were discharged, but Manley remained in custody until 5 November when she was released on bail. After several continuations of the case, she was tried and discharged on 13 February 1710. Rivella provides the only account of the case itself in which Manley claims she defended herself on grounds that her information came by ‘inspiration’ and rebuked her judges for bringing ‘w woman to her trial for writing a few amorous trifles’ (pp. 110-11). This and the first volume which appeared in May 1709 were Romans a clef with separately printed keys. Each offered a succession of narratives of seduction and betrayal by notorious Whig grandees to Astrea, an allegorical figure of justice, by largely female narrators, including an allegorical figure of Intelligence and a midwife. In Rivella, Manley claims that her trial led her to conclude that ‘politics is not the business of a woman’ (p. 112) and that thereafter she turned exclusively to stories of love.

Delarivier Manley was in her day as well-known and potent a political satirist as her friend and co-editor Jonathan Swift. A fervent Tory, Manley skilfully interweaves sexual and political allegory in the tradition of the roman a clef in an acerbic vilification of her Whig opponents. The book’s publication in 1709 – fittingly the year of the collapse of the Whig ministry – caused a scandal which led to the arrest of the author, publisher and printer.

The book exposed the relationship of Queen Anne and one of her advisers, Sarah Churchill. Along with this, Manley’s piece examined the idea of female intimacy and its implications. The implications of female intimacy are important to Manley because of the many rumours of the influence that Churchill held over Queen Anne.                  ESTC T075114; McBurney 45a; Morgan 459.

)§(§)§(

9) 103g Philips, Katherine.1631-1664

Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus

 London: printed by W.B. for Bernard Lintott, 1705                       $2,500

Octavo,6.75 X 3.75 inches.  First edition A-R8  Bound in original calf totally un-restored a very nice original condition copy with only some browning, spotting and damp staining, It is a very good copy.

It is housed in a custom Box.

    10) 376J Mary Pix 1666-1720

The conquest of Spain: a tragedy. As it is Acted by Her Majesty’s Servants at the Queen’s Theatre In the Hay-Market 

London : printed for Richard Wellington, at the Dolphin and Crown in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1705.      $2,500

Quarto [A]-K4.   First Edition . (Anonymous. By Mary Pix. Adapted from “All’s lost by lust”, by William Rowley)

Inspired by Aphra Behn, Mary Pix was among the most popular playwrights on the 17th-century theatre circuit, but fell out of fashion. 

“It is so rare to find a play from that period that’s powered by a funny female protagonist. I was immensely surprised by the brilliance of the writing. It is witty and forthright. Pix was writing plays that not only had more women in the cast than men but women who were managing their destinies.”

Pix was born in 1666, the year of the Great Fire of London, and grew up in the culturally rich time of Charles II. With the prolific Aphra Behn (1640-1689) as her role model, Pix burst on to the London theatre and literary scene in 1696 with two plays – one a tragedy: Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperor of the Turks, the other a farce – The Spanish Wives. Pix also wrote a novel – The Inhuman Cardinal.

Her subsequent plays, mostly comedies, became a staple in the repertory of Thomas Betterton’s company Duke’s at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and later at the Queen’s Theatre. She wrote primarily for particular actors, such as Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle, who were hugely popular and encouraged a whole generation of women writers.

In a patriarchal world dominated by self-important men, making a mark as a woman was an uphill struggle. “There was resistance to all achieving women in the 18th century, a lot of huffing and puffing by overbearing male chauvinists,” says Bush-Bailey.

“Luckily for Pix and the other women playwrights of that time, the leading actresses were powerful and influential. I think it was they who mentored people such as Pix and Congreve.”

Davies believes the women playwrights of the 1700s – Susanna Centlivre, Catherine Trotter Cockburn, Delarivier Manley and Hannah Cowley – “unquestionably” held their own against the men who would put them down. “What’s difficult is that they were attacked for daring to write plays at all,” she says.

One of the most blatant examples of male hostility came in the form of an anonymously written parody entitled The Female Wits in 1696, in which Mary Pix was caricatured as “Mrs Wellfed, a fat female author, a sociable, well-natur’d companion that will not suffer martyrdom rather than take off three bumpers [alcoholic drinks] in a hand”.

While Pix’s sociability and taste for good food and wine was common knowledge, she was known to be a universally popular member of the London literary and theatrical circuit.

“The Female Wits was probably written, with malice, by George Powell of the Drury Lane Company,” says Bush-Bailey. “It was a cheap, satirical jibe at the successful women playwrights of the time, making out they were all bitching behind each others’ backs. So far as one can tell, it was just spiteful and scurrilous.”

Mary Pix (1666 – 17 May 1709) was an English novelist and playwright. As an admirer of Aphra Behn and colleague of Susanna Centlivre, Pix has been called “a link between women writers of the Restoration and Augustan periods”.

The Dramatis personae from a 1699 edition of Pix’s The False Friend.

Mary Griffith Pix was born in 1666, the daughter of a rector, musician and Headmaster of the Royal Latin School, Buckingham, Buckinghamshire; her father, Roger Griffith, died when she was very young, but Mary and her mother continued to live in the schoolhouse after his death. She was courted by her father’s successor Thomas Dalby, but he left with the outbreak of smallpox in town, just one year after the mysterious fire that burned the schoolhouse. Rumour had it that Mary and Dalby had been making love rather energetically and overturned a candle which set fire to the bedroom.

In 1684, at the age of 18, Mary Griffith married George Pix (a merchant tailor from Hawkhurst, Kent). The couple moved to his country estate in Kent. Her first son, George (b. 1689), died very young in 1690.[3] The next year the couple moved to London and she gave birth to another son, William (b. 1691).

In 1696, when Pix was thirty years old, she first emerged as a professional writer, publishing The Inhumane Cardinal; or, Innocence Betrayed, her first and only novel, as well as two plays, Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperour of the Turks and The Spanish Wives.

Though from quite different backgrounds, Pix quickly became associated with two other playwrights who emerged in the same year: Delariviere Manley and Catherine Trotter. The three female playwrights attained enough public success that they were criticised in the form of an anonymous satirical play The Female Wits (1696). Mary Pix appears as “Mrs. Wellfed one that represents a fat, female author. A good rather sociable, well-matured companion that would not suffer martyrdom rather than take off three bumpers in a hand”.[4] She is depicted as an ignorant woman, though amiable and unpretentious. Pix is summarised as “foolish and openhearted”.

Her first play was put on stage in 1696 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, near her house in London but when that same theatrical company performed The Female Wits, she moved to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. They said of her that “she has boldly given us an essay of her talent … and not without success, though with little profit to herself”. (Morgan, 1991: xii).

In the season of 1697–1698, Pix became involved in a plagiarism scandal with George Powell. Powell was a rival playwright and the manager of the Drury Lane theatrical company. Pix sent her play, The Deceiver Deceived to Powell’s company, as a possible drama for them to perform. Powell rejected the play but kept the manuscript and then proceeded to write and perform a play called The Imposture Defeated, which had a plot and main character taken directly from The Deceiver Deceived. In the following public backlash, Pix accused Powell of stealing her work and Powell claimed that instead he and Pix had both drawn their plays from the same source material, an unnamed novel. In 1698, an anonymous writer, now believed to be Powell, published a letter called “To the Ingenious Mr. _____.” which attacked Pix and her fellow female playwright Trotter. The letter attempted to malign Pix on various issues, such as her spelling and presumption in publishing her writing. Though Pix’s public reputation was not damaged and she continued writing after the plagiarism scandal, she stopped putting her name on her work and after 1699 she only included her name on one play, in spite of the fact that she is believed to have written at least seven more. Scholars still discuss the attribution of plays to Pix, notably whether or not she wrote Zelmane; or, The Corinthian Queen (1705).

In May 1707 Pix published A Poem, Humbly Inscrib’d to the Lords Commissioners for the Union of the Two Kingdoms. This would be her final appearance in print. She died two years later.

Few of the female playwrights of Mary Pix’s time came from a theatrical background and none came from the aristocracy: within a century, most successful actresses and female authors came from a familiar tradition of literature and theatre but Mary Pix and her contemporaries were from outside this world and had little in common with one another apart from a love for literature and a middle-class background.

At the time of Mary Pix, “The ideal of the one-breadwinner family had not yet become dominant”, whereas in 18th-century families it was normal for the woman to stay at home taking care of the children, house and servants, in Restoration England husband and wife worked together in familiar enterprises that sustained them both and female playwrights earned the same wage as their male counterparts.

Morgan also points out that “till the close of the period, authorship was not generally advertised on playbills, nor always proclaimed when plays were printed”, which made it easier for female authors to hide their identity so as to be more easily accepted among the most conservative audiences.

As Morgan states, “plays were valued according to how they performed and not by who wrote them. When authorship ―female or otherwise― remained a matter of passing interest, female playwrights were in an open and equal market with their male colleagues”.

Pix’s plays were very successful among contemporary audiences. Each play ran for at least four to five nights and some were even brought back for additional shows years later.[10] Her tragedies were quite popular, because she managed to mix extreme action with melting love scenes. Many critics believed that Pix’s best pieces were her comedies. Pix’s comedic work was lively and full of double plots, intrigue, confusion, songs, dances and humorous disguise. An Encyclopaedia of British Women Writers (1998) points out that

Forced or unhappy marriages appear frequently and prominently in the comedies. Pix is not, however, writing polemics against the forced marriage but using it as a plot device and sentimentalizing the unhappily married person, who is sometimes rescued and married more satisfactorily.”(Schlueter & Schlueter, 1998: 513)

Although some contemporary women writers, like Aphra Behn, have been rediscovered, even the most specialised scholars have little knowledge of works by writers such as Catherine Trotter, Delarivier Manley or Mary Pix, despite the fact that plays like The Beau Defeated (1700), present with a wider range of female characters than plays written by men at the time. Pix’s plays generally had eight or nine female roles, while plays by male writers only had two or three.[

A production of The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich (or The Beau Defeated) played as part of the 2018 season at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Pix produced one novel and seven plays. There are four other plays that were published anonymously, that are generally attributed to her.

Melinda Finberg notes that “a frequent motif in all her works is sexual violence and female victimization” – be that rape or murder (in the tragedies) or forcible confinement or the threat of rape (in the comedies).

^ Kramer, Annette (June 1994). “Mary Pix’s Nebulous Relationship to Zelmane”. Notes and Queries. 41 (2): 186–187. doi:10.1093/nq/41-2-186

PIX, Mrs. MARY (1666–1720?), dramatist, born in 1666 at Nettlebed in Oxfordshire, was daughter of the Rev. Roger Griffith, vicar of that place. Her mother, whose maiden name was Lucy Berriman, claimed descent from the ‘very considerable family of the Wallis’s.’ In the dedication of ‘The Spanish Wives’ Mrs. Pix speaks of meeting Colonel Tipping ‘at Soundess,’ or Soundness. This house, which was close to Nettlebed, was the property of John Wallis, eldest son of the mathematician. Mary Griffith’s father died before 1684, and on 24 July in that year she married in London, at St. Saviour’s, Benetfink, George Pix (b. 1660), a merchant tailor of St. Augustine’s parish. His family was connected with Hawkhurst, Kent. By him she had one child, who was buried at Hawkhurst in 1690.

It was in 1696, in which year Colley Cibber, Mrs. Manley, Catharine Cockburn (Mrs. Trotter), and Lord Lansdowne also made their débuts, that Mrs. Pix first came into public notice. She produced at Dorset Garden, and then printed, a blank-verse tragedy of ‘Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperor of the Turks.’ When it was too late, she discovered that she should have written ‘Ibrahim the Twelfth.’ This play she dedicated to the Hon. Richard Minchall of Bourton, a neighbour of her country days. In the same year (1696) Mary Pix published a novel, ‘The Inhuman Cardinal,’ and a farce, ‘The Spanish Wives,’ which had enjoyed a very considerable success at Dorset Garden.

From this point she devoted herself to dramatic authorship with more activity than had been shown before her time by any woman except Mrs. Afra Behn [q. v.] In 1697 she produced at Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and then published, a comedy of ‘The Innocent Mistress.’ This play, which was very successful, shows the influence of Congreve upon the author, and is the most readable of her productions. The prologue and epilogue were written by Peter Anthony Motteux [q. v.] It was followed the next year by ‘The Deceiver Deceived,’ a comedy which failed, and which involved the poetess in a quarrel. She accused George Powell [q. v.], the actor, of having seen the manuscript of her play, and of having stolen from it in his ‘Imposture Defeated.’ On 8 Sept. 1698 an anonymous ‘Letter to Mr. Congreve’ was published in the interests of Powell, from which it would seem that Congreve had by this time taken Mary Pix under his protection, with Mrs. Trotter, and was to be seen ‘very gravely with his hat over his eyes … together with the two she-things called Poetesses’ (see GOSSE, Life of Congreve, pp. 123–5). Her next play was a tragedy of ‘Queen Catharine,’ brought out at Lincoln’s Inn, and published in 1698. Mrs. Trotter wrote the epilogue. In her own prologue Mary Pix pays a warm tribute to Shakespeare. ‘The False Friend’ followed, at the same house, in 1699; the title of this comedy was borrowed three years later by Vanbrugh.

