#at that point. Kirby is going to kill the god responsible

[daydreaming-ace]

If Kirby had an infection/zombie au, I don't think the main problem would be the infection.

It'd be keeping the Halberd out of the ocean.

[kyurilin]

Fic Writer Interview

I have been tagged to do this by @plusultraetc and obviously I love talking about my fanfics so here will be more than you ever wanted to know!

How many works do you have on AO3?

At the moment 16! 11 MHA, 4 Cars, and 1 FNAF but y'know. We know which ones matter

What's your total AO3 word count?

218,641. That's a really big fucking number right there Jesus Christ. And with some of the chunky fics I have on there that number is only gonna get even stupider.

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

1. Present Mic's Totally Bullshit Life

2. Crumbled Rooftops

3. How To (Hopefully Not Fail) At Telling Your Bestie You Love Him

4. Stray

5. Our Little Horror Story

Actually quite a surprise to me that my erasercloud fic takes 3rd, and 5th is my single FNAF fic. Not at all surprised by 1st and 2nd though lmaooo

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

ALL THE TIME!!! I love responding to comments even if it's just with emojis, but I also like to ramble in responses to stuff. I wouldn't be able to live without responding to them I love talking to people about my fics and I get some really good in depth ones anytime someone braves 54k erasermic one shot and crumbled rooftops especially.

What's the fic you've written with the angstiest ending?

Honestly I feel it has to go to After, my post-Oboro death story featuring Nemuri and Shouta. The whole thing is sad and at the ending the closest thing to happiness the characters get is that at least they have each other, but Oboro's still gone.

Technically the super short This Isn't How The Story Goes where I killed Shouta in place of Oboro could take this too but we all know I'm not actually doing anything else with that (and trust me it would have gotten angstier but other people have done the concept better than I made an attempt at in 2021)

What's the fic you've written with the happiest ending?

Present Mic's Totally Bullshit Life, for fucking sure! Look, it's pre-canon erasermic figuring their shit out and getting together for 54k and it ends on them getting married. We know in canon that things are absolutely going to shit down the road but in the context of that story which starts with Hizashi thinking of himself as Mic and being a little too used to faking smiles ENDING ON him being genuinely happy at his own wedding is a fucking phenomenally happy ending. I'm incredibly proud of that ending. It's such a great ending on that story.

Do you write crossovers?

I USED TO, not so much anymore but back in the day I used to write Cars and Transformers crossovers lmaoooo

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Someone got real pissy on one of my old Kirby fanfics at one point, whining about how it was illogical that the Kirby villains would help Kirby fight a bigger bad guy. Hope that reviewer in particular felt stupid when Kirby Star Allies released and all the DLC was previous Kirby helpers and villains coming to help fight the big bad.

Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

I have written some but it is lurking on my Google drive because I'm not ready to have smut out there on the internet that people can look at. That's about what I can say on that front 😭

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

GOD I hope not

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Nope! People out here just want the Kyuri experience in English it seems which is fine, but if someone did want to translate my fics I think I'd ascend

What's your all-time favorite ship?

Honestly if it's a ship that involves Nemuri, Oboro, Hizashi, and Shouta in any combination, it's my favorite. Erasermic is the go to just because it's so damn easy to find but I'm also a sucker for Cloudnight, or Erasercloud, or Cloudmic and so on for the rest of them. Hell, Poly Rooftop Gang is something I really want to write at some point cause I have so many thoughts about their dynamic as a whole. There's really none within that group that I like less than others and if you name me a ship from it I have Thoughts And Feelings locked and loaded

What's a WIP that you want to finish but don't think you ever will?

Technically going back to it, the extended This Isn't How The Story Goes idea where Shouta died instead of Oboro. I have PLANS. They exist!!! They're out there in my brain and pieces are on Google docs but it's been so long since I put anything together that it's just kind of dead in the water. The only reason I don't orphan that one on AO3 is that I like the way I wrote it.

What are your writing strengths?

I think characters. I've had a lot of compliments about the way I write characters in my fics and I really do feel like that's my strong point.

What are your writing weaknesses?

Whenever I have to get more than two characters to talk I feel like it comes across more stilted. I like having dialogue flow without having to use dialogue tags for stuff, but sometimes I have to use them for bigger conversations and I'm just dying on the inside thinking it sucks the whole time.

Also Big Info Dumps. I never know how this kind of thing comes across (example- the talk with Kurogiri from Crumbled Rooftops chapter 7 or the last segment of Stray chapter 2). I don't WANT to know how it comes across. I feel like sometimes I should reiterate that I'm autistic/ADHD and my mind is like 'you must infodump here'.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

If I could speak another language i'd love to occasionally use that as a skill just for fun but the only time I've ever done this was using Google translate for an original novel based on an idea for a Kirby story I wrote and then the whole notebook got lost. So now the cringe lives in my head

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

It was either Star Wars or Monsters Inc, and I truly don't remember which it was because I posted two separate things the same day on ff.net and don't remember which went up first.

What's a fandom/ship you haven't written for yet but want to?

I never think ahead fandomwise, but again. I WANT to write Poly Rooftop Gang SO BAD. I want to write for that dynamic so my thoughts can be out of my brain! This is a topic that has come up between me and @shabby-blog OFTEN! One day I will write the four of them together and the world will be made whole again 😌

What's your favorite fic you've written?

this is always such a hard question because I have three very large stories that are all beloved in their own right but today's answer is Stray

We're coming up on four years since I started writing it and I'm SLOWLY working on the last chapter, and it's got a very small but very dedicated group of readers and I just love that story so much. I went a crazy direction with it in terms of how I wrote it and the fact that people love it means a lot. I'm bound and determined to finish it even if it takes me a lot longer to finish it than I was hoping 😅

WELP that's all the questions I am free now and all the people I would have tagged have been tagged so HOPE EVERYONE ENJOYED THIS

[bluecladone]

Ngl if Varric dies in DA:TV it's going to severely impact my enjoyment of the game. I'll still play it, of course. I'm not the type to completely write a game off because of a plot point i don't agree with, to make no mention of the money spent. I'm sure the game is fine as a whole and I want to see Solas's story--and by extension, the DA setting--come to a close. But God, to kill off Varric of all characters...more under the cut.

Like don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of angsty, high stakes, kill-your-darlings type of plots, but it MUST have some kind of point. Killing Varric right at the start doesn't really serve much of a purpose. Like we don't need any motive or other driving force when we've been given plenty enough already a la the events and ending of Inquisition. We're well aware of the stakes. Killing Varric away from the people who loved him best (Hawke and crew, or whoever's left) surrounded by strangers (with the exception of Harding and Solas) would be such a disservice to his character. Add in extra yuck with the way EA/Bioware treated his writer, Mary Kirby. It just feels like an extra 'fuck you.' Besides, using him as such a heavy marketing tool for years only to kill him off is so cheap.

Maybe the writers didn't know what to do with him. (And maybe this is a direct result of Mary Kirby's layoff) Maybe they were afraid of the criticism they'd get if they just wrote him into retirement. I get it. Varric is a notorious busybody who shoulders a lot of responsibility, and he's so tied up into the story at this point. He's had a hand in most major plot points in the series. Not everyone would be satisfied with the retirement card. But the guy is getting old. I'm hoping and praying that they'll just settle with destroying Bianca and maybe injuring him enough to where he's like 'I'm way out of my league here, plus I've got a city to run. Time to pass this along to someone more capable.' He'd make a good advisor/mentor figure--there in the background, but still involved with the plot just enough. I feel like the team was so worried about people being disappointed that they couldn't have him as a companion that they jumped to the extreme to give us a good reason why and a chance for D✨️R✨️A✨️M✨️A.

Honestly, I wouldn't mind so much if they chose to kill him at the end, or shit--literally any point besides the very beginning. It's the last game in the series. Much like in Mass Effect 3, the world as we know it is ending and the stakes are ever higher. Not everyone is gonna make it. I know nothing is confirmed, but the set up in the trailer is so obvious. As soon as Varric tells Rook to take care of things, i got a sick feeling. Maybe they'll surprise us, but I doubt it. It's hard not to be cynical after hearing about the layoffs at Bioware and watching in real-time the development hell this game has gone through for the last decade.

Like imagine in Mass Effect Andromeda, say someone like Garrus or Liara shows up only to die right at the beginning of the story. They had no effect on the plot, other than explaining to Ryder the plot of the last 3 games to let them know why what they're doing here in the newest game should be important to them. Then they die to kickstart the plot and for Ryder to shake their fist at the villains and exclaim 'this time it's personal!' Ryder doesn't know Garrus/Liara. They met like a week ago. Plotwise, the moment falls flat emotionally when we know that Ryder wouldn't mourn Garrus/Liara as much as we know Shepard might. It should go without saying that a character dying would impact your main character more if those characters got to know each other throughout the story, but it's what I'm saying. I think it's better to shock your characters more than your audience.

And that's what this is. Shock value for the audience, to make us clutch our pearls and shake our fists at whoever is responsible for a beloved character's untimely demise. To make us care about a plot we're already invested in, and have been for 10 YEARS. Or maybe to get away from the uncomftability of having a character with an arc they don't know how to end gracefully. If they go the way I think they're going, anyway. Fingers crossed so so so hard that they surprise me.

[starmeadowsystem]

Nif-Point Moral Evaluation: Kirby :) (games)

Gonna start out with this lil guy as a test drive :)

Who is Kirby? What does he do?

Kirby from the Kirby franchise is a loveable lil guy who just likes sweets and friends. He is also a major hero known throughout all of Popstar. Now, this lil guy has 30 real life years of history behind him, so i think I'm going to go for a shorthand version of his actions.

The amount of times he saved Popstar from your wildest threats imaginable is... Well, quite a few, really. He killed Nightmare after (unintentionally) releasing him from his seal, he fought off Dark Matter three times in a row, he got betrayed by two separate characters (both of whom wanted power over Popstar, of course) and kicked both their asses, one time he went to fucking space and faced off against a cult and their dark god who threatened the entire universe. Actually, that wasn't even the first time he saved the universe: in Planet Robobot, he destroyed a being who attempted to kill all organic life. In Return to Dreamland, he faced off against a wizard who tried to conquer the universe, only to be assimilated by the artifact he used to take it over. What I'm getting at is that he's responsible for the safety of Popstar and the universe as a whole several times over.

But it doesn't even stop there- Kirby's also known for being a very good friend and a positive influence to others in general. The most notable example is King Dedede, a tyrant who stole all the food in Dreamland in the very first game, but had a change of heart once he had his ass beaten by Kirby and tried to do good in the next, albeit in a very roundabout way with no communication at all. In his most recent outing, King Dedede put himself in harm's way to save a single waddle dee fresh out of possession, and it's clear he wouldn't have done that without Kirby's influence. This isn't even the only case- Gooey was shaped by Kirby's love and attention, the villain of Return to Dreamland ended up regretting the harm he caused to Kirby, Taranza was able to stand up to Queen Sectonia because of Kirby, and there are probably a few other cases.

Kirby, due to all of this, is both very admirable and very simple. He's the hero. The good guy that you always play as, for good reason. Due to all this, I don't think I can say anything bad about him. There aren't any qualities that get in the way of his heroism (Kirby's Avalanche is NOT canon), he seems to understand the moral implications of his actions since he's happy when his friends are, and if Meta Knight and Galacta Knight are the same species as him then Kirby is technically also capable of being evil, meaning he does in fact have moral agency.

I. Don't really have much else to say on the matter tbh

Poster's Ruling: 55 (Pure of Heart)

[criminalmutantsins]

April O’Neil(2012) Character Analysis

So, this version of April is pretty controversial, especially beyond this community. Many fans accuse her of being a toxic, manipulative women. Even some fans would use derogatory words. For me, she is not so bad. Not my favorite, but pretty okay.

I’m not trying to convince others to change their minds. I respect everyone’s opinions because everyone matters is many ways. All I want to do is explain how I see April and get some of you guys’ opinions.

Hope you enjoy this analysis! And comment down below if you would like me to analyze another character.

Anyway, here we go.

The Main Issues

Season 2:

This season was where it all began with April hate train.

I think almost everyone can agree that April wasn’t so bad in season one, maybe even likable. At least, I did.

But all that potential love went down the drain once season two started.

The first episode, called “The Mutation Situation,” takes place a few months after they defeat the Kraang and the Shredder disappeared. Everything seemed fine since April’s dad was back and the city hadn’t been attacked. But, the Turtles once again have to face the Kraang and stop them from transporting their mutagen supply. They asked for April and her dad’s help to find the ship, though she had to trick him into doing it. The four brothers destroyed the ship, but they paid the price because all of the mutagen in the ship fell off, scattered across the city. One of the vials was going to drop on April, except her father took the hit and mutated into a human-sized bat.

Kirby kidnaps April and the guys have to save her. Once they did, Michelangelo reveals that him and his brother’s were indirectly responsible for the incident.

April gets so mad and storms off, wishing to never see them again.

Okay, so from my perspective, I understand why April broke down and said those hurtful things the first time. She went through a lot during the first season. With her dad being held captive for so long, getting kidnapped and probed by the Kraang, and being forced to relinquish most of her old life.

I’m surprised she isn’t even a bit traumatized.

When April believed the Kraang were defeated and her dad was safe, she was happy to have her life back in some kind of order. Yet, in basically a day, that whole dream died right in front of her. She was tired of all the fighting, and lost it when she realized she would have to again. In her irrational, emotional mind, I think she was angry at the turtles for more than just accidentally mutating her dad. She associated them as the start to all the craziness she didn’t want.

After everything she went through, April was desperate to have some clarity that she was willing to throw away her close friends.

I’m not saying that she shouldn’t have apologized. April needed to apologize.

What I didn’t condone from this arc was her yelling at Donnie in “Target: April O’Neil.” She went a bit off line and at least should’ve had some sense in what she was saying. Maybe Donnie practically stalking got her upset, but I get why people would get upset with her over that.

 The Love Triangle:

This love triangle was the worst written plot point in this show. I still love the show, but god this needed so much work.

I believe there were some Apritello shippers around season one. I kind of shipped them.

This ship was ruined once season two came around with that April arc and introducing Casey.

I love Casey, but he was mostly used as a plot device for the love triangle. He had so much more potential than what he got.

Based on the comments about the triangle, most people have an issue with their belief that April was manipulating the guys and how unclear the status of either Apritello or Capril.

I just got to say that poor April was dragged through the mud because of the writer’s mistakes. They confused the h*ll out of us, or at least me, with all the will they, won’t they switcheroo. It was hard to tell if April liked Donnie, Casey, both, or none of them. I think the main goal with this triangle was the writers indecision to either follow the 2003 version’s lead with Capril or go their own path with Apritello. If they had decided, this plot point would have been so much better.