Hitherto Mary Pix had been careful to put her name on her title-pages or dedications; but the comedy of ‘The Beau Defeated’—undated, but published in 1700—though anonymous, is certainly hers. In 1701 she produced a tragedy of ‘The Double Distress.’ Two more plays have been attributed to Mary Pix by Downes. One of these is ‘The Conquest of Spain,’ an adaptation from Rowley’s ‘All’s lost by Lust,’ which was brought out at the Queen’s theatre in the Haymarket, ran for six nights, and was printed anonymously in 1705 (DOWNE, Roscius Anglicanus, p. 48). Finally, the comedy of the ‘Adventures in Madrid’ was acted at the same house with Mrs. Bracegirdle in the cast, and printed anonymously and without date. It has been attributed by the historians of the drama to 1709; but a copy in the possession of the present writer has a manuscript note of date of publication ‘10 August 1706.’

Nearly all our personal impression of Mary Pix is obtained from a dramatic satire entitled ‘The Female Wits; or, the Triumvirate of Poets.’ This was acted at Drury Lane Theatre about 1697, but apparently not printed until 1704, after the death of the author, Mr. W. M. It was directed at the three women who had just come forward as competitors for dramatic honours—Mrs. Pix, Mrs. Manley, and Mrs. Trotter [see Cockburn, Catharine]. Mrs. Pix, who is described as ‘a fat Female Author, a good, sociable, well-natur’d Companion, that will not suffer Martyrdom rather than take off three Bumpers in a Hand,’ was travestied by Mrs. Powell under the name of ‘Mrs. Wellfed.’

The style of Mrs. Pix confirms the statements of her contemporaries that though, as she says in the dedication of the ‘Spanish Wives,’ she had had an inclination to poetry from childhood, she was without learning of any sort. She is described as ‘foolish and open-hearted,’ and as being ‘big enough to be the Mother of the Muses.’ Her fatness and her love of good wine were matters of notoriety. Her comedies, though coarse, are far more decent than those of Mrs. Behn, and her comic bustle of dialogue is sometimes entertaining. Her tragedies are intolerable. She had not the most superficial idea of the way in which blank verse should be written, pompous prose, broken irregularly into lengths, being her ideal of versification.

The writings of Mary Pix were not collected in her own age, nor have they been reprinted since. Several of them have become exceedingly rare. An anonymous tragedy, ‘The Czar of Muscovy,’ published in 1702, a week after her play of ‘The Double Distress,’ has found its way into lists of her writings, but there is no evidence identifying it with her in any way. She was, however, the author of ‘Violenta, or the Rewards of Virtue, turn’d from Bocacce into Verse,’ 1704.

[Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, 2nd ser. v. 110–3; Vicar-General’s Marriage Licences (Harl. Soc.), 1679–87, p. 173; Baker’s Biogr. Dramatica; Doran’s Annals of the English Stage, i. 243; Mrs. Pix’s works; Genest’s Hist. Account of the Stage.].

  )§(§)§(

331j.#781  Polwheile, Theolophilus

Aὐθέντης, Authentēs. Or A treatise of self-deniall. Wherein the necessity and excellency of it is demonstrated; with several directions for the practice of it. By Theophilus Polwheile, M.A. sometimes of Emmanuel Colledge in Cambridge, now teacher of the Church at Teverton in Devon

London: :printed for Thomas Johnson, and are to be sold by Richard Scott book-seller in Carlisle, 1658.

  First Edition ¶. bound in mid 19th century brown calf, (48) 424 (46) pp. including 8 pp. publisher’s catalog, errata leaf at end, text clean, bright, collated complete, ownership signature of a B. Fuller in an old hand on bottom of title page, probably not that of Bishop William Fuller, but perhaps. Wing (2nd ed.), P2782; Thomason; E.1733[1]. NO US Copy. #331j. Item #781

n 1651 he took the degree of M.A. He was preacher at Carlisle until about 1655 (Dedication to Treatise on Self-deniall). In 1654 he was a member of the committee for ejecting scandalous ministers in the four northern counties of Cumberland, Durham, Northumberland, and Westmoreland. From that year until 1660, when he was driven from the living, he held the rectory of the portions of Clare and Tidcombe at Tiverton. The statement of the Rev. John Walker, in ‘The Sufferings of the Clergy,’ that he allowed the parsonage-house to fall into ruins, is confuted in Calamy’s ‘Continuation of Baxter’s Life and Times’ (i. 260–1). Polwhele sympathised with the religious views of the independents, and after the Restoration he was often in trouble for his religious opinions. After the declaration of James II the Steps meeting-house was built at Tiverton for the members of the independent body; he was appointed its first minister, and, on account of his age, Samuel Bartlett was appointed his assistant. He was buried in the churchyard of St. Peter, Tiverton, on 3 April 1689. His wife was a daughter of the Rev. William Benn of Dorchester. Their daughter married the Rev. Stephen Lobb

¶ Polwheile was a minister based mainly in Tiverton; the year after this was published, in the Restoration of 1660, he was ejected from his ministerial position for his religious views and for his sympathies with the Independents, who advocated for local control and for a certain freedom of religion for those who were not Catholic; because of this, he was often in trouble until the Declaration of Indulgence by James II in 1687, establishing freedom of religion in England (James II being Catholic). Polwheile died in 1689. Very Good. (DNB).

Price: $1,800.00

  12) 323J Madeleine Vigneron (1628-1667)

La vie et la conduite spirituelle de Mademoiselle M. Vigneron. Suivant les mémoires qu’elle en a laissez par l’ordre de son directeur (M. Bourdin). [Arranged and edited by him.].

Paris: Chez Pierre de Launay, 1689.  $2,000

  Octavo 7 x 4 3/4 inches ã8 e8 A-2R8 (2R8 blank). Second and preferred edition first published in 1679.     This copy is bound in contemporary brown calf, five raised bands on spine, gilt floral tools in the compartments, second compartment titled in gilt; corners and spine extremities worn; three old joint repairs; on the front binder’s blank is an early ownership four-line inscription in French dated 1704, of

Sister Monique Vanden Heuvel, at the priory of Sion de Vilvoorde (Belgium).

Overall a fine copy.

This is the stirring journal that Madeleine Vigneron , member of the Third Order of the Minims of St. Francis of Paola, she began to keep it in 1653 and continued until her premature death, (1667) It was first published in 1679 and again in the present second, and final, edition which is more complete than the first. Added are Madeleine’s series of 78 letters representing her spiritual correspondence.IMG_1410

In these autobiographical writings, which were collected and published by her Director, the Minim Matthieu Bourdin, Madeleine speaks of the illnesses that plagued her since childhood and greatly handicapped her throughout a life that she dedicated to God by caring for the poor. She received admirable lights on the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ, on the mysteries of the spiritual life. The hagiographers have remarked her austerity, her patience, her insatiable desire to suffer for God. Those who knew her perceived in her a virtuous life that impressed them.

This is a very rare book: the combined resources of NUC and OCLC locate only one copy in America, at the University of Dayton which also holds the only American copy of the 1679 edition.

§ Cioranescu 66466 (the 1679 edition).

checklist of early modern writings by nuns

Carr, Thomas M., “A Checklist of Published Writings in French by Early Modern Nuns” (2007). French Language and Literature Papers. 52.

)§(§)§(

End

This is a link to the rest of my books.

jamesgray2@me.com                  617*678*4517

Half price or less SALE Price DEFERED BILLING Early Modern Books by Women/ about them. Author INDEX 1) 415J #779 . Anon.), Waring, Robert 2)  342 J Attributed to James Wright…

[justanothercinemaniac]

Epic Movie (Re)Watch #173 - X-Men: Days of Future Past

Spoilers Below

Have I seen it before: Yes

Did I like it then: Yes.

Do I remember it: Yes.

Did I see it in theaters: Yes.

Was it a movie I saw since August 22nd, 2009: Yes. #294

Format: Blu-ray

1) The film marks Bryan Singer’s return to the franchise he helped to start, making it his first X-Men film since X2. He was a producer on X-Men: First Class and originally Matthew Vaughn was slated to direct this film. But Vaughn dropped out to speak with Lucasfilm about Star Wars: Episode VII before focusing his efforts on Kingsman: The Secret Service allowing Singer to step back into the director’s chair.

2) Magneto, Xavier, every mutant in the X-Men films (especially the original trilogy) had fears about war. The X-Men tried to avoid it while Magneto was preparing to win it. Well now everyone’s worst fears have come to past in a dark and desolate future were Magneto was right and the X-Men are forced to band together.

3) John Ottman’s theme from X2 plays in the opening credits, making this film feel like a triumphant return to form from the get go. It fills the audience with an energy, hope, and even nostalgia that helps make the film as great as it is. While I absolutely adore Henry Jackman’s score for First Class, Ottman’s theme has now become the (unofficial?) theme for the franchise in a lot of ways.

4) We’re off to a strong start with the movie’s opening action sequence.

This film features - by far - the best action sequences in the entire franchise. It embraces the powers of its mutant characters in a way no film has before it. This leads to incredible visuals and extended action scenes which never lose the audiences interest. It does what some films (The Last Stand) have failed to do before: show off the X-Men’s powers in incredible and memorable ways. The opening action sequence alone feels like something out of a comic book or (dare I say?) the 90s animated series. Characters like Iceman and Colossus have finally reached the full potential of their mutant powers, making good on a promise any X-Men film makes. New characters too have small roles but are wildly memorable. Blink, Sunspot, Warpath, and Bishop come across as unique with not a lot of lines and not a lot of screen time. But they have an impact because of the visuals of their powers/fighting styles.

From a storytelling standpoint the opening scene also works to set the stakes of the film. We understand immediately how much of a threat these sentinels are, they are able to massacre an entire squad of mutants with relative ease. If it weren’t for Kitty’s ability to send people back in time this war would be over very quickly. The dark tone and sense of dread this future has is established immediately through the action sequence, making the rest of the film carry that weight in a conflict driven/interesting way.

5) I am so impressed and so grateful that this film was able to get all the original cast back they wanted. Kelsey Grammer couldn’t participate because of scheduling conflicts with Transformers: Age of Extinction (ew), but most of these actors have gained a higher price tag since X-Men: The Last Stand. Ellen Page in particular is a critically acclaimed and Oscar nominated actress who comes back for what is essentially a supporting role, but she (like the rest of the returning cast) commits to it all the same. It provides a nice amount of fan service which also feeds into the story and I love it.

6) It is so weird for me to hear Patrick Stewart Xavier talk about this.

Professor X: “I knew [Mystique] as Raven...she was like a sister to me.”

He never talked about her like that in the original trilogy, it first came up in the First Class prequel. But it adds something to Professor X’s character: he walls parts of himself and his past off for the sake of the future.

Note: In this post Patrick Stewart will be referred to as Professor X and James McAvoy will be referred to as Charles.

7) The decision to send Logan back instead of Kitty might upset Kitty Pryde fans and comic book purists (as Kitty was the one to go back in the original storyline), but I think it makes the most amount of sense. The original story was published in the 80s or 90s and Kitty came back from 2013 into her younger body. Movie Kitty has no younger body in 1973 but Logan does. So that’s why it makes sense from an in world decision, but also from a filmmaking standpoint it makes sense too. Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine is the face of the X-Men films primarily, with only one film up to this point not having him in a prominent role. So it makes sense to put stock in his character as you have in the past. My biggest regret though is that I do LOVE Kitty Pryde and so it would’ve been nice to see her do more, but she still serves a more important role in this film than she does in The Last Stand.

8) I absolutely love this.

Professor X: “Logan, you’re going to have to do for me what I once did for you.”

I am a sucker for character development and having watched now seven X-Men films in a row seeing Wolverine in this role is incredible to me. This was the guy who originally wanted to ditch the X-Men, who was a loner and who primarily looked out for Rogue. Even with that he was mostly out for himself? Now. He’s invested. He’s older, a bit wiser (if not perfect), and gets to repay the kindness Professor X showed him by helping Charles along his way. It puts him in a new role, a role he’s not all too comfortable with, but it is just so damn interesting and I love everything about it.

9) The extended prologue in 2023 as well as the fact that this film will cut back to that time occasionally helps make this film a worthy ending to the cast and characters first introduced in X-Men. It could’ve ended that series entirely, a farewell tour for all the actors we came to love in their respective parts. Despite this, at its core this film - more than anything else - is a sequel/continuation of the story set in place by X-Men: First Class. Doing both of these things is no easy feat but the film is able to pul it off beautifully.

10) Peter Dinklage as Bolivar Trask.

Dinklage is one of the finest American actors around right now, notable for his work in “Game of Thrones”. And his performance as the villainous Trask gives us the best X-Men villain since William Stryker in X2. While I do LOVE Sebastian Shaw in First Class, there is something fundamentally more unsettling in Dinklage’s performance. He is chilling, focused, intimidating. You know this is not a guy you want to mess with. And Dinklage himself has a unique look on the character. This according to IMDb.

According to Peter Dinklage, Bryan Singer picked him to play Bolivar Trask because of his height, stating, "With my dwarfism, I'm a bit of a mutant. I can't move metal or anything, but I thought of it as self-loathing. Deep down, Trask is quite sensitive about that aspect of himself."

11) Mystique in Saigon.

The scene of Mystique saving a group of mutants in Saigon from being shipped off to Trask (including Lucas Till’s return as Havok) works really well for a number of reasons. First of all: it helps not only re-introduce her character but also her motivations for this film. She has gone through a lot between First Class and now so this scene helps to establish just exactly this NEW Mystique is. She’s one with a lot of pain, working towards avenging the loss of her friends. Mystique is also much more of a fighter in this film than in First Class, with her choreography and skills leaning much closer to what we would expect from Rebecca Romijn. She has been pushed up to the point of no return but hasn’t crossed that line yet and that’s what this film is about. If she’s going to become the Mystique she does in the original timeline or if this is her second chance. The writing for her character is conflict filled and amazing, I absolutely love it.