To be honest, I think the writers stopped April from making a decision to make the show “interesting. ”In season 3, it seemed like April wanted to be with Donnie. Casey and her were also acting more like friends instead of love interests. Yet, in the first episode of season 4, they had to make him get love struck over her new outfit.

Ughh... the writers confused me too much.

I think it didn’t come to fans’ minds that maybe April was confused with her feelings. Maybe she liked both guys and didn’t reject both of them outright because of her need to clear her head. Sure, it was a bad idea to be honest with them, but people make mistakes.

 “The Power Inside Her”:

People are a bit harsh towards April in this episode. I totally get how they feel, though their hate for her could have clouded their judgment.

The biggest complaint I have seen about this episode is the fans being angry with April for not breaking from the alien’s control. Compared to the aeon, Za-Naron, April is a not that experience with her mental powers. Communicating or using their mental powers is normal for the Aeons, while April figured out how to use them a few months or a year ago. As she kept the crystal, Za-Naron control over her grew stronger. I think that if any other character like Leo or Donnie, fans would be more lenient since their writing was way better.

Of course, April needed to apologize for temporary killing Donnie, and hurting her friends; good thing she did. I don’t hold it against her as much as other fans.

 Conclusion:

After finishing the analysis, I concluded that April is a victim of bad writing instead of a terrible character. I know there’s an argument that the writing doesn’t really play a part with liking or disliking a character, but it does. Writers decide every character’s actions and create the person they’ll become. Reducing April to a plot device for romance was terrible. Not seeing April’s potential was one of the greatest disappointments in TMNT 2012.

If you still don’t like April, that’s fine. I’m not trying to change your mind. All I want is to open their perspectives and see that all the hate April gets can be explained.

Hope you enjoyed this analysis. Comment down below your thoughts.

Do you agree or disagree?

Thanks for reading! 😊❤️

[chillassimagines]

Behind These Doors - Landon Kirby Smut

(REQUESTED)

Watching Landon fly with his wings in full fire mode was absolutely entrancing. Landon obviously wasn’t a very graceful human, but he looked absolutely flawless as a Phoenix. Watching him learn how to control it was the only thing reminding you that he was still your little dork, because when he wasn’t gliding across the sky, he was knocking into trees and even falling back down to earth.

“Babe, why don’t we give this a break for today. I don’t know how many more times I’m able to watch you “fall from grace” as you call it.” You called up to him. He sighed and slowly came back down to earth on both feet in one piece. You walked up to him as his flames went up into dust.

“No matter how many times I fall, when I get back up into the air, I feel invincible.” You smiled and placed your hand at the nape of his neck, fiddling with his curls.

“You’re so cute. Remember Landon, please don’t try practicing without someone here, you are still very breakable.” You winced inwardly as you remembered when he broke his nose. It was all sorts of messed up looking and he was in a lot of pain. He asked you to spell the pain away, but no way were you going to break his nose back in place. So, he had MG break his neck so he would die and come back with a perfectly normal nose. You preferred not to go through a similar situation again though.

“Leave me alone, super wolf healer.” He laughed as he put his forehead to yours. You joined in with his contagious grin.

“My bark is as equally strong as my bite, so you’re best off to listen.” You stated seriously. He cocked an eyebrow up.

“Oh really now?” Those words were fighting words. Landon knew as well as you that when those exact words were spoken in that tone with that face...you got extra hot.

“Can you guys chill that out? I’m getting uncomfortable.” Lizzie spoke up from her lawn chair a few feet away. Lizzie was a good copilot for Landon, with her magic she’d held his take offs and his come downs. She just wasn’t always available, so her time was precious.

“Geez, uh, I’m sorry Lizzie. I didn’t mean to um, make that, uh-“

“Calm down little grizzly head,” Lizzie rose from her chair and patted Landon’s head of curls as she walked past. “I’ll see you guys later!” She called over her shoulder walking away. Landon’s cheeks were pink, but you were on fire.

“I really am the worst at timing things.” He whispered as he watched her walk off. You extended your claws and ran them lightly down Landon’s neck, causing him to shiver at the sensation.

“You really, really are.” You rasped as you felt your wolf coming over you. Landon’s eyes widened slightly.

“You know, I don’t know when I’ll get over those.” He pointed at your eyes and you were sure they were shining bright yellow.

“Landon, you know you can’t just say that!” You grumbled as you felt your wolf and hormones mixing up a storm. Landon cupped both sides of your face.

“Hey, hey, calm down, breathe-“

“You need to do something.” You attempted to get your breathing under control.

“O-Okay, let’s just get back to my room.” He grabbed your hand and started walking back to the school. You knew that would take way too long.

“Fly, goddammit.” You pulled him to your chest and wrapped your arms around his waist. He nodded and spread his fiery wings. You only prayed he wouldn’t fall or drop you.

~

“Take it all off.” Landon mumbled as he closed the door to his room and locked it. On the way over your wolf had some fun taunting Landon. With touches, words, and things that had him matching your anxious energy. You followed his order with no hesitation.

“Landon.” You whispered as he gripped your waist harshly when you only were able to strip down to your underwear. Couldn’t finish the job if he wouldn’t let you go.

“I change my mind, get on the bed.” He then captured your top lip in a dirty kiss before releasing you. When you had first had sex with Landon it was a sweet awkward. You both knew what you wanted to do, but the execution was far from the dream. However, as time went on you both learned from each other, gained knowledge from outside sources (Lizzie and Rafael), and Landon opened himself up when you were intimate. Few things actually phased him when he was in this element.

And it was hot.

You sat on the bed and backed up onto the middle as Landon removed his shirt. You were damn near butt naked, but you didn’t care about the fairness, because you were still on fire. He moved to hover over you before pressing his lips to yours again. You held onto his soft curls as you made out. One hand moved to your side and moved to cup your breast. It made you want to howl, because the wolf in you was fueling this desire.

“Landon, please.” You broke from his kisses, but his lips soon found the valley between your breasts. His lips felt cold against your raging hot body and it was exhilarating. He traveled lower to the hem of your pink panties and you knew what he was up to. “Don’t tease.” You begged, raising your hips up to his face. He smiled softly and looked up at you.

“Only because you said please.” With his thumb he gathered your panties to the side and brought his mouth to your core.

“Yes! Landon!” This was his favorite move. He liked the look of you still in your underwear while he made you come undone. You had no idea if what was an actual kink, but he treated it like one. It turned him on to no end for unknown reasons. “God, you’re so good at this it’s, no fair.” You whimpered our your two last words.

His response was him humming against your beating clit. Your thighs were slowly closing in on his head, and your hands buried in his forest of curls made sure that he wouldn’t be going anywhere.

“I’m so close!” You rasped out again, feeling your wolfish urges becoming sated slowly. Your stomach was in so many knots for this boy and his mouth.

“Cum, Y/N.” He managed to break away briefly before diving back in to finish you off. You raised your wrist to your mouth and bit down as you came, fighting from hollering. You rocked your hips slowly into his face as you came down.

“Everytime, I dont know how you do it.” You breathed out in satisfaction as he rose to his knees. You readied yourself for him to pull down his bottoms by hooking your legs around his waist, waiting for him to pull them down and enter you. It was almost routine, and you had not one problem with it. At you readying yourself for the next position, Landon seemed to not be with it.

“We’re gonna do something different, babe.” You raised your brows and Landon flipped you over like a sack of potatoes. He pushed your thighs forward, making your ass rise in the air. He ran his hands up your back, applying pressure in his thumbs for a brief massage. Your face was in fact pressed to the bed and your ass was up. You were in shock at this turn of events you couldn’t bring yourself to say much.

“What are you doing?” Seemed like a reasonable question, right? Apparently you were wrong.

“Stay put and find out.” Your eyes widened like saucers. Landon was never outwardly dominant like this and it had your tummy doing flips. His hands placed themselves on your ass cheeks and began massaging them slowly. His thumbs would slowly inch towards your slit at every motion and the anticipation was killing you.

You were so glad he didn’t have súper hearing, at least not yet, because your heart was like a rock concert right now.

“Different’s good right? Exciting. Behind these doors I’m usually different for you in this situation. Behind these doors you make me feel just as invincible as flying. Free...like I can do anything. Like I can make you come apart while I do anything.” Those words reignited your flame and you knew he sensed it.

“I-I’m ready to find out.” The room fell into silence when you said that. It didn’t last for long before you filled it with your moans again. Landon pulled your panties to the side once more and ran two fingers down your slit. “Landon, I’m going to explode.” You pleaded.

“I know.” He answered shortly before rubbing your clit.

“Ahh, shit.” You whimpered, grinding your ass back into his rotating fingers. You felt his other hand release your panties leaving his fingers trapped inside of them as he continued pleasuring you. You heard the ripping of plastic and you mentally cursed yourself for not even thinking of a condom.

“Tell me if it gets uncomfortable.” He leaned over your back moments later, his naked chest pressing into your skin. You couldn’t barely comprehend what he said while you were lost in the pleasure. But the head of his member slipping inside of you sure woke you up.

“Landon!” You cried, muffling your voice in a pillow. He thrusted into you, not letting up on your clit. You felt yourself repeatedly clench around him and it matched up with his grunts and moans he muffled against your back. “Faster, please.” You groaned as he angled his hips in an upward motion, hitting you exactly where you needed him. He sped up at your request and feeling the sensation of his breath along your back gave your heightened senses a push.

“You close? Because, fuck I’m so close.” He asked before pressing a kiss to your skin. You angled your hips just right to rock back into him while moaning out. “I’ll take that as a “hell yes, Landon”.” You smiled and moaned once more as you clenched around him so tightly it made his thrusting pause. You felt his thighs vibrate against your ass and it was the most empowering feeling ever. “Y/N, relax for me, I can barely move.” He pulled his fingers away from your clit and moved the panties even further out of his way.

“Sorry baby.” You whispered and took a deep breath, trying to relax yourself. It was quite hard to do with a fully erect man inside of you.

“No, no, no, don’t be sorry.” He whispered and began pressing kisses everywhere on your back as you calmed down. He was able to slowly begin thrusting inside of you at a slow pace and you felt consumed by it.

“I’m there, I’m there, Landon.” You whimpered once more letting your head comfortably press into the pillows as you basked in your orgasm.

“Good, good.” He cooed before he gave you a particularly sharp thrust. You gasped out as you felt the pressure of his release against your walls. He pulled out and moved from on top of you to stand and throw away the condom. His pants hung low on his waist as he made his way back to your collapsed body. He laid next to you and moved your hair out of your face.

“You’re so pretty.” You both said at the same time. Landon raised an eyebrow and you bursted into laughter.

“You are something else, Y/N.” You scooted closer into his chest and moved his hand to rest on your bare bottom.

“You are someone else sometimes, Landon. I love it just like I love you.”

[squid--inc--writes]

purgatory

so, I decided to finally finish writing that piece from a really fucked up dream I had. this probably doesn`t cover a quarter of it, but I enjoyed it, and its the first solid writing piece I`ve had in 2 years, so I`m proud.

@schwarzekatzen @wettthepottterheadss4120

warning: gore, gross descriptions, vague psychological bullshit, bullying, violence, etc.

word count:  2281

summary: you follow Trith (not mentioned in the story) on her first round to meet some of the residents within this particular realm of purgatory. Because, frankly, who else can?

My eyes open to a hollow ceiling, peering right into an attic where a familiar rocking hair rocks away. Not a care in the world about how it's up there. That would be Granny Gin. Don't know her real name, but still. She's there. Dead as ever, and knitting away. Sometimes I sleep in long enough that her scarf reaches the floor.

Standing up, groggy, I make my way to do my rounds. Someone's got to make sure the dead don't panic. The first round doesn't have to be me all dressed up. Not like they care about the smell. At least I don't think they do. Can the dead smell? I don't know. At Kirby's request, I started keeping a journal so he can remember what last happened and get one step closer to getting out of here. I also want to help everyone else out of purgatory, so this is why I'm writing this. Brand spanking new. Right up on a blank page. Yep.

So, I guess my next ghastly figure is Heidi. She stands in the bathroom all day. Touching up her makeup, not changing a thing. Aside from the usual changes extended stays can cause. I think she starved to death. Couldn't tell you. She's standing there, takes a glance at me in the mirror, nods, then tries another colour of lipstick. She's been here a while, so that means three eyes, each one a distinct colour of red, blue or yellow. She also has glowing skin, and her legs are becoming more horse like. Maybe her puzzle would be solved by getting her life a little STABLE. Hah. Get it? Why would I write down my laugh?

Whatever, I'm not going to erase anything or cross it out. The thoughts of the living might help, even abstractly.

The next is the hallway. Bert walks along, holding a gas can thing. Y'know, an old timey thing they used to gas bugs? I'm not sure, I can't recall ever needing an exterminator.

He tips his hat to mean, "hey there, lil' lady. Didn't the landlord tell ya to keep out of the building for the next day or so? Don't worry. I'll wait to do my work until you get out. I'll just let 'im know I'll be a bit late starting."

I nod, "thank you." Sometimes it's easier to play along. I feel he's been a tad testy, so I try not to agitate him. Usually I can pass by just fine. Maybe he had anger issues. Try and work his puzzle out like that. Ironically, he resembles a cockroach by now. He doesn't have hands, but the rigid limbs that should have been his hands were made of a hardened skin. It chipped away from his bones like it knew it wasn't supposed to look like that. I rarely look him in the face, both because he looks… interesting, but also because it tends to aggravate him. Maybe it's the way I look at him. He's yelled at me for being a large bug before, not always a roach. I just don't want to get hit again. Maybe I shouldn't help him.

Next up, Theodore and Teddy. They have the same name, and they yell at each other from across the hall. They each have their own rooms. Sometimes they switch rooms. They seem to be connected at this point, literally. They have long strings of flesh swinging from between their bodies. At one point, they got cut, and you see everything pouring out. They acknowledge it in their recent arguments, getting mad at the other for not making enough of an effort to keep it all in. Theodore usually doesn't have a jaw anymore, since it melted down, combined with his clothes. I can't check on Mindy anymore thanks to them. I don't think I want to.

However, I think the problem revolves around they're communication. But that's an obvious point. Maybe they need to accept their own responsibility for their misfortunes.

Mindy… last time I saw her, she had dolls connecting to her through thousands of strands of veins, and nerves, and all other sorts of things. They aren't all made of plastic anymore, last time I saw her.

Theodore says to me, as if his chin wasn't sitting where his stomach would be, "hello dear. How are you today?"

"I'm doing well. Thank you. How are you and Teddy today?"

Teddy snorts from the other room, dusting off an old hat, and placing it on his head, "I'm fine. Perfectly."

Theodore rolled his eyes, "we're as well as ever. Just a lovers' quarrel."

Teddy got offended, ripping the hat off, "oh, NOW we're lovers?"

I nod, and quickly leave before they start trying to pull their guts to their respective sides, and spitting insults. It never ends well.

Next up, Patty and Simone, standing on the stairs. They are actually quite friendly with each other. Patty asking Simone about her husband, Simone asking how Patty's been, after her being widowed and all. They swap recipes regularly. Patty very much seems like she killed her husband. And some of the recipes they swap sound as if Simone is trying to kill her husband. If what she says is true, he deserves it. God do I hope it's not.

Simone has morphed into the railing at this point, spine jutting from bloodless flesh so she can lean on the staircase. I feel the one they used to talk at was a lot lower, considering Simone is almost nine feet in the air. Patty, however, seems to be turning to a bone statue. Her legs can no longer move, not that she moved much to begin with. Wait, no, this time she seems to be turning to ice. Her legs are quite transparent, but there's a layer of frost surrounding her feet. They never used to acknowledge me, but Simone seems to have spread to the stairs, and she'll scold me for walking too roughly. Patty gives me the most judgmental look. I think if they could move on from husband's they'd probably be home free. But that is what their lives revolved around for so long, so I'm not sure that could be easy.

Once I sneak down the stairs without slipping, or getting yelled at, it's into the kitchen I go. Sid is at the fridge constantly stuffing his face. Somehow, he's a part of the fridge. Everything drops out of his stomach back into the fridge, into a pile of slop. Like something a pig would eat. If he's particularly frantic, he'll tear chunks out of himself. I don't think they can feel it when they hurt themselves. Not unless they're supposed to…

I have no clues as to how Sid can save his puzzle. He doesn't tend to talk. I'm not sure he has vocal cords anymore. He barely has eyes.

Moving from the kitchen is the parlor. I'm not sure how this place works, so I'm not sure this is in the right place. Either way, the parlor has about seven people in here. Kirby plays checkers with Daniel, Maud watches TV with Lainey, Paula and Shess pick on Lily. 

Paula and Shess would probably be gone if they could stop, and just sincerely apologize. I'm not sure Lily is really a person though, because she's never changed once. I think she kind of looks like a mannequin, but moving. She's meant to play a part, being small, and easy to pick on. Shess shattered her arms at one point, and now just has gooey, bloody stumps with bone shards sticking out that she uses to punch lily with, and her head is being engulfed by her own skin, but her eyes seemed to have multiplied, hair having started to attach and grow off of the eyes. Like the world's grossest ice-cream cone. Paula, on the other hand, started turning into blades. Her fingernails are long and sharp, her arms have started to thin at the edges, and splinter into more blades, even her nose resembles a knife. I passed her once, her hair brushed my cheek, and I had a long cut from my temple to my chin. That wasn't fun. I can't talk to either of them. They're always caught up in bloodlust.

Lainey and Maud try to ignore Shess and Paula as much as possible. They are actually aware of their surroundings. I don't think they need my help out, because they've been fading lately, so maybe they're ready to pass on. They generally talk about the movie they're watching. Sometimes they get new snacks from an unknown source. Usually they just coo at each other about how much they love each other, and what signs to look for to find each other again. They told me that Purgatory allows you the chance to return to when you died, the chance to fade completely, or to join the better place in whatever you believed in. Purgatory is for learning lessons. They both believe in reincarnation, and fully believe they'll still love each other, no matter the timeline. It's one of the nicer conversations.

Daniel and Kirby are next up. Daniel has no idea what's going on ever. His skin seems to be made from webs, and these small black creatures weave over him all the time, anytime something starts breaking down. Which happens at every move.  Daniel seems actually peaceful here. Maybe he needs to take a stand. Especially with Kirby always cheating. He doesn't even do it subtly, he straight up takes pieces, and places them where they shouldn't be. Daniel would probably tear all his 'skin' off at this point if he tried to do something.

Kirby, however, seems to increasingly be made of greasy Hawaiian print shirts. Yes, you are made of shirts. I almost slip when I pass your table because it's not, like, slightly caked on grease, it's literally dripping, and doesn't spread past a three foot radius. Maybe if you apologized for Dan, it would help. How's that sound?

Okay, three more rooms, then I start getting ready. So, I leave the other side of the parlor, head into the hall, and head to the basement. Shimi is down here. They're just a long, skinny eel at this point. With multiple heads that bite at Shimi's main body. I'm not even sure when Shimi showed up, and I've never seen much else, so I'm not sure they can leave. I don't try to go into the water. Too scared. It's undefinably deep. Some places you can see the ground, others are holes, others are so obfuscated by flesh that has yet to melt down and turn into water. I'm sure Shimi's been here for thousands of years.

Heading back upstairs, I check on the, what I can only assume, ballroom. It's huge, and usually has a few dancing couples. This room changes a lot, and has the least mutated people in it. I remember I helped one couple realize the intense emotion they couldn't move on from was rage, at the fact that they had cheated on each other. They both felt wronged, but they were both no better than each other. The puzzle they solved involved them no longer dancing together, and finding new partners. Today it stood completely empty. Not unusual, but still. The room always unnerves me.

Next up, I like to call the nook. It's not quite in the library, but it's very cozy right outside it.

A rough, sweet voice says, "what took you so long?"

I smile at Ronnie. She's very nice. I think she is, maybe was, actually my age when she died. We're both around seventeen. She however has skin made from literal porcelain, although that does mean when she moves too much, her body starts leaking blood, like from her eyes and joints . Her hair is nearly laid around her head, a warm auburn. And I don't mean that figuratively. It literally feels the way a room with plenty of blankets and a fireplace would feel like. The nook doesn't have a fireplace, it just has Ronnie.

She rasps out, "well, are we going to have a nap? You're my favourite snuggle buddy, and I can't have one without you."

I'm pretty sure she can't leave because she's trapped in her childhood. She's told me about all her dolls, and toys. I think her house might have burned down, and she wouldn't leave them behind. I'm not sure if I'll be able to get her to leave.

I give her a closed mouth smile, and step forward, "yeah, I can help you take a nap."

I wind up cuddling up to her. And, I think I won't write much until after I get ready. Too tired. Need to wake up more.

When I'm finally up, I look up to see the hollow attic. No floor at all. Grandmother Gin rocking away in her rocking chair, completely unaware of the lack of floor.im not sure if that's actually her name. Sometimes I get up so late that her blanket actually gets in my way trying to get up. At least I don't usually get dressed up to do my first round. I don't think the dead care about when the living stink. They don't seem to care about much. I do. Speaking of stink, I am doing this for my pal Kirby. Try to keep a record and write down everything that happens. Maybe I can help him, and some of the others, out of here. That's why I'm writing this. Right here. Blank page. Well, not blank anymore. But, hey, first page, first to go.

[its-sixxers]

Top 10 Female Characters

Rules: Name your top 10 favorite female characters from 10 different fandoms and then tag 10 people. tagged by: @marvilus73​ thank uuuu

tagging: @benny-gecko-official​ @courier-sux​ @randomwordsandstormydays​ @radbeetle​ @vaulties​ @nukasoda​ @falloutglow​ @valkyriejack​ @corvegaassemblyplant​ @eeveevie​ woof that’s a lotta people u dont gotta do i just obey the tumblr tag gods sometimes

It’s a VERY good thing that this was for different fandoms because 3 of them were going to be from A Song of Ice and Fire because I am the worst. All of these women have inspired parts of my OCs, see if you can spot the fascinating ways I am a hack fraud under a read more cuz long

Samus Aran (Metroid)

My first videogame love. I will die for her. Really the first example of a lady kicking ass that I can remember, and also gave me my fascination for the mysterious person in armor trope. Seeing a female character who wasn’t sexualized (until the zero suit, anyway) was a game changer.

Sansa Stark (A Song of Ice and Fire)

I’m in the camp where I prefer book Sansa to show Sansa, but in general I just really love what she represents - or at least the potential of it. A woman constrained by the binds of her society and suffering for it, but learning to play it to her advantage and turn the tables on motherfuckers and make them forever regret underestimating her. Strong in a way that doesn’t require physical power or violence. She’s a very different archetype and I love her for it. (I also enjoy her dynamic with Sandor even though it screams problematic). MY QUEEN IN DA NORF

Honorary mentions also go to Brienne of Tarth and Olenna Tyrell from the series. :V

Sarah Connor (Terminator)

I prefer the first movie to the second and Sarah's a big reason for that. I love seeing an ordinary woman faced with horrifying circumstances and fuckin' killing it. T2 Sarah is very fucked up (and I appreciate that she's realistically fucked up from what she's been through) and I love her too but sweet baby angel T1 Sarah is my fave. I pretend the other movies don’t exist lol sue me

Maiev Shadowsong (Warcraft)

In a total reverse from Sarah Connor, I love Maiev because she's an absolute asshole, but also because she's right. Mostly. A woman incredibly devoted to her duty, who has witnessed a lot of terror and horror, arguably betrayed by her leader and still trying to do what's best for her people. Love her to bits. Tyrande who?

Red (Transistor)

This game stuck with me after I finished it and has still stuck with me. Just having a relatively mute protagonist (save for her singing) in crazy circumstances with her dead boyfriend's soul in a sword she uses to whoop ass. Idk. I just think she's neat.

Furiosa (Mad Max: Fury Road)

She's fury and love, power and tenderness. She's every shade of woman - she’s a human and there’s absolutely no male gaze regarding her (to the point of angering manchildren, legend). If every female character was like Furiosa I could die happy. I can't sufficiently express how amazing she and the rest of the female cast in the movie are but I've seen it three times in theatres if that tells you anything.

Margaret (The Crown)

Her character is based on an actual real life person, but dramatized. This is going to be a smidge weird but idc. I identify a lot with Margaret - her pains in love, her aimlessness, feeling ignored or misunderstood, a complicated but loving relationship with her sister. Taking to abusing alcohol to deal with it and everyone just kind of turning a blind eye. The mix of very high highs and very low lows. Trying to be happy and things never seeming to work out. The absolute tragedy of her life just being absolute garbage - partially of her own making. She's great, Vanessa Kirby and Helena Bonham Carter do a great job portraying her.

Elinor Dashwood (Sense and Sensibility)

For the Austenverse this spot was a tie between Elinor and Anne Elliot from Persuasion. Both are characters I've grown to love more and more as I've gotten older and can identify with them more. They're up there in age, they're the obligatory responsible adult in their families trying to fuckn' make do on this bitch of an earth. They have great pains and anxiety regarding love a nd their age and broken hopes and just hnnnh feels. Emma Thompson is my favorite rendition of her.

Lady Sarah Churchill (The Favorite)

Baddest bitch on the block. Emphasis on bitch. Like Sansa, her world is a sexist and misogynist one where women aren't percieved as a threat - they're barely percieved as players at all - but Sarah is smart as hell and has managed to seat herself in a position of extreme power at the Queen's side. At the cost of emotionally manipulating the Queen for her own selfish needs. (wtf) She's a villian I really like and seeing her and Abigail's power struggles is depressing but entertaining. Also her fashion sense is bomb dot com.

Megara (Disney)

Alongside Esmeralda (another favorite, tho problematic) the only Disney heroine from my childhood that seems to be an actual adult. She's sassy, her hips don't lie, and she loves herself a himbo. Relateable.

[gerryconway]

Superhero Comic Book Publishing: Time to Change

So I've been reading rumors (and had a recent conversation with a top exec at one of the Big Two) about the potential end of Marvel and DC as publishers of original comics, and I Have Thoughts.

These thoughts are the product of fifty years experience working in and around the superhero comic book business, writing and editing for both Marvel and DC. I'm no business expert. I'm not a student of publishing. I can't analyze a spreadsheet or write a business plan. I'm not an MBA. The closest I've come to owning and running a company was helping my second wife develop her small business (though I believe some of the lessons we learned about the perils of expanding a business are relevant here).

No, what I'm about to discuss isn't the result of a deep understanding of big business, market share growth, the realities of corporate politics, or any of the realpolitik aspects of modern day publishing as understood by the people who've brought both companies to this moment of near collapse.

I'm just a long-time observer who's worked in the superhero field almost since its modern inception in the 1960s.

Perspective: when I started writing comics professionally, Marvel was publishing about 12 titles a month, and DC (then National Periodical Publications) was publishing about 30. Comics cost 15 cents and offered between 20 and 25 pages of story. (I'm not going to work with exact numbers because for my purposes here exact numbers aren't relevant; like I said, I'm no MBA, and this is based on personal observation, memory, and experience. If I get a precise number wrong, sue me, it doesn't matter.)

Background: How the 1960s and 1970s got the business to where it is today, and how that era reveals possible ways out of the current crisis.

It was during the 1960s, a period of modest output (compared to today), that almost ALL of the roots of modern superhero comics mythology were created. Modern incarnations of The Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, Robin, Batgirl, Aquaman and Mera, Wonder Woman, the Teen Titans, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Black Panther, X-Men, Daredevil, Captain Marvel, Black Widow, Thor, Captain America, Iron Man--

The list of characters and storylines and mythology created in the 1960s (with overlap from the 50s and into the early 70s) is just flabbergasting-- especially when you consider the size of the companies and the number of creators who accomplished it.

When I started writing for DC Comics in 1968, their offices consisted of half a floor in a modest office building on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. Eight editors (or maybe seven, I'm not sure) and one editorial assistant worked under one editorial director and one publisher, with a production department headed by one production manager, one assistant manager who doubled as a colorist, one proof reader, and two or three production assistants, and a receptionist. Each editor was responsible for five or six books and only one editor had enough pull to have an assistant. (Mort Weisinger, who edited the highest selling range of books, had Nelson Birdwell "helping" him with the Superman line-- in fact, Nelson did all the hard editorial work while Mort snarled at people.) Four of the editors shared a single office; two others shared an office; and the two most "important" editors had an office each. That's how I remember it-- I may be off on the specifics but the general picture is accurate. This was how the company that controlled the largest market share of the comic book publishing world, possibly more than seventy percent of sales, looked in 1967-68.

Marvel Comics was an even more bare bones operation. With most of its business operations handled by Magazine Management, Martin Goodman's main publishing operation, Marvel Comics itself in 1968 operated out of a small office on Madison Avenue barely the size of a large modern conference room. The company had one editor and one assistant editor, one production manager, one assistant production manager, a part-time art director, a couple of production assistants, and a receptionist. The receptionist had a cubicle; the production staff shared a "bullpen"; the assistant editor and production manager split an office that wasn't really an office, more of an alcove; and the editor (Stan) had a private office not much larger than an average editor's today. This was the company that was revolutionizing storytelling in modern comics-- and while its individual titles were selling extremely well, its market share, due to an onerous distribution deal with its chief competitor, National Periodical Publications, was much less than it might have been.