12) Logan really needs to give people a spoiler warning about their futures.

Logan [before punching out Beast]: “You and I are going to be good friends.”

13) And because he’s Wolverine, it doesn’t take long for Logan to cause shit.

(GIFs originally posted by @ofsagitta)

14) James McAvoy’s return as Charles Xavier.

So First Class was really about Erik becoming Magneto, this is about Charles becoming Professor X. We have never seen the character so low, he has never been so low. He is a broken man with the events of First Class changing him more than he - or the audience - even expected. He tried soldiering on but the war in Vietnam led to his school being shut down. Charles is wallowing in pain, in self pity, he is exactly what Professor X said he was: as lost as Logan used to be. Hell, he’s a drug addict! The serum to give him his legs is a not-so-subtle parallel for drug use. There is a great conflict there, a great pain, and it leads to an incredible story.

15) This is kind of a perfect representation of how continuity works in the X-Men films. The movie tries to remember something from the past, tries to have continuity track, only to get something about it wrong and make everything more confusing.

(GIFs originally posted by @mcavoying)

In fairness the original line in the First Class script WAS, “Fuck off!” but First Class was released three years before Days of Future Past meaning they knew that wasn’t the actual line for a while. Granted I’m probably just nitpicking.

16) In this film we learn that Emma Frost, Zoe-Kravitz-Angel (as opposed to the Angel from The Last Stand and Apocalypse), Azazel & Banshee are all dead by the hands of Bolivar Trask. Which is sickening and heartbreaking but left a unique opportunity which Apocalypse never took with the characters. I’ll talk about it briefly now but go in depth during my Apocalypse post but in the comics Apocalypse’s Four Horsemen are resurrected dead characters. Using this to bring back the four mutants I just listed would have been a smart move I think.

17) Let’s share what IMDb has to say about the rights to Quicksilver:

The addition of Evan Peters as Pietro Maximoff/Quicksilver to the cast sparked wide discussion over the direction of the character who is also slated to appear in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). Quicksilver had been discussed previously as a potential character in both X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) and The Avengers (2012), but legal complexities over the license to the character resulted in his omission from both films. However, in May 2013 both Marvel and Fox Studios announced a resolution to the previous legal issues, and that Quicksilver would appear in this film as well as an Avengers sequel, though under certain parameters: no reference to Quicksilver's membership in the Avengers can be made in an "X-Men" film, and no allusion to his relations to the X-Men or Magneto (the character's father) can be made in an "Avengers" film; the rights agreement between Fox and Marvel even goes so far as to stipulate the character cannot be referred to as a "mutant" in any Marvel film. Additionally, the day after the announcement of Peters's casting, Marvel and Fox entered into a legal standoff over provisions of the rights agreement for the character, including the issue of whether Peters would be allowed to portray Quicksilver in any other film outside the "X-Men" franchise, possibly necessitating a second actor to play Quicksilver in any Marvel film, resulting in two different versions of the same character appearing in two competing film series. Ultimately, Fox and Marvel decided to cast different actors in the part for the "X-Men" and "Avengers" films, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson taking on the role in the latter sequel, thus preventing any connection between the two franchises and keeping the X-Men confined to a separate universe from those of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

18) Evan Peters as Quicksilver.

No, I said EVAN PETERS as Quicksilver!

That’s better. Anyways: Evan Peters’ performance as the speedster is the definite scene stealer in the film. His screen time doesn’t amount to much - with a more significant role in 2016′s X-Men Apocalypse - but every time he’s on screen you are drawn to him. The character is wonderfully fun, with his smart assery amusing to us as the audience without being totally annoying. There’s a unique and vibrant energy that Peters brings to the character which is 100% captivating. By far one of the best new elements of this film.

19) Peter Parker could learn something from this.

Quicksilver [to Erik]: “I’m holding your neck so you don’t get whiplash.”

Erik: “What?”

Quicksilver: “Whiiiiiiplasssssshhhh!”

20) Okay, so Logan knocks out a bunch of Pentagon guards with a frying pan. Is it wrong that this is the only thing I could think of?

21) Oh boy....

(Screenshot taken from a GIF set originally posted by @barrel--rider)

22) It is unique and conflict filled to see Charles filled with such intense hate/loathing towards Erik when Professor X always has hope for his, “old friend,” Magneto.

Charles [upon first meeting Erik]: “I’m never getting inside that head again.”

Note: In this recap Michael Fassbender’s character shall be referred to as Erik while Ian McKellen’s shall be referred to as Magneto.

23) THE QUICKSILVER SCENE!!!!!

This is without a doubt the best scene in the entire film and it is absolutely brilliant across the board. Like the earlier fight scenes it takes the concept of mutant powers and is able to translate it into absolutely phenomenal visuals. From a technical standpoint the scene is a masterpiece, as the seams are practically invisible. It’s hard to make, but you don’t want the audience to know that. Which makes it all the more impressive that it seems so relaxed. The scene pulls your interest and never lets go, using music and point of view in absolutely stellar ways. How boring would this scene have been if it were from Erik’s point of view? Or Charles’? The most interesting way to do this moment is through Quicksilver and that’s what we get. It is intelligent, organic, full of small surprises, and despite its short length is strong as hell. If they were to teach this class in film schools some day, I would not be surprised.

Although it does raise the question: why don’t they just bring Quicksilver to Paris? It seems like he’d be really helpful.

24)

Erik [looking at Wolverine’s bone claws]: “Imagine if they were metal.”

25) Erik and Charles having it outis very key to the film. Right now the audience sees Erik as the one who messed up. Taking away Charles’ legs, getting arrested for killing the president, etc. But Charles needs to know he’s made some pretty crucial mistakes.

Charles [to Erik]: “You abandoned me!”

Erik [after bringing up the dead mutants]: “We were supposed to protect them!...You abandoned us all!”

26) A part of me gets why Raven seduces the Vietnamese general in order to take his place at the pace conference. Another part of me lives in a post Wonder Woman world and A) never sees male characters doing this and B) thinks there was probably a different way she could’ve gotten into the peace conference. And this isn’t a comment on a woman using her sexuality in a way she is comfortable with, this is a comment on men trying to shoehorn scenes were a woman’s defining feature is her sexuality.

(GIF originally posted by @marshmallow-the-vampire-slayer)

27) I love the added conspiracy theory that JFK was a mutant. I remember reading a promotional material at the time that Bobby Kennedy was a mutant too and that’s why he was assassinated. I’m a nut for conspiracy theories though.

28) Okay, I just need to take a minute to geek out about HOW HAPPY RAVEN IS TO SEE CHARLES!!!!

29) And this is the turning point of the film.

Wolverine gets rocky and weak when he sees Stryker, injuring Kitty in 2023

Erik tries to kill Mystique

The world can’t deny the existence of mutants anymore and reacts with fear

Charles & Erik are now against each other again

Trask gets Raven’s blood

The tone of that is not lost. There’s a sense of darkness and dread which falls upon the film as it moves forward. It has an impact on the audience and helps to raise the stakes.

30) Okay, this is funny as hell to me. In an effort to calm Logan down:

(GIFs originally posted by @marvelheroesdaily)

31) Hey look, a Bryan Singer cameo!

So now in the X-Men universe, Bryan Singer is someone who first introduces mutants to the larger world through his movies. How meta.

32)

Erik [after Mystique pulls him into a phone booth and holds a knife to his throat]: “It’s been a long time since we were this close.”

(GIF originally posted by @rocktheholygrail)

I don’t know why, but I don’t like the idea of an Erik/Mystique relationship. Maybe it’s just a hold over from how I felt about their seduction scene in First Class.

33) And this right here is Mystique’s motivation, clearer than before.

Mystique: “I’ve seen too many friends die, Erik. I don’t want a war. I only want the man who murdered them.”

Mystique is no longer an idealist. She does not subscribe to Charles’ or Erik’s way of thinking. She is on her own now, which she said in the very beginning of the film. It makes her character and the conflict she has all the more interesting.

34) The first step in Charles accepting who he is comes from accepting his powers. He tries Cerebro, but it’s too much at first. All he has is pain and suffering. But then - and I can’t understate how much I love this - Logan helps guide him.

Logan: “I was your most helpless student.”

Logan is able to guide him, showing off not only his own growth but also the strength in his relationship with Charles/Professor X. We are reminded of all of Logan’s pain as Charles sees it, but we see now that he has moved past it. It is absolutely incredible for me and leads to an amazing scene.

34) Charles (McAvoy) and Professor X (Stewart) meet.

This scene has much more of an impact now than I was expecting. Charles is at his most broken in life, it will never get worse for him than this. Or so he thinks. He looks into the future and sees just how awful things have gotten and he sees his older self in Professor X. Except when Professor X speaks of the future...he still has faith that it can turn out well. He still has HOPE. Professor X’s endless search for hope has always been his defining feature and it is something he has even in a dark future. It is something Charles has lost and which his older self helps him find again. It is an absolutely beautiful and moving scene, perfect in so many ways. Developing Charles, giving us a peek into the mindset of Professor X, we even get an incredible new theme from composer John Ottman. “Hope (Xavier’s Theme)” I think might be the most moving piece of music in the entire X-Men franchise and I absolutely love it.

35) If you’re a writing student, I suggest you analyze Raven’s character in this film. Particularly the scene where she and Charles are talking about Trask in an airport. It’s an excellent example of how important stakes are to a story and its characters. If a character can leave the scene without what they want and not be devastated, the stakes are too low. Raven’s personal stakes are high as are Charles’. And the fact that Raven doesn’t is still set on this path leaves Charles - in some shape or form - devastated.

36)

Hank [about where his device monitors news]: “Over all three networks. And PBS.”

Wolverine: “All three? Wow.”

Hank: Yeah. And PBS.”

37) The effect of Charles’ discussion with Professor X has an immediate effect and shows that he IS now that man. He is the man who has hope when all is lost, when everything looks grim. He still has faith in people and hope for the best.

38) How powerful do you think this is to hear?

Logan: “Storm, Scott, Jean. Remember those names.”

Charles [after a moment]: “I’ll do my best.”

Logan: “You’re best is enough.”

Can you imagine what that would feel like? This guy from the future telling you that you’re best is enough. Because that’s all we can ever do is our best. And to know that that is enough is just...I cannot tell you how happy I would be in life to hear those words.

39) Thanks to @orsonkrehnnic for this amazing GIF set that perfectly captures this scene:

40) The dual climaxes are edited between wonderful, carrying pacing between the two wonderfully and interesting throughout. Cutting between 2023 and 1973 could have been a mess but John Ottman’s editing helps bring the scenes together spectacularly. When one breathes, so does the other, and that’s what works.

41) Logan...

Hank: “In the future, do I make it?”

Logan: “No.”

(GIF source unknown [if this is your GIF please let me know].)

42) Of course Wolverine still gets his ass kicked by Magneto, even without the metal bones. But I will say that removing him from the final conflict is a strong story choice. Because at this point what’s going on between Erik, Mystique, and Charles isn’t about him. It’s about them. The future is about him but it is much more impactful if it results from a choice by everyday people as opposed to the guy who knows what is about to happen. It’s very smart.

43) If this isn’t a beautiful final line for Ian McKellen’s Magneto I don’t know what is.

(GIF originally posted by @hughxjackman)

44) I love this.

Charles [when he can control Raven’s mind]: “I’ve been trying to control you since the day we meet. Look at where that’s got us.”

Charles TRUSTS Mystique. He trusts Raven. He lets her make her own choice and she choses life. She choses to be better. She choses not to become the murderer that Mystique is in the future. But her journey isn’t over yet. That won’t come until Apocalypse.

45) Did I mention I love that Charles embraces the Professor X philosophy?

Hank [about Mystique and Erik]: “Are you sure you should let them go?”

Charles: “Yes. I have hope for them.”

46) I cannot begin to express how satisfying this ending is.

I wish I could find a video clip of the ending so I can perfectly illustrate just how amazing it is, but everything about it feels EARNED. Everything about it breathes HOPE. And not just for this movies. It may be most effective while watching these back to back, but I geeked out at seeing everything. Seeing Rogue and Bobby back together, Kitty and Colossus teaching a class together, Kelsey Grammer’s brief cameo as Beast, Storm as a teacher. THEY EVEN GOT JEAN AND SCOTT BACK! Everything about it just feels SO GOOD! The characters we’ve cared for and loved for 14 years now are happy and at peace. And so what if Logan fucks up their lives again? Right now, everything is just good.

Note: I also own The Rogue Cut version of this film, which reintroduced a subplot featuring Anna Paquin’s return as Rogue that was deleted from the theatrical release for pacing issues. I WILL be doing a post about that sometime in the future. I’ve never seen it before so whatever that post looks like it’ll be a first time viewing. That’ll be labeled as 173.1.

There is a chance that X-Men: Days of Future Past is the best X-Men film yet (as in has X-Men in the title, so discounting films like Deadpool and Logan). It seamlessly blends together a large cast of characters from both the original trilogy and the First Class cast in a story which does the same. With strong performances throughout and incredible character drama (ESPECIALLY for Charles), it marks a triumphant return for director Bryan Singer. The action is better than ever, featuring that amazing Quicksilver scene, and it is practically perfectly paced. X-Men: Days of Future Past is an incredible entertaining and emotionally satisfying film all fans of the series - old and new - should watch.