That's how the superhero comic book publishing business looked in 1967-68. Prosperous but culturally insignificant (at least, not obviously significant). A pair of modest small enterprises, family owned and operated (NPP was bought by Kinney in 1967; Goodman retained ownership of Marvel until 1968), with rigidly controlled costs and a decent, relatively predictable profit margin.

Five years later, in the early 1970s, EVERYTHING had changed. Both companies were now controlled by larger businesses, and both were under pressure to expand market share and increase profits. Simultaneously comic book readership was dropping as the baby boomer audience aged out. The superhero comic book business was in a crisis-- and each company responded in hysterical counter-productive ways. Marvel, no longer hampered by its distribution deal with its competitor, worked to expand its market share with an explosion of new titles in multiple genres-- without proportionately expanding its editorial support structure and production staff. DC Comics experimented with new titles and new formats, without an overall publishing strategy or company-wide creative approach, continuing its tradition of independent editorial fiefdoms.

For most of the 1970s, in other words, both companies, Marvel and DC, faced creative and economic chaos. That chaos produced memorable and influential work-- Kirby's Fourth World was born, I killed Gwen Stacy, the X-Men were reborn under Chris Claremont, Jim Starlin created Thanos and killed the original Captain Marvel, Batman began getting dark-- but the companies themselves were flailing. Management at both Marvel and DC were clueless how to proceed. (As someone who held editorial positions at both companies in the 1970s I can attest top executives at DC and Marvel were way out of their depth.)

No one working in comics in the early to mid 1970s had any realistic expectation the business would even exist by the end of the decade-- news stand sales were that bad and getting worse every year. Cost cutting was rampant. Marvel reduced page count to 18 pages (and tried to hide it by paying writers and artists for 1 page that was printed as a "double page spread"). DC maintained a higher page count while adding reprint pages in order to increase the price. Short term fixes for a devastating long term crisis.

Two events saved superhero comics from disappearing in the late 1970s, and each produced effects that fundamentally altered the economics and creative direction of the business up to the present day.

The first event was the creation of the Direct Sale Market by entrepreneur Phil Seuling in 1973. There are many articles available describing how the direct market expanded through the 70s and 80s, so I won't repeat the details here, but in a nutshell, the direct market offered comic book publishers a way to guarantee the profit on individual titles compared to newstand sales. Comics sold through newstand distribution were returnable; sales to the direct market were not. Returnability meant most of a title's print run was wasted. (Typically in that era a publisher would print, say, 200,000 copies of a title to sell 70,000.) In addition, the direct market offered predictability-- eventually publishers would learn in advance how well a title might do because of pre-orders. These positives, of course, have a downside, but we'll get to that later. By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the direct market for comics was viewed by almost everyone in the business as a god send that saved a dying business.

The second event that saved superhero comics was the arrival in 1978 of the first mainstream superhero blockbuster movie-- Superman. That movie and its sequels, followed by Tim Burton's Batman in 1989, fueled the growth of "serious" superhero mythology in mainstream pop culture (as opposed to the kid-friendly Superman series of the 1950s and the camp comedy of 1966's Batman TV show). Those movies (and other baby boomer inspired genre entries into mainstream culture like Star Wars and Indiana Jones) began the gradual colonization of pop culture by superhero mythology which exploded into fruition in the 2000s. In the 1970s, however, the main effect Superman the Movie (and later, the Batman film) had on comics was to temporarily increase sales and thus allow both companies to avoid dealing with longer-term creative and economic questions about the fundamental viability of the industry's business model.

The combination of both events, the development of the direct market and the arrival of the blockbuster superhero film, saved the comic book business as such in the 1970s-- but at the same time created and reinforced conflicting tendencies that today have produced a potentially fatal contradiction in how super hero comic book publishers approach their business.

On the one hand, the growth of the direct sale market into the de facto sole distribution point for superhero comics (the recent Walmart experiment and the digital comic market notwithstanding) has resulted in an incestuous and shrinking niche market for the sale of physical comic books. As recent reporting makes clear, this is unsustainable as a business model. Both Marvel and DC have resorted to increasingly desperate and counterproductive marketing ploys to maintain market share and profitability in a decreasing pool of readers-- a ridiculous explosion of variant covers, "special" events, crossovers, mini-series, extortionately-priced first issues, reboots and rebirths and renumberings, spin-offs and multiple versions of the same superhero teams, more events, more crossovers, more tie-ins. What all of these efforts have in common (despite some high-quality creative work on individual titles) is a complete absense of long-term strategic thinking in either the creative or business sense. What's the plan here? How is any of this short term market share maneuvering going to build and sustain a stable long-term readership? And, in particular, how does it fit with the other, even more significant development in the superhero comic book business-- the ascendency of superhero mythology in pop culture?

That second fact-- the mainstreaming of superhero mythology, begun by the Superman movie in 1978-- is the most significant development in the modern history of the comic book medium, and NEITHER company has developed an effective strategy to address it in their creative approach or their business model. The primary reason they haven't, I believe, is rooted in the first of the two events that saved comics in the 1970s, and is at the core of the contradiction that's crippling the superhero comic book business today-- the direct market and its lock on the distribution of comic books.

On the one hand, you have superhero mythology in mainstream media-- a mass market appealing to millions upon millions of consumers world wide, a potential audience beyond anything imagined by comic book creators half a century ago in our most weed-enhanced fantasies. And on the other hand, you have superhero publishing in the direct market-- a shrinking niche market numbering in at most a hundred thousand, dominated by a core readership of a few thousand, whose financial support is strained to the breaking point and beyond by ruthless and extortionate marketing of low-value-added gimmick publications that thwart long term emotional investment.

In a rational universe, both companies would be examining their core business strategy to stake a claim in the mainstream market-- a claim they have a moral, creative and financial imperative to demand as the originators of the mythology being celebrated. If ever there was a moment for the Big Two comic book publishers to think outside the traditional box, this is it. Instead, they are consumed with chasing the diminishing returns of the direct market-- creating properties to exploit a readership exhausted by the financial and emotional demands of predatory publishing techniques designed to milk as much profit from a shrinking audience as possible. This isn't only cynical, it's stupid and counterproductive-- not to mention ultimately an expression of creative bankruptcy.

So, having analyzed the problem from my own admittedly limited viewpoint-- a viewpoint privileged, somewhat, by fifty years of experience-- do I have any solutions to propose?

Yes, I do.

The superhero comic book business is in a death spiral, and everyone in the business seems to know it. A crisis as serious as this cannot be addressed by fixes at the margins. We need a fundamental break with the business practices that have brought the companies to this point. A radical solution to a radical crisis.

Both Marvel and DC need to redefine themselves as creative entities. What is their CORE purpose? What is their CORE contribution to the larger enterprise of creating superhero mythology for mainstream media?

Is their core purpose publishing paper pamphlets for sale to a small readership of tens of thousands? Or is their core contribution creating stories and characters in comic book format that can be transformed into other forms of media?

If it's the first, their business is a dead end, and nothing they do will extend its existence past the next few years. The direct sale market is dying. There's no time to develop other methods of distribution to profitably replace it. The publishers have tried expanding into bookstores, which, like the comic book stores, are dying. They've tried expanding into big box stores like Walmart, but that experiment seems to have failed. They've sought sales in digital format, but judging by reports of my own sales in that medium, it's not a panacea-- yet. Traditional comic book publishing for profit by the Big Two seems hopeless, by all the available evidence, at least as presently constituted. Maybe, if both companies scaled back overhead and production to 1967 levels-- Marvel producing 12 books a month with a small office and a skeleton staff, DC producing 30 with a slightly larger editorial footprint-- they might survive as pure publishing entities.

But survival shouldn't be a goal.

Instead, I suggest both Marvel and DC dramatically redefine themselves as creators of comic book content first-- and profitable publishers second, if at all.

One advantage both companies have as corporate subsidiaries that they never had as independent family businesses is something they need to embrace and promote to their corporate masters as a positive principle-- neither company needs to turn a profit, at least not in the short term, and not as publishers. Instead they should redefine themselves primarily, in the modern lexicon, as IP creators. Intellectual Property is one of the most important drivers of modern corporate media success-- if not the most crucial component. Comic book publishers are easily the most cost effective creators of IP in modern media. For a media corporation to require profitability of an IP generator like a comic book publisher, when even the highest levels of publishing profitability pale beside the far greater value of the IP itself, isn't just short-sighted, it's counterproductive and self defeating.

Marvel and DC should see themselves primarily, if not solely, as IP generators, and sell themselves to Disney and Warnermedia as such. Publishing should be the tail of the dog; the dog is creation.

If the companies do follow this path, they'll also need to radically rethink their approach to publishing-- ironically, with potential benefit both to themselves as profitable enterprises and to their customers in the direct market.

For example, if your goal as a company is no longer to increase or maintain market share in the direct market, but instead to generate exciting and long-term potential IP, you don't need predatory publishing practices like variant covers, or twice-yearly "events," or extortionate pricing, or required pre-orders. You could even begin to accept returns, lightening the financial pressures on dealers and encouraging them to risk new series. You could reduce the number of unnecessary spin-offs and reboots. You could devote energy to nurturing creatives and long-term storylines.

At one point in the mid 1970s I had a dust up with Marvel's production chief, the late John Verpoorten. I was complaining that a revision to the production schedule would negatively affect the aesthetic quality of a book I was writing and how could he justify that (I was young, naive and arrogant). John looked at me and growled, "From an aesthetic point of view we can maybe justify ten of these books." I was gobsmacked and obviously never forgot his point.

Redefining their core mission as IP generators would allow both Marvel and DC to address John's point positively: is there an aesthetic reason to publish this story? Does it say something new and valuable about our characters, or is it just an effort to increase market share? Does it add to the mythology, or diminish it? Is it good?

Publishing sales success has rarely been a reliable predictor of a superhero story's viability in other media. Venom is a popular comic book character with mixed success in sales-- but a worldwide hit as a movie antihero. The JLA Detroit era heroes ended ignominiously in a market driven by direct sales, but individually have provided useful source material for CW TV shows. The Green Arrow was never a sales leader in comics. Before the Batman movies, Batman was a mid-level but important DC comic. Deadpool was a popular second string character but again never a sales leader before Ryan Reynolds put on the mask.

There's a way forward for both the superhero publishers and the direct market-- but not if the publishers continue to define themselves first as publishers. That day is past. The publishers will have to be bold if they're going to thrive in the post-direct market world. The first step is for them to decide what they do best. In my view, what they do best is create comic book stories. Those stories transcend the traditional sales platform that produced them. It's time for the bird to leave its nest.

[vanessakirbyfans]

When I went to see Vanessa Kirby starring in Julie at the National Theatre, it turns out I picked “a really bad night. Oh God everything went wrong,” she says when we meet a few days later, in a café in Chelsea where she has just ordered scrambled eggs. In one climactic moment she has to kill a budgie on stage, but the blood capsule didn’t burst until well after she whizzed the fake bird up in the food processor. “That happened two nights in a row! But it was better than before, when we used to start the scene with a real budgie and then kill a fake one, because one night the real one started tweeting after the lights went down, when he was supposed to be dead. I was trying to shut him up. He was called Gordon. We had to get rid of Gordon. There have been letters to the theatre: ‘We need to know that Gordon has not been harmed.’”

Kirby is a 30-year-old actor from London, a galloping laugh a minute, and quite probably the future of British acting. You may know her as Princess Margaret from Netflix’s The Crown, a role she describes happily as “the gift that I was given”, and which turned what could have been a staid drama about duty and class into something much more delicious. She gave Margaret a youthful vulnerability – we saw the damns she had to give before she stopped giving any – and now, after two series and winning a Bafta, she is handing the role over to Helena Bonham Carter, who will play the older incarnation. And Kirby is gutted.

“The Crown was the best time of my life,” she says, in her quick voice. “Saying goodbye to it was awful, I really grieved it, actually.” Kirby kept a photo of Margaret on her bedroom wall and used to gaze at it, wondering What Would Margaret Do? “The easy route would have been for me to just play her as the version of her who comes later, the public persona of her that is so – I don’t know the right word – gauche?”

They could have sent you to Mustique!

“I know! Livid! But I wanted to try and find the person she was before she hardened, before she became bitter and self-loathing, which is what I sensed. I wanted to find the torment that’s underneath those things. That, for me, made a real woman, even though the circumstances were ridiculous.”

She played opposite Claire Foy as the Queen. Both of them have just been nominated for this year’s Emmy awards for The Crown. I ask what it’s like to be on the receiving end of the enigmatic, brooding looks that Foy’s Elizabeth so regularly deploys.

“Oh, she used to give me the look in our scenes together and I’d just be feeling, aaaargh – you’re so internal! You’re so good! You’re so subtle and I have to try so hard to rein it in! But Claire was much better about the show ending than I was. She said it was because I had such a personal synergy with Margaret, whereas the Queen remained a mystery to her.”

It transpires the real Queen is a fan, though. Kirby only knows this because a friend of hers was at a fancy party recently, “where he didn’t know a soul so when he heard some people discussing The Crown he was like: ‘Actually I know someone in that.’ They were like: ‘Cool.’ He goes: ‘No, but I really know someone in it,’ and, meanwhile, this girl says: ‘Well my granny likes it,’ and he suddenly realises her granny is the Queen. It was Princess Beatrice. Although, I told someone else recently it was Eugenie,” she laughs, “but I got that wrong.”

Kirby grew up in Wimbledon, south London, the middle child of three, and attended the private Lady Eleanor Holles School. Her mother, Jane, had been the editor of Country Living and her father, Roger, one of the country’s leading prostate surgeons, “always watched loads of films with me – totally inappropriate ones like Midnight Express when I was about six. He put all films on. I think my sister was five when he took us to the cinema to see A Perfect Murder.” They were also taken to a lot of plays, “and I got really bored until I was about 11 and then suddenly it clicked for me, like: oh, when theatre’s really good it can be transformative. More than anything, it made me understand people.”

At school, “It was always the drama side of things where I felt the most alive,” she says. “The most myself. I was quite badly bullied for a few years and I became self-conscious about everything I did in relation to the bullies. But drama was the place where I didn’t.”

Was it other girls?

“Yeah it was… systematic. Quite awful. A teacher said to my mum on my very last day of school: ‘She survived it. She’s done it,’ which means they knew it was happening.”

Strangely, Kirby doesn’t sound remotely bitter about it and mutters a half-finished thought about it perhaps being a useful experience now. She describes her childhood as very happy and she knows how socially and financially privileged she was, but she also suffered from giardia, an intestinal parasite, which went undiagnosed for a long time and made her feel permanently nauseous, as if she was about to vomit. “All these nightmare injections, pills up the bum, all of it. Prodded around from age nine to 11.”

At school there was a noticeboard with a picture of Ben Whishaw as Hamlet at the Old Vic on it. Kirby stole it for her bedroom wall, went to see the play three times and became obsessed with him, which was not helped by bumping into him on a London bus. She was in amateur local productions at the time, but after studying for an English degree at Exeter and then giving up a place at Lamda to go straight into work as an actor some years later, her first big chance was on The Hour – starring… Ben Whishaw.

The director was tough on her, which may have been because: “I wasn’t paying any attention to the scene. In my head it was just alarm bells going: ‘Oh my God that’s Ben Whishaw.’” Afterwards she had to tell him everything. “And it felt good to finally confess my infatuation. Of course, he was with his boyfriend.”

Hollywood came calling and she’s had to become better at dealing with famous men since being cast in the sixth instalment of the Mission: Impossible films, out this month and starring Tom Cruise. I ask what he was like. “Such a pro. Absolutely disciplined; super enthusiastic. Always wants everything executed at a super-high level, so you have to train really hard.”

With him?

“Oh God no, without him.” She laughs, groaning. “I think that would be… I did say to him at one point: ‘I am never getting on a running machine with you.’ But I learned a lot about work ethic from him. I never thought that stunts and action would be my genre, but I’m understanding now that you can transcend genre, as long as you try and find the real woman behind the part.”

It struck me, watching Julie – which is Polly Stenham’s rewrite of the Strindberg play Miss Julie, and set at 3am at a druggy party in a wealthy house in Hampstead – that Kirby could have played the heroine in a much sexier fashion. Instead, she chooses to drag her body around with her as if it brings her discomfort. The reviews have been kind to her, but not to the script or production, which tend to say it all lacks chemistry. Kirby diplomatically says the problem is: “It’s such a huge space, it’s not an intimate theatre and sometimes the space dictates the parameters.” I’m not convinced she’s enjoying it all that much.

Still, the current feminist awakening of Hollywood has had a real impact on Kirby, who has risen to fame at the perfect moment to seize it. She is working on her own ideas, too. The week after we meet she will fly off to work on an unnamed film project she’s developed with Adam Leon. “He’s the best New York film director, I think.” It’s inspired by an article in the New Yorker about a woman who entered a fugue state and went missing in the big city. They have cast a group of renegade, gender-fluid young Brooklynites to play her new friends, and Kirby scrolls through her phone to show me photos of these genderless kids she finds so mesmerisingly beautiful. She is also developing a film of her own with Ben Caron, who directed her in episodes of The Crown, and making “something about babies who are born addicted to drugs and how society treats those mothers”.

Partly this seems like an attempt to get away from the wealthy-woman-in-gilded-prison roles. “I feel like now, more than ever, it’s all of our responsibility to have other things represented on screen. There have been somany male stories on screen, or stories of women written by men, so she’s the wife of someone, the girlfriend of someone… It’s only now I realise that looking back, all the scripts I’ve read over time, unless they’re really small indie films, the women have always been fantasy figures, always viewed through the male lens, almost cartoony.”

Her boyfriend, Callum Turner, is also an actor, and recently they were on a plane together, both with a pile of about 10 scripts to read through. “In every single one he was the central protagonist and the women were helping the leads. Out of mine, about two of my parts were the leads – and then you knew that someone like Jennifer Lawrence would be doing it. So we women have got to be the generators of the material and, in order to do that, we have to understand the system we’re in, which I’m really trying to do.”

Kirby has a friend called Sarah, “who says it just pisses her off, all these Hollywood actresses getting on the red carpet and sounding off about #MeToo, etc. She says, what are they actually doing? I say I know, but these are the women who will be on the front pages of newspapers, for better or worse, and then it leads to real change in other industries, too. Media is the controller of everything.”

Another close friend is the writer Dolly Alderton. They even share the same therapist, which made Kirby very amused to read all about said therapist in Alderton’s recent bestselling memoir, Everything I Know About Love. Yet another friend is Anna, with whom Kirby and her sister share a flat in Tooting. “So we’re like three sisters. No idea why we live in Tooting, though. I think it was cheapest.” Their home has calmed down a lot since Kirby became so busy. “It used to be mad parties non-stop and the vibrations going through to the little old lady who lives next door – her house was constantly shaking at 4am.” I can’t imagine Kirby upsetting old ladies – she seems too sweet. Did the woman complain? “Sometimes, yes,” Kirby admits, with a shamefaced twinkle in her eye.

Still, she seems entirely unafraid to call the shots on the big guys now. “My only little area of change is to be in a big movie and say no, I’m not wearing a short skirt, I’m not showing any skin, I don’t want slapped-on make-up,” she says.

And if the action film wanted to give you robo-tits? “I would say absolutely not. I don’t care any more. I feel more able to say that now. I’m in a slightly luckier position, but also the times now support it. I don’t want an arse shot – well, not that they’d want one of my arse. But I don’t want to be shot through a lens of sexualisation. That’s not me. That’s the distorted feminine and the distorted masculine that is creating so much of the toxic energy in our society.”

It is unusual to hear an actor ask quite so many questions in an interview. As she says, she is fortunate to have risen to fame in a time that allows it, with other women having begun to push the boundaries. But Kirby is questioning everything. Still, you can only fight off so much of the culture. We say goodbye and she picks up her bag of M&S shopping and heads home to watch Love Island, during which, she says happily, she will “feel my brain turning into disgusting nothing”.

[theepitomeofamess]

152 Analogical if you can!?!

#152: “Stop texting me weird stuff so late at night.”

Pairing: Analogical

Word Count: 1119

General taglist: @iamtrashcans @jazzyb11 @lucifer-in-my-head @pendragonqueen09 @galaxy-warping

Thanks so much for the prompt! This one was fun haha

*ping*

Logan sighed at the sound of a new notification. Pressing the home button to light up his phone, he didn’t know what was worse against the wallpaper of Scorpio in the night sky - the white numbers of the clock telling him that it was 2:47 a.m., or the text notification from Virgil that read “Virgil sent a photo.”

Logan was hesitant to open the picture, all things considered. Virgil had been texting him pictures and videos since around midnight. He already had three separate tabs open with the origins and meanings of memes on them - one from what seemed to be a commercial about real estate, one from a movie that Logan recognized as Despicable Me - or more accurately, the origin of those god forsaken minions - and one from an anime in which a seemingly very confused man asks if a butterfly is a pigeon. The last interaction they’d had had been a little more than ten minutes ago.

L: Stop texting me weird stuff so late at night.

V: Never.

L: You need to sleep.

V: Could say the same thing to you.

L: *sigh*

V: *winks*

Logan could only imagine what Virgil would send next.

Opening the new message, Logan found a picture of a monstrous black dog. Matted, scraggly fur, glowing red eyes, bared fangs and scorch marks at its feet.

*ping*

It me.

Logan quickly went through his pictures, specifically the folder he’d labelled as “Patton’s Puppies,” finding the perfect one to send back to Virgil. A tiny black pomeranian with wide dark eyes, one that Patton had identified as, “precious floof!”

First of all, this is you and you know it.

Second of all, explain. *send*

Logan didn’t expect Virgil to respond immediately. He would take a minute to glare at the picture of the pomeranian, deciding whether or not it would be worth his time to argue the point with Logan. Then, he would either come up with what he saw as an appropriate response to the first message, or he would go ahead and explain what Logan didn’t understand.

In the meantime, Logan turned back to his laptop, typing away.

*ping*

You sent the wrong pic, that’s definitely you.

That’s The Shuck. It’s a cryptid from East Anglia in England. Legend has it he showed up at a church during a thunderstorm and killed a man and his kid. It was around 1577. He also tore down one of the support pillars, making the steeple collapse, and left scorch marks where he went. It’s me because I’m supposedly very dangerous, I show up a lot with thunderstorms, but also a lot of people don’t believe in me. Also, his name sounds a hell of a lot like “the fuck” and I identify with that.

Logan chuckled at the last line. He made a mental note to look into doing more research about cryptids so he could carry on more in depth conversations with him about them. A common point of interest often helps connections grow. Given how similar they actually are, Logan had always thought that the two of them should have more strong of a connection.

He’d only just started constructing a response when…

*ping*

Also, I found Patton when he finally snaps.

The picture below the message was of a stuffed Kirby toy with a knife taped to its hand - stub? - finger? - appendage. As per usual for the character, the toy had on a cheerful smile and was the epitome of soft and innocent. At least, it would be if not for the knife.

Logan’s hand found its way to his mouth, unconsciously covering his widening grin. Logan didn’t need to know the origin of the image to know that Virgil was correct in his interpretation of it.

*ping*

Roman:

A picture of Tan France from Queer Eye saying “the gayest thing I’ve ever seen.” Logan snorted through his nose.

Accurate. *send*

*ping*

A picture of a man between two women - one clearly his girlfriend, the other he’s checking out behind her back. On the man, the word “me.” On the girlfriend, “getting a full eight hours of sleep.” On the other girl, “staying up all night looking at memes.”

Logan’s smile fell.

Looking at the time on his phone again, he found that thirty minutes had flown by effortlessly. 3:26 in the morning…

Virgil… do you want to come over? Or for me to go over there? *send*

*ping* ...I mean if you want me to…

I think it would be easier for you to sleep if you did. A more serene atmosphere or familiar or calm presence often helps people to sleep more easily. However, the choice is entirely yours. *send*

Less than five minutes passed before Logan heard the softest knock on his door. Logan called for Virgil to come in, and he obeyed. Logan asked a malady of questions, ranging from how Virgil’s day was to whether he wanted a cup of hot something - coffee, tea, cocoa, something - to whether it was a cuddling night or if Virgil wanted Logan to pull out the spare cot under his bed.

Virgil’s day was fine, he didn’t want anything hot, and he wanted Logan to hold him, so they didn’t bother getting out the cot.

The two of them talked in person for a while more, an activity that when done properly helps both of them to wind down and prepare to sleep. Virgil briefly explained some of the more obscure memes he’d sent Logan, and Logan asked about cryptids, and soon enough they were both curled up in Logan’s bed, Logan holding Virgil’s form in his arms. Logan’s clock read 3:58 a.m.

“In this world,” Virgil mumbled, half asleep, “it’s yeet or be yeeted.”

“Go to sleep, Virgil.” Virgil grunted, curling closer into Logan. He’d interpreted Logan’s words as vague irritation only because his eyes hadn’t been open to see Logan’s wide grin.

Logan knew that the same thing would happen tomorrow night. The two of them would be awake until ungodly hours of the night, eyes burning and voices gravelly from the day’s use. They would converse through texts for a while - maybe a few minutes, maybe a few hours - until one of them determined that it was far too late for the other to be awake and the two of them ended up in the same room, able to sleep with the other’s presence close.

It’s not an official tradition. It’s not like Patton’s cookies for every special occasion or Roman’s insistence on implementing caroling and Secret Santa every year. It’s not something known and enjoyed by all four of them.

That doesn’t mean it’s not Logan’s favorite tradition.

[fantastic-nonsense]

@colpfiction replied to your post “me: *sees a post on r/AskHistorians about comics history*me: ”

Always. I've learned more about comics and comics history and stuff from your blog than I think I did in college.

Lol, thanks! I feel honored!

Anyway, the original question asked was “Comic books featuring superheroes in the 60s-70s are typically more lighthearted and laden with sci-fi themes than earlier examples. In the 80s there was a sharp u-turn towards more grounded and dark subject matter. What trends caused this shift towards (relatively) grittier realism? What social trends led to this shift? Was it just a matter of sales or was something bigger happening in entertainment/media/society?

Me being me, I busted out pretty much the entirety of the bare bones of the history of the Comics Code and the switch from the Silver Age to the Bronze Age to the Modern/Dark Age of Comics. Also, I’m not sure if it’s good or just sad that I basically wrote the majority of it off the top of my head and really only needed to Google things to source dates, specific title and author names, and a couple of quotes. Now granted, r/AskHistorians specifically asks for and curates in-depth, sourced responses, but still:

“In terms of actual comics that contributed to the sharp turn towards "more grounded and dark subject matter," there are four or five comic events people usually credit as marking the general "turning point" between the Silver Age and Bronze Age of comics where comics began to get progressively darker and less silly: Gwen Stacy's death in "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" (which had a huge impact on the readership of Spider-man comics and comics readers in general), the 1971 "Snowbirds Don't Fly" drug abuse storyline in Green Arrow comics, Green Lantern being turned over to Denny O'Neil and Neil Adams, Jack Kirby's New Gods, and the revival of the Teen Titans with The New Teen Titans. However, unlike the progression from the Bronze Age to the Modern Age, there is no true clearly defined group of comics you can point to as being the definitive marker.

However, you can point specifically to the four comics usually credited with ending the Bronze Age and kicking off the "Dark Age/Modern Age" of comics: The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Watchmen (1987), The Killing Joke (1988), and DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline (1986) that saw a universe-wide reboot and restructuring. While Crisis completely revitalized the DC Universe's sales, The Killing Joke, DKR, and Watchmen were so enormously popular that they literally redefined the superhero genre and inspired years of "grim and gritty" comic books. In fact, DKR was so popular and so influential that in a lot of ways, the entire modern conception of Batman is loosely, in one form or another, based on Miller's work (despite DKR being a dark alternate future and completely out-of-continuity even to this day).

In terms of societal trends and influences, you had quite a few things going on: in comics specifically, you had writers and artists beginning to stretch the bounds of what was considered "acceptable" by the Comics Code Authority guidelines, which was implemented in 1954 after the moral panic surrounding comics, juvenile delinquency, and "bad influences" that culminated in Senate Subcommitee Hearings into comic books and their influence on children and teenagers (the moral panic itself was kicked off due to the infamous book Seduction of the Innocent by psychologist Fredric Wertham). Incidentally, this is why the Silver Age is so well-known for its light-hearted subject matter: comics companies were trying desperately to stick to their self-imposed censorship code, which you can find here.

Stan Lee has talked multiple times about the story of how Marvel Comics famously defied the CCA in 1970 by publishing a Spider-man story dealing with drug abuse (at the request of the US government). His deliberate refusal to adhere to the Comics Code with "Green Goblin Reborn!" in 1970 led to DC publishing the influential and seminal Speedy/Red Arrow storyline "Snowbirds Don't Fly" in 1971, depicting Roy Harper becoming addicted to heroin. Together, these two storylines would form a big part of the basis for depicting darker storylines. "Snowbirds Don't Fly" is considered one of the big watershed moments for the depiction of mature themes in comics, and particularly at DC, as the arc was the start of an era of socially relevant Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics.