[thecomicsnexus]

NEW TEEN TITANS #1-6 AUGUST 1984 - MARCH 1985 BY MARV WOLFMAN, GEORGE PEREZ, ROMEO TANGHAL, DAN JURGENS AND ADRIENNE ROY

SYNOPSIS (FROM DC DATABASE)

The Titans enjoy a training exercise on Titans Island. The game is tag and their objective is to capture their newest member, Jericho. Jericho keeps the Titans on their toes by alternately taking possession of each of their bodies and using their unique talents against each other. In the middle of the exercise, Raven appears on the scene. In the spirit of fun, Jericho tries to enter Raven's body. Raven, suffering from her own secret inner turmoil, panics and teleports away, forcing Jericho out of her body. Jericho's eyes are wide with terror and he signals to the others about a great darkness that he senses inside of Raven.

Everyone returns to the Tower to discuss the matter. They want to help Raven, but unless she elects to confide in them, they don't know what to do. Raven enters the meeting room and tells them that she is leaving the team. She is dealing with matters of the soul that the others could not hope to understand. The Titans plead with her to let them help, but Raven is adamant. She announces that she will depart the following morning.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Tamaran celebrate the end of the Citadel War. The Royal family sends a special envoy towards Earth to recover Starfire and return her home.

That evening, Jericho visits Raven's room. Raven thanks him for her concern, but tells him that there is nothing anyone can do for her. The journey that she must take is one that she must take alone. After Raven falls asleep, Joey decides to enter her mind in the hopes of learning the exact nature of her problem. He finds his spirit displaced to a nightmarish dreamscape made up of bones and tortured souls. At the center of Raven's soul is the essence of that which has been corrupting her – her demonic father Trigon. The essence of Trigon unleashes a psionic attack that forcibly expels Joey from Raven's body. When he comes to his senses, Raven is gone. The Titans go to Raven's room and Joey tries his best to describe what he experienced (using sign language). The sky outside Titans Tower grows immensely dark and peals of thunder accompanied by an omnipresent sinister laughter echoes all around them.

An impenetrable darkness blankets the Earth, and an unnatural thunderstorm assails New York and Titans Tower, all of which are manifestations of the imminent return of Trigon.

Lilith rejoins the Titans to help them search for the vanished Raven, but first insists they also recruit Wally West, the former Kid Flash, because of his former close relationship with the empath. She then leads the young heroes in a seance, using Raven's rings as a focus. Raven's image appears, but rejects their help, after which the Titans are mystically transported to an Azarath in the throes of destruction. Despite their efforts, Azarath and all its inhabitants are apparently destroyed. 

Back in New York, Raven returns to Earth in a terrifyingly transformed state, with red skin and four eyes like her demonic father, and announces his coming. 

Then Titans Tower is transformed into a solid mass of rock and a gigantic Trigon appears atop it.

Lilith taps the power of Raven's rings to return herself, the Teen Titans, and Arella to Earth, which has been totally taken over by Trigon. The demon himself appears to be asleep atop Titans Tower, while the Titans encounter the transformed Raven in the streets of a hellish version of New York. They attempt to reason with her, then fight her, to no avail.

Jericho is thrown into shock by his attempt to possess her, and Wally West and the other Titans are banished into the realm of their own nightmares. There, each confronts an evil version of him/herself: Nightwing's double shows him a murdered Batman whose death the new Robin, Jason Todd, was unable to prevent, and demands that he return to the role of a twelve-year-old sidekick: Cyborg finds himself regarded as a monster by Sarah Simms and her students, who look to a normal Victor Stone for protection; Wonder Girl watches as her counterpart uses her Amazon strength to kill her husband, Terry Long; Changeling sees himself as a scavenger feeding on the bodies of his deceased loved ones and terrorizing his living friends; Starfire's duplicate taunts her with an image of her homeworld enslaved by the Gordanians, and claims that she can only save the planet by returning to slavery herself; and Wally is witness to his own doppelganger and the transformed Raven making love, after which the evil Kid Flash invites Wally to take his place. On Earth, Raven, Lilith, and Arella see the Titans as a stone column of lost souls.

Raven attacks Lilith and Arella, but finds herself unable to destroy them. Each of the Titans trapped in nightmares of their own worst fears is taunted by his or her evil double until, one by one, they turn on their tormenting duplicates and kill them.

The column they made up on Earth is shaken apart, and the Titans reappear as their own dark sides. Raven believes they are now Trigon's slaves, but Lilith tells her that by forcing the heroes to kill, she has instead sealed her own doom. Raven orders the transformed Titans to destroy Lilith, but instead they unite against Raven herself and slay her. With her death, the Titans return to normal and to their right minds, just as Trigon awakens to take vengeance for the death of his daughter.

Trigon awakens at full strength, possessing the souls of everyone on Earth except the Titans and Arella, and grown to an even more gigantic stature, many times the size of the former Titans Tower.

Maddened beyond endurance, Wally West launches a hopeless attack on the demon with his super-speed, and the other Titans follow him into battle. With minimal effort, Trigon levitates the stone mass that was once their headquarters and sends it hurtling down on all the Titans except Nightwing, whom he then disposes of with a single blow of his staff.

Only Lilith and Arella remain, but Lilith senses the Titans are still alive. Starfire had used her starbolt powers to protect them from the falling tower and now uses them to free them from the rubble. She then locates and revives Nightwing.

In despair, Wally is ready to give up, but the other Titans decide to fight on, even in a seemingly hopeless cause. As they rush to confront their foe, Lilith tries to rouse Arella to action, but fails until Raven's mother suddenly hears the clairvoyant Titan speaking in the voice of the deceased Azar, former spiritual leader of Temple Azarath.

As the Titans approach, Trigon begins to open a gateway to his ravaged home universe, intending to recreate it by allowing it to absorb the dimension containing Earth. While the Titans fight a delaying action, Arella and Lilith, who is being controlled by Azar, replace Raven's rings on her body. Raven's soul-self, now an angelic pure-white entity serving as a conduit for the power of Azar, rises from her still form and grows to envelop Trigon, ultimately destroying him. The form of Raven rises from the battle site and is lost to view, the darkness which had covered the world vanishes, and the Earth returns to normal.

Although the memories of most ordinary people are hazy in the aftermath of Trigon's destruction, the people of New York recognize that the Teen Titans have saved the Earth from the demon, and give them a heroes' reception and a huge parade. Depressed over what has happened to Raven, most of the Titans are in no mood for the festivities, and some are wary of the sudden wave of publicity. Wally West, meanwhile, has returned home to Blue Valley, not telling his parents of his involvement in the battle. Following the parade, the Titans make plans to rebuild their demolished headquarters, Arella leaves to search for her vanished daughter, and Cyborg visits Jericho in the hospital. 

All of the young heroes are haunted by the nightmares induced by Trigon, and finally, at Terry Long's suggestion, they take a second camping trip to the Grand Canyon together to talk things over. Each tells the others about his or her nightmare experience, and Terry offers his advice to the group, as well.

REVIEW

I am not gonna lie to you. This is the Titans’ finest adventure, and they have been struggling since then to repeat their greatest hit. Proof of this is how this story plays into the “Titans Hunt” story. And of course, how often this plot resurfaces around Raven.

Artistically, the story also has a lot of creative spins. Issue #2 was delayed so the penciled pages could look good. The result is pretty good, and the Baxter format helped a lot. In fact, they would have probably not taken that risk with newsprint format.

I don’t like Wolfman and Perez handling Wally West. They struggled a lot with him during their run, and here he looks very weak as a character (beyond his health issue). He has his heroic moments, but in the climax, he stays behind, defeated. It made sense at the time, but a year from this issue he was going to become The Flash (they didn’t know this at the time), so it feels like a very low point for Wally. Sure, not as bad as Heroes in Crisis.

This was also one of my first Titans comics. Not a bad start!

The Jurgens issue is a relaxing issue where the characters can cope with everything that happened during the Terror of Trigon arc.

I give this story a score of 10

[aion-rsa]

New DC Universe Timeline Revealed

https://ift.tt/2otHAxM

The history of the DC Universe will become much more clear, as a comprehensive new timeline has been revealed.

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There are big changes coming to the DC Universe. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, as DC continuity is always in flux, something recently illustrated in the pages of Doomsday Clock, which introduced the concept of a “metaverse” that allows for events of the past to shift as new stories are told. But still, superhero history can be tricky to navigate, and DC Comics is looking to clarify it all with a new timeline.  

Comic book time is a historically fluid affair, operating on a “sliding scale” that allows characters to age only at the pace necessary for the story (if at all), and very few characters are tied to specific dates in history. DC Comics continuity has generally avoided “fixing” its characters to particular points of the past, with notable exceptions for those who were necessarily of their era, like various Western heroes (Jonah Hex, Bat Lash) or the Justice Society of America, whose early adventures take place between approximately 1939 and 1950. It was generally considered that the “modern age” of DC superheroes was roughly a decade old, and everything else moved around the timeline accordingly. But with the post-Flashpoint reboot of the entire DC Universe in 2011, the traditional Justice Society were removed from the “main” DC Earth in favor of a new timeline in which superheroes had only existed for the last five years. 

Since 2016’s Rebirth relaunch of the entire DC line and in the pages of The Flash, Doomsday Clock, and Justice League, the original JSA have started to reappear in the DCU, once again establishing that superheroes have been around since at least the 1940s. To further solidify this reclaimed continuity, DC is creating a comprehensive timeline of major events in DCU history, the first of its kind in roughly a decade, and apparently the most significant continuity-shaping effort since 1994’s continuity altering Zero Hour event.

“When we launched the New 52 there was a lot of great excitement that came along with that,” Dan Didio told the DC Nation panel at NYCC. “For us, it helped validate a lot of things we knew. There’s a large fanbase that loves our characters and they were looking to come in at a place where they were interesting, exciting, and new and fresh. But what might have slipped up was that while we started everything brand new, when we started getting deeper in, we didn’t spend the same amount of time as we did at the start to figure out what worked into continuity and what didn’t.” 

Two key complaints about the New 52 era were the loss of legacy characters like Wally West, and the question of what “happened” in the newly compressed timeline and what didn’t. Issues of legacy (and hints about the timeline) were addressed in 2016’s DC Universe: Rebirth special, and Didio told the NYCC crowd they’re ready to solve the rest.

“We know that what’s important about comics is that immersive sense of what the world is, what’s going on, and how it all works together,” Didio said. “When we see things happening in film and television where they’re building universes, and if we’re not doing it in comics, the place that inspired them, then we seem like we’re failing. So we’re starting to figure out how the DC line works a little bit better now.”

This doesn’t mean that yet another reboot of DC Comics continuity is in the cards. Instead, it sounds like DC will continue their tradition of simply revealing new elements of history or slightly reshuffling chronology as needed, without the need for a New 52-style hard reset. In the wake of Rebirth, DC revealed that Wally West had a career with Barry Allen, a past with Dick Grayson, and a history with the Titans, all of which (including the main era of the Titans itself) had merely been forgotten. Recent events in the pages of Doomsday Clock and Justice League have reintroduced the Justice Society both to continuity and in their original era, while in the pages of Superman, the Legion of Super-Heroes (albeit a rebooted version, to be fair) made their return.

“The whole idea here right now is from our standpoint we are trying to organize our stories in a way that makes cohesive sense from beginning to end, from the start of DC Comics to today,” Didio said. “This timeline will build a continuity that makes sense across all our characters, showing when they were first introduced, how they interact with each other in one big story that will be the basis for all DC Comics for the future...What you see right now is a story that will be consistent, because ultimately, when you guys get all upset or concerned about reboots and restarts, those things occur because the stories stop making sense and the continuity basically slows down our storytelling and nothing’s being done at the same style or pace.”

To keep things on track, DC continuity has been split into “generations.” An intricate spreadsheet was flashed on the NYCC screens that identified four generations of DC storytelling, and hinted at what’s to come.

Perhaps the biggest reveal was that Generation 1 begins not with Superman, but with Wonder Woman. “When Wonder Woman arrives in the United States, that starts our storytelling,” Didio said, before joking, “Oh wait, I don’t remember reading that.” 

It’s true. Diana has never been considered the starting point for DC superheroes, with that honor traditionally going to either Superman or the JSA. But making Wonder Woman DC’s first major costumed hero makes sense, especially given the success of the first Wonder Woman movie, which placed her first appearance during World War I. From the spreadsheet shown on the screen, the Justice Society would form shortly after (and recent events in Justice League place their formation in 1940, roughly around the time of their first publication). Generation 1 appears to end with the disbanding of the Justice Society, but it was tough to get a good look.

“The start of the second generation is the advent of the modern age of heroes, when Superman first appears,” Didio said, before joking “wait a minute, I don’t remember reading that either!” Whatever DC has planned, it seems like key moments in DC history will be explored once this full timeline is revealed.

Generation 2 also looks like it includes the formation of the Justice League, the discovery of the multiverse, the rise of Robin, Batgirl, and the Teen Titans, and all the way through Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Generation 3 appears to include the post-Crisis years, including massive, status quo changing events of the ‘90s and early 2000s like the death of Jason Todd in Death in the Family, the Death of Superman, Grant Morrison’s JLA run, and others, before ending with Flashpoint. 

Generation 4 encompasses the current era of DC storytelling, roughly Rebirth to now, including recent events like Dark Nights: Metal, Doomsday Clock, and Year of the Villain.

This isn’t comprehensive and is only what I could spot at a distance on the screens. And it should be made clear that these “generations” aren’t tied to the eras in which their stories were published. In other words, even though Generation 3 includes stories published between 1986 and 2011, the events themselves almost certainly all took place within the last 5-10 years of DC Comics time. The “sliding scale” of comics time will apply to everything other than the characters and events (such as the formation of the JSA) that they feel are essential to their era.