Michael McAvennie and Hannah Dolan actually mention this in their book DC Year by Year: A Visual Chronicle:

"It was taboo to depict drugs in comics, even in ways that openly condemned their use. However, writer Denny O'Neil and artist Neal Adams collaborated on an unforgettable two-part arc that brought the issue directly into Green Arrow's home, and demonstrated the power comics had to affect change and perception."

These two stories triggered a re-examination and revision of the Code in 1971 with standards that were slightly looser (though not by much) and helped contribute to a culture where writers/artists were interested in stretching the boundaries of what they were allowed to depict. As the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund's History page states:

The 1971 code relaxed the restrictions on crime comics and lifted the ban on horror comics (while still prohibiting the use of “horror” and “terror” in titles). In addition, the liberalized standards on sex reflected changes in society. After the Spider-Man controversy, the CMAA added a section on how to handle depiction of drug use. The code, although it was less restrictive, represented a lost opportunity in its reaffirmation of comic books as a medium for children.

So you can generally point to "Green Goblin Reborn!" and "Snowbirds Don't Fly" in 1970/1971 for the re-introduction of socially relevant topics such as drug abuse, the revision of the Comics Code in 1971 for allowing the growth of supernatural and horror-related titles (as well as an explosion of non-superhero genre titles throughout the 70s), Gwen Stacy's death in 1973 as marking a trend towards dealing with death and darker subject matter, Jack Kirby's move from Marvel to DC and his "New Gods" storyline as marking a fundamental change in the storytelling priorities of both companies, the revival of Teen Titans under Marv Wolfman and George Perez as marking a change towards character-based storytelling, and the introduction of several minority heroes (particularly John Stewart as Green Lantern, Luke Cage, Storm, Black Lightning, Vixen, and Cyborg) as marking a trend towards the attempt at inclusion and greater diversity (and thus socially relevant storylines regarding prejudice and racism). All of these things combined led to a "perfect storm" where comics began to deal with darker and more gritty/realistic subject matter throughout the 70s and into the 80s, culminating in the publication of stories like Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke, A Death in the Family, and Crisis on Infinite Earths in the mid-80s (and later on in 1992, The Death of Superman) which led to the start of the Modern Age/Dark Age of comics.

There are probably three other big societal trends that helped contribute to the depiction of 'darker' subject matter in comics throughout the 70s and early 80s: the change of marketing trends where young children and girls stopped being specifically targeted as comic readers; the end of the careers of many of the veteran writers and artists of the time (or their promotion to management positions and retirement from regular writing or drawing) and their replacement with a younger generation of editors and creators; and the rise of direct market distribution, where specialized comic book distributors could directly solicit orders and distribute directly to retail outlets rather than the old system where wholesalers delivered the comic books to retailers along with other magazines. I suspect that the beginning of the "War on Drugs" and the rise of the Women's Liberation movement in the 70s also played a huge role (you can read a little bit about the revitalization of Wonder Woman and her impact on the Women's Movement/second-wave feminism here), but I only know about how social trends affected specific comics like the Batman, Green Arrow, and Wonder Woman comics rather than the industry as a whole.

As a sidenote, there are a couple of really good books on Wonder Woman, her history, and her impact on the feminist movement: The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore and Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World's Most Famous Heroine by Tim Hanley.

For further research on this matter, I would suggest you look up books relating to the Comics Code and the Seduction of the Innocent scandal (David Hadju's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America is particularly good) as well as any articles and academic papers on a) the rise of minority superheroes throughout the 70s, b) the impact of "Snowbirds Don't Fly", and c) anything relating to the impact Gwen Stacy's death had on comics.

If you're more interested in the switch from the Bronze Age to the Modern Age, I would focus on the rise of independent publishers such as Milestone Comics and Marvel/DC's non-superhero publishing lines Vertigo and Image, the near complete dissolution of the Comics Code in 1989 (with the final hit being Marvel completely withdrawing from the Comics Code in 2001), authors like Frank Miller (who wrote extensively on Daredevil and then went off and wrote DKR and Batman: Year One) and Alan Moore (especially Alan Moore, considering he wrote Swamp Thing, Watchmen, and The Killing Joke), Crisis on Infinite Earths and the lasting impact it had on both DC Comics and the comics industry as a whole, the death of Barry Allen in Crisis on Infinite Earths and the installation of Wally West as the Second Flash, and the development of the X-Men franchise.”

[whitelippedviper]

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin. Fuck war, love comics.

So I’m making my way through Yoshikazu Yasuhiko’s Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin and like I’ve seen Yaz’s work before.  I have the first volume of Venus Wars--but it just didn’t click for me. MSG: The Origin tho is goddamn sorcery on the page. You need to know this first off, you don’t need to know anything about Gundam to read this.  The whole thing is this is the book retelling the story that started it all but like Yaz’s from the heart version.  And two volumes in, which is like...1000 pages of comics, and this is a masterpiece.  

I’m mostly going to talk about the art, but story wise, military stuff is generally not my bag.  Unfortunately, it’s a genre that is grossly popular in American comics, not just in straightforward military stories, but superhero comics as well.  Too often these heroes have design updates that are all too happily to enlist heroes whose past models leaned more heavily into daredevil circus performers or wrestlers.  You know the look.  When your favorite hero goes from tights and a cape look to body armor looking shit everywhere.  War on crime right? And then these companies on their film side have all kinds of connections to the military industrial complex--hell these companies often employ ex-military, or in some notable cases ex-CIA to write the damn books.  And when you couple that with how interested the military has always been with warping people’s brains to keep the war machine humming(they once put acid in a whole town’s water supply just to see what would happen!) it’s quite unnerving!  So besides being extremely anti-war in practice, I’m also pretty tin foil hat when it comes to seeing the edges of the military in pop culture, particularly when the message is like “look how cool this is!”

Which as a sidebar is one of the things that makes the Aubrey Sitterson GI Joe thing complicated to me, because like...I don’t think GI Joe is a good thing, and I don’t believe leftists should be getting their pay pushing paper for something that could not BE more military industrial.  Like let's make kids think how cool being a soldier and going to war is--and then those kids grow up, and what a surprise we are in like ten wars that we know about, and will be for forever--and you get this kind of brainwashing that turns Kapernick trying to say “hey, maybe cops should stop shooting black men” into a debate about “respecting the flag” because the NFL is in bed with the military….agh.  I hate it.  I hate it all.  From Operation Condor, the firebombings of dresden, hiroshima and nagasaki, the genocide of the american indian, fallujah, Abu Ghraib, our complicity in Saudi atrocities in Yemen and Qatar...we are not the good guys of history!  We kill for empire, but our empire isn’t colonies, it’s more war. Our chief export is war.  And I would love to expatriate to a country that doesn’t have these values, but I don’t know if even then I could shake that shit from my stomach.  And even more insidious than our war is our financial arm, our banks and investors who have killed as many people with pens as any soldiers with guns.  We are an empire of atrocity!

So when I see military comics, or cop comics, it just reminds me that I live in the most warlike country of the last 100 years, and all of those innocent people that are caught up in our bombs, and the way we turn whole regions into chaos to serve our ends and make more money--my relative prosperity as an American is built on the bodies and bloodshed of innocents the world over.  I mean why is America what America is?  It’s because WW2 basically moved europe's wealth to the US, and then we spent it on more bombs and we stepped in not because of any real moral thing--we stepped in because england owed us too much for us to let them go down.  We as a country became a world superpower, the world superpower, through war profiteering and slavery.  That’s a huge aside, but I’m saying, I fucking hate war.  And maybe find ways to not contribute to more of those sort of comics?  But more than that in an aesthetic sense, the codes for military in American comics are so bland and it seems half the time to justify not having to do interesting character designs. So surely there is a better fit for someone like Sitterson who has the politics I do, I think, than writing war comics to a patriotic pro-military audience, so I wish him the best, but fuck GI Joe. (And as an aside aside, if it were Frank Miller and not Aubrey Sitterson with the controversial opinion that book isn’t getting dropped--these companies only do these things as financial calculations, and if you are a big enough cash cow you can say or do whatever you want in comics for the most part but if you aren’t--you better protect your neck because these companies don’t have your interests in mind. And we live in stupid times) So I can fuck with Gundam because 1) it hates war as much as I do. And 2) they’re not trying to make everything look like utilitarian military shit.  They’re about looking goood while they are hating war.   The story is really rich, background characters positively radiate and each have their own character which comes to the fore at different parts.  In some respects, Amuro Ray haunts this comic like death, because he’s the end of so many terrific characters that you really grow to love, and the Federation cause is somewhat murky at best, as is their exploitation of kids like Amuro. I kind of think Yaz does my favorite faces in all of comics, unseating Jose Munoz:

This kind of caricaturing is really lovely for a story this rich and dense, because you get so much just from how a character looks and the faces they make, and it’s quite appealing to look at I think.  There are characters you fall in love with just because you want to see Yaz draw their face again.  The range of expressions he has in the toolkit is amazing to me. Yaz’s style in general to me is like magic.  Lines don’t connect, and it’s like he can just shift around these minimal set of lines and accomplish anything on the page.  It’s like he has a set number of lines that he’s working with on every page, and he just dips his brush into the page and waves it around and those lines bend and contort into perfection.  He’s one like Kirby where he kind of just sits down at a page and the images come out of his brain.

 It’s not overly rendered, but it still is textural and inky.  I think this also has my favorite lettering in comics.  I don’t know who was responsible for it in english, but I love the obvious care that went into varying the lettering, and just how gentle and elegant it is.  It probably was just a font in a computer--but it doesn’t FEEL like that, which is cool. Oh also Yaz watercolors various pages in the book, and they are almost all stunning.  I’m planning to read his Joan of Arc book which is all watercolored, so that should be interesting. But I think what comes across more than anything reading these books, because of not only the comic, but the production value of the books themselves--the hard cover, the essays at the back, the slick pages, the thoughtful lettering--what comes across from stem to stern is that these books are a labor of love and passion in a way that you would not expect from the retelling of a decades old giant anime franchise!

Hideaki Anno said in his essay in the first book: “And I sense a certain good grace.  He decides to draw Gundam--well known to the masses as a premier franchise of the plastic model and anime industries--not from weariness, not as expiation, nor to return to his roots, but in earnest as a work of his own” and I think he’s absolutely correct.  There’s a love and attention to every inch of these books that is really inspiring to behold whether as an artist or in whatever you do to fill out your days--seeing something, anything, done by a master, with care and concern is a special thing to behold.  I mean I don’t know for sure that Yaz actually gives a shit about this book--but that’s what comes across on the page.  It comes across that he cares about these lines, about these stories, vividly, and even more surprising, the people whose charge is getting the work out to others, they seem to care just as much, so what you get is a very very special book.

In some ways, these dueling masters, Char and Amuro Ray, also express this concern and care.  At one point Char loudly criticizes Amuro Ray for his lack of style.  And while Char’s vanity, his secrecy, his romantic rogue ideal is extremely alluring, and any scene he’s in, I’m pretty glued to the page--he’s like Harlock or Queen Emeraldas.  We don’t have these kind of artist villains in American comics for some reason.  The closest I’ve seen was Ron Wimberly’s Prince of Cats which has characters who besides their bloody monstrous ideas, consider style to be important.

But even with all of that going on with Char, I’m surprisingly drawn to Amuro Ray--who is a character even without watching the original Gundam series(something I’m planning to rectify this winter--trying to finally knock out all the Gundam I’ve put off for years) that you just kind of know even without ever knowing why.  He’s a legend.  Like Luke Skywalker.  Even his name when you say it, you feel like you are speaking the name of a god.  But he’s a punk kid who has been dragged into this war against his will, and is desperately trying to balance doing the right thing, and keeping his identity.  I love that sometime he just refuses to go out in the Gundam which puts Ltg Bright in these particular binds(Bright might lo key be my favorite character in the series weirdly, for how he kind of morphs through being a snotty prick, to being in over his head, to being someone capable of real genius creativity. I’ve been watching Iron Blooded Orphans which is a Gundam series about child soldiers and is really brutal and depressing, and Orga is kind of like Bright mixed with Char.) His mercurial nature speaks to the nature of his art versus Char.  Amuro Ray belongs to the fickleness of inspiration, so because of that he’s not really reliable, but when he shows up he’s capable of things Char isn’t, moments of improvisation and grouchy genius that are the linchpins of the romantic appeal of the series.  

Versions of this character archetype I feel usually are supposed to be incompetent or dumb to those around them, but their conviction carries them, they have the most will--but in Amuro Ray’s case, he’s just an asshole.  The despair of it all, which is never lost on Amuro is that whether he does something, or doesn’t do something, people are going to die and it’s going to hurt.  And knowing that, that in the end horror is inescapable, and that death is undefeated--like what do you do?  How do you function?  What do you choose when there are no good choices?  Char is a little different, because his aim is revenge.  Which that side of Char that he hides behind his rogue’s grin, and devilish acts is really stunning when it first comes out in these early books.  He’s so careful to let that out, and when it does, you’re like “oh man, Char isn’t playing the same game the rest of you are”.  Agh.  It’s soo good. Comics like these keep the fires going.  There’s an infinity of them out there to be sure, but nothing makes me happier than a truly great comic.  Those comics that years after you remember the experience of reading them, where you were, what music was playing.  A great comic is a great lover.  It won’t last forever, though there’s a LOT of this book still for me to read--and I get in this mode where I both want to just inhale the whole comic as fast possible, and I don’t want this experience to end.  This is that sort of thing.  Which should be evident, since I bothered to write about it, haha.  I could never just review comics.  I’m like Amuro Ray with comics criticism, I need the right situation to be compelled to climb in and do it.  I don’t fundamentally love writing comics criticism--but when I experience something great, I have to talk about it and write about it.  Comics like these affirm everything about being involved with comics for me.  Check it out, see if you feel the same way.

If you liked this essay, and want to see more like it, subscribe to Sarah Horrocks’s Patreon.  For as little as a dollar a month you can help a comic topic in need get the coverage it deserves.

[okgrumps-blog]

The Best and the Worst of You

AO3 link | more

Chapter 1: Long-Haired Arin

Every day at midnight, there was a loud whirring sound in the Grump space bathroom, followed by a loud thud. Nobody could miss it. So when Danny waltzed into Arin’s office five minutes later, hair ruffled and a lazy smile across his face, it was unquestionable. Arin was sat at his desk, flicking his eyes over various lines of emails with a concentrated expression. His hair was tied up in a tight bun.

“You should grow your hair out.” Dan grinned, walking towards Arin and patting the bun at the back of Arin’s head. Arin grumbled something under his breath and cracked his neck to one side. “Like, down to your back.”