During other interviews at New York Comic Con, I tried to get notable DC creators to spill some details about the timeline. They were understandably and diplomatically vague.

Joshua Williamson, the architect of the Flash’s past and future since 2016, had this to say when asked if he had considered the new timeline when crafting The Flash: Year One, “ I think next year you'll see where things start to line up, and there's things that will tie back into The Flash: Year One that you'll see were left behind on purpose,” Williamson says. “There were little clues in there, these little clues I've been planting in the book for a long time, so you'll see it will all add up eventually.”

Recently, Justice League even reintroduced the Will Payton version of Starman, not as a contemporary hero, but one who was first active in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In other words, roughly the period when he was first published in a comic series by Roger Stern and Tom Lyle. Justice League, written by Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV, has been re-establishing the very rules and core concepts of the DC Universe from the outset, and hints of DC’s new timeline can be found there.

“The biggest thing that we can say is we're right in the midst of the biggest story that we've told, and all of the threads that we've been playing with the start of Dark Nights: Metal are starting to converge and hit in this really, really big way,” Tynion says. “We have lots more answers to a lot of these questions that we really can't get into. We want people speculating, we want people wondering what we're building and all of that, because we're building something that I think long-term fans of the DC Universe and new fans of the DC Universe are going to be thrilled by. The stories that we're telling are some of the most exciting work that I've done since joining DC Comics eight years ago. It's freaking amazing working with Scott and bringing it all to life.”

We’ll have more from Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, and Joshua Williamson about their corners of the DC Universe in the coming days.

(Thanks to Jim Dandy for helping me keep all this straight!)

Mike Cecchini is the Editor in Chief of Den of Geek. You can read more of his work here. Follow him on Twitter @wayoutstuff.

Read and download the Den of Geek NYCC 2019 Special Edition Magazine right here!

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Feature Mike Cecchini

Oct 8, 2019

DC Entertainment

NYCC

NYCC 2019

Justice League

Justice Society

from Books https://ift.tt/310USiy

[trans-girl-sonic]

Your blog is really funny. False accusations against artists being pedophiles, but also transforming everything and everything into homosexuals or trans, whether it's been canon or not. Hope to see more laughable postings in the future!

Teen Boat! Kindle Editionby Dave Roman  (Author), John Green  (Illustrator)3.8 out of 5 stars    24 customer reviews See all 3 formats and editionsKindle $9.99Read with Our Free App

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Product detailsFile Size: 70468 KBPrint Length: 144 pagesPublisher: Clarion Books (May 8, 2012)Publication Date: May 8, 2012Sold by: Houghton Mifflin HarcourtLanguage: EnglishASIN: B005OC305GText-to-Speech: Not enabled  X-Ray:Not Enabled  Word Wise: Not EnabledLending: Not EnabledEnhanced Typesetting: Not Enabled  Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,065,292 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)#164 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult > Literature & Fiction > Action & Adventure > Pirates#293 in Books > Teens > Literature & Fiction > Action & Adventure > Pirates#1164 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult > Literature & Fiction > Social & Family Issues > Emotions & FeelingsWould you like to tell us about a lower price?Related media

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5.0 out of 5 starsPouring the Teen Angst on so Thick that You’re Going to Need a Bilge Pump IByFredTownWardVINE VOICEon November 6, 2015Format: Hardcover|Verified PurchaseThis prequel to Teen Boat! The Race for Boatlantis is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. The parodies are laid on thick and fast. About the only nit I can offer up is that this book is much more episodic than the second one, and some of the chapters work better than others.Comment|Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse5.0 out of 5 starsTHIS BOOK IS HILARIOUSByElaine Ritteron December 31, 2013Format: Hardcover|Verified PurchaseThis is quite possibly one of the funniest things I have ever read in my entire life. I was laughing the entire way through, cover to cover. I’m actually not sure what target audience this book was aiming at, because there are definitely some off-color sexual jokes throughout. I don’t think I would recommend this book to children, but it’s perfect for teens and adults. I loved it so much I ordered a second copy for a White Elephant Christmas gift and it was a hit!!Comment|Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse5.0 out of 5 starsTeen BoatByJoseph R. Romanon June 11, 2012Format: Hardcover|Verified PurchaseJust love Dave Romans new book. I am a fan of his work.He writes really great stuff for kids to read.Hes a kid at heart,and he knows what kids like to read.Comment| 2 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse5.0 out of 5 starsFive StarsByAmazon Customeron June 28, 2016Format: Kindle Edition|Verified PurchaseAmazing book for speech and debate.Comment|Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse4.0 out of 5 starsSaturday morning cartoon spoofByLivianiaVINE VOICEon June 5, 2012Format: Hardcover|Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What’s this? )Collaborators Dave Roman and John Green originally published the TEEN BOAT! mini-comic through their own Cryptic Press. You can still visit the old websites associated with that version of the comic. TEEN BOAT! won an Ignatz Award and now it is available in a full color version with extra comics and other bonus material.

The art of TEEN BOAT! is clean with easy-to-distinguish and consistent character designs. The girls aren’t overly sexified either. They look like teen girls and their designs are stylized the same as the guys. The art doesn’t stand out from the crowd, but it is definitely not hideous. And believe me, you’d be surprised how many comics and graphic novels get published with awful art.

TEEN BOAT! first came onto my radar when I read the AV Club review praising its light parody of Saturday morning cartoons. After reading it myself, I cannot come up with a better description than that. TEEN BOAT! is an updated, self-aware Saturday morning cartoon that invites the reader to laugh at the ridiculous premise and plots and enjoy the story anyway.

The protagonist of TEEN BOAT! is actually named TEEN BOAT! He’s a high school student who can turn into a boat at will, but must turn into a boat when wet. He gets in and out of trouble, dates an Italian gondola, and runs for class president. Like most teen guys, he’s pretty self-absorbed. One of the running gags is how he doesn’t notice that his best friend is both into him and has shape-changing abilities of her own.

Older teens will probably find TEEN BOAT! too short and silly. But hey, I’m an adult and thought it was cute. TEEN BOAT! is probably best for tweens, especially ones that still enjoy the cheesiness of Saturday morning cartoons. There is some underage drinking and gambling, but it the protagonist does not partake and the behavior is punished.Read moreComment| 4 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse3.0 out of 5 starsNO WAY, JOSE!ByFrequent BuyerTOP 500 REVIEWERon June 2, 2012Format: Hardcover|Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What’s this? )Beware!! This gal’s got her Mom-Review Hat On…

I actually requested this book to see what the team of Roman and Green were up to; and with a mind to finding out whether this might be the beginning of a series I could introduce to my 10 year-old son…

…BUT NO WAY, JOSE. I might let a ’d-mn’ slide but it’s not cool with this helicopter mom to have marijuana, drinking and smoking (cigarettes this time) mentioned like it’s no big deal. [Not to mention that ‘getting to second base’ would have to be explained.] Sooo, me in my-mom-hat will not be suggesting this book for Tweens.

Which leaves the question of who it would be good for. Here’s my opinion:

No - for adults. There was some funny stuff here, but not enough to make it worth the effort.

No - for Tweens. At least if you’re a mom like me. If your child is already rolling their own, they might enjoy it.

Yes - for guys 13-16 years, if they feel like a fun read that’s based on goofy humor.

Yes - possibly for girls 13 - 15 years if they like non-violent graphic novels. Romance is the focal point of the stories. And I particularly like the sections that dealt with where Teen Boat (that’s his name) fell in love with a gondola named Risatina.

Maybe - for guys older than 16, but honestly all of the things I thought were inappropriate for younger kids, is going to be too bland for mosts tastes at this age. I mean, no super cool artwork, and no ultra violence or women with extravagant 'attributes’...I’m divided on this one and not prepared to give it a definitive thumbs-down because there might be a guy out there that will be motivated to pick up more books if he starts on this one. However, that said TEEN BOAT is just got the wrong synergy going. On the one hand it’s childish but has inappropriate things for children, and one the other hand it’s not sophisticated enough for most Young Adults, which leaves it possibly right for that thin band in between: 13-15 year olds.

Pam T~putting away her MOM-hatRead more4 comments| 5 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuseSee all verified purchase reviews (newest first)Write a customer review

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3.0 out of 5 starsShallow and not-quite-funnyStock characters and situations pulled from Judy Blume and John Hughes. Heavy-handed metaphors for teen angst. It’s all part of the joke, right?Read morePublished 1 year ago by Irene Ringworm5.0 out of 5 starsA BOAT load of fun!!!!A great success! My Son LOVES It!!! He couldn’t put it down until he was done!! A MOST AWESOME BOOK…my sons says “I just like it a real lot!!”Published 1 year ago by I am a Children’s Librarian5.0 out of 5 starsIt’s very simpleTEEN! BOAT!! What more do you need? All the angst of being a teen … all the thrill of being a boat!Published on October 5, 2014 by Jennifer5.0 out of 5 starsWacky, silly funNot every book comes with a fool-proof litmus test, but this one certainly does. Just read the tag-line on the cover:

The angst of being a teen!Read morePublished on September 3, 2012 by Andrew C Wheeler4.0 out of 5 starsJoin the Adventure!This book immediately jumped out at me as I began reading because of the wonderful illustrations and vibrant colors, and the story didn’t disappoint.Read morePublished on July 21, 2012 by A. Lynn4.0 out of 5 starsFun parodyTeenBoat! is a one-trick pony. Whether or not you’re entertained will depend entirely on how much you like that trick.Read morePublished on July 18, 2012 by A. Reid5.0 out of 5 starsIf I’m any judge at all as to what teens will laugh at…This graphic short story collection is ridiculous, silly, and hilarious. It pokes fun at the genre, at the way teens are often portrayed, and yet, from my understanding of…Read morePublished on June 20, 2012 by Neal Reynolds2.0 out of 5 starsConcept Fail.Some things that are completely absurd can also be funny. This is not one of those cases.

The entire premise is ridiculous and simply doesn’t work.Read morePublished on June 13, 2012 by Hedera Femme1.0 out of 5 starsNot RecommendedI thought I was getting a fun, innocent little book. But no, it is not. The book is boring, plus there is profanity and mention of unmentionable things such as smoking, etc.Read morePublished on June 6, 2012 by AndreaSearch Customer Reviews

SearchSet up an Amazon GiveawayTeen Boat!Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon GiveawayThis item: Teen Boat!Set up a giveaway

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[recentanimenews]

Singer/Voice Actress Megumi Ogata Covers Half Of International Crowdfunding Goals Half A Week

She was Kurama in YuYu Hakusho, she was Sailor Uranus in Sailor Moon. She was Yugi Mutou in Yu-Gi-Oh! You'll also know her as Shinji Ikari in Neon Geneis Evangelion. And, in 2017, 51-year old voice actress/singer Megumi Ogata is celebrating the 25th anniversary of her career! In part, she's doing this with a crowd-funded Animeg. 25th album. On the 12th, she launched a Japanese Campfire campaign, followed by an international one on Miraimode the 19th. Already, that $13,000 towards its $25,000.00 goal.

  【THANK YOU】50%！ Please continue to give us your support…！ Megumi Ogata 25th Debut Anniversary Project https://t.co/ABDYQrUqHl #animeg25th

— 緒方恵美@25thAnniversary (@Megumi_Ogata) May 23, 2017

Recording began,yesterday! This is base of a song（・_-）-☆ project open!⇒ https://t.co/ABDYQrUqHl　#animeg25th http://pic.twitter.com/HN6fuI0TN4

— 緒方恵美@25thAnniversary (@Megumi_Ogata) May 23, 2017

Project Update: A collection of Ogata-san's beautiful illustrations! https://t.co/civaESdEwP #animeg25th

— Tokyo Mirai Mode (@TokyoMiraiMode) May 22, 2017

  From the English page

  Hello! My name is Megumi Ogata. I’m a Japanese singer as well as a voice actress for animations. My 25th voice actress debut anniversary will come in a few months on October 10!

Why am I producing an album through crowdfunding, you ask? I have two main reasons.

To provide genuine content to Japanese fans and also fans around the world at the very same time

To raise awareness in Japan and overseas about the current status of our industry

As you may already know, the CDs and DVDs that we produce in Japan are difficult to obtain outside of Japan. I don’t mean the pirated and illegally distributed versions. The genuine copies of our CDs and DVDs are difficult to obtain. As authentic routes of distribution are scarce, fans are generally required to import them privately and pay hefty shipping fees.

  We in the industry want to share our music and other creations with fans, no matter where they reside. Fans overseas often ask us about gaining access to more of our content, too.

  I spent a long, long time pondering over this issue. What can I do to overcome this invisible wall separating the fans and myself? There has to be something that even I can do, right?

The conclusion I came to was to utilize the power of crowdfunding.

I consulted other members in the industry about my thoughts. Many fans in Japan also helped me brainstorm and search for possibilities. “We want to share the pleasure of receiving something on the day it’s released with fans living outside of Japan”. “We would like to celebrate music and creativity with fans around the world”.

  To transform those thoughts into reality, I decided to propose this special project. My wish is for this project to serve as a platform that upcoming generations of Japanese voice actors and actresses, musicians, and other members of the entertainment industry can use to connect with fans around the world. Not just in sharing music through CDs, but also through other simple yet innovative formats.

  I also wish my project could help fans residing outside of Japan to gain access to a wide variety of Japanese content. Nothing would make me happier than having those wishes come true.