Arin swivelled around on his chair to look at Dan, a tired smile on his face. Dan threw himself onto Arin’s office couch and sighed happily. It sounded like he’d had a good adventure. Arin wondered where Dan had been all day, whilst he’d been cooped up in his office reading emails and doing other Grump-related things alone. Occasionally Suzy would pop in and bring him something to eat, and Arin had regretted not leaving his office at all, but he had a lot of work to catch up on.

“It’s hard enough to manage as it is.” Arin chuckled under his breath, shaking his head. “It’s only stayed like this for so long because it’d look weird if I chopped it all off.” Arin reached his hands up and carefully began to untie his hair, his brown locks falling into soft waves across his shoulders. Dan watched in awe, stretching himself out across the couch.

“Suzy could plait your hair. I could plait your hair.” Dan smirked. Arin rolled his eyes, leaning back in his chair and waiting for Dan to get on with the main part of their conversation - where Dan had been, what he’d seen and who he’d met. Dan propped his head against one of the cushions on Arin’s couch and watched the ceiling.

Every day, for just an hour, Danny visited another dimension. He didn’t know how, and he didn’t know why - it just happened. At 11pm daily, he’d be transported to an entirely different dimension, where he’d meet various different versions of his best friends in the office. Then at midnight, he’d be back in his own dimension, in their Portal-themed bathroom, with the people he knew and loved. The unfamiliarity of it all used to scare him, but after dealing with it for the majority of his life, he was kind of used to it by now.

Arin was worried the first time it had happened - it was Dan’s first day on the job, and after staying over late to record an episode of Kirby’s Dream Course, he turned to see that Dan had disappeared halfway through recording. He nearly had some sort of panic attack, rushing around the room to see if Dan had been hiding, but to no avail. He ran out to find Barry, tears welling in his eyes as he tried to explain what had just happened. Barry didn’t believe him at first, but when he stepped into the recording room and didn’t see Dan, his heart dropped. Arin had been incredibly anxious, Suzy having to sit by his desk and rub small circles into his back as he flicked across emails and comments. He didn’t leave at the usual time - nobody did. And when midnight came around, and Dan walked into the main office like it was no big deal, Arin had cried his eyes out and hugged Dan tightly. Dan had hugged him back just as tightly, having to explain everything to him until the sun rose.

From that day forward, they had rules. Dan had to tell Arin every detail about his trip to the other world - where he’d been, what he’d seen and who he’d met. Dan was thrilled to chat to Arin about the countless different versions of Arin Hanson - the man who animated professionally for Disney, the man who had eight children, or the man who had a shaved head as opposed to his current shoulder-length mop. There had also been times where Dan had been terrified to speak to Arin about the countless different versions of Arin Hanson - the man who recently divorced his wife, the man who lived on the streets, or the man who tried to kill himself. What frightened Dan the most was that any of these things could happen to his Arin, and he’d never know when.

“He was like…” Dan began talking about the ‘other’ Arin he had met. “Sat by himself in Starbucks, with a strawberries and cream cooler?” He looked to Arin to see if he’d gotten the name of the drink right. Arin nodded. “I went in and spoke to him, he seemed pretty chill about it. I guess everyone has a Danny that can dimension travel, now.” His laughter rang in the air like a bell, Arin laughing softly along with him. “We were in Starbucks for like, half an hour… Oh, I mentioned he had really long hair, right?”

“I figured.” Arin cracked a smile, leaning forward to listen to Dan. Dan grinned and continued to speak.

He spoke about how they sat in the local park, by the fountain, talking about their lives. The ‘long-haired’ Arin was modelling with his girlfriend Suzy, and he told Dan that he even occasionally wore make-up. Later on in the day, they went back to Arin’s house to meet the ‘other’ Suzy, who was incredibly pleased to meet Dan, and they all ended up watching a movie together. When it was time for Dan to leave, he made sure to touch Arin’s hair at least once, marvelling at how gorgeous it was.

“You should seriously consider it.” Dan nodded enthusiastically, his legs now up in the air and over the back of the couch. “Growing your hair out.” He grinned cheesily. Arin shrugged with a small laugh, folding his arms across himself.

“Maybe. Are you ready to record?” Arin asked, standing up from his office chair. He seemed tense today, but Dan didn’t press. Most likely he’d just had a really busy day. Dan nodded quickly and dragged himself up, stretching and following Arin to the recording room.

They recorded around five episodes in total before Dan started to get sleepy.

“Next time on Game Grumps…” Arin grumbled, cracking his neck to the side. Dan simply looked at him, lost. Arin definitely seemed off today. The episode time hadn’t even reached ten minutes, and although Dan was losing interest in the game, it was mostly due to the fact that he was struggling to keep his eyes open. Recently, the travelling had been taking a toll on his energy, and he felt incredibly tired when he got back.

When Dan didn’t react, Arin stopped the recording equipment, facing away from Dan as he started to switch off the console. Dan tensed.

“Are- Are we done?” Dan asked, slightly dumbfounded. Arin turned to look at Dan with a small frown.

“I mean, you’re literally falling asleep, there’s no point.” Arin said monotonously, which scared Dan. Dan sat up a little, a frown appearing on his face, too.

“I can grab a coffee or something…” He pouted. “Dude, what’s up? Is something bothering you?” Arin made his way back to the couch and sat next to Dan with a sigh.

“It’s just… I’ve been waiting all day to record, y’know?” Arin sighed heavily, watching Dan. “I get that you had tour stuff to figure out this morning but… God, I’ve been through at least a thousand emails today.” Arin folded his arms and leaned into the back of the couch. “And now, we get here and you’re just all ‘Oh, I’m gonna fall asleep on the fuckin’ Grump couch! Why not!’, and I’ve been waiting for hours and…” Arin rubbed his forehead and sighed again. Dan sank into his seat, afraid to talk. He really had been too busy all day to record, and it didn’t help that travelling to a completely different dimension shattered him.

“I’m sorry.” Dan said in a quiet voice, fiddling with the blanket he was currently wrapped up in. That didn’t help, either. “It’s just- going places really tires me out, man.” He tried to explain, looking at Arin’s face for any sign of sympathy. Arin nodded slowly in response.

“Yeah- it’s difficult, right?” Arin reached out a hand and patted Dan’s knee. “I get it. I’ve just been really stressed lately, and I’m sorry that I’ve been taking it out on you…” He smiled apologetically. Dan smiled back at the younger man.

Around fifteen minutes later they were headed off to their respective homes. Suzy left the Grump space a few hours ago, as she had to feed the cats and make sure they weren’t beating each other up. Arin stood by his car outside, watching as Dan walked to his own (which wasn’t very far, because they were parked one bay apart from each other.  

“Arin?” Dan asked as he unlocked his car. Arin was about to step into his own car; he turned to face Dan, raising an eyebrow. Dan smiled softly and shook his head. “Have a safe journey home, okay?”

“You too, don’t fall asleep at the wheel.” He laughed, finally climbing into his car and sitting down. He waited and watched Dan start up his car and drive away, before turning on his own car’s ignition.

He’d been having a lot of thoughts about Dan lately, so when he didn’t see him for a while, he felt lost and uncertain. Dan would often come back and tell Arin about some romantic-sounding experience he’d had with a different version of Arin - and <i>God</i>, did he wish that were him. He felt like he hardly got to spend any time with Dan anymore - especially with the band tours that felt constant, and the fact that Dan was fucking off to another dimension every day.

Arin had tried to talk to Suzy about it all, and she had immediately clicked what was going on. Arin nearly cried when Suzy told him that he might be in love with Dan. But she understood, and she supported Arin, and that was the weirdest feeling in the world for him. So sitting in his car, the engine running, Arin sighed again and slumped in his seat. Luckily, he hadn’t heard about any of the bad dimensions Dan had visited for a while - those were the worst days; Dan would be close to tears, and Arin would have to convince him that the Arin he needed was right in front of him - in the most platonic fashion possible, of course. But even that hurt Arin - it hurt that he had to hold back and repress every pang of jealousy he felt within him, because he just knows that Dan won’t feel the same way.

He sighed once more and began to pull out of the parking lot.

[renaramblesaboutcomics]

Wednesday Roundup 4.10.2017

This week ended up being a relatively light reading week for yours truly, but that doesn’t lessen the quality of my enjoyment whatsoever. In fact, I had enough love to share that I wanted to go over all of the available Marvel Legacy Primers for this week as well, even if they’re just short blurbs!

So without further ado let’s jump into it.

Marvel’s America, Marvel’s Black Panther, Marvel’s Incredible Hulk, Marvel’s Invincible Iron Man, Marvel’s Jean Grey, Marvel’s Monsters Unleashed, Dark Horse’s Usagi Yojimbo, Lion Forge’s Voltron Legendary Defender, Viz’s Yona of the Dawn

Marvel’s America - Marvel Legacy Primer Pages (2017-present) Robbie Thompson, David Lopez

As interested as I am in America, I haven’t had the opportunity to really follow her outside of the Young Avengers run she is in. So I think, oddly enough, for me this is one of the most necessary “Primers” of any of the ones I’ve read so far, and the information was very good to have. It really helped to frame her history, her relationship with her mothers, and her confidence in herself in a new light that is really appreciated. And the art from David Lopez is as beautiful as any of his issues on All-New Wolverine.

Marvel’s Black Panther - Marvel Legacy Primer Pages (2016-present)  Robbie Thompson, Wilfredo Torres

There’s honestly not going to be that much more to say on most of these Primer pages. They’re fun, quick run throughs of relevant histories of the characters and teams that they showcase and depending on your interest and engagement may influence whether or not you want to hop in on the next storyline that they’re promoting. 

I do like the sense of unity and legacy that is built into the Black Panther title already, having it be a responsibility tied to kingship that T’Challa knows and the all-important bond it has between him and the memory of his father. 

It really puts a spin on the importance of Legacy that this event seems intent on hammering home.

Marvel’s Captain Marvel - Marvel Legacy Primer Pages (2016-present)  Robbie Thompson, Brent Schoonover

Carol Danvers is one of those characters I desperately want to lie on every feasible surface level, but whose books have never quite got me on board and whose guest appearances always leave me a bit more confused about her than I had been before her said appearance. And yet there was still not a whole lot added here. I appreciate it, and young Carol is adorable, but there was nothing here that didn’t make me feel like... well, like she’s Hal Jordan. And ‘m not a fan of Hal Jordan.

Marvel’s Incredible Hulk - Marvel Legacy Primer Pages (2017-present) Robbie Thompson, Joe Bennett

Everything I have read so far with Amadeus Cho, both in Totally Awesome Hulk and in his guest appearances or team-ups in Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur to Champions has  really connected to me on a level that Bruce Banner hadn’t exactly managed over the years. So it was nice to see a little blurb that went over their mutual histories and explored what was there.

It almost makes people forget that Marvel unnecessarily killed Bruce Banner for... no reason. Almost. Not quite. Though he might be alive by now. I am obviously not current.

Marvel’s Invincible Iron Man - Marvel Legacy Primer Pages (2016-present) Robbie Thompson, Valerio Schiti

Gah, reading this overview of Tony and Riri’s history really reminded me how much I really loved reading Invincible Iron Man when it first came out and just how much I positively adored Riri’s character and her banter with Tony. You know. Before they completely undid the relationship within the first storyline and then Bendis went all Bendis on us and it became obvious that Tony was coming back sooner than later and then Secret Empire destroyed the world... somewhat literally. 

I’d love to read a Riri-centric book in better circumstances. Or at least once the next trade is out. We’ll see.

Marvel’s Jean Grey - Marvel Legacy Primer Pages (2017-present) Robbie Thompson, Mark Bagley

I was actually just recently talking to my good friend @shobogan about how much more interested I would be in Young Jean Grey if only Marvel had the guts to either give us a romantic relationship with her and Laura (or her, Laura, and Scott OT3 hullo) or have Older Jean Grey return to mentor her younger self and others at the school since she’s the only X-Man kept dead for this long who was considered a Top Tier X-Man. And since we’re finally getting the latter, it seems, now I have to look at what we know of Young Jean and consider my feelings all over again. And this primer gave me the opportunity to do just that!

While I’m not following Jean’s book at the moment, I’m obviously a pretty big X-fan so I have a general sense of where all the moving pieces are at the moment. And I have to say, with Older Jean returning it’s going to be a pretty awesome time for comparing and contrasting their characters and relationships. After all, this younger Jean is far, far less experienced than her counterpart, but has a peripheral knowledge of her own fate, and as much as she tries to not be defined by it, it’s been defining her in the opposite direction in a sense. And more than that, she’s a Jean who sees the Phoenix Force not as an asset or a tool, but sees it as an honest to god enemy, which I’m not sure how that will work. And I’m even more interested in Jean’s return now because of the possibilities of their interactions with the Force together. 

Guess we’ll wait and see!

Marvel’s Monsters Unleashed - Marvel Legacy Primer Pages (2017-present)  Robbie Thompson, David Baldeón

I have actually been planning for a little while now to pick up the trade of Monsters Unleashed because I had fun with the miniseries earlier this year and I have been craving more Elsa Bloodstone (as well as the entirety of the Nextwave crew) and this seems like one of the more interesting powers to come from the Inhuman collision.

.... Actually it’s completely stolen from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic and later adapted TV episode dedicated to Jack Kirby who had the power of creativity to draw and create anything he drew and also had a a penchant for creating monsters and different worlds and so on. So I mean. There’s that unavoidable fact. But Kei’s cute so I’d be willing to overlook it for the sake of seeing what Marvel plans on doing with this very wild and unruly power. 

Dark Horse’s Usagi Yojimbo (1984-present) #162 Stan Sakai, Tom Luth

The conclusion of Usagi and Inspector Ishida’s investigation about the doctors’ murders has come and the hilarity of Kitsune and Kiyoko bumbling along with them and incidentally becoming crucial to the entire investigation does not lose its edge either.

Story: The conclusion of this particular caper is interesting mostly in how the framing by coincidence is not ultimately a linchpin to the story, having been solved almost immediately in the story’s first issue. The inventiveness of Sakai’s work, overall, is simple subterfuge which continues to make each new adventure feel unique and uncertain. In this instance, it would be in the assistance that Kitsune and Kiyoko end up providing by revealing the true murderer almost by accident. 

That being said, as simple as individual stories are for Usagi Yojimbo, the complexity really rests in the margins for long time fans, and that shows most clearly in the way a quiet buildup of several arcs seem to flow together for coming to a head. Perhaps the most famous and arguably best all around example of this would be in “Grasscutter” and how years of storytelling and slow vignettes linking together culminated in one of the greatest comic storylines of all time. We seem to be getting something similar in the backgrounds of more recent adventures with this guild of assassins which Usagi has unknowingly crossed the path of and caused ire to several times at this point. 