Megumi Ogata Born on June 6. Known as Ogata, Aniki, Otoko-Hachidan

Ogata debuted as a voice actress in the role of Kurama in Yu Yu Hakusho: Ghost Files and quickly gained popularity among fans. She is known for her ability to voice a broad range of characters and also for her natural performances. Young boys and girls, older men and women, serious and comical genres, Ogata can easily handle them all.

  She possesses a vocal range extending beyond three octaves, delivering rich and full notes regardless of how high or how low they are. Ogata is also active as a singer who performs with a powerful and soulful voice. In recent years, she has released numerous motivational rock albums that offer listeners the passion and the gentle push forward they need. She continues to hold live performances not only in Japan but also in other countries as well. Ogata’s newest album “real/dummy” (High Edition) was ranked first during the first week of its release on the Hi-Res charts.

Notable roles: Yu Yu Hakusho: Ghost Files (as Kurama) Sailor Moon (as Haruka Tenou/Sailor Uranus) Neon Genesis Evangelion (as Shinji Ikari) Angel Beats! (as Ayato Naoi) Danganronpa: The Animation (as Makoto Naegi & Nagito Komaeda) and much more.

  About the Album

Animeg. 25th

An anime song cover album featuring selections from titles Megumi Ogata performed in and other relevant tracks.

Tentative tracklist

“Taiyou Ga Mata Kagayaku Toki” - from Yu Yu Hakusho: Ghost Files

“Moon Revenge” - from Sailor Moon R: The Movie

“Platinum” - from Cardcaptor Sakura

“Komm, süsser Tod” - from THE END OF EVANGELION

“Driver’s High” - from Great Teacher Onizuka

“Fukanzen Nenshou” - from Kamisama Dolls

“My Soul, Your Beats!” - from Angel Beats!

“???” - from ???

“Kamisama no Itazura” - from Tamayura: Hitotose

“Bye Bye Yesterday” - from Assassination Classroom Second Season

Additional Notes  ・Tracks will be skillfully arranged by a music arranger who is active at the forefront of the Japanese music industry. ・Tracks with lyrics written for a specific character will be performed in a voice that closely resembles that character (some exceptions apply). ・Tracks already covered in “Animeg.” (Megumi Ogata’s 15th debut anniversary anime song cover album) and in other projects will not be included in this album.

Tracks covered in “Animeg.” “A Cruel Angel's Thesis” “Kyou mo Dokoka de Devilman” “Yamato Yori Ai wo Komete” “Moonlight Densetsu” “GET WILD” “Omoide ga Ippai” “Yuzurenai Negai” “Unbalance na Kiss wo Shite” “Miyu Yachiyo” “Ao no Requiem” and more. (The track “GET WILD” in “Animeg.” was also featured in the album “GET WILD song mafia”)

  -------

Scott Green is editor and reporter for anime and manga at geek entertainment site Ain't It Cool News. Follow him on Twitter at @aicnanime.

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[gregwhite]

GRATITUDE IN WRITING

Please pardon me for being the millionth person to bring up gratitude in LA this year. Gratitude is having something of a moment you might say. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but by the 10th time you see it used to sell green juice in Venice you start to get a little white person wary. But it makes me think about something crucial to sustaining a career in this or any industry.

Last night I was delighted to do a talk with a class of BU students* who are here doing a semester in various entertainment industry jobs while learning about how this town works and etc etc and I brought something up to them that I’d like to share here.

I finished college in 2006 and decided, being from Jersey, that I would get my start in New York before riding triumphant to LA. I had always been told, “if you want to work in TV, move to LA,” but that was too frightening to contemplate and so HA I thought. HA IN YOUR FACE. So NYC it was**. I got a job as a page at Letterman, and when that ended I was a temp at HBO, and when that ended (after a day) I got a job as a prep cook/PA on a PBS cooking show (which was pretty outstanding) and when that ended I got a job in my friend’s wine store in Tappan, NY, the Grape d’Vine (currently relocated to Sparkill, NY). Also I was unemployed a lot. 

And when you’re ambitious and also uncertain about the path forward, the only boot in the ass you need is the one that comes with being unemployed a year out of college, living in your childhood bedroom (it’s a great bedroom actually), while your little sister finishes college up in Boston and your other friends move into the city. (It also compels you to write a lot.) So it was with that in mind that I moved here in January of 2008. 

So back to gratitude. I won’t go into the whole thing now, but basically, during the year and change I was living at home in NJ before I moved here, my rule was (I like rules) that I had to email 10 BU alumni every day asking them if I could buy them a coffee (if they were in NY) to talk to them about how they got their start and if they were in LA, if I could just give them a call and talk to them. So people are generally really nice and open and happy to share their experiences (aka talk about themselves) and by the time I made the very scary move to LA, I had actually amassed a nice little group of contacts who said that if I ever moved to LA, they would be happy to meet with me. 

And in this way, I ended up meeting with fancy writers, and network execs, and studio heads and all kinds of people. And one of them was a BU alum named Debbie Liebling, and she was very encouraging and sweet (and even let me pitch a feature to her, which was a DISASTER because I figured I could just wing it in the room...it still makes me nauseous to think of that) and at the end of our meeting, she mentioned another friend of hers from her time at Comedy Central named Zoe Friedman. I met up with Zoe at her office at Comedy Central and we had a memorably enjoyable conversation about what I hoped to do, and our time on the east coast (she was a New Yorker), and before long a friendship developed, one that I was and still am very grateful for in its openness and kindness. 

At the same time I was doing a bunch of random jobs as one does in their early days of LA. I was a PA on a Comedy Central show called Lil Bush, run by a very nice man (and BU alum) named Donick Cary, and I was, most depressingly, a temp at Sony filing legal affairs paperwork, which meant that I would spend by mornings writing scripts I wasn’t sure anyone would ever read, go to work filing PILOT DEAL PAPERWORK FROM FANCY WRITERS, and then go home and continue writing. It was frustrating in one sense, but also highly motivating, and I think in that first year in LA, I must have written 10 pilots.

Anyway, this is getting long, which was not my intention. 

Long story short, I end up working for Zoe’s dad Budd, legendary founder of the Improv, and thank god for that job because I needed one (again, thank you Zoe). The job was basically helping Budd book acts for the Improv’s casino sites, and while booking comics wasn’t my goal in moving to LA, it was fun, put me in touch with some very lively characters, and also allowed me time to write during quiet spells throughout the day. It was during my time working for Budd that I received an email from someone at Comedy Central informing me that a showrunner for a new show had read something of mine and wanted to meet and would I like to set up a time?

I had to read the email a few times, because (a) the words seemed Nigerian Prince levels of too good to be true, and (b) because these kinds of emails often have a weird subject format which looks like MTG TO SET: GREG WHITE WITH _____ and I assumed it was a spambot trying to get me to sign up for a credit card. I emailed back informing them that yes I would love to meet with the showrunner but um, let me just check my sched--okay, checked it, yeah anytime is fine. But I also asked how this guy had even gotten a script of mine, and the response was that Zoe had submitted a script on my behalf. One of those scripts I was writing at home in NJ after college.

So very long story short, I met with the showrunner, a fellow named David M Stern, and within a week I was writing on my first show as a real life TV writer. (Thanks, David.)

But the point of this is gratitude. Nobody anywhere is self-made. Sure, you work hard and you hope to get a shot, but like Obama said during the debates in 2012, “you didn’t build that.” If you have a trucking company, guess what, you benefit from the public works programs that built the highways that allow you to run your company. And if you’re a writer, there are a million gatekeepers and the walls are way too high to jump over on your own. You need help. That isn’t to say this isn’t a meritocratic town, because to an extent it is, and so if you keep working and writing and trying to get your stuff in front of people, eventually something will fall your way because you refuse to stop until that something does, but...you’re not self-made. And realizing this is the key to sustaining a happy and healthy and productive career (and life) in the arts. You are a product of everyone who has ever said something encouraging, or given you an idea, or played you a song, or made a phone call on your behalf. Your career is a balance sheet on the amount of kindness you’ve received, whether it was deserved or not. And the way you can try and deserve that kindness, is by not being a dick about it. Acknowledge that, and you’ll be very glad you did.  

Let’s just consider this for a second. David had gotten a show to series, itself a small miracle. And he had read probably hundreds of scripts and certainly wasn’t asking for Zoe to send him one from some random guy from New Jersey. And it’s not like Zoe needed to submit me. And it wasn’t like David needed to even bother reading me. And that he liked it? And wanted to meet with me? And hire me? Consider all of the things that had to happen for me to get my first job, a foot in the door. Such tiny odds. Now, if you’re an insane person you go, YES THE ODDS WERE SMALL AND I VANQUISHED THEM! But if you’re a normal functioning human, you go, Jesus God, that almost didn’t happen, and hug the things you’re grateful for a little tighter and whisper THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU (just don’t do this on a bus or in public). Seriously, consider that. The good things in your life almost didn’t happen, and it is basically just weird luck that it did. Be grateful for the random accounting error that is your life. In fact, consider anything you love in life...and now consider that thing removed from your life. Kinda sucks, right? Exactly. You fall into a routine and you complain about something dumb and you forget about the fact that your entire life is pretty much full of glorious things that, taken on their own in a vacuum, appear to be miracles. But taken collectively they become the things most people don’t even look at. (Not to get all Pete Holmes-meets-Eliza here, but seriously. Don’t forget how lucky you are to be alive right now.)

I called Zoe to thank her the day I got that email, and I called her to thank her when I met with David, and I called her to thank her when I got the job, and I called her to thank her when I got my second job, and to this day, I still email her when something goes my way. Sold a pilot? Thank Zoe. Wrapped season 2 on a show? Thank Zoe. And not only Zoe, but my high school film teacher for showing me this was a thing I could do and was good at. And my mom and dad. And the friend who invited me to join the writers workshop when I first moved out here. And so on. And more than just this being the right way to live, it also feels really good. Your gratitude connects you to these people and reminds you that you’re never alone, that you carry in your body all the good things that ever happened to you and the more you acknowledge those good things, the more they stay alive. And of course, if ever you see yourself ten years ago in a newly-arrived LA human, you do what you can do show them kindness because in the end, nobody wins unless everybody wins.

So I guess my point is, whether you’re just starting out or many years into a career, you’ve got someone to be grateful for, and I hope you let them know it. It’ll make you a better person, and that will make you a better writer. 

*I also went to BU, class of 06, but did not do this LA program as (a) it seemed insane to pay a semester of college tuition to come intern and (b) I REALLY love Boston and (b) I REALLY liked being in college and taking classes. They told me I couldn’t take more than 5 per semester, so I just started showing up to classes I wasn’t enrolled in and waited for someone to kick me out. They never did. Goddamn, I loved being a full-time student. I always say that if I ever become grossly wealthy I’m going to grad school to get a masters degree in something useless. Basically for me college was going to lectures and talks and film screenings and making our late night talk show with my friends. Actually, it’s not very different from my life now, only I own more kettlebells. 

**It was not glamorous per se. I would take the bus from Harrington Park NJ to the Port Authority daily and then back. Gross. But NYC is lovely in the fall and spring and a nightmare in the winter and summer and I loved working there, even if it was as a page for $270 a week. 

[droneseco]

Boyue Likebook P78 Review: Huge Battery, Gorgeous Screen, and It Runs Android

Boyue Likebook P78

9.00 / 10

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See on amazon

If you want a high-resolution screen for crisp text and images, and demand an open Android system to read anything, the Boyue Likebook P78 is a fantastic option. Battery life and connectivity is superb, and the front-lit screen is gorgeous. 

Specifications

Brand: Boyue

Screen: 7.8-inch eInk Carta panel

Resolution: 1404 x 1872 (300DPI)

Storage: 32GB, micro-SD expandable

Connectivity: USB-C, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0

Front Light: Cold and warm

OS: Customized Android 8.1

Battery: 3800mAh (5 weeks standby)

Buttons: Home, Power, Volume

Weight: 267g (9.42 oz)

Dimensions: 8mm thick

Pros

Crisp 300DPI display

Full Google Play access and open system

Incredible battery life

Cons

Interface can be sluggish, and even casual games are mostly unplayable

Speakers are of limited utility

Buy This Product

Boyue Likebook P78 amazon

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// Bottom

Need an eBook reader with fantastic battery life and a high-resolution screen, but don't want to deal with a locked-down OS like the Kindle? The Boyue Likebook P78 might be exactly what you're looking for. At $260, is this the essential accessory to ride out the rest of 2021? We think so.

Who Is Boyue?

Boyue is not a household name when it comes to eReaders, not least because neither you nor I can pronounce it properly, but also because until recently, it was mostly an OEM manufacturer. That means it made the eReaders that were then branded by other companies. But why go to a middle man when you can go direct?

The Boyue Likebook P78 is its newest model, and the successor to the Likebook Mars, which we've previously recommended.

Related: Best eBook Readers of 2021

Likebook P78 Hardware

Measuring a mere 8mm thick, and weighing in at 267g, the Likebook P78 comes in any color you want, as long as that color is dark blue.

Charging and OTG features are provided by the USB-C port on the bottom edge. The power button is on the top right; while you'll also find volume controls for the built-in speakers on the right-hand side.

Why does it have speakers? The Boyue reader app features voice synthesis, for those moments when reading becomes too much effort. Simply pull up the menu, tap the read button, and it'll begin. The voice is understandable but robotic, and nowhere near the quality of Google Assistant or Alexa. I personally couldn't tolerate this for long, but the other alternative is of course to download your favorite audiobook, and just listen to it being read by a professional.