I’m excited to see where that story is taking us, and likewise interested in how little details, like Kiyoko successfully pickpocketing Inspector Ishida, will pay off down the road. 

Lion Forge’s Voltron Legendary Defender Vol. 2 (2017) #1 Tim Hendrick, Mitch Iverson, Jung Gwan Yoo, Ji-in Choi

Egghhhhh. Are you ever really rooting for something against your own common sense and get bit in the butt regardless? I feel like that happens to me on an inconceivably high average and almost all of it can be blamed on the fact that for some reason I am still expecting comics to play fairly with me. If anything my standards should be lower by now. But, well, let’s see if I’m being a bit too harsh on Lion Forge’s second effort in making a Voltron comic. 

Story: I would argue that one of the reasons that I had unreasonably high expectations for this comic is in part because the first comic produced by Lion Forge had actuallymanaged to not only be a fairly solid effort as a comic but managed to capture the spirit of the current Dreamworks Netflix series in a wa that was welcoming to fans new and old, and importantly of all ages. So I was hoping for more of the same with this comic project.

In more or less words... I did not exactly receive that. Where there was a solid read of the characterizations in the last comic, this issue showed a severely flattened to the point of parody version of the paladins, especially poor Hunk here who had the already obnoxious and unnecessary fat jokes and food jokes from the series amped up to the point of being his only characteristic in this comic. To the point that at one point he doesn’t even form a full sentence, just grabs a pie successfully from a training maze and says “Hunk win”. Which... I guess is somewhat better faring than the other paladins who didn’t even have dialogue that really fit them. Save for Pidge who was likewise flattened to “the smart one.” 

The storyline itself of a new planet where Voltron is needed but the species they end up helping... they actually fail initially, I won’t lie, is a pretty solid premise for Voltron overall, and would be something I’d love to see the show tackle similarly, but the fairly generic wolf-furry aliens didn’t receive a whole lot of depth in this first issue. 

Depth trended on being the biggest problem for this issue overall. There wasn’t an examination of the characters and their interactions, how they treated each other and how they tackled problems differently. The sort of things you’d want from an ensemble cast like Voltron. Which is surprising since again the first series by Lion Forge managed all that and was written on a much younger reading level at the same time. Each issue tackled exactly those very things -- individual characters, how they functioned in the group, and how they tackled obstacles differently to find a solution together. I would expect the same here but it didn’t seem to be on the menu. 

Hopefully all of this will be addressed and fixed as the comic progresses, but as for now I’m apprehensively putting this series on my three issue trial run. 

Art: The art was not a great improvement on the previous comic but it also wasn’t bad in the least. In fact I think the art popped very well, adjusting colors and textures about as well as you’d expect from a television show adaptation for kids. I do wish that the face models for the paladins would keep more consistent and overall there was a rushed feeling to the comic that seemed fairly unnecessary considering it’s the first issue. 

Viz’s Yona of the Dawn (2009-present) Vol. 8 Mizuho Kusanagi

You know, I keep hearing over and over again from friends and trusted sources that Yona of the Dawn is a series that will continuously subvert my every expectation and make me continue guessing and yet every volume I really do manage to be caught off guard by something which the story chooses to do which is shockingly poignant and new even to its fairy tale epic adventure structure. 

Story: So the Yellow Dragon joining the group was hilariously and purposefully anti-climactic but what we got as a result of that choice is the new direction for the series that ties directly into Yona’s own self-realization. She doesn’t simply want to rule and she doesn’t simply want to conquer. What she wants is to know her people and to save them from the crises that were overlooked by her father before her and by Su-Won now. She wants to take up arms to protect the entire country not just with the power of the loyal followers she has gained but with her own hands. She is something that neither of the kings -- her father or her cousin -- could have ever dreamed of being.

And then my expectations were really taken for a loop by us then in turn following Su-Won as he travels to the Earth Tribe and earns the respect and allegiance of the chieftan general there through a series of manipulations, tactical conceits, and ultimately quiet and subtle intimidation mostly by the fleeting moments in which he dropped his ditzy and well-meaning act to show his true intentions. But as fascinating as it was and as surprising as it was, for me at least, that this complete shift of POV for a few chapters actually managed to keep me on board when I’m not one to often fully appreciate the “villain’s side of things”, probably the most interesting part of any and all of this is actually how much tension is underlying Su-Won’s leadership. HIs appeal to the Fire and Earth Tribes is less in the leadership that he promotes and more in this current of possible warmongering that appeases the more warlike fractions of Kohka. 

It’s all fascinating and offers a sense of danger in Yona’s new quest to help the people of fher country feel a new sense of danger, knowing that our group is ultimately pretty unprepared for helping parts of the country which would not be as receptive to their quest or the offer of Yona’s leadership.

That being said... the final chapter driving home Yona’s relationship with Hak and everyone’s strange obsession with protecting Yona but rejecting her attempts to grow her own strength and independence. Lik eI guess we’re just all going to overlook the way she killed the slave trader mob boss in teh previous volume. But beyond all of that, my real concern is just... I cannot stand the way Hak’s character is portrayed in his “over protectiveness” of Yona. It’s far from romantic to me to continuously have a character obsess over someone to the point of “jokingly” considering locking them away for the world to see. 

It’s not the best issue of the series by far, but it has some great moments, especially for Yona.

Art: I actually do think that the further we’ve come in this comic, the more consistent and confident the at has gotten. There are still lots of soft tones and all the markings of a usual shoujo, but the real stand out this time around is that we’re beginning to see more and more the variation in ethnicities in the people of the country, which is honestly relieving even if for now the Earth Tribe, which drives that point home, consists mostly of Su-Won’s supporters and may carry with them some more unfortunate stereotypes being fed that I might not be aware of as a non-native to Japan.

So far as single issues this week are concerned there’s really no competition for Usagi Yojimbo in a regular week but especially not in a fairly light week. Yona is still a fantastic book and if there were other trades to compare it to I’d probably lavish on it more, but since we’re on singles I have to give this one to the unending quality that is Stan Sakai’s anthromorphic feudal epic.

And, once more, I am in a bit of a financial crunch for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which being the medical bills I’m paying for my dog, Eve, who experienced a catastrophic dog fight and underwent surgery recently. On top of that, I have exactly a month and a half to pack up everything I own and move halfway across the country again which is not helping those financial crunches I mentioned before either.

As such, I really would appreciate if you enjoy my content or are interested in helping me out, please check out either my Patreon or PayPal. Every bit helps and I couldn’t thank you enough for enjoying and supporting my content.

You could also support me by going to my main blog, @renaroo, where I’ll soon be listing prices and more for art and writing commissions.

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[hecknopoohsadventures]

Weekenders Adventures of Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

And now, a technological breakthrough in Pooh's Adventures history - a classic unnecessarily reworked with your favourite cartoon characters, unnecessarily reworked with your favourite cartoon characters! The infamous Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, a.k.a. Why Paramount Should’ve Kept Those Rights in the First Place, was the closest a corporation-based animation studio could get to channelling Pooh’s Adventures as it so commonly stands - deliberate exposition that dumbs the original mains down, absolutely no reason for the guests to be there other than comic relief, a villain confrontation scene where there shouldn’t have been, dialogue tampered with to bring up these newcomers, you name it.

So of course Poohphiles would enjoy it enough to slap even less time-consistent cartoon characters onto that and make them twice as useless by having them direct every pratfall the cat and mouse stumble into as usual. This might just be fan fiction, but this is still what storytelling shouldn’t be. And so, without further adieu, let’s bite into Weekenders Adventures of Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I can’t believe I just pasted that either.

Part 1

0:15 His most diabolical scheme yet.

0:28 Implying this is artful enough to be transferred onto celluloid.

0:43 Tiff is about to request that the volume be increased, but all Dedede ironically shushes her. All he wants is Kirby's suffering.

1:18 Originality truly is dead.

3:00 As terrible as the original, uh, Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka is, at least Spike Brandt chose characters who knew when to shut up.

3:49 Oh my god.

4:30 OH MY GOD.

7:13 Why are they paired up with these two again?

7:28 How not to script a crossover vs. how absolutely not to script a crossover.

7:42 Charlie didn't even ask...

7:57 ...neither does he care.

8:17 If you're not as starving as they were, YOU SHOULDN'T BE IN THIS MOVIE.

8:24 What's in your wallet?

8:34 Charlie's ignoring you.

9:08 How about offering some, you greedy fucks?

9:14 How about using some of your contract "more"?

9:17 It can't be that hard, right? ............Right?!

Part 2

0:59 Are every single one of them that foolish not to bring just the slightest nickel on their journey?

1:05 You can say that over and over again.

1:27 Says the girl who will just give over to temptation anyway, including booping what should not be booped.

3:01 You've got a better cartoon to attend to.

5:04 Clearly someone hasn't heard of a term called "surprise".

5:47 Bravo. Just coming out clean rather than saving yourselves jail time.

6:10 You know, at least Brerdaniel would probably treat Tom and Jerry as goofy pet sidekicks rather than have a bunch of usually-independent chatterboxes follow suit.

6:19 That's what the mouse was mentally suggesting, faithful student.

7:07 Alright! What delicious spells has Star conjured up ready for blas- Oh. Never mind.

7:31 As for the rest of you, welp, you're screwed.

8:12 Worse than tobacco?

8:57 And whoever else is surrounding the desks but doesn't matter in the slightest.

9:58 Something with more artistic merit than this.

11:46 Some kid that has lifted dicks up for generations somehow.

12:11 How..................am I barely riffing on two well-known cartoon characters' extensive presence in a movie they're not supposed to be a part of?

12:42 And how are they not noticing that creepy old man on TV? A gaping flaw in the dumbest of Pooh's Adventures implemented into a corporate, Korean-co-produced film from WB. Welcome to 2017 in cinema.

13:27 *grumbles* I know, right?

14:04 And just like Pooh's Adventures, an extra guest just had to be thrown in.

Part 3

0:18 Lor, you're in 7th grade. That, and you're mentally stable. Think about what you're saying.

0:20 Diverting gender norms, are we, Nobita?

0:31 Physically, you're not helping.

1:03 Unless Star could use her noodle arms to pick it straight out. 

2:09 Those poor Koreans.

3:03 Star's not not feeling it lately.

3:32 You don't ask that the very moment you bump into one.

4:12 It's the 90's all over again, and some millennials just happen to be in the scene as Slugworth turns Veruca's song into a goddamn reprise.

9:40 They're the only two guests dancing. Remind me what the point of this crossover is again?

11:47 And you only just noticed?

11:49 Even Twilight Sparkle herself wouldn't figure it out so accurately. She may be a god, but she's no psychic.

12:28 Or, you know, just hop onto the sidewalks.

13:00 And one of you could've just tucked it firmly into your pocket, you lazy fucks.

14:59 A simple "excuse me" would suffice?

Part 4

0:02 And the rest? They all sneak in somehow without being detected. 

1:25 See how boring and clueless these people now are?

1:49 I can understand Tom and Jerry squeezing through a pipe, but everyone else?!

2:44 In a shopping mall, no less.

3:30 But in clown garb!

4:23 tfw when a mouse can silently explain the situation better than you can.

5:00 Speak for yourself, all you're doing is standing there.

5:20 I'll say.

5:52 Hiding yourselves, on the other hand...

6:31 ...beyond "kinky".

7:23 Christ, at least Tom and Jerry are doing nothing to interrupt not-Gene-Wilder’s soothing melody.

8:00 How did nobody in the guest team accidentally push one of theirs into the river trying to rescue him?

9:07 Who now?

9:39 Why is Star so aggressive in this crossover? Her religion is unicorns and rainbows, you’d think she’d giggle and dance around non-stop being in the same team as Princess Twilight Sparkle.

11:35 This is wasted fetish potential.

11:51 Oh, finally you give a shit.

12:24 Wha?!?!?!?!?!?!?

13:31 ALL of you?

Part 5

0:02 She looks like she's seen this before. Hmm.

0:46 For once, censorship actually makes the source material less awkward.

1:01 Oh, please, this ain't close to worthy of a montage. You could have seen a live chicken being chopped up.

3:09 She came straight out of nowhere. EXPOSITION. LEARN IT.

5:03 Truly wasted fetish potential.

7:22 Every other guest concurs.

8:18 *slow clap*

8:31 He already had a dog by his side, no need to make every line of dialogue politically correct.

9:18 INCREASED fetish potential.

10:16 And like many Pooh's Adventures creators, the writers do not understand independent thinking.

11:06 Um, Marco............... Oh, fuck it.

11:34 HE'S IGNORING YOU.

11:57 UNBEARABLY wasted fetish potential.

12:30 What, you want to kill him?!

16:48 Good.

Part 6

0:33 And it really should've been you all.

0:48 GO DIE IN ANOTHER FIRE.

3:36 Which is more than I can say about everyone following him.

4:39 See what at least happens when you have every character in the frame? SEE HOW BORING THAT MAKES YOUR CROSSOVER IF YOU SPLICE IT WITH IMOVIE?!?!?!?!?!

5:18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUEd6gPjIsY

6:55 Sunset Shimmer fires Megan. Meme videos at their finest.

7:42 But how does even Wonka automatically recognise their names?

9:20 Well, certainly not Megan, whoever she was. Why was she in this again?

9:46 Star's response is priceless.

11:08 Of course we have crack shipping in this thing. Sunset is technically a horse.

11:53 Story of a Poohphile's YouTube career. Wonka knows what he's smirking about.

15:25 You're telling us.

15:28 SMART CHOICE!

15:30 Who has already spun fast enough in his 2016 deathbead.

Outtakes

And finally here's some outtakes, because someone thought bloopers could work in Pooh's Adventures. Prepare to cringe like you've never cringed before.

Unoriginality: 

Illiteracy:

Tom and Jerry’s baffling superiority:

Bonerkills:

At least it wasn’t made by Yakko:

Overall: 7.2/5

-0.44/10. This is the epitome of pointless, and a chilling reminder of the potential devolution of storytelling now that it’s possible to build stories out of emojis and Slenderman. This being simple-minded, inoffensive fan fiction by a couple of guys with needs hosted by Google Drive and linked to in one out of 27,000 wiki pages, of course it’d be insignificant to the community compared to what you can pay money for right now, but as far as innovation goes, and I say this as a film critic in progress, it’s misguided, aimless and devoid of any substance of any form. I’m just saying, with plenty of much-deserved scholarship, maybe you could be writing far more intricate prose than "Tom, Imagine when a chocolate mouse appears." I know Time Warner didn’t get some when they commissioned Gene Grillo to write Tom and Jerry into Roald Dahl. If someone else is planning to put a few (or a thousand) more cameos into Tom and Jerry’s gonzo Wonka trek for fun and not for profit, you bet I’ll be ready-ish.