32GB of onboard storage should be plenty for a collection of even the heaviest PDFs, but if you do need more, there's a micro-SD tray on the right-hand side. However, you will need to use the included metal poker tool to remove the tray; it's not quite as easy to slot in as I'd like, but you shouldn't need to do this often.

The design is otherwise not noteworthy, but as they say: you shouldn't judge an eBook by its cover.

Optionally, you can purchase a protective case. This features a semi-rigid back, and the cover supports auto-sleep and wake feature, extending battery life even further.

Internally, the device runs a quad-core 1.4Ghz CPU, backed up by a meager 2GB RAM. You're not buying an eReader for its stunning CPU performance of course, but a reasonably good chipset does help to keep page turns snappy.

Getting Books on to The P78

Out of the box, you have quite a few options for getting books onto the Likebook P78.

The first is to use a micro-SD card. If you're upgrading from another eBook reader and already have a library of content stored there, this is probably the easiest method.

Second, if you're connected to a home Wi-Fi network, you can use the built Wi-Fi Transfer App. This only works from desktop or Android smartphones, not iOS, but seemed to be reliable during testing. Open the app, type the specified IP into your browser, then select and upload files.

Third, you can use the USB-C cable. This is by far the fastest and easiest way to get books onto the device, and the method I found myself using the most from Mac OS with the Android File Transfer utility.

Finally, with full Google Play access, you also have a store full of cloud storage providers and other file sync applications, should you already have a favorite method.

In short, you'll have no issues whatsoever getting any of your content onto the Like P78, DRM-free, and from any source.

It's All About the Screen

Perhaps one of the biggest selling points of the Likebook P78 is the high resolution on a 7.8" display, resulting in 300DPI, the highest pixel density eInk Carta panel you can get. This results in a crisper, more enjoyable, and paper-like reading experience for every type of static media you might consume on it.

While 7.8-inches is the perfect size for novels, I did find it a little small for most PDFs. That said, the auto-crop feature ensures there's no screen wasted on margins, and the text reflow works wonders too.

For bedtime reading and other dark environments, it also features a dimmable cold and warm white LED front light. Activating the default night mode is as simple as pulling down from the top, and long holding on the bulb icon.

Alternatively, press once for more presets and sliders. Unlike other electronic screens, which tend to burn your eyes at night even on the lowest of brightness settings, I experienced no discomfort from the front-lit night mode.

The choice of warm or cold light is nice to have, though it's worth noting that the myth of blue light stopping you from sleeping has been thoroughly disproven.

Shockingly, there are many factors that affect your ability to sleep, none of which are the color of light your devices are emitting. Still, if you believe in that particular placebo, you'll be delighted to know you can have a very dim warm light to read by in the dark.

A2-Mode

Some apps won't run comfortably with the standard eInk display method; for those, you can enable A2-mode simply by pulling down the settings screen. This increases the refresh rate, but at the cost of resolution and contrast.

While access to the Google Play store means you can theoretically install anything, you shouldn't. Even with A2 mode active, I found a simple word game that involved dragging my finger over letters to be a little frustrating, and faster touch movements just missed letters out. It requires you to adjust your use of a touchscreen to be slow and methodical. Apps that need only single touch events should work better.

Battery Life

It's difficult to objectively evaluate the battery life of an eInk device during our standard testing period of two weeks. But suffice to say, I haven't charged it yet, despite daily use and app testing. While I could leave a YouTube video running and tell you that it lasted however many hours, I don't think that's a fair way to evaluate an eReader. The beauty of eInk is that it only uses power to update the display. The upshot is that when used as intended, battery life will not be a concern.

Featuring a 3200mAh battery, which is huge compared to similarly-sized eReaders, Boyue claims a 5-week standby time for the P78, and I've found no reason to doubt that.

Of course, you'll get the best battery life if you disable Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and only use the Likebook P78 to read books. Games, videos, audiobooks etc will all drastically reduce the battery life.

What's Wrong With a Tablet or Phone?

You might think that in a world of ubiquitous technology at our fingertips, the market for eReaders has died out. Quite the opposite. I'm a big fan of my iPad, but for reading at night, the lowest screen brightness is still eye-wateringly bright. And for daytime use, it's pretty much useless in direct sunlight. And there's the notifications, the temptation to check Reddit, deal with those emails, or any of the other million activities that can distract you.

That's why I've been looking for an eReader: not to replace a traditional tablet, but to compliment it.

Is This The 2021 eReader for You?

Running a full Android system underneath blows the doors wide open to apps and content you simply couldn't get on other eBook readers. You won't be restricted to DRMed content, and it's incredibly easy to add your own PDFs, comics, and ePubs that you've sourced from elsewhere—as well as install your favorite reader app.

The default Boyue Reader is surprisingly competent though, so you may not even need to install other reader apps. The actual reading experience is snappy, even with image-laden PDFs. And that high-resolution screen means any media looks gorgeous.

While Google Play isn't enabled out of the box, updating then enabling the Google Framework isn't hard, but there's no guarantee this will continue to work in the future.

But the trade-off to that open system is a generally sluggish UI elsewhere, and an older version of Android (8.1) may open you up to security risks. Android simply isn't designed for eInk screens (though some reader apps do actually include an option to optimize for them).

Browsing the web is just about tolerable, but I'd recommend saving articles you want to read into an app like Pocket instead to remove most of the guff.

Very simple word games can be played in A2-mode, but other than that, don't buy the Likebook P78 because you want a smooth Android experience that'll run anything you throw at it. It won't. Unless it's a lightweight app that doesn't need more than a few frames a second, don't bother.

Finally, although the default reader app now natively supports CBZ/CBR format comic books, I ran into a few compatibility issues, and even when it does work, you're still trying to read a large format comic on a small black and white screen. For anything outside of comic strips like Calvin and Hobbes, the comic reading experience is subpar.

If you're looking for a bare-bones eBook reader with a stunningly good screen that won't lock you into a particular system, the Boyue Likebook P78 is definitely a top contender. With the prospect of summer holidays being canceled again, now is a great time to rediscover the lost art of reading (if you haven't already during the past year of lockdowns), and the Likebook P78 is a great way to do it.

UK readers, you might want to buy from TechInTheBasket instead, where we're reliably informed they hold local stock for faster delivery, and the price is lower at £146. This is not an endorsement though—I've never heard of that store either. 

Boyue Likebook P78 Review: Huge Battery, Gorgeous Screen, and It Runs Android published first on http://droneseco.tumblr.com/

[grassroutes]

Onyx Boox Nova2 Review: The Best 7.8″ eReader of 2020

Our verdict of the Onyx Boox Nova2 Ereader: If you're familiar with Android, the Onyx Boox Nova2 is flat-out the best 7.8" Android ereader of 2020.910

Amazon Kindle eReaders are designed to do one thing: sell eBooks. For those looking for something more versatile, the best Kindle alternative of 2020 is the $340 Onyx Boox Nova2. It’s a stylus-compatible Android tablet with an E Ink display, optimized for reading, not for selling.

But it’s not for everyone. Its higher up-front cost and the complexity of Android make the Nova2 a poor choice for those who want a dead-simple device for buying and reading ebooks. But for those comfortable with Android, it’s the king of its class.

What Is Onyx?

Onyx‘s Boox eReaders aren’t as common as devices from Amazon or Kobo. But unlike the Kindle or Forma, Boox eReaders can install Android apps—and Android’s app store has a tremendous number of apps.

On the downside, Onyx’s earlier models had poor quality control along with a return policy that either required shipping it back to China or dealing with third-party importers, who often refused to honor warranties.

As Onyx has moved into Western markets, though, they have started to contract with American and European repair shops.

BOOX Nova2 7.8 ePaper E Note, 300 DPI Android 9.0 Front Light Dual Touch USB OTG E-Reader BOOX Nova2 7.8 ePaper E Note, 300 DPI Android 9.0 Front Light Dual Touch USB OTG E-Reader Buy Now On Amazon $322.99

Onyx Boox Nova2 Hardware and Features

The Nova2 won’t win any beauty competition when compared to the Oasis 3. No eReader would. It’s pleasant to hold and fairly lightweight for a tablet. But it’s almost twice as heavy as an Oasis and not nearly as svelte or pleasant to hold. It doesn’t automatically change orientation depending on how you hold it. And forget about taking it to the swimming pool as the Nova2 lacks waterproofing.

Think of it as an Android tablet that’s great for reading everything. It smashes through ebooks and plows through websites with tablet-like speed. If the Oasis is a lithe and graceful ballerina, the Nova2 is a chunky and powerful sumo wrestler.

Here are the device’s major features:

3,150mAh lithium-ion battery with a battery life of over a month (average 210mA power consumption)

Wacom touchscreen with 4,096-degrees of pressure sensitivity

Passive stylus compatibility with palm rejection technology (stylus included)

Snapdragon 625 system-on-a-chip

Bluetooth 4.1

Black plastic construction with a matte finish

3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage

Supports Power Delivery (PD) charging (USB-C to USB-C)

E Ink Carta screen

Variable warmth front light (as opposed to a backlight)

Android version 9.0

Screen DPI of 300

On-the-Go functionality on the USB Type-C (USB-C) port for external devices, including keyboards and mice

So what do these specs mean?

It’s one of the fastest eReaders ever made and comes loaded with features, such as USB-C PD charging. But most important, it supports stylus input for note-taking.

USB Type-C Power Delivery

It’s also worth noting that unlike many other eReaders, the Nova2 includes support for the USB Type-C Power Delivery standard, although without Quick Charge capabilities. While it may not charge as fast as a smartphone does, it works with any USB-C charger.

The Nova2 Is Fast (for an eReader)

Up until 2020, eReaders used low-end, obsolete processors based on ancient 28nm “transistor” technology. This is doubly true for eReaders from Amazon and Kobo. However, Android eReaders need a little more CPU juice in order to fluently run apps.

The Onyx Boox Nova2 is one of the first E Ink devices equipped with a modern processor. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 uses a 14nm process-node technology and the Arm Cortex A53 architecture.

Even though these aren’t exactly performance specs, within its class, these are some of the punchiest components around.

Great Battery Life Even for an eReader

The big advantage of its more advanced Snapdragon processor is battery life. Combined with power-saving optimizations in Android 9.0, the Nova2 tested at around 25-days of battery life with Wi-Fi turned on. To my knowledge, all other Android 6.0-based eReaders get around a week of up-time with Wi-Fi on. In comparison, the older Onyx Boox Nova Pro gets about a week of usage.

With Wi-Fi turned off, it can probably get in the range of two months of battery life.

E-Ink Fast Reading Modes

The Nova2, like a few Android eReaders, also possesses four variable screen-refresh modes, which trade text clarity for faster refreshes.

Speed: Speed mode provides a tradeoff between visual clarity and refresh rate, favoring clarity.

Normal: Normal mode maintains high screen clarity but uses jarring full-screen refreshes.

X-Mode: X-Mode is the fastest refresh mode but it also suffers from serious amounts of ghosting.

A2: A2-Mode, is a blend of fast refreshes combined with decent visual clarity. It’s not as clear as Speed Mode although its refreshes are faster.

It’s also worth noting that the Nova2 (like most of the Boox series) includes a partial refresh method that Onyx calls Snow Field. Snow Field is a software-based technique that allows for partial refreshes of the E-Ink screen. That means there’s less ghosting and higher visual clarity when running Android apps.

However, even with this technology, there are still visible traces of ghosting. Unless I use the fastest refresh modes, the ghosting doesn’t impact reading quality, though.

The Nova2 Is a Great Reading Experience

The 7.8-inch 1872×1404, 300DPI E Ink Carta display has great contrast with crisp, clear text. Even with a matte-glass finish, the display looks whiter than the previous Nova Pro model.

The Default Reading App Is Excellent

The Nova2’s default reading experience stands above its competitors. While you can install any ebook app (I recommend KOReader, which is on the open-source app store F-Droid), the native reading software onboard the Nova2 is versatile and efficient. Aside from being able to reflow any text, including sloppily scanned images, it can write notes directly onto ebooks. In other words, you can write on, highlight, and annotate your texts.

Using the Onyx Boox Nova2

Activate the Google Play Store on Onyx Boox Devices

As a full-Android device, capable of installing apps from the Google Play Store, the Nova2 requires patience. You’ll need to do two things: first, activate the Play Store and, second, learn how to sideload content on it. If that sounds too complicated, a Kindle Paperwhite, Oasis, or Kobo might better meet your needs.

The Boox Nova2 Launcher

The Nova2’s home page includes shortcuts to a Library ebook organizer, Onyx’s defunct ebook Store (which only offers public domain books), Storage, the app manifest, and a Settings menu. New to the Nova series, there’s a Notes feature, which takes advantage of a Wacom touch layer. Of these features, the ones worth mentioning are its Notes app and its native reader, which appears to be based on the open-source FBReader. Onyx brands the app as the Neo Reader.

The Native Ebook Reader App Is Crazy Good

If you launch any ebook from within the Library app, it opens in Onyx Neo Reader.

Neo Reader opened every book format that I threw at it, from EPUB, to massive 800MB PDFs, to CBZ. While it won’t natively open Kindle books, you can install Amazon’s Kindle app through the Google Play Store or convert Amazon’s ebooks using Calibre.

The best thing about the Neo Reader is that you can hand-write notes directly onto the text. While there’s zero margins to write in, the app will write-to and save all your marks. Personally, I’d feel more comfortable with a 10-inch eReader for annotations, but if you’re just highlighting text, then it’s perfectly adequate. For taking more detailed, handwritten notes, I’d strongly recommend the Notes app.

While the Notes app isn’t as good as the Remarkable 2 for annotating eBooks or taking notes due to the limitations of a 7.8-inch screen, its pressure sensitivity is equal to the Remarkable 2.

In a nutshell, if you want to only take notes, you’re better off with a Remarkable 2. But if you want something more versatile, the Nova2 beats all competitors.

Note Taking With a Stylus

The note-taking abilities are outstanding for a $340 device. While larger, more expensive devices take handwriting input better, nothing in its price-range offers the same features for the money.

While the Nova2 lacks the 10.3-inch writing area of the Remarkable 2, it’s still a credibly better all-round device. But on top of that, the Nova2 can quickly transcribe your handwriting into digital text.

I was surprised at the Note app’s handwriting recognition accuracy, despite how sloppy my handwriting is. It got every single word right with 100% accuracy.

Amazon Kindles Vs. Boox Nova2

If you’re using an ad-supported Kindle, chances are you’re not reading EPUB documents, which is the most common electronic book format in the world.

You’re also probably not taking notes, or reading CBZ (comic books), or really anything outside of Amazon’s proprietary formats. While Kindles can, on paper, read PDF files, their limited hardware and smaller screen aren’t great at it. In comparison, the Nova2’s significantly beefier hardware opens even the largest of PDFs in seconds. And each page turn is a fluid, seamless affair.

In terms of heft, the Kindle Paperwhite weighs in at 182 grams with a six-inch screen, whereas the Oasis 3’s seven-inch screen and 188 grams weight make it one of the lightest models in its class on the planet. The Nova2, while 7.8-inches, also weights a whopping 265 grams.

On the other hand, not everyone wants to deal with what’s essentially a black-and-white Android tablet. If you just want a lightweight, pocket-sized, dead-simple eReader, you’re far better off with the much less expensive Paperwhite 4, Oasis 3,  or even the older Voyage.

Reasons to Not Buy the Boox Nova2

While the Boox Nova2’s hardware and software beat all competitors, it’s not a for everyone.

It’s Bigger and Heavier Compared to Kindles and Kobos

While the Nova2 may have a larger screen, it also weighs almost twice as much as the heaviest of the Kindle eReaders. And its 7.8-inch screen makes it difficult to pocket, particularly if you use the included case.

History of Poor Quality Control

Onyx’s earliest devices had a poor quality-control record (I’ve had four different failures between 2015 and 2016). Additionally, I’ve had issues returning devices through importers. Fortunately, in 2019 Onyx began contracting out repairs using Michigan-based iCare Repair, although the customer pays shipping costs. iCare Repair, a disabled-veteran-owned and operated service, promises a two-day turnaround on returns.

iCare Repair’s service included a “lifetime warranty” on the replaced components. In other words, they guarantee that if they replace a part, it’ll never fail. That’s a substantial promise.

That said, in the past four years Onyx’s newer devices have not failed on me in any way and their build qualities have improved substantially.

Onyx Doesn’t Release Source Code

Any manufacturer that modifies the Android operating system is required by the GNU General Public License (GPL) to regularly publish its source code. In other words, they have to share their changes with the larger Linux community, of which Android is a part.

Unfortunately, Onyx has not yet released any code, which means two things:

They are in violation of the GPL.

There will never be custom ROMs that will extend the lifespan of the Nova.

For most consumers, neither is a serious problem. In my opinion, however, it’s a serious black mark on an otherwise attractive device.

Boox Devices Aren’t Play Store Certified

None of Onyx’s devices are Play Store certified. That means Google hasn’t evaluated any of these devices for security vulnerabilities. No black-and-white E Ink device has official Play Store certification, and Google has dropped support for E Ink after Android 6.0. This has led to Onyx selling their devices in China and East Asia without the Google Play Store.

In other words, the problem is with Google’s refusal to certify E Ink devices, likely because of performance issues.

Android Is Too Complex for Some

Finally, Android is more complicated to use than other eReaders, like the Kindle. If you’re already using an eReader from a big-box retailer, and prefer its ease-of-use and straightforward interface, there’s no reason to buy a more expensive and more complicated device.

What’s the Best ~8-inch Android eReader?

The Nova2 is the best eightish-inch Android eReader ever made. It’s the kind of device you wish Amazon sold. But it’s not for everyone.

BOOX Nova2 7.8 ePaper E Note, 300 DPI Android 9.0 Front Light Dual Touch USB OTG E-Reader BOOX Nova2 7.8 ePaper E Note, 300 DPI Android 9.0 Front Light Dual Touch USB OTG E-Reader Buy Now On Amazon $322.99

While installing any app you want looks good on (pun intended) e-paper, it’s a lot more complicated than a Kindle. But if you can handle sideloading content and want the best possible reading device, or need to annotate digital texts, no better 7.8-inch purpose-built eReader around. (We’ve covered the best simple Readers elsewhere.)

For those interested in a color eReader, recent advances in E Ink’s ACeP display technology along with its Kaleido color E Ink screens may kill the Kindle in 2020 or 2021.

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Onyx Boox Nova2 Review: The Best 7.8″ eReader of 2020 posted first on grassroutespage.blogspot.com

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Kull, Star Trek, Dying Earth, Doc Vandal

Publishing (Pulp Archivist): The market is contracting, without signs of stopping, from at least the mid-2000s generational handover. Digital and its different margins have likely kept some of these magazines in business far longer than print runs can justify. It’s almost to the point where the established science fiction “fandom” does not and should not be the audience. There are 300 million people not reading science fiction short stories. The editor who can figure out how to reach even 0.0001% of that will be the king of science fiction.

Gaming (Walker’s Retreat): In other words, WOTC’s being pozzed again. Do not give money to people who hate you. Do not buy WOTC’s products new. Not for D&D. Not for Magic. Not at all. Buy used if you must, but otherwise give your money to those making their own versions of the game (legal thanks to the Open Game License making D&D open source 20 years ago). What would those be? A short list includes: Adventurer, Conqueror, King.

  Science Fiction Community (Kalimac): The news has been getting out, both within and outside the SF community, that Alan Beatts, owner of Borderland Books in San Francisco, has been credibly accused of physical and sexual assault by women close to him. I’ll leave out the details; you can read them at the above links.

  D&D (RPG Pundit): They say that Oriental Adventures is full of stereotypes and needs to be cancelled. And well, yes, it is full of stereotypes and not an authentic historical setting. Every other D&D setting is also full of stereotypes and not an authentic historical setting too!

Fantasy (Fantasy Literature): Kull, for those unfamiliar with the character, made his first appearance in the August 1929 issue of Weird Tales magazine, in the story “The Shadow Kingdom,” so no, Howard most certainly did not get his inspiration for the regal name from 1933’s King Kong. Howard would go on to write 13 more stories dealing with the character (plus one poem), but only two of those were published before his suicide death in 1936. The Lancer volume, sadly enough, is complete with the exception of two of those 14 tales.

Star Trek (Superversive SF): cannot count the number of STAR TREK novels I have read over the years. Not as many recently as I used to, in fact, no new ones in a few years. It’s the old story, when you’re young you have all the time but limited money. When you’re older, you have the money to pursue your old hobbies like a demon but limited time. In the library, I stumbled across this Next Generation novel entitled Available Light and decided to give it a whirl. I’ve not read any new ST novels in a long time, so based on the back blurb, this one seemed like a great piece to dive back in with.

Cinema (Tulsa World): Today is the day to celebrate #Harryhausen 100. While we’re at it, let’s celebrate the lives of two people: a special effects legend and an Oklahoma cowboy who are connected by one movie at the dawn of their careers. Ray Harryhausen was the genius behind a form of stop-motion animation that brought all kinds of beasties to life in movies like “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” “20 Million Miles to Earth,” “One Million Years B.C.,” “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad,” “Clash of the Titans” and a series of Sinbad flicks.

Fiction (Grubb Street): Song of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance, by a LOT of people you’ve heard about, edited by George RR Martin and Gardner Dozois, with Art by Paul Kidd. TOR Books, 2009. Provenance: Christmas present, probably 2009 as well. I came to Jack Vance late in life, which is a bit of a surprise given that D&D is hip-deep in Vancian notions, tropes, and outright, um, borrowings. But once I struck his Dying Earth series, in the form of a massive compendium, I was delightfully hooked by his mannered approach to far-future fantasy, and of course, when a massive tome by a cluster of big-name authors came out in his honor, I had to get it and consume it.

Comic Books (Wasteland & Sky): omic books need to bring back all-ages comics as the standard. They have not been primarily aimed at children since the 1970s, and it has shown in declining sales. Comic books are an inherently juvenile format and that is their strength. Old comics and the classics could whip through plot points, action scenes, and wild settings within a single issue all while telling a complete standalone story.

D&D (Sacnoth’s Scriptorium): So, a few years back there was a campaign to build a Gary Gygax memorial statue in his home town of Lake Geneva. I think I even blogged about it at the time; I certainly tried to buy a copy of the memorial booklet intended to help fund the project, a collection of E.G.G.’s posts in a gaming forum, called CHEERS, GARY.

Sherlock Holmes (Black Gate): If you mention the term Gothic to most people, it’s likely to conjure visions of teenagers dressed in black, wearing black nail polish and Doc Marten boots. Someone a few years older may think of drugstore paperback racks filled with book covers featuring women in nightgowns running away from sinister mansions. But Gothic originally refers to a type of architecture, an overall aesthetic of the macabre, and a genre of fiction popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Gaming (Heavy Metal): Scorn is a long-awaited first-person shooter based on the art of H.R. Giger and, to a lesser extent, Zdzisław Beksiński. It’s been in development for years; developer Ebb Software dropped a drool-inducing teaser trailer in 2016 and a gameplay trailer in 2017. There have been video games — lots of them — based on the Alien movies, but this one is specifically Giger, so expect to see more of the creepy, twisted sexual side of his art than you got in the Xenomorph movies.

Pulp (The Pulp Net): While Doc Vandal is influenced by Doc Savage, he has some other influences. And a big difference is that his stories are not set in our world, but in the 1930s of an alternate world that has a steampunk element where zeppelins are everywhere, aliens exists (with hidden cities on Earth, as well as the Moon), and there are other science fictional elements. Doc Vandal is an inventor and adventurer, assisted by three people: Vic, Gus and Gilly.

Robert E. Howard (Messages from Crom): The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard. Coming in September! The Great Old Ones Return… In the early twentieth-century, in the pages of Weird Tales and other pulp magazines, H.P. Lovecraft created the Cthulhu Mythos and offered it to his friends, creating a shared mythology for much of their weird fiction. Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, was one of those good friends.

Popular Culture (Bronze Age Babies): Doug: Hi, my name is Doug, and… well, I’m addicted to the Planet of the Apes. There – I said it! Are you happy now? Welcome back to the BAB, everyone! We are pleased to be in your company today, and also excited to have been asked once again to participate in this summer’s Super Blog Team-Up. “Expanded universe” is our topic, so we are running with that across three blogs. Our premise here is that the variety of products available to kids in during the era of the Bronze Age of comics allowed our imaginations to make leaps into new territory for our favorite Apes characters.

Art (Silver Key): A big name in fantasy role-playing/Dungeons and Dragons art passed away yesterday—Jim Holloway. Jim was not my favorite D&D artist of all time—I might have to go with Bill Willingham or Erol Otus—but he was one of the 5-6 most iconic and prolific of the silver or “commercial” age of TSR, circa 1981 and on.

Tolkien (Tolkien and Fantasy): I believe that there are only two instances where J.R.R. Tolkien was interviewed on film. The first dates from 1962, and the second from 1968. The first, by John Bowen, was conducted on 10 December 1962, in black-and-white, for the BBC television program “Bookstand”. The episode was broadcast two days later, on Wednesday, 12 December, from 10.15-10.45 pm, though the Tolkien segment took up less than nine minutes.

Science Fiction (Marzaat): Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950. Well, I’ve known about this book for years, but it was pricey on the second hand market, but I got it for Christmas. A lot of science fiction crit books from the 1980s I’ve purchased recently seem to be deaccessioned from university libraries. This one came from the Columbus College Library in Columbus, Georgia.  It seems to have been checked out only once, in 1995. That matches Brian Stableford stating, in his essay “The Profession of Science Fiction” that he only sold “157 copies in the UK, not counting remainders”.

Fiction (Mostly Old Books): The First Quarry doesn’t dwell on an origin story but rather shows the young hitman being fully formed as a cold-blooded and intelligent killer as he accepts his first assignment after being recruited by The Broker – killing a college professor and destroying his manuscripts. The story takes place in Iowa in the early 1970s, the years that I came of age, and I was impressed and highly amused by all of the pop culture references from that era.

Pulp (Pulpfest): When Ned Pines was asked by The American News Company to start a chain of pulp magazines that it would distribute for him, he knew he needed an editor. The young publisher requested Frank A. Munsey employee, Leo Margulies, to be the managing editor of his new enterprise. With the country gripped by the Great Depression, the two men came up with a daring idea for the rough paper market: a ten-cent pulp magazine. Standard Magazines, better known as “The Thrilling Group,” launched THRILLING DETECTIVE, THRILLING ADVENTURES, and THRILLING LOVE in late 1931. Each sold for a dime.

Art (DMR Books): Matthews created a considerable amount of artwork depicting Elric and various other characters from Michael Moorcock’s stories. Moorcock said that “Rodney captured the images and invention, having a larger space to work with on the posters and calendars. He was brilliant, for instance, on the quirky End of Time stories and I love his inventiveness.”

Sensor Sweep: Kull, Star Trek, Dying Earth, Doc Vandal published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